Context: I submitted this story Tribute to the Furious II to Writer’s Digest magazine’s 88th Annual Writing Competition. As announced here on September 20, 2019, it won honorable mention in the Memoir/Personal Essay category. The editor Cassandra Lipp told me over email that there were over 6,000 entries across all categories that year. I might as well post it now that I have a Substack, eh? There was a 2,000-word limit, I probably would’ve gone to 3,000 if the rules would’ve let me.
Tribute to the Furious II
The smoke from one million acres of Washington and British Columbia forest fires tinted the morning sky an apocalypse orange, but my mind was preoccupied with thoughts of a blackberry patch and sex. The blackberry patch was on my mind because it was the source of my breakfast. The sex was because I had a lot of it last night and rode a smooth, ego-boosting body high in part thanks to the roiling chemical cocktail released within me. What flummoxed me was that I met her in the public library up the road after innocently asking for the time. Add “diving headfirst into lusty romances” to “access to all human knowledge” as benefits of your free library card, nerds.
The pine tree smoke smelling, Oregon Pinot Noir-stained porno on repeat in my mind faded as I neared the blackberry patch. Thanks to the Puget Sound summer sun, the gnarled thicket of thorns and vines worked overtime to pour its energy into the largest, juiciest, seediest berries in the whole damn universe. As part of my morning walk-to-work ritual, I sat in a prime spot and feasted.
I felt a pang of guilt, for I knew that the patch provided these berries so I would spread their seeds. It was a fair trade, but I cheated the generous blackberry patch with every toilet use, dooming future blackberry generations to a darkly comical end in the sewage system. I call that kind of black humor cosmic because only the expansive perspective from the cosmos produces that brand of comedy, so sublime in its total apathy to what we living things strive for. The Setup: The hope for your future generations ends up in the shitter. The Joke: You, plant. Ha-ha!
My teeth stained with blackberry juice and a testosterone-fed spring in my step, I hummed Can’t Feel My Face by The Weekend—a hit during summer 2015—during my lazy walk to work.
I was a paddle guide and my boss a German Mennonite with a Rand Paul 2012 bumper sticker on his old Chevy truck. Udo rented kayaks, large Nootka-style canoes, and stand up paddleboards from his shop set on a waterlogged wooden fishing barge of 1910s vintage named the Furious II. Water didn’t leak aboard, rather it sweated through every square inch like a morbidly obese grandma trapped in the sauna. Her two bilge pumps whirred around the clock to keep her afloat.
The decades of penny pinching—Mennonites are not fans of playing with credit, known to Udo as “fake money people don’t actually have that’s sending this country to hell”—and no hull cleaning grew a garden under the waterline fit for an aquarium. A living carpet of sea weeds, fan worms, and anemones shifted in the current like the Great Plains of frontier America in the wind. Sculpins, sea cucumbers, and kelp crabs roamed these wilds instead of bison. Sea otter families slept aboard at night and great blue herons, poised like statues, used the Furious II as a hunting perch. Cleaning up their fishy scat in the morning was a part of my gig.
Despite its decay into a thriving marine ecosystem, the Furious II remained afloat, crammed to burst with homebuilt racks of kayaks and canoes. My typical day was spent muscling kayaks from the racks to the water for sun-drunk families visiting Seattle who hopped on the ferry for an afternoon on Bainbridge Island. I heard many of the world’s languages with a kayak on my shoulder while working aboard that glorious piece of garbage.
I rounded a corner on my walk to the Furious II and smirked at the sight of a familiar 36-foot wooden Chris Craft, probably built in the fifties. The wayward boat should’ve been moored in the designated mooring field but had a habit of drifting over in the night. Frayed blue tarps and duct tape covered gaping patches of deck rot.
Her skipper was a red-faced old man I secretly dubbed Drunk Joe who lived aboard. Drunk Joe, when not awaking at noon and growling cusses in surprise at the new location of his home, spent most of his time on some conspicuous waterfront perch with his easel. His typical day was devoted to scratching out marvelous landscape scenes with charcoal or watercolor. The Furious II was a frequent subject of his, the elegant curves of the brightly colored plastic kayak hulls contrasting with the boxy shape, straight edges, and Earth tones of the wood barge.
Drunk Joe was an endangered species. The Bainbridge that inspired David Gutterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars took one of its final gasps a few years back when the liveaboards, free to anchor in Eagle Harbor since before the sawmill era over a century ago, were kicked out by local ordinance. Once an agrarian world of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants, with many Japanese to keep the peace between the two, Bainbridge Island was also a draw for young loggers, chronically self-sufficient salmon and albacore fishermen, and unambitious artists. A cross section of this society lived for free off their anchors in Eagle Harbor for generations. Allegedly, one of the vessels, an idyllic cabin on a log raft named the Wicca, even graced the pages of National Geographic magazine.
Bainbridge devolved into an affluent Seattle-adjacent suburb over the decades, and as the island stopped living off the land and sea so too did young blood stop dropping anchor in Eagle Harbor. The opening of the 21st century dawned on a fleet of almost entirely silver-haired professional bachelors, most with modestly paying but sufficient tradesmen or artist gigs ashore. Theirs was a tribe of one-syllable names: Toms and Tims, Bobs and Robs, Carls and Earls, Jeffs and Jims, Dans and Stans. The near hourly public ferry ride to and from Seattle probably accelerated their demise, for a paradise too easily accessed rarely maintains its integrity.
The liveaboards, once the salty soul of an island pioneer society for rugged individualists, became a ghetto community of misfits in the global mainstream, a pack of weirdos surrounded by waterfront condos and a hostile neighborhood association concerned about views and property values. Real estate investors and stakeholders balked at the wild duffers who waved hello, these life cheats who figured out how to live in a waterfront paradise without giving the monied masters of land a slice of the action. All the landlubbers saw were filthy bums who, despite evidence to the contrary, shit in the ocean. They had to go.
Via committee meetings and votes and boardroom discussions, the liveaboards were ordered to register and pay to anchor in designated areas, or tuck into one of the marinas that happened to require $100,000-plus liability insurance. The exodus began. The poorest of them limped off to new waters where they hoped they could keep living for free. Others lost their disintegrating vessels to salvage. A few might’ve been able to sell their vessels, bless the hearts of the shiny eyed bastards who bought them. No doubt some of the liveaboards ended up on the streets, indistinguishable from the milling hordes of desperate belonging to Seattle’s growing untouchable caste. A handful transitioned and started to blend in with the rest of us, but these men stood out from the crowd if you knew what to look for. Most notable was their uniquely watery and far-looking gazes.
These men were generally friendly but poor conversationalists, gruff in tone with jaws rusty from lack of use. Some had sailed around the world while others didn’t know the first thing about taking a boat anywhere. A few were so highly evolved it was eerie interacting with them, like I was talking to a member of an advanced alien race. This breed built their boats by hand, played the violin, and satisfied a revolving cast of swooning lovers with ease. One fellow, a great Paul Bunyan of a man, forged iron garden tools aboard his ancient wood tug boat and sold them ashore. He was surely the spirit of some extinct era of America. Others were cagey and best avoided, for they were not sound of mind, rarely sober, and prone to blurt inappropriate comments to any woman with a pulse. All had an important piece of their mind elsewhere, lost in a place where no amount of sailing could take them.
There were qualities both noble in their commitments to that lifestyle and pitiful in their inability to function in society. These were men addicted to lonesomeness, prone to cyclical bouts of warm extroversion that contrasted with their natural state; to be alone and surrendered to a private moral code. They reminded me of Mohammad, who was alone in a cave when the angel Gabriel spoke to him, or Moses, who made his trip up Mount Sinai for the ten commandments solo. Prince Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment during his isolated meditation under the Mahabodhi Tree, thereby becoming the Buddha. Nicolai Tesla saw a vision of alternating current while on a lonely stroll through a park.
Perhaps they would’ve been Bedouin shepherds in Saudi Arabia or peers of Da Vinci if alive during Renaissance Italy. Maybe they innately understood why Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in a way you or I cannot. Yes, Drunk Joe and his ilk were closer to those big epiphanies than the rest of us. It wasn’t their faults they lacked the capacity to fully communicate what they saw in their watery gazes.
I boarded the Furious II and was greeted by Udo. He sat in the back behind the register.
“Good morning, boss,” I greeted him, a dopey I-got-laid-last-night grin stuck on my face. Today I was on paddle camp duty. A dozen 10- to 12-year old kids would soon be in my care.
“Ya, good morning,” Udo gestured to a rack of colorful kayaks. His voice was rich with a heavy accent from his native Germany. “Let’s get the kayaks for the kids in the water.”
Udo looms large in my life experience as a singularity, an ancient iron comet that passes by Earth once a century and is only visible to the few willing to look up. He was somewhere between 70 and ageless, wiry as it gets with a snowy wizard’s beard. A pair of eyeglasses usually perched low on his hooked nose. He stroked his largest kayak like the quarters of a favorite horse. It was a giant two-seater we called the White Whale.
“Ya ya,” Udo mused approvingly from the sidelines as I shouldered the smaller single seaters from the racks to the water. The fleet in the water grew, a rainbow fan of hulls with their painter lines tied off to one cleat on the barge. “You know, I used to carry the White Whale all by myself. The kids used to call me The Beast.”
“That thing is heavy. I don’t know if I could do that!” I panted between kayaks. Udo pointed mournfully at his heart.
“The old ticker isn’t what it used to be,” he said quietly, the yearning to shoulder kayaks as The Beast once again etched in a slight grimace.
My heart aches like Udo’s at these memories. Only a few years passed before local ordinance struck the killer blow against this microcosm, this time against the Furious II. The old girl had to go, reduced to an ugly reject of the waterfront’s Master Plan. Last I heard she was for sale, but she probably doesn’t exist anymore. I heard of a few prominent deaths among the aging sea salts who lingered in the bay. The spirit of old America who forged iron garden tools is one of them. The fate of Drunk Joe is unknown to me. Perhaps it was a graceful, meaningful exit. Likely it wasn’t. Perhaps I should be grateful that I do not know. Cosmic comedy at its blackest.
Consider buying my book, Salmon in the Seine: Alaskan Memories of Life, Death, & Everything In-Between! Available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Powell’s City of Books, and Third Place Books. It’s won eight notable independent/small press book awards, so hey, it can’t be that bad, amirite?