Sailing, oh sailing,
a sea without women, oh
we
men crave the sea.
This book was spell-bindingly written. I finished it in two back to back readings. It did drag a bit towards the end. But this author is a master at 2 to 3 page
character outlines. He was like a
script-writer penning a memorable back-story for an actor to use to properly
get into character.
He neatly, Dickens-like, drew the characters together
with a plot web at the end with some surprising twists.
The
author titled this book a novel; but he also commented at the back that it
could be called a fictional memoir. As a
novel, I found it bland, and when he went into older, reflective sections at
the end, it was actually boring.
However, as fictional memoir, it was brilliant. Ondaatje has an imaginative knack for
inventing characters.
But then, I listened to Michael Krasny interview the
“Train” guy about his book on Trains[1]
(see below). Ship travel, like train
travel, pushes people’s nostalgia button.
So,
I’m finishing up with my nostalgia.
Since
stories have been told around traveler’s campfires, the most exciting
and heroic are those about sea voyages. It’s
not too big a jump, for me, to think of space travel as sea voyages. I’m not alone, the USS Enterprise of Captain
Kirk and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon to name a few. I’m
a junkie for sea stories; good or bad, I’ll still read them all. My top four are: (1) The Odyssey, (2) Two
Years Before the Mast, (3) The Old man and the Sea, and (4) Shackleton and the
Endurance. I’ve reread each of these at
least once; a rarity reserved by Peter for the likes of Lawrence Durrell and
the Alexandria Quartet, or Frederik Pohl’s “The Heechee Saga”.
My first Atlantic
crossing by sea was on a troop ship, whose name was probably 0026894023. It was a great adventure. I got my “sea legs” after less than a day. Me, who got seasick as a Boy Scout fishing
off Santa Cruz Bay. [It was probably the early morning bus ride from San Jose
to Santa Cruz; and I wasn’t the first – the deck was slippery from the first 6
or 7 eleven-year-old boys.]
The crossing to
Europe was in bad weather, rainstorms all the time; 30-45 foot swells that made
you wonder why the ocean didn’t just swallow us up; “How will we ever get back
on top of the swells?” Looking forward
along the port bow at a three-story building of turbulent water that you are
heading for is scary.
I volunteered to
work in the bakery, getting special privileges, but mainly roamed the ship from
sunup to sundown, just like these Sri-Lankan kids. No swimming pools on a troop ship. Most GIs stayed below decks and spent their
time being sick, not eating and vomiting when they did. The sea air gave me an enormous appetite, and
I could eat even as food was sliding from one end of the table to the other. We were prohibited from going on deck during
bad weather, but the crew wasn’t about to patrol the place: “If some idiot GI
wants to get washed overboard, who cares.”
So, I spent most
of my free time exploring the ship and watching the sea.
I could watch the
sea for hours.
On Feb 18th
Michael Krasny’s Forum was a call-in book discussion about “Train:
Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World”, written by Tom Zoellner. In NPR’s promo for this program, they said
that “… .. Tom Zoellner is back from a rousing trip around the world… ..
Zoellner charts the history of the locomotive along the world's most important
railways, from the birthplace of the steam engine in Cornwall, England, to the
frigid stretches of the Trans-Siberian railroad. We'll talk about his journey
and discuss the future of high speed rail.”
Most of the
program was devoted to telephone callers, remembering with fond nostalgia,
their experiences with trains. They
didn’t ever get to any of the planned talking points. The link above will take you to the more than
a dozen comments that came in on-line with similar nostalgia.
