Episode 1: The Glass Barges of the Northern Sea

One does not just build a ship out of glass.  There are no mallets to swing or pegs to pound, no timbers to bind or planks to shape.  The grand ships of glass on the northern seas are not built, but sculpted on sand bars that emerge near the Barrier Reef briefly once every ten seasons.  The nautical clans of the glass barges converge and sculpt mounds and interwoven tunnels of sand and air entwined with hand-woven cable and wrought rods that stretch toward the sky.  Once the slashing storms rumble and flash on the horizon the barges set sail and anchor just far enough away to watch the lighting grip the rods, race along the cables, and burn the white sand in explosions of seared slashes, filling the night and darkened day with pulses of blue and colorless white. As the tides begin to seep over the scarred sand, hiding them again for another lengthy sleep below the crystal clear waves, the people in one rare eve of raucous festivity celebrate the launching of the new vessel as the waters wash away the excess sand, slowly lifting the newly now-glass mounds and conical vessel from the bar from whence it was sculpted. The young family groups assigned to people and homestead the newest barge wade through the encroaching pools and climb the netted and knotted kelp towards the stalwart newly-appointed captain who watches on with a false air of indifference fitting his status and station.

Living in a world of windows the clans of the glass barges slowly became a quiet and unedited people seeking no pretense of perceived privacy, giving themselves to a deep internal connection beyond what can be achieved through spoken word alone.  Of course my introduction to this fascinating population was not through the mariners aboard the glinting multi-hued vessels.  My introduction to the sea clans led me to very different and false conclusions about the people I had only heard about in stories told by the elders in my own clan as the young nestled and prepared to sleep. I met them in the water, the last place I would ever expect to be, a reality that was always purported to be a death sentence.  I did not meet the mariners, I met the swimmers, and then, only after I fell from the sky.

Next Episode: The Edening