"The Eye": Vignette from the Chapter titled, The Woodrift

Excerpt taken from the chapter, titled "The Woodrift.":

The Eye
of the Hurricane

Silence! It was inexplicable to me, the young boy, when, all of a sudden, this storm
that had burst upon us like from the bowles of HELL, this storm laid down as if by
the mightly hand of God Himself. I thought that, maybe, I was dead, maybe this was
heaven; yet, the dogs were licking 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 just
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.
I had the strongest will to survive, now that I had gone through the very worst that I
had been through in my entire life, and I started preparing. I took a quick look
around to see what all I had lost. Some of the tin that had been ripped away lay
snarled in the tangled branches around about me. The iron plate had not moved. It
still rested on the barrel top and the four-by fours that I had nailed to my platform.
My bed, swingingfrom the dorsal fin*, declared: civilization is still here!
I quickly rearranged my living space and made sure that everything was tied down.
The first thing I did was to nail my compass bearer that had slid back against the
trunk of the tree to the deck with ten-penny nails from the bucket of nails I had
saved.
Next, I checked the chickens to see that the crate where they roosted was still tied.
I covered it with canvas and nailed it to the deck. My boat had moved further up
onto the woodrift and I retied her down tight. I nailed everything down through I was
exhausted, I tied a board here, nailed the tin there more securely to the huge limb
of that giant oak.
I looked around me to see white-bellied fish flopping all over the woodrift by the
hundreds. The dogs were grabbing the fish in their jaws and killing them. I'd never
seen fish like 'em before, and I've never caught a fish that looked like 'em since. I
began scurrying to pick them up that they might not fall down in between and go
back into the water. Eventually, most of 'em did survive, returned back
down through the woodrift to the eternal call of the sea. But I gathered up quick
twenty or thirty fish, strung 'em up and put 'em down into the water to keep 'em
alive.
My next concern was to eat. For four days and four nights, we'd not had rest nor
had we eaten and the dogs were hungry. I took a wee bit of the coal oil and built a
fire with the matches I kept dry in one'a my pill cans. It was a weird kind of a smoke
that came from my fire. The smoke went straight up without a ripple. I'd never
seen, except in the dense undergrowth of a quiet swampy morning
or would I ever find that the smoke would rise completely straight like it did then.
There was no wind. The sea about the woodrift was perfectly calm. There was only
the loud persistent call of the Seagull, his cacophony of distress.
I took two real nice fish and gutted 'em and threw 'em on the sizzling part of the
iron plate next to the fire and seared 'em. As I was eating, I remembered the hour
before the violent whistling of the wind that when I cried out to the top of my voice
covered my sounds and though I could see my dogs barking, I could not hear their
sounds, so violent was the wind, the whistling of it in and out
of the woodrift, the eerie sounds that it made, like a band of people with giant
voices speaking to me to try to comfort me or to frighten me. I fell soundly asleep
with my belly full and in the relative comfort of my Wheelhouse with my dogs next to
me for warmth. I slept, and by the grace of God the current had carried me along
to where, now, I was in the middle of the eye of the hurricane upon awakening.
As I looked around, the intensity of the light that shown through was like a light
from heaven that shines through into the darkness. I was overwhelmed by it, and I
knelt, and I said, "God, I thank you for all my blessings. I thank you, my God, for
what I have. But most of all, God, I thank you for what I have not."
Coming out of the eye and back into that hurricane, as the storm closed in upon
us, the air receded and the eye got smaller and smaller. I heard a huge vacuum
like sound, and I actually felt the sucking of the air as it went up into the blue sky.
Oh, it was one hell of a thing after that little lull and the rest that I had, the funny
color of it and the eerie sounds seagulls made as they sailed around like in
suspended animation, for, coming out, all of a sudden, the sky turned dark and
black. Mother Nature unleashed her wrath of hell against the sea and everything
upon it. It was like a crushing force from different pressures against me. When we
come out of the eye of tranquility, we come into a
monstrous mountain of water that comes crushing down upon the woodrift.

*The huge branch of the giant oak tree

T H E V I G N E T T E S OF J Ō D by S H I P P I N B O W

HOME

How
challenging is life . . .
especially for a boy
who faces
the wrath of
mother nature upon
the sea and
survives!