The Red Boat

Not Exactly the Lusitania

“Water finds its own level.”

Anonymous

This phrase has several meanings. The one dealing with hydraulics says that water under gravity and atmospheric pressure will fill any container to a uniform level. The sociological, metaphorical meaning is that like attracts like. For example, I will naturally choose as friends and associates people who are most like me. We see a ground swell of that these days in our politics. It's as though we live on different planets to hear the way conservatives describe the function of government, and then listen to liberals describe it. We're very choosy about which news shows we watch, because we want the ones that will say what we like to hear—the ones that reinforce our own views. This sort of polarity has brought us to the brink of schism in the nation and the world. But that's for another day.

Right now, I'm more interested in the hydraulic meaning of this phrase. We had a very good example of that over the weekend at the lake. There was a small wooden boat, a gift from one love to the other for a 40^th birthday. The boat had seen twenty plus years of service, and had holes in it which leaked whenever anyone tried to use it. Several people who loved this little wooden boat had attempted fixes—new wood, lots of epoxy, even some fiberglass, but alas, it did not do the trick. Finally, the owners decided to allow the little Red Boat to be buried at sea (lake, actually) and devised a means and location for her final resting place. We made nautical flags to commemorate the passing of the Red Boat, procured the Navy's hymn and decommissioning ceremony, and set ourselves to the task of sinking her. Five large cinder blocks were purloined from the shelving in the boat house and loaded aboard; the boat was towed by swimmers to its place of honor by the sea wall, and the plug was pulled. We laboriously filled the boat with buckets of water, tipping its sides, bow and stern to take in more. The boat filled but did not sink. The water reached its level inside and outside the Red Boat, and then she just sat there, with her top bobbing contentedly on the surface. I suddenly recalled the documentaries we watched as children in school assembly, of lumberjacks in the great North West, floating entire tree trunks downstream to the saw mill. Wood floats—even heavy wood. The precious Red Boat would fill with water to the same level as the lake, but she would not sink until her saturation level was sufficiently heavy. When I left the lake, she was upside down, tied to the dock, her red hull shining triumphant in the sun.

We humans are a bit like the Red Boat—we may be swamped, but we're pretty hard to take down. We get knocked about by trials and adversity, but we come back to the surface and regain our footing. We have a determination and adaptability about us that refuses to sink, no matter how rough the seas. We seek our own level, then reach out and pull one another to safe harbor. I like that about us, don't you?

                                                              In the Spirit,

                                                                 Jane