The Plover: A Novel
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Authors: Brian Doyle
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For Mary
CONTENTS
Chapter I: 45° north, 125° west
Chapter II: 24° north, 159° west
Chapter III: 1° north, 173° east
Chapter IV: 0° south, 169° east
Chapter V: 5° south, 160° east
Chapter VI: 4° north, 160° west
Chapter VII: 22° north, 165° west
Chapter VIII: 24° north, 170° west
These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have never wearied; and never once did I lose my fidelity to blue water and a ship … my exile to the place of schooners and islands can be in no sense regarded as a calamity.
—
Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, 1890
Every one of us has within us a drop of [the] ocean … just like a drop of the ocean has the same qualities as the whole ocean.
—
George Harrison
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
—
Annie Dillard
I
45° NORTH, 125° WEST
WEST AND THEN WEST
for weeks and weeks or months and months sweet Jesus knows how long. A lifetime of lifetimes. On the continent of the sea. A pair of shaggy claws scuttling on the ceiling of the sea. The silent She.
West and then west! says Declan aloud, startling the gull sitting atop the
Plover
’s tiny cabin, her feathers ruffling in the steady wind. Onward twisted soldiers! The gull launches without the slightest effort, sliding into the welcoming air. Declan laughs. Go ahead, bird, assume the position, he says, and as if in obedience to the man’s command the gull wheels behind and over the stern and hangs exactly nine feet above the boat without even a shiver of her wings. Sweet Jesus, says Declan, I would ask you how you
do
that, but you know and I know that there are more things than we know, as you know. Onward whiskered soldiers!
* * *
The
Plover,
out of Oregon, skippered by O Donnell, Declan, no fixed address or abode. Last registered midcoast, in Depoe Bay. Originally a small trawler, much amended and edited by its owner, who installed a mast and rigged the boat for coastal cruising. Wrecked once near Neawanaka, minor damage, repaired by owner. For some years a fishing boat bringing in regular catches, occasional permits filed for charter fishing, one permit filed for whale-watching cruise, a number of gratuitous permit applications filed in last three years apparently for the amusement of the owner: for flossing the teeth of unsuspecting whales, in search of Robert Dean Frisbie on account of incontrovertible evidence of his faked demise in the South Seas, in pursuit of the magnetic West Pole, in search of the names of god in the languages of the invertebrates west of the Mendocino Fracture Zone and east of the Emperor Seamounts, and etc. in that vein. Flurries and then blizzards of permit applications filed in the last six months, each more fanciful than the last. Last seen heading directly west from Oregon coast. Captain reportedly stated that he was going to “glom on to the 45th parallel and ride that sucker right onto the beach of some godforsaken island being bickered over by the Japanese and the Russians and claim it anew for Saint Mary Magdalene while none of the formerly murderous imperial powers were paying close attention.” Also heard stating that he was going to “turn sharp left at 150 degrees longitude and snatch a Society island, naming it fresh for Saint Catherine of Siena, why should bold imperialism die ignominiously during my brief lifetime, and there were not enough celebrations of and monuments to Catherine of Siena, fine woman, twenty-fourth of twenty-five children, who are we not to sing her praises assiduously with gratuitous acts of theatrical foolery,” and etc. in that vein. Conclusion: no destination known. Coast Guard reports no sightings. U.S. Navy Pacific Command alerted. General marine bulletin posted. To be considered lost at sea pending further information if any. Notice of same sent to next of kin. No estate. Three survivors, a sister of age and two minor brothers. No plans for funeral or memorial at this time.
* * *
What’s on board: two hundred gallons of fuel, stashed in every conceivable nook and cranny. One hundred pounds of rice. Magellan survived on rice and so dammit will we. More onions and heads of garlic than a man can count in an hour, as I well know, having tried. A man is like an onion, is he not, a layered and reeking thing? Fifty boxes of cookies, fifty lemons, fifty limes. An enormous tin of marmalade. Fifty oranges. An enormous tin of olive oil. Fifty small bags of almonds scattered variously throughout the vessel so that a man will constantly be discovering a small bag of almonds no matter where he is on board, good idea, hey? Element of surprise, hey? Not that there is all that much board on board, or surprise neither. Twenty feet long by eight feet wide by seven feet deep. The size of a roomy coffin. But few coffins have fifty limes aboard, hey? Life raft, life jacket, foul-weather gear, medical kit, complete set of spare parts for engine, complete set of tools for fixing the fecking engine, complete set of fishing gear. One, two, six, seven, why do I have seven fishing rods? Radio, charts, graphs, sextant, compass, flashlights, soap, baseball bat (Dick Groat model), set of Edmund Burke’s speeches, sails, rigging, backup sails, backup rigging, a trumpet, excellent knives, bow and arrows? Who the hell put a bow and arrows on board? I don’t remember putting a bow and arrows on board. Am I losing it already? A bow and arrows … what am I going to do with a bow and arrows, shoot flying fish? Sweet Jesus. Binoculars, backup binoculars, mirrors, sounding lead and string, flares, pencils, batteries for flashlights, sweet Jesus, arrows, I cannot believe I am shipping arrows, is that even legal? Am I considered armed? Can I get pulled over by the fecking Coast Guard and busted for harboring unregistered weapons? What is this, the fecking age of Magellan? Almanac. And, most important of all, boys and girls, your six-volume set of sight reduction tables! Never leave home without it! Because why? Because sight reduction tables are your handy solutions to problems of spherical trigonometry, which is to say problems in observed latitudes, celestial declinations, and computation of your azimuth! Exactly! The azimuth is
important
! Also do not leave home without Edmund Burke’s speeches. Burke is
important
. Burke is an ocean whose depths are in general unplumbed. Everyone thinks they know what Burke said and wrote and meant and means and no one has the slightest idea what he actually wrote because no one fecking reads old Edmund Burke anymore but
I
will address and redress this problem.
I
am going to read old Ed Burke, because
I
have the time, because
I
am on a voyage to nowhere, and in no hurry to get there neither.
Bird! says Declan aloud, startling the gull surfing effortlessly above the stern, are you in this for the long haul? Because if so I’ll have to edit the crew manifest, and we’ll have to talk about shares of the proceeds and stuff like that. Hey, can you calculate sight reduction tables?
* * *
The Peaceful Sea, Fernão de Magalhães called the Pacific, when he wandered into it for the first time in 1520, in his ship the
Trinidad
—a caravel, a two-masted ship. The South Sea, Vasco Núñez de Balboa called it when he saw it for the first time, in 1513 (and promptly asserted ownership of the entire ocean and all lands encroaching upon it). The Panthalassic Ocean, scholars call the Pacific’s predecessor, the ocean of the world when the world was young. The Endless, some early and brave travelers called it, people who sailed by the stars. The Mother, other old cultures called it, in their various languages. It is the biggest ocean on earth and perhaps in the universe. It is about half of the wildernesses we call oceans on this planet. It composes about a third of the surface of the earth. Some parts of it are more than six miles deep. On average it is about two miles deep. It weighs about eighty quintillion tons, an idea represented by an eight followed by eighteen zeroes. In the hundred thousand years or so that human beings have been exploring the Endless, we have discovered some two hundred thousand species of animals and plants living and working in it, which some of us believe to be perhaps a tenth of the actual animals and plants in it, the rest of those beings not having revealed themselves to us as yet. If it is true that human beings in our current form rose in Africa, and then ambled briskly into the rest of the world, there must have been a moment when one human being, probably a curious and mischievous child, peeked through a fringe of forest, perhaps on a high hill, and saw the biggest blue thing on earth and perhaps in the universe. Imagine that scene for a moment: the child’s gape, the thrumming roar of the ocean, the child’s thrill and terror, the shock and allure of encountering a thing far bigger than the imagination had previously stretched. Imagine that child’s wide eyes and sizzling brain. Imagine the message imparted to his mother by the fire that night. Imagine
that.