August Franzen

The Unfortunate Ordeal of Captain Ballaurd of the Peregrine in Port Lanhauster

(The beginning)

        There was no truly bad voyage at sea. Certainly some of them were better than others, and this was one of the best, but Captain Ballaurd of the Peregrine did not rue a single one in the nineteen years since he signed aboard. A deaf, dumb and blind man could not miss his enchantment with the waves.  The salt water folding under the wooden hull, a splash over the deck in heavy waves, the way each single crest was at once the whole and a part of the ocean had this unique harmony with his personality. They were like two opposite ends of a magnet held apart; there was a tangible attraction between. The two preceding captains were entirely different men. Matson, who recruited him from the life of a baker ashore in Maryland, was a profiteer. He sailed for fortune, plain and simple. Captain Lanwey was an old man. At age 49, he walked and talked of someone on his deathbed at 65. As Edgar Ballaurd was promoted to Head of Watch and successively First Mate, he would occasionally see through the veneer and find a man who loved the wind beneath a wrinkled face. Edgar fancies he got his own love of sailing through this old man, but the elderly and eternally jovial Quartermaster Nicholas saw it in him from the first time he set foot aboard the Hemlock. The crew had hopped ships after a British Privateer fired upon them, mistaking them for a slaving vessel. Before the flag of surrender could be run up the mainmast and negotiations begun, splinters from a cannonade impaled Lanwey. He died standing rigid with a snapped figurehead in front of his closed eyes and the calmest of looks on his face.

        The manifest added up perfectly under Ballaurd’s pen, as it should and always did. He was an honest man to his ocean-filled core.

        “Sir.” The voice was recognized with a smile.

        “Come in, Nicholas, I need your signature on this too.” He quickly scrawled his name and held out the paper and pen to the stocky Quartermaster.  It was customary, although an honor, for all signatures aboard a ship to be in the Captain’s pen.

        “Thank you. The Customs Office has arrived and need you on deck for their own feeling of self-worth.”

        He gave a short laugh and walked onto deck where three men in green and blue had large hounds on leashes. It was a useless exercise; the dogs couldn’t smell a thing over the salt. Both he and Nicholas knew the entire cargo from the minute it came on board, and despised the false sense of security trade barons got from hiring the most corrupt of men to search ships. If any smugglers were found on board, the captain knew no Court on solid ground would be involved. Each man gave their word, and to break that oath would be the same as pulling your own trigger.

The Greater Gravity

        I learned to appreciate my feet. They wander when my tongue is tied and trip when my tongue wanders too far. Someday I will marry them. Together we will plan a murder of my eyes, because they blind me. They see the dirt, and feel the stones on a path or mud in a streambed, but my feet feel what is deeper. My feet speak the language of the tectonic plates.

        When I saw Niagara Falls, my eyes could see the water and mist and droplets settling out over the multitude of tiny worldlets. My feet told me to go for a swim, because they will be the interpreter for each of the languages in each tiny world. They felt a pull that any blinding beauty could not have.

On the edge of a cliff, my feet want to feel the pulse of the air and rhythm of flying. They want to be a part of the great magnetism in the planet’s soul, because it is a magnet that has pulled me stronger than gravity ever will. Without my eyes, my feet and I happily would have become a part of something more a long time ago.