Any Port In A Storm

Preface

Refuge—Inner, Outer and Innermost. Refuge is necessary at times and it is rare that we experience it alone. We often share refuge with seen and sometimes unseen companions. The following stories touch this theme directly and indirectly. They are an amalgam of experience and observations—mine and others—in some cases people I never encountered directly. They are offered here for your contemplation, enjoyment or disbelief.

Paul Dean Coker, FRSA

San Diego, California

August 2009, February 2012

The Port We Still Call Home

Morro Bay, California

I met a widow named Dawn yesterday afternoon. At least I assumed she was a widow: a sea widow, that is, a woman who has lost her boat, not her passion for boats. A woman who, above all else, in defiance of all else, clings passionately to being on the water, not to be overtaken by a mere predicament.

When I met Dawn she was sitting in the driver’s seat of a Ford Fiesta, an indistinct automobile if ever there was one and a pitiful replacement for a boat. I later learned she hailed from Dearborn, which explained the car and perhaps my affinity for its owner. Michigan folk are good-natured people, agreeable and pleasant to be around. Soft in the way Michigan sounds when spoken aloud—soft on the tongue like an Indian lullaby—hey, hey wan-ta-nay.

It was a languid Saturday afternoon and I stood in the parking lot above the bulkhead in Morro Bay, California, watching two gulls fighting for the remains of a fisherman’s catch. Pickup trucks dotted the parking lot, each with its trailer-mounted boat, each boat drying slowly in the salt-laden air. Morro Bay—seaside revelers, the embarcadero and a place for chance encounters.

Sitting inside the Fiesta, Dawn appeared preoccupied; I watched through the driver side window as she busily wrote. She didn’t notice me. I always notice writers, always wonder what they are writing. A quick look about the Ford made me wonder about her even more. There was a luggage carrier on top, the back seat was full of indistinguishable stuff and its occupant was road-worn though clearly not downhearted.

I saw that Dawn was right handed. Left would have made us clan. Short white hair adorned her angular head and her right hand was golden brown, making it apparent to me that the sun had worked some magic in her life. Her face was thin, though shy of gaunt. She peeked over a slender pair of glasses. I looked at the paper she wrote on, hoping for a clue to reveal what she was writing. Was it fancy stationery, plain white, or a form—an application form, perhaps? Was it poetry, an essay, a diatribe—a Dear John? Unexpectedly, the paper was on a clipboard, the kind a shop steward carries on the job floor. Was it a keepsake from an assembly line in Dearborn?

She wrote steadily, intently, the kind of writing I am supposed to be doing, according to writing pundits’ advice. It impressed me in an odd way—this place, this situation, this person I assumed to be a sea widow—all aspects focused through the window of a dusty and road-worn Ford. I thought, Sea widows are a bit odd, but who am I to judge? I am much like Dawn, a sea widower, her counterpart, which undoubtedly makes me odd, too. I soon became convinced that Dawn and I, widow and widower, were in Morro Bay doing the same thing—breathing salt air, dreaming of boats and enjoying an atavistic connection with a sea that holds all secrets in its depths, sad and happy all the same.

Dawn looked up, saw me watching, and abruptly asked, Do you own a boat?

I replied simply, Not now.

She smiled, rather knowingly I thought, and said, Me neither, but I have this car. I park it down here when the campground is full. They let me stay there only fourteen days, then I have to move … but I can go back.

I’ve heard that before. I’ve done that before; but it was a very long time ago while skippering a yacht, not a car, in Marblehead. The boat will have to move, you can remain on a mooring only until … I would pull up anchor, take the boat out for a couple of hours and motor back to a new mooring. I couldn’t see a future in it, though it enabled me to stay temporarily in a place I very much wanted to be.

I’m from the Great Lakes, she said next. This really surprised me. I thought I was the only one around the Central Coast making that claim. I had already started to like her, and now I considered her kin—an aunt perhaps, a schoolteacher in Allen Park with a tiny annuity, or a settlement from an accident that ended her marriage, an accident on the assembly line, perhaps. People around here don’t know how Michigan folk live and die. People here live and die differently, and I suspected Dawn was only now figuring this out. It had taken me several years, and not a little heartache, to discover life and death occur differently in different places.

My presumably widowed friend told me she had departed Michigan on May 10. A date pronounced distinctly, a date that meant something special, but that something she did not reveal. We chatted a few minutes longer. She wanted to know why I didn’t have a boat and I gave my standard, albeit ambiguous answer. It’s kind of cold out front there, a lot of fog, and a chilly breeze when there is one. This response Dawn would not let lie and, in the kindliest way, gave me a list of new fabrics, undergarments and special weaves that would keep me warm. I liked her even more, for in her innocence she could not possibly have known my deep aversion to the cold, and my deathly brush with hypothermia two days out in the Gulf of Maine. I didn’t explain and instead replied, South Florida—that is where I’d like to be on a boat.

Introductions over and feeling like family, we continued talking. She told me bits and pieces of her life, which I quickly wove into the story I had conjured to afford her a place in my memory. She asked about me; I gave a few highlights, seasoned for the palate of a sea widow, and it was about then that an old fellow climbed out of the fog, drew along the starboard side of the Fiesta as a proper yachtsman would, leaned down into the open window and asked if she was ready. I’m starving, she replied. She turned to me to explain, because I was her own kind, not a Californian. He’s invited me to supper; I’ve made some friends here. I thought of the Californians who had become my friends: good people, and that is something to be thankful for. Standing on land is enough to bear—to be a boat widow or widower as the case may be—but no reason not to have friends.

Then Dawn surprised me. She looked up, lifted her hand out the car window and extended it to me. It seemed unusual; I did not expect this gesture and stared momentarily into her calm eyes. As if lured by a siren on a blowing sea, I reached for her hand. I felt her warmth and noticed instantly her hand was not soft or delicate. Perhaps she wasn’t a teacher after all. Still, I shook the sea widow’s hand the way I had seen my father shake women’s hands, embracing it with both of mine. In doing so I became convinced it was the hand of someone who builds things. So, the assembly line … perhaps. Cars, transmission, brakes, maybe even boats—I didn’t care, really. I cared only that she was from home, the place I had sailed away from nineteen years ago, the place we all come from and never leave despite our movements in time and space.

The few seconds we humans give this ritual of mutual touching ended and I stepped away from the Fiesta. Dawn’s other friend shuffled his feet courteously—the sound reminding her that she was being courted. She smiled at me and spoke aloud a tenuous good bye—the farewell of like minds—of people who never really part, but find each other in the body of another. People whose souls sail upon dreams of boats, safe passages and the port from which they disembarked—the port they still call home.

The Double D Drifters

Paso Robles, California

I watched a man die today, over at Crystal Springs.

You what?

He died—of old age.

My God, Russell, you were there?

Yes, and I’ve felt uneasy since.

Sweetheart, that’s awful, just awful. What were you doing?

Fixing the air conditioning—trouble with the control system in one of the rooms—as it turned out, the dying man’s room.

Deborah glanced at the oven timer, then at me. She took a deep breath.

His family, was anyone there?

I don’t think so.

He died with only you in the room?

No, no. There was a visitor. I thought he was family, at first—the dying man never spoke. I overheard the visitor while I was working. He sounded like an old friend. You know how you pick out things like that from a conversation? And it was easy because the guy spoke loudly—left me with the impression that he was, or they both were hard of hearing.

No wonder you feel peculiar. I wouldn’t have thought the residents at Crystal Springs were dying in their rooms. It’s a senior apartment complex, isn’t it? I know they’re elderly and I suppose anything can happen.

The resident was in bed when I arrived—even though he was fully dressed. He wore an old western-style shirt, with curlicues and pearl buttons. His jeans were wrinkled and bunched up, and he died with his boots on—and I don’t mean to be funny.

The oven timer