WAHINI MAN




I'm riding on a paddleboard. - Do you know what that is?  It's like a surfboard but meant for standing and paddling with a single oar, now left, now right. When they first began appearing a few years ago immediately Sue and I were enamored; now, along with many others, we have our own.

So I'm riding on our paddleboard, plying the rippling waters of the Long Island Sound.  Our board is pink underneath with a white trim; the top is light bamboo with a grey mat.  It's ten feet six inches long, weighs twenty six pounds and is composed of some kind of foam wrapped in lightweight composite material.

Toward the front of the paddleboard is a drawing of a hibiscus, next to which is inscribed the word, wahini.   This is Hawaiian and means woman.  The reason I am riding a pink paddleboard named Woman is that it came to us by mistake.  Hoping to surprise me (which she did) Sue ordered the male version, a white board called Nalu. But something went wrong in the shipping and, as we planned to share one board this season and to get a second board next summer, we decided to keep the pink one.

So for now I am Wahini Man (which circumstance I utilize to demonstrate my understated, confident masculinity - those broad shoulders, those sun-tanned arms, that head like a storm-beaten stone, surely belong to a man - a poet (see the distracted gaze!), an artist (is that paint on his trunks?), a visionary (but is he smiling or grimacing?).

With religious regularity we take our paddleboard out each day, preferably in the late afternoon when the water lies down like a kitten and the sun throws a sparkling carpet across the Sound from east to west, where soon it will seem to descend into the ocean itself, trailing orange clouds.  You can paddle along that golden slate of water, the myriad sparkling specks of light like the souls of the blessed in Dante's Paradiso who retain their distinctiveness while being wholly at one with the infinite ocean of the Godhead.  Turning back, you'll feel the warmth across your back even as you're cooled by a salty breeze that whistles in the airholes of your paddle's silver pole.  A couple of necessary asides here: First, I never read the  Paradiso.  My father told us of that image when we were kids and I've simply been repeating  perennially to my own kids that those sparks of light on the water are like Dante's  vision - I tend to dabble and I've begun many books, but seldom do I finish the heavyweights.

Second aside:  When the wind whistles through the airholes in the paddle (which allow you to adjust the height of the pole) there always emerges a primary pitch and, occasionally, a few soft harmonics.  These  sounds, flute-like and tremulous, whimsical and incantatory, remind me of the description by the musicologist Colin McPhee of an instrument he discovered in a remote part of Bali back in the 1920's.  The native inhabitants, doubtless as astonished at the sight of a white man as was he at their orchestra, performed a similar kind of music upon vertical rows of bamboo sticks held together by horizontal ones, producing the sound by shaking the instruments up and down.  Needless to say (for the ethnomusicologist but worth pointing out to anyone else) the resulting intervals (in both cases) are not tempered so that you could hardly believe your ears (for the strangeness of the music) while in the end you had to (for its obstinacy).

The sensation one gets, standing just behind the middle of the  Wahini,  feet spread, knees slightly bent, back straight, head up and arms at work (as the hands alternate, top to bottom, bottom to top) - the sensation one gets, gliding over the watery expanse, is one of liberation, almost the freedom of flight ( that I first experienced as a child skating around the abandoned tennis courts in winter with my hockey pals, seeming almost to escape the constraints of gravity - until my attention was diverted to the adjacent basketball courts where a boombox was churning a grungy organ and raspy vocals next to which my Mozart sonata momentarily seemed emasculated and stiff) - a freedom tempered by the need to keep your balance so that you become, at one and the same time, transported to a meditative state and keenly responsive to rapidly changing conditions, just busy enough to be free from thought.  

The current at the Sound is never twice the same.  On a calm day you can either glide dreamily (or even lie down and meditate while your board floats on the lapping water) or stroke with vigor, plying the coastline with rhythmic energy.  Heading west the current usually confronts you so that little waves slap gently against the curved nose of the board; heading east you feel a slight nudge from behind.  When the wind kicks up it's fun just struggling to maintain balance; every so often I slip, and as I fall I quickly rehearse: grab your glasses, get the board, find the paddle.

And though it's fair to say the both Sue and I have become pretty adept, overconfidence is never advisable, as danger always lurks.  A sudden storm can appear out of nowhere and if you're half a mile out you'll find yourself paddling frantically as the waves begin to churn, with a dark rain cloud racing you to shore.   Sometimes (as on my first adventure, back in June) the wind will blow straight out to sea, requiring that you describe broad, sweeping gestures with the paddle to turn the board toward shore (which I didn't know how to do on that maiden voyage with the result that suddenly, helplessly, I found myself being dragged out at what seemed a very high speed.  My first impulse was to lie down, both to diminish the chance of falling and to take stock of my situation from a relaxed position.  But ten seconds of that only served to convince me that I was disappearing from the sight of land with Sue and my step-daughter Erica frantic on the beach.  So I found, as people do in dire straits, an extraordinary solution - extraordinary, that is, considering how tight my hamstrings are: I contrived to sit, straddling the board, legs in the water, and from this secure position to paddle toward the distant shore, a task in which I was abetted by the fortuitous if humiliating appearance of young Erica who, like some Amazonian goddess, circled behind me in a kayak (against my vehement protests)and pushed my board home).

When you're not fighting for your life, when you're paddling in peaceful solitude, you can focus on what's near at hand - the board beneath your feet, the green, lapping water all about, a jelly-fish or swooping gull, a cormorant you pass, perched  on a jutting rock, drying his wings in the sunny air.  Or you can concentrate on the ocean floor perhaps some ten feet below, in some places sandbar-tan, in others, dark with seaweed-covered stones.  Or again you can let your gaze sweep across the water - towards home, where the curving outline of the bluffs is speckled with colorful bungalows, or north, toward Connecticut, about eighteen miles off, whose coastline seems but a dark, blurred line separating the ultramarine water from the sky's cerulean blue.  (I used to dream, as a child, and I still dream now and then, of that far shore as a slightly magical, barely accessible and sportive place, where dolphins splash about with children, while imperious cats guard the entrances to fish stores redolent of sawdust and tartar sauce.)

They change - these vast and peaceful vistas,  the great dome of sky, the endless waters, the rolling dunes and scrubby brush - they change - the quietly insistent ostinato of murmuring waves, the intermittent,  forlorn cries at sunset - the whole scene changes, but with such ingenuity as to make a delight of seeming monotony, be it the unfolding of the day's long hours, or the waxing and waning of high summer, or the slow work of a century's erosion and renewal along the shore.  

And, as if in symmetry with nature's cycles, the people too abide through generations, or return each summer, eventually bringing their children, then their grandchildren (as I have done as my childhood's companions have done) into the land their fathers found for them.  

Which causes all of us distress and discomfort when we meet on the road, our
conversation, once lively and sincere, reduced to an exchange of pleasantries.  We've grown so far apart as to be a source of embarrassment to one another, but I fancy they have the advantage, as I'm additionally embarrassed to greet these folks each weekend as they return from their jobs, while I've been vacationing here all along, riding the  Wahini.

And when I do return to work at long last, early in September, it's only to another comfortable routine, teaching what I know too well, where the faces of the students change over time as the questions remain the same - a routine enlivened now and then by a new course offering, a change of dean or the arrival of new publications in the library - so that there, as here, the years have somehow floated by and what was once a beginning, a first step in a scintillating career, has become the unspectacular story of my life.

But there is something else that has been changing all along, more slowly than the  tides, more profoundly than the passing moods of the seasons, and I can feel it here, and out there, on the Wahini: it's me.  How is it that, without ever ceasing to be myself, I've become so different from the person I look back on, so that the arrogant certainties of youth have dissolved into a thousand questions.

Am I blessed to walk this desolate shore with the detachment of a child, or have I failed to make a life of real importance?  Must beauty be impermanent, and love something we lose?  Why do my children, grown and flourishing, return each night, small and fragile, to haunt my dreams?  Why is it that the happiest moments I've known, when, briefly, I felt fully awake to my existence,  are moments I now regard with puzzlement and pain?  Am I born just too late to achieve cybernetic immortality (in whose endless ages I could learn to transcend art) or will I die just in time to escape an eternal prison?  Are those waking visions mere delusions of my unconscious or harbingers of higher dimensions wherein some part of me, some better self, exists?

The answers, I suspect, are found in the living out of life, and so, perhaps this idleness, this apparent stagnation, is wisdom: the less force we exert on the world the more brightly it may shine...

...Like the sun-speckled waters above which I'm poised, at one with the universe while remaining myself, balanced over the chaos on a pink Wahini.