Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, governed by the Lord High Sextuplet, (aka ‘the God of as many arms as fingers…sorta’), all are invited to participate.

Note: this is Part 2 of a serial Six, to establish a modicum of narrative context, go ahead and follow this link to Part 1

Prompt word:

POWER

The night grew darker, the wind stronger and the grey-green avalanche of the following sea grew bolder; like a 7th grade bully, in thrall of early-onset adolescence, the waves, stalking the boat as it ran for port, hungered for the opportunity to prove that might made right.

Perched uncomfortably on the edge of the duct tape-patched helmsman’s chair, the newest deckhand vainly sought to anticipate the behavior of the Eastern-rigged trawler as it rode up the front of the closed arcs of waves pushed by the wind; recalling movies and youtube videos of stormy seas, the young man felt the visceral punch of image-versus-reality stronger even than his first time lying next to a naked woman.

The boat, synonymous with ‘the world’, (which in turn, through the alchemy of extreme fear was now shorthand for ‘Life’), rolled in the trough of a wave that never even slowed down to see if the trawler had capsized.

His first sense of the precarious relationship that pretended to exist in balance between the ambitions of Man and the raw power of Nature, bloomed like a nightmare orchid as he felt the wood and iron boat rise and accelerate.

Being lifted by a wave is different than being lifted while standing in an elevator; the ocean was a fluid and therefore free of the constraints imposed by the straight line vectors and ninety-degree angles so in abundance on dry land; ‘Up’ could be at the end of a spiral, and, well, ‘Down’ was only some point not up, the path of the fishing boat was as unhindered and freeform as a refrigerator door finger painting.

Survival of a race is often a binary sequence involving chance, continuation of an individual is where the traces of divinity are to be found; as the newest deckhand decided that power was a verb, one could be forgiven for believing the fruit of a certain Garden was not Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather it was the reality-transcending power of Metaphor; laughing at the dark world, the young man made the fishing trawler a surfboard and rode the waves to home.