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In these dark troughs the polycarbonate front windshield of the wheelhouse
became like an obsidian mirror and my face was refl ected back at
me by the muted interior lights of Jester’s instruments. It
was a haggard face, and an even thinner one than just months before.
I suppose this was due to the loss of weight from recovering from
the Glastonbury injuries. It wasn’t a handsome face, at least
I didn’t think so, but the face at least wasn’t actually
scared-looking any longer, not since I had learned that Jester rose
easily to the Channel waves.
My height took up all but an inch of the 6-foot, 3-inch headroom –
Jester had been designed that way – and so my nondescript mousy
brown hair was partly cut off by the wheelhouse’s frame. Only
that unruly shock of hair curved down over my forehead and had to
be brushed back from time to time so that the equally nondescript
brown eyes could see. These eyes now gazed steadily back at me with
new confidence in Jester’s seaworthiness. The slight rippling
imperfections in the plastic polycarbonate window-mirror emphasized
the fl atter, crushed right cheekbone and the lumpy right jaw line
that the combination of a land mine and a Timor palm tree trunk had
conspired between them to create. Jester rose out of the trough, crashing
through the foam of the swell’s crest.
True, at Margate, after throwing Mariko O’Shaugnessey’s
roses overboard at Gravesend, I had possessed the presence of mind
to fold the cutwater plates forward and I had bolted the pointed apex
where they met fi rmly together in overlapping steel plates –
but all this was out of sheer habit.
Then I had even, for some reason, bolted the folding fl oor of this
cutwater to the steel flanges of the cutwater’s plate sides
at the bottom. This triangular cutwater extension of Folderol Jester’s
bow had never been intended to be watertight. Indeed, it had round
holes drilled in its floor.
I had been experimenting with a Chinese refinement when I had designed
it. As I have made abundantly clear elsewhere, I have never aspired
to be a blue water sailor and I had therefore not permitted myself
any lapse in weather watching to test the ancient Chinese idea.
And this was, in a word, to make the forward compartment of a vessel
purposefully leakable, and drainable, to act as something of a shock
absorber in serious waves. We were encountering serious waves now
because I had suffered a lapse in weather watching back at Margate.
No, that’s not quite true. I just didn’t want to know
about the weather at Margate because that Thames-side town was much
too close to London. If I had learned of a late August Channel storm
at Margate, well, commuter trains to London were much too handy.
I didn’t think that Mariko and I could survive a second parting
on the same day and I didn’t want to spend any time at all in
any lonely Margate marina. I also knew, and too well, that Mariko
didn’t want to see me again soon, or at least not for a long
time. She was revelling in her long- deserved and new-found fame as
a linguist, translating the Gospel of Mary Magdalene that we had supposedly
dredged up somewhere, and rather vaguely, among the sunken islands
of lost Lyonesse.
Given both the triumph and tragedy, the ecstasy and agony, that that
adventure had cost us, I was already thinking of the summer’s
experiences as a parable with subtle depths. Privately, I always thought
of the painful lessons we had endured because of that ancient parchment
as The Magdalene Mandala. Something to be studied because of the perfect
balance of its components, something a Buddhist might have kept spinning
as a meditation prayer wheel. There had been the victory and retribution,
the initial
poverty and eventual comfortable fi nancial viability, if not quite
wealth, juxtaposed with such exquisite symmetry that * the wheel would
have spun true. And in the central vortex of that wheel, around which
everything else had revolved, was a scrap of parchment – well,
vellum, according to Mariko – that weighed almost nothing and
yet the impact of it might change the world.
After her tearful farewell at the Thames mooring, I thought it best
not to return to her very quickly, if ever.
So I had put out into the Channel without turning on the radio and
without learning of the impending ‘early autumn’ or (very)
early equinoctial storm roiling up the Channel from the unpredictable
North Atlantic.
I was feeling somewhat fey – perhaps the Celtic half of Mariko
had gotten to me more deeply than I realized. And I was feeling more
than a bit fatalistic because the Oriental half of Mariko had most
certainly gotten to me.
I didn’t greatly care what happened to me.
Of course, that half of Mariko O’Shaugnessey, the Oriental half,
had the reinforcement of decade-dead Mei Ling, now at the bottom of
the Sulu Sea in the storm-twisted wreckage of an Indonesian orembai
just like Folderol Jester.
As Jester rose easily to the next black wall of water – a wall
I estimated at about fi fteen feet high – one part of my brain
wryly whispered a more vulgar version of ‘folderol’.
To wit, horse shit.
Mei Ling’s orembai had been a traditional one of bamboo and
teak planks held together with ages of skill but only bamboo-plaited
ropes with which to express it. Jester’s main two folding hulls
were welded steel up to their gunwales and from there up she was welded
in 6061-T6 aluminium- magnesium alloy. Jester’s outriggers were
of the same stuff, as were most of her internal bulkheads. Her outrigger
struts
were not Indonesian bamboo, but oval stainless steel pipe. Jester
was about twenty times as strong as the Brunei orembai that Mei Ling
had fi shed from and died on, maybe more.
The realization that I was infi nitely more fortunate than Mei Ling
– and perhaps even luckier than Mariko
O’Shaugnessey, come to that – dissipated my feyness and
fatalism pretty quickly.
In short, I donned a life jacket and clipped a nylon safety harness
around me. Then, I climbed out of the wheelhouse and into the ‘bracing’
wind. It was maybe a little more bracing than the half-gale naturally
made it because Jester was making about ten knots under steam power
and almost directly into the wind, at that. All four masts were up,
but the sails had not been hoisted for over two months. They were
still securely furled by nylon straps.
I noted that the wind was not yet strong enough to blow the crests
off the rollers, so it was not even a full gale, as blue water sailors
might disdain it. But it was a strong wind, stronger in the gusts
and also whenever Jester topped a wave. I held onto the wheelhouse
hatch until I had clipped the safety harness to the brass knee-high
rail around the rear hull that contained the cabin.
I sat on the great stainless steel hinges that held the two hulls
together and let my legs dangle down into the almost empty ice-cube
tray of Jester’s forward hull. I saw that Ivory – which
Mariko had fi rst re-named Achilles and then Victory – was securely
bound to the deck just below me by its stainless steel 1x19 wire cables
and stainless steel snap- shackles to eye-bolts TIG-welded to the
very frame of the
hull. Ivory rocked forward and aft a bit with every wave, but the
vehicle wasn’t going anywhere soon.
I noted, with some amazement, that the fl ower shop’s paper,
in which Mariko’s roses had come, and which I had wedged between
the smokestack and one of the thinner whistle-tubes, was still in
place. A substantial piece of the paper had folded over the hinges
and all of the paper cone had apparently been held there by the sheer
force of the wind. Even as I watched, this folded piece tore away
and was
whirled aloft into the black sky. The piece wedged between the smokestack
and the whistle-tube somehow stayed in place a few moments longer.
As I watched it, however, it performed a wild gyration.
It had been defi nitely creased in a straight line, either by the
fl ower shop’s counter edge when Mariko had bought the roses
and they had been wrapped, or else – and less probably –
when the conical paper container with the roses had been carried down,
crushed against Mariko’s chest, to Jester at the Thames-side
quay. And now this creased paper arose, like a thing alive, and began
to fl ap like a bird’s wings along the crease-line beside the
smokestack. As it fl apped, it began to rotate, slowly at fi rst,
and then faster and faster. Finally it stopped fl apping and closed
in an aerofoil curve caused, I suppose, by some cello tape stuck length-wise
inside it, and rotated even faster. Fascinated, I watched it soar
upward alongside the smokestack until it disappeared aloft into the
blackness.
I imagined that its strange antics were caused by errant drafts of
the wind that were distorted by the smokestack and the two brass whistle-tubes
fl anking it. Strange things can happen in wind. I remembered seeing
in Florida, after a hurricane, old-fashioned broom straws stuck completely
through telephone poles. I doubted that the newer plastic broom bristle-whiskers,
ubiquitous only a few years ago, but once again becoming supplanted
by natural straw because of the energy and petroleum crisis, could
pass through a telephone pole even with hurricane force behind them.
I remembered these aerial antics of the rose wrapping in the back
of my mind as I looked forward toward Jester’s cutwater.
I knew that the strength of it, and the Chinese idea, hinged, very
literally, on the strength of its vertical hinges that were welded
to the sides of Jester’s steel front hull. Of course, these
hinges had more than substantial stainless steel pins.
And, in the approved Chinese manner, I had drilled holes in the cutwater
floor that were smaller in the front and became progressively bigger
toward the landing-craft type ramp-style door that, squeezing plastic-covered
edges together tightly, denoted the truly watertight section of the
front hull.
A foot thick layer of Styrofoam under the plywood deck ensured that
this rectangular front hull of Jester would not sink even if it were
fl ooded. Any water in excess of about six tons would simply drain
out through the screened (stainless steel) scuppers at deck level,
or fi nd its way back into the sea a bit more slowly through the doors
covering the well between Ivory’s rear wheels.
And these vertical hinges welded integrally with Jester’s steel
hull had held, so far, even when cascades of a comber crest had occasionally
curled aboard and had splashed up against the truly watertight vertical
ramp wall. The water seemed to recede quickly enough from this strange
cutwater, too.
Jester rose and fell easily to each oncoming wave, but not abruptly.
I had tried to follow ancient Chinese depictions and it seemed as
though I had done a tolerable job. The only thing not really done
in the ancient Chinese style was to have simple rounded holes of progressively
larger diameter in the cutwater’s fl oor rather than diamond-shaped
holes of progressively larger size. This would have required extra
machining and thus extra cost and I had long since decided that the
Chinese refi ned things beyond the dictates of sheer practicality.
As politically incorrect as I was, I attributed this to, probably,
genetic inclinations of Oriental humanity.
The ancient Chinese believed that the diamond-shaped fenestrations
(as the French called these holes from the French word for window,
fenêtre) created ‘living water’.
Perhaps they were right, but the round holes had worked very well…
so far. I had left Yin and Yang at that in my design drawings intended
for my Toronto welder. Jester seemed to be working very well in conditions
I had never dared (consciously) to try – like the passage from
St. Nazaire to Hoedic or worse, the passage back from Hoedic to the
Vilaine River, both with Mariko during the last summer solstice. The
waves then had been only four-to- six footers and even so I had been
a bit worried. Now, my
feyness or fatalism at Margate had plunked Jester and me into waves
three times as high, at least.
With even the last paper reminder of Mariko O’Shaugnessey’s
roses gone from Folderol Jester, as it were, I started to become once
again my own man – as it were. I sat up there, on the break
of Jester’s poop, with the strong hinges beneath my knees emphasizing
my reality. Mostly, I was re-running last summer’s vignettes
of Mariko-as-anima.
Surprisingly, I must have thought (and didn’t do it very often)
of C.G. Jung, and the primal strength of the female anima on the male
psyche. I sat there, I suppose, for some hours, not feeling much of
anything, but seeing the enjoyable and also the not-so-enjoyable mental
vignettes. The fi rst stages of that
oft sought, but never truly grasped, emotional closure, you see.
On the other hand, because I suppose Jung happened to cross my mind
when the day had begun to lighten, maybe I had been looking in the
wrong place for that elusive anima.
I could discern the barest smudge of land to the southeast because
of a few twinkling lights. I noted that no such lights glimmered toward
the northwest, so I must have been steering automatically all that
time. This barest smudge of land must be France, assuming that I was
still in the North Atlantic, that is. And I was fairly sure we were.
I cautiously turned Jester to port, noting with satisfaction that
the boat
ascended the diminishing waves – greenish-looking rollers in
the wan dawn and looking about ten feet high now – with her
outriggers almost parallel to the waves. From my perch up on the hinges
where Jester’s two hulls joined, I could view my boat more objectively
than I had for the full ten
years since she had been made.
At fi fty-eight feet long with the cutwater extended and twenty feet
in total width, Jester wasn’t about to capsize even in this
cross-chop on the unconscious course my mind had chosen. Not with
the eight tons of free ballast on her bottom, the impeller tubes of
always-moving water alongside her wide keel.
Finally, turning more to port, the wind and waves pushed me toward
France just on the horizon. I guessed from the chart that the smudge
must be a part of Normandy. So, since I was back to normal, more or
less, I steered a bit more westerly for Brittany. Sooner or later,
when I made landfall, I would fi nd out exactly where we were. The
main things were the distant horizon of land over the bow and the
fact
that the sonar had run out of enough fathoms with which to express
the depth of water beneath the keel. The Eagle 5000 portable sonar
was good for a depth of over 400 feet, about 70 fathoms, so things
couldn’t be all bad. In fact, things were relatively good.
And as the grey dawn light steadily became stronger, I realized that
I truly felt very good too – except for some slight aching in
the neck, spine and ribs that had probably truly awakened me from
that pleasant miasma of Jung-and- anima nostalgia. I’d been
told that my neck and ribs would always cause ‘mild discomfort’
(as doctors like to put it). So, I was not particularly surprised
at the ache, but gratifi ed to
learn that it had required some hours in a cool breeze to start it
up. All that physiotherapy back in London had done some good, after
all.
And I had discovered, through carelessness back at Margate, Folderol
Jester was much more seaworthy than I had ever dared to test. Not
that I hadn’t designed her that way, but it was good to verify
the theory with practice. With my newly found confidence in Jester
as an offshore boat, and with an ever-brightening day that promised
to be sunny but blustery, I decided to take a stab at more serious
navigation. After some concentrated study of the chart, and fi guring
that the winds had created a current of two knots against us during
the night, I fi nally decided that the distant glimmering lights far
abeam were probably Dieppe. Taking this as a reasonable assumption,
I turned Jester a bit to starboard, heading more south and west for
the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and Cherbourg.
It, or some headland, duly rose above the horizon dead on the bow
by late afternoon.
If I left Cherbourg and crossed the Gulf of St. Malo to coast around
Brittany and Poitou down to the Gironde, it would take Jester about
two weeks to reach Aiguillon.
But with a dangerous lee shore all the way and the season turning
to notorious September in the Bay of Biscay. If, once reaching Brittany,
and sailing its southern shore to once again enter the inland canals
at St. Malo or further east at the Vilaine River, the same trip would
take about three weeks.
And it would be as safe as houses. I found that with twenty- four
hours between Mariko and me, I was looking forward to being ‘home’
– although I had no idea what awaited me there or even precisely
where home was. Oh, Raoul and Joëlle had given clear enough directions,
but I had never actually seen
the place.
There, somewhere off the mouth of the Seine, with Cherbourg nestled
in a headland muted with distance ahead of Jester, I succumbed to
temptation. On a whim I braked the wheel and ran Jester for some minutes
under unchanged power while I hoisted sail. I hoisted both mains and
mizzens, and on both sides, not forgetting to rotate the port masts
forward. The full-battened and vaguely Chinese-shaped sails turned
Jest (or Genoas) on the fore stays – except that they, too,
had full battens of carbon fi bre slats, cut from sheets of the stuff.
The three pairs of sails each were tethered together by an aluminium
tube; so only three sheets came back to me atop the poop and hinges.
The wind was coming out of the west; call it about 15 knots and in
the gusts a bit more. When I had these six smallish sails (or three)
depending on one’s point of view, correctly trimmed to my satisfaction,
I reached down into the wheelhouse and valved the steam engine down
to ‘simmer’, as I called it, and de-clutched its chain
drive from the impeller.
Jester had already heeled over a very few degrees toward the low coast
of Normandy to port. But now she was making about 15 knots –
if not a bit more in the gusts – and I was using only a trickle
of fuel to keep the boiler hot enough for fairly quick usage.
As the sun sank toward the west in the late afternoon, I noted that
the smudge on the horizon over the bow was becoming much more defi
nite. I knew also, without having to look at any chart, that the harbour
and town of Cherbourg must be snuggled behind this headland.
Home? How could one have a home without knowing its precise location?
Its smells? Its trees? Its views from cozy windows?
Mariko, when she had chided me on that last – was it only yesterday
afternoon? – Thames-side parting had said with too-feminine
certainty that I had a perfectly good permanent address at Aiguillon
with Joëlle. But Mariko had really known nothing of the seven-year
relationship between Joëlle and myself.
I had never told her.
Firstly, because I had known too well that any knowledge that Mariko
had beyond her own theft might have proved dangerous to herself, and
would certainly have proved dangerous to Joëlle. Not to mention
Raoul, Philippe and their wives. And secondly, because the strange
relationship that existed between Joëlle and me was ours alone,
not to be shared with anyone, not even with Mariko O’Shaugnessey.
Joëlle, during the seven years we had been together since I had
fi rst come into France, had gradually become more of a daughter to
me than a womanly peer consort.
And also, in some strange way that she herself had insisted upon,
and perhaps was, Joëlle had also become a timeless Earth Mother,
a spirit of the Haute Garonne. And it was simply a fact that her family
had lived for, perhaps, 10,000 years where the Lot River fl owed into
the Garonne River, not six miles from Aiguillon where Raoul had so
conveniently found the warehouse that my money had made
it possible to buy. So, by some unlikely quirk of fate – or
was it coincidence? – Joëlle was once again living at the
confluence of the Lot and Garonne Rivers, just where her entire family
had resided since, maybe, the close of the last Ice Age.
And, aside from securing, almost outright buying the warehouse itself,
had I not sent some 17,000 Euros to Joëlle out of the bounty
gained by the Magdalene Gospel from Stewart and Ibn Da’ud? Then,
she had the motorized tricycle that I had constructed for her in Narbonne
seven years before.
It had been made of steel and aluminium, yes, but its major components
had been infi nite care and concern. It would sustain Joëlle
for longer than she could reasonably expect to live, or be able to
ride on it. Its driving mechanism would never wear out, it seemed.
There were Velocette mopeds still running in France that had been
made in 1930. Its 25cc engine had not changed at all from 1930 to
1997, when an
upscale refi nement to 35cc had been introduced. Even its tires would
last for a decade, if cared for.
So, I owed her nothing. Nothing, except, of course, those obligations
of my heart. She was, after all, female, and in the world as it seemed
to be disintegrating day-by-day, this fact alone made her as vulnerable
as little Lucy the Australopithecine some 2-3 million years ago. Once
again.
As I looked aloft at the superbly-drawing Chinese sails…
I realized that Folderol Jester was my real home, and not Joëlle
and ‘my’ (or the communally-owned) warehouse at Aiguillon.
Could Joëlle understand that I had changed? That there was no
automatic ‘chivalry’ or ‘obligation’ in my
heart, beyond what I had already done for her, any more? Somehow,
‘the Magdalene Mandala’, as I chose to call it, had burned
that sort of emotional commitment out of me – again –
just as Mei Ling’s death had burned it out long before.
I didn’t know what Joëlle could, or could not, understand.
I did know that in the very late afternoon, almost sunset, the Cotentin
Peninsula was close abeam and I steered for its westernmost tip, the
Pointe de Barfl eur. Long before actual sundown I dowsed the sails,
furled them with the strong nylon straps again, and, once rounding
the fi rst headland, steamed at a stately 5 knots up past the Grande
Rade breakwater into Cherbourg. I threaded the narrow channel between
the Petite Rade with some care and disdained the Chantereyne Marina
– more like an upscale Western-style boat city, really, since
it could accommodate some 12,000 yachts – and I noticed that
it was much less than half full even at the end of August.
As the sunset fl ared into reddish-orange in the far West, I turned
past the Government Wharf and into the much more modest breakwater
of the Club Nautique Sportif. It felt a little odd to be back where
Mariko and I had started our Channel crossing to Weymouth and Glastonbury
just two months earlier.
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