Okay, so I’d said, maybe one per year, well I feel like rambling more than that, so here I go again. A while ago I wrote a blog entry for the Amistad website (I’ll copy and paste it below) titled something like: “I didn’t sign up for this!”. Then I started reading Moby Dick. I’ll be a while in finishing that one, fer shure. But, I found this quote that is sorta similar – and it’s from someone famous so I’m not that crazy!
“Now, when I say tat I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick – grow quarrelsome – don’t sleep of nights – do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; – no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of yourself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. ” … “No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardincanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. “What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weight, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; taht everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.”
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
I think this guy Mellville really has a point. There is a lot of work that I do onboard that is demeaning as hell. Every morning, I’m on my hands and knees scrubbing shit out of the toilet, and wiping the floor (sole) of the boat with a sponge. It’s part of our morning routine for sure – but later in the day, I have respect and am a competent sailor. I remember a few jobs that I’ve had in my life where I sit/stand there and ask myself “what the fuck am I doing right here, when I could be doing something else?”, and I’ve certainly been in that position before as a sailor. But here, as I start off every day doing something that I feel is below me, I’ve been able to reevaluate my position on doing menial jobs that simply need to get done. I may be scrubbing a toilet right now, but I’m also sailing a wooden schooner from Europe to Africa. There is a bigger picture, I knew it, but I hadn’t really lived it. Now I have.
mrDrew