Avoidance Issues
By Martin van der Wal
Life is messy, O.K. I’m working on the influencer theory that every post should start with a meme, often what previous generations called a cliché . Editing away the mess of life will ultimately result in sterility. Giving rise to another cliché, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good.’
You're facing forward, hand on helm. She’s an old one, her structure a little more elastic these days, the automatic bilge pump is performing its duty. Life is getting messy, one crew member a whiter shade of pale, the other turning a Hulkian green. Nature is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you. Given the fact that life is messy enough, why do people think it's fun to go to sea, multiplying life’s mess with a high risk, ever-changing panoply of winds, currents, and waves? Is it something to do with the previously mentioned ‘good’? As you challenge the conditions to do their worst, relishing the mess nature is throwing at you, the crew are less sanguine. Describing the experience as ‘good,’ at the bar afterwards might be disputatious.
‘Bonkers!’ is the word used frequently by those whose irrationality is limited to sporting pursuits requiring only one ball as they describe the subset of humans who go to sea for pleasure. Enjoying the mess nature throws at you on the water would seem a less than perfect definition of ‘good’. The only rational response to our embrace of this mess is disbelief in our own rationality. Most of us would rather avoid that thought. Following our meme down the Rabbit-Hole, let’s give a wave to Alice! We've gone through the Looking Glass.
We describe sensible, rational people as ‘grounded’. The moorings are dropped, the anchor breaks ground, the pen is left behind: What is it? It’s avoidance. Avoidance of being ‘grounded’. A drift up a creek, a fang around the cans, an ocean crossing, an around the world race, all just ways of evading the sticky mud that clings to earthbound life; the humdrum of the known is replaced by an existential unknowable. It’s a kinda’ crazy thing to do. Will you survive? It’s not a rhetorical question. The avoidance of death itself is now a nagging reality.
OK, so first and foremost you’re obliged to avoid the attentions of an Irishman called Murphy. Why Murphy? Why Irish? The answers are lost in a fog of Guinness. It is what it is! Murphy wants to pick a fight with you and that's that. The only way to lessen the chances of a knuckle sandwich is you gotta go Bristol Fashion. Everything all the time in every place has to be perfected to within an inch of its life, because let's face it, there is usually less than an inch of something between you and another bloke you’d want to avoid, a Welsh chap called Davey Jones. Murphy and Davey are old mates, they love a good laugh. Nothing is as uproarious to them as a tale of human fecklessness. It’s rumoured they regularly meet on the poop-deck of the Marie Celeste downing a few pints of a dark brew called Shiva’me Timbers while regaling each other with the latest examples. The ones where the blokes go overboard holding their willies are always good for a wheeze.
A sailor may or may not evade these two chaps; like thieves in a dark alley it's sometimes a simple case of wrong place, wrong time. There is a third villain. A conspiratorial, dark force. A Super Villain with a wicked name ‘Entropy’! I think it was in my second decade of classic boat ownership when a shipwright; putting my boat to rights after an incident with Murphy, pointed out that wooden boat ownership is actually: Entropy squared! Avoiding entropy is a game of; ‘Whack-a-Mole’! The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that - Entropy always increases in an isolated system — things naturally move from order to disorder. Isolated systems are a strange attractor to most sailors. Let us count the ways? You, personally are an isolated system, your crew, if you have one, are both individually and collectively, isolated systems, your boat relies on clusters of isolated systems. In each of these systems disorder relentlessly creeps forward. It goes without saying that the entire collective of isolated systems, the vessel itself, is an isolated system. That isolated system (your boat) usually has a name, a name that reflects and describes the pathology of our own internal isolated system (your psyche). Who are you? The incurable romantic, (a woman’s name usually,) the cosmic woowoo (the sky’s the limit), the sociopathic aggressive ( there will be blood); ‘Esmerelda’ gives way to ‘Stardust,’ — everybody gives way to ’Alien Terminator.’ Curiouser and curiouser!
We set out to sea on our isolated system, feeling a nervous freedom as we shake the lubber's mud from our feet; it’s an old wooden boat, we are at the pointy end of the rebellion against entropy, our appetite for the fight is greater than most. With senses attuned to a higher plane, avoidance is the name of the game. Murphy is probing every isolated system. Davey’s locker yawns beneath. Achieving and maintaining Bristol Fashion has been the challenge of every moment since we received the first survey report, the first time we threw off the lines, the first time we went off soundings. Nothing is certain. Oh! Hullo! There’s Alice again.
