Afterward - Sep 2009

                                                       afterword

NOTE:     To squeeze the chapter onto four page-sides, I left out the maypole ceremony, and the fact of my having floated my home/boat in on high tide the night before to rest on the low tide mud, not fifty feet from the stage. Plus: while “wringing out my clothes & my brain”[and slipping into dry ones]), I failed to note the twenty-three small boats hauled up on that beach, and realizing, with a smug approval, that darn near all of my floating world's peers were there. As I revisit this place-in-time, more memories of that day surface, but this chapter contains plenty without adding more sentences to it.

     And now, I am remembering other, even more wacko—if that's even possible after this one—waterfront waterborne parties. Five I have now remembered, where we located offshore where cops could not get to us. As backward as it may seem, back then, neither the city cops nor county sheriffs had any marine patrol boats! I think the one I'll remember as most unique was the one we had in a 140 feet long twenty-three feet wide, twelve feet deep seagoing tugboat's stripped clean spacious curved leaning oval 'floors' of the engine room, that the owners—who'd bought this stripped hull for $1!!!--had filled in all the gaps to create a roller-skating 'rink' in. We played and the rollers rolled. The largest iron firebox I've ever seen kept a steady heat radiating from the front (higher) end of the cavern, down in there. We had set up on the (enclosed) back deck, which made a perfect  balcony over the rushing energy down below. Think about trying to dance with your honey, either fast or slow, on a floor that is nowhere level and undulates a little with the motions of wave action against the ship you are down in. That was a wiggy gig with maybe sixty seventy attendees that ran well into the wee hours; one of the very few of the dozens and dozens of gigs that weren't interrupted by the cops over my 17 years living in boats—12 of those not connected to the shore.

     Geez! I've run on way more than I intended for this short addendum to attach as a P.S. in afterthought.