AS LAST 12 months’s now unimaginably dry spring was followed by a dry summer, the canals began to dry up — and the place to seek out water, but not an excessive amount of water, was on England’s rivers. As we travelled up from Leicester on to the Trent, we knew that, to travel on a tidal river, an anchor could be essential, should, for any reason, the engine fail.
On the canals, travelling on still water, you might be never greater than a number of feet from the bank. A tidal river, alternatively, even without this winter’s exceptional rainfall, combines current with tidal flow and with wind. So we presented ourselves to the closest chandler, and did the obligatory calculations for a 58-foot steel narrowboat, which amounts to 17 tonnes to be held against wind and tide. They handed over a 20kg anchor, and one other 20kg of chain: ten metres in all, with an additional ten of rope.
The man behind the counter did his best to make the anchor more accommodating. He taped the hinged Danforth design in order that you could possibly lift it without the anchor breaking open, to maximise its hold. He sold us a rubber mat that we could lay it on in order that it wouldn’t damage what was beneath. And he suggested that, if we borrowed an angle-grinder, we could cut off the crosspiece to make it more compact. It seems that cutting into tempered steel is neither easy nor secure; so the anchor stays in its original configuration.
WE STAGGERED back to the boat and stowed it within the cratch — the seating area on the bow — where it takes up the entire side. I don’t want it there, but there may be nowhere else to place it. From that place, it might probably be lifted into the water inside a matter of seconds. When that happens, it can take half the paintwork off the side of the boat on its way down. I can have to face clear to avoid being dragged over because the chain runs free. Once it’s over the side, I don’t know whether I can have the strength to tug it up again.
Everyone on the river has got an anchor. Everyone knows someone who has needed to drop anchor to avoid wasting themselves and their boat from being swept over a weir, or right into a wall. My anchor has one purpose, which is to avoid wasting my life. It occurs to me that this anchor is rather a lot just like the cross: not wondrous, but brutal; less iconic than effective.
IN OUR churches, we now have done our greatest to make ourselves comfortable with the cross. There is frequently at the least one cross inside a sightline from nearly anywhere in a church constructing, though time was when no Anglican church would permit such a logo inside a churchyard. I wear a cross. The liturgy jogs my memory what it was for, and who died on it. The repetition makes it familiar: it has develop into an adjunct to faith.
The anchor is anything but that. The steel has not been finished or polished — why finish something which does its essential work in the dead of night? When I edge past it to select up something, the crossbar glances against the back of my knee and tears the flesh open.
Its functionality is basic and dreadful: it’s there to stop a 17-tonne boat dead within the water. There isn’t any accommodation for the rest. It occurs to me that, after we concentrate on the person of Jesus on the cross and on his suffering, we are able to forget the functionality of the cross that killed him. The first Christians weren’t so distracted. Paul instructs the Ephesians to take the accusations flung at them by the powers and to nail them to the cross. The cross is a life-saver in addition to a life-taker.
ON OUR way up the Trent before the Cromwell lock where it turns tidal, we paused in Newark. At a Sunday-evening service, the congregation sang confidently that their anchor held throughout the veil. It made me wince. My anchor deployed throughout the veil would shred it. Or is that the purpose of that odd, mixed metaphor from the Letter to the Hebrews? The veil needs shredding, and the anchor does that essential violent work.
I once heard a speaker claim that the cross stood on the centre of the Trinity — a startling image, which, on the time, I assumed verged on the heretical. I saw the cross as a waypoint: a step on the trail towards salvation. The anchor, ready at any point to avoid wasting life, is closer to the speaker’s image: my God and my Saviour at the center of the mystery.
John Griffiths is a Reader from St Albans diocese. He is somewhere on the waterways.
