Stained Glass Bluegrass

My whole life, I’ve loved music – so it’s no surprise that the memory of the “loss” of two radio stations, each of which I had come to depend on to introduce me to new music, still lingers.  As a teenager in suburban Washington, during the early 1970s, my station was WGTB – based at Georgetown University (GT), and billing itself and its listeners as “One Nation, Underground.”   Under its non-commercial tutelage, I grew to love David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Mott the Hoople, Iggy Pop, and others.  Eventually, WGTB changed its format, having undermined its credibility with Georgetown’s Jesuit priests by airing too many pro-choice editorials and announcements.  Progressive music fell victim to progressive politics; alas.

Later, in the 1980s, during my young parent/early professional days, WAMU, based at American University, became my music tutor, introducing me to a quintessential form of American roots music:  bluegrass.  Every morning:  bluegrass.  Every afternoon:  bluegrass.  All day Saturday:  bluegrass.  And on Sunday mornings:  Stained Glass Bluegrass, lovingly programmed by the late Red Shipley.  Four hours of gospel bluegrass – tight harmonies, timeless lyrics, and the unamplified sounds of guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and bass.  The Carter Brothers.  The Stanley Brothers.  The Seldom Scene.   The Country Gentlemen.   I recall, as a kid, in the 1970s, my parents going to the Red Fox Inn, to listen to these bands play, musicians wearing -- defiantly perhaps – narrow string ties, black pants and white shirts.  I remember Emmy Lou Harris, in her bluegrass period, appearing at the Childe Harold and the Cellar Door.  Going to the original Birchmere,  just down the street from its present cavernous location. Those Sunday mornings with Red Shipley were a regular in our young household throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and to this day, my kids tell me that their memories of Sundays are mostly defined by the songs in the Stained Glass Bluegrass genre.  Regrettably, in the late 1990s, WAMU succumbed to the market-tested religion of “pure” (vs. eclectic) programming and now delivers a 24x7 diet of talk shows.  Alas.

So to compensate, I began to collect bluegrass CDs, including a healthy assortment of Stained Glass Bluegrass.  Here, on ile de Grace, we have a 20 song playlist of the “best” Stained Glass Bluegrass which we listen to each and every Sunday.  Sunday is also the day we call our kids, using Skype (when in harbors with internet access) or, more likely, with our Iridium satellite phone.  This Sunday was no exception, and on a windless day, with the  flat ocean glazed over with a velvety sheen of molten blue, under a cloudless hemisphere of sky, Jennifer and I listened to the music of my – and our kids – youth:  “On Canaan’s Shore;”  “I Love to Tell the Story;”  “Model Church;”  “Far Side Bank of Jordan.”  And on and on.

Many of these songs reference water, oceans, and rivers, and I was struck by our apparent aloneness on the ocean, its circular horizon 12 miles distant, sailing in the center of a 450 square mile circle of water, floating 12,000 feet above an ocean floor of restless volcanic rock.  Since we left Rarotonga, we’ve seen just a few signs of life on this expanse of blue:  two humpback whales as we left, surfacing not 20 feet in front of us, and passing, with a casual flip of their flukes, not 30 feet off our beam; a pair of mahi-mahi, one of which we caught on our fishing line; and last night, 10 miles astern, the lights of a ship headed to New Zealand.  Other than that, it’s been three days and three nights of us, the ocean, and a night sky flanked by two bright planets, east and west, and a slowly rising, daily-waning moon that lifts its orange and misshapen globe as I come on watch at 10:00 pm.  Sparked perhaps by the lingering refrains of “Model Church,” I recalled those long-gone radio stations, and in the vastness of a Sunday afternoon sky mirrored in a shimmering azure ocean,  my memories turned to sailing to Bermuda as a 15 year old – my first ocean passage.

As with many adolescent experiences, my earliest ocean passages were formative, and imbued in me a profound realization of our individual insignificance in the space and time of our universe.  Being 15 years old, with one’s hands on the wheel of a sailboat heading south, a sky full of galaxies, stars, and planets might do that to anyone:  it’s impossible not to understand, accept, and embrace the truth that it’s a big sky, a big world, a big ocean, and that one’s boat is so very, very small. 

These days, I can often lose sight of that elemental insight and emotion, drawn instead into the concrete, mundane vortices of clogging fuel filters and leaking transmission fluids.  But on nights like we’ve had on this passage, I find myself recalling those long-ago first-time feelings and the glorious sense of wonderment at seeing a moon rise so suddenly and brightly it scares you, a Milky Way smeared delicately across a speckled sky, and the simple glory of a cloudless sky stretching from horizon to horizon to horizon.  Today, I think:  material worries will take care of themselves; give them their due, but remember why we embarked on this voyage.

Today – Sunday -- with its songs and recollections, also brought welcome news from home, as we connected with our kids.  We learned that our son, David, is now engaged to be married.  He and Marisa have been seeing each for a number of years, have traveled extensively together, and, not coincidentally, have sailed together.  I know they each embrace the awareness that it’s a big world, a big ocean, and that our boats are so very, very small.  That said, I also know that, for them, as for me and Jennifer, this awareness is not paralyzing, where one might otherwise yield completely to the forces of nature and the universe.  They, and we, seem to embrace the desire, obligation and responsibility, and the attendant possibilities, to tend to our little boats, to navigate the windless days as well as the stormy days, and to press onward to distant horizons. 

So after dinner, with the strains of bluegrass gospel songs drifting out of our boat’s cabin, and David’s wonderful news enveloping me in a glow of possibility, I went to the bow and sat quietly, feeling our boat press onward, looking down at the as-yet-unparted waters of the glassy sea.  I noticed a slight discoloration here, then there, in the water’s surface, and peered more intently down at the surface.  There … and there … and then a field of small discolorations –each resolving themselves into a tiny quarter-inch round floating sac, with what seemed to be all-but-invisible tentacles hanging perhaps one-sixteenth of an inch into the water.  And then, hovering in and around these unnamed creatures, small flying insects of a kind, skittering among them – hundreds of miles from land, flitting and fluttering over the undulating flatness of a salty sea.   No whales here, no mahi here, and no ships, but yes, life everywhere around us, an ocean – a universe – a boat -- teeming with life if only we look closely enough.

It’s a big world, a big ocean, and our boats are small.  But I’m constantly surprised by the forces of life having a go of it, as my friend Tony might say.   Today, tonight, Stained Glass songs about walking across the Sea of Galilee ring true – not so much for the walking part, but for their references to forces unfathomable, to the ability to see more things more clearly when we slow down, slow down enough to look closely at world around us, to look down on an ocean laid flat, vibrating with life and echoing the words of a son relating his intent to have a go of it.

Congratulations, David and Marisa; we wish you a wonderful voyage.