Waves From All Sides

The experience of a ship in a hurricane.

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Here’s what’s been resonating with me lately: a description of the experience of a ship in a hurricane.

“As the center approaches, rain falls in torrents. The wind fury increases. The seas become mountainous. The tops of huge waves are blown off to mingle with the rain and fill the air with water. Visibility is virtually zero in blinding rain and spray. Even the largest and most seaworthy vessels become virtually unmanageable, and may sustain heavy damage. Less sturdy vessels may not survive.”

Oof.

It continues: “Navigation virtually stops as safety of the vessel becomes the only consideration. The awesome fury of this condition can only be experienced. Words are inadequate to describe it.”

Is that condition 2025?

I was paging through the US Coast Guard’s comprehensive and annually updated tome The American Practical Navigator – affectionately known as Bowditch after it’s original author in 1802 – because we’d just experienced the first major dust storm in Chicago since the 1930s – Beaufort scale 10 sustained winds and hurricane force gusts recorded at the water intake. Each weather event these days somehow feels reminiscent of some TC Boyle novel set in a climate apocalypse.

Which is to say nothing of the piling waves of headlines, the blinding spray of lies, the furious torrents of cruelty, unmanageable corporate interests, mountainous digital additions – so much that I love sustaining heavy damage. I wrote paragraphs on this, but deleted them. Perhaps the fury of this condition can only be experienced.

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I should probably admit: I haven’t actually lived through a hurricane myself. A child of the midwest, we might have had an occasional tornado or polar vortex blizzard, but nothing quite so powerful as a fully developed hurricane.

Still, I feel like I’m well acquainted with the impact of a hurricane force wind. Perhaps we all are.

I mean, I was biking to a potluck in Chicago when the dust storm alert hit. At that point, the weather data later told me, I was peddling into 30+ mph sustained winds, with gusts even higher. At those speeds there were moments when no matter how hard I pumped my legs my bike wouldn’t move.

Now double it. At hurricane force 74 mph sustained winds cycling becomes fully impossible: even the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships are cancelled for too much wind.

Ever since I decided to try a new career – to try to be who I thought I wanted to be – it seems like all I’ve been doing is pumping and pumping on a bike that won’t move. Entrepreneurship feels like trying to protect a match on a too windy day: no matter how much I cup my hands and add twigs and listen to my heart skip beats with each flicker, all I can think is the odds are it will still just end up as smoke.

The wind: you have so little control. Like recently my friend, who suddenly we’re in a significant conflict I didn’t see coming and don’t understand and want to rectify but can’t control how they feel and can’t do anything to make it better. Like the divorce of two people I love, like the upheaval and splintering of my church, like the sudden death of my dad’s best friend or the death of my high school friend’s son or the mortality in my parent’s voices and behind their eyes as we all face the way to high sustained speed of ever passing time.

Bowditch spends substantial words discussing the paths and maneuvers to avoid hurricanes, or a least their centers, and most dangerous arcs. Which maybe would have been nice to know years ago. But here I am.

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And yet, my life keeps going. Today, the sun was shining. Yesterday a friend made me a delicious pastry. The trees are a brilliant late spring green.

So perhaps, I think, the hurricane metaphor doesn’t quite hold water. I’m navigating, right? Visibility, at least on my block, isn’t quite 0. Maybe I’m good.

But it’s been nearly impossibly to write lately. And I have this ongoing experience where my brain things everything should be fine, but I lay awake at night with this tension in my shoulders that my body can’t see to get rid of.

There’s a line in the musical Hamilton that for some reason keeps popping into my head lately. “In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet.”

I dig into Bowditch, curious about the experience of the eye of a storm. “If they eye of the storm passes over [a] vessel the winds suddenly drop to a breeze,” it confirms. “The rain stops, and the skies clear sufficiently to permit the Sun or stars to shine through holes in the comparatively thin cloud cover.”

But then it continues. Here is where “the barometer reaches its lowest point” and here, though the breeze is light, “mountainous seas approach from all sides in complete confusion.”

I think that’s how I feel right now. My face might feel a light breeze, but my feet know they’re on an unstable vessel, riding waves from all sides.

From all sides. Face the news get hit by a friend’s text. Steer to save my career, and watch my writing get swamped out, buried in a furious foam.

I look for stars through thin clouds and try to ignore the water. Like most people, I keep going on with my life. I attend my fiddle jams and try not to think too hard about how I would feel about people “just going on” if my home was rubble, my kid dead or starving, my dad deported without due process to a prison that has drawn comparison to Nazi concentration camps. People of my race criminalized, removed from their jobs, the focus of dehumanizing attacks.

It’s like my bones know what I might try to ignore. They shake without words, a sentiment perhaps best stated in a recent State of the Climate report: “We are on the brink of an irreversible… disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”

The eye of a hurricane may be quiet, but the seas inside still churn.

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The American Practical Navigator gives practical advice for when you are in the dangerous arm of a hurricane. Noting that at some point it may become necessary to heave to, that is, to lock the boat down, in as stable a position as possible and just ride whatever comes. “It has been reported that when the wind reaches hurricane speed and the seas become confused, some ships ride out the storm best if the engines are stopped,” it says. “In this way, it is said, the ship rides with the storm instead of fighting against it.”

I stopped when I read that. Here I am exhausted, engines at full speed. Trying to climb each wave. And you’re saying the best approach might just be to throttle down?

Sometimes, ships ride out the storm best with engines off.

Not all the time. And not all boats. And not because you think all is lost.

But maybe navigating a hurricane is, in the end, an act of faith.

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In Christian circles there often is a sentiment thrown around like Hallmark: trust in God, and everything will be fine. It seems pretty rich for a God that allow genocide, that allows for the murder of His only Son.

“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will” that Son taught. Yet, as Mary Doria Russell points out: the Sparrow still falls. Some vessels may not survive.

But I wonder if the problem is not so much with the sentiment: indeed, ancient scriptures again and again suggest a compassionate God, one who works together all things for good. Far from considering it all a grand lie, to me I wonder if the issue is more often with our understanding of what it means for everything to be fine. Fine, I find myself expecting, means my ship sails damage free. Fine as in we ride out the storm like a roller coaster with cotton candy.

There’s no such biblical promise, no such evidence in our sweating world.

But if we zoom out and try to look with a God sized picture: see how small this storm is, compared to our planet, the solar system, our vast and beautiful cosmos? See how short our breath is on the canvas of eternity?

Reading Bowditch writing about taking on a hurricane with engines stopped I felt, perhaps against reason, permission to breath.

Not to give up. Not to stop in the work. But to consider my posture. To relax my shoulders and let go. Even a hurricane, if I let it, might carry me through in its powerful arms.

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