Across the Waters:

Daddy was a dreamer. He watched the winter storms roll across Lake Erie from Canada and gazed toward the distant horizon. For his own good, Depression-era parents kept his dreams reeled in tight.

While he longed for the adventures of faraway places, he found himself not riding the waves, but balancing columns and burrowing through the bowels of anthracite mines. As an accounting student attending university in the hills of southern Ohio, father struggled to finance his schooling; there, on the brink of Appalachia, only the coal corporations proved willing to oblige.

Their co-op program offered experience in the book-keeping office and stints as a badger burrowing deep beneath the green hills. Some men succumbed to the Company. The long dark nights of study, followed by longer, darker days in the pit sent my father fleeing along the path of the coal he liberated from the earth.

Northward, he and the ore sped. The gloomy industry of the Great Lakes ports looked to be their demise. From the belly of the earth to her barren fingertips at land’s end, industry pursued them. The ore fell prey to the hot furnaces, but father escaped. He fled the clutches of the land on the crests of the Great Lakes.

* * *

January 1986

Dear Dad,
When I gaze across the water, I can see you leaning on the starboard railing, the lake mist frosting your whiskers. You were younger then, as you steamed toward the newly opened seaway.

It was a work you could love, a hard, healthy work that left you exhausted but satisfied. There was no coal dust in the crisp, sharp air. You ate, looked, and talked like all your Swedish pals from Minnesota. Grandma told me so. I picture you at the railing with your broad smiling face a healthy bronze. Gone is the pallor of the mines. Your eyes look off to the sea and distant ports.

Your image is vivid because some bent and yellowed snapshots fell on me one day. The box, like a secret, sacred corner of your life was pinned beneath old ledgers in your den closet. The shelf was far too high for me to reach when I was small and you were here. Alone, I puzzled through smudged photos.

You and four others grin from under woolen watch caps. Your shoulders were more squared then, not yet softened by the taming of home and the office. Cold, foaming waters break the rail behind you. Dampened hair gleams wheaten gold against your wind-chiseled face. Suddenly I understand your joking way of explaining your youth as being so long ago that I “was just a twinkle in your eye and half of that was the reflection off the waves;” it was another world for you.

A black-and-white postcard shows a lake freighter with “National Steel Corporation” blazoned down the hull. The fine letters on the bow, ERNEST T. WEIR, tell me it was your ship. On the reverse side of the postcard is an address and postage. The brief scrawled message suggests the bustle of your lifestyle:

*****
Here’s the new rustbucket. We’re in the land of eternal fog. Caught 60 to 70 cod last night. Good fishing.
Junior
*******

The postmark says, “Sept Iles, Quebec, 21 VIII 1959….” Your twenty-first birthday. I’m twenty-one now.

You loved the deck watch, the endless rolling breakers and the brisk Arctic winds that whipped in from Canada. You never told me how you loved it; I had to ask grandma and read it from the faded journal you thought I’d never find.

Your journal was buried in the snapshot box. A younger you emerges from the faded fountain ink. Many entries are travelogues; more are poems and letters. Some are to the grandfather I never knew. Did you find the letters years later at home, or were they never sent?

Some of the ink is not so old; perhaps the box was not so forgotten. In broad, flair pen, you write of more recent days:

*****
11-24-75
A lovely revelation came to me early this morning as I walked out my lane. A beautiful, pink sunrise was peeking between the horizon and the cloud cover where it would disappear for the rest of the day. Beside me walked my ten-year-old daughter in a sheepskin coat with a bright, orange rucksack for school gear on her back.

Sounds like an idyllic start for a father’s day until I add that I’ve been unemployed for eight months, between lack of work and illness, and the bus driver who will pick her up is my working wife.
****

Your love of the water was never far away, even on the farm where we settled. What farmer’s shelves were filled with books like Men, Ships and the Sea or Chapman’s? I guess I always knew though, by that longing gaze that appeared every time you saw the lakes. I always sensed the pride you tried to hide when I said I’d be a sailor. Your heart was never in it when you scolded me that sailors were drifters and that there was no satisfaction in aimless wandering.

You escaped the mines, but the land won back your body. You gave up the sea for the accounting office because Grandpa told you that security was most important. He was an immigrant and had survived the Depression so you thought he knew. You married Momma, had Bob and me; you were everything a husband and father should be. We had a good life.

The sea was in your soul though; I knew even though I was little. I knew you loved us dearly but that you longed for the Lakes.

Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand?

I wish you could’ve told me, but you left before I had the chance to ask. Your dying never hurt too badly; I missed you, sure, but I just figured you were finally back on the Lakes. Death didn’t seem so harsh that way; it was almost even kind.

Now, ten years later, I still cry for you sometimes. Your death caused tears, but they were for a figure: FATHER. And Death did seem almost a friend come to end your pain. Now, I cry out of frustration because I was ten when we learned you had cancer. At ten, you don’t tend to contemplate fathers dying; they’re kind of “forever fixtures” in your life.

I never consciously acknowledged that you were dying. At ten, I had total faith in medicine and doctors.

Now you’re an enigma to me. You’re a memory collected from eleven years of co-existence. I never had the chance to know, to curse, to understand, to grow with…to love…my father.

God, Dad, how I’d love to talk to you now. I want to share sea stories, and life. Do you realize that the last time we talked we watched EAGLE sail into New York Harbor? You told me all about the Tall Ships during the Bicentennial Parade of Sail while I sat on the foot of your hospital bed. It’s my last clear memory of you.

I’ll be on EAGLE this year and we’re going back to New York for a tall ship reunion. I want to tell you about riding the bowsprit and what a seaport looks like from the yardarms. I want to ask questions and tell you about so much.

Sometimes I want back the last ten years. They haven’t been bad without you; they’ve been good, but you’ve been gone almost half my life now. Sometimes I have to look at pictures to remember your face.

I know life would have been different now if you could’ve stayed, but, oh, just to glimpse the would-have-been. I look back sometimes and wish you would’ve fought more, or did Death sneak up on you too? Were you as surprised and unprepared as I was?

Heraclitis said, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” So, even if we could talk, I guess I’d still have to find the answers for myself. To sea or not to sea? That is my question, Dad. Maybe you always knew I’d come asking; maybe you left those faded pages just in case.

I see you at the starboard railing, looking off to sea. Just wanted you to know Dad, I’m looking that way too.

***

July 2007

Dear Dad,
It’s been 31 years since you left us. Oh, I wish you were here to celebrate. Tomorrow I will end my career at sea - twenty-four years on or by the ocean. The sea is a wonderful teacher. I know now what drew you to the waves. What else holds such a range of moods? Serenity, rage, playfulness, tumult, calling forth, casting up.

You introduced Bob and me to sea life in funny ways. When we played Battleship, you made us call our guesses in the phonetic alphabet. My cadre at the Academy thought it odd that a hayseed girl from an Ohio farm knew the phonetic alphabet by rote upon reporting. During lambing season, we split the night into watches and, whenever it was cold, a blue Bean watchcap snugged atop our heads.

You set me up well. The Coast Guard allowed me a life tied to the tides. In an age often cut off from nature, the vagaries of wind and weather framed my days. It is a rich life, seasoned by the tang of salt air, primeval scents, and the sense of decay and renewal that ride every tide -- natural wonder framed in the routine of the watch. Around-the-clock watches taught the beauty of all hours.

The morning watch was my favorite. Beginning at 0330, this watch let my sleep-stopped eyes stargaze. The stars are never more sharp and brilliant than at sea, away from the clutter of manmade light. You taught us to look at the stars lying on top of Sky Hill, gazing at constellations.

Sea in the pitch of night is humbling. I never felt more insignificant, given my smallness in the grand expanse of sea and space, and yet felt more connected, a part, albeit small, of the cosmos that cradles us across the swaying black sea.

On this watch, night’s pitch gave way to day. The spread of dawn across the sea and sky taught me the painter’s palette. Nowhere are there more shades than in the sky as the black chrysalis of night hatches into the thousand pastels that become the blue wings of day.

The morning sea teamed with life. Perhaps because the hubbub of day was not yet there to distract, dawn unveiled sea life. Depending on the sea and season, daybreak brought the dancing dorsal fins of dolphins playing in the bow wake, or bobbing orcas spyhopping to gaze at us in mutual curiosity. Flying fish danced across the wavecrests away from their pursuers. Near shore, seals barked to greet the day. Sometimes, a ray leapt from the waters or more sinister dorsals cruised close aboard. Perhaps the most mystical discovery is that the sea is not a way of life, but a life unto its own. I see now why the ancients worshipped the ocean as an entity in its own right.

The days and watches have grown long now. Watching the sun sink toward the waters, I know too why you left the sea. The Coast Guard rewarded me so richly that I sometimes overlooked its demands.

We have four small children now. Neither the satisfaction of a rescue, the thrill of a chase, nor the beauty of the raging, rolling waters is enough to temper the long, erratic hours and lengthy separations.

The merchant hulls you rode would have taken you away from us long before the cancer did. Maybe some sense of foreshadowing kept you with us for that brief time we had.

Somehow, in so many subtle ways, you planted the dream that sent me in search of salt air. It led me to many of the loves of my life: a career of challenge, the man I love, the children I never knew I’d love so much. It is a wonderful, wonder-full life.

Twenty-four years plying the waters along the coast has been more than a livelihood. Those years helped me to see you more clearly, to appreciate you as more than my long-lost father. Perhaps I went to sea to find you, but you were not there on the waves.

When I was young and looked at you looking off to sea, your gaze and smile were bittersweet. I thought you looked toward dreams unfulfilled because of your untimely death.

While your young death was a tragedy, your brief life was a gift. Now that same smile seems one of knowing. Like those ancients who worshipped the sea, you, in your love of the waves, became one of our wisdomkeepers, those revered as repositories of ancient ways and sacred knowledge.

Over time, I have realized your good fortune in discovering a passion at an early age. Beyond discovering it, you followed it to the waves. You carried the surge of the surf, the majesty of the sea, in the deepest recesses of your soul.

You chose to leave the waves to have a family, which I now understand as a passion and journey unto itself. As you gazed toward that distant horizon, you piqued my curiosity to look there too, to push out beyond the safe and familiar. The fascinating thing about horizons is that, if you go toward them, they expand, but you never reach them. It is that journey that has made life sweet.

Having sailed the seas, I understand your fierce love of the freedom and challenge of the waves. Like all good sages, you guided me to see my interconnectedness to you, to the world, to life. I see how some of your choices helped me to frame my own. You taught me the sea and the sea taught me -- reverence for its moods and might, reverence for the land that bounds it.

I leave a waterborne career to immerse myself in the sea of life. I revel in the expanse of time to watch my family grow. Your gift to me was more than the sea. You looked not only at the water, but at the horizon. That vision allowed me to look beyond the immediate and the ordinary.

In those old photos, I still see you at the starboard railing, looking off to sea. It’s odd to think that I’m older now than you ever were, but this twinkle-in-your-eye danced on the waves. I didn’t find you at sea; I discovered you in the waypoints, the hints, along the way. Dad, my lines are taut and I follow your gaze across those waters where new horizons may lead.