The Tale of Captain & The Fox

Even as a ship’s apprentice, the hearty soul who would become our Captain had one eye on the horizon and one on the smallest details of duty. On the job, her aesthetic sensibilities became refined as she diligently scrubbed barnacles off a dozen hulls and polished spearheads to perfection in the belly of her employers’ whaling vessels. Accidentally and on her own time, she learned the importance of a finely-crafted story, copying the words of Moby Dick by oil-lamplight in her cramped quarters (her initial goal was to improve her handwriting). She read voraciously and dreamed with pleasure.

As she mastered the literal ropes (knot-tying being another of her specialties) of her trade, moving from job to job, she accumulated a loyal group of career sailors at once meticulous, trustworthy, and crustily eccentric. When her ambition crystallized, she sought to formalize these relationships and, to a man, they pledged to serve as her crew. With their help (and at a truly tender age), this seafarer built by hand her own small ship and was awarded the rank of Captain after besting several nations’ professional fleets in a secret regatta held on an undisclosed Northern sea.

Meanwhile, and in much warmer climes, a Fox of some renown (published poet, winner of an amateur prize in photography) found his craftiness underutilized on land. Though he had been content for many years to read, meditate, and think foxy thoughts alone in an un-airconditioned burrow, this fox fancied himself a traveler. For a time he’d been an avid collector of postcards, but despite (or because of) the sultry heat that surrounded him, he became obsessed by images of snow-capped mountains and wide, chilly oceans. As with all foxes, it was his habit to eschew hibernation, but for this gentle creature, the decision had originally been made in favor of more time for philosophizing. Now he studied maps and weather charts in earnest, plotting to experience winter, no matter how far from home he had to travel to meet the cold.

And so he struck out on an afternoon that he judged to be autumnal. Perhaps he wore a jaunty hat; that moment in which he took his destiny into his own paws was, sadly, not recorded. He hitch-hiked north until he shivered, sniffed out a frozen field of water, and was still unsatisfied. Casting himself dreamily adrift on an ice floe, the Fox set off to record the wider world and all its seasons. Camera and scrapbook at his side, and a certain natural scrappiness in his favor, he found himself the happiest he’d been in his young life - floating into parts unknown, interviewing and dining with strangers he met along his pathless path, loving the feeling of every temperature change that rolled through his fur.

Some of what happened in this in-between-time has been lost to history. The Captain sailed and crafted stories for her crew; the Fox padded his patches of ice and turned his thoughts into photographic postcards he mailed to strangers. We also know that the Fox volunteered with Greenpeace for a year or so, and that - while on a mission, incognito - he must have floated up to The Captain’s ship.

Imagine our Fox’s surprise upon boarding, his brush of a tail tucked and his hackles up, expecting a fight over environmental concerns, when he found he had landed upon an unusual sort of whaler. The Captain had by this time chucked her spears and nets in favor of a larger shipboard library and movie theater. She had even, in fact, been seeking an exhibitor for a floating gallery show, and happened to be partial to iceberg photography.

As the Captain and the Fox sat down over a dinner of lentils and roast chicken, an unlikely friendship seemed, well, likely. Sure enough, by the time they’d consumed their grapefruit sorbet, the two had joined forces and begun to draft plans for a creative partnership of sorts. The Captain and the Fox, assisted by a curated crew of creatives, would make their mark, they swore, by paw or pen. It is here their story - and our adventure - begins.