I was once a Triathlete. During a season of life spanning nine or so years through my mid-twenties and into my thirties I competed, but mostly I trained. It was the training I adored–races were just the final superfluous act. I put in intricate, meticulous miles through neatly sleeping neighborhoods across Fishers, Indiana, and then Thousand Oaks, California, and finally Gig Harbor, Washington. Those miles to nowhere over inanimate suburban streets bear no impression of my passage.
A triathlon always begins in the water and ends on land. In the summer of 2006 I was a good eight-hundred meters out in the Pacific Ocean at Malibu, California. The water was alive, brackish; a furiously beautiful sea of green full of grainy particles visible in milky light up to about fifteen feet. I surged forward, slippery and measured in the powerful flow. As I attained a buoy and reoriented my heading to the next one I was very aware of how far I had come, how much farther I had yet to go. The idea of turning back was so silly it startled me. I never stopped swimming. I just kept going. The decision to do so was not, then or now, profound. It was simply necessary.
***
Ernest Shackleton set sail on The Endurance for the South Atlantic in August, 1914. He and his crew of twenty-seven men intended to make the first successful crossing of Antarctica. The expedition failed and they lost their beautiful ship. Over the course of some twenty months those men endured and survived a trial as harrowing as any ever recorded. Not a single man was lost. Time and again, these men, under the remarkable and caring leadership of Shackleton, rose to the occasion and matched the fury of desperation with ingenuity and grit. Of particular note during this crucible is an utterly incomprehensible feat of open-boat navigation by dint of dead reckoning in April, 1916. The crew were stranded on Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands; their supply emaciated. Shackleton made the necessary decision to cross the Southern Ocean to the whaling stations in South Georgia. He selected six men to join him on the eight hundred mile crossing which would take seventeen days in freezing, bitter air and heaving waters.
By definition, dead reckoning is this: it is a means of calculating position. It requires a fix or, rather, a point of origin from a previous and known position in order to gain an estimation of present position through a consideration of calculated speed and course over an elapsed time. The measurement is conducted at sea under the sky using a sextant and chronometer with logarithmic charts. A sextant is a triangle with an eye-piece of two mirrors that measures the angle between two objects–usually a fixed point on the horizon in scale to a heavenly body in the sky. It is an inexact art that, if done properly, has a remarkable means of overcoming cumulative errors of approximation. Speed and direction must be accurately known at all times or it will not work. Dead reckoning cannot account for directional drift in a fluid medium such as the sea and, therefore, requires the keen judgement of the mariner doing the reading to not only calculate the fixed points on the horizon and in the stars but also the movement of the craft underneath him. Given the grace, ease and accuracy of Global Positioning Systems today, the very notion of dead reckoning seems barbaric. It is indeed primitive, hearkening back to a purer form of seamanship and belies the beauty of human insignificance as this mortal race drifts through its own existence on island earth under a vast sea of stars.
Against all odds the seven men on the small open boat they named the James Caird, managed to command their own dead reckoning. Into winds of eighty miles an hour and through cape horn rollers as tall as sixty feet and under gloomy skies forbidding regular sightings out on an illegible horizon they persisted and managed. One man would take snap readings standing on the icy thwart of the boat while another held him fast in freezing mists and raw air. During the crossing there were moments when days would pass without a successful reading. In essence that miserable band of seven desperate men were dead reckoning a dead reckoning, but still they got through.
***
I am a dreamer. The dreams that come are usually quite vivid. Some are terrible, others are beyond my inadequate words.
In one such dream, I sat in a small boat fishing at dusk on calm obsidian-black water just off Peninsula Point in Ketchikan, Alaska. I was uneasy. With sudden awareness I felt the presence of several orcas in the deep below me. The calm water swelled and ebbed rolling my small craft into an otherwise gentle bob as these distinctive hydrodynamic giants displaced volumes beneath me. For some inexplicable reason I found myself in an almost mindless abandon slicing, with a silver plane, thick squares of orange cheddar cheese from a heavy block and then lofting them–frisbee-like–into the water. Each heavy slice slapped onto and then rippled the black water. These floating orange squares lapped up against the hull of my little boat. I persisted in the act even as a dire warning of welling dread iced my veins. I looked down over the edge of the boat into the deep and saw beneath the surface terrible, elegant movement. Sliding shadows blacker than the water itself with bone white splotchy streaks of tight skin circled. I counted three but knew there had to be twice that many, maybe more, far below the others. And then the jolt came. My clenched teeth exploded into grist under duress of a forceful launch outward into the gloaming horizon where air and water meet. Sharp horror and panic displaced the recoil of my body. It was a violent flight and then I sank. I sank and sank and sank. Into a thick ink, I sank. There was no definition in the water; its empty medium carried only haunting sounds of echoes and shrieks. I felt such despair! I think I screamed but could not see the bubbles that would have emitted into the black and could not hear or feel the vibration of my voice. With all my strength I pulled upward, digging into the water with fingers unable to achieve a perch. Time ceased. All was lost. I knew I would soon know.
I awoke.
***
Sometimes I feel a heaviness come on, a wave of weakness that makes me wonder if I’ve got the energy to make it through a day, to see an hour into a fuller completion of itself. When I doubt my will or strength to see it through I tell myself, you’ve been through worse, you know how to stand hard against the wind. The weakness fades and I’m reminded of that silver thread of strength, sometimes only as wide as a flimsy string of floss, but it’s stronger than steel and I hold onto it knowing that I can still chart my course under the Southern Cross and get to that other shore on that other side I can’t see yet. I’m taking my own snaps at the moving horizon under fixed stars so far away, so amazingly close. I am drifting and surging, so far out into the depth of deep waters that to consider going back is foolishness. I’m not even considering that diminished thought. No, I’m taking a dead reckoning, certain my reading is enough to account for the cumulative errors of my own miscalculations and blindspots. I won’t miss. I can’t. I’ll get there. I have too much heart. I see it all with such clarity now.
You see, I once thought I’d built a grand ship of my own. It was my own mighty Endurance, but that beautiful ship, the one I spent so long attending to, got caught in the ice pack of my own ambition and was crushed and then pulled under. What the sea wants, it takes and ultimately this mariner, this very man, decided to let it go. I took to the ice in a makeshift sled of my own diminished resources and traversed a distance spanning several years of quiet and often painful transformation. All of it has been necessary.
***
When I look in the mirror and focus on the eyes I see who I really am and I like knowing that I know, more now than ever, who is looking back.
I tested my mettle–God knows there will be more testing ahead. I swam in deep waters–deeper water awaits. I discovered strength I never realized I had–more discovery will be revealed in due course.
***
When I look at the stars I marvel at the little bursts of clear light coming from so far. Sometimes it’s the vast blackness of space that intrigues me. Sometimes I prefer only the light. But, truthfully, I love them both and the one cannot exist without the other.
Whenever I think I might actually sense the presence of the Almighty everything gets quiet and the stars become a fixed position along a maplike labyrinth to a truth so pure it cannot be held. The light of knowing what must really be out there has to be extraordinary and just when I think I’m about to overwhelm my own small intelligence with a clarity I’m nearly grasping I tell myself this: Russell, He’s out there. You don’t need to worry because He’ll always turn down the light just enough to let you see Him as He sees you.
RCS
27 May, 2020