When it has been outrageously windy for days on end, to wake up to dead calm is quite unsettling. I've grown tired of the constant noise, and yet its disappearance feels like yet another foundation being pulled out from under us. Maybe if the wind is no longer roaring, then "it" has all been a figment of our overheated imaginations and stability (however illusionary, temporary or unsustainable) has returned. It only takes a brief glance at news online to realize that this isn't the case. Still, I welcome the sudden calm.
I guess that's the opening to another story, one that I don't think I've ever told you. I am not entirely sure when this happened, perhaps 50 years ago.
I was out sailing in a small Sunfish with my youngest brother. Lake Champlain had had, for an hour or so, perfect light winds for such a sailboat, and we had gone down to Split Rock and over to Vermont, and were back near the shoreline south of Essex when the wind suddenly died. We were becalmed, a word that should be used more frequently than in a sailing context! I mean, completely becalmed. We didn't have far to go, and it might have been possible to use the tiller to push the rudder back and forth to gain forward momentum, but for a few minutes we just sat in the water. I was looking at the beautiful sunset over the New York shoreline. We may have been chatting about nothing, or looking for faint evidence of wind, as you do.
All of a sudden, some kind of live being rose out of the water, creating an enormous wave. It had a smallish head and an arc-shaped back -- it didn't leave the water entirely, but created a half-moon shaped watery image that was there one minute, gone the next. I guess I shrieked and pointed it out to my brother, who I know at least saw the telltale ripples in the water. At that moment in history, there had been relatively little scuttlebutt about "Champ" (or Champy), Lake Champlain's version of the Loch Ness monster, although I'd heard of sightings. But I had recently seen a TV special about Nessie, and I immediately assumed that a lake monster is what I had just seen. My brother pooh-poohed me, and indeed, several times over the years when I brought up the story, he insisted that I was wrong, either that he hadn't seen anything at all, or perhaps a fish. And of course, at this late date, I can't know for sure what I saw, although I'm in much better company, as in recent decades, sightings have been taken far more seriously, even by scientists.
But I think there are two bigger metaphorical points here. First of all, had it been windy, Champy and his or her "wake" would have been invisible to two young sailors paying all of their attention to the breeze, coming about, and avoiding getting too close to shore. It was the calm of the usually wavy lake that made this being's momentary leap above water visible. The second is the lifelong problem I have had, not being believed about many things I say, from the most seemingly fanciful ("I've just seen a monster") to the most profound ("I've seen the future and I know what is coming"). Yes, it started in my family, but it has continued on into most situations I have been in -- thankfully, not all. While I think it has something to do with being female, I don't think that is the whole story. Humanity has limited itself to only a few ways of knowing, and anyone who breaks free and finds other ways of seeing or sensing may be left unheard. And in that situation, it is hard to continue to believe in oneself.
Thankfully, I still believe I saw Champy, and I still believe most of my other observations, whether the "lake" is wavy or whether it is becalmed.
