After a hurricane made landfall along the east coast of the American South in 2011, the remnants of the storm’s arms swung toward the Gulf of Maine where coastal and island communities prepared for tropical storm conditions.
The sky over the harbor was dark and the rain was thick when our ferry got the call to aid in evacuating Monhegan Island, one of those communities about 10-12 miles off the coast.
As we exited the relative stillness of the harbor’s waters, standing on the deck of the Hardy III, I could just make out the swinging of the harbor navigation buoy being tossed in the white-capped waves ahead, it’s bell ringing out for vessels to locate it while its big red body was buried under water or hidden behind fog.
With clear skies and smooth seas, it takes the 60-foot commercial vessel between 45 minutes to an hour to cross Muscongus Bay, but with southeasterly rolling 8-10 foot seas pushing the starboard side of the bow away from our destination, and the crosswind catching the empty top deck in a way that made it more like a sail than it did a seating area, it took about two hours.
The captain, whose name I remember but won’t share, assured me that the passage back would be easier — that our currently empty boat meant we were getting tossed around more easily, but with the weight of the passengers and their luggage from the island, we’d steady a bit in the worsening storm.
I don’t remember believing him but wanting to — when you’re out to sea in a storm, you can’t help but want to trust the person who has their hand on the wheel.
The rain was the heavy kind that hurts when it hits your skin, like each drop was a nickel or dime thrown from a great height. By the time we reached the lightly sheltered western facing harbor of Monhegan, a fortune had fallen across our bow and into the sea.
With some grace from the shadow of the island — a place where the seas are calmer because the other side of the island is taking the brunt of the storm – we were able to load everyone on board without incident. Luggage was stored in the front row of the seating in the boat, and we had everyone sit as close to the center of the covered benches below the top deck as we could.
I don’t remember exactly what the captain said to the nervous passengers over the speaker system before we left the harbor, but I think it went something like this:
“It’s going to be a bumpy ride still, but getting back will be better than getting here because we have all of you aboard now.”
And the captain was right, the boat did rock a bit less from side to side on our way back. However, as soon as we left the island shadow, waves began to pour over different sides of the boat, which, while scary, washed away the evidence of any passenger who had been sick almost as quickly as it was hurled on the gritted deck.
Amidst the tumult, the captain turned to me and smiled.
“If we make it back to shore,” he said, reaching for the dials of the radio, “you owe me a drink.”
“If!?” I said.
The captain laughed and began to play the song “Red Red Wine” by UB40 through the boat’s speaker system.
And for a while, “if” sounded right — lightning began to strike the crests of waves between us and the shore and the passengers continued to be sick and scared. But the boat wasn’t being thrown around quite as much as it was on the passage over, although, that didn’t seem to be easing the passengers any.
We made it back to New Harbor with every soul we left Monhegan with, and I bought my first drink (a Captain Morgan and Coke for the Captain) from a bartender who worked at the wharf we pulled into. Her name, I will tell you, is Storm.
While Storm and I are still friends, I no longer work on the Hardy III as a deckhand, in fact, the year of that storm was my last on the boat. During my first semester as an undergraduate at Florida State University, I ran across an article published in an edition of Popular Mechanics, which depicted the dynamics of how ships survive storms at sea. A few paragraphs down in her piece, is perhaps Kiona Smith-Strickland’s, the article’s author, the most spiritually revealing line.
“The most dangerous ship in a hurricane is an empty one,” she writes.
The science, not the spirit, behind the claim, is what the Hardy Boat captain assured his passengers and myself: when a ship is weighted down into the water, there’s less of the boat subject to the rough seas.
Vanderbilt Divinity School isn’t the only place that loads a ship like this, and I’d be the last person to pretend otherwise. But if it’s a harbor you’re considering, I can tell you what I found here — intellectual, spiritual, and communal weight that I’ll be sailing with into whatever lies ahead. To quote Ram Dass, “we’re all just walking each other home,” and whether that’s here or somewhere else, I think that’s the point.
I don’t know how I would define “home,” but I think there’s some quality of the familiar in there. I feel at home on the coast of Maine, when I read poetry by John Ashbery, and now Nashville.
I was only 17 when I found myself in my first storm at sea, so the waves seemed bigger and the turmoil larger than maybe it really was, but afterward, I had added a bit of weight to my seaworthy ballast, and I felt a bit more at ease in choppier waters.
Now I’m in a chapter of my life, as is with my peers, where we’ve anchored our boats in the safe harbor of Vanderbilt Divinity School and began to load up. It’s tempting to see our time here as refuge from the sea, but the relative stillness of the harbor is just to bring spiritual cargo aboard, and to create further stability — but no port is forever, nor should it be.
Johnathan Riley is a Unitarian Universalist from the coast of Maine in the Master of Theological Studies (M.T.S.) program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Some of the topics Johnathan’s exploring in his coursework include the maintenance required of meaning-making, the act of writing as spiritual-identity formation, and theopoetics in pluralism. He holds degrees from Florida State University, and the University of New Hampshire where he earned an MFA in Writing while teaching poetry and first-year composition. In addition to his work as a theologian, Johnathan is an award-winning journalist, columnist, photographer, and poet. Read more of Johnathan’s reflections on the VDS Voices Blog.