Cutter Abner beat a hopeless box search, struggling to stay alive, scaling the waves like a small white toy indifferently tossed into a riptide.
Somewhere a cartographer placed a small red x on a chart. Fishermen, lighthouse tenders, seamen and fishermen’s wives from Newfoundland to Boston hovered helpless and voiceless and tense, with radio transmitters idle in their hands, as a nearly laconic voice from Redstart gave its last loran readings and was cut off in midsentence. Souls of the coast would remember that week as the week of the Redstart.
Jensen carried a submersible pump aboard Adrian’s ancient acquaintance, the fishing vessel Louise, on the day it sprang the last of its legendary leaks.Īdrian received the distress call while homeward bound from Rockland during one of those weeks God makes for drownings. Still, in some minds there is a difference between life and property. Well, then true, no doubt, and if old men still believe the proposition, perhaps that is only because it is easy to believe from the depths of a comfortable chair. Let us suppose that the weight of belief makes that awful proposition real and-although it will not here be held-that when the earth was railed by horizon, and flat to seamen’s perceptions, that their belief made it flat-but in matters of the abstract. In some men they bring out the underlying romance, for seaman cynics are secretly romantic believing the tradition of “you have to go out, you don’t have to come back”… and let us say-for a chance-that the tradition is not a myth, but true. Those calms are, in their way, as treacherous as ice on superstructure. At the time no one doubted that he would make it, and Jensen (who was not religious, but who may have been good) most likely died while losing a bet with himself.Ī day of calm saw him under. Also religious and good.” By the time Lamp would tell the tale in its hundredth version, the figure of Cecil Jensen acquired the stature of major saint on Lamp’s calendar. “No,” Lamp would say, and always he was serious. “Crazy?” In later days at the Base it would always be a young voice asking that. Downeasters know such days, when the North Atlantic seems gathering its forces to crack holes in the planet. In that past winter of treacherous seas there were occasional days of alarming calm. Jensen was an idealist with occasional poor judgment, and now he was a drowned idealist. He had not been a fool, this dead man who would shortly become the nemesis of Ernie Brace.
0 kommentar(er)
