David, Thunder Thief

Slow dread as it gets dark. I will never get there. My batteries are low. I don't even know what the harbor looks like. Where are the shoals?

I beat wind all day. A strong wind seemed to pivot around to stay in front of me, and the superstitious nature of sailing makes me ask the wind in my mind if it wants me not to go to Ganges Harbor. It is cold again, and I am overpowered, leaning steeply, and the sails making a snare drum snapping roll every time I come up from the lean. My mind rolls behind my eyes: women I have loved are having fun without me, and will have babies with men I don't know. I remember a past lover with new eyes, and see more clearly how absurdly callous I was. I would have laughed at me if I was her. I am lost. Not in space, I know that I am south of Thetis Island, about to pass the north end of Saltspring Island. Sailing is me being lost, and masturbating to myself.

A boat sails out from between two islets. I didn't think that boats that size could pass there. I'll try it. I could turn from the wind and run for a bit, and save about a half hour. Check the chart. Rocks. Rocks that are less than a foot underwater, but never above water, even in low tide. They will have no markers. What is the tide? It's about noon, and the tide should be high. I only draw four and half feet. I could pass at high tide.

I turn, and keep my hand on the tiller. I am not committed. I am waiting until I have to turn back. I can turn back whenever I need to. Until I can't. And now I can't. I am between them. My hand hurts, and I think at it, and I am gripping the tiller too hard. I look over the side. Derk told that you see the shells first. You see the white of the shells, and you know the water is about ten feet, and it's time to turn back. My eyes make images in the reflections of the waters, and then the water is pale with rocks. They roll like still waves under the waves. They are so close. I pay attention to my feet, anticipating the moment, the tear and grkdgkg as the boat wails and grinds. My eyes are fixed into the water, as if staring at the stones will keep them at bay. They don't want to hurt me. They just want my fear. The want respect in the form of my fear. I can't hit them; that other boat got through! There are crab traps. Does that mean that it's deep enough? Is it really high tide? Maybe the charts are outdated. Why did I go this way? This was risk for no reason. Dumb, David. This is dumb. Then they are gone, and the water is brown and dirty again.

Slow dread as it gets dark. Passing the rocks was four hours ago, and now I am out in a straight. The point I need to round, the last turn, is smudged with fog. I disbelieve it, but I know that it is far. It is at least two hours into the dark. I sailed in the dark near Vancouver, but there were so many lights that "dark" is only a comparative term. Here it will be ghostly, and it is. The land disappears into the sky, into the water. and now there is only the horizontal constellation of buoys, lighthouses, and ferries that are grids of lights, like skyscrapers, chunks of cities on the water.

I round the point in good time, and decide not to go into the first harbor. People are in Ganges, not Long Harbor. I'll got to Ganges. I fix my sites on a green light that flashes GREEN-GREEN...GREEN. I pass Long Harbor faster than I expected, and I don't notice that I pass it on little wind. I am struggling with the sails and the wind is dead. This was supposed to be the easiest leg of the trip. The southerly wind that I had fought the whole day would blaze me into the harbor and I'd be ashore in time to get a beer. No. I am going backwards and sideways. There is no wind. I go below deck to check the currents. They are flowing out, towards GREEN GREEN...GREEN. Check the chart. The green is Hoarda Shoals. I point the boat against the current and hope, rather calmly. The GPS has a little battery, and it says I am not moving. Check the charts again, and see that the currents are not with me for five hours. I stand behind the hunchback of the boat before I decide I am really not moving, and I go below and make a sandwich. I stand for another forty five minutes, then another sandwich. Hours pass, and I have beers, hot tea, and a fire about fifty yards from the shoals. Then I drift forward. I drop anchor and sleep.

The battery is kicked. I used the running lights all night, and it is kicked. Why didn't I bring the generator? I get dressed and see I am out of socks. Derk offered me socks and a generator, and I took neither. I have no clue why. I need to charge the battery. If you leave it dead for a while, it will be useless when you get back. I could sneak onto a dock, but how can I sneak a boat? I could take the battery out, but that's idiotic. Where would I charge it? I open the battery box and lift it. Hell, that's heavy. I don't wanna carry this. And I don't really know how this whole system works. I'm gonna mess it up. No. No this is gonna be fun. Today is a sailing day, and this is my job for the day: charge this battery. I take my rusty wrench and bang it on the seat to loosen the rust. I pry it open with a screwdriver, and fit it around the nuts on the battery. The battery is loose, and I feel like a surgeon. The precious, volatile heart of the boat is on the seat with me. I empty my luggage bag, and carefully slip the battery and charger into it. I almost drop it in the ocean. I row to shore with my laundry and my bag, and in the bag, a battery, and the battery is somehow mischievous.

Charging things in public places has an etiquette. Charging a laptop in a coffee shop is nothing extraordinary. People look when I set up my computer, phone, and radio in a long line of wires. This will be my best, and definitely outside of etiquette. I get to the laundromat and start my laundry. Without fully opening the bag, I connect the clamps. Black to negative, red to positive. The charger lights up, and I press a few buttons. A woman complains about the music. I am quiet, but I try not to be too quiet. "It IS Christmas."

"This isn't christmas music. Christmas isn't even what most people think it is. I don't celebrate it." Says the woman.

She tells me that every religion is a lie. I tell her I don't think anyone got it right yet, but that each religion seems to have some good and bad. She says that she stopped being religious, and now she is free. She asks me how long I've been here.

"I just dropped anchor last night."

She is impressed, and I indulge in the pride as she says it is very dangerous to be sailing in winter. I say that I sailed the Straight if Georgia.

"Oh, well! Let me ask you: You sailed the straight in a motorless CAL 25, do you believe in god?"

"Well, hmmm...There was....I found myself calling out to something. I don' think I thought it was there, but it felt good to call up to it. There is something unspeakable out there, and all around us." A safe answer, I thought, by all accounts.

We talk more about christmas. She says that it was always a let down,and now she doesn't celebrate. I say I am Jewish, and that christmas meant chinese food and movies.

"Oh my! You're half? Like on your mother's side?"

"No, both sides."

"OH! And you think you just survived the Straight? God is gonna tell you something. God is trying to show you something. It's just to wild for me to see you here, because, you'know, you're- God chose the jews. God did all kinds of things for them. They are his chosen people. In egypt? He hasn't done things like that for any other people. Not the Scottish, not the French. He loves them. That's why everyone hates them. I hope you are terrorized the whole time. So that God can show you. He loves and is kind. He's gonna terrorize and show you. Wait til I tell my husband. What's your name?"

"David."

The woman almost drops her laundry. "Ha! Well! God is-David...That's quite the name! God is gonna show you. He's gonna say, "David, you're one of the chosen! Go on! God needs you to do what he chose you people for! You're in trouble now. You're gonna be in my prayers. What a name. They call him the God of Israel, you know?"

"Yeah."

"He's gonna take you out there and show you something. He wants you to see it. You can ask him for it. Ask god to prove himself to you. I'm gonna pray for that, that god shows himself to you."

In my mind, I don't want to be terrorized, and I don't really want to be driven to religion, but I'd not pass up the chance to have god reveal himself to me.

I look down into my back and a red light is blinking on the charger. The battery is full. I thank the woman, whose name is "Dee". She laughs about my name and the spectacle of my blood and the building of the third temple in Jerusalem as she leaves the laundromat.

I bundle up the battery, and sneak off the land with it. I replace it, and check it. I am proud, and I have tended well to this boat, this beast. I work slow, though, and try to remember when it was first for me that being Jewish was even worth noting.

Shower

What they say is true, and cleanliness is akin to god. Derk and I drove for a half hour to a public pool to shower. In the white tile tank of the shower room, my concept of wealth occurred to me: To have the necessities at arm's reach.

Foundry

I welded mostly on the knuckle turntable. A steel wheel, maybe fifteen feet across, with I-bars welded to it like the hour markings on a clock. There were three sections around the wheel. One for a loader to put knuckles in between the I-bars and remove the finished knuckles. A second section had a booth around it with rubber curtains. That is the welder's booth. On either side, a red button to stop the wheel, and in front of the welder, above the wheel's axis was a gaping hood that sucked up dust and fumes. To the right was a cage around a motor that turned a large tire. The tire pressed to the turntable, and kept it moving. The third section was the air arcer, curtained off like the welder. There, another toothless but respected man used an air arc to cut the steel nubs off the casting. Air arcing is melting metal and then shooting the molten out with compressed air in a noisy cone of spark and smoke. Then the knuckles, welded and air arced, went back to the loader, a boy of eighteen, who used a winch on a yellow I-beam overhead to lift the knuckles off the table and onto a tray to be taken away.

The winches were on every few support beams. Sometimes, when I worked in the open, I would look up to see men leaning forward like draft animals to pull the I-bar around on it's hinge. The bar was ten or so feet above them, and they pulled it by the winch hook and controller, one in each hand. They'd lean, their hands high, the weight of their bodies up in their arms instead of on their feet, and they'd look like large marionettes, attached at the hand to the rod above them. They rarely go out of the swoop of their bar. All day, the bar swings back and forth, and they sway under it.

When I wasn't frustrated in the booth, I would look up to see the black opening that swooped up to suck out all the air around me. I began to think of the turntable as a large spinning woman, whose skirts I worked under all day. The likeness to Chaplin's Modern Times was so striking that I couldn't laugh, and any self pity felt illegitimate. Jeff would turn the table up, and I'd scramble to weld as fast as the table offered more and more knuckles.

Eventually, I found a sort of dance. I can still sort of remember it. Push, pull,flip up, flip over, and the last part, the grace of it, was to spin the ninety five pound shape on it's head correctly into place for the air arcer. This is all done with the left hand only, because the right hand holds the stinger, the electrode. But you don't really use your arm, you use your body weight. It is very taichi like in that your whole body moves the piece. In the end, you simply sway forward, sway left, sway right, and back. Your body moves the metal and your arm guides. Four hundred and fifty times in eight hours.

Never have your hand beneath the knuckle. When it falls, let it. I tried to catch a knuckle a few times, and once the knuckle caught my finger between itself and the corner of the I-bar, and my fingernail died and fell off.

The dance is impossible to teach exactly, and it seems like everyone who learns the turntable does it their own way. The dance is imperative. You could never weld enough knuckles in a day without a dance, and maybe more importantly, you could never let your body go on autopilot without a dance.

The Dance is elaborated and spiced by the movements of the right hand with the stinger. The left hand might hold the knuckle up in suspense as the right hand globs on metal to a crack, and a satisfying release when both hands let go and the knuckle spins down into place like a high diver. Other bits of personal flair include the jerk of your neck as you flick down the welding hood. Finally, when you dance with ease, you add song.

At first, I sang to pass the time, and to keep my morale. The foundry is loud, and everyone wears ear plugs, so no one can hear much. Most people were also wearing respirators, or sometimes airstreams, which are helmets that look like props from sci-fi movies, fully enclosing the head, so everyone's voice was muffled. I sang loud, because no one could hear me. I thought I might seem silly, singing in the foundry.

One day, as I watched Jeff weld, I heard him sing beautifully. Really beautifully. In his voice is a love of singing, and a love of his own voice. I don't mean that he “loved his own voice” in a self important sense, but that he knew how to make sounds that pleased him, and he celebrated his voice to himself, and sang with comfort and confidence.

“I heard you singing a little bit ago.”

“Oh yeah. You gotta sing. Or you'll go crazy. You go around here and everybody's singing to themselves.”

“You've got a good voice.”

“Yeah, you know, there's no job that ain't work, there's no job that you gowna love, but maybe music. I could spend hours in the studio, doing production. I think if things mighta been different, I'da been making music. That ain't work to me.”

He is the lead welder, in a huge building of men singing to themselves unabashedly.

The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship

To Whom it May Concern:

I am in British Columbia. I am on Vancouver Island, in Boat Harbor, a few miles south of Nanaimo. I am on a modified CAL 25. The modification is a little vault to the ceiling inside, so that I can almost stand. I am tied to a float, tied to three anchors set out in a triangle, in about ten feet of water, maybe ten feet from the costly dock. That is our “Eff You!” to the marina. You can drop anchor anywhere, and so we set the boat up mind bogglingly close to the dock.

The boat is 25 feet long. CAL 25, 25 feet long.

Names. For a while, I thought of naming it “Fool's Errand” but I thought that that would invite bad luck, and bad words about whoever was on the idiot boat whenever the bad luck did hit. I call it the Fool of the World now, for the book my mom read me as a child. It helps me be humble when I am in trouble, and people look at me and I get embarrassed. I think, “Here I am, a fucking idiot, making a fool of myself on a boat.” And then I remember that that is the basic concept of the name of my boat, and I think, “Yep. Yeah, that is me. I am a fool. Ah, well.”

There is a culture of live-aboards here in Canada thanks to an ancient maritime law. The law is that no harbor may turn away a ship, ever. This is to ensure that ships can come in to find safety in storms. This combines with another law that says that no one can own water, and water extends up to the historical high tide line. I can walk along any beach, and even over recent high tide lines, if I can cite a time when the tide did extend to where I am. I can walk onto your beachfront property, and say, “In 1826, the tide went into your living room,” and I'd have a pretty legitimate claim. When I got here, a man told me I was trespassing on another man's land and water. Derk said, “I didn't know you could own water. You guys don't have high tide laws?” The man responded, “Well, yeah, if you wanna get technical...” Oh, I do. I want to get quite technical.

To claim water, all you have to do is set a mooring, or an anchor. A mooring is a huge weight with a float at the end of a line for you to tie onto. Drop one of those, and that is your float, and you can charge people to tie up to it. People fill nice bays with moorings, and people come to live on their boats. The most people I have see so far was Cadboro bay, where it was all basically earthy punks. Maybe ten of them. There were more in Vancouver, but that town is trying to flush them out. Live aboards look and are crusty, so the sparkly city tries to flush them out. However, that ancient law is well know and long cited by the live aboards, so the city can't really get them directly. And the law is so old that it will maybe never be undone. It is maritime law, which is federal, so no matter the local laws that threaten the people on the boats, the federal law will always trump. Vancouver doesn't like them, but they are safe.

None of this applies in America. In America, you can own the beach and the water. Old families set moorings in the best spots many decades ago, and they are occupied, and costly to use. You can't just drop an anchor if things are not safe. The water there belongs to someone, and you could get hit with trespassing.