Evanston: sixteen shades of darkness

Some welcomed color on a gray and gloomy day in the upper flatlands.

They are Balinese fishing boats that Wikipedia calls jukungs and I in THE OCEAN WAITS called gujungs.  Thirty nine years ago I followed them through the pass into Benoa Harbor, Bali.  From the sea the reefs overlap and there is a seemingly unbroken line of surf.  Under sail the Balinese boats were faster than CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE who was making six knots.  As they wizzed past, the fishermen stared at the unknown sight we were.  Some smiled and waved.  One came close enough to call in English, “Where you from?”  Thinking that California was too far, I replied, “Darwin,” which was startling enough.

The night before not wanting to be blown past the island I hove to.  I wrote:

On a moonless night I found sixteen shades of darkness. 

Six were in the sky: an overall blackness of the heavens; a diffuse gray to the west, although the sun had set hours earlier; the pinpricks of the stars; a few scattered shadows that were clouds; the flow of the Milky Way; and sporadic flashes of lightning far to the north. 

The sea revealed even less than the sky. It seemed to have turned in upon itself and to be studying its own depths for hidden memories. It breathed with deep, low respirations, in rhythm to a long, low swell from the south. The waves, only inches high and from the east, were a lighter gray than the swell, or—rather—than the back of the swell, for it was not visible until it had passed. The shadows of clouds, shadows of shadows, were impenetrably dark. And there were a few flashes of phosphorescence as Chidiock Tichborne ghosted forward. 

On Chidiock could be found six more shades. The featureless triangle of the mainsail undulated above me. Around me was an indistinct cockpit. A solid black line marked the teak gunwale's absorption of all light. And there were the vaguely golden columns of the varnished masts; lumps of bags; and my own form, clad in foul weather gear. 

The foul weather gear was worn in this instance not in anticipation of bad weather, but because everything was covered with evening dampness. For me, on even the best of nights, foul weather gear serves as pajamas. I wondered about the impressionist tenet that all shadows have color.

In all that I saw, only a few stars, the masts, and the foul weather gear revealed even subdued color, hidden as though beneath a thousand years of soot. Yet perhaps more color was there.