"The Lonely Sea and the Sky"

I’ve been blogging since 2004. I started slow and in recent years my posts have been even more sparse. In the middle 15 years,  however, there’s a sort of bell curve with a flurry of posts and poems and stories piling up each month. Strange as it might seem, when I come here to write, I often find myself reading my own work as if it were written by someone else. I do remember writing each post, but it's almost as if they are old letters I've found in a dusty shoebox. Reading them years after the writing is surprisingly enjoyable. There is more of a cohesive theme throughout the years than I was aware of in real time.

Something I'm doing this week made me think of a line from "Kept," written in January of 2007.  That's the poem (if you can call it that) about the old feather pillow my Grandpa Collinge gave to me. It was old when I got it, and I slept on it every night until shortly after I was married.  One line in particular came to mind because I recently came in possession of a family heirloom in need of a home. 

“… life is full of things still kept 

well past their being wanted…”

It's an old model sailboat, a cutter, my "Uncle Coop" (Claire Cooper) made during the Great Depression. (Because it has only one mast, it's a sloop not a schooner. A sloop with one mast but more than two sails is a "cutter," but I've nicknamed it "Uncle Coop's Sloop.") 

Uncle Coop and my Great Grandpa Collinge were shirt-tail relatives but mostly good friends. Both had served in the Merchant Marines. (My grandpa-great joined when he was only 13--a fact I wish I had known when I sat with him in the front room watching Arthur Godfrey) 

I've written about my great grandfather's house on the corner of Forest Street and Riverview in Port Huron. It was built in 1910. Grandpa was a plumber by then, and that house was the first in that part of town to have indoor plumbing, a fact my Grandma Spencer and my mom always stated with pride. My grandmother grew up in that house and my mother was born there in the front bedroom in 1930. So both my grandma and my mom grew up under that roof with Grandpa Collinge as the patriarch as told in "The Gray Hair in the House."  It was the security my mom knew in that house that made wonder whether she could ever re-create a sense of "home" when she got married (which was the theme of Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe. 

I say all that to say that it was in the side yard of that home where my Grandpa Collinge created a large flower garden for my great grandmother. Between that garden and the old apple tree, he made a goldfish pond that we grandkids helped him tend for many years. It was like a cement wading pool, and in that pond, Grandpa-great would sometimes bring out this wooden boat when we were feeding the fish or otherwise wading in that pool, and if we'd leave it alone--and if there was any breeze at all-- it would sail from one side to the other. At the time, we had no idea that it was thirty years old or that Uncle Coop had made it during the Great Depression, but that explains why Grandpa Collinge took it in and out of the pond himself.

Grandpa Collinge passed in the late 1971, and my Grandma and Grandpa Spencer remained in the house.  That pond required quite a bit of maintenance and for years Grandpa Collinge kept the big goldfish in a old wash tub in the basement through the winter. Well... my grandmother had no intentions of keeping up with that routine. So the same year, Grandpa Collinge died, the goldfish pond got filled in. In fact, they asked my dad to cut down the old apple tree at the same time.  

My dad gave me a piece of the apple wood, and I carved this masted ship from it. The tree was fifty-five years old at the time and this carving is now fifty-five years old. This little relic has bounced around from house to house with my family, and my grandkids play with it regularly. I'm surprised it still exists, but you'll understand why I mention it as you read on....

There are only a dozen or so folks still alive who might remember seeing this boat in that pond. To anyone else it has no meaning beyond whatever value people put on such things in musty antique shops. Even my children and grandchildren have no real connection to this boat. To them, the it is "someone else's memory," as I once said of a discarded page of photographs that blew right up to me as I was walking down our street. 

This is a corner of what we call our way-basement (its the fourth level of a tri-level that is sort of a man-cave. Otherwise, such things would never find a place in my wife's nicly decorated home. That's the boat there in the middle before I put the sails on it this week.

My wife and children know I am a notorious keeper of things "still kept well past their being wanted." I still have the actual Duncan Phyfe table from the story of that title down in our basement. The girls will have to decide what to do with that someday. This boat, however, had been in a cousin's barn for decades. He then gave it to my brother Dave who then gave it to me because he knows my basement is a family museum of sorts and that it might just turn into a poem or story. He’s right: that sometimes happens. My memories of this boat are vague and overshadowed by much fonder memories of my great grandfather who used to float this boat in his goldfish pond. Dave was correct, however, in working on the sails of this sloop, bits and pieces of nearly forgotten conversation are forming in my mind. 

I didn't know it until recently, but my Grandpa Collinge was born in Ontario, Canada. His birth name was actually Gibbs, but as a young child he was adopted into the Collinge family. I hope to learn more about  the circumstances of his youth, but I'm even more curious about why (and how) a thirteen-year-old began sailing the Great Lakes in the Merchant Marines. I only know that the experience shaped him and stayed with him all his life. He and Uncle Coop were sailing the lakes at the same time, but they met much later in our tangled up family tree. They served on different ships together, as they used to say with a laugh. The Great Lakes are actually vast freshwater seas complete wuth storms and stories of sunken ships and lost souls. So stories there were for these two men to share. I only wish I'd been there to hear them.

Neither of them ever owned a boat like the model Uncle Coop made for the goldfish pond, but making such models was a common hobby at the time. Watching the real versions of such boats on Lake Huron had become more popular in 1925, with the inaugural Port Huron to Mackinac Sailboat Race, a tradition that is still a highlight of summers in Port Huron. 

During the last several years of Grandpa Collinge's life,  he would push back from the dinner table and say, "I think I'll go down to watch the ships." It was a regular part of his evening: He'd  drive down Riverview Street, turn right at the Dunn Paper Mill, head south two blocks toward the Peerless Cement Plant and pull his car right up to the river's edge. This was back when there was still a mile of industrial shoreline from the paper mill to Pine Grove Park. The stilted ishing shacks lined the river's edge from the gravel piles of Peerless Cement to the end of Gurney Street. Each night, Grandpa Collinge would just sit there until dark or well after, staring across to the Canadian side and watching the freighters pass. 

One evening, when I was in elementary school, Grandpa Collinge took my brother Dave and I with him to sit at the river. The three of us sat in silence on the front bench seat. Then he started telling random facts about each ship. He knew them by name and could tell you what they were carrying, where they were going and where they'd been. In the pauses between passing freighters, his eyes kept staring at the passing water. eyes were seeing past them, though. Without changing his gaze, he sighed, and said something we did not believe at first:

"Boys, when I was your age, lots of the ships that passed through here looked like the old pirate ships you see in the movies. Big schooners with two or three masts and huge sails billowing out like bed sheets on the line."

"Awe. You're just kiddin' us, Grandpa." I said. "Those ships are from the olden days."

But Dave could tell he was not kidding. "You mean like the ships in Captain Courageous and Long John Silver? Passing right here?"

"That's what I mean," he nodded.

I was still gob-smacked. "Made out of wood with cannons and stuff?"

"Well... not cannons, but yes, of course, made out of wood. Huge ships lined up and waiting their turn to go down the river. The Great Lakes were the busiest waterway in the whole world back then--what with coal and iron and lumber... and this here is the choke point of the whole Great Lakes. It's like sand in an hour glass right here. It was twice as busy as it is now. because the schooners had to be towed through the river by tugboats. They'd string 'em together three and four at a time. Couldn't rely on wind to get through this treacherous current. I can still see it sometimes in my mind when I'm sitting here at night."

He pointed at the passing water as if it were a blank canvas, and his eyes looked into the distance. Then he spoke is a sort of whisper. "One by one, the tall ships just stopped coming, and it was only the steamers. That's what I was on but we were sometimes right next to masted schooners. We could hear the sails snapping in the wind."

"Were you ever on one?" Dave asked.

"Not to work on one, but yes. Sometimes in port, I'd have to run an errand to one of them. It was a whole different thing than the steel deck of  a coal burner. Even to me, it seemed like something from a book. No coal to shovel. No boiler. No pipes going everywhere below. No black smoke plumes higher than the bridge--of course, the bridge wasn't here then." [He was referring to the Blue Water Bridge to Canada."

"The bridge wasn't here?" I asked. 

"No. That didn't come until I was about fifty years old. The tall ships were all gone by then."

"When was the last one you remember?" asked Dave.

"Our Son" active use on Great lakes until 1930

I didn't see the last one, but here's how you can remember it: The last working schooner on the great lakes was the "Our Son." It sank in 1930--same year your mother was born."

Dave and I stared at him with our mouths open. To think that big sailing ships like that were still on the lakes when our mother was born seemed impossible.

"She was carrying pulp wood to a paper mill in Muskegon over in Lake Michigan when a storm took her. The Coast Guard was able to save the whole crew. It was in all the papers."

Another freighter slowly came toward us from the lake to the north. We watched it in silence until the horns blew at the bend by Pine Grove Park. "

"I didn't know that one," He said, 

"You know most of 'em" by name," I added as if to encourage him.

"There was a time, I could tell you the names of fellas I knew on them." His voice dropped off as he started the car with a sigh. 

I wish I had known then how to prompt the stories behind such sighs, but we were just kids in shock that someone we knew had seen the river full of boats from the olden days. The truth is. He had also seen horses replaced by cars. He had read about the Wright brothers before he even had a radio, and now he could see jets flying over the lake leaving lines in the sky. All that was true of his lifetime, and that one short conversation was the closest we'd come to a wealth of untold stories. 

A few years after my great grandfather died, I headed off to college. By then, I had developed an interest in poetry and writing--enough so that I eventually changed my major to Education. In an advanced poetry class I learned "Sea Fever" by John Mansfield. I sometimes say it aloud and think of how my Great Grandfather was drawn to the water each night.

This weekend, I am going to Port Huron, my hometown. I do it at least once a year, usually in the summer. We'll be staying a few days at my cousin's summer house on Lake Huron. It's right on the lake, just a few blocks from where Grandpa Collinge used to sit in his car to watch the ships. My cousin lives out west, but he and I many of our siblings who live far away have a cyclical yearning to return “home” to Port Huron, and he’s kind enough to let us stay there when it's not otherwise in use. 

My cousin doesn't know it, but I'm taking this boat with me, and I'm going to leave it there in that house on the lake. It's the one place on earth where some who visit might remember the boat and the goldfish pond and Uncle Coop and Grandpa Collinge. For those who never knew these people or the pond, perhaps a glimpse of “someone else’s memory” will be of interest through the eyes of one who saw them… like the glimpse my brother and I got of the tall masted ships that Grandpa Collinge described to us. It's possible that there isn’t a shelf or a corner in the lake house to put Uncle Coop’s Sloop. I understand, but I'm also leaving a copy of this post with it. Maybe... just maybe... he'll understand why I think it belongs closer to the lake again after all these years. 

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https://youtu.be/G_T6CaQt7EM?is=wcVqidTJSVGlvNtO