On Boats and Brokenness
Walking with the dogs down a quiet lane, I first spotted the boat on the other side of a drainage ditch, at the edge of a pine forest. It was a small wooden canoe, and by the ornate copper fittings, had been crafted with care. It was carvel built, so that each horizontal band of wood was curved around the body of the canoe and fitted neatly between corresponding bands above and below. The horizontal bands converged at bow and stern in the streamlined symmetry typical of this type of watercraft. This wooden canoe was built for paddling around the black water of the South Carolina Lowcountry, drifting sleepily along with the pace of the Waccamaw River, as it courses like a perforated artery through the cypress swamps before softly discharging its tannin-tinted waters into the Atlantic. The boat’s only movement now was in the even slower processes of disintegration. Lying partially submerged beneath layers of leaf litter on a forest floor is not the destiny this canoe’s designer had intended. Boats are made to skim the water’s surface, yet there it was, draped in pine straw and rotting into the sand and clay.
“the clearing opened space for nonhuman architects of new assemblages to emerge from ruination”
Some months later, the landowners cleared the forest. Hundreds of pines were toppled, and as they fell, they crashed into each other, cracking apart, before quaking into the leaf litter covering the deep layers of sand and clay. One tree crushed the canoe, splintering its dry upper parts—the wales, the bench, the knees —and sinking the lower parts of its hull deeper into the soil (figure 1). Another tree fell across the ditch, forming a bridge from forest to road. It was time to take the boat out of what little was left of the woods.
Figure 1. Site of boatwreck, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Photograph by Sara Rich.
The salvage crew consisted of my beau, his two daughters, and my two dogs (figure 2). We photographed the broken boat’s remains in stages, as we lifted the components bit by bit from the site, and removed them closer to the ditch where they could be more easily—mechanically—retrieved (figure 3).
Figure 2. Boatwreck site and salvage crew, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Photograph by Sara Rich.
Figure 3. Salvaged artifacts, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Photograph by Sara Rich.
We maintain that, thievery and trespassing aside, this larceny in the name of knowledge was nothing if not noble.
The hull was sheathed with an acrylic and woven nylon layer that had once protected the wood from saturation and leaking, and still did its best to shield the timbers attached from the encroachment of the forest floor. Affixed to the bow were the remains of the watercraft registration number issued by the S.C. Wildlife and Marine Resources Department (figure 4). The cotton painter line, no longer tied to the bow, lay semi-coiled and stiffened with mud and age. Minding the rusty nails and staples, we noted the type and condition of each wooden element too. Over the years of the boat’s abandonment, its onset of sedentarism, the termites had moved in and enjoyed many feasts, and their hollow tunnels made the wood fragile to the touch. Yet many of the timbers retained traces of varnish and stain, faded into new hues, and cracked into new textures.
Figure 4. Watercraft registration number and sheathing at the bow, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Photograph by Sara Rich.
A bald eagle toured the skies above, taking advantage of this newly unobstructed hunting ground from hundreds of feet in the air. The scene recalled Anna Tsing’s photographs of decimated pine forests in the Pacific Northwest, on the opposite side of the continent, and her remark about “landscapes of unintentional design” as “sites for more-than-human dramas.”[1] Here too, the clearing opened space for nonhuman architects of new assemblages to emerge from ruination.
Toward the end of our archaeological mission, the sun, with no more forest canopy to intervene, glared off something metallic beneath the leaves and splintered branches. Moving them aside revealed an engraved chrome plate fixed to a curved timber. After smoothing the soil away from the surface, the plate could be read: “HANDCRAFTED BY Ben Galloway, GALLOWAY’S BOAT SHOP, CONWAY, S.C.” (figure 5).
Figure 5. Timber and plate with construction information, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Photograph by Sara Rich.
This plate’s message was an epistemological fortune. Some of the questions that we archaeologists ask most fervently about artifacts are in regards to the circumstances of their inception and eventual deposition. With the engraved message, our hermeneutics had disclosed a partial story about the boat’s origin. Its provenance—its birthplace and the identity of its creator—had been revealed, but we still did not know when it was made, or when and why it was deposited in its current location. With the other artifacts set safely aside, we took the timber with its silver plate for desk-based research. A quick search led to a website, Boat History Reports, which catalogs basic manufacturer information (figure 6). From there, we learned that Ben Galloway was crafting his canoes in Conway from 1972-1983, placing our boatwreck’s construction at some point in that period, at approximately the same time that my beau and I were born, in 1978 and 1980 respectively, elsewhere in the South. Histories overlap, bury, and reemerge.
Figure 6. Screenshot of website with manufacturer information. Image by Sara Rich.
Archaeologists deal in the abandoned, the broken, and the partial. Aside from interviewing the landowners, prying open state records, or performing more sophisticated acts of stratigraphical science, our knowledge of this broken boat in the woods will remain limited to certain facts of its origin. But then again, all knowledge is. Because of the nature of our work among fragments buried in the leaf litter and sediments of eroded time, perhaps archaeologists are more comfortable than most with the limitations of human knowledge, and, relatedly, the dirty implications of entropy.
Physicist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers offer a way to string these pieces together, even if the rope is detached from the bow. Their research tells us that certainty is elusive. Directions change. Mutations are random. If we can only know the past partially and vicariously, the future is entirely inaccessible. And Now--, what is it, and is it even?
Their work has implications, admittedly unclear and uncertain, for telos. Creationists would like to say that all things have a function, a purpose on Earth. We have a reason for being here and for knowing that we are. Enlightenment thought offered the metaphor of the cosmic machine, visualized as a clock, wherein each individual is a well-placed, finely-crafted cog. All things were designed with purpose in mind. Function begets form. And yet biological evolution has revealed that just as often, it is form that begets function. Physics and chemistry have demonstrated that, on macro and micro levels, the universe is no automaton. If it were, processes could be reversed. Old could become young. Paradise could be restored. Instead, random factors introduce chaos into all systems, rendering them irreversible and outcomes unforeseeable.
Irreversibility means instability. It means inevitable aging, death, and decay. But it also means becoming rather than being. It means that the future is defined by failure.
“In brokenness, objects may experience a kind of liberation, autonomy even, by shaking off the original telos imposed from beyond.”
Some remnants of the boat were left on site to continue meandering along the unpredictable vector of entropy. Others were reconstituted. With Mr. Galloway’s intentions having been subverted by brokenness, the timbers’ other qualities could shift into prominence. Now those new hues and new textures, new shapes caused by fragmentation, became paramount to the boat’s next becoming. Only by way of its failure, some unknown years ago, could a new design issue forth from these salvaged materials (figure 7). Eventually, maybe not long from now (whatever Now means), it too will break, and break free from my artistic vision for it. In brokenness, objects may experience a kind of liberation, autonomy even, by shaking off the original telos imposed from beyond. In failure, they may still try to resist decay, but they also might become food for trees and termites, nests for palmetto bugs, revelations for young girls, supplies for new art. As Prigogine and Stengers conclude, “Artistic activity breaks the temporal symmetry of the object.”[2] Such apparently random intervention into matter’s being disrupts it and opens up new possibilities, along with new risks of failure.
Figure 7. Galloway, sculpture composed of select timber and sheathing elements from the canoe, Conway, South Carolina, 2020. Sculpture and photograph by Sara Rich.
As we bear witness to the breakdown of so many systems—climate, economy, education, politics—it seems that human civilization itself is on the verge of shooting off into a different, unknowable, direction. The emergence of a highly contagious and deadly microscopic virus has exacerbated this teetering effect. What is broken can never completely be restored. There is no going back. We are in a canoe whose symmetry of bow and stern, so suggestive of reversibility, cannot account for the current of a swiftly shifting stream, against which we simply erode into some unknowable new. Of course, that’s no reason not to paddle like hell, to become the artists that craft the conditions most permissible of the future that we want to see come into being, to become.
NOTES
[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2015), 152.
[2] Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York, Bantam Books, 1984), 312.
