NORAH’S BARQUE by Christopher Williams

   For eighteen years, there was a massive wooden vessel resting at the top of our beach. It was perched just above the tide line. Broad-sided and incongruous, it demanded attention, set as it was against the dark, blue-green, fir forest. To the few passing mariners, it appeared to be a derelict, washed ashore by some long-forgotten gale. In truth, it had been constructed just where it was, above the rock and sand, at my request. We had needed all those eighteen years to complete its tedious, demanding construction. When it was eventually finished, and it floated us away, my children had known nothing other than its enormous presence, there by the dooryard of our saltwater farm. It was the most important object in the children’s world, their entire lives, and now it was filling its promise. When the water eventually came, it was ready, as it was built on its own launching ramp, though over the years of construction, the ramp had settled some into the sandy soil near the wild peas and fireweed, as it became a part of the landscape.

Our farm was on an island where my husband and I had chosen to live. Our children had been born here and had grown into adults here.

When I tell my story to the new ones as they come along, as I so often do, the first question always is: “How did you know we would need it?”

Yes, fair question, and the answer is coming, but first I must give you some family history:

   We, my husband, three children, and I, Norah, lived, as you may have heard, on the distant windward side of that remote far north island, some miles off the Newfoundland coast of Canada in the mid-twenty-first century. The forty-acre, low-lying island was dramatically beautiful. It was covered with spruce, fir, birch and alder, with a scattering of tussocks and open fields of grass with outcropping of moss and rock. I tell you this because it is crucial to the building of this vessel. During the extended dark winter months, we were entombed in a frozen white blanket, but like little field mice, we scurried about happily, going about our business, beneath its mantle, until the spring came when we poked our heads out to the sky.

I still mourn its passing.

   Before the island came into our hands, when my husband and I were yet kids ourselves and living down the New England coast in Boston, we belonged to a group of forty-one people who were eager to leave behind as much of our culture as possible. The same culture that had nurtured us from childhood. We were enormously anxious to be-done with our society’s chaotic indulgences, greed, willful indifference, and its vast consumption of goods. We, the ‘Group of Forty-One had,’ organized ourselves together to form a plan of escape. We were young, free-thinkers, loosely paired, and high-minded. We were smart and energetic, and had saved enough earnings to provide for our break-away. Most of all, we were willing and even anxious to give up this opulent and easy life we had as children for clear, responsible thinking and a freedom of spirit. To our determined minds, the careless self-serving judgements, the gross disregard for the following generations, and the extravagances of our society lay like a pile of rocks on our chest. We had taken on the guilt for the entire human world.

   After lengthy searches into a year of late nights, we found and subsequently purchased this spot of rock and earth far out into the North Atlantic Ocean. It seemed to be the perfect answer to our needs, and it turned out to be just that. En masse, we quit our jobs and sold most of our things. Without loss of time, and in an impressive caravan of old cars and trucks we made the trip from Boston to the wild eastern coast of Newfoundland. At the designated spot, we left the vehicles on the mainland and were transported forty-eight miles out to the island by local fishermen.

   On the island, at the landing cove, we found a small scattering of long abandoned grey-wood buildings, a fishing settlement from the early part of the last century. The old, weathered houses were stark and romantic with their old faces and unglazed windows looking out on the sea. We moved in and took over. After just a handful of years, we made an altogether civilized habitation for ourselves, making great effort to avoid any scent of duplicating the society we had fled. We became completely attached to our life, liking it as well as any human could like anything. You might say, and rightly so, that we were set on remaking our society anew, and thrilled at our successes. We had no formula to follow, no constitution to translate into law, and no laws, only a very strong sense of compassion, empathy, right and wrong. Each individual understood this completely.

   The years tumbled on, the children came and grew, and we slipped into that great marsh of middle-age. The original adults who had made the pilgrimage not only altered their corporal lives completely but shifted their minds to ‘think life’ in a new way. Everything in our environment, all our worldly goods took on a brand-new meaningful value, for we wrought, by our own hand, those objects that we used and admired ourselves, either making it anew or remaking some vital piece of machinery, that might have been thought of as trash to our former selves. My family and I found, and chose, the old saltwater farm that we rebuilt and occupied those many years.

   But as time passed, as one might guess, all was not easy. We all had conflicts arise, some more painful. For my part, I acknowledge one serious difficulty: My initial training was as a marine biologist. To leave my society behind I had to leave my career behind also. This was difficult for me. I loved my work and began to miss it terribly. I must admit to an overpowering curiosity, a deep desire to know. Living on a remote island shut me off from the life of worldly knowledge, which I craved, was very hard.

   Amid a great fuss and disapproval from my community, I insisted on establishing a means of communication with my hither-to abandoned colleagues and fellow scientists. This contact would entail a satellite tie for a computer, a generator to power it, gasoline to power the generator, and long dangerous ocean trips to supply it all. The generator was later replaced with solar panels. My dear husband made all that happen. Nevertheless, I was violating the very tenet of our flight and the philosophy of our new fellowship. Many of my friends shunned me and my choice. I chose not to actively defend my actions. As self-serving as they were, I attempted only a feeble justification, that my activities did not encroach on any other’s life.

   I, too, was chagrined by my own insistence, however, I had achieved my goal. And I must confess to you at this point, that I did, on occasion, wander from my strict science tasks to surf the forbidden realm of the internet, its deadly allure was a force. Seditious as it was, I now had it all: I could sit by the wood-fired stove in the cozy warmth of my kitchen, on dark winter days and eavesdrop on the passing human species from a safe distance. I could lean back into my battered, old, oak, office chair and watch my renounced culture march over my little computer screen, right there before my eyes, for my personal observation. Then, in order to return to sanity, all I must do, was to shift my eyes ever-so slightly to the left beyond the screen, through the kitchen window and out over the roiled gray-green sea just on the far side of our ice covered shores, and again be at peace and at home in our solitude. The arrangement was exquisitely to my liking. I relished my new role as a somewhat prurient, remote observer of the human condition.

   Aside from the social views, and within the keeping of my profession, which was an ongoing survey of fish species found in tidepools of the mid-tidal zones around the world, I was able to go back to the work I had previously built. I had well-established relationships with colleagues in many countries on the world’s shorelines, from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Now, I was able to provide them with research from my own shores, which was abundant.

   About four years into our new life on the island, with children on the way and the work of building a viable community in the old settlement succeeding as planned, I began detecting incoming oddities from my associates online. In pictures and words, my computer began giving me disturbing evidence of disappearing tidepools. Pools, that is, that don’t come out of the water at the standard low-tide level. Meaning, that the receding tides no longer leave them on the shore. Dozens of my correspondence complained of losing valuable study pools that ceased to emerge at the lower tidal zones. Odd, what was happening? There seemed to be more ocean. Where was it coming from?

   This emerging study, mind you, was some twenty years before ‘sea level rise’ was a known phrase. Our group of tidepool researchers were onto spanking new information, which predated, by a decade, the rest of the scientific community’s awareness.

   To my family’s vexation, I plunged into this curiosity to find out what was going on. Our island group, angry with me at the onset, with my introduction of shunned technology, grew angrier with me for bringing into our sheltered microcosm the disorderly distractions of the world beyond. Be that as it may, I needed to know.

   On our own shores, I set up markers at various places around the island, in tidepools and rock headlands. I spent hours at my computer going to other shores. It soon became evident that the ice bound waters of the world, those lying just above sea level, were diminishing from warming atmosphere and their waters were flowing from them into the seas. This was on-land ice, glaciers, ice bound continents, islands and ice shelves.

   I settled into a scientific world of figures, computer models, thermal futures, locations and hectors of ice continents, islands, and fields, all in heaps of data. When I pulled it all together and stacked it against the volumes of water in the world’s seas, I found a startling revelation:

   It appeared that the oceans of the world were rising, at a stunning rate. To make a very long and most complicated story as short and personal as possible, I set these statistics against our own low-profile island, the results indicated that we would be overcome by the sea within eighteen years, if this all continued, which seemed to be its apparent intention.

My God! No island in eighteen years.

To my dismay, my figures held up over countless back checking and exchanges with colleagues.

We, on our little island, needed to take action, were we to survive. The rest of society, well-be damned.

   I called for an immediate forum to make a grave presentation to my people. The news was received with shrugs of the shoulders and an indulgent smile. I believed that they must not have understood me. Over the period of some many months, I pleaded and cajoled with never-ending meetings. To no benefit. Our group now, with the addition of offspring, numbered more than a hundred people. Though I had the irrefutable evidence of this coming reality, the large majority of the people refused to accept the evidence. They were kindly, within reason, but not accepting. And those who were somewhat accepting, well, they were just not inclined to act.

   My family was staunchly behind my findings and agreed to agree to whatever might be needed to be done. We concluded the only escape from a sinking island was by leaving it to return to the mainland and the society we had previously rejected. No one accepted this path. Or by floating away, probably by boat or raft. All were adamant, there would be no returning to the mainland, which would likely be in chaos anyway - absolutely not. A raft was unacceptable. It then was going to be some sort of a boat.

   Our island group was pleasant enough to our family but would have none of it. They were completely engaged in their fully occupied lives and had little time for these kinds of speculations. And of course, there were a certain number of people who absolutely refused to acknowledge any of my work. The human mind is not inclined to think in future terms but operates quite happily focusing on what lies just before the nose. If the community did not wish to participate, we, our family, could do it ourselves, after all, there were five of us now, and with help from a few loyal friends we could manage it.

   My family also concluded, quite forgivingly, that although the other island people refused to accept the findings, they must, in the last tally, also be accounted for, and if we were dead serious, as we were, they must be rescued when the time came, no matter what they thought of the project. As my four year old son implored, we could not leave the livestock behind, nor the dogs, cats, sheep and goats, and of course, as many of the wild creatures from our doomed island as possible must go with us also. All this called for a ship, not a boat.

So, there it was, we must build a vessel of some length and girth.

   My husband is a fine builder of everything, sturdy wooden chairs were his specialty. He had little problem selling them ashore. He often said that a chair was the most demanding of all furniture, for it had to accomplish many needs: it ought to possess great strength with minimum material, be knocked about for its whole lifetime, be a comfortable sit, last for several generations, and of course it had to be of correct proportion and be a handsome object to look upon. Aha then, all this was true of watercraft also. The family couldn’t have been more anxious to start.

   After more research, we determined to build a barque. The barque was to be one hundred and twenty feet long, with a forty foot beam. With its three masts, the barque was chosen for its sensible sail plan which allowed seaworthiness yet maneuverability, speed was not crucial, yes, after launch, need it be said, we had no destination. Two of the three masts, including the main mast were square rigged, the aftermost mast would be fore-and-aft-rigged, or with a triangular sail, lying parallel to the keel; this would be for maneuvering.

   An engine driven craft was not even considered, for obvious reasons. The timber for the three masts would be chosen from our forest trees, we had some handsome spruce with long straight trunks, we selected three of the tallest and the straightest of them. The timbers for the hull would also be cut from our spruce forests and milled with the ancient mill that had been left here on the island by the first inhabitants; it had been rebuilt sometime earlier. Frames, braces, and finishing woods would come from our birch trees. We had the time needed to cut, stockpile, and season the timbers. The greater challenge came from the sails and the rigging. We had neither the inclination nor the money to order anything from ashore. And, obviously, domestic cotton and synthetics were impossible.

   It was decided to have the rope and sails fashioned from our own treated wool. In the early years, we had acquired about one-hundred head of Shetland short-tailed sheep which provided us with an excess of fine wool for our winter clothing: socks, scarves, mittens, and even underwear. The short-tailed Shetland sheep were descendants of the Norwegian and Faeroe Island animals, similar to the Viking sheep that gave the Vikings their woolen sails. This northern variety of sheep have fleece that is double coated, a long fiber of about four inches stands above a short curly inner fiber, which provides the sheep with warmth. In sail making, the guard fibers, the longer ones, are used in the sail’s warp for strength and the inner fibers are used for the weft for air tightness. Large sails were to be made from smaller woven squares of sail material which is sewn together after being treated with a resin made from pine tar and sheep tallow, to make the fiber wind-proof and waterproof. We gathered all this wool by pulling, often called rooing, and not by cutting or shearing, to improve its structure. Our sheep were a hardy lot; to survive winter they, as on the Faeroe Islands, learned to augment their diet with seaweed eaten on the rocks at low tide.

   Our last two problems were solved by luck and ingenuity. On the island, we found two formidable anchors and a length of decent chain, evidently from old coastwise trading ships which had put in here many years ago. The fastenings that were to hold the timbers together were our last issue. That solution came from shipbuilders of the past in the form of tunnels, or wooden nails, which are driven into precut holes to form a connection that actually increases its hold as it wears into its job, by expanding and tightening in place. The last ingredients were a tremendous amount of labor and our native skill.

   So began the work. The keel was laid on its wooden launching timbers in the early spring, two days after my third child was born. I liked the idea that the barque would be a familiar part of my children’s life well before they needed its services.

   Children, need it be said, adapt to change remarkably well. As the hull began to take form and in its early stages, it became a climbing playground, as it began looking more like a vessel it was their playhouse. As they grew and the barque grew, they found new places and ways to relate, all were changing forms. As my children and their friends reached mid-teens, the slow growing barque became of less interest and of little use to them, it stood at the top of the beach a well-known part of the landscape, and of little note, even as the waters came ever closer. By the time the masts had been stepped, we were seeing the need to barricade the hull from winter storms and driven ice. As the time drew close, the beach had mostly disappeared at high tide, and a bulwark had to be constructed between the barque and the sea to protect it from the lash of winter waves. The calm summer waters now rippled beneath its great bulk. We had just one summer to finish work. One by one, families came to us with apologies for their previous judgements and words of compromise, and yes, they were indeed there to help in any way they could. And the help was much needed, for we were quite clearly running behind on our construction. As the waters flooded my garden and required foot bridges to enter the barque’s decks, the entire community was at work. We were having nightly sessions of preparations concerning food, quarters, living necessities, livestock, even schooling. The sailors among us feared the large spring tides. This became our goal - the top of the coming spring tides.

   Work that winter was frantic, with wretched cold and finishing work without good lighting. But we now had among our community a dedication to the barques completion that could only be expressed by those who had a deep belief in their goals.

   The day was set, the food was stored, the animals were collected, the children were exalted, both fearful and delirious, about their coming adventure. Everyone was rushing about while deep in thought. The land was disappearing fast, forests were flooding, only the upper floors of houses could be occupied, skiffs and the few horses were the island’s only transportation now. The moon was completely round, the spring tide hit its peak at 2:31 in the morning, the wind was calm.

Silently, all night, the people were arriving by skiffs and rafts in the moonlit dark hours.

   Horses and riders were taken in, even the children were now whispering. By midnight all were aboard, the water was silently slipping in among forest branches and bedrooms of the disappearing homesteads; its stealthy, steady inundation was floating away the remainder of our community.

   Some days before, several men had affixed two stout lines with anchors set offshore and tied to the barques bows. Most of the community were on the broad decks of the barque, waiting, feeling with their feet for movement from below. At 2:00 AM, a rumble came up the sides of our craft, as it began to release its great weight. The launching ramps sprung to the surface, from their beds of eighteen years in the sands near the wild peas and fireweed. At 2:15, a shift was felt as the vessel experienced its first float. Then with little perceived movement the barque slowly rotated on its axis, facing, for the first time, out to sea. The men in the bow hauled on the anchor lines with everything they had, and the barque moved at a deliberate pace offshore into the calm, cold, spring morning.