A Story, By the Water and From Above

By Osman Can Yerebakan, 2024 Writer in Residence, Mystic Seaport Museum

The winds are rough on the excursion from which I am typing these words—up and down we go, chasing the unclarity of the horizon ahead. The destination sits far off, across the Atlantic, towards northwest Europe. I am on an aircraft, en route to Amsterdam to connect to Milan. The turbulence we’re experiencing over Canada is not unlike the rough sea, challenging the stubborn vessel with its precarious blows. I know that “easy” has rarely been a part of any voyage. For me, the journey started in the seashore city of Antalya, on the Mediterranean part of Turkey. Growing up a ten-minute walk from the sea, I took the coastal life for granted. I might have even envied those who lived in Istanbul where the sea was equally prominent but so was the culture and its expressions.

Looking back today, I see an unparalleled privilege in the ease and the heat, the reach and the breeze. The way the seagulls glide onto the surface and get back up or the boats dot the dark blue water in the afternoon carving visions that linger in memory and eventually settle for good. And there is yakamoz—a word in Turkish, without direct English translation, meaning the moon’s reflection onto the sea at night. There is hardly any better painting than a bulbous yakamoz on a July night when the full moon washes the dark sea with a liquid silver hue.

In terms of the journeys, the move to New York from my hometown sixteen years ago is the biggest that I have ever embarked on—one that I doubt will be overshadowed by any other. Over the years, I have zigzagged the Atlantic countless times, traversing the capricious waters from thousands of feet above in an airplane, with an anticipation of reaching home of which the definition or the address has only become growingly vague. Living an ocean apart from my hometown perhaps gives me a more day-to-day awareness of distances. Between the physical reality of the mundane and the memories embedded in the cerebral, there is a slippery state of belonging, both here and there. Here I am crossing the ocean again, when the waves of the sky are rough on our vessel.

I returned from another journey a day ago, from Mystic, Connecticut, where I spent a week at Mystic Seaport Museum in early April. New England weather was still indecisive about standing on our side or acting mischievous, constantly showing her different face much to our helpless curiosity. Throughout the week, my visits to the Museum’s various departments slowly revealed the sea’s entanglement with storytelling. From the whale-slaughtering expeditions to greedy invasions in search of new lands, the sea has witnessed some of the starkest realities of humankind. My time at the Museum indeed urged me to see the boats’ sculptural aspects, not only through their formalist heft in energetic geometries but also with their static silence that contains depth of narrative. Exploring the collection that includes over five hundred boats in a plethora of sizes, I witnessed their rough compositions in which elegance rests. Painted by the countless strokes of the sea, their canvases were elaborately worked, primed with the wind and finished with salt. Their silence was eerie and their stillness hypnotizing. Retired to the land, they contained a sculptural completeness, both in shape and soul. They no longer ushered us across the ocean or to the next town, but they always gestured ahead, affirming that a destination awaits.

After spending most of my life moving back and forth between continents, the liminal space of travel has gained resonance itself; the in-between state has claimed its own poignancy. My travel experiences on aircrafts may have lacked the romantically lingering ease of a sail, a pace that demands savoring the journey. The exposure to the Museum’s boat collection, however, let me imagine. What intrigued me was not only the upcoming exhibition space dedicated to displaying some of their boats in the collection—I also mused on the countless stories enveloped inside each vessel. Before some of them go on view in the inaugural exhibition next year, I witnessed their calm resonance outside of the spotlight. Tired might be one attribute to describe them in their retreat, but their sculptural afterlives defy any sign of wear. Like lines on a face, their signs of time only tug them towards timelessness. As a constant traveler myself, I strive for the sea stories that inhabit each of them: how different are they from mine? Are the greatest and the bleakest human stories similar in core even when they are decades or centuries apart? There are many documented experiences, including a Cuban family escaping to Miami or a Museum visitor recognizing her grandfather’s boat decades later. The vessels, however, are silent witnesses to many untold or forgotten human tales as well. War, love, ambition, curiosity, or even greed and violence drove many crafts ahead, and as my exploration into the collection has proven, always a grander human element awaits to be discovered. Between the wooden cracks and chipped paint lies more to discover, most of which will perhaps never see daylight.

My sea story is still an unfinished book, an open-ended journey with more and more chapters being added as curiosity for places and people guides my way. Born and raised by one sea and living surrounded by another one in New York, I can rarely imagine a life far from it. The sea, for me, is a reminder of what awaits in the invisible, beyond the horizon line, as well as beneath the surface. My sea story stems from this curiosity for other tales, far or near, prompted by my urge to get near to them to listen. The sea is a carrier, just like the sky or the land, it tugs and hauls our stories, from the bleak to the hopeful, when the destination means an end or a beginning. Having never lived away from the sea is a reward, a grounding and calming prize that re-assures the existence of stories out there in the sea, buried, floating, or hovering above.

Published in the Mystic Seaport Museum Magazine | Spring/Summer 2024 Issue