Web Feature: Moments
Written by Jacob Rawson Too much wine – I must have dozed; my boat drifts into rough water. Make fast the lines, make fast the lines! Now peach petals float around us; maybe paradise is near. Chiguk-chong chiguk-chong oshwa! At least we’re far away from the dusty world of men. -From The Fisherman’s Calendar, Gosan Outside the window of the Mokpo ferry terminal the sea churns with the frothy consistency of bean paste stew. I am anxious as I watch for the ticket girl to signal the captain’s decision. It is a small flat-bottom ferry that will motor out some thirty nautical miles into unprotected waters. If the wind is too strong it will not sail, and I will be stuck waiting another two days for one more shot at the next scheduled sailing. A giddy old man from Anjwa-do chuckles in the seat next to me. He is reliving tales from his world travels in a monologue that I am somehow a part of. Have I seen Huang Mountain in China? I really must go. Have I been to the Thai beaches? He continues to rattle off his world tour checklist until the captain finally appears and gives an expressionless nod. The ticket girl waves to me happily and I sigh. The Island Love 10 chugs through dull beige water out of Mokpo Harbor. Orange shipyard cranes spin overhead as tankers and freighters glide by, their girthy bellies sagging fully laden. The harbor opens and whitecaps curl across the choppy straight. Laver plots and eel rafts disappear into a sliver of shoreline off the stern. This is deep water, and the ferry begins to roll in a slowly mounting swell. The few other passengers aboard are octogenarian islanders huddled together and peeling oranges on the heated vinyl floor of the main cabin. I have the windy extremities of the vessel to myself until the ship’s engineer climbs down from the bridge to light a cigarette and finds me on the stern deck. Can I speak Korean? And where am I from? Washington state? Why, that’s where the White House is! He invites me to share a pot of barley tea in the small crew’s kitchen. We are now chugging through the northern Jindo islands. They are small, each no more than a few lengths of a tanker ship. The islands bounce in my peripheral vision as if they are floating on top of the foaming breakers. The engineer has worked on passenger ships like this for thirty-five years. He asks why I have come to such an isolated place, and I explain that I am tracing a path across the South Sea coast on foot, but that the scarcity of ferry runs between islands has made the going tough in places. My trip would have been a cinch if I had set out during his youth, he tells me. Back then there were regular ferries for each little rock – thriving island communities from Mokpo to Busan. Now as the network of expressways and sea bridges spiders out to every crack and corner of the peninsula, the ferry lines are dying one by one. Those who live on rocky crops too far out for the bridges have dropped their fishnets and plows and moved to the cities to find work sitting in stacked cubicles punching sales figures into glowing spreadsheets. The engineer recites the populations of each island as we pass. “Eight… Three… Was three, now one…” He and the captain are old, both in their seventies. The island residents are older, and they will soon be gone. It is no longer a question of decades; it is a matter years or even months. This ferry has twenty-one scheduled stops – twenty-one stepping-stones into the Yellow Sea. But most of the scheduled stops have no passengers, and today the ferry stops only six times. At each island it rams its bow up onto a concrete ramp and drops its iron jaw just long enough for one or two sun-beaten fishermen to climb off. No one boards. The engineer and captain are well past the age of retirement. When the last of the island residents die off, the engineer and captain will move in with their children in the city. The old iron-hulled Island Love 10 will find retirement in a shipyard somewhere before it is gutted for parts. It is a sad story the engineer tells, but he is unmoved as he tells it. Like the waxing of the moon and the rising of the tide, it is an inevitability. And these islands will not die altogether. Under their original caretakers, the azalea, the deer, and the magpie, they will thrive once more. This is not a story that speaks to the gall of human endeavor, and this is perhaps why I find it sad. But these human concerns are somehow transcended by a greater kind of perfection. In the ebb and flow of civilization this place has reached a sort of cyclical completion, and this is something the old ferry engineer and master of the tides understands well. *** U-do (“Cow Island”) is so named because its shape resembles a bovine in recline, or so professes the glossy wisdom of the tourist brochures. The island’s volcanic soil is black and rich, and the interior teems with fields of broccoli, chives, leeks, garlic, peanuts, and the yellow canola blossoms that blanket the island with patchwork precision each spring. On the sea the mackerel and abalone keep the men busy while the women dive under the waves for sea-grass and urchins. On a cool morning in April a horsehand at Genghis Khan Ranch drives his six horses into their corral. Few riders are expected on a cold day so early in the season, but he smiles and hums all the same. I climb a volcanic cone to the lighthouse at the highest point on the island. Horses graze below next to more volcanic mounds, which are in turn covered with