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June 21, 2007
Boat-in-the-Sky Dreams
by Layne Maheu
The big new movie this week is about some gray-bearded guy and a boat full of animals. The world ends. Everyone drowns. It’s a comedy, the latest in what promises to be a “So-and-So Almighty” series. The only reason I’m paying more attention to the routine hype for this blockbuster as opposed to all the other Spiderman Threes and Shrek Twelves and Ocean Thirteens is that, well, hey, they can’t steal that story; I already did.
Then again I’m just one in a long list of miners who’ve unearthed this archetype of archetypes for its rich human material in order to retell an oft’ told tale. My version of the Noah story, by the way, is not a comedy. It has talking animals. More or less recent literature has told the biblical Flood myth from a variety of perspectives: from the shifting vantages of the Ark’s human family members (David Maine); as a marital feud, where those who side with the father ride in the ship’s cabin, and those who side with the mother stow-away mutinously below (Timothy Findley); and as one chapter narrated by boo-weevil like mites that bore their way into the Ark’s wooden hull (Julian Barnes).
But more astonishing are the investigations into the Noah saga as historical record. (I don’t search these stories out; they just come to me out of the ether of our information churning whurl.) Late this April, much media focused on a Dutchman by the name of Johan Huibers. Apparently he built an ark, but only one-fifth the size of the original, using biblical dimensions as his reference. He plans to set sail with it through the interior waters of the Netherlands. Will it be guided through the waters by God’s hand? Or will there be some mechanical assistance? Has it a designated bow? A stern? Electricity? The internet? How close is it to the original? Instead of all the world’s creatures, he plans on taking just horses, lambs, chickens, and rabbits, and mostly baby instances of these, so as to conserve on cargo room. Consider the enormous investment, in not only faith and imagination, but in his resources, his time, his very life stuff. He borrowed 1.2 million dollars U.S. in order to finance this ancient biblical reenactment. His hope is that the ark becomes a religious monument, and zoo, and a divine inspiration to those who come to see it. He needs some 100,000 visitors in order to recoup his loan.
For sure, when you juxtapose a modern sensibility with such an ancient, ancient tale of such mind-boggling magnitude, one of the obvious and natural reactions must be comedy. I’m sure the Hollywood movie people had a lot of fun with their giant ark, having it surf on the waves that crash over evil Washington, D.C. (I saw the trailer.) But this only serves to make us ponder even more so the intense and singular vision of the Dutch shipwright, trying to recreate perhaps the oldest of huge sea-going vessels.
And then, at least once a decade or so, there’s always a band of religious adventurers who set out to climb a snow-capped mountain above the hostile Persian desert. Their hope is to discover an artifact from the four-millennia-old wreck. Just last year, I listened to a radio announcer on a late-night talk show, following the latest expedition, financed by two Americans. One of them was from Indiana, I think, and they set out to climb a mountain in Iran. I imagine that they are ever hopeful, as they rise in the morning, and don their mountaineering gear, leaving much behind at base camp, and up they climb, step by step, up the agonizing mountain, eyes held aloft, to the heavens, the clouds, the rocks, scanning the horizon for boats.
Layne Maheu is the author of Song of the Crow, a novel that shares the story of Noah and the flood from the point of view of a crow. It was released this month in paperback.
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