Sea Change

Since I am not a walking dictionary, I need to find answers for questions that arise. Lately, the term “sea change” pushed my want-to-know button after I heard it used a few times. In context its meaning could only be guessed at, so after searching, I found out it simply means a radical change or transformation. 

    Not yet satisfied, I went a bit further to find its earliest usage. It turns out William Shakespeare first used it in his play “The Tempest” in 1610. With wildly beautiful poetic lines he wrote “Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”

     Using Shakespeare’s name might stop some from reading further, but I used it because it illustrates the use of the English language in its highest form. We’ve experienced lots of sea-change on the local level. Perhaps some day there will be a sea change invention that will let us peer through a scope and gaze at a scene of untouched prairie from the past.  Appearing on the horizon, we can watch a herd of bison making its way toward us, and a few miles to their side a hunting party of Indians mounted on their finest, fastest ponies patiently waits to run amongst them.  

     Not many years after the buffalo hunters the screen focuses on a sweating work crew wielding shovels and driving teams hitched to Fresno scrapers as they dig and shape a rail bed through the county. The Fresno was itself such a revolutionary and economical device that it has influenced the design of modern bulldozer blades and earth movers. A sea change, if you will. Said to be one of the most important agricultural and civil engineering machines ever made, it has been designated as an international historic engineering landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

     My dad scoured the countryside for antique items, and one time came home with a stick shaped with a draw knife that had a similar but shorter piece attached to it with a leather strap. What is that? “It’s a flail,” he answered, “they used it to knock the kernels from the wheat straw.” That brought the past into my hand. Now the kernels would lay there and require winnowing to separate the kernels from the chaff. Only then could it be bagged for marketing. Can we consider today’s harvesting methods to be a transformation, a sea change?

     The above scenarios are obvious ones, but to get down to considering deep-seated changes, look at the path our human culture has walked. The best tools and weapons the stone age cavemen had at hand were rocks and stones in their natural form. They developed a bit when they learned to shape them into sharp edged arrow points, digging tools, and stone-walled shelters.

     Eventually the bronze age appeared which may have been discovered when copper and tin-rich rocks bled molten liquid if set too close to a fire. Perceptive people recognized that they could shape and mold items from this strange thing. The iron age followed when they discovered and produced iron after recognizing that its durability and usefulness exceeded that of bronze.

     The vast industrial age has given us the machines of cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes. Sometimes things came too quickly and left people out of work. Remember the Luddites. They protested and destroyed machines that replaced hand work. But they couldn’t stop progress. Development has followed development, and the last I’ve heard, we’re now in the digital age where such things as these words are being typed on a computer and will soon be transmitted to my editor via the internet. What’s next? 

     In case we take this sea change thing too seriously, look at a lighter example recently featured on Facebook. An unshorn buck sheep had been corralled in Australia after roaming wild for five years. He hadn’t shed any of his fleece which had just kept growing thicker and longer on his body. A video pictured him looking almost unearthly as he walked down the alley of a shearing shed. It took a man almost an hour to shear through the twig and bug infested wool. Finally when the clippers were turned off, the shearer learned the fleece weighed 77 pounds. Let’s call it a light-hearted example of a sea change.

     We didn’t even look at the sea changes in religious thought where paganism, polytheism, monotheism, even atheism existed, some rising, some dying. All religions have their own story. Now I must get busy making my personal sea change, for the better, of course.