down to the sea in ships

I have spent a long, quiet day travelling from the first page of Silas Crockett to the three-hundred and thirty-seventh — only about sixty left to the end.  I’ve sailed round the world from Maine in the Southern Seas and the Solace Winthrop, and puffed up and down the New England coast in the steamer Searsport. I have seen generations of sea-faring men born and die, waited and watched with their waiting, watching women. Seen styles change and travel transform, and yet been rooted to one family name, one graciously aging house in an imagined village on the Maine coast.

Now, with those many days packed into my one — and yet they fit without crowding, like Narnian days — I am swathed in quietness, remembering a girl in her early teens who spent days and days wrapped in other worlds, so that days like today were not novelties then.  And I wonder if that is why she said so little, and if the habit of watching other lives in books trained her to watch people outside of books.

The day with the book somehow puts a distance between me and all worlds, so that the events of the past week in my piece of Mississippi seem as distant and dream-like as the luminous Maine coast one hundred and fifty years ago. And yet tomorrow a new week opens, with all the bits of this past week crowding back, important and necessary.

The forty-nine students, whose faces and names I keep taking up in my mind, working to stick them together with the bits of their stories which I’ve learned and the other bits which I’ve imagined: hometowns and pieces of educational history and the way they chose to format their first essays combining with ideas derived from style of dress and style of speech and willingness or unwillingness to answer my smile with one of their own. Certain vague ideas in my music-teacher world, too, to be definitely settled with decisions and music copied and inserted into fifteen black folders. Appointments made, appointments kept, and my green Honda needing gasoline next time I go to town.

Sailing vessels which carried ice from Boston to the West Indies in 1850 really have no place in all of it, have they? Yet I am not sorry to have spent my day with them. Not sorry to wonder, having read of “the long dependence of the present upon the past,”* what presents may come, leaning on the arm of today. And, though often those wonderings worry me, tonight, swathed in my quiet, I don’t mind.

*Mary Ellen Chase, Silas Crockett

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