Evanston: spartina
Evanston: spartina
My vocabulary has been enriched by boat names. I have learned new words and had some I occasionally read but never used re-enforced. ‘Chimera’ and ‘nepenthe’ come to mind. There have been many others. And to that list can now be added ‘spartina.’
Spartina is a marsh grass, which has given its name to a novel, which has given its name to a boat and a website. It is the latter, Steve Earley’s THE LOG OF SPARTINA, which I have mentioned here before, that led me into this.
There is something of a mutual ripple effect here, of actions moving out like ripples from a stone dropped into a pond with distant and unknowable consequences. Once Steve and I were in the same room without meeting, but have since mutually influenced one another in small, but perhaps important ways.
On the very first page of his 1989 National Book Award winning novel, SPARTINA, author John Casey, writes: Only spartina thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water.
That is a very good and very difficult way to live: filtering out the inevitable bitterness of life and thriving on the good.
The main character of SPARTINA is Dick Pierce, a member of an old Rhode Island family whose land is gone and who wants to finish the 54’ fishing boat he has been working on for years and be his own boss.
Right at the beginning I began to count his mistakes: he is married with children; he built too big; and he needs to borrow money.
I would not argue with anyone who claims that reproducing ourselves and sending our DNA into the future is the essential act of life. But children, like debts, are chains if what you want most is personal freedom.
How all this works out in the novel, I’m not going to say, other than that along the way there is an extra-marital affair and a hurricane. And that I enjoyed the book enough so that I have already bought the recently published sequel, COMPASS ROSE.
Steven Earley’s website has become one of only three sailing sites I check daily. (The other two are sailinganarchy.com and 70.8%.)
I am enjoying rethinking sailing in terms of a small boat. Although the future GANNET has a lid, she is much more like CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE than any of my other boats, and I am beginning to believe that I may want to have a slip instead of a mooring, so I can take everything out of her tiny interior, which has been likened to a coffin, and start empty.
I remember how I did things on CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE; and I’ve gone over Steve’s site to see how he does things on SPARTINA, among them cook, although there are some major differences here. Steve is a fisherman, and I am not; and Steve does cook and I only boil water. Literally.
Steve posts frequently, and I look forward to that.
I particularly recommend that you view the three collections under “some photographs” part way down the right hand column of his home page. “The Neuse River,” the first in “calm” is classic.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011