Cal goes on a diet for California, Ferris wheels, the Alaskan summer ends

So the weight cut-off for most apartments that even allow dogs in San Francisco is 25 pounds. So Cal’s on a venison-blood diet, and we’re taking long hikes in the alpine to drop lbs. It’s kind of like a tri, as we do a swim once we get up there to even things out. He’s dropped ten pounds so far. I’m hoping a good shave of his undercoat will put him over the top and get him to where he needs to be…

After a summer of straight fishing, pulling salmon that seem to have magnets in their throats, hook after hook like a descending progression as you stare down into the depths. Now that fishing is done Dan Sheehan and I have been out on the decks, waving the weedburner like wand, marbling the backside of the roofing material until it drips and melts over the peeling silverseal, creating a barrier to the rain. I’ve been working alongside Steve Warren to pump out the crankcase after the flood, bathe the bearings and the babbets in WD40, install a bilge pump, high-water alarm, strobe alarm, splash-zone in the the thru-hull that leaked around the edges, and generally button the boat up with profits from fishing. Dan continues his wild experiments in processing unborn fish. (His caviar is getting very good – although I’m unsure how it’s all squaring with his Catholic faith.)

Denizens of the dock continue to get drunk and fall into the drink, as it were, on occasion – no names will be named. I will say I was surprised one recent morning to find an unopened can of Olympia and a bottle of Mickey’s on the free bench at the top of the ramp. Granted, it was around 7 am, so folks might have just been sleeping it off.

I will miss the P-Bar dearly. The other night three people rang the bell and the bar took flight, that mad alcohol-fueled ecstasy, hugging people you don’t know, the minute hand eating chunks of the clock at a time. There was blood on the toilet in the bathroom, and the results of someone’s fervent prayers to the wrong porcelain god in the sink. The following evening night there was a shooting in that same bathroom – now there’s a bullet hole next to the urinal. Apparently a fight between two fishermen. After the gun was fired, the skipper gave the gun to his deckhand, and told him to go back down to the boat. Who says trollers aren’t smart?

I had the good luck to go to Ireland to witness the marriage of my younger sister. On the flight over I prostrated myself at the check-in, hiding grubby nails and removing the camo hat. Minutes later, found myself with a long-stemmed champagne glass in-hand, installed in First Class for the ten-hour flight between Seattle and Paris.

Word to the wise: don’t get drunk on wine and whiskey in a pressurized cabin and watch Ryan Gosling’s latest film “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and be exhausted from an Alaskan summer of sleeping four hours a night. The crying continued until Bradley Cooper came on to play a cop, and then everything was fine again.

And Ireland itself. I tell you, the place makes one a believer in the myth of St. Patrick, how he flung the snakes and devil from Ireland over to England. And the devil became an English gentleman.

I made the grave mistake of trying to keep up with my brother-in-law’s buddies at the pub. After three Guinesses I felt like leads had been sunk in my stomach. My sister pulled the customary first Guinness for Aonghus, her husband from Donegal. After the wedding headed to Dublin for a night, and then to the Dingle Peninsula, past the Bay of Brendan, over Connor Pass, into the sweet town of Dingle. And then a boat to the Great Blasket Islands, a wind-blown cluster of six rocks off the peninsula.

The Great Blasket was home to about 160 people until 1953, when the government cleared the island after a medical emergency. Until then people spoke only Irish, and fished and foraged for food, living as in medieval days well into the 20th century. No priest, no pub, no doctor. Each family had a cow, a few sheep, and a garden of potatoes, chard, parsnips, along with a few other hardy plants. The great famine passed the island over like a dark cloud, leaving them unscathed, as they weren’t dependent on the rotty potato. Gorgeous literature arose from the island – “Peig,” by Peig Sayers, and “The Islander,” by Thomas O’Crohan.

A port in the town of Dunquin that looks like something out of Game of Thrones is the entrance to the islands. You walk down a pier slick with algae, with currachs surrounded by lobster traps put up on horses.

Currachs, I learned, are boats particular to the west coast coast of Ireland. Animal skins are stretched over a wooden frame, then hot-tarred. In Irish the boats are called naomhóg, which means “little female saint.”

To get to the islands you take an old scow, which makes the three-mile crossing at about 8 knots. There’s no pier on the island – so you hop onto a Zodiac, much to the chagrin of an older Italian couple, who seemed to regret their decision to make the trip. And then you’re left to roam the ruins  of what is essentially a ghost-town occupied by rabbit and sheep. You can hike around the treeless island, and perhaps find yourself up on a small cliff, the Atlantic slashing the rocks beneath, open your “Peig” to a random page, and find the story of “Haven on the Little Cliff. “And read about two women who came up along the trail to gather the high grasses when food was scarce. And one slipped and tumbled into the morning fog, and the other returned back to town, on the sheltered eastern side of the island, in the lee of the wind, shaking her head at the loss of her closest friend. And there, along the trail, came the fallen friend. And the other, sure that it was a ghost, told her friend to shoo, for it must be the devil indeed.

Strangely, many of the islanders now find themselves in the town of Springfield Massachusetts – where Dan, Adak resident, comes from. His family was from Dingle, and there’s a spectacular photo of his cousin in the “Blasket Heritage Center,” which shows Dingle residents relocated in Springfield, Jockey underwear and all.

Wondering how to end this blog, I got an email from   Kent, saying that the contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is ready for signing, and should he send it to California for signing?

I leave on Thursday. Cal will be crated up, provided with food and a frozen cube of water to defrost for the trip down. And from there –

Sunday, pulling into the harbor with boxes in the back for packing up my things, I caught the tail-end of Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon.” He was describing  his realization, as he grew older, that “so many things that happen by accident are wonderful.” He speaks of being on a ferrris wheel, bats whipping around in the low light, lights of the carnival bright below. And that weightless moment at the top, up in the sky, the world spread out beneath you, and then the dip back into the trees. “I once thought faith was a building block,” he says, “blocks you put together to make a house. Now, as I get older, I think it’s a matter of surrender, of giving up and leaving that house and trying to keep up your hope and some sense of hope and gratitude.”

And he points out, justly, that wild-grape wine, and dancing with abandon – how I will miss you, P-Bar – helps one accomplish this.

If I could sum up this summer, working alongside Karl and Tibault, waving the weed-burner like a wand and watching tar spread over the deck of the boat, lazing in the sun beside the dock, listening for whale and inhaling their rotted fish-breath like some Alaskan perfume, ringing the bell at the P, I would sum it up as such: just when you’re not sure of where things will lead, the thing itself provides the answer. It has been a summer of leaving that house, and keeping up, or recognizing in the first place, hope and gratitude. Especially after the summer of last, a dark cloud that set in and would not move. And it felt more like being stuck on the ferris wheel at the top, in that cloud, unmoving.

As a friend writes so beautifully, “I hope beauty is the beater of all you desire today.” Some days it is, some days it isn’t.

And now, back to slimming down my dog for the apartment hunt. Too bad he’s already snipped.