What’s With the Water?

What’s With the Water?
Water, Water, Everywhere

I still remember parts of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I memorized several portions of that poem for Mrs. Davis in high school. I memorized these five stanzas, which reduced the hundred-line requirement for the first semester by twenty lines.

Even in high school, that poem fascinated me. Essentially, the poem is about the Ancient Mariner telling a wedding guest the story of shooting an albatross that flew over the ship. The killing had no meaning; it was done just for the hell of it. The two stanzas that I memorized dealt with the divine punishment for the senseless killing.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The Ancient Mariner met a wedding guest and made the guest listen to him talk about the consequences of that wanton killing.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turn'd from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

This morbid poem ends with the wedding guest having to listen to the story and sleeping that night with the story life floating in his brain. He woke up the following day “a sadder and a wiser man.”

This article is another of my providing Ti Ti’s request for a photo of me. This picture shows me chatting with my mother when I was three.

We were at Strawbridge Lake, which wasn’t far from our home in Pennsauken, NJ. We were at a family picnic. Two things haunt me about our mother/son discussion. I would love to know what we were talking about. What were the issues that I brought up? The other thing that drew my attention was the small sailboat next to me.

The next photo is of me, the summer before the picnic, and I was happy as a lark playing at the beach at the Jersey Shore.

I can rattle out a litany of small towns along the Jersey Shore. My family stayed at Beach Haven, Ocean City, Cape May, Stone Harbor, and Wildwood when I was young. This picture is of me on the beach at Ship Bottom.

That is a strange name to those who didn’t visit the Jersey Shore. The name came from a schooner sailing south along the New Jersey coast in March 1817. In a dense fog, the schooner ran aground due to a shoal, turned on its side, and partly sank. By the time rescuers got to the disaster, all the passengers had died while floating in the cold water. When the various volunteers got to the ship, they heard tapping from the half-submerged hull. The rescue cut into the hull and saved a young woman. That area was named Ship Bottom. Over the next decades, people started to inhabit Ship Bottom. Ship Bottom became Life Saving Station #20 in 1872.

If you ever visit Ship Botton, NJ, go to Black Whale Bar and Fish House.

The Black Whale eatery

As I looked at the photo of the Black Whale eatery, I was reminded of Ti Ti’s most recent essay, Living in Bangkok.

“Water, water, everywhere” is a positive aspect of my life. In my youth, it was the ocean and a lake. Over my journey down my yellow brick road, I lived near the Rock River. At the time, I had a boat and taught my kids to waterski. In my twilight years, I have lived on a lake for the past twenty years. Gone is the boat, which was replaced by several kayaks.