Breaking the crust of drifted snow with booted foot. Struggling up and across dubious and perilous mountain paths. Following footprints in ancient mud now hardened by time into stone. Following your footsteps. You had been here before, and here I have come yet again. All time is unexpectedly compressed into the span of a short moment of reaching back, and in that brief moment I feel as one with those whose footsteps โ your footsteps โ we all follow.
Not everyone does.
Some years ago, I was crewing on a small sailboat, helping to bring it back to Portland from British Columbia where it had been sailed during part of the summer. Two of us met the owner-skipper of the vessel in Victoria and under motor power headed west into the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The day became balmy and no winds buffeted us, just an easy spreading of view in all directions. In late afternoon I stood at the helm. The other two men were below, loafing, shooting the breeze, playing cards.
As I looked around the seascape for oncoming freighters and other nautical hazards and then to the landscape beyond the water, my vision of the present faded and dissolved into a slightly bluish haze, a hue not unlike that which some painters cast over landscape paintings. On the starboard side the low hills of Vancouver Island. At the port hand the rising slopes of Washington State. I grasped the tiller with one hand and gazed lazily at the scene, but then slowly became aware that I discerned no man made objects, no navigation and channel markers, no telephone or electrical poles, no buildings, no wharfs, no piers, no pilings, no structures of any kind. In the blur of the afternoonโs fading light all evidence of civilization had vanished.
Suddenly, it came over me, dream-like, that I was seeing the past as others had seen it. Surely the image before me โ all around me โ was what Quadra and Vancouver and others had first beheld hundreds of years before. I imagined myself following in the long lost wakes of their ships. A kind of nautical kinship joined us as I realized that I was surely observing what they had observed. This feeling reaching out from the distant past caught me in an emotional grip, and I trembled beyond the agitation of normal excitement.
I yelled to my two companions below, โcome topside, come up here quickly.โ They did. โLook.โ I pointed. โLook. This is what Quadra and Vancouver would have seen.โ My arm swept from left to right guiding their eyes to the lack of any signs of encroached civilization, only the hills, the distant trees and vegetation, the unblemished littoral. I explained. They grunted, said โUh-huhโ and went below.
I remember my feeling of elation that in a sense I had stood on deck with those early pioneer sailors who had first come to those waters, of knowing what their wonder might have been as they stared about. But I also remember the disinterested, unemotional grunts of my fellow crew members. The emotion that surged through me did not touch them in the slightest. Their interests lay in the here and now โ as it might be from one day to the next. The past, who they were and how they got here, in whose footsteps they had followed โ was that important?
Eliot Mentor
