[A chapter of the current project, a novel called ‘What Matters’]
I awoke with the lifejacket pushed up beneath my chin by the water—adrift in the ocean, in the midst of a puddle of whale piss, so it wasn’t water at all, or not much of that. The water beyond me, a ragged patchwork of flat sky light and dark water—dark water, not black or gray, ran to a thick smudge of horizon. Only that smudge could be seen in every direction across the rise and fall of gentle swells. No land. No other boat. The sky was pale and colorless as well. I knew I was floating in whale piss because I had been there before.
Now, I am one of those writers that works in metaphor more than analogy. This predicament had all the markers. Simply judged, my life was then a lot of whale piss.
The lifejacket was the one my father kept stowed beneath the short forward deck on our old boat. Mostly kept there so that he could keep his feet up on something when he was steering. It was mildewy and faded and strangely soiled so that what was left of the orange color remained only where the ties were sewn to the fabric. I recognized it immediately as a familiar of my childhood.
I imagined myself as seen from below, from the dark, a fracture in the bright surface light like a windshield ruined by a stone. Analogy, of course. My white legs scissoring the water, flashing like a lore to any predator. Another analogy.
I had read somewhere of a shipwrecked sailor lost at sea who had found himself in a puddle of whale piss amidst an empty ocean and reckoned that it had been deposited there purposely by some protective creature to keep the sharks away. True or not, he had previously been on a whaling ship and it seemed to me that whales might not think so kindly of him.
My life was a puddle of whale piss. When had I been in such whale piss before?
It wasn’t really a ‘when.’ It was where I had always been. Befuddled by life itself.
My father, being a child of Illinois, had never had a boat before in his life when he had uncovered the old lacquered mahogany ‘skiff’ in the great room of our house after moving there. I was not born yet so, I was not a witness to this, but he had many miss adventures learning how to deal with it. My real fascination with it had always been the motor, which seemed alive to me when it ran, and growled as I believed a dinosaur might, and was encased by a sinewy enclosure, not smooth on the surface like modern engines, but ribbed by its parts the way a body builder might be. It wasn’t a large engine but required constant attention, and the very difficulties it posed to my father were some part of the affection he had for it. But having the boat out with the family nested there at all sides was an event, and the several times that we were stranded by sudden bad weather only enlarged that event and the mythos attached.
The boat was made by Hacker-Craft, which evidently made it special, and he was always getting offers for it when we pulled up at a dock to get gas, even with us right there inside. They always called it a ‘runabout.’ My father called it a skiff. Evidently, what made it unique was that it did not have much of a deck area. It was an open design intended to ferry passengers back and forth to larger boats. That is as much as I remember about it. In 1963 my father ran it up on some rocks and it forever after sat on its rusting trailer at the side of the house, covered with a green canvas tarp, and was used from then on as a hiding place. That was when I became most familiar with the old life-jacket.
But it was during a previous mishap, when the boat was swamped while my father attempted to reach a safe harbor during a summer storm, and all of its occupants were turned out into the foam near a jetty, that the experience of floating in the ocean with a lifejacket on had likely been impressed on my soul. I was never alone then. We held hands as we rode the waves and my mother told Irish stories her mother had told her, and a dory came from the harbor and fished us all out in short order.
I had first had the whale-piss dream when I went off to college. And again shortly after that, before I left from that place for good. The metaphor seemed as right to me then as it did years later when I was changing wet diapers in the middle of the night. The dream had no beginning and no end. It was always the middle. But that fact seemed the key to understanding the dream.
My effort to live according to my principles, was likely less pure. I had never been able to fully attach my thoreauvian ideals to the everyday process of living. Old Henry did not seem to care quite as much about sex, for instance. Or women in general. And I am not sure if he ever changed a diaper, but I know that he avoided spending time with children. My too brief years around Bridgett could have been multiplied ten-fold, as far as I was concerned. Of course, that would have been at the expense of Doris.
I was engaged on what I believed to be a great project—not exactly a civil war, or a revolution, but something. The idea was that I should write for an audience that might appreciate what I was saying without a need for concocted plots and made-up tribulations. I asked myself what would a person do if they were in such and such a situation. The person of the characters should be interesting by nature. The situation should be unusual. But there were no murders, and because I had never been on a battlefield, there were no wars. The situations were all of the kind that a normal human being might have. And the themes were always grand: variations on utopia, or the collapse of civilization due to ignorance and neglect being the most common. There were murders and wars, but they occurred off-stage. The importance was in how the characters dealt with this hardship. The human matter.
Unbidden, a reviewer had called my second book, ‘whale piss,’ for dealing with the utopia theme without reaching a conclusion. I actually wrote him back to explain that the urine analysis was that this condition was actually caused by a lot of human beings pissing on someone all at the same time for not obeying the ‘rules.’ I have no idea if he had somehow been blessed with a similar dream as myself. I can only hope so.