Uh-oh, another Tori Amos fan, and a Hello Earth story.

[Zimri Smith <ST701790@brownvm.brown.edu>]

After reading all the hoopla here about Tori Amos over the last week
or so, it's been planted in my brain that this is someone to
check out. So last night when I was listening to WRIU (from
the U. of Rhode Island) and they played Peter Gabriel/Kate's
Don't Give Up, I was of course reminded of .gaffa and therefore
of all the Tori chatter. Called up and requested anything
by Tori, and the next song to come on after Don't Give Up was
Little Earthquakes, which was *amazing*. Then the DJ segued
from Little Earthquakes into Babooshka, and it was just... perfect.

I'd never heard Tori before, and now I think I'm going to have
to go get it. Thanks all.

I've been meaning to post something about Hello Earth for a while,
but I haven't been sure if I can really express it.
I love the song, but sometimes... well, I suppose I should say
that it scares me silly. It's the imagery that comes from this
part that does it:

(pardon inaccuracies -- I'm operating from memory here)

Can't do anything
Just watch them swing with the wind out to sea
All you sailors  [...get out of the water]
All you cruisers
All you fishermen
head for home
(etc)

I get this image of Earth as seen from a distance, probably
from high orbit. Looking down, you see a horrific, dark storm
shooting out to sea, toward a sailboat, on which the sailors
are ignorant of the impending horror-show that a nasty storm
at sea can be. The reason this occasionally conjures up real
fear is that I've done a some open water passages on
sailboats, and know first-hand the potential for feeling
helpless and alone out there when a dark wall appears on the
horizon and grows quickly, consuming the entire sky in an
angry black froth. I've been scared shitless out there, but at
the same time it's weirdly exhilarating. Whenever some sort
of nasty weather starts to come, I can't help playing over
and over again in my mind, "All you sailors/All you cruisers..." etc.
The worst time I couldn't stop running the lines through
my head was about 14 months ago, when my father was sailing to
the Virgin Islands and got into a nasty storm (50 knot winds,
40 foot seas). A simultaneous set of events led to what is
called a "goosewing jibe", which is a generally a bad thing.
What happens is this: the boat is at the bottom of a trough
between waves (in this case, about 40-footers, which are big
and scary), and the mast sticks up above the top of the waves
(on Mariah, the mast is about 60 feet tall), catching wind
above the waves that isn't down in the trough. As the boat
goes up the side of the next wave, the sail fills more and more.
Now, if the sail is off to one side, say, the port (left) side,
and the wind starts to fill the sail *from* the port side, beginning
at the top of the sail, you don't really notice this happening
unless you're staring at the top of the mast. What happens is that
the sail continues to fill, and at a certain point, fills more
from the port side than the starboard, and as it continues to fill,
violently whips to the other side of the boat. There is what is
essentially a big stick on the bottom of the sail, called a boom,
which during a jibe (a jibe -- or for the Brits out there, a gybe --
is that violent movement of the sail from one side to the other)
becomes a big baseball bat being swung at least as fast as the
windspeed. Anyway, as the 50 knot winds swung this big bat,
my father was standing up and caught the end of it right in the
face. Miraculously, he wasn't killed, and because he was wearing
his harness, he wasn't thrown overboard. But his head was bashed
pretty badly, and needed to be pulled from the boat, as they were
about 350 miles off shore and couldn't just duck in to the nearest
hospital. The problem was that the weather prevented any boat-to-
ship transfer, and the coast guard tried several times to get him
off with a helicopter and a rescue sling, but the waves were still
too bouncy, and it wasn't possible. 36 hours after the accident,
Air Force air/sea rescue was finally able to get him off the boat
by dropping frogmen from a helicopter, who patched him up some and
put him in a horseshoe sling which was dragged behing the boat to
a distance at which it was safe for the helicopter to come down
and pick up him and the frogmen.
Anyway, during that awful 36 hours, the only information my mother,
brother, and I had was that he'd been struck by the boom during a
jibe in a storm, and that the coast guard and air force were trying
to get him off the boat, but couldn't. And among the swirling
vortex of things rushing through my head were the images and lines
from Hello Earth. And of course now I can't help associating
the song with this story, and with ugly storms I've seen
for myself.

So that's my story about why Hello Earth scares me sometimes.

Oh, in case anyone's interested by now, Dad's injuries
(multiple skull fractures, lacerations to the eye, etc)
actually healed pretty quickly, and he's fine. In
fact, he was back on the boat about two months later.
If any of you out there are students and have loved ones who sail,
ask them not to get smashed in the face by a boom while
you're in the middle of finals. It's kind of distracting.

-Zim

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Zimri Smith                           |
internet: ST701790@brownvm.brown.edu  |           ni!
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