ch:2 Seadawg
Ruff and Reddy were a good team; almost twenty years now. But Ruff was taking a beating and his slave wasn't doing much better. He remembered other beatings; not so fierce maybe, but beatings just the same--all part of the game, really. Just that: All two-dozen generations of sea-gypsies and wooden boatwrights could conjur in a sweet stiff boat was Ruff. The lucky dawg got thirty long large curved Teak logs out of Burma just before they quit dealing with rest of the world, and whacked them up into his unsinkable dream. No family besides a near-useless kid ½ brother, he put all his marbles into this last-a-lifetime once-&-forever boat. A hopeful title for his dream, Ruff wore it proudly, living up to every expectation of what a seakindly boat ought to be.
Now, in a seaway driven to excess by intense wind, this endless wild windstorm was doing its best to see what Ruff was really made of. Dawg cinched up his ties and held on, trying not to get creamed when thrown this way and that by stupid damn big ocean. He's thinking, 'Oh, to be sailing in toward Statue' (instead of a thousand miles north getting pounded by Taku.) Still, Seadawg prayed to her; promised his soul if she got them through this worst of the worst. The arctic blast had pushed them hundreds of miles south in the five days & nights that it blew and the poor old boat had taken a beating. To confound matters, not only was the idiot compass haywire, but the chronometer too, leaving him guessing at where he was, exactly, in this unfathomable froth of whitecapped wilderness. (This was before satellite navigation.)
Forty feet high rollers rumbled across his horizons. Only saving grace were the four-hundred feet long hollows between; giving our boy a relative calm half a minute of sloppily-lurching along in the trough. Then, the swell again surfing you skyward as sea-noises build another crescendo of forty knot wind—sayin' yer prayers as the boiling masses engulf your tiny boat.
“Come on, boy. You can take it. You will,” willed hopefully. “Seagoddess is on our side and won't let us down.” Autopilot but a dim memory, he clutched the wheel, trying to hang on; whole life merged to one with omnipresent mountains of frothing water surging by. His only mission was: to keep nudging the bow as far off of dead center as he dared. Too far threatened turning turtle; belly up if too sideways to the raging swell. Doing hand-to-hand combat with the bucking wheel while getting jerked on and heaved up from all directions at once. Life on the line to the tune of mighty seascape whooshing them along in fury unleashed.
Finally, too tired to care anymore, Dawg threw the sea-anchor out, tied the tiller, and collapsed in a heap; his final waking thoughts mumbling a fervent prayer for oil to smooth the troubled waters' desperate grip.
As the rollers rumbled along, Ruff surfed down the leading slopes until the crest passed. The waves traveling past in slow-motion reverse skewed the surfing sensation. Intense bubbling sounds transmitted through the hull roared as if through a powerfully-amplified speaker.
Statue dream shook him awake. As he lurched and rolled in his bunk, she had come to him in his dream. Head and shoulders awash, peering out to sea, emitting subtle spine-tingly low-frequency lullaby-like warbling musical tones, that somehow faintly-suggested riddles. The 'song' did have words but, though he often found himself idly humming its melodies, he never could remember a word. He wondered how long it had taken the sea to sculpt this washrock boulder that he sent prayers to. One of his oldest memories, she came in a recurring dream. He believed that her calming presence had saved his sorry butt more than once and her vision burned ever brightly in his fantasy. The strange ways she gave him courage to deal with the sea, and boatlife in general, were an unknowable mystery. According to his pop, legend had it that she had been “put there by sea gods, no doubt, to watch over us boatdummies, and it can't hurt to keep on her good side, boy. A few good wishes and such to her and, like as not, she'll be there for ya when you need her most.” A hundred times he'd bowed to honor a vision she suggested, prayed to her for safe journeys, and thanked her for deliverance coming in. Through how many thick fogs had that fear about where he was been eased by her appearing at the last possible warning moment? Always the grateful sigh of relief to see her glistening body materialize from out of the fog to verify that the compass and Otto (autopilot) were still working and safe harbor just around one more headland. Some of his friends would argue, “aint no statue. It's just a bunch of rock,” but he was insistent: magic existed there. Awash, smooth, glistening vision in stone, scanning seaward: a familiar friend.
During his nap, the sea had become phosphorescent. The hyperactive spectacle of yellow-green sparkleresq splattering pinpoint jewels of light never failed to mesmerize him and his eyeballs became unable to unglue themselves from the scene. Mist in the air took on eerily glowing greenish hues of electric static; firing his senses to throb in a sympathetic, keenly-tuned resonant ecstatic sync with the sizzling, wildly-arcing sparkling fizz of nerve tingling magic.
This was one meanass beat-um-up storm. Of the dozens that he had ridden out or run for shelter through, this was king daddy: Taku. (Inuit word for the fiercest bitter wind from the pole.) And when it swung east of north, boy, you better be ready; that's if you hadn't already found shelter. Sea folk keep a keen sixth sense about such stuff, weather eye going pretty good, and instinctively just know when it's time to seek safe harbor. Comfort stations and rescue boats are not plentiful up north and often more than a day or two away, so you're on your own. But, no matter how cautious, even the best get caught sometimes and blown right away by the big wind, and that's where your boat has got to measure up or it's all over, friend. ALL over.
(excerpted from my Guilty Pleasures book, originally © by me in 2000, titled Stars Last—no apostrophe after Star)
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