July 16 2008 "Chapter One?"

                                                               Chapter One?                                                     c.f: 08-07-16

     Though I've had bigger boats, I'm really a small boat guy; and I am glad to have realized this before I got into the kind of troubles that a bigger boat can find itself ensnared in. I like how easily I can manhandle the smallish boat when needed. Unable to interest most females to share my boathood, a twenty-five footer is plenty comfortable. The bigger boats I had didn't prove any more amenable to the other gender. So: Give me a small boat to live in and out from. Room for a vise, a sink, a wood-burning stove—I've always cooked and heated with wood; it's a Hardway thing--and my bunk; with plenty of space in the ends to store the hundreds of items necessary for a waterborne existence. Serious mariners have need of an entirely different set of stuff  to have handy than the lubbers who live a land-based lifestyle; and the bigger the boat: the more stuff  'needed.' Ultimately, this fact appealed to my inborn  urgings to take the easy way 'out,' and restrict myself to boats that I could push around and not the other way around; that I could row or scull with oars or oar. Of course, being able to hang sails when the wind allowed was quite helpful; although I always reminded myself of the many potentially dangerous situations I was lurching into when I hoisted them. Being Hardway and all, I still marvel at having never been totally flummoxed by my life on the water. It seems that I only screw up on lesser pursuits. And with a regularity that only became apparent to me when my waterfront friends nicknamed me Hardway. I had been oblivious to this truth for over two decades until early into my boatlife, when the nickname showed up and pointed its dirty finger at me. Boatlife, when lived to the hilt, is a particularly 'dirty' affair. Dirty, that is, by landlubber standards: All that green slime and salty grit; not to mention a century of effluent-dumping layering the bay and river bottoms, and for miles out to sea.

     I think that this Hardway character, who lives side-by-side with me in my brain and has at least half of the 'say' in how we manage, is impervious to the salt scum's potential toxicity. I think this because, though I invariably lost skin, I never got infected or sick from my many immersions into the slime. Hardway took to salvage just like my shoreside dumpster-diver counterparts. Feeding this near manic urge was the fact of my home bay having been the marine graveyard dumping ground for used up large wooden vessels for over a century. The marine wreckage littered nearly a mile along the northwestern shore of the upper reaches of my home bay. I had grown up around its shallower northern edges, on the hillsides of Mill Valley, so Richardson Bay was my home bay. Maybe some folks might feel the urge to argue that moving onto a boat is not such a great idea, but I did. The story that follows is a direct result of my having done just that, and couldn't have happened anywhere else—or maybe it could have: I just don't know.

     This is Hardway's story as much as it is my own, for we, I guess, are inseperable, as it were; and besides: I would probably have been too prudent and conservative to have allowed myself to have been taken for such a ride as my good buddy Hardway, for all of his faults, took me on forty-five years ago.