Where Drum Lives

There needs to be a drug for writing. A stimulant, a depressant; an enlightener that puts my ass in gear, makes me put one word in front of the last. I guess that's what I'm doing now, but even as I process and re-process the book, I feel that I am in a holding pattern. Drum is languishing. It needs to be revived, reviewed, re-imagined.

Had a dream the other day that had me trying to park Drum, the boat on its trailer, in a parking lot. It was too big, even with the pontoons folded in. There just wasn't enough room in the lot, and I remember thinking this wouldn't last, this situation cannot be sustainable. Such a revealing dream. The situation I am currently in as Drum awaits revision, this situation is unsustainable. The thing cannot simply be parked here forever.

Drum needs to sail. We all know that. What I know to be true too is that it was made to sail, maintained and caressed and coaxed to sail. Michael knew the boat inside and out to the last millimeter. If Drum failed, it was Michael who failed. This realization is something Jade needs to make. Michael is not infallible. He is not the idealized hero-brother of her childhood. He is--was--human, full of error and fallacy, and while Drum is his conceit, Michael is Jade's conceit. He is her idea of a certain past, one largely shaped by her own life and what she has projected onto the disappearance. She lives in her brother's shadow and it is within this shadow that she may well fail, herself (or fail herself).

But there is Cordelia, the love shared, and what this represents to Jade. She is seeking just such a love, idealized, romanticized, yes. But it is genuine, and Jade understands that this is what survives. Whatever became of the boat and occupants, it is what they shared that lives on in Jade not as ghost or abstraction but as palpable reminder of the vanishing moments of her own life.

So, what do I think when ------------- contacts me to let me know that there may be more FBI information relevant to the case--some "other department" that has information which may (or may not) be released? I suppose I am grateful that he is taking this on, but I am also a bit ashamed that I did not pursue these documents myself years ago. This shame can also feed Jade's perspective. That it takes an utter stranger to do this work serves to illuminate just how buried, how sequestered, the loss is in Jade. I can use this, let this realization sink into the reader: Jade is a loser. But she is also someone who may rise above these shadows. Herein is the weight of the book.

Morning Moon

sand-dollar high this mid-summer sky
lower quarter fading upon her steady tumble
north she carries with her an urgent wonder and moves even now
across the glass announcing I am going now and now and yes she is nearly vanished
there behind the newly thrown curtain and even as my dream
lingers in blueness I see that her departure is completely of my own

Hanalei

It was to be a long beat to weather, Michael knew, tacking up the meridian at least a week before moving into the Trades. There little Drum would fly into a  northerly--lighter that year than others but enough to raise her windward amma--commencing her slow skate back across the Pacific. The journey home required an endurance peculiar to Michael, Cordelia and Drum. Their love had grown, Jade did not doubt. She understood the world aboard, knew the ways of the trimaran even if she did not understand those of her occupants. Every sailor is possessed by his vessel; he may finess the craft to the wind, but he is hers to protect and deliver.

It is May 10th, 1976. Drum is anchored in the darker blue water out some distance from the other boats. She is riding low at the waterline, holds packed for the voyage. Michael's on deck sweating the final details, hunched over some knot or cleat, crouched at the bow inspecting a shackle, or perhaps standing and peering up the mast for a fray in the halyards. Drum is a sound boat, a boat of sound, of soundness. Drum is a beat away from all that Jade has grown to speculate and conjure in these years of loss and recovery. She herself is a beat away from Drum.