Close to perfection

Of all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but one which . . . I still regard with unmitigated amazement.

“One fall day, the pocket on the southeast corner of Canapitsit Channel served up more than we could handle, but the MacKenzie [bass boat] carried us through. We’d edged the boat into the bowl during a lull in the surf, and before we could position her facing the open sea, we found ourselves gaining altitude on the face of a high, steep comber. Then we were surfing down the wave, careening toward the rocks at the head of the pocket. We recall no time to think – only to hold on; the MacKenzie was on her own. She ploughed into the bottom of the trough, her buoyant bow stopped her cold as if she’d run up on a mud bank, and she pivoted sideways, falling over on her starboard side. The boat righted herself . . . and 165 Chrysler Royal horses drove the boat through the crest of the first wave and over the next, straight out to sea.” – “Nautical Quarterly” 1980

***

Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that it does battle with . . . . To war with that living fury of waters, to bear its breast moment after moment, against the unwearied enmity of ocean . . . and still to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam . . . . does any other soulless thing do as much as this?

“With nerve-endings tingling, we flaunted our excitement in the cat-and-mouse game that was developing with Hurricane Chantal, which was rapidly closing in from the west. For a day, we ran east, away from the storm and our destination, and farther out into the Atlantic. For another day, we beat back toward Bermuda into 30-knot winds and monstrous hurricane-generated seas, burying the bow in the gut of every wave. A nearby cruise ship . . . estimated the wave-height at more than 30 feet – about the length of our boat.” – “Ocean Navigator” 1997

***

For there is, first, an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the thing, as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does, which is perfect, but that. All his other doings have some sign of weakness, affectation, or ignorance in them. They are overfinished or underfinished; they do not answer their end, or they show a mean vanity in answering it too well. But [this thing] is naively perfect: complete without an effort. 
“Gentle wavelets chuckled in the lands of my 50-year-old clinker sailing dinghy as she reached across Newport Harbor in a dying northwest wind. The low late-fall sun brilliantly illuminated the west sides of the waterfront buildings and made the topsides of the remaining boats in the anchorage pop out of the darkening shoreline behind them.

I shivered, partly from the cold as the sun dipped below Jamestown and an incomprehensibly large orange moon rose in the east, but also because I’d recaptured, if only for a few seconds, an ageless, elemental thrill and sense of adventure that, for me, comes only from following in the wakes of mariners of millennia past.

I was Eric the Red, easing his longship into a wild Greenland fjord. No, better yet, I was the Great Essex Marsh lighthouse dweller in Gallico’s “Snow Goose,” bound cross-channel for France in his winkle brig during the evacuation of Dunkirk.” – “Cruising World” 2004

***

Flowers open, and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less . . . . The sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not see how it should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still, which I never pass without the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is the bow of a boat.
The author of the paeans of praise set in italics – from the 1856 treasure, “The Harbours of England” – was Victorian England art critic John Ruskin. The editor, too, is smitten by forward sections, and excerpts from three of his articles – set in roman type – reveal some reasons why.
Which brings us, in a roundabout, cruisers’ kind of way, to the point of this exercise: It’s Maine Boatbuilders Show time again (Portland Company Complex, 58 Fore St., Portland, Maine; March 18, 10-6; March 19, 10-6; March 20, 10-4). Enjoy, savor, ponder, and try to wrap your head around the handsome-is-as-handsome-does grace, beauty and genius of boat bows – both power and sail – displayed at the 29th edition of this event.