The Wind On the Sea
A fresh wind from the ocean made the waves sparkle when Daniel took his cruise. He was on a solitary tour of New York Harbor in a hired motorboat, his tribute to the general pleasantness of a spring day out of doors, balmy, yet with sufficient air. A motorboat was not, he reflected, as attractive to a lover of the sea as a sailboat, but it enabled him to poke around the arms of the port more satisfactorily. Today he set off down the harbor with the breeze in his face.
At first he passed close to the docks of the enormous ships, some of which were so long their shapely stems reached far out into the stream. Nothing was so exciting as seeing their masts and the tops of their huge funnels over the top of a dock. It reminded him of a glimpse he had had of the tall, delicate spars of sailing vessels over the roofs of a seacoast town. The realization of being on the immediate threshold of the romantic sea is irresistible in its rich suggestions, linking the most prosaic person for a moment with strange places, hitherto only imagined, and possibilities of adventure, startling even at a distance from the point of view of ordinary life. Daniel thought about this and other theories of his concerning the sea as his boat sauntered past the imposing liners which so engrossed his attention. Their sharp, carefully flaring bows and the suggestion of velocity in their slanting rigging attracted him. One was just docking as he went by. It was huge, and seemed a city with a host of tugs like parasites slowly pushing it around. He could never get over the size of them. It seemed like magic,—this, building a community that floated so snugly on the water, the four red funnels above adding the emblem of something powerful in its compactness. Yet in spite of their size, the steamers seemed at a distance slim and graceful, essentially ships and obviously made to deal with the exacting ocean. Daniel saw liners with more penetrating eyes than the ordinary casual observer, he was sure.
It was not long before he was off down the harbor away from the docks. Here the waves danced to the breeze among the little boats which carried on the teeming local traffic of the port, rushing back and forth like water-bugs on a pond. The vessels that were anchored strained at the ends of taut hawsers with the wind and tide both coming up the bay. Over near the farther shore against the sun, a great ship was moving down, a massive black shadow sliding imperiously out to sea. He steered the launch near the anchored vessels, under their high sterns. Reading their names was a fascinating diversion for an imaginative person like himself, he thought. Here was the “George B. White” of Jersey City, near it the “Orphan” of Bombay; here a sloppy tramp from Beirut, there an empty freighter of Cape Town; Japanese and Chinese and Javanese vessels were there whose names he could not read, and a little ship from the Piraeus, laden with smells from Athens—dirt from her gutters and hovels, and dust from the Acropolis.
Well, well, what a highway the sea was, after all. It was fascinating, the harbor, fascinating! These great ships always sailing out on voyages that somehow still seemed perilous, and others, looking—to the imagination, at least—weatherbeaten, coming in from foreign lands.
He turned and headed out past the narrows to the slow dips of the ground swell, powerful, but almost at peace for the moment, which his little boat climbed and descended like smooth, gentle hills. The sun still sparkled, and here the water slapped more vigorously against the sides of the boat, throwing flecks of spray out and whirling back some of them to sting his face. He was getting gradually drunk, he concluded. Certainly the spaciousness of everything around him was going to his head. But it was, he later decided, really the smell of the air that did it. No sweet gasoline-sick atmosphere of streets out here, nor the faint odor of millions of his fellow-men to which he was accustomed in the buildings he frequented. The breeze was fresh and tasted strong of salt. It had a palpable vigor of its own. Not artificially intoxicating like a stimulant, but with a gusty sting. It whipped his mind and brought it up eager and sharp, like a trembling racehorse.
That air—that makes men on steamers feel so ridiculously fit without exercise, enabling them to eat and eat—tea, jam, pastry, steaks, cheeses, and then sit and read all day in one steamer chair and be ravenous again! If only he could sail on a ship, he thought. To feel so strong and finely balanced—not, as usual, subject to his little moods of depression which so often went hand in hand with indigestion, he had discovered—to feel so well tuned! He had a vision of himself as he would stand on a ship—as he had, on the only trip he had ever taken—in the very peak of the bow, looking over and watching the tall prow sweep down on and devour the unsuspecting patches of the sea. He remembered how the breeze was steady in his face and how he used almost to taste it! His hair was worried by the wind and he relished its swift buffets on his face as he stood against it, drinking it in as a hot man drinks a running stream. What nameless joy he felt, he now remembered; and how he used so to overflow with something buoyant inside him that he would ecstatically smile. Well tuned! And singing, like an old lyre at the touch!
Well, if he could get to feeling like that he would give anything, he said to himself in his conventional way—and suddenly he grew disgusted. Give anything! Lord, he wouldn’t give up a month of his most valuable time. Love the sea! He had been repeating to himself all during his little outing that he loved the sea. He was one of those few who really loved the sea. He felt that he understood it better than a good many people. As though he knew anything about it, who had never gone to sea and never would. His experience of it standing on the street-like decks of a liner and watching it; thinking about it, he flattered himself, with rather a light touch, as it were, but still from a poetic point of view.
The light touch! Everything nowadays was written and spoken and even thought of with a light touch. A light touch in connection with the sea! The old sailing vessels—swift clippers around the horn; that was the ocean! No drawing-room stuff about that. When the brutal masters carried all the press of sail they could in those tremendous storms, till the topmasts went and the gear came flying down like a thunderbolt and had to be chopped away to save the ship. Trim ships where you worked beneath the lash, and insubordination was best viewed from the yardarm. Ships used to go down and never be heard from—often in those days. But the men that lived were really children of the sea who knew its great aspects; and they knew their ships, every inch of them, from their thin spars that “shone like silver”, as the chantey says, to the bright copper on their keels.