Nearly two hours later we left the shelter of Magnolia Head. The wind and sea caught us head-on. The first big wave flung us skyward, then plunged us down, bow slicing deep into green water. Spray flew the length of the boat, dousing Gail and Alph. She staggered and clambered past the raging engine, Alph scrambling at her heels. She grabbed my arm in both hands and stared up at me in alarm, shouting something. 1gripped-the wheel, not a little alarmed myself. Spray broke again across the windows and the hull rang like a gong. Round-botomed and keel-less, we pitched like a bowl as we soared and plunged from wave to wave. I couldn’t hear what Gail was shouting, but I could guess. Since she couldn’t hear me either, I shouted back whatever came into my head, nodded reassuringly and clenched my teeth against the next roller-coaster plunge. I’ve been on some wild rides, but till then I was either alone or with some more addled boat freaks like myself, too cranked, crazy or otherwise removed from reality to seriously consider anything so mundane as drowning. Our conviction that somehow we’d muddle through in spite of our reckless ignorance remained mostly unshaken, and rose like the Phoenix when the flame of abject fear was past. If I may beg forgiveness for the gross generalization and acknowledge in advance the many exceptions which may be edited in refutation, I believe it is a phenomenon of the feminine half of the human race that they are less inclined than men to plunge themselves in needless jeopardy. Once endangered, they react, like men, with as much courage as their personality contains, but their caution in placing themselves there, though only simple prudence, is often derided as timidity. Men, though inclined toward moral cowardice, have enshrined recklessness as a virtue. I choose to evade response regarding whether or not this is good. Some years later, Gail confided she concocted a litany, a mantra that saw her through that afternoon. While wind and tide conspired to throw us onto the rapid surf at the foot of the bluff and we smashed through wave after wave merely to stay in one place, interminably pitching, yawing, rising and falling ten vertical feet every twenty seconds, she repeated over and over, “ I will not die seasick.” When this nostrum failed as palliative, she substituted the resolve: “Never again.” At last we rounded the Magnolia light and I put her about. Wind and sea at our backs, we fairly flew past Shilshol, where the small-craft warnings fluttered stiff on the mast above the Coast Guard station, and into the shelter of land. “We made it,” we shouted, and hugged each other. We passed under the railroad bridge proud as Drake returning to the Thames. Gail pointed ahead to a row of huge wooden doors, moss-slimed and banded with steel, that barred our path. “What’s that?” “The lochs,” I shouted. She nodded, dawning incredulity in her eyes. We’d visited the lochs together on shore and laughed at the madhouse below. As we inched up the canal, the ponderous doors opened, disgorging a small armada of blithe adventurers scampering like lemmings to the open sea. Past us into the lochs streamed dozens of fancy pukemobiles, top-of-the-line showboats that must have been hiding at Shilshol waiting for the wind to drop. They rushed ahead of us, took lines from the loch crew, poured fresh drinks, settled into deck chairs near their Past us streamed dozens of fancy pukemobiles. Settled into deck chairs near their varnished teak rails, they observed with cold, disapproving hauteur the approach of our noisy, foul and contemptible craft. varnished teak rails, pulled the scrambled-egged visors of their admiral’s hats low over their sunglasses to protect their bloodshot eyes from the dazzle of brass and chrome about them and observed with cold, disapproving hauteur the approach of our noisy, foul and contemptible craft. Undaunted, I shouted to Gail, “Get up on the bow and take the line. I’ll hand up the loch slip.” “What line? What slip?” “They’ll throw you a line. Don’t tie up, just pass it around a cleat and hold fast. I’ll give you the slip, you give it to them.” “You do it.” “ I can’t. Who’ll run the boat?” “No. I can’t do it.” “Will you get the fuck up on the bow before 1 ram one of those fiftythousand-dollar extravaganzas up there?” I pleaded at full volume. With a look that only began by protesting the injustice of it all, she crawled out onto the bow. Of course there was nothing to it. They threw a line and she held one end of it. They screamed for me to shut off my engine and I screamed back if 1 did they were stuck with me, they pumped the lochs full, Gail reluctantly gave back the line and refrained from leaping ashore, and we roared out into Salmon Bay, past Fisherman’s Terminal and under the Ballard Bridge into the afternoon shadow of Queen Anne Hill. We thrashed up the Fremont cut, under the bridge and, as the sun sank behind the downtown skyline, into the bankrupt marina we would now call home. Another fifteen minutes shoving derelicts around till there was room for one more, Gail spending what she describes as the “Worse part of the trip,” back on the bow clinging to Skeet’s tugboat anchor to keep us from drifting away while the wakes of returning Sunday sailors tried to crush her between the hulls, and we were safely moored at the far end of a long cedar log strung along dolphins perpendicular to the end of the dock. IWORKED as if the boss were watching all the next day and by dark had contrived, from scrounged plywood, a dull drill bit, a borrowed skill saw and a bag of screws, a serviceable galley, table and engine hood, and a bunk in the forecastle wide enough for a double mattress. I knew from experience nothing on a boat is composed of straight lines. This was not a problem. Neither is my cabinetmaking, ashore or afloat. So while nothing really fit as it should and visitors either burst out laughing or averted their eyes, it existed, while the previous owner, a meticulous craftsman, had struggled, baffled, for over a year, then retired in defeat. We moved in the next morning: mattress, btedrolls, clothing, pots and pans, dishes, a little food, over a hundred books, my manuscripts, two coleus, three cacti, one Angel-wing and.one Reicher begonia, a jade tree, a black cat named Blizzard and a white one named Babe Puss (Sorry, it’s true), and a bright green parakeet in a spacious blue cage. I spent the first evening aboard teaching the parakeet to screech, “Pieces of Eight.” In the morning it was dead. I’d batched on a boat before and the little inconveniences didn’t bother me. I suppose in this ecology-minded era I should blush to admit it, but I think it’s one of the pleasures of life to stand at the rail and piss in the lake. Women, I’d noticed, require more sophisticated plumbing, so I requisitioned a five-gallon mayonnaise pail from behind a nearby restaurant, thereby simultaneously providing with private sanitary facilities and complying with the law that forbade through-the-hull waste disposal. By her expression alone I knew Gail was astonished at my ingenuity. We adjusted to life on board. Eventually we learned, after the perilous trek down the swaying gangplank under the stern of .the island ferry Concordia, along the rolling, slippery log, stepping over the lines of Skeet’s tugboat, Lois, another liveaboard, an abandoned, ridiculous aluminum houseboat and several lesser derelicts, and finally onto the bow of a plywood gaff-rigged daysailor, how to drop onto our rolling back deck without dislodging the kitty litter, even in the dark. With a smoldering, smoky fire of driftwood in a rusty coal stove, Gail made our coffee, cooked our meals and heated water to clean up afterwards. A monstrous mess accrues in such tight quarters if you do anything but sit, so I sat, but Gail had her standards to maintain. She cleaned from bow to stern daily, but the odds on Noah’s Ark, as we unofficially christened our craft, were against her. Though I horse-traded us into a prop with sufficient pitch to move us smartly through the water and was anxious to do some cruising, Gail announced she’d eschewed travel by water. “You want to go, have at it,” she said with the calm reasonableness used with retarded children. “I’ll stay here in the unlikely event you return. But count me out. I don’t want to drown.” We stayed moored to the end of the breakwater as the last golden days of autumn slipped away and the winter rains commenced. By early December, the crew was ready to mutiny. We existed on nothing plus food stamps. The pitching and rolling of a round-bottomed boat can be vicious even when tied to the dock, and our exposed position insured we notice every passing wake. The cats were neon-eyed berserk and most of the plants had followed the parakeet to Davey Jones. The deck leaked in the forecastle and the mattress was always wet. We were poor, damp and cold. I had developed a hacking cough. Donald once described a boat as a hole in the water you tried to fill up with money, to which Gail retorted that even if it was full of money, you couldn’t live in a hole in the water. | SPOTTED him before he reached the dock: a curly-headed student type, pockets jammed with pipes and paperbacks. As he passed longingly from boat to boat, I could sense he suffered from Jack London Syndrome. Our last bath was nostalgia and there were dog hairs in my coffee. There was no one in the world I’d rather have seen than a glassy-eyed romantic with the sea in his veins and jack in his pocket. I looked at Gail. “Put on the coffee.” “Don’t let him get away,” she agreed. I stuck my head from the companionway. “Ahoy there, mate,” I bellowed like Wolf Larsen. “Come aboard.” It took two days of delicate flattery and artful blarney to transfer the boat from my hands to his and the jack from his pocket to mine, but finally the dog, the cats, the surviving plants and all our worldly belongings waited in our old Plymouth in the parking lot and we stepped off the stern for the last time. “ What will you do now?” the new captain inquired as we turned to go. Gail replied. “I’m going to put an oar over my shoulder,” she said, “and start inland. When someone asks me what I’m doing with the funny-looking shovel, 1’1 stop.” As we reached the shore I heard the screech of a wrecking bar as the new owner began dismantling my unsightly cabinetry. By noon we were rolling down the east side of Snoqualmie Pass. The cedars gave way to pine, the air grew dry, and by nightfall even the pines were gone and the gibbous moon rose over rolling fields of frosted white stubble and naked black voids of summer fallow. Larry Adams is a Spokane writer whose boating days lie fondly six fathoms under. Dana Hoyle is a Portland artist and a long-time CSQ contributor, who is now a staff artist for The Oregonian. 24 Clinton St. Quarterly
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