"Old Ironsides" Under  Sail Brings a Lump to the Throat

Texas  City Sun,  July 27, 1997

By MAX  RIZLEY, Jr.

I  suspect only another member of the tall ships fraternity would understand why,  as I was talking with my mother last week about the sailing of the USS Constitution, I had to stop in mid-sentence to  deal with a very big lump in my throat.

Oh, anyone can get wide-eyed with wonder at the fact sheet on "Old  Ironsides," the legendary frigate who celebrated her 200th birthday last Monday  by setting sail under her own canvas for the first time in more than a century.  Everyone knows the basics -- oldest naval vessel in the world still under  commission; got her nickname when a seaman on the British frigate Guerriere saw cannonballs bouncing off her hull and  remarked "her sides are made of iron!"; pennies donated by schoolchildren paid for her 1930s renovation.

Those are the basic, elementary-school facts. But, as you recall the vision  of this American icon ghosting along on the Atlantic breeze last week, consider a few other facts, for a moment, and let them sink in:

-- President George Washington authorized her construction. -- John Adams  was president when she was completed in 1797. Washington himself was still alive.

-- The document for which she was named was only 10 years old when she was  launched, the nation whose flag she flew was only 16 years old. And that flag had only 16 stars.

-- The bolts in her two-foot-thick "iron walls" of oak planking were forged by Paul Revere. And he supplied the copper sheathing to protect her hull from shipworms.

-- Today's Marines sing about "the shores of Tripoli"; the Constitution was there.

-- In the War of 1812 against Great Britain, Constitution and five sister ships belonging to a still-wet-behind-the-ears United States utterly humiliated the world's most  formidable naval power.

Those are the particulars, and it is breathtaking on its face that their 18th-century subject is still with us in the almost-21st century, that she is still afloat (on, I am told, about 20 percent of her original timbers), and that she can still be sailed.

But to the sunburnt, tar-covered square-rig rats out there, those who love and live these graceful ladies from the past -- Galveston's Elissa, San Diego's Star of India, Philadelphia's Gazela, and all the others -- Constitution's brief sail tapped an emotional well few others can fathom.

Maybe I can explain. Maybe not. But I'll try:

You see, a sailing ship is alive -- anyone who has been around them for any length of time will swear to it -- and she is alive beyond the roll and pitch of  her deck and thrum of the wind in her rigging. She has a soul and a heart that long for blue water and fresh breezes, and chafe at the fetters of dockside life.

If you are attuned to that heart and soul, you feel the sorrow and longing of a gallant tall ship held captive to the land by wire rope and chain, and you feel her joyous leap when the last mooring is cast off and she is again free to  hase the horizon.

As a caged bird yearns for the sky, so the sailing ship aches for the sea.

And when any of these  proud ladies is brought back from limbo to life -- when she is allowed, if even for just an hour, to fill her canvas and point her bow toward the open sea, to once again fulfill her purpose -- well, in the inverse of a certain presidential sound bite, "we feel her joy." But when it's a ship as venerated, as  heroic, as closely tied to the infancy of our Nation as the Constitution -- a ship who might have heard the very voices of Washington and Jefferson and Adams -- pointing her flying jibboom toward the same seas she tamed 200 years ago, raw emotion chokes off the words.

We can only watch in awed silence, and dab at a tear as we resonate to the  exultation in her oaken heart.

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