WINTER COMING

(From MAGIC HARBOR by Don Berry)

 

 

 

There is a poignant, almost tender feeling in the harbor the past few days. Like watching a good friend sail out, not knowing when you will see him again. This poignancy is odd, because it is the result of a warning -- a warning I dread.

Winter is coming.

After a couple of weeks of brilliant sun, high contrast light- and-shadow, glittering waves and bright blue sky, the weather suddenly shifted. The temperature dropped 30 degrees overnight, from the low 90s to the low 60s; halfway to freezing in the b link of an eye.

And it began to rain. A thousand miles northwest of here, a deep bowl of low pressure tucked itself into the Gulf of Alaska and began to rotate slowly. Like a great waterwheel in the sky, it swept up moisture from the ocean and scattered it across t he land. Puget Sound again took on the subtle pearly grays that are its natural color; the contrasts softened, the sparkling waves relaxed, the brilliance eased away. It is a little like watching a showgirl remove her makeup. "Good" weather in Puget So und is flashy and amusing; but it is, plainly, unnatural. Our natural state is softness, not glitter.

Even this early rain is soft. The drops are tiny, and sometimes they sound on my deck as though some giant were dropping handfuls of tiny needles up there, barely perceptible, just enough to say hey, I'm here. But it goes on for days, and there is e nough that my dinghy needs bailing every time I use it. Winter is coming.

Those of us at anchor do not expect to come unwounded through hard winters. For us there is a question that will surely seem melodramatic to the shorebound, but is real to us: What will become of me? What will become of my friends?

My friend Carl of SLEEPY JEWELL may not be here this winter. He tells me They are putting him in the Old Soldiers Home for at least a year. He is frightened. He does not understand what is happening to him.

I don't understand either, because all I have is the picture in Carl's mind, and those images are blurred, like a shoreline seen through morning fog.

When he came aboard my boat yesterday under the misting gray skies, he had just been released after two weeks of a detox program at the Veterans Hospital. In the program were not just drunks like Carl, but crack junkies, psychotics, victims of Vietna m combat stress, and the full range of jetsam cast overboard from a sinking society.

It was supposed to be a four week treatment, but he hadn't been able to handle the whole thing, so They sent him back to his boat to get his discharge papers; the requisite paperwork for getting into the Old Soldiers Home.

Carl is a gentle, small man in his sixties with an inner core I can only describe as a kind of innocent sweetness. He might have served as a model for Popeye, and I often think of him that way. His hair and beard are a shining white, his nose smashe d flat from ancient battles, his eyes (when sober) a clear, pale blue. When ashore he dresses more neatly than most water rats, in clean clothes from the Free Store.

His only education has been what life as a seaman taught him, but he unquestionably has a natural artistic talent. He's done portraits of me which I treasure, and he got through much of the confusion in detox by doing pen portraits of his fellow addi cts. I wish he did more.

Carl first went to sea during World War II, as a sixteen year old. He went through that war, and Korea, and Vietnam, usually as a merchant seaman, Ordinary or A.B. He belonged to both the Seaman's International Union and the Sailor's Union of the Pa cific, until he lost his papers for the booze. That was a long time ago. After that he sailed on his passport, or on vessels that did not overly concern themselves with paperwork.

Now Carl lives here, aboard SLEEPY JEWELL, when he is not ashore on long binges with his SIU buddies from the hiring hall. It is the binges, of course, that trip him up and lead to the Old Soldiers Home, because he gets caught driving. In Washington state a DWI conviction leads to a complicated involvement with the law, but most of all with the social workers and the complex of social services that are meant to help, but also confuse and terrify the beneficiaries. The detox program was part of that .

Carl's boat, SLEEPY JEWELL, is almost indescribable. It is one of the most confusing boats I have ever seen; more like a structuralist work of art in progress than a vessel. The hull came from some Boeing experiment in the 60s, but it has been added to and subtracted from so many times it is difficult to see what the original intent was. I know at least one of the cobbled-on cabin houses came from the shore gig of a Navy battleship. The most bizarre structure is a pair of fanciful wings, like the carapace of a great insect, which were designed to shield a pair of jet turbine engines mounted abeam.

The interior is a nightmare; a tiny passage just wide enough to place your feet between heaped piles of rubble and junk; hoses, bolts, lines, wrenches, engines, pumps, oil cans, gears, tarps -- anything in the past twenty years that ever looked as if it (1) might someday be useful or (2) was too much trouble to throw away. Every object in the world fits into at least one of those categories.

SLEEPY JEWELL now rests beside one of Russ Trask's docks, hauled up a few weeks ago so Carl could scrape the bottom. That was before his last encounter with the law, so the bottom has not been scraped and the great hull lies beside the pier where it goes dry on every low tide.

Often when I pass along the pier, the sound of classical music floats up from inside the beached monster. The perfect clear will of Bach, the rationality of Vivaldi, the power and force of the great visionaries who created order from chaos, beauty fr om the vibrating of a string, and truth from nothing at all.

Now winter is coming, and I think Carl will somehow forget to get to the Old Soldiers Home. I am sorry for that. It would be good for him to be in a warm, dry place, out of danger; out of the wind and the cold and the rain and threats he does not un derstand. A place where he could do his drawings and his portraits, where he could laugh and his clear blue eyes sparkle, and go to a warm berth and sleep warm and wake up warm. A place where he could be comfortable and a little forgetful and listen to his music and understand from it there is purpose and coherence and clarity and order in the world and all is safe.

But the chaos of winter is coming, and I do not think that will happen. Not to Carl, not to my friends, and not to me.

 

 

end

 

Winter Coming
©1995 Don Berry