POWER CORRUPTS

(From Magic Harbor by Don Berry)

 

 

 

I was about half way through fixing dinner when I had this great idea. I would scoop up all the water rats I could get hold of and take them on a tour of the harbor where they live.

I think this idea, somewhat out of character for me, came about through the interweaving of several small frustrations. Perhaps most spontaneous ideas are formed from small frustrations, I don't know. It's a reasonable theory.

In this case, the first frustration is that I had been dead in the water for almost six months. Going through the ordeal that internal combustion engines inflict on somebody who depends absolutely on them and can't afford to fix them. After six mont hs of patient resignation, the final problems had been solved a couple of days before, and my engine was actually running.

I was mobile again, and it flooded me with a sense of relief and gratitude. I don't move much, and I don't particularly want to. I'm not in a cruising mode at all -- this is just where I live. It is the freedom to move that is a central value in my life. The inner concept of freedom is, after all, a concept of possibilities, not habits. I could feel raw spots on my wrists where the manacles had been chafing for half a year of enforced anchorage.

The second frustration was when the beautiful replica of LADY WASHINGTON came into the harbor. They gave tours of the boat and took people out on short sailing trips, and I couldn't afford either one of them. Just to go on board cost $7, and a few h our sailing trip was $20. This is actually a tremendous bargain any way you look at it, but only if you've got the 20 bucks. All my recent 20 buckses had been devoured by the voracious lump of iron in my engine compartment.

So I figured I would give my own tour, and take the water rats with me whether they liked it or not. When this tour idea flashed up in my mind, like a hole card triumphantly revealed, I instantly stopped chopping vegetables, leaving a little pile of peppers and celery and onions and garlic on the cutting board. In its newfound health, starting my engine was not only easier than cooking, it was easier than eating.

There are two steering positions on my boat, one inside the cabin and another directly overhead on the upper deck. Under way, I always steer from the flying bridge outside, a fact that has some relevance in the events that followed.

Julia of LEGACY was anchored closest to me. I cast off my mooring and climbed up the ladder to the flying bridge. Little LEGACY is a 26' sloop, very low in the water, and my boat stands ten feet in the air above her. Frankly, I was hoping that hear ing the rumbling booga-booga-booga of a Big Block Chevy 454, combined with the looming tower of my flying bridge, would have an intimidating effect on Julia.

It is only fair to say that Julia is not easily intimidated. I have seen her swinging eight foot oars at people who tried. I have seen unwanted suitors falling all over each other to get the hell off LEGACY when Julia decided she wanted them off. A nd when she gets rowdy she's like a small scale nuclear explosion.

At this particular juncture, I definitely owed her one on the rowdy account. A couple of nights earlier Julia had been in a wild phase, and she had recruited Dale of OBLIO to conduct an inebriated midnight raid, of which I was the target.

Out of a serene and contemplative sleep I was wakened by the thumping of dinghies at my stern, quite a lot of shouting and laughing by Julia, and a steady giggle that turned out to emanate from Dale. The bearded old anarchist had been swept up in Jul ia's tornado and was just doing what he was told, which is his supremely successful policy with strong women.

So they came loudly and thumpingly aboard, and there was a lot of arm waving and shouting and criticism that I didn't get into the joyful spirit of the thing immediately.

"God damn trouble with you, Berry," Dale said with disgust, "is you got to be raped before you'll have any fun." There is actually a certain amount of truth in that, so I didn't argue. Argue, hell, I wasn't even fully conscious. I was just sitting up in my berth with my sleeping bag around me trying to figure out what was happening.

In the meantime Julia is noisily pillaging my liquor locker. My own specialite de la bateau is a drink called a Scurvy Preventer, made of equal parts of dark rum and Rose's Lime Juice. Julia knows where everything in my boat lives, and she unhesitat ingly targeted the rum and Roses, bringing both bottles out triumphantly and splashing up huge Scurvy Preventers, while she laughed and shouted at my drowsy helplessness.

In the other meantime, my meantime, I am not getting into the joyful spirit of the thing at all. I am just getting more and more pissed off, grouchier and grouchier, and finally I kicked them both off the boat. They took it with reasonable grace.

"I know you have parameters," Julia admitted cheerfully as they left. "I just don't know what they are."

Nevertheless, there was a certain unpaid debt involved from this raid. Serious damage had been done to my rum stores, and in parting I had promised an act of vengeance coming their way very soon. They both knew I meant it.

When I steered the broad bow of my boat up to LEGACY's hull, I was sort of hoping Julia would believe it was the promised act of vengeance; that I was actually going to ram the tiny sailboat with my seven tons of tall, growling power vessel.

Julia, however, was in her other persona this evening, her calm phase. When she is not on the wild side, she is sweet and witty and agreeable; sometimes nearly demure. Not quite, but nearly.

However, even in her calm phase she is not a good candidate for intimidation, and she was grinning when she popped out of the hatch as I approached with my rumbling engine.

I announced the nature of the Eagle Harbor tour -- "Fifteen minutes of heartstopping excitement for only $87, a thrill you'll never forget, etc, etc." and she scrambled on board over my bow rail.

From there I proceeded over to a transient boat, a little unnamed sloop, and picked up her skipper George and Michael of SEABIRD, who was visiting. In the next few minutes I went up to every boat in the harbor where I thought there was somebody at ho me.

By the time there were four or five people aboard, I felt the Eagle Harbor tour was off to a good start. I forced everybody to listen to the unaccustomed sound of my engine running, required them to visualize the propellor turning, and accepted their congratulations with what I considered modest grace.

It is just possible I overdid the engine thing. A little bit. I think it was Rick of TATTOO who wryly suggested that the proper name for this venture was not the "Eagle Harbor Tour", but the "Power Corrupts Tour". The Eagle Harbor water rats are al l sailors, and not overly impressed by the finer points of power vessels.

It is true there are comparatively few physical pleasures about a motor vessel. You don't get to play with the balance of forces as you do with sails and keel and rigging. But there are a couple of enjoyments, and one of them is the flying bridge. When steering from the flying bridge, the boat disappears almost entirely. You're looking out from a high vantage point into a worldscape that is only water and sky. The boat itself is just a light blur, slightly beneath your field of vision. There's a good reason to call it a "flying" bridge, because it's more like flying than helmsmanship.

Another pleasure is the strange game of forces you have to play when maneuvering at low speed with a single screw vessel. There is virtually no rudder control at low speed, and every time you go into reverse, your stern swings to port. You have to s teer not by the wheel, but by the direction your propellor is turning. If I want to move my stern to starboard, I go into forward gear. If I want my stern to move to port, I go into reverse. I am almost never moving in the same direction I'm pointed, a nd half the time I'm moving forward with my engine in reverse or vice versa.

It is completely un-logical, but makes for a good game. In this particular game the goal was to get close enough to another hull for someone to step comfortably aboard, while never physically touching the other boat. I did not feel it prudent to rem ind the water rats this was the first time in six months I had handled the boat. If the Sea Goddess wishes to crunch some water rat, I am willing to be Her humble instrument.

To compound this situation, none of the boats I was maneuvering alongside was standing still. They were all swinging at anchor in different patterns according to the effect of current and wind on their particular hulls. Boats only yards apart were s winging in different directions at different speeds in the eddies of slack high tide.

This world of changing wind and water is truly an Einsteinian universe, because there is no fixed point of reference, nothing that can be relied on as stable. All motion is relative to some other motion, all forces involved are relative to some insta ntaneous and transitory combination of circumstances. There are so many factors at work in any given second that it would be quite impossible to account for them in a rational way.

If this sounds suspiciously like a nifty paradigm of Life Itself, hey, it's not my fault. But it is good to know that navigating through this intellectually ungraspable web of changes ultimately comes down to just a little forward throttle here and a little reverse throttle there.

By the time I'd taken passengers aboard from nine different vessels, my guest list consisted of 4 dogs, 12 people and 1 cat; the cat was my ship's cat Barnacle, who was making himself exceedingly scarce. Half the people were on the upper deck and the rest clustered either on the fore and aft decks, or in the cabin. The dogs were all wrestling on the foredeck. (Except for Scuppers, who came up to the flying bridge, pooped twice, and returned below.)

Since Julia had such recent experience with getting rid of my rum, I delegated her to dispense the rest of it as far as it would go around. Starting, of course, with me. I must say she was at her most charming, and undertook her duties as hostess pr o tem with sweet agreeableness. She carefully stretched out the remaining rum, trying to be sure everybody got at least a little.

Fortunately, when I stopped at M'LADY to pick up Tom and Nancy, Tom took one astonished look at the population density aboard my boat and immediately came up with a dozen or so cans of beer, which helped a lot.

And so with everybody aboard we set off cruising down Eagle Harbor at idle speed. Eagle Harbor has a sort of zig-zag form, and at each bend there is a sudden, and quite remarkable change of character. From the middle harbor, where we are all anchore d, the urban skyline of Seattle, eight miles away across Puget Sound, is the eastern horizon. The ferry repair docks, an industrial plant, four marinas sprouting forests of aluminum masts, a public dock, and two shipyards are all within a few hundred yar ds. This harbor has been a center of maritime commerce for well over a hundred years, since it was crowded with square riggers transporting Puget Sound lumber all over the world.

But when you turn the first bend, there is a sudden change toward the silent side. The forests of masts are gone out of sight, and only a small boat or two is anchored out. The shoreside houses have docks going out into the cove, reaching away from generous green lawns, often with picturesque dinghies overturned on swimming floats. If Boeing sent recruiting posters around the world, they would probably look a lot like this scene.

But the greatest change happens when you round the second bend. Now there are not even houses along the shore, because this is tidal land. At low tide, the back bay of Eagle Harbor is a half-mile long mudflat. The edges are not tended and manicured , but wet and swamplike, looking like the dream image of an infinitely ancient, prehistoric landscape.

Before the whites came to settle this country, the summer longhouse of the Suquamish people was here on this point. At maximum low tide you can still find the remnants of fish traps set a century ago and more. In the outer harbor that century of wh ite occupation has left much history, but no ghosts. In the back bay, there are ghosts.

And there is silence here. Seattle is gone out of sight, all of the settlement of the middle and outer harbor is behind the black green wall of firs. You can still hear the occasional swish of tires on a landside road, but not much more.

It is now sunset and the sky is pearly gray. The calm waters of the back bay are the same shade as the sky, as though heaven and water were two halves of the same clamshell, reflecting the subtle iridescences of these northern waters; muted, subdued, gentle, serene.

Here a great Blue Heron stands just off shore, calmly watching us pass. Then he springs up, and with long, slow sweeps of his seven-foot wings, he curves gradually up into the bordering trees. There is not much conversation aboard the boat. Even th e dogs have quit wrestling.

We are in shallow water, getting shallower. I ask Julia to monitor the depth for me. She stands on deck beside the starboard cabin door where she can see the depth sounder, and quietly calls the reading up to me on the flying bridge. Sometimes she makes no sound at all, but only mouths the reading silently. Nine feet. Eight. Seven.

At six feet of depth I stop, and we drift for a little while, not saying very much. Listening some. Watching some. After a bit, I put the boat back in gear. Slowly we turn, and begin to ease back out of the back bay. It is like moving a hundred y ears in two minutes. From the silence of the back bay, broken only by the sound of heron's wings, we turn the first corner and see other boats, and in only a few seconds we reach the next bend and re-enter the urban, civilized world, suffused with electr icity and ambition and the absence of ghosts.

I don't know if it was owing to that sudden influence of the civilized world, but I think that was where the mutiny occurred.

Michael of SEABIRD was steering, when he suddenly looked over at me in some alarm and said, "Something's happened to the steering. I don't have control any more."

I was a little alarmed, too. On the sea trial after fixing the engine, the steering had seized, and I was afraid it had happened again.

I took the helm and quickly discovered there was nothing wrong with the steering except that somebody else had taken control of it. Somebody was down in the steering position in the main cabin, refusing to let the boat be steered from the flying brid ge. When I tried to turn right, this obstinate mutineer turned left.

I got into a ridiculous wrestling match with the damned wheel, trying to snatch it out of the mutineer's hands, and having it snatched out of mine as soon as I succeeded. I cursed anybody who was so crazy as to take control of the steering in shallow waters.

 

I don't really know how long this struggle lasted, but we zig-zagged out toward the outer harbor like -- dare I say it? -- a drunken sailor. It was almost as though the vessel itself were resisting every attempt to bring her away from t he world of ghosts and herons back into the world of engines and exhaust manifolds and gasoline and noise.

At last the mutineer quit, and after I'd had the wheel long enough to be sure it wasn't going to be taken away again, I leaned over the bridge. Four or five people were on the foredeck.

"Who the hell is on the helm down there?" I said. Somebody went to look, and after a moment the answer came back:

"Nobody."

"Probably Dale," I said.

"Don't think so," somebody answered. "He's on the aft deck."

By that time we were approaching the fleet of anchored boats, and I had to turn my attention to letting off passengers. By the time I'd gone back to all nine boats, I'd forgotten about identifying the mutineer, and I had also faced the fact that I wa sn't going to get much more cooperation than Humphrey Bogart got aboard the Caine.

I did finally find out, though. Turned out not to be Dale after all, who only said, "Christ, matey, I'd never try to get away with that."

So who was the ghost who appeared at the heart of the vessel?

Julia. Of course, Julia. Sweet, agreeable, obedient Julia. Serving out my rum, quietly helping me to navigate in shallow waters, being the most charming and cooperative person you could imagine; a true, calm, and civilized companion on a sunset cru ise.

And seizing secret control of the vessel the first chance she got. I can visualize her little smile, the glint in her eye, as she wrestles the wheel in the cabin, knowing I am hopelessly bewildered up there on the flying bridge.

I have got to get better at this intimidation thing. It just isn't working.

 

 

end

 

Power Corrupts
1995 Don Berry