Many, many moving moments these days of April sifting like sands of a springtime beach filtering through my fumbling fingers as I try to tether time, as I pretend to cup and cradle the present inevitably cascading into the past. In these bittersweet days of momentum and milestones, I come across a pair of clipped artifacts, renderings of barges on our lake — still swollen as springtime rains compensate for a low-snow winter — from a century and more ago. A sepia tinged engraving from a magazine. A yellowed and worn postcard unwritten, unsent. These images remind me that we’re barging into May laden with cargo, a heavy load that weighs us down, that displaces still waters and leaves a wide wake. It’s time to pull ashore. It’s time to lighten the load. It’s time to share the goods.
In the 1970s and 1980s when I was still a boy barges plied the waters of Lake Champlain. These immense vessels transported fuel oil and jet fuel (or so I understood at the time) to distribution hubs like Westport and the Air Force Base in Plattsburgh. The slow, lumbering fuel barges — propelled by a tugboat leaning into the stern — pushed a wall of water before them and left an even larger wake behind. Not big enough to body surf, but we tried.
I have anxious memories of becoming becalmed while sailing only to realize a barge was bearing down upon. Sure taught me to paddle efficiently!
The images in today’s post look backward as we look forward, a recurring theme in these posts. Forging ahead by reexamining the past.
As we begin barging into May with the momentum of a cargo barge — whether remembered from the 1800s or the 1900s — I’m aware of the swell we push before us and the frothing wake we leave behind. I’m aware that the swell is felt by others. And I’m aware that the swell might for a moment destabilize vessels, might crash rambunctiously on the shore, or might encourage a young boy to try body surfing one more time.
What do you think?