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FANTOME, 1974 (PHOTO BY MPMc)
BY ARTHUR HONEYMAN
Among the many thousands of casualties of Humcane Mitch last October was the
four-masted staysail schooner Fantome, which disappeared with its crew of 31 after dropping
off passengers in Mexico. Fantome had been owned by Windjammer Cruises and operated in
the Caribbean. It was built in 1927 for the Duke of Westminister in Germany, which constructed
the world's best large windships in the years between the World Wars (most of the sailing
training ships still in use, including the U.S. Coast Guard's Eagle, were built at the time), it had
served as a training ship for the Italian Navy and was purchased in the 1950s by the Greek ship­
ping tycoon Aristotle Onassis as a wedding present for Prince Ranier and Princess Grace (Kelly)
of Monaco, but was never delivered because he wasn't invited to the wedding
Fantome was on a cruise near Belize and the Bay Islands v#ien it disappeared after
disembarking its passengers. The ship sought to escape the hurricane by heading for a nearby
island but Hurricane Mitch changed course and Fantome was caught. The last communication
from Fantome's crew was that the ship was experiencing 100-knot winds and 40-degree rolls.
Coast Guard aircraft, assisted by the British Navy's HMS Sheffield, searched for more than a
week for Fantome but all that was found were an empty liferaft and several life-jackets.
Portland writer and poet Arthur Honeyman sailed on a cruise in the Bahamas aboard
Fantome in the spring of 1974 He wrote an account of his adventure and incorporated it into
the following essay.
Wilderness is drama, and the reverse. As soon as you forget this, wilderness is no longer
wilderness, rather it is drudgery. And to be on the rolling deck of a schooner in the middle of the
ocean is as much of a wilderness as the mosquito ridden slopes of the Sierra Nevada or the
Cascades; a rolling deck is a floating isle tossed about by a fluid maze, far less secure and far
more dramatic than hard ground.
To be a Spastic, either on a rolling deck or crawling, shaking and struggling into a
bathtub fHleVwith tepid water, is to have created your own internal wilderness, because you are
without control and eventually aware of your own frailty; for instance you need to rise up from the
bathtub still alive. However, to be a Spastic in a bathtub, chaos reigning, splashing the floor
uncontrollably, is still a lot better than no bath at all. And besides, you have time to reflect while
your body screams to shake loose and everyone else screams to stop shaking, and you are
trying to rise up to a rolling deck, but your body is almost ready to subside into a primeval gulch
alone with the rest of the amoebas.
Even drinking is not easy. Water slobbers down my beard and throat I gag and choke,
and this too becomes a spitting, sputtering wilderness
I would always take the first boat ride ashore and the last boat ride out to the ship. And one day I
had to jump from the lifeboat into the sea and wade ashore. Naturally, Michael assisted me. That
was the same day I swam in the Caribbean and for the first time in my life floated in a lifejacket.
I let my mind relax and travel back through eons. I became a sea creature for a moment and I
could feel the rhythm of the waves beating inside me
The roar of the ocean is equivalent to the whispering of trees There are times when only
the Spastic can interrupt the tranquillity and the ring of silence. No wonder the Indians left
spastics to die. Imagine a shaky brave quivering on the stalk of some prey, not disturbing himself
but disturbing everyone else, most of all the ring of silence (a naturally understood law) before
loosing his shaft on the would-be victim. Nonetheless, in today's decadent society a Spastic
shook his way into new worlds on a rolling deck and probably disturbed civilization, creating
natural and social chaos in a normally sane region of the sphere History was disturbed
(Poseidon shook in his watery grave wrinkling the mirror of Narcissus and Ishmael) and so
was pre-history. The Spastic saw:
"Rolling along the street, I let my eyes wander from the street to the beach to the sea
Everything on land seemed to be colored white (white is a color in the Caribbean Sea) and then
began a bright aqua green, clear down to the bottom, and gradated into bright blue, also clear
down to the bottom, and the gradation suddenly shaded into blue-purple and the blue-purple
became purple-red. And then my eyes rested on the four-masted staysail schooner which was
our ship My mind was on the Spanish Main. The sky was blue, the sea was blue and everything
else was bleached white, except for the black laborers, picks in hand I urged my friend Michael
McCusker to move us closer to the edge of the water We found ourselves beside a Union
Gospel Church The white minister was busily overseeing the laborers The world stopped Work
stopped. Picks hung in the air Blacks gaped. The colors took on a Van Gogh madness Blue,
white, glare, Negro, clergy-black, merged and diffused like a bolt in my mind. I wish I could
describe the look of awe on the Negroes' faces, the look of shock on the minister's. The scene
was so eerie, that I asked Michael to push me away from there We rolled away, leaving the
faces still gaping. We stopped some more traffic that day: cars actually stopped and people
stared But down at the market, where the butcher was chopping up a fish, and a big turtle
was waiting to get its head lopped off. a 12 year old boy asked Michael what was wrong with his
'brother“ Michael explained to the black boy about Cerebral Palsy The boy tried to give him
four Bahamian quarters. Michael explained to him that I was too proud to take money. The boy
understood and I said something caustic about decadent American Spastic imperialists."
A Spastic saw and felt the sea merge into his being: Michael will tell how I almost tipped
the lifeboat over in frustration, obnoxiously shaking and rocking it. Frequently, we used the life­
boat to get ashore I would climb into the lifeboat when the crew lowered it from the davits to the
deck to pick up other passengers, and then they would lower it the rest of the way into the ocean
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But back in Boston Harbor in the early 60s, a Spastic rolled in a storm, riding a small
outboard motorboat. The Spastic's usual lack of security and sense of chaos was confirmed,
while the waves washed over the gunnels and the small craft was tossed against direction, and
the sky was swirling in gray. Across the bay a streak of light bolted and struck a house. A puff
of smoke grayed that part of the sky even more, a flickering orange leapt up to join the puff and
to change the color of the sky. The Spastic's blood raced beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond
disgust at the death of the people in the house, into a feeling of unfeeling ecstasy. He knew,
like lightning, the certainty and searing of chaos. His Spastic life had trained him for this moment.
Even though he clutched the gunnels for life, he reveled in the sinuous grasp for eternal breath.
He had always known the futility of desiring for eternal breath, but at this moment that was what
he was gasping for.
On the 'Fantome':
"One day the sea rolled like a real ocean rolls. It was the perfect day for sailing. I saw the
sails go up. I saw Michael leap into action just like he's always talking about. I saw him and Bob
and Joe Perkins and another Bob and Mark, jump on ropes and let the inertia from the weight of
their fly-like bodies haul the sails all the way to the top of the mast. I then knew why steam had
replaced sails Steam was a laborsaving device and the beauty of sails had to be sacrificed along
with the sailors. I, too, played my own heroic part. When I was a boy my dad taught me to move
out from other people's feet when they were working. I was asleep in my sleeping bag and
suddenly I heard a thundering bunch of feet on the deck. Without thinking I rolled my sleeping
bag beneath a table and cowered there heroically. "Dive for the bushes," I heard my dad's voice
ringing in my mind. Soon Michael came and got me and sat me on a bench while I gazed at the
dark blue sea rolling real waves. The waves were not big but the sea was not glass anymore. In
a while a school of porpoises came and sported for us. Michael was on the bow and I was on the
sundeck thinking magical thoughts about the playful sea."
And there were the times on the Nehalem River, when the water was down, the Spastic
shook his clothes off and sat on a rocky ledge — midstream — and let the water tingle and trickle
between his thighs and over his groin. Everything in his body crystallized and almost cracked, net
just from the cold, but also from the knowledge that he was closer to nature than usual. But this
was not a tranquil nature. His rump was rock raw and his legs were lengthened and lifted up out
of proportion and beyond balance, while he was slapping mosquitoes away from his unreachable
back. His friends didn't know the Spastic's chaos, even though he was, at the moment, a contor­
tionist, grunting and squealing like a black fly-sucked pig. This was water in the wilderness.
Not long after the Caribbean cruise, on the coast of California a Spastic realized his
conflict between chaos and tranquillity in verse
There is a fine line between tranquillity and rage
Rage is a rest from tranquillity, rage is life
Tranquillity is sickness, death unrelated to death
My bronze Indian woman directed an orchestra between earth and sea
Poseidon responded to my wife's commands
And Zephyr was hdr breath
And I, a Spastic, leapt from my wheelchair
Onto her prone nobility in a musical dance
Wilderness is the recognition that nature and chaos control you, and you sometimes
desperately long for the roar of the ocean, the whispering of the trees, the shriek of silence,
in a Spastic non-Spastic convulsion
Arthur Honeyman was bom with cerebral palsy He is author of Sam & His
Cart (illustrated by Michael DeWaide of Astoria), which was made into an award win­
ning movie Other books include Sam & His Bright Idea (also illustrated by DeWaide),
Claws & Homs (illustrated by Don Osborne of Manzanita), The Business of America:
Economic Opinion of a Non-Expert, Domicile (illustrated by JoAnn Honeyman), The
Follies of Sexism in the Civilized World, and collections of his poetry, Coffee Me A
Cup of Fix, Epic. The Spastic & The Queen of America. Vernal Verse and Portraits
in Poetry. He has also published, through Wheel Press, vrtiich was co-owned by him
and his wife JoAnn. a selection of his essays. Journey and Journey II. He lives and
writes in Portland