shipwrecked

during my stay in London, i am living in short-term housing. policy dictates that we should be kept as close to the office as possible, so my apartment is actually on the Wharf. though i sometimes wish i was closer to the centre of activity in London, there are definite upsides to living near to work, namely that my daily commute is only a 15 minute walk.

every day, twice a day, i cross a footbridge that spans a small strip of water. the Docklands are composed of these small strips of water, created by the landfill and built-up areas around them. they are not nearly large enough or with a strong enough current to be called streams or rivers, but are similar in appearance (long, sometimes winding).

on the second or third morning after i started here, while crossing the bridge, i noticed a small boat in the water, partially sunk. it looked like a small pleasure boat, pitched forward on its nose so that the back third of the boat that was not submerged came out of the water’s surface at a 30-degree angle.

on the walk home, the boat was still there.

maybe this is an indication that i’d been in New York for too long, but when it hadn’t been removed after a day or two, i concluded that it must be a performance art piece. i imagined some arty-hipster carefully guiding the boat through the Docklands, edging it closer and closer to a high foot-traffic junction, under a foggy London night. i could see them positioning it just-so, and then weighting the front end of the boat somehow before jumping overboard and swimming to safety nearby. they must’ve laughed themselves silly at the thought of finance professionals walking by in hordes the next morning, having to confront a physical manifestation of the crisis they were busy fighting. despite its blatent nature, the metaphor to sinking ships is no less painful.

after another week of seeing the boat twice daily, i resigned myself to the fact that it was just a sunken boat and not some art student’s idea of a laugh. the weeks flipped by and i stopped thinking about the boat altogether. it had blended into the background; it was now part of the quotidien.

this morning on my walk into work, there was activity on the water and on the walk home, it was confirmed. the sunken boat had been raised. someone had finally taken notice or the approvals had finally passed up the chain and lo, a rescue operation!

at this stage of the game, it’s more likely that the task was less of a rescue and more of a cleanup. there is a low probability that life can be breathed back into a boat that’s been sunk for about a month. it’s more likely that its removal was to prevent water flow disruption or because it had been a blight on the normally well-manicured environment for far too long.

i’m nearly two months into this rotation, though it feels much longer given what’s happened during that time. it’s strange to think about names like Lehman Brothers as the equivalent of sunken vessels that cannot have life breathed back into them. and yet, all around boats have sunk or are still sinking. those of us left are tasked with distinguishing between the ones that can still be raised, have the water pumped out, and be put back out to eventually sail again, and those that should go the way of my non-performance art piece. it’s not going to be an easy task, but it’s a necessary one. if we’re going to give the boats still on the water a better chance of navigating the storm we have to do the messy work of removing the flotsam first.

cross-posted from tumblr