Lethe, the Fourth Sister
Each
one of us knows awareness at our own interval
of change
But we change together on many levels
at intervals too fast
too slow
for any one to know.
I begin the day with a strange feeling. Kind of a reverse deja vue.
I walk into Moira's main salon and it is as if it is the first time. Everything is brand
new and different. The warm teak interior, the polished brass portholes and lamp, the teak
and holly floor, the white dinette and the sleek, smooth white aluminum mast surround me
with novelty. I feel I can go outside and see a new place, exquisite and exciting, just
waiting for exploration.
It is a refreshing feeling. The day gleams with a sense of
beginning. I look out the porthole and there is El Torito and the rain forest. The sun is
edging over the tops of the tall palms across the lagoon. Huge billowing clouds decorate
the deep blue sky and reflect from the still lagoon. I go outside, sit in the cockpit, and
admire the world of the Three Sisters.
 The Solomon Island myth says there were once four sisters and one sank beneath the surface of the waves when a young girl who lived on the island
betrayed a powerful chief on San Christobal. She ran off with a boy who lived on the
northernmost of the four sisters. The chief hired a sorcerer who cast a magic spell over
the island, causing it to sink. The survivors and the people living on the other three
islands were so terrified they fled the islands - explaining why they remain uninhabited
(except for us) to this day. As it happens, there is a sunken shoal between 2 to 6 miles
northeast of the northernmost sister. It is 68 meters deep. Walter thinks this is might be
the sunken island.
Well, this morning it
feels like there are secretly four sisters
of fate. In addition to Moira
Clotho - the weaver of cosmic wool into the
thread of fate - Moira Lachesis - who measured
how long the thread of life would be - Moira
Atropos - with the shears to snip it off -
there is another. The Fourth Sister is hidden
from us, sunk beneath the surface of earthly
awareness.
She is Moira Lethe and she must have visited me last night. Lethe is
the River of Forgetfulness all beings must cross after Moira atropos does her trick with
the shears. Or so the ancient Greeks mused. But I don't think she is a river at all. She's
a fourth sister of fate lurking in the depths of our awareness. She administers the drink
of forgetfulness and I have taken a sip of it. So today, the world around me is fresh,
sparkling with new awareness.
A school of sardines splinters the mirror of the lagoon into a
million shards of liquid silver, each fish a momentary sparkle of brilliant sunlight. A
marauding jack boils the water in the center of the spreading silver drops and then they
are gone, predator and prey, leaving only a series of ever widening concentric circles on
the skymirror.
We have sat right here for over four months, doing practically
nothing. In a few days we'll leave. Off to tour the Solomon Islands. Walter has given me a
long list of anchorages and people and places to see.
Gypsy Cowboy and the Tsunami
It's my birthday today. We're rafted up alongside the Gypsy Cowboy
in one of the long, narrow bays of the Russell Island Group. There is a large wharf at the
entrance of the bay to load and unload cargo for the Lever Brother's plantation here.
Coconut trees cover most of the island group and from these trees,
Lever Brother's gets the copra for use in their cosmetic products - like PalmOlive soap.
At the Lever Brother's wharf there is an interisland fuel tanker, the Pacific Trader. It
is delivering diesel to the Plantation and taking on a load of fresh beef from the stock
which grazes below the coconut trees. Freddy and Yvette from the Gypsy Cowboy want to take
the laundry over to the ship and wash it in the ship's Laundromat.
Carl and Bill are still asleep and I want to look over the ship so
we clamber in the Avon with the laundry and zoom up the harbor to the ship.
We go aboard and the girls look up the captain to get permission to
use the Laundromat. Yvette is a pert Tahitian and, together with Freddy, they could get
permission to do whatever they want from any captain. I dump the last bag of laundry in
the laundry room just as they return from the bridge. While they do their thing, I mosey
up to the bridge to have a cup of coffee with Lou Davidson, the skipper. He tells me about
his adventures in various island ports while I sip the strong, black brew and look out the
window, forward over the long deck of pipes towards the bow.
I raise my cup to my lips
and  the
floor drops from under me. A deafening WHAM lifts the entire bow of the ship some ten
feet into the air. The ship gives a mighty
shudder, then another. My first and only thought
is, "Explosion!" The captain is out the door and I am on my
feet looking back and forth, trying to decide
what to do. The ship settles down again. My
honed, trigger-like reflexes have dropped
my mouth wide open. Christ! She's blowing
up! I start to turn to my left. The floor
of the ship slams against my feet as she heaves
upward again.
Meanwhile, down in the laundry room, Freddy pushed the button for
the washing machine one microsecond before the ship lurched. An instant later, Captain
Davidson leaped into the room and Freddy and Yvette, convinced they had somehow blown up
the ship, both cry, "We didn't do anything!" but the captain was gone.
The second time the ship leaps, I am looking shoreward. The flag
pole, with the Lever Brother's flag, whips back and forth. Trucks and buildings and people
shake violently. A blissful relief floods over me. It's only an earthquake. As the third
shockwave hits I sit down, grab my coffee cup, and marvel at the way the ship bucks in the
water. Even more interesting are a group of men unloading copra sacs from a truck onto the
wharf. The truck is rocking back and forth as are the men but they continue their work as
if nothing is happening.
Standing next to the crew is a European man with hands on hips, legs
apart, wearing a safari outfit complete with high black boots. He taps a black quirt
against his thigh as he glares at the workers. The image of a slave master. From the way
they keep hustling, the workers are more afraid of him than they are of the earthquake.
Captain Davidson returns to the bridge with a happy smile of relief. "I don't mind telling you that one had me a bit jumpy." he laughs.
"I thought we had blown up," I chuckle.
"Well, I knew we hadn't blown up because we were still here but
I sure as hell didn't know what did happen." As he speaks, I suddenly get the urge to
return to Moira and find out what happened there. I tell Freddy I'll be right back and
race down the ladder to the afterdeck and climb down into the dingy.
Bill and Carl sit calmly in the cockpit of the Gypsy Cowboy.
"You should have been on the tanker," I climb aboard,
"It was pretty exciting."
"You should have been in bed with a hangover," quips Carl,
"it was pretty miserable. One minute painfully asleep, the next the whole damned boat
rang like a bell. What the hell is that noise?" He cocks his head - listening.
I listen. There is a steadily mounting watery roar. "Might be a
tidal wave."
Sure enough, a bore of water about a meter high rushes up the
harbor. When it hits, the two boats rear back and the water surges by at 6 to 8 knots. We
have secured both yachts to a giant steel buoy which sank during World War II. It rests on
the narrow, submerged ledge on the edge of the deep harbor. The nylon lines holding us to
the buoy stretch thin with the strain as the tidal wave races past us up the harbor. A
moment later, the water from the tidal wave sloshes back out, reversing the rushing
current. The boats spin around and vibrate to the roaring water. A second tidal wave spins
us around again and then gurgles back out, followed by another and another, each smaller
than the last.
There is nothing to do but stand and watch the sea rush by. Carl and
Bill decide a couple of beers might calm things down. When all is quiet I return to the
tanker where the girls have finished the laundry. An hour later the El Torito arrives.
Walter and the whole gang from El Torito, Gypsy Cowboy and Moira troop up the plantation
road to the estate of the manager.
Jim Broom, the manager, turns out to be the guy with the Jungle Jim
suit and big shiny black boots. On closer inspection he still looks like he should be the
master, not the manager, of the plantation. He's a tall, powerful blonde haired man with
the most fascinating ears I've ever seen. They are pointed, like Mr. Spock's on Startrek.
When he grins, the effect is almost scary. Little wonder the islanders are afraid of him.
Jim escorts us out into the plantation to show us his newest hybrid
coconut trees. They are a cross between the Malaysian Dwarf and a tree from Renell Island.
They have luxurious clusters of big coconuts which are only head high off the ground. Jim
has planted rows of coco-bean trees underneath which produce a fine chocolate. He picks
some fresh coco-beans and Freddy and I taste the meaty fruit surrounding the nut. It's not
bad.
Jim is justly proud of the plantation. We tour the facilities and
watch the workers husk the coconuts. They extract the white meat with a flick of a knife.
The meat is placed on racks and dried in a smoker fuelled by the husks. The dried coconut
meat is copra. It is shipped to England and pressed into oil and then processed into soap
and cosmetics. The plantation covers most of the Russell Islands. There are thousands of
acres of coconut trees. We finish the tour with a grand BBQ at Jim's house.
I am sitting between two interesting conversations. While I devour
an excellent charcoal grilled steak from one of the plantation's beef cattle, I try to
listen to both.
"What do you think about the coming independence? Will it
endanger your operation?"
"Well, I think it is pompous for a Ph.D. to use the title
Doctor, especially in a social situation."
"No, not in the slightest. There will be practically no
difference. You see, there really won't be any actual independence. Oh, I know all the
rhetoric about self determination and all that but its all so much talk. There will be
some changes in who runs what office but it will still be the same office with the same
rules and regulations. All very British."
"Why? Doctorate degrees represent a great deal of hard work.
Why not use the honorific?"
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Well, look here, before the protectorate began, there was no
political entity larger than a whole island and, in fact, most of the larger islands were
split into very small political groups - villages really. No grand chief of the whole
thing existed.
"My dad was an MD, a country Doc. For me, there is only one
kind of Doctor deserving the title and that's a medical man. Some nerd who sits in
university classes for half his life learning some esoteric narrow field doesn't ever do
anything to deserve the same title as a medical doctor."
"There are over two hundred languages here, you know. That
gives you some idea of how well the different villages got along with each other, right?
The whole idea of a central government for all the islands is strictly an English concept.
And the only language which unites the people, the official language, mind you, is
English."
"I suppose you object to the use of other titles, too, like Sir
Gary."
"Now, this means, of course, the constitution is written in
English and the laws of the country are English laws. The various government agencies are
also typically English Colonial. English instructors train the people who will run those
offices how to do their jobs in a proper English way. And lastly, none of it would ever
work without continued British supervision....not to mention British funds."
"Very funny. But yeah, I do object to nobility titles."
"Why, even the money here is printed in England. You wait and
see, the Solomons will still be a part of the Empire, part of the commonwealth. The whole
independence business is a political whitewash if you'll excuse the pun."
"What about Mister, Mr. Bartlett? How about that?"
"What makes you think the system can't work without continued
British supervision?"
"Oh hell, Mister is all right, but Doctor. NO. I'll never use
doctor when I get my Ph.D."
"Ha ha ha, because you see, the locals don't know how to
operate the English "Old Boy" system correctly. Either they mess it up and get
it confused with "Family" and thus it falls apart through old time family feuds
or they are rigidly "by the book" as per their training. And we both know the
English governmental system especially the Colonial Office simply does not function when
all the laws are properly applied."
"Well boys, I don't know about all this doctor bullshit. I like
to be called Master," Jim smiles and that's something people with pointed ears should
do very carefully.
I am wondering if he is right or not when a man runs up to the door
and shouts, "Master, Master, Boats long harbor go walkabout!"
Even I understand that pidgin English. Carl, Jim Broom and I are in
the Jeep even before the others put their drinks down. We race to the wharf where we tied
the Avon. Carl and I are in the dingy and on our way out into the harbor without missing a
step. There, in the center of the bay, Moira and Gypsy Cowboy are slowly waltzing out to
sea.
In seconds, we reach the boats, leap aboard and start the diesels. I
run forward to survey the situation. The heavy mooring we are tied to must have been
knocked off the ledge during or after the earthquake. The mooring lines are like steel
rods. The weight pulls the bows of both boats way down. Must be 4 or 5 thousand pounds of
steel down there. There is no way we can untie the knots, so I decide to dive down and cut
the lines.
If I cut his line first, the whole weight of the buoy will be on my
line and it might pull the bow right underwater. Accordingly I race aft, grab a knife, dig
out a face mask and snorkel and dive in the water. I swim down to the mooring, about 50
feet, and cut Moira's bow free. Fortunately, although Gypsy Cowboy gives a frightful lurch
downward, her bow does not quite go under. I take another breath, dive down, and cut her
away. |
