The Parallel Lines of Churning Chaos

See, the mind wanders …

Living even more than ever at the edge of the sea. Life’s retirement bonus after the penultimate chapter of years in a house built a hundred years ago, with inside bathroom and everything, for a large family finally shriveled to two senior citizens. 

Inside bathroom? Wasn’t universal in those St. Andrews days. In fact, my grandparents’ later house, which Pop himself built on E. Caroline Boulevard in the early 1940s, originally had, out close to the huge chicken pen that was forbidden to me because of the fierce rooster, an outhouse, as the house itself had but one bathroom. In the bathroom was an enormous old kerosene-fired water heater that Pop lit up once a week for Mom’s bath. Pop himself took a cold shower daily. I remember cold showers at Camp Weed as a kid and teenager, and also that on Saturday evenings the camp staff stoked and fired up the water heaters for us. 

But of outhouses. The danger of course, as I’ve remembered here before, was spiders lurking, giant, or sometimes black with a red hourglass on the belly, waiting especially, I always suspected, for a boy (ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω). 

Just one more step toward this decency cliff. At Pop’s fish house there was a double outhouse over what is now Smith’s Yacht Basin, and I’ll not even allude to the delight of visiting a breezy board with a hole in it on a hot summer day. It may be that of those alive today, only Walt and I remember.

How in aitch did I wander so far down this dirt road —

The sea is an image of chaos and in fact sometimes in rattling off from Genesis 1:1, I like to say “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved over churning chaos. And God SAID, ‘Let there be … and it was so.” Doing that, and also finding the Holy Trinity in the opening of Hebrew Scripture, I realize I stray far from literal translation and even farther from the P-Writer’s intent; but I like the notion and sound of it. Besides, fear of the chaotic, churning sea is an element of early folk tales and mythologies. So, I say “churning chaos,” no exaggeration to one who has encountered a typhoon in the open ocean. Or a deadly squall while entering the Gulf of Mexico through the Old East Pass. Odom Melvin’s memory, “In the darkness the waves seemed mountainous as they crashed upon us, and the wind was shrieking in the sails, but the most dreadful sounds of all were the cracking and ripping as the Annie-Jennie began breaking up …” 

So, churning chaos. And I’ve wondered, mindful of chaos theory, whether a butterfly fluttering its wings in Brazil and stopping on this flower instead of that one, caused that storm beyond Davis Point on that particular night, and thereby giving me life instead of never-having-been-ness.

Repeatedly distracted and still not yet where I meant to be because of what I noticed yesterday. The sea with Tiamat and her lap monster that great leviathan even causes whitecaps on St. Andrews Bay crashing against E. Beach Drive’s “thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed”

 (and yes, that’s the lone pine at the tip of Redfish Point), Boreas and Tiamat squabbling under an angry sky. Churning chaos. 

Yet at the end, even Chaos yields precise order, doesn’t It, He, She.

Even so, because of that Brazilian butterfly, we can’t predict exactly when and where order will emerge. Sometimes seven stories down.

IDK