Light Action in the Caribbean

by Barry Lopez

  One evening I looked up from my reading by a motel pool and saw in the middle ground of my imagination a monk in white robes. He was bending over to comfort a child in a cloister.

  The Benedictine monastery of San José de Galisteo stands on a low knoll in the Santa Lucia Range of the central California Coast. I had known of it since my boyhood in Santa Barbara, and in recent years had visited there. I found the monks worldly, funny, compassionate, and cerebral. Nominally Catholic, they were open to any genuine search for the divine. One afternoon, walking in the garden with the prior, Brother Jorge, and talking about the rationale behind Buchenwald and Treblinka, he offered one of his typically succinct summaries. “Liturgy without justice is sentimentality. And justice without liturgy is barbarism.”

  My visits with the monks had been as comforting as my recent weeks in the Triassic folds of Nevada. Why I’d not gone there first I didn’t know. I was there a week or two before I saw the outline of something else in the long run of beach below the monastery. That margin represented a boundary for me, one I could not have found without swimming across Nevada.

  I could easily have paid the small fee the monks suggested to cover my meals and laundry and been done with it; but I needed another sort of exchange, and I wanted to be physically engaged in the world again. I arranged with Brother Thomas to work under his direction in the monastery’s gardens. They raised vegetables and fruits for their own table and sold what remained in a public market in Paso Robles on the weekend.

  As on earlier visits, I asked to live under a rule of silence, speaking and being spoken to only on Sundays. Brother Thomas wrote out my chores and left his list each day on a small table in the courtyard garden where I usually ate alone. I attended canonical hours with the monks, starting with matins at four a.m. and continuing through compline at eight-thirty, giving my day that spine. Observing the three mealtimes, attending the seven hours, and receiving the Eucharist at noon was the daily order I needed. Around it I weeded, trimmed, picked, and gathered. I read and slept deeply.

  I held to this rhythm for weeks, speaking with the brothers on Sundays or going for a long hike, and then reentering my silence on Sunday evening. Outside of birdsong, wind in the bare branches, and the click and snip of my tools, all I heard was the opening and closing of doors, the sound of footsteps on wood floors, and the tick of utensils in the dining room. On Sunday we talked about baseball, about the ruins at Petra, and of the defiant natures of Isadora Duncan, Artaud, and O’Keeffe.

  This tranquil, innocent mantra ended one day with a frightful disturbance. Every evening the monks lock the outer doors of the quadrangle that forms the monastery, even though the monastery’s remoteness and its very nature make it unlikely that thieves would enter. One night after compline, while I was reading in the library, Brother Elliott handed me a note saying, “If you go outside, please be sure to lock the door when you return.” His note irritated me. Why did I need to be reminded?

  I did go outside that night, exiting through the library door in the north wall of the monastery and crossing a wide driveway to a low stone wall that marked the edge of a bluff above the ocean. The night was clear. I could see the arc of the Milky Way and thought I could discern the evidence of all that starlight on the enormous heave of the ocean. A few long minutes, though, and I was ready for bed. As I turned back toward the library door, which I had pulled to behind me, I saw a creature about the size of a spaniel run from the edge of the building. It angled away from me across the drive, moving swiftly to the bluff wall. My jaw quivered involuntarily as I studied the space in the dark where it crossed. As it rose to the low wall, the hair on my arms and head stiffened. It was the movement of an animal without legs. It slipped away down the wall around some overhanging bushes, and then slid down and seemed to lope off into open country behind the monastery, into the steep canyons of the Santa Lucia.

  This all happened in a few seconds. I moved quickly to the door, my head trembling in denial. Bolting through the opening, I nearly tore the library door from its hinges trying to lock it behind me. All the way to my room I felt a weight like a wet hawser of darkness lying along my spine, and trailing my body like a tail.

  In the days following, I felt the contrary presence of the world leaning forcefully against the idyllic existence I had contrived. I put Brother Elliott’s note in my journal.

  I started having trouble sleeping around this time, and I grew afraid that I would not be able to sleep again, for I now more easily fell prey to that sort of self-doubt that dismantles the first stages of every attempt to recover one’s balance in the wake of a great loss. I did not, of course, find rapport with every one of the monks. A few seemed unaware from the beginning—men ignoring the world; others seemed to have penetrated the world and to have arrived somewhere from which they could now look back and be a kind of beacon for the rest of us. What I admired in each one, though, was that in their Rule of St. Benedict they had found a kind of psychological order they had the wisdom not to disturb. They had been leaning into it for centuries. It wasn’t religion, and it was their first great gift to me.

  I lay awake a few hours before matins one night, turning every couple of minutes trying to find the entry port to sleep, to squeeze through into oblivion, and imagined a ship I had built as a boy, a model of the windjammer Cutty Sark sailing through the ceiling. I’d taken pride in building that ship because I had successfully strung every line of the standing and running rigging (and I had finished it without sails to trumpet the feat); but all I saw that night was its hull cutting the water. I saw it from below as a diver would, the sleek parabolas, hyperbolas, and ellipses of the hull lines ripping through the ocean, the cleave of the entry and the afterboil of its wake as the wind above bent twenty-some sails, from the main courses to the moonrakers, and the refined invention bore on, its caulked and nailed materials shuddering just this side of flying apart, but so well conceived and built that it ran like a dolphin.

  In the moment it surged over my head I fell into sleep.

  The silence of the monastery and the privacy it afforded made me wonder after a while what the other monks actually did during the day. I hardly saw them, except for Brother Thomas. When I asked, Brother Jorge said Brother Aloysius built furniture in a basement workshop; Brother Raymond repaired bound books in another place; Brother Timothy and Brother Fadius volunteered as nurses in hospitals in Atascadero and Morro Bay; and Brother Emmett wrote detective novels. He said that Brother Maria was basically a surfer, but that he also helped Brother Aloysius, and that the other brothers were mostly occupied with tasks around the monastery and with helping AIDS patients and indigents. Brother Jorge himself was writing a ninth volume in his History of Mexico.

  I told Brother Jorge, partly to define a task of my own, that I had decided to build a large model, a ship. I asked if he had some space in which I could work. He described a small room off the kitchen he said I could have, if I could find somewhere to store the flour and other staples. He thought of this room, he said, because it had a window with a view to the sea.

  The monastery building was originally constructed as a palacial home, with a ballroom, art and sculpture galleries, and a library. A financier from Kansas City had it built in 1957, but when his wife died he found he didn’t want to live in it alone and I believe he all but gave it to Brother Jorge. He wasn’t a Catholic, but he apparently had great respect for Brother Jorge’s intellect and spirituality. Whatever thoughts he had had of spending years in retirement in the place with his beloved wife, he successfully transmuted them into years lived here by Brother Jorge and the other monks.

  When, in that same conversation about the room, I told Brother Jorge about the creature I’d seen, he smiled and gave me a look of acknowledgment and assurance, his raised eyebrows saying I had at that moment stepped briefly into waters in which he rowed every day. (What made me trust Brother Jorge was that at odd hours I would find him smoking a cigarette in the gardens while he pulled weeds with his free h
and.)

  I had been thinking about ships ever since I’d dreamed about the Cutty Sark’s hull cutting through the ceiling. I wanted to build a ship, not a bark or a schooner, but a square-rigged, three-masted ship, a model of Cook’s Resolution or a working ship like the whaler Charles W. Morgan, or one of the storied clippers, like the Flying Cloud. I wanted to build an object that would make more real the longing to get somewhere, to do something.

  I finally settled on a model of the Rachel, a ship built in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1851. She had worked as a grainer, mostly, carrying hard wheat from California to Hong Kong and Djakarta and then chinaware and tea and teak lumber on the back haul. I got a set of plans through the mail and in Morro Bay bought the few tools I would need. I wrote out an order for spars, decking, strakes, rigging, and other parts, but then quickly shortened it. I had another idea, and sent out only for chain and sails.

  The Rachel carried twenty-one sails: three jib sails forward and a spanker rigged fore and aft on the mizzen mast at the rear of the ship; five square sails each on the fore and main masts and another four on the mizzen. Between the fore and main masts she was rigged with two staysails, and between the main and mizzen masts was a third staysail, all three rigged fore and aft, at ninety degrees to the square sails.

  As a boy I had had trouble with sails. Each one is slightly different, and I could never cut them exactly right. I planned to mount these furled, but I wanted them absolutely right before I lashed them up to their yards.

  I kept at my work in the garden with Brother Thomas, but made additional time now in my daily routine to get down to the beach for a walk. One day in the wrack line I found a ball cap, which I took to wearing against the sun. Another time I found a door with an ornate set of latch plates, a confirmation of the other part of my plan. With bits of plastic thrown up on the beach and scraps of clothing, and with the great supply of driftwood and odd bits of metal attached to this debris, I thought I could fashion everything else I needed for the Rachel, from deck planking to its binnacle and water buckets. What I could not find on the beach I might locate around the monastery—broken clocks and radios, say, from which I could take the materials for capstans and rudder hinges.

  It would take longer than buying everything ready-made, but it was the better route.

  Embarking on this task altered the shape of my day for the third time since I’d left Boise. Deep within the pattern of canonical hours and the times set for meals, I built a rhythm of work that included gardening, walking the wrack line on the beach, and working on the ship. Though repetitive and predictable, the rhythm was engaging, like riding a gaited horse through ever-changing country.

  I set up in the room Brother Jorge assigned me. The day the plans arrived, I laid them out on the worktable like oracular documents. I lifted measurements for the hull design from the plans with a pair of dividers and tried them out on various pieces of wood I had gathered. I saw quickly that I had enough hawthorn branches to fashion the ship’s frames. I had a limb of applewood from the beach from which I could saw the thirty-one-inch keel and the stem and stern posts. I read the ship plans like a property list for a play. I had scraps of isinglass to use for the skylight above the captain’s quarters. I had a broken car antenna to slice for spar rings.

  I’d not built a model ship in twenty-five years, but the skills were still in my hands, and more importantly, I still had a sense of how to manage the sequence of steps, so I wouldn’t, say, install the main mast with its shrouds and stays and, in so doing, block access to additional work required on that part of the deck. I had been able to obtain a set of used surgical tools—hemostats, scalpels, needle probes—through Brother Fadius, which simplified many tasks requiring precision and dexterity. I was also able to assemble a set of used dental tools to the same end, a related discovery made in my youth.

  I wanted the ship to come quickly, but of course it didn’t. Many hours into the work, I would wonder what had happened to my once certain sense of its impending completion. Making the incredible array of ropes and cordage I needed—halliards, sheets, clew garnets, vangs, lifts, braces, guys, brails, tacks—each one different from the others, took weeks instead of days to get right. And, of course, things went together wrong, and work had to be taken apart, and things broke; and then one day when I was so angry I snapped an unpainted pencil in my fist, I saw in the fragments the six-sided spool piece I needed for a winch on the forward deck. I readjusted my chair. And I began again.

  The day I glued in the last hull plank, which for the first time revealed the exquisite distillation of curves that allowed the ship to run so smoothly through the water, Brother Jorge was standing in my door. (Though it was a Sunday, the monks never presumed you wished to be interrupted, let alone spoken to, just because it was Sunday. During the week they never so much as made eye contact with me unless we were involved in coordinating a task together.) But there he was, with his heavy-rimmed glasses and his finger in a book folded to his chest.

  “Is it ready?” he asked.

  “Well, just now, as you come by, the hull is finished. I have the masts, the rigging, the decking and deck equipment and furniture, all that to go.”

  “May I look?”

  “Oh my, yes, of course.”

  I pushed back from the table and he approached as if he were about to inspect a being. He laid his book aside on the table and bent in close. I watched his eye as it took in the flow of planks, from the garboard strake at the keel all the way to the sheer strake at the deck, and the longitudinal lines fore and aft, from the bow through the beam to the stern. His look was not of approval but one of confoundment and wonder.

  “Who thought of this?”

  “Of ships?”

  “No, of this design, this line?”

  “Do you want a complicated answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “When the East India Company, in England, lost its charter, and ships began competing to get from one port to another, speed became of the essence. Naval architects tried to find new solutions to drag and resistance, and the first great solution was a clipper ship called the Ann McKim, built in Baltimore in eighteen thirty-two. By the time the Cutty Sark was built in eighteen sixty-nine, they were approaching speeds of close to eighteen knots, nearly twice as fast as the old ships.”

  “Capitalism?”

  “Mmm. The desire for profit, competition in a free market. It produced the need for the clippers, but the ships were things of beauty without that. When steam came along, ships got much uglier. The graceful lines here in the hull became bloated and square so the ships could carry more cargo.”

  “Are you saying that the beauty of the ship, then, was a kind of accident, that it didn’t need to be beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so, when its days had passed, ships like this, they had nothing to do? They became orphans, relics?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not capitalism, then. I think it must have been the desire for beauty that made the ship, along with the restlessness of the soul, a belief in the solution we say is a journey.”

  One evening during vespers I realized I had reentered a time of my childhood. I was happy because my energy was almost entirely focused on the ship while the rest of my life was following on like a dog, obedient but unthinking. I put the model aside for a while and concentrated on other parts of what I had now come to think of as my “prayer”—my reading, my Sunday afternoon sessions talking about the history of Mexico with Brother Jorge, my Wednesday mornings with Brother Aloysius in his furniture workshop, my dishwashing and floor-mopping chores.

  One day I found a note from Brother Jorge under my door. He’d come upon a reference to sails in the writing of Bartolomé de las Casas, “las gallardas camisas de los arboles,” which he translated for me as “the proud shirts of the trees.”

  I stayed away from the room where I was building the Rachel and instead concentrated during those weeks on what was washing up on the beach. I waded in the wat
er, and from time to time swam in the surf, and I walked the mile of sand that stretched before the monastery. I rarely met anyone. One day I found a dollhouse from which I removed a door for a companionway hood. Another day I came upon a dresser drawer, the bottom of which was of a perfect thickness to saw shells for snatch blocks, fiddle blocks, cat blocks, viol blocks, and other exotic parts of the running rigging.

  With these and other scraps of raw material to hand, I went back to fashioning ship parts, using jeweler’s tools and kerf and bead saws and my medical and dental tools. Making the parts a single one at a time, tapping and tapping a snippet of brass with a tiny hammer on a block of steel, and then drilling it with a needle-thin bit to make a hinge plate, I came back in control of my enormous task.

  In the closing weeks of autumn I finished the ship. From jib boom tip to transom it measured thirty-nine inches, and from keel to main masthead twenty-three inches. It rested in cradles screwed to a board of Honduras mahogany, the one piece of wood I took to Brother Aloysius’s shop to mill and cut square at his table saw.

  In the six months I had been at San José de Galisteo, I had spoken with no one but the monks. Whatever it was I had accomplished at the monastery, I was now ready to return home. I felt cleaned out, not so much healed, I suppose, as capable of managing. I had had no thoughts about whether I would now quit work permanently; but there was a lot of mail waiting, I knew, and no doubt other sorts of messages, and I wanted to attend to it.