The foggy morning mists swirl in a swaying shroud, covering the coastal Maine landscape in a curtain of memories as it hides the present from my view. Even as the afternoon wears on, the weariness settles into me, and the landscape pulls me from my home to my longing...Why, when I have the surroundings of peace and safety, would the ache return for what nearly separated me from this mortal existence, not once, but several times? What grips me so intimately that it's hold would pull from deep within my soul, and that life which is otherwise denied me, to cry out for a reprieve?
Why Art? Isn't it a reaching out from a heart trying to communicate to the world around you, to be understood, to be appreciated? To be seen in real terms, this spoken word of one's spirit that cannot find expression in any other way?
So speaks the ice to me.
The Arctic has a way of facing you off with who and what you really are. The hype of the civilized world has no meaning to a frozen Arctic wind - if you aren't prepared, if you can't take it, it kills you. That simple.
You live with an honesty that confronts you in every minute of your puny existence there, and unfolds to your mind the raw beauty surrounding you -it's embrace accepts you for that moment as one of her own. But the law is always in force, and your very life depends upon the basic rule that you never forget it. You cannot stop the sun from getting lower each swing across the sky, until the frozen tundra is kissed goodnight. In the long nights of an ice crystaled, tortured eternity, the blazing aurora borialis awaits the mind reaching eagerly for a dance with the evening, as the brightening skies come alive and chase the darkness across the heavens, the stars winking and flashing through the curtain's twisting crescendo of flashing colors.
All of this over a world that still grips it's inhabitants in a frosted glove, controlling every motive and crushing those who make the fatal mistake of forgetting Who is really in command here.
So is it any wonder then, but that when the beauty is so vibrantly apparent, one clasps to the rhythm of life still moving your soul, an appreciation of that which for that moment you are still allowed to enjoy? Does it seem, perhaps, too poetic to be real?
And What has all this got to do with the price of tea in China?
Think again. You are what you make of yourself - and what you then give to others. I learned that up there, where confusion couldn't find the fertile ground of man's philosophy to thrive in. The ice is real, the cold is real, you are real. And the life that comes of a reality without hype keeps it real. Circumstance can influence the conditions you must deal with, but it doesn't control you. How you live is up to you.
How you die can often be quite another matter.
So, you try to hedge the bets in your favor as much as you can, and give the God Who created you a chance to have at least some say in the outcome.
In this case, I couldn't take all the credit. I drew up the lines to my kayaq from what centuries had already taught the ancestors of those I grew up with - and pulled together the features I knew would win from several of them. A lifetime at sea from Bowditch to my Dad, learning and growing all came together when the Nor'easter started to turn the ice pack into a corkscrewing mass, cutting off my lead to freedom as the visibility dropped to a chilling few dozen yards.
Only a few hours before, the day was sunny and bright. Now I more heard than saw the hidden ice grinding together around me, as I twisted and turned in and out of dead ends and shifting cul-d-sacs as I sought to stay on a course I could only predict in the wind and thermal mists surrounding me. And as the hours stretched out, I began, despite the marine insulation I wore, to feel a loss occurring in my legs bracing me in the craft that was trying to keep me alive.
The time was long overdue to get out of the boat - over ten hours had passed since I had first entered the field that now threatened to entrap me. But where was a flow large enough and stable enough, in a configuration that I could get out upon, to safety?
It was as the last of the pack was pushing together and cutting me off from the last of a lead I needed to get through, that a chunk of ice opened up as I tried to get past it - into a small horse-shoe shaped lagoon, just big enough for my kayaq to slide into, and out of danger.
The timing was too close for coincidence - I won't buy it. A God Who was watching me struggle to live made sure the refuge was there when I needed it most. Had I given up, I wouldn't have found it, and certainly not in time.
The picture shows the field several hours later, after the winds had shifted and dispersed the growlers to some degree. I was, in fact, hoping to get the rest of the way through, but the wind increased out of the NW - from across the Beaufort, and straight across the flows to me. The increasing weather made the outcome of the approaching storm clear - but this time I could call in for support, from the excellant North Slope Bourough Rescue crew. By the time the storm hit early that evening, we were all safely out of range. Their training and skillful use of the equipment they were entrusted with provided a service that rescued me, and in a like manner, so do we for each other.
I was thinking of that as I wrote. And remembering still as I write.
So, with this a Blog is born, bearing in the memories one of many reasons why I chose to to try and keep alive a hope of better good within me. I watch my Wife painting, and the filtering rays of her sunsets remind me much of what I saw as I returned to finish the first leg of that journey across the Arctic NW Passage.
So, together we try to keep the beauty alive - she paints, beautifully, and I design and paint boats, scrim, and write.
And Jeep.
As a Veteran of the Vietnam conflict, and as our son later (my stepson) is also a Veteran of Iraq with the Bronze Star (he was just grateful to have himself and his squad home alive), we can't help but appreciate what we have. It wasn't always this good.
Enough said on that subject. I know I'm in abundant company there.
So, what's the goal? I've already raised a family as best we could, and they turned out rather well despite our mortal shortcomings. I've written one Christian Science Fiction, and am starting the sequel, as my Beautiful Wife continues to keep her studio humming in preparation for the shows she has scheduled. I'm still restoring boats and the salt is still in my blood. (You would think I'd have learned by now.) We're Grandparents to a wonderful group of young people, and in all of this, the substance of life, we see that maybe that's what this is all about.
Hope. Where it wouldn't appear to be. I write about that, in fact, remembering Solus (in my novel "Lightship", beginning with his entrance into the story in Chapter Four), who starts out having lost everything, only to realize things can change. And If you follow him through the series, change becomes an understatement...)
So it is with life. Mine on the sea, in military service, and a host of whatever it took to feed the family. Dad told me when I was seventeen (Miracles do exist - I was listening!) to never pass up a chance to learn a new trade - he grew up during the Depression - because your chances are better of finding employment when others are on an unemployment line. So I did.
Even writing - a man who doesn't even know how to type!
So, The Bottom Line, in Ten Words or Less?
Don't be afraid to Live your Dreams. Just Do It.
The more good you do, the more it empowers you to do better. I guess the hardest part for me, is keeping on, when it doesn't seem to be making a difference. But the Lagoon in the Ice was a refuge I didn't see coming, until it was right there. That's why I find myself going back there, in my mind... the Arctic ice's reality is not only in what you see and experience there - it's in the God Who created it.
And us. Not to fail, but to see.
And Because we see, we win.
All it takes is perseverance.
And the Faith to see it through.
-WKD
