Tides currents & gyres

3. 5 inches of rain, the heaviest fall in Oregon in the last twenty-four hours of torrential flooding. Cannon Beach impassable, swathes of it coming down, the land indistinguishable from the whited out sea and the greycaps of the Pacific sky. We are huddled inside unit 11 of the Gearhart Inn, getting cabin fever, staring at the maps. Tomorrow we’ll go up to Mount Shasta, Leonard Cohen’s place of meditation. There are famous people, and then there are people you meet who have delved into the deepest corners of the psyche. It’s hard to tell which Cohen is. He’s pretty visible for a mystic, but then, so is the Dalai Lama.

I’m not sure about the distance from here to the Sargasso sea - doesn't show up on MapQuest. Plus the ashes are back in Miriam Cendrars’ bedroom. She’s gazing into something vaster, more bottomless than the Nares abyssal plain, the great submarine field that awaits us all, as seen from the Brittany coast. Brittany is like the Sargasso, very easy to fall into, impossible to escape.

The map shows the 1916 currents of the Atlantic charted by drift bottles. What are the odds of a drift bottle making it across the Atlantic from the Brittany coast to the Sargasso Sea.

One thing is sure. If it makes it there, it will never emerge again. Which is the precise goal of the expedition.

Cendrars' Ashes

On the Oregon coast, rain pouring down, but the mind is on Cendrars Ashes, and the Sargasso Sea. Cendrars expressed his wish in the following words:

"« …je serai un homme comblé si je pouvais aller mourir, le jour dit, au point choisi et disparaître anonymement, sans aucun regret du monde, à la source même du monde, en pleine mer des Sargasses, là où pour le première fois la vie s’est manifestée et jailli des profondeurs de l’océan et du soleil. »"

Here is what it means: I would be fulfilled if I can die on my chosen day, disappear anonymously, with no regrets remaining, at the very source of the world, in the Sargasso sea, there, where the world first appeared, bursting from the depths of the ocean and the sun".

Mare Sargassum is an oddity, an oceanographic abberation. The great tides, gyres and eddies of the Atlantic can take the embryonic larvae of eels across the entire ocean, but if a man driven vessel errs into its path, it will never be heard from again...