The Sea

A break from the election

Wendy and I have a long-time affectionate relationship with the sea. Wendy was born and grew up in a seaside community south of Melbourne, Australia. I lived in Philadelphia, but year after year we spent the week of Dad’s vacation at Ocean City, New Jersey. A couple of other times Dad and I would fish for flounders in Barnegat Bay, renting a rowboat for a dollar.

When my Son, John Mark, was a Junior in high school, he was able to spend the year on a three-mast ocean-going schooner. I had taken a very part-time job recruiting faculty for “The Oceanics,” (an alternative high-school.) My salary consisted of a berth for John. What a deal!! When John graduated from a public high school the following year, he attended a merchant marine college. Following graduation he worked as a mate on a great LNG (liquid natural gas) ship. I lived in constant fear that he would be killed when the thing blew up somewhere in the Persian Gulf where we were engaged in a very dangerous war. But no, during his yearly vacation John and two cousins were killed when their rented airplane crashed on takeoff. While that has been almost forty years ago, I still grieve. John lives just beyond my right shoulder and at unexpected moments appears-- and my grief is renewed.

Years later Wendy and I found ourselves in northwest Missouri, as far as you could get from the sea. One summer when Wendy was visiting her daughter in a village on the coast of Maine, she called me about a wooded acreage which was on the Penobscot Bay. We agreed to buy it and planned to build a modest seacoast cabin. There is a six-foot tide in that part of the world, and Wendy had seen the property at high tide. When I saw the property at low tide two years later, instead of the sea I was confronted with a great mud flat. That year we were able to sell the acreage at twice our purchase price.

The week of the sale I encountered a lobster fisherman who told me that he was about to move from his simple seaside house to a nearby mobile park. That afternoon we purchased his house, and for the next few summers we journeyed from Missouri to Castine, Maine where we also became owners of a 26-foot sailboat we renamed the JOHN MARK.

When subsequently I retired from my marvelous long-time Missouri pastorate, we became missionaries assigned to teach in an Australian theological college. After a five-year assignment we decided to return to the USA where we were to take up residence in a church-oriented retirement community. We made the trip home aboard a container vessel that took twenty-nine days to cross the Pacific.

Now we were back in California, an hour from the ocean, but alas, in these twenty years we only rarely got to see it

My older daughter, Carol, had become a psychiatrist, retired early, and lived with her partner on a sailboat on Catalina Island off the southern California coast. A few years ago she died of lung cancer doubling my grief.

But I still remain fascinated by the sea. I have painted a series of American lighthouses, and used them in a community vesper service. I still resonate with John Masefield who wrote;

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

What are we doing to the sea? Tune in next week.