It all started when someone brushed the dog in front of the smoking trays

It all started when someone brushed the dog in front of the smoking trays. Thick white hair stuck to the soy-encrusted metal. Cleaning each tine individually before setting the salmon out to glaze.

Then the oven wasn’t working – well, hasn’t been working since I arrived. Spent an embarassing amount of time researching Magic Chef 20” on the Internets and got all sorts of interesting results.

Turns out with a pilot ignition there’s a spring-loaded thermo-coupling, a copper bulb that looks like a small missile that must heat up enough to open a gas safety valve. Mine apparently wasn’t heating up. So I took it out, only to find water and sludge and a fouled screen. Cleaned it all out put it back in and it worked fine two nights ago.

Last night after a long shitty day I’ll get into in one quick sec, I put in a pizza, and the damn thing didn’t light. If I kept my lighter just beneath the bulb, indeed the copper wire would conduct heat and the propane would illuminate, singeing my arm hairs and creating a smell which confused the dog goodly.

But as soon as I removed it – and that bulb cooled, the valve closed, and no more oven heat. So I could either lay there on the floor with my lighter under the pilot while the pizza cooked, or cook the pizza on the stove. Or burn the pizza in a cast-iron pot on the stove, to be more specific.

Taking a step back – one of my renters working at the cannery got kicked out of the bunkhouse and so came crawling back here the night before. Did laundry, showered, drank beer, brought his Ukranian girlfriend over. All well and good. He returned last night, drank some beer, passed out on the table. I told him he better find another spot – this a good, young, confused guy. I went down to work in the engine room, as the electricity on the boat had gone out – and indeed he had parted – leaving his empty beer bottles and a few additional remnants I won’t deign to discuss  in his stateroom, along with the salon pillows he had borrowed. I look forward to seeing him again on Katlian– I know I will.

But the crown glory of it all – and all this yesterday, five to eight, in the final three hours of the usual workday on the boat. I had two visitors, was showing them around, modeling in fact my discovery of just about the greatest coat I’ve ever witnessed – more on that later – when the lights on the boat went out. I saw my visitors to the dock, and checked the breaker onshore. Still on. Marat, just back from fetching Bella, walked in, and we got a voltmeter and started poking around. Hot on both 30 amp breakers coming off the dock. But one meter had stopped rolling.

Went down to the engine room. Checked the three polls on the box – three because we were bringing in triple phase from the Deutz. Only one was hot.

We checked the line coming in from the boat. And heard, standing there on the dock, the sound of eggs frying. Strange. Frying eggs in the pm rain. Sounds like – well, sounds fucked up. Traced the line and found a gash, steam rising as rain fell on the open wire – thick wire, mind you, 6-wire, or the like. Enough to make a roman candle out of a sentient being.

We traced the line further. And found a splice on the big line that had a corroded metal bolt exposed. I mean if someone grounded themselves on the gunwales and grabbed that splice for balance – or hell the silver-coated deck was covered with rain most of the time anyways, that’s a fine ground in and of itself – you’d have a stinking burnt corpse topside.

So something had to be done about that.

Marat had the bright idea to pigtail off from the hot to the line which had failed – not Kosher, by any means, but it would light the boat for the eve. Course we couldn’t use the dryer, for example, as we’re bringing in only 110 off the one 30 amp breaker instead of 220 volts, which the dryer requires.

And so we found the sole blessing of the evening – 6-wire or so curled up like a sleeping ratsnake – not unlike the one my uncle killed in the corncrib at the farm when I was a kid – in the cargo hold. We eviscerated it, cutting out a red, just to be proper, stripped down the ends, and, found a big allen wrench key, shut down the boat lest we make fried eggs of ourselves, and, in the LED light of the headlamp, slid in the jumper beneath the aluminum bolt – tracing first the other wires, removing the Deutz hots to the disconnect, as we surely weren’t going to be turning on the generator any time soon.

And then that followed by the eviction followed by the ornery oven and the rain general over it all.

To come down from it all Dog and I took a walk on the docks. A rainsoaked guy in a baseball cap stopped as I passed. Thus passed this interaction:

“You Brendan?”

“I am.”

“Yo, where’s Amanda?”

“Who?”

“Amanda. Amanda P–. I heard she was down on the Adak.”

“Buddy, I don’t even know who you are. And there’s no Amanda on the Adak.”

“She’s displaced, man. She’s in trouble.”

Crazies out hot and heavy that night on the docks, I’ll tell you. I saw him again, pulling on a cigarette like it was a Pixie stick. He apologized, and appeared, there in the wet, on the verge of tears.

“It’s just been a shitty night man. A really shitty night.”