I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is.
2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the C.A. Thayer, which is a schooner, a real one, not some Disneyfied replica, sitting there at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park like a wooden ghost that somehow avoided being turned into condos or a themed restaurant. Below deck where the light doesn’t quite reach and the wood still smells like salt and history and the accumulated sweat of every sailor who ever gave a damn.
And there was me, performing the only surviving fragment from Aeschylus’ The Argo. One fragment. That’s what’s left of an entire play about the early stages of the Argonaut expedition, maybe even its very beginning. The moment when the shipwright Argus, with Athena herself guiding his hands, built the Argo. That legendary vessel with a piece of prophetic timber from the sacred forest of Dodona set into her prow, speaking oracles to sailors brave enough or stupid enough to listen.
Now, if you know this story at all, you probably know it from the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, that glorious Ray Harryhausen spectacular with the stop-motion skeletons and the bronze Talos and all that Technicolor myth-making. Which is fine. That film is a goddamn masterpiece of its kind. But understand: what I was doing here is the exact opposite of that. No special effects. No swelling orchestral score. No Hollywood heroics. Just one voice speaking fragments of a play that predates that film by 2,400 years, fragments about a ship that would eventually be consecrated to Poseidon and translated (that’s the word, translated) into the sky as the constellation Argo Navis.
Everything else about this play? Gone. Lost. Burned. Rotted. Thrown away by people who couldn’t be bothered to recognize what they had. And this fragment, these few lines that somehow survived, I spoke them in that dark hold to five people. Five. The duration: maybe one minute.
The weather? Partly cloudy. 74 degrees. Perfect California indifference.
You see the fucking poetry of this, right? Performing a fragment about the birth of a ship on another ship. The Argo, which became stars. The C.A. Thayer schooner, which became a museum piece, a monument to its own obsolescence. Both vessels pulled from their intended purpose and transformed into something else, something that bears witness. While somewhere, probably, someone’s streaming that 1963 film on their laptop, half-watching, scrolling through their phone during the slow parts.
This isn’t some one-off vanity project. This is IOTA, a genuinely lunatic, beautiful, impossible mission to perform every existing fragment from the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. I’m talking about thousands of lost plays. Thousands. And what remains? Scraps. Sentences. Sometimes just words quoted by some ancient critic making a grammar point.
Most people would look at that and see nothing. A fool’s errand. Why bother? But that’s exactly the point. That’s exactly why it matters. Because someone has to bear witness to what we’ve lost, to what existed before Hollywood, before everything got turned into content and spectacle. Someone has to stand in a ship’s hold and speak these words about a ship being born to five people who bothered to show up, who understood that this moment, this absurd, magnificent, completely uncommercial moment, was worth being present for.
One minute of ancient Greek verse about beginnings, performed in the belly of a ship that’s reached its ending. Five people willing to sit in the semi-darkness and listen. Partly cloudy skies that couldn’t give less of a shit about any of it.
The Fragment…
The holy speaking beam of the Argo
groaned aloud
The Location…
Let me tell you about the C.A. Thayer, because if you’re going to perform ancient Greek fragments about a mythical ship in the belly of an actual ship, you should probably know what kind of ship you’re standing in.
1895, Hans D. Bendixsen, Danish-born shipbuilder working out of his Humboldt Bay yard, builds this three-masted schooner. And for seventeen years she does exactly what she was built to do: hauls lumber from E.K. Wood’s mill in Grays Harbor, Washington down to San Francisco. Sometimes Mexico. Sometimes she gets ambitious and makes it all the way to Hawaii, even Fiji. She’s a working ship doing working ship things, which is the only thing that matters.
Then in 1912 a heavy southeasterly gale beats the hell out of her. Her lumber days are done. But here’s the thing about ships: if they’re built right, they don’t just die. They transform. So the C.A. Thayer enters the salmon trade.
Every April from 1912 to 1924, she’s hauling 28-foot gill-net boats, bundles of barrel staves, tons of salt from San Francisco to Western Alaska. Every September she comes back with her hold stacked with barrels of salted salmon. This is brutal, dangerous work. And in one of those journeys, a reporter named Max Stern from the San Francisco Daily News is on board, documenting everything. His reports changed labor laws. That’s not nothing. That’s a ship that mattered beyond just moving cargo from point A to point B.
World War I breaks out and suddenly she’s carrying Northwest fir and Mendocino redwood to Australia. From 1925 to 1930 she’s making yearly runs from Poulsbo, Washington to the Bering Sea codfishing waters, carrying supplies and thirty men north into conditions that could kill you if you made one wrong move.
Then the Depression hits and she sits. A decade in Lake Union, Seattle, doing nothing. Until the U.S. Army buys her from J.E. Shields, a prominent Seattle codfisherman. They rip her masts off and turn her into an ammunition barge in British Columbia. An ammunition barge. Like turning a racehorse into a plow animal.
But after World War II, Shields buys his ship back. Fits her with masts again. Returns her to cod fishing. And in 1950, the C.A. Thayer makes her final voyage and enters the history books as the last commercial sailing vessel to operate on the West Coast. The last one.
The State of California buys her in 1957. She gets transferred to the National Park Service in 1978. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1984. Which means she went from working ship to monument, from tool to artifact, from doing to being.
And that’s where I found her in 2015. Except that’s not exactly true. When I was a kid, my 4th grade class slept aboard the Thayer. And at eight years old, I had the 3AM to 6AM watch. So I’d known this ship since I was small enough to think standing watch in the middle of the night on a museum vessel was the most important job in the world. In the hold of a ship that hauled lumber and salmon and men and ammunition and hope and desperation for fifty-five years. A ship that survived gales and wars and the Depression and the indignity of having her masts removed. A ship that, like the Argo, got translated into something else entirely.
You want to perform fragments about the birth of a legendary ship? You do it in a ship that earned its own legend the hard way, one voyage at a time, one storm at a time, one transformation at a time.