Malcolm Lowry
THE BRAVEST BOAT
It was a day of spindrift and blowing sea-foam, with
black clouds presaging rain driven over the mountains from the sea
by a wild March wind.
But a clean silver sea light came from along the horizon where
the sky itself was like glowing silver. And far away over in America
the snowy volcanic peak of Mount Hood stood on high, disembodied,
cut off from earth, yet much too close, which was an even surer
presage of rain, as though the mountains had advanced, or were
advancing.
In the park of the seaport the giant trees swayed, and taIler
than any were the tragic Seven Sisters, a constellation of seven noble
red cedars that had grown there for hundreds of years, but were now
dying, blasted, with bare peeled tops and stricken boughs. (They
were dying rather than live longer near civilization. Yet though
everyone had forgotten they were called after the Pleiades and
thought they were named with civic pride after the seven daughters
of a butcher, who seventy years before when the growing city was
named Gaspool, had all danced together in a shop window, nobody
had the heart to cut them down.)
The angelic wings of the seagulls circling over the tree tops
shone. very white again-it the black sky. Fresh snow from the night
before lay far down the slopes of the Canadian mountains, whose
freezing summits, massed peak behind spire, jaggedly traversed the
country northward as far as the eye could reach. And highest of all
an eagle, with the poise of a skier, shot endlessly down the world.
In the mirror, reflecting this and much beside, of an old weigh–
ing machine with the legend "Your weight and your destiny" en–
circling its forehead and which stood on the embankment between
