(HOST) Writer, storyteller, and commentator Willem Lange notes that water moves us in many ways.
(LANGE) Our boat’s log was a small, spiral-bound, water-stained notebook. Nansen Watch of Hurricane Island’s Outward Bound School was on its training expedition off the coast of Maine in 1966. The log recorded data, mostly: time, weather, course, wind direction, estimated speed. But during the night it changed.
"0230 hours," the log-keeper wrote one August night by the kerosene lamplight of the anchor watch. "Thick fog down low, can’t see much of anything. Very quiet, temperature 48. We can hear the tide moving up the beach. Pauly just sounded. 15 feet. We’re cool. Everybody else sleeping on the oars.
"Watching the Big Dipper. We can see it turning around the north star. But we’re the ones turning. If we kind of go out of focus, we can feel it. Weird. Like the poem we read this morning, ‘Ulysses.’ About 20 minutes to go before we wake up Tom and Beale.
"Somewhere out in the water something is breathing. Something very big. Maybe a porpoise or a whale, or a seal, or a SEA MONSTER!"
My years as an instructor at Hurricane Island were magical. On the first day of each course I introduced my watch of students to their boat, which they’d keep for the duration. Thirty feet long and powered by oars or sails, it was perfect for building rapport and confidence in a group of young strangers. After a couple of days’ sailing and camping on beaches, we stayed in the boat around the clock, till it became a part of us, and we of it. The motions of the boat, the sea, the winds carried us back to beginnings and made of us a crew.
Why does water so enchant us? We love to live beside it in almost any form. It creeps into our consciousness – stormy and gray, still and misty, aflame at sunset. Almost every picture on my office wall is of a small boat or a canoe in an idyllic setting. Each one expresses the tension between the solid security of the earth and the water that draws us back to adventure.
The memories we create on water last a lifetime. My friend Bob and I were paddling years ago through what looked like a mild rapid on the mighty George River. Carelessly, I steered just left of the previous canoe’s course, and directly into a hole in the river the size of a Volkswagen camper. Down we went! and then, against all odds, up again! Whoo! Bob looked quizzically over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow.
Recently some friends and I were again out on moving water. As I started my sixty-first year of canoeing, the lines from Tennyson returned: "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides." And I remembered that logbook entry that always has said it all: "Somewhere out there in the water something is breathing. Something very big."
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.