Small Craft Warnings

Small Craft Warnings

L. Edgar Otto   17 September, 2013

In our deeper dreams than those that review encounters of the day and set our memories, our throes and fall as we pass thru the wide wall of sanity before we make sense of all the creatures and fantastic worlds our unlikely stories ground us in mangled pictures we impose to protect our rest that for awhile we do not startle back awake, there in our second sleep like a second death we rehearse imagine warnings, fight the shadow beasts of night.

Or is there a real place to go down into some imagined future that fate itself binds us to foreseen actions we cannot change our dreams walled off too far from others that we no longer connect to each other once we have touched in shared entanglements save some parallel place, space time travel the echos and actions to which we can make a ghostly difference in some other world?

I caught a lucid dream before it was forgotten of a place far away I had never seen before, a warning horn startled me to awaken, to seek some level of familiar world of home yet felt at home there awhile until like a lightning bolt's echo going around the globe and coming back the static overloaded the crystal cat whisker whispers of my mind's sensing waves of radio.

I was walking down the streets, the capitol stood high in the distance but grew larger as I let it guide me closer.  The isthmus grew more narrow between the two lakes.  The streets had familiar names but it was summer time, and a joy to just be where the snow cover lingered but I did not know this was some future bright and not a wishing to take flight from the reality of an empty depressing season.

Odd plants growing by the street and on the bricks of buildings, in the gardens and the lawns were different than places I had been but neither these nor the town seemed to bring to me that sense of fear of strange lands and strangers
when on the road open to shadows of the unknown.  The motor and specks on the bricks and the painted houses and picket fences with many layers seemed to be there so to see the thousand stored memories in the air from the minds of brick layers on some particular day, of some particular brick pattern they had long forgotten so deep into the years - or like the no two snowflakes the same in the complexity the whole season of them, and all the seasons over time, that I somewhere found time so to leave awhile my footprints.

Just one glimpse of a hint of chilling resonating in the lower notes of my spine, that from where time folds back again into itself to take a clearer or different form, a teardrop like a world in a drop of rain of denizens in the distance really small, on the face of my indian grandmother stopping a moment in daydreams as she roasted the acorns, and fried some fish, here caught between the lakes and the isthmus, a warrior chief and his tribe were subdued by the federal force leaving too damp to preserve paper treaties what was still left in the grass of their dew.

As I came to the canal, briefly watched the water fill to height and the sleek fast pleasure craft within it, I crossed the street and walked along the wall.  Being raised near the Eastern ocean I knew of fog horns moaning in the distance at night but did not know such a warning near these locks would be so loud.  As I turned the corner I saw a little girl fishing with her cane pole by the bank in the park like grass and a Spanish man near her.  But she was close enough to the road to be startled seeing me appear from behind the wall just at the time the horn blew loudly.  So startled she jumped up and fell into the canal.  I rushed down as did the Spanish man and jumped into the river but we could not find her in the tangles of the growth and mud, and for awhile it felt like I myself would be trapped and drowned - then woke up to the chilly room thinking how strange and creatively intense our dreams.  We sometimes avoid the final ground of our dreams as we fall.

Yet, a year and a half later I found myself in that town chasing a job in the New Orleans style restaurant and on a day off decided to walk to down town.  I would use the Capitol as my compass and guide.  Sure enough the scene became familiar as if I had been in that place before as I came upon the horn, one that I found later would act as a warning to all the small craft in the lakes for changes in the weather such as storms.  Then I remembered the dream. I wondered if this premonition like event was destined or if we in some sense were free to change it.  I did not know but I hesitated to turn the corner by the wall and waited while the horn went off sure enough as if this was a certainty.  Then I slowly peeked around the wall half curious if I would see a little girl.  With their cane poles I saw her and whom I presumed her father holding hands walking away down the grassy park and nearby road.

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Footnote: this story inspired by the Monday open link poem by grapeling.