The Wooden Whale

The incongruous prop. A 14' wooden ladder lying among the marsh grasses, a mile from the road and a mere 100 yards from Kehoe beach on the Point Reyes National Seashore. At a fixed length and weighing about 100 pounds, it is an awkward, unwieldy thing. It was likely discarded in favor of a lighter, more portable aluminum model. It's former owner found it easier to throw it into the sea. It was not the tool of a painter, as it bears no staining or any sign that it was employed as a means to apply colored pigments in hard to reach places. No right tradesman would carry such a dinosaur as this, as it was virtually unportable. 

However it got to this secluded location, this practically antique ladder may have found it's truest and most honorable calling. To serve as an object of utility, to be well-made and useful are noble virtues. But to rise above such high functions to become an object of aesthetic beauty is to achieve a certain immortality. How many of its fellows, manufactured by the thousands in some poorly lit and virtually soulless factory, will ever transcend their natures and design to live forever as an artistic expression and a metaphor? 

The ladder's hard right angles and rigid forms, crafted by the hard hands of man, lie in sharp contrast to the irregular and curving form of nature as seen in this tidal marsh. The flexible brown grasses, the soft, reticulated clouds of condensed water, the rolling hills, the corpse of the ancient cypress - disembodied and covered in celadon lichen. The irony of the wooden ladder, propped up as it is by the mammoth trunk of an old growth tree cannot be ignored either. After all, the ladder was mass produced in order to serve the construction industry, home builders and home service providers - the greatest threat to trees and forests than all the world's asteroids and ice ages combined.

And there, framed between two rungs of this now dead tool of man, a prehistoric eye. Perhaps the ghost of a giant sauropod. Perhaps the wooden effigy of a beached sperm whale.  It faces east, away from the sea, and before the gathering clouds. Maybe it's telling us something. Maybe we should listen. In the end, all the ladders will be gone, and all the walls they were designed to lean against will crumble, and all the men who place them there will have returned back to the dust from whence they came.

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