Watching vastness and why we do it

July 2009

By David Roper

Late afternoon finds her standing at the very edge of the sea, waves just touching her toes, the rising onshore breeze lifting her hair, sunlight glowing against her skin and faded neon bikini. One of the locals, one of the women who brings no accessories to the edge of the world, stares seaward, watching something invisible to the summer people who walk behind her, between her back and the dunes. Now and then, some inlander stops to follow her stare, focusing and refocusing on the immensity of waves beyond the surf, then gives up and strolls on, content to look a few yards ahead. Only the other locals know that the woman watches vastness.

So writes John Stilgoe in his book Alongshore. It makes me wonder: Why do we watch vastness? We sailors look seaward, yearning, searching, but it’s not just because we’re sailors. The landsman who lives on the shore does the same. Are we attracted to water because we ourselves are 72 percent water? Or that our earth’s surface is 79 percent water? Or do we look out to sea because of our inquiring nature as humans? Do we want something that is “out there” because it’s not “here?” Why then, when we sailors are finally out on the vast empty sea, do we then look and yearn for land.

Perhaps it’s all about “looming.” Herman Melville writes of it early on in Moby Dick, on how, on any Sunday afternoon, there are “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China…as if striving to get a better seaward peep.” Seamen knew this act of gazing over the horizon as “looming.”

I remember first thinking about this looming business during an offshore delivery from Rhode Island to St. Thomas, late one fall many years ago. I had a sketchy boat and an even sketchier crew of three: two unsavory characters I’d found in a bar in Edgartown and a big, tough, red-headed, ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot turned Mississippi River towboat pilot friend who had never seen the ocean but thought this was as good a way as any to get a strong dose of it.

I told Big Red as tactfully as I could that, well, it would be different out there on the ocean, that shore and society wouldn’t be close as it is on the river, that it would be day after day of vast open ocean and, perhaps, huge waves and storms. Big Red looked at me, leaned towards me, and cocked his head inquiringly: “I ain’t afraid of any of that dying stuff, if that’s what yer getting at,” he said. End of discussion.

Anyway, when we got offshore, I noticed how every one on board, myself included, fell into looming mode, especially Big Red, who, despite any land being hundreds of miles off, just kept watching the vastness, looking over the horizon. One hundred miles short of Bermuda, the ocean began to get rough. Then it got rougher. When we went off a particularly large wave, and the combination engine box/table in the center of the cabin lifted up off its mountings, we called it quits and hove to.

When it got too scary up on deck, we all went below and lay on the cabin sole, except for Big Red, who squeezed into a portside pilot berth. When we fell off another breaking sea, and Big Red was thrown out of the berth and into the cabin table, he sheared off half of one of his front teeth. “Makes me look tough I bet, don’t it?” he asked.

And when we were completely submerged by a third wave, and the cabin interior went quiet and turned Atlantic Ocean green, Big Red started calmly singing Dylan’s “Oh, Mama, Can This Really be the End.” Obviously, it wasn’t. When we finally did get to St. Thomas, I gave Big Red his return air ticket at a thatched bar on a pier end in Charlotte Amalie. He was staring out at the harbor’s mouth, lost in thought.

I was doing the same. I was thinking of vastness and how, after more than two weeks at sea yearning for land, here we were staring out to sea again. I was thinking about how, as humans, we’ve been around for a mere 200,000 years, compared to our four-billion-year-old oceans. Our planet’s highest mountains were once covered with water; up on Mount Everest, we’ve found fossils of animals that once lived at the bottom of the sea. Really, I thought, we humans are just highly specialized fish adapted to our 21 percent landmass. Our limbs came from fins; our jaws from gills. So maybe that’s why we still look out to sea, and then look back.

Just then, Red, still looking seaward, interrupted my thoughts. “How about another Heineken there, Cappy, before you and me dive into them fish tacos?” he asked.

I looked over warmly at my old friend; we’d been through a lot together, and his spirits had never wavered. I wanted to say that to him, but I didn’t.

“You know, you’re really a fish, Red,” I said instead.

He scratched his big red beard and turned to look back at me, his broken front tooth giving him a jack-o-lantern look when he smiled.

“I been called worse,” he replied as he threw a big arm around me. And then he lifted his empty green bottle toward the bartender.

Dave Roper lives, sails and writes out of Marblehead, Mass.