by Mandy Olina
the storm was just a coincidence, we will never truly know. Our beliefs, however, are free to be what they may.
THE BOAT BUILDER FROM THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE
PPart I
‘I am building a boat,’ Arthur slowly said. ‘I will sail it across this mountain. Until I am on the other side of it and here no more.’
‘Nonsense!’ said a stranger. ‘Crazy old man!’ he muttered as he wandered away on the winding streets of the village.
Arthur spoke in a soft, crooked voice that always seemed to ponder every word. He had been a good father and an even better grandfather and now, after all his granddaughters and grandsons and nephews and nieces had left to live different lives elsewhere, he had, surprisingly, rediscovered his own.
He got up one morning with a taste of wood and salt in his mouth. A taste that had been long known and filed away by his memory. A father has no time for trifles like boat sailing. He goes out and he provides the best that there is for his family and only when that family is no more is he allowed to hope that he can do so for himself. It is only the way of things.
That morning his life came back to him uncalled for and unattended, maybe out of simple, unexplainable luck that he didn’t even particularly deserve. But it is the test of that moment that separates the men who choose to live again, an endeavor perhaps known to be difficult by many of our readers, from those who merely brush away the opportunity as thoughts of… crazy old men.
So Arthur, kind, good ol’ Arthur, bought planks, nails, hammers and a wood plane and started work on his life’s work. A boat. To cross a mountain. The mountain that sheltered Arthur’s village was one of the last to appear on the surface of the world. It was a young, sturdy, healthy mountain, with a pride to match. The storms it took itself to bear were gruesome. Winds that hurled rocks into the air, only to see them blown to dust at the touch of lightning, and avalanches that covered entire forests were matters of the ordinary. But the village had been saved, either out of sympathy or some other form of warm-heartedness that the mountain displayed or, yet again, out of sheer coincidence.
Arthur’s boat had to be strong enough to make it through this gauntlet, with him alive and days left to spare. So he worked on his boat. Day and night. And one evening at sunset, he wiped his forehead and put down his hammer and saw that the woodwork was almost done. It was time for him to see the only man that could decide if he had any chance, at all, to survive.
THE BOAT BUILDER FROM THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE
PPart II
‘But I want to leave, Phidias. I have to get on the other side of this mountain!’ Arthur said, pounding his fist into the table.
‘That you must. But you do not have to leave. You have to realize that your place is indeed here, as it always was, what separates who you are now from who you want to be is not a matter of place. It is what you do, not where you do it, and you want to do something impossible and traveling isn’t it. You are not going on a journey, you’re going to war. You see that, don’t you? You just don’t know what to call it.’
‘But these are just words, Phidias. Will you put your protection charm on my boat? That is all I have to know.’
‘We are friends, are we not?’
‘We are.’
‘Then how could I say no? I will come see the boat tomorrow. Go sleep. Go dream. Go prepare for your war.’
Arthur went and sat himself down on the floor by his bed. As he tapped the wool rug with his fingers, he saw the sharp cliffs of the mountain before him, like a set of giant teeth.
‘But I cannot be alone,’ he thought. ‘I cannot be alone because there is this certainty inside me that I will see the other side of the mountain, just as I live and breathe. There is something which I cannot hear, see or smell that is with me and that will take me there alive. So I know.’
He went to sleep on the floor, with an arm under his head and another covering the tabby cat that had come to be scratched and petted and cared for by its master. And he dreamt that he walked across an entire ocean in his ski boots. Without so much as one of his shoelaces getting wet. And he wondered in his dream about the temperature of the water and if he were to fall in, would his boots drag him down. But he did not. And, as the sun crept up through his window and into his eyes, he reached a golden beach. Then his eyelids parted, and the sand turned into the specks of dust that danced around in a ray of light, scattered about by the cat that was trying to claw its way out of his grasp. There was a knocking on the door and the deep voice of Phidias.
‘Arthur! Bring your old sword outside. We will need it.’
So it was as if the charm was already set and the preparations done. The only thing left to do was to push the boat off the pillars. And cross the mountain.
THE BOAT BUILDER FROM THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE
PPart III
The boat sailed and there were no rocks that it did not hit, nor trees that it did not scratch. But it sailed. It floated across the stone, as if carried by the mountain itself. It hovered like a speck in sunlight and it dripped to the top of the mountain swinging and crashing but steadily moving ahead.
On the deck stood Arthur, seasick and lonely and tired from the crashing and murmuring of the trees that cursed at him for ripping and tearing the branches that no mortal had even laid eyes on. And he was torn for being despised and ill willed by all that he encountered and he wondered how this had come to be.
But there was a voice that stayed with him and murmured through the noise. A voice like a memory, like his mother’s voice sounded in his mind. Only thinner, and sandier. Like the dry bed of a river that rests under sight, like any absence that stands as proof of something or other.
It was because of the voice that he tied himself to the mast. Where he was seasick no more. Where he saw in all clarity that he was indeed climbing up the mountain in a ship. A ship made of wood and nails, that he had built with his own hands. A ship that had a spell on it, but no stronger than a roof. A ship that stood as the roof of the tallest, proudest mountain in the land, like a raggedy hat on a rich man, that would not come off by hand or scissors or wind.
So when the boat reached the top of the mountain, and tripped across the ledge of the tip and fell like a child on a bumpy country road, the water it raised shot to the sky and rained on Arthur’s village and his house and friend Phidias, who then knew he was safe.
Then the water fell and fell, and filled every crack and gap and ditch, and when they were all full, the ocean started pouring from the tip of the mountain, where it had remained hidden, and washed everything in its path to the shore. There it stopped with the village on top of a wave, and its surrounding army of forests on a horde of others. And the village thrived.
Arthur, after having conquered the ego of the mountain that had succumbed before him, became a ship captain, on land. A wayfarer. He traveled the world with Phidias and told stories of his boat. And many others were built, and new heights were reached. Because of one man, who had followed his voice.
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