Lost at Sea

Most Holy Spirit! Who didst broodUpon the chaos dark and rude,And bid its angry tumult cease,And give, for wild confusion, peace;Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,For those in peril on the sea!

William Whiting, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”

Four ocean songs from my childhood:

“There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” each verse adding something in the hole—log / branch on the log / bump on the branch on the log / frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. Ad infinitum—what’s called a cumulative song, very popular with kids.

“The Skye Boat Song.” “Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar / Thunderclaps rend the air,” but Bonnie Prince Charlie escapes “like a bird on the wing.” A willful child, often disciplined, perhaps I too was “the lad who’s born to be king.”

“A Capital Ship,” lyrics from a poem by Charles A. Carryl. “The man at the wheel was made to feel / contempt for the wildest blo-o-ow, / Tho’ it often appeared when the gale had cleared, / That he’d been in his bunk below.”

And, “Oh it was sad (very sad), oh it was sad. It was sad when the great ship went down, to the bottom.” A folk song, they say, which made its appearance after the Titanic sank in 1912. In my days as a child at summer camp in the 1950s, it was sung and shouted with boisterous good cheer. Same gusto as “I’ve been working on the railroad,” or “Build me a bungalow,” or “I’ve got sixpence.” Raucous. But what about those “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives.” None of us pausing to imagine what it was like to perish that way.

No pity, just the wealthy on board? Harry Elkins Widener and his parents, it turns out, were there. Only his mother survived, funding the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard. During college in the early 1960s, I was often in Widener library, loved going down and down in the stacks, browsing books long unread. Bumping into the shelf of books by sailor-writer Joseph Conrad, most not checked out for many years. Writing my thesis on Lord Jim. Jim, who abandoned ship.

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Every sea is sea. Why do we foolishly blame the Cyclades, or the Hellespont, and the Sharp Isles? They merit not their evil fame; for why, when I had escaped them, did the harbour of Scarphaea drown me? Let who will pray for fair weather to bring him home; Aristagoras, who is buried here, knows that the sea is the sea. Antipater of Thessalonica

“But the sea is a picky eater. It chooses its sacrifice.” Anna Badkhen, Fisherman’s Blues

Shipwrecks. In his twenties, my friend’s father Henry was crew on an American ship that sank off Newfoundland during World War II. Not German sub; navigational error.

Somehow making it to shore in the freezing and oil-slicked waves, trapped at the foot of an icy cliff, Henry was one of the survivors rescued by heroic Canadian villagers. Saved from what T. S. Eliot termed “the sea’s lips.”

Henry lived to be nearly one hundred, loved the ocean, for most of his life continued to sail the seven seas. Witty, compassionate, humane, and curious till the very end. Well loved, well cared for.

Maybe you get just one shipwreck per life, and Henry was not exactly lucky but maybe lucky to have his shipwreck early on. Got it over and done with.

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After still another surgery, an elderly friend, long in the tooth, told me he’d “dodged another bullet.” Flintlock pistol at ten yards? Protocols, etiquette. Fair play. As if figures of speech can mitigate facts.

The aging self as body shop. Not the dating-bar kind: the ones for cars. More than a fender-bender taking place. Auto-self nearly totaled. A wreck, actually.

About aging, it’s no surprise that ocean—inviting, powerful, variable, menacing—is a source of metaphor. Freya Stark, early twentieth-century traveler, wrote in...