Open the Heavens

The Striker

Out at sea the waters of the Atlantic Ocean seemed impossibly vast to John Bryant, today working as a striker on a shrimp boat owned by one Captain Edwin Walker of Summerville, Georgia.  He could only assume that they appeared so to others.

But it was an illusion.  Everyone knew better—yet some knew better than others.  John fell into the category of the more informed.

These waters, like everything else in the cosmos, were finite.  The sun now rising in the east—so magnificent, so triumphant at dawn—was no more than a sphere of light and fire and heat, just as the Earth, like its sister worlds, was but a lump of rock in orbit around that sphere, and all of them specks floating in the great dark infinite.  The only difference between Earth and other planets known to Man was that conditions on Earth had been right to give rise to a variety of life forms, some simple and some complex, while those on others, so far as anyone knew, were not.   But conditions could change.  Subtle shifts in the planet’s rotation might bury its surface in ice; a minor convulsion of the sun might render that same surface a wasteland; a slight change in the composition of the sweet and life-giving air could turn it poisonous.  Scientists said these things were unlikely, but how did they know?  How did anyone ever truly know anything?  The truth was that they didn’t.  They could only guess—and an educated guess was still a guess.

The fragility of life was shocking to John.  Small adjustments in nature’s balance were enough to make it untenable.

And yes, everyone knew that.  But, again, it was something John knew better than most.  He lived with this knowledge every waking moment.

He had come to look at the world around him as an hourglass, turned upside down, its sands running thinly but steadily from top to bottom.  Even his job—the very thing that kept a roof over John’s head and paid his bills—carried with it a mild sadness.  The industry in which he worked had seen better days.  While the appetite for shrimp in the United States was more robust than ever, it was being satisfied, increasingly, by shrimp imported from Asia and the Caribbean—and the saturation of the domestic market with foreign shrimp had depressed shrimp prices all around.  The result was that fewer shrimp boats were trawling, if not with each passing year, then certainly with each passing decade.

Just this morning, as Captain Ed was taking the boat out to sea, he had made one of his patented “It Won’t Last” speeches about the demise of the local shrimp industry.

“I hate to see it go,” he said to John as they moved over the great placid Sound toward the ocean.  “But there’s no saving it.  Just can’t be done.  I don’t blame Eddie for wanting to do something different with his life.”  He was talking about his only son, Edwin, Jr., who was seventeen years old and intent on going to college.  “This boat won’t give him the things he wants out of life.  It’s not able to.  So I don’t blame him for wanting to do something different.  I don’t blame him at all.  If I’m the last Walker to shrimp these waters, that’s fine—because everything changes.  Still, I hate to see it go.”

“Yeah,” John said.

Captain Ed smiled and said, “I don’t guess I could sell you this boat when I retire, maybe?”

“That depends,” John answered.  “Can I pay you in Monopoly money?”

It was a joke, but John instantly regretted making it, because the mention of currency launched Ed into yet another discussion, this time about how a dollar just didn’t go as far as it used to and that probably the greenback would be worth about as much as Monopoly scrip one day.  So he did what he always did when Captain Ed got long-winded.  He tuned him out, just offering the occasional grunt of acknowledgement as the good captain held forth on the many problems of the world.