Uncomfortable
This was goodbye for another summer. I was going back to northern Canada to weld in some freezing Saskatchewan mine-site 45 miles by ice road from the Northwest Territories. Up there, spring was still two months away.
Ernie and I decided to have ourselves a mini going-away drink. We walked down the Overseas Highway to a bar neither of us could normally afford. This last season in the boatyard I had spent almost six month’s salary on Someday and I needed to go back to work to make enough money to finish it. Ernie had spent every cent he could get his hands around, on other things.
Ernie was a good and decent man. He would lay awake in the morning head pounding, mouth tasting like cotton and say to himself ‘Just for today I won’t drink. Just for today. Today I’ll be clean.’ By nightfall, he’d be passed out in the cabin of his boat, regrets and self-loathing’s tomorrow’s problem.
I had caulked both port and starboard cabin moldings on Someday this morning. Then I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the droppings from the mangroves above. I moved all my tools from the yard’s garage into Someday and covered everything with a blue tarp. The canvas was attached with double ropes and rubber bungee cords because I wouldn’t be back until after the hurricane season.
Ernie wanted to tell me something. He just was having trouble saying whatever it was he wanted to say. I looked around the restaurant and waited. We sat in the sunlight and I watched the sun shine on the bubble at the end of the straw that Ernie held like a cigarette. The straw quivered off a drop of coke.
Ernie’s sunken eyes skimmed the restaurant’s clientele. Finding no one of interest his eyes turned back to me.
“You know what I’ll do when I get to the West coast? I’ll pack up and sail my boat right from L.A. down to the Marquises, no stopping. Work out all the kinks in the boat and in me in one big jump.” Ernie smiled as he flicked his straw.
Little by little Ernie’s smile was replaced by the usual jumble of crags. The afternoon sunlight caught his salt and pepper whiskers. Ernie tapped the straw on the table while his eyes stared out the bar’s window. His eyes followed the motion of the boats pulling at their lines but they weren’t focused on anything, not for long.
I had never seen Ernie with a hat. His hair was thick. Whether his hair was clean, dirty, neglected or shampooed an hour ago, it always stood out straight and stiff. His face was framed with that head of bristles, which gave him a look of a kindly distracted professor. A kindly distracted professor wearing a dirty football helmet.
Ernie methodically wiped the condensation from the glass with his straw. Leaning forward over the cola while stirring the ice, he took the straw and tapped it on the table. Droplets of soda splashed on my fingers. I shook my hand and scowled.
“What’s the time? I can’t miss dinner.” Ernie looked at his empty wrist.
I looked at the large soft drink in Ernie’s hand. Sailing alone for several weeks to a remote island in the Marquesas, with diabetes?
“I’ll tell you when it’s time.” I said, again looking at my watch. Ernie looked like somebody who was waiting for a phone call.
“You want to talk?”
Ignoring me, Ernie stared at the plastic tabletop. He took the straw and traced the splashed droplets. My mouth worked for a moment then clamped shut. Ernie tapped the straw while he asked me.
“You’re quiet.”
“When I was a kid, a friend and I paddled down the Mississippi. We were gone four months. The whole trip cost me $250 bucks. With the money that I’ve sunk into my boat I could have flown around the world. This.” My hand pointing in the direction of the boatyard. “This isn’t freedom, my boat’s an anchor. I’m stuck.”
“You’re just realizing that now?”
Ernie’s shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch. Finally, he breathed a long sigh through his nose. If a man could be seen shaking off a black thought and trying to pass to something more pleasant, Ernie was doing it. He looked directly at me.
“Why did you come here? To the Keys.”
“Put some life between me and my divorce. My lawyer said that. Put some life between you and this, she said. She called it a death of a family.”
I studied Ernie. He smiled.
“Okay I ran away.”
“You know what? Sailing’s boring.” Ernie pointed at me with that straw. “If you’re sailing okay, sailing’s real boring. Do sailing wrong and it gets exciting quick. Too damned exciting.”
“At first I moved into Someday so I could just sail away. I wanted to do that grand adventure.” I spread my hand in a dramatic arc.
Ernie smirked.
“I wanted to sail, not to be some boat-builder. But, you know what? I love working on it; you know? What started out as a means to an end, has become the goal.” I rolled the words around in my mouth. “But I do love that boat.”
Ernie smiled.
“You know Ernie, the longer I work on it, the less I feel the need to sail off.”
“It’s all packed up for the season?”
“Everything’s tied down. Leaving tomorrow early.”
In the final scene of the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madera, after all the trials, the men had to go through, the gold leaks unnoticed from the horse’s saddlebags back into the river. I was watching that scene and thinking that the screenwriter who wrote the lines probably owned a boat.
“Going back north feels like winter in Vancouver.” I said.
Ernie looked up from his drink.
“Cold, wet and clammy.” I smiled. “And I think I’m growing moss.”
Ernie contemplated the cola as if divining some meaning from its bubbles. He took a long pull from the straw.
“Money comes and money goes. Okay, mostly it goes. Health is forever.”
Ignoring him I shook my head.
Ernie went on.
“You just have to decide whether you’re a shipwright or a sailor. Ultimately do you want to just build a boat, or get off your ass and sail?”
Ernie looked around the restaurant at the patrons.
“I don’t know Ernie, but I do love that boat.”
Ernie turned back to my face and interlocked his fingers around that straw.
“I met a guy working in an engineering company here in the Keys, did I ever tell you about him?”
I shook my head.
“Theo. Theo was his name. Was an engineer who washed up here a couple of years ago. He was just going to do a project here, something about the dock’s pylons. I had just got here myself and didn’t know anyone either, so he and I struck up a friendship. He told me a neat story about him and his brother building a boat in South Africa. I think it was Durban.
Every day, they’d go work on their boat. But slowly, it started to get to them. Any work slowed to a crawl. One day a rough, tough character shouted up at them. It turned out that the guy was also building a boat, after a fashion. The visitor had run away to sea when he was 15. Now, he had decided to build his own boat. Right beside Theo, the engineer and his brother.
And what a boat.
The hull was any metal the guy could scrounge. The railings were thick heavy pipes, there were bumps and mounds in the hull. The welds were all chicken shit. Theo said it was just a mess. This thing was a blunt instrument. Theo and his brother used to laugh when they saw how rough the fisherman’s boat was, and how the guy was just slapping it together. The only thing was, he was building his boat twice as fast as they were building theirs. Theo and his brother kept fiddling away at their boat, making it prefect.
One day, the fisherman abruptly took his boat down to the harbor. The guy said he was going to finish the interior while he was afloat. After that, they lost touch with him.
About two years later, they’re walking down the docks and they see that fisherman’s boat tied up at the yacht club. Even though it still looked rough, Theo said the finished product was okay but it wouldn’t win any beauty contests. The brothers wandered down and looked over the boat. They commented to the fisherman that his boat needed a paint job. The sailor turned back to look at his boat and said.
“Well it’s not bad after a circumnavigation’.”
“Your point being?” I asked.
“Theo and his brother never finished their boat.” Ernie looked at me, and glanced down at my watch.
“Sometimes perfection is a cover word for procrastination. Like I said. You either make that choice or it’ll be made for you. Sailor or boat builder, you have to decide.”
“I don’t know.”
“You gotta decide, but know this. Whichever you choose, you’ll wish you did the other. It’s the nature of the beast.”
Ernie rose slowly from the table. His red T-shirt flashed bright in the afternoon sunlight giving his deeply cragged face a false pink color.
“Where you going?” I asked. “I thought we were going to have drinks?”
“Back to the boat. Doc says I have to eat regular. Besides, have you seen the prices?”
“I thought you wanted to talk?”
Ernie looked at me sharply. “It can wait.”
“Hey! Wait for me. Sitting in one spot is uncomfortable anyway.”
Other than to say our good-byes, that’s the last conversation I had with Ernie. Shelly’s email a month later said that John found Ernie laying on his bunk in his boat. Almost as if he was just resting his eyes.
But he was dead.
Rick Ranson 