She’s alive!!!
She went!
In fact, she went beautifully. With aplomb. Blowing perfect smoke rings along the way, as if to proclaim to the world, and all the folks gathered on the harbor docks — “Really? Truly? You ever doubted me?”
Thanks to the help of so many folks – but especially to Mike on the Thunderbird, whose quiet manner and deep knowledge when it comes to these things saved the day. Mike has a contract with the cruise ships that come into town – he stands by with his direct-drive tugboat in case a cruise ships get into trouble. You can also occasionally spot him dragging a dead sea lion off the back of his skiff – he’s called when one washes up on the beaches.
Together we went through everything step by step. True, the engine manual is tattered and oil-stained. True, parts for the Fairbanks-Morse haven’t existed since the Second World War. However, the equation is pretty simple: fuel, air, and compression. If you have these three things, the engine will run. And when you don’t, she won’t run.
So we were building air, and could hear its whistle through the cylinders. Check there. And we could hear the knock of the cylinders sent down hard, especially when we built over 150 PSI of air. So check there. Finally, there was fuel. And we finally hit it – a clogged filter. When the engine first starts it takes a greedy sip of diesel, and water and grit accumulated in the day-tank must have jammed up the filter. Meant to be white, the filter was dirt-brown when we removed it. So we built air – the Deutz generator is still pulling of a Jerry can, one more thing that will need to be corrected – and started her again at the docks. And the noise was deafening. A sound for sore ears!
Saturday, the day of the move, was cloudless. We had a number of skiffs on hand. I think word had gotten around town how 220 tons of tugboat had come a foot away from being beached. I swear I wish I had an underwater camera to see how close the stem was from the sandbar – last night I had a dream that we did in fact get stuck in the sand. And then got blown back into a town, and I was trying to get out of there, and the brass propeller was shredding up against the rocks. Awful dream. Anyways. In reality, thirteen feet of water is what we were in. And the boat drafts twelve.
What else to tell? It exhausts me just thinking about it. I had Rick in the wheelhouse helping me turn the wheel. Here’s a photo of the two of us – me staring at the PSI gauge, which is pretty interesting because it doesn’t work. Still, at the end of the day she came in easy – no crashing into the gas dock this time! A jewel of a landing, if I do say so myself. And god she ran smooth. Engine sounded like a team of professional bowlers, throwing in perfect synchronicity, each one bowling a strike.
Afterward we had beers on the deck and celebrated. I think everyone in Eliason Harbor was relieved to have what amounts to a 220-ton torpedo safe and tied up for the forseeable future. Thom caught rockfish for dinner – we’ve been depending on the primitive spiked beasts increasingly, as food prices are so crazy high in town. Getting the garden tilled over and planted has also been a project – that will help. Between the woods and fish and the garden the goal is to nix out the Hames Center shopping store completely. I’d get chickens if Stanford hadn’t made their kind offer. I still had plans of putting the coop on top of the wheelhouse. Wee chickens should be thanking their lucky stars…
Big problem now being that I’m having to spend serious time and brainpower talking myself out of the harebrained idea of taking her down to the Bay Area. The rents are absurd! How perfect to tie her up in the San Francisco Harbor, and rent out rooms! But of course, if anything happened in the 2000+
-mile trip down we would be up a creek, as it were. As my one friend put it, “you run her the length of a city block, and now you want to take her to San Francisco?” If we got in trouble I guess we’d just get towed to a nearby harbor and then have to winter it out there. Whatever – I’m trying to ignore my habit of making a wonderful – indeed dreamy situation with the Stegner Fellowship – more difficult.
The novel progresses well. I handed her in last Friday to Kent – now he’s making changes inside the manuscript, going through it sentence-by-sentence. I feel very lucky to be in his hands – he seems to balance literary and commercial considerations, and also have a good ear for tone throughout the book. That’s something I’ve lost. I’m too close to the darn thing, and I can’t see when it diverges, when the horns come in too strong, too much cowbell, that sort of thing. We haven’t discussed it, but I’m thinking a late May submission. He will get back with the manuscript on the first of May, and then go from there.
And here in town I’ve been turning attention back to the boat – she’s been feeling neglected as of late – hence the business with the filter. Grinding and re-painting the bulwarks. Clearing out the First Mate’s room for the renter and repainting. Tracking the propane leak in the stove that gets us all high in the morning. Unfortunately we WERE able to fix the electrical ground problem that made the back railing hot – so much fun when we had Adak visitors. Kind of like a hazing, an initiation. 110 volts through the bloodstream. Actually, I guess it was direct current, so it was 220 volts. Hmm. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why people screamed so loud, gritting their teeth and foaming at the mouth like that…
Years ago I lived with a woman who was working as an au pair in Paris. I tutored English to students in the neighborhood, but she paid the rent – it came with her charges, three French boys, who lived in a ritzy 16th arrondisement, and peed everywhere in the bathroom but the toilet when their parents were at dinner parties – which seemed to be every other night.
We broke up, and she stayed in Paris, and began to run. Through the Bois de Boulogne, in the nearby park. We remained in touch, and she announced that she would run the Paris marathon. i couldn’t make sense of it – how she could stay in that 300 square foot chambe de bonne studio where we spent so much time, five flights up, separated from that Egyptian woman – who played Celine Dion doing that Titanic song, singing along in her interpretive English – by a slip of a wall. And the shower at the end of the hall, which was quite literally a closet, with a louvered door you needed to pull close and shut with a hasp from the inside, before turning on the mixer.
But run she did. I watched her finish the marathon, and took her parents around the Paris subways, and we made it late to the finish line. I’ll always feel bad about that – arriving to see her there, with her sister, foil blanket over her shoulders, eating an orange.
In any case, it strikes me that here I am, years later, with a heart thinned out by another, training for a marathon. And let’s be clear about one thing – I am no long-distance runner. Sprinting, yes. Boxing, yes. Wrestling, yes. A marathon – as I am quickly finding out, doing my best to adhere to these absurd training schedules – not so much. I mean, the guy who originally ran it died when he finished. Shouldn’t that be a clue for all of us?
Friends up here encouraged me to do it. There were just four more spots. Once in a lifetime – why not? That combined with the refrigerator technician out at Silver Bay Seafoods separating my shoulder in Judo, fat white-belted red-headed bastard (he can’t read, so this shouldn’t be a problem). And here I am, dreading the Saturdays when we’re supposed to do the long runs. We run along the trails with bear spray, skipping over bear scat, trying not to get tempted picking the fiddleheads and cow parsnips and violets and salmonberry shoots coming up here in the springtime. The forest chartreuse, almost a neon green. I swear you can walk through the woods and come out with a full salad half an hour later.
In any case I think about this woman when I am running, with wonder and respect. And think about the woods, and spring everywhere. And, of course, the Boston Marathon. A Sitka man ran it, Brent Cunningham, and made national news when he gave his medal away to a woman who hadn’t finished. And another good friend was a block away when the bomb went off – and yet another worked at that corner. So awful. Suddenly running 26.2 miles, even here in Alaska, takes on a larger significance.
And so we continue, one smoke ring in front of the other…I take inspiration from my boat.
