THE EYE
Boy, I was lookin' out at the horizon when a sudden stillness came upon us. Thistles were
flying through the air on a breathless day on a slick glassen sea when, all of a sudden, the
wind started blowin' and the thistles were flyin' round about me. I thought, holy crap, I'm next
to a thistle patch. I could feel that the wind was stiffening by degrees and the sky turned
black as tar. What a howl the wind made through all that wood. Here comes another storm, I
was thinkin' and I prepared. I carried everything to my boat and lashed it under the oilcloth
and canvas with the Jacob's ladder, and I put a bucket 'a dry wood underneath, all except
the raincoat and the big black umbrella. My oars, I pulled up from the water and put them in
their locks. Before that wind got to blowin', like, one hundred miles an hour, we headed to
the protection of the root camp.
I mean to tell you, this storm became so violent, you cannot see in your mind the magnitude
of the sea which I'm tryin' to describe. It was unreal to me. It was unbelievable, even to this
day, and I've been on some seas. I've been in the North Atlantic and the Alaskan Gulf
several times but never have i seen anything like it since. Here it come! Big rollers were
comin' at us. This woodrift began to rise and fall. I could see the end going up, and I
watched the woodrift rise as the wave went underneath and just rolled right through it. By
that time, there would be another wave. Both ends would be goin' up, and we'd be layin' in a
trough. Boy, come wind, lightenin' and thunder, wind just like they'd opened the gates of hell
up and started throwin' it at us, we hung on. The dogs were barking
and I was scared.The wind was blowing everything around. I could hear that sign just
a-thrashin' in the howling wind. I was thinkin' that we were goin' off the end of the earth,
really. I think that we are going into a terrible hole all that first night. The next morning it's
even worse.
During the day after the third night, the woodrift was turning around in a circle, fast. It was
goin' so fast that I cried out, "STOP! Is this you God , doin' this?" I just hollered, I was getting
so scared: "Stop turning. Stop turning! STOP TURNING!"
All of a sudden, we followed a trough. We dove, like falling on a roller coaster into serenity.
Silence! It was inexplicable to me, the young boy, when, all of a sudden, this storm that had
burst upon us like from the bowels of Hell, this storm laid down as if by the mighty hand of
God himself. I thought that maybe, I was dead, maybe this was Heaven; yet, the dogs were
lickin' me in the face, and I came out of it and looked around through a yellowish tone of light
that I had not seen before in my life. I was seeing as if from within a huge glass bowl that had
been turned upside down to block out the storm. When I took reckon of what had happened,
the storm had completely passed over us. Yet, I could see all around the lightening and the
terrible dark violence that lay outside the almost invisible bowl that surrounded us. When I
looked up, I could see seagulls circling, and, then, I could see the white clouds and the blue
sky beyond. It was beyond my comprehension where I was.
But as I looked around and saw that there was not a ship in sight as far as I could see and
that around the horizon the torment of nature still existed, my natural born instincts told me
that I must prepare for the worst was yet to come.
SHIPPINBOW
