Bolts, Rhum and the Sea

The first strike was off to port, disappearing before the corner of my eye could catch it, but its presence remained with a vague twisting thunder. The sky was hidden by a dense brooding continuing line of cloud. The horizon hid somewhere between a steel grey sea and a light grey setting of the sun somewhere West of South.

Water lapped lazily alongside the hull. It passed slowly in the light airs. The sails were moist as if it were morning in the place of evening. 

Another crack echoed to starboard but turning I only saw monotony all around. Then a bolt split into three almost straight stripes just ahead of me. My eyes blinked at its sudden thick flashing. I looked elsewhere and heard its crackling music still blinking the dots out of my vision. Darkness was merging fast. More strikes from ahead again but I did not look at them. I concentrated on the slightly moving tiller and glanced around to look for storm patches or anything visible aside from my boat.

All of a sudden there was no elsewhere as a distant scattering of light strikes broke from the heavens and entered the seas. Their orchestra began tuning instruments and I looked to see and hear them gathering momentum and approaching me as their central meeting spot. Sulphur lay lightly faintly touching my nostrils.

I have always been afraid of lightning. As a child my first memory of it out a window in the comfort of our back porch. Even that told me to remember to be aware and stay away. The light from it was elegantly monstrous and the sound was mightier than anything I had ever seen up to that small amount of time I had been alive. Lightning seemed to slash at the sky. That fear remains and I was looking at it surrounding me without the comfort of a window on our back porch.

The first horizontal strikes ran for miles not wanting to rest with thunders chasing them into the crowd of verticals. The jagged thin lines of the horizontal streaks screeched the twisting of its notes. A net of light was created all round me with lateral, vertical and horizontal bursts, rays, streams, strikes. I was alone in this tiny boat moving by zephyrs and short surges of wavelets. I was almost still, awaiting what came next, thinking forced thoughts of anything that would not come with any clarity. I could think of nothing but this music of light with its wonderful clashings and pitiful moans. They were all penetrating notes never dreamed of nor wanted.

I tried to get into the dramatic beauty of flashing streaks of the dazzling jags, of reflecting arches of sea lines but there was no control. Life and death have no controls and I felt that I was surely going to be hit. The warmth of my fear ran down my legs inside my trousers onto the socks inside my boots. I could feel the warm urine where I sat helpless in the cockpit. I had no need to stop the flow. My thoughts caught up with the beating of my heart. I was conscious that my eyes were wider than normal and that there was nobody around to say any of this to.

I was alone in the middle of my own world of phosphorescence, sulphuric smoke and black seas of bursting lights. The lightning did not stay in the sky. They moved in and also out of what I assumed was the sea. My surround was being defined by light in pulse, beams, rays, flashing jags. Movements that halted the world, then let it move again.

There was no sense in being afraid of these sporadic, ever-present forms. There was nothing I could do about it. I kept telling myself this between cringes and gnawings of teeth. Time could not count the seconds between the wonders and the trepidation.

Spasms of tension with hairs standing in rushes accompanied me as I bravely went into the cabin. The ports were brilliant spotlights that undulated the cabin scenes my eyes recognised. I reached up behind me to the bottle of Barbancourt Three Star Rhum. The label was well lit. I unscrewed the top in jerks to the corresponding near crashes of thunder consciously hiding from the light outside. I lifted the bottle and drank a timeless amount of the liquid. The lightning was now inside me as a tasty substance of caramel.

A memory crawled into my brain and demanded attention. I was sailing on the spitsgatter, the little Danish double-ended sloop that was my first sail and the owner, a Dane with a melted right side of face was below singing a Danish song about something since I didn’t know Danish. The boat and I were moving out the Golden Gate Bridge. I looked at the noise of traffic bouncing echos off the steel of the structure as people passed going to work or pleasure or just driving. I felt alone, with a drunken guy below who looked up at me and my yelling for instructions and said, or slurred, you do’n fine.

That was the memory so insistent for an appearance and I could not think of why I remembered it just then with the rhum jerking this way and that in my belly it now demanding that I focus on the lightning outside. My head rose a bit to see the sullen flashes just above my eyelashes. I started to get back into boat mode and decided to worry about how to combat lightning. Chain overboard was the first thought. With squinting out the light eyes I gained the cockpit and moved to the stern anchor lashed across the deck. My fast breathing reminded me that I was scared. I thought of scuba diving and slowed down my air intake like I was going to drown by running out of air. I started to laugh at the Dane sitting down there in the cabin with his bottle of DeWars in hand and the other rolling on the cabin sole. What a way to start sailing.

My hands were on the anchor bindings and untying them without my conscious thought. I laced the end of the line through a chain link allowing about ten feet from the anchor and tied it off tightly to the stainless steel backstay making sure the iron of the chain was pressed against the steel of the rigging that I checked to see if it still ran up to the top of the mast. I gently lowered the anchor into the water until the chain tightened. Okay, I said to the little sea bubbles moving away safely from my boat and me. The roar of power was still there but it occurred to me that it had become normal in my life’s moment.

Normal? It was all normal now and I was able to see how grand this lightning storm had become or I was just in the beginning stages of going nuts. I scrunched my eyes shut and regained my fear or fears. Scanning the horizon all round I exhaled and decided to go get another shot of rhum to make this into some sort of party. Nodding to my decision I made my way back to the hatchway as a strike hit a foot away from my little boat and a blast of sulphur seared the left side of my body. My heart stopped beating. I looked down at my chest and it was still there. My foul weather gear was still on my body. I could still feel the sweat under the clothes as little cold finger touches on my skin. I breathed again and resumed my descent into the cabin and picked up the bottle, tilted and let liquid pour down my throat until it filled my mouth. I started choking, air was not going in and I spit the rhum out the hatchway into the soft breeze and thought about the Dane again and what he would say about wasting liquor. It made me laugh while still choking a bit.

I sat on the bunk with the bottle still in hand. I put the bottle top near my nose and smelled the rhum’s tangy bouquet. I thought of Haiti and a warm sensation coated my body for a moment. I was feeling a memory of humid heat and saw a memory of a still sea from the side of a hill near the canon I used to stop at and lean against. A soft roaring of thunder made me look outside without squinting and saw a clear door in the horizon wall of light strikes. It was behind me but I wasn’t quite sure if behind me was behind me and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the almost constant thunder was sounding further and further away like a band, no orchestra was marching on down some street.

Up my head popped to look around at scattered strikes to the port side but nothing to the starboard side of the boat. Ahead were a few strikes but the lightning was even further away. The breeze picked up and the boat moved toward the lightning ahead of me like it wanted to catch up with it. The boat leaned a bit, still guiding she always did when the wind was coming from ahead on what us sailors called pointing. I smiled at the bottle in my hand and while gently replacing the cap and placing the bottle in the sink so it could not hurt itself, I thought to myself that I was a sailor.