The Mast-Head: Sisyphus and Me

Trudging up the dune path leading to the beach on Tuesday evening, Sisyphus came to mind. I was midway through finally building a swim raft to moor out front in the bay and, in several trips, had carried my tools, number-two cedar deck boards, and dock foam from the house along the rising serpentine path, then down the steps, which I had built to the beach.

My labors were not quite as useless as Sisyphus being condemned by the gods to rolling a stone up a mountain only to have it fall back under its own weight and have to do it again. And yet, there was something similar going on, more similar perhaps than Hercules mucking out the dank Augean stables. Albert Camus argued that there was joy in Sisyphus’s endless toil; the rock was his thing.

My thing is building stuff. Maybe more accurately, thinking about building stuff. I had picked up the chunks of blue dock foam that will provide buoyancy for the swim raft on beaches here and there for more than a decade, storing them in an Augean heap near the woodpile. On a college visit trip in Maine last week, I picked up a mooring anchor; the framing planks came from a friend renovating a house in Springs. I bought some galvanized chain made in the U.S.A. and a shackle made in China at the boatyard. The cedar came from the lumberyard in town.

As I nailed down the last of the deck boards this week, the sun was setting. Soon, the Devon Yacht Club cannon fired, and I sat down to contemplate my work. The raft was large, far more of a thing than I might move by myself. Come fall, I will have to figure out how to get it on higher ground, lest storm tides take it away. Then, come spring, I will have to take it back down the mountain, unaided even by the gravity that to this day pulls down Sisyphus’s rock. But it will be of no matter; such is my thing.