The Open Boat

Hey, Billie. The GPS ain't working again.

So here’s another reason I have an issue with my high school English teachers. (My students would say, “We be beefin'”).  In eleventh grade, we read Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.”  I was bored, of course, but I was bored by most of the stories we read in high school.  My beef is that the teacher didn’t make any connection between the story and Florida.  Now,  23 years after graduating, I find out that the story was inspired by Crane’s own shipwreck off the coast of Florida in 1896.  (Specifically, the Commodore sunk off the coast of Daytona Beach, a mere 90 miles from my classroom at Melbourne Central Catholic High School.)  The boat was headed from Jacksonville to Cuba, and it was a known smuggling ship.  Crane was onboard as a journalist, of sorts.  (Again, to any teachers out there, this is information your students might find interesting.)

So, of course, I reread the story this week.  I’m afraid to say that I found it just as boring, but at least I was aware that the Mosquito Inlet in the story is now known as Ponce de Leon inlet, just south of Daytona.  And I’ve been there, several times.  I think I have pictures of myself at the top of the lighthouse wearing a very cool 1980s Van Halen painter’s cap.   

As a more experienced reader now than I was in high school, I see the appeal of the story.  It’s certainly the classic conflict of man versus nature, but without the instinct versus intellect that makes Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” one of my faves.  (What’s added though, to Crane’s benefit, is the cold, uncaring, outside world that’s completely indifferent to our individual longing for survival.  From a seagull to an empty lighthouse to the towering waves themselves, it seems that no one gives a rat’s butt about the four guys in the boat.)  I also love how Billie the Oiler, the most polite member of the crew, is the only one to die.  (If I’m correct, I think he also did the most rowing to get them to safety.) There’s a life lesson for you, kiddos.

As far as The Tour, I think a stop at the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse, aka the Mosquito Island Lifesaving Station, is in order.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the Disney cruise ships out of Cape Canaveral will go down while I’m in the area.

Here are some excerpts from the story that I liked:

“The surf’s roar was dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty.”

“There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea.”

“The wind came stronger, and sometimes a wave suddenly raged out like a mountain-cat and there was to be seen the sheen and sparkle of a broken crest.”

(Wow.  I can’t wait to show that one to my students.  It’s a single-sentence example of both a simile and the passive voice. Crane, you devil.)

“When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”