‘He Hadn’t Lost His Mind. He’d Lost His Moon!’

Navigation at Its Most Atavistic. Not Totally Eclipsed by Electronics, Not Yet

Genevieve Jacobs Jul 9   ∙   Guest post

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Besides being a regular Loose Cannon contributor, the author is a longtime professor of Psychology and Communications. She landed in Vermont in 1987 after a decade of voyaging under sail. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.”

How did we get our bearings, back in the day? Back in the night, back in the dark ages before the Internet. Before there was “an app for that?”

You kept your star charts, your local tides, your moon phases, your dawns and dusks in your mind. You tracked stuff half in your head, half in your hands, half in your heart, half up your ass, and half in pages of your notebook or in scribbled margins of reference books.

Maybe you’re a prawn trawlerman who needs to get up and down the channels and out to the fishing grounds, mind the tides or maybe you’re a woman who needs to track your cycles. If you’re moving through unfamiliar places you are extra observant.

When you sail out of a harbor, you take a good look back to study the way you came in at different distances, just in case you ever need to sail back in. You might hold up your thumb to make a sight by a landmark where there’s a crook in a shoal underneath. Turn here, when the treeline appears as separate dots.

One evening, not long after the first satellite circled the earth, not long after the first black-box satnavs graced the bridges of well-equipped boats, around the time of the Challenger explosion—which rocked our worlds, and which I personally heard recounted over a scratchy radio—we were anchored on the Ningi Creek south of the Great Barrier Reef.

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Our prawn trawling friend came aboard in the dusk to swap yarns and discuss boats and generally shoot the breeze and eat up the supper I’d made. They were nattering on, not particularly interesting to me yet sort of comforting to hear their voices rambling and wrestling in a pleasantly low volume, low key, slightly competitive, brotherly kinda way. Same old stuff.

This one piece of gear, some brand of equipment, a few fond insults exchanged in camaraderie; a particularly fond and well worn argument about preferences when it comes to this or that maneuver or bit of tackle, or a type of engine, a detail of machinery, feat of mastery, stupid mistakes, a new enthusiasm, an old disappointment, a critique of some product seen in an ad…The conversation rambles along in a kind of chummy intimacy on shiny rails like a cheerful little choo choo.

Horns toot and brakes squeal and crossing signals dinga-dinga-ding and harmlessly power on by, and that’s a trusting friendship, amongst men. They go somewhere, do something, together. Silences and one upping, punctuated by contests. Men talking on a boat is something you appreciate like a river, but mind the rocks. Stay alongside, on the riverbank. Don’t get in the way.

I’m bored stiff, as I’ve been pretty much solid for…years. On end.

I quietly gather up the supper stuff and I go up on deck to wash dishes in the bucket of salt water and a dab of lemon Joy and just drag on a roll-me-own when I’m done, gazing at the Southern Cross and all the stars laid out above me, some dimmed by the orb of a fully pregnant, perfectly round moon, a vast spider’s web of lights, cast across an upturned bowl of ancient mysteries and long sent messages I only now receive.

I think about the glimmering promises of actual ideas in life. The embers still glowing from things I’ve been reading, but nobody wants to talk about. It’s okay. I’m fine with it. I suppose “fat dumb and happy” lives right next door to contentment and what the other sibling called satisfaction. I guess it boils down to lowering your expectations, basically. I mean, what do you want? The moon?

Our buddy is a third generation prawn trawler, son of a son of a son of shrimpers. You know the breed.

They crank up the diesels at 3 a.m. and chug out down the channels no matter what the weather to the scent of bitter burnt coffee grounds and oily fumes of exhaust and their own body odors, while they busy the works on decks and getting all the clanking tackle ready to drag nets for the many-legged little morsels of food out of the sea, along with the occasional hideous monster of the deep that may have sharp teeth or strange poison, weird antennae or various sharpnesses, google eyes or razor fins—they drag this hidden aquatic life up in their hapless nets and never know WTF is coming up in any given catch, figuring they just gotta throw it back, if they don’t die first, and hence these particular guys are not, on the whole, that impressionable.

Everything is just either dinner or a dollar or a good story to share a million times.

But he’s recently deserted the boats, his life, his heritage, to get with the times, modernize, be sensible. To work in a paper factory and “get benefits.” Doing typical normal life quite well, thank you very much. Hasn’t even glanced at an almanac in ages.

He comes up the hatch at length and at long last, a welcomed guest, welcome to go back home already. I start to get up to fetch the painter and ferry him ashore when I hear a supernatural gasp. His eyes are riveted on an empty quadrant of the night sky. He’s frozen half in and half out, crouching like a stone statue of some Neolithic hunter overwhelmed by a tusked mammoth and no weapons at hand.

Stroke? Heart attack? UFO sighting? Stuck Chicken bone? Heimlich? Ghostbusters? Traumatic flashback?! What is happening? Is there something I need to do?

“Moon!” he croaks.

My god. He hasn’t lost his mind. He’s lost his moon!

His mother, he’s lost, catapulted back, the moon who is always there—changing and waxing and waning and traveling the whole world, and sometimes beclouded or squalled from view. But he had a sky map in his fisherman head of where exactly at any moment on any night he would see her, the moon.

This eclipse, it snuck up on him.

I’ve heard that the last thing sailors cry out when they are drowning at sea is “mother!” Oh, mother! In every language: Mom, mama, momma, mother.

The moon, his mother. She who did suddenly disappear, one time. It was after his dad “beat her out of the house with nothing but the clothes on her back”—a story I’d already heard boasted enough times to know that the man had wronged her

And that neither he nor the sons, now grown men, would ever stop missing her.