July 2, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
In the navigable waters in the USA, we spend a lot of our cruising time looking for markers. Usually we watch for red and green buoys. We remember the sailor’s mantra, “Red, Right, Returning,” and we get a little confused sometimes in rivers or canals, trying to remember if upstream or downstream is “Returning.”
Sometimes we argue, not about which marker we need to find, but rather about which marker we have actually found. We seek a red marker “6L” and I shout “I see it.”
“Where?” asks the captain.
“Over there,” I say, pointing.
“Where?” he asks again.
The problem is that I am standing on the port side of the aft deck while he is sitting at the helm. When I point to the silhouette I can barely distinguish as a red marker, from his perspective, my finger appears to be pointing somewhere else altogether. From our different starting points, the light and shadow on the water do not look the same. It may take two or three “sightings” before we agree that we are both looking at the marker we wanted to find.
Differences in point of view color our lives in many ways. I remember when my mother acquired a wonderful sewing machine that made fabulous embroidered designs. What fun she had with all those designs! She put arrowheads on stitched-down pleats. She decorated my clothes and my doll’s clothes with frieze lines and flowers. It was wonderful.
However, she did not want to exclude anyone. To share the joy, she made a set of colorful string ties for my brother. She made them in every color imaginable. She embroidered them with all the designs her machine could make. She stitched. She pressed. She spread them all out on the dining room table for everyone to admire. And each morning as my brother headed out for school, she looked him over and asked, “Did you forget your new string tie?” She dug in his drawer to find just the right tie for that day’s shirt. I think that my mother and my brother saw those ties from two different points of view.
Today as we transited the C&D Canal, we encountered a problem. The railroad bridge with only 45 feet of clearance was down. The top of our mast is 55 feet above the water. In my opinion we need 70 feet to feel safe, and if I were asked about it, that is what I would say. “We need 70 feet.”
The captain, however, tells it like it is. When the bridgemaster asked for our height, Larry said, “55 feet.” But then he added,”We would really like 70.” That made me nervous. The bridgemaster had already told us that men were working on the bridge, so I worried that he might not want to move that bridge one inch more than absolutely necessary.
Then the bridgemaster told us that as soon as he could see us, he would raise the bridge. That really put me in a spin. We could see that bridge right in front of us. When exactly was he going to see us? Would there even be time for the bridge to be raised high enough? I didn’t like this plan one bit. What was he waiting for?
He told us to proceed, so we did. It seemed to me that we were awfully close to that bridge when the bridgemaster came back to say that he could see us and was starting to raise the bridge. “You don’t need to stop and wait,” he said. “Just keep moving. You will have plenty of room.” Easy for him to say! He was sitting on this monster steel bridge that we could not damage if we tried. We were asked to proceed toward it as if it would simply be where it needed to be when it needed to be there. Talk about a faith challenge!
My faith was weak. We moved forward, and I saw the bridge inching up ever so slowly. Of course it was slow. How many gazillion tons does it weigh? I was standing on the back deck looking up. I kept waiting to see that bridge rise higher than the top of the mast, and it wasn’t happening. Finally I screamed. “Larry, stop! Stop! You have to stop!”
Larry slowed the engine, and I saw him try to make a sharp turn away from the bridge. “You have to stop! We’re going to hit it!” I was frantic. I could hear men’s voices shouting, “Keep going! Plenty of room! You have twenty feet.”
I kept looking at the top of the mast. There was no way we would go under that bridge. I expected to hear a horrific “Bonnnggggg!” at any moment. Again I heard the voices. “You have forty feet! Keep going!” Then amazingly, I looked up and saw the underside of the bridge. We were suddenly through it and no disaster. We waved to the men and shouted “Thank you!” They waved and shouted “You’re welcome. Happy sailing!”
I am pretty sure that I am the subject of dinner table conversation in a half dozen homes tonight where the men who were working on the bridge tell about the frenzied screaming woman who nearly created a disaster when there wasn’t one. From where they stood, they could see that we truly did have plenty of clearance. They were standing on a bridge pier almost at the level of the top of the mast. I was standing at the bottom of the mast looking up. From the deck of the boat, looking up, the top of the mast looks much more than 50 feet away. When we came to the next bridge, which is reported to have 150 feet of clearance above the water, I watched as we approached the bridge. Even there, knowing that the bridge was 150 feet above, it still appeared to me that our mast would never go under it until we were finally there.
It is a real metaphor for life. How often have you faced a situation that appeared insoluble from your perspective only to have a friend say something like, “What if you looked at it this way?” As long as I lacked the ability either to get a new perspective on the relationship of our masthead to the bridge or the ability to have some faith in the bridgemaster, I was doomed. We face a lot of situations in real life that are like that. We lock in our perspective on the problem, and we have no faith in anyone else. We stand rooted in our self-centered universe and refuse to trust anyone to help us. The next time I come to a bridge, or to a seemingly insoluble problem, I will try to trust the perspective of the folks who are in a better position to see the truth than I am.