Old Man and the Shore

73 years ago when I was born in Mississippi, Ernest Hemingway was writing a story about an old man and the sea. As I sit here, seaside, on a beach of the Caribbean island St. John, reading that story, I am also writing a story which may be called Old Man and the Shore. Since I am not out on the open sea hauling in a great fish, as Hemingway was when he was actually the old man experiencing the sea, I am just a guy reading that book on a beach. Before sitting to read, I did summon up the energy to walk the length of the beach, from one great rocky outcropping to the other. (pic) My activity here, rather lazy compared to Ernest’s life long escapades driving an ambulance in Italy in World War 1, fighting royalists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and ultimately contending with the great marlin off the coast of Cuba. As I read through Old Man and the Sea, the old fisherman’s rambling thoughts serve as prelude before he hooks the great fish and becomes entangled in a three-day, life-threatening contest with the great fish, such as his explanation of how to detect an approaching hurricane, using signs from the sky and the sea. And there’s his statement that a marlin, such as the one he has been attempting in for over 24 hours, is less intelligent that the man, but more noble. Sitting here on the beach, it is easy to affirm that the great fighting marlin is more noble than a man. In that grand, ancient struggle—man against nature, the fisherman is just an old man with a cramped hand, no thanks to the fish. “I wish I could show him (the fish) what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am, and I will be so.” And after a while, “I wish I were the fish. . . with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.” Such is the macho man of the early 20th-century, after we had driven the krauts back into minding their own business in Germany . . . except they were summoned back out of their Armistice-enforced peace by hitler’s self-destructive third reich. But after a while, the tough old man, weary to the bone, lacerated and slipping toward self-defeat, retreats into his lapsed Catholicism—or perhaps his actual faith in God, when he prays the Hail Mary prayer and promises the Lord that he will perform further religious duties . . . “if I catch him”, the fish. Such is the relapse of collapsed Catholicism, such as Ernest apparently was, and I was, before I turned born again—i.e. “evangelical”, when I was 27. But that was long ago. Now I’m just an old man on the shore.