My Great-Great Grandfather, Captain Robert Flanagan, was born in Scotland in 1819 to Irish parents. He eventually became a sea captain who immigrated to Nova Scotia and piloted ships from the open sea into the mouth of the St. Lawrence River during the height of the Golden Age of Sail–the period between the mid-18th century and the early 19th century, when sailing vessels reached their peak.
As one might imagine, the North Atlantic seacoast was flourishing with commerce and almost any sheltered inlet with water deep enough to accommodate a boat attracted sea traders. Ports were crowded with sailing vessels and shipbuilding yards flourished as ships sailed every major ocean and visited every major port doing the world’s business.
These bustling sea coast communities began to see the emergence of another feature: a roof walk built atop the large private homes of sea captains; an architectural element referred to as a “captain’s walk” or “widow’s watch.”
These walkways were especially popular during the height of the whaling industry as, in those days, a whaling expedition could last more than a year and the long-awaited homecoming was something of a major public event.
The romantic story of the widow’s walk has pervaded American culture since the 1800s.
Wr i ter/ Researcher Leigh Donaldson writes, “Depicting an almost mythical structure, the diverse histories behind widow’s walks, whether real or imagined, all seem to merge into a collective nostalgia of a seaman’s wife or companion looking out from a heightened vantage point, in the hope of his safe return.
“While the origin and any utilitarian purpose of widow’s walks remains open to speculation, romantic folklore persists. In his book Chesapeake, James A. Michener writes that the name widow’s walk “derived from the romantic tales of those loyal women who continued to keep watch for a ship that had long gone to the bottom of the coral reef.”
“Even today, widow’s walks can inspire a narrative of a woman attired in a long crinoline dress, pacing for hours with her eyes and emotions reaching out to sea. It is easy to imagine that these 18th and early 19th century structures could have been designed to provide women with a dignified refuge where they could pine after their absent husbands and mourn their deaths at sea.”
The anxiety of those onshore vigils, when storms lashed the cold North Atlantic coasts, when anxiety somersaulted to obsessive levels of worrying about what might have occurred on the rough seas beyond the harbor, these were foreboding, fear-fermenting occasions. With no communication, all one could do was look to the horizon in hopes of spotting a sail advancing through the uncertainty.
The vision of a lonely widow peering into an unrelenting wind at the close of each day as the light faded on an empty horizon, is a poignant reminder: ‘“You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”
An allegory
…taking for granted the things we’ve come to hold dear.
We are inclined to do this with both people and things, things that I would term as intangibles. The dilemma is we do not realize things are slipping away until the situation or state of affairs in one’s life has come and passed. We take things for granted on a daily basis, always with the assumption that whenever we need someone or something, they or it will be there.
(Reflective pause) … there are many things we fail to realize the true value of until they are missing from our lives.
Recent months in the “great deep blue” of this world have demonstrated this truth.
Today, as each of us stand on our proverbial “widow’s watch,” our eyes fixed on a distance horizon, we watch as things we once held dear are slipping beyond our view. Similar to those whose eyes and emotions reached out to sea in a bygone era …we wait to see if things we’ve come to hold dear will return.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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