Cathedral of the World: Sailing notes for a blue planet - Hardcover

Arms, Myron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385492693 ISBN 13: 9780385492690

Publisher: Doubleday, 1999

Synopsis

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself.

Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire.

What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

About this title

About the Author

Myron Arms is a teacher, writer, and professional sailor who contributes regularly to Cruising World, Sail, and many other sailing and adventure magazines. Educated at both Yale and the Harvard Divinity School, he taught high school English for seven years before founding a sailing program for teenagers. As a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed ocean master since 1977, he has voyaged more than 100,000 sea miles and has led seven sail-training expeditions to northern Canada, Greenland, and the Arctic. He lives with his wife, Kay, on a farm overlooking the Sassafras River on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

From the Back Cover

"An enchanted journey across an interior sea."
--Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

"A thoughtful, expansive, provocative book."
--Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean

"As a sailor and a theologian, I was carried along by the currents of this unusual book."
--Harvey Cox, author of Fire from Heaven

"There's nothing like open sea to send the mind off on meditative musings...Arms treats the sea as a cathedral, a place that inspires reverence for the natural world, a place in which it is appropriate to let the mind and soul chase after the big questions...Brief as these essays are, they are pungent and, at their best, as refreshing as a blast of sea spray."
--Publishers Weekly

"He keeps [a] musing quality alive in these pieces, as he struggles to convey the spirit that moves him: the edges are raw and unfiltered, as if he might be bouncing a notion or two off you while sitting around the galley table, with just enough buffing to add focus...artful."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Taken individually, the travel notes that follow recount many separate voyages. Taken together, they describe a single voyage--the same one that millions of us make as we seek to learn how this planet works and what our place in it should be."
--From the Preface

From the Inside Flap

ines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself.

Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and ponderin

Reviews

There's nothing like open sea to send the mind off on meditative musings. Arms has done a lot of sailing?and a lot of musing. Here, the author of Riddle of the Ice offers 20 philosophical essays that reflect both the interior and exterior voyages he has taken over the years. Arms treats the sea as a cathedral, a place that inspires reverence for the natural world, a place in which it is appropriate to let the mind and soul chase after the big questions. And chase he does, speculating on people, life lessons, the planet and the future. In "Charts and Other Fiction," he writes of learning, as a boy, that it is as important to be aware of what nautical charts do not show as what they do?the uncharted rocks and shoals knowable only by self-discovery. Variations of this lesson appear throughout these thoughtful essays as Arms emphasizes that wisdom is obtainable only through experience and that, no matter how expert we are and no matter how thoroughly we plan (or chart a course), we must always leave room for intuition and an openness to the moment (or the prevailing wind). "What is a cathedral after all," he asks, "but a place to go as we seek to understand how the cosmos works, and what our proper place is in it?" Brief as these essays are, they are pungent and, at their best, as refreshing as a blast of sea spray.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Arms (Riddle of the Ice: A Scientific Adventure in the Arctic, p. 29) offers here some notes toward understanding sailors' profession to the sea and how they interpret that water world and their place in the brine. If this miscellany of essays and letters and fragments is any indication, Arms has not only logged some serious mileage on his sailboat, but raked up some impressive down time between watches. The idle hours were anything but, for Arms is given to pondering why the ocean makes him feel so good. He keeps that musing quality alive in these pieces as he struggles to convey the spirit that moves him: the edges are raw and unfiltered, as if he might be bouncing a notion or two off you while sitting around the galley table, with just enough b uffing to add focus. Its the sum of many small things that pleases him so, most of them having to do with ``the exquisite geometry of an inscrutable universe infinitely chaotic, infinitely simple.'' Take the weather as a good example, its thousand faces a nd unadorned lessons: Arms can reel and roar along with the rogue seas, go quiescent on flat days, mimic and adapt. There is the strange world of charts, their wealth of information and half-truths, queer scale and miscalculations, the credulity and skept icism necessary to put oneself in their hands. There are the colors of the water, which can be read like a book and are too often signals of distress from pollution; the daring trickery and sly wing work (the ``avian magic show'') of shearwater, fulmar, a nd petrel; the sensible offerings to the sea gods, who just may be feeling a little squally. For the artful, guileless Arms, one senses it comes down to the migratory urge, what he calls the ``oughtness'' of wandering, in his case over big water, where he can ``focus on today and embrace the journey as if it were all of life.'' -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Arms is a dedicated and experienced sailor and author of Riddle of the Ice (LJ 1/15/98), but readers expecting accounts of his voyages will not find them in this collection of essays. His new book is a philosophical commentary on "the primal spaces" and the present and future of life on earth, based on his four decades on the water. Readers are exposed to his musings not only as a sailor but also as a boatbuilder and an observer of nature and what humans have wrought upon it: pollution, waste of natural resources, and so on. Arms's philosophical bent may disappoint readers in search of stories of the sea; this will appeal to a rather limited audience and should be purchased only by those libraries with a good handle on their clientele.?Robert F. Greenfield, formerly with Baltimore Cty. P.L., MD
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Charts and Other Fiction

Some of my earliest memories are of games I used to play with my father on long winter evenings, the two of us hunched over a table in our living room studying the charts for the next sailing trip he was always planning for the family during his upcoming holiday. Armed with a pencil and a set of parallel rules, we would set sail on imaginary voyages across the bays of summer, marking off distances and estimated times of arrival, checking depths and the location of buoys, poking into coves, making plans.

The thing I remember most about my father's charts was the way they set us free. They were like novels without characters: settings in which we were the actors and the creators of our own episodes. They contained fabulous worlds, and we lived in them like supermen, traveling through their benign geography as if we were invincible.

There seemed no reason, then, to worry about the dangers that might have been lurking somewhere within the games we played. The games themselves seemed harmless enough. In fact, they seemed a perfect way for a little boy and his father to share a few pleasant hours together. I wasn't concerned at the time about the inconsistencies between the charts and the actual geography they were intended to represent. I wasn't thinking about the real bays of summer: the ones with uncharted ledges and misplaced buoys and currents that flowed in opposite directions to the ones predicted by the cartographers.

As a child I learned to roam across the worlds of my father's charts careless and free. But I didn't learn about their limitations. I didn't realize that nautical charts, like all maps, are only guidebooks: fictitious renderings of a world perceived by imperfect human beings, never identical with the actual places they describe. I learned about the wealth of information the charts contained. But I didn't learn that they were also filled with oversights and half-truths and miscalculations. This realization has taken many years to learn--years of trial and error, summers of close calls, winters of near catastrophe when I've made the mistake of trusting the chart spread out before me, only to discover that the cartographer must have been half asleep the day he drew this line or marked that shoal or measured such and such a distance.

Nautical charts suffer from a basic flaw: the flaw of scale. They are complicated, often powerful abstractions of the actual world, but they are not--cannot be--identical with that world. The terrain they attempt to map is too large and too complex. To be useful at all, they must reduce and simplify.

The Polish-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot once asked an odd question whose implications may have forever changed the face of modern mathematics: "How long is the coast of Britain?" The answer, he argued, is not to be found on any chart. In fact, the answer is not to be found in any conclusive way at all, at least not with the tools of measurement that we have presently available to us.

The reason for this apparent dilemma has to do with scale. Imagine a cartographer armed with a measuring device one meter in length. He paces off the coastline in question one meter at a time, traveling in and out of bays, across rocky headlands, over river deltas, until he comes up with a total number of meters. Now imagine the same cartographer with a much shorter measuring device, say one centimeter in length. This time as he remeasures the distance, his total will include more detail. His new "coastline" will include pebbles and rocks that were ignored in his first calculation, and the resulting answer will be somewhat greater.

What Mandelbrot discovered was that there seemed to be no limit to the length of the coastline, providing only that the scale of measurement could be made smaller each time. A microscopic measuring stick would reveal as yet undetected bays and promontories that would, when measured on a smaller scale, contain ever smaller bays and promontories, all the way down to subatomic scales (and possibly beyond). The point he was trying to convey, as a mathematician, had to do with the tendency of certain apparently chaotic natural phenomena (such as "coastlines") to repeat complex patterns across scale. But what he also managed to show was the impossibility of anyone's ever drawing a perfectly accurate chart of any real coastline anywhere on Earth.

Chart makers, all of them, are the purveyors of our collective nostalgia for order and simplicity. They are players in a con-game whose performance is so convincing that we are, at least momentarily, blinded to the underlying dishonesty of their craft. Each line a chart maker draws is an approximation. Each location is a calculated guess. Each measurement is a hypothetical proposition whose accuracy is based partially on the calibration of the measuring device, partially on the attentiveness of the one who reads the scale.

Even when we know such things, however, we seem willing to suspend our disbelief. We want things simple. We want to think that we can comprehend the world that the chart represents. So we accept the chart maker's fiction--we welcome his lie.

I remember the first time I was forced to question the chart maker's world. I was eleven years old. For two summers I'd been learning how to sail with my father and uncles and older cousins in a small wooden dinghy in the river in front of my grandmother's house. Finally, I was given permission to sail the boat on my own. I wasn't allowed to venture out around Stone Point into Buzzards Bay--the seas were too rough out there, my father warned, and the afternoon winds were too strong. But I could sail in the river and investigate its creeks and coves to my heart's content. I was given the key to the boathouse where the dinghy was kept and a chart of the river, and I was set free to unravel the mysteries of a miniature world that seemed to me as large as all the seven seas.

The river, at first, felt strange and dangerous. Directly in front of my grandmother's house, between her beach and the cottages on Cromeset Point, was an irregular heap of broken granite rubble called the Channel Rocks. A quarter mile upriver was Indian Cove, marked on its southern flank by a sentinel boulder and surrounded by a series of shallow underwater ledges. In the first bend of the river was a low, muddy island of eelgrass flats that I had visited several times in a skiff to collect fiddler crabs for fishing. Beyond the island lay a series of shallow bays fringed with scrub pine and marsh grass, and beyond these were the twin highway bridges, a broken pier, and a half dozen gray shingle buildings: the last signs of human habitation before the river narrowed and twisted into a dark, unruly forest of pine and beech and pin oak.

My first attempts at navigating the river were tentative in the extreme. I studied my chart and kept as well as I could to mid-channel. All the obvious dangers--the Channel Rocks, the boulders and ledges at Indian Cove, the eelgrass shallows near the muddy island--were marked on the chart, and I gave each one a wide berth. I sailed on mornings when the weather was clear and the winds were light, increasing the range of my travels only as I grew familiar with major landmarks and with the look and feel of the river.

Familiarity is the enemy of care, however, and my boldness grew with the summer. The inevitable day of reckoning came in the last week of August when a cousin arrived at my grandmother's house for a visit. He had seldom sailed the river and knew even less than I did about its secrets, yet his presence gave me courage. He took the chart, I took the tiller, and we set off on the bottom of a flood tide one windy afternoon to explore all the way to the river's headwaters, promising our parents only that we would be home by dinnertime.

The upriver leg was easy. The wind was at our backs, and the current flooded strong in midstream. The boat seemed to fly on invisible wings as we ran past Indian Cove, around muddy island, under the highway bridge, past the last of the summer cottages, and into the cool shadows of the river's upper reaches.

But the homeward leg was a different story. Now the wind was ahead, and the only way to work the boat back downriver was to trim the sheet close-hauled and sail in a zigzag course across the channel. In the deep water the flooding tide now became our foe, and whatever progress we managed to make while we were in the relatively still water near the shore was quickly negated each time we were forced to cross the stream. It soon became apparent that if we hoped to get home by the time we'd promised, we were going to need to keep to the shallows and short-tack down the edges of the river.

The first rock we hit resounded against the wooden dagger board and sent a shudder through the hull that threw me forward against a thwart and skinned my knee. My cousin laughed; I got angry. "Watch the chart," I yelled. "You're the navigator!"

The next rock glanced off the dagger board and caught under the heel of the rudder. The boat stopped dead in the water, and I hollered out my anger again.

"Okay, you read the chart," my cousin cried. "I can't figure it out."

We changed places, and I stared at the map as the boat gathered way, pointing my finger in a direction that I thought would lead us out of danger. A minute later we bounced off another rock, and another. My anger turned to frustration, then confusion, then fear. I stared at the chart. There were no rocks indicated in this cove, just a broken line where the marsh grass met the water and a single sounding somewhere in the middle. I began to suspect that nobody had ever really tried to map this part of the river. Either that--or else we were lost, and I was looking at the wrong section of the chart altogether.

"Try over there," I said, pointing across to the opposite shore. "I think we might've missed a turn." My cousin's laughter trickle...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385492693
• ISBN 13: 9780385492690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176