The harbor was closing up for the night, just in time to assign us our slip alongside the sailboats rather than the powerboats. “Those guys like us,” Mark said, “’cause we’re not that far from a sailboat. And they’re all thinking about trawlers, anyway.”
I let Hunter and Leo roam around on the deck, taking their tour of boats. One by one, they would board each boat, wander around the deck, then move on to the next. Leo found a sailboat that was open (the owners were at dinner) and disappeared inside for nearly an hour. I could see him through the top hatch, sniffing everything. There’s only a slight problem that I can’t board the boats my cats feel more than welcome to explore – I stand on the dock, calling to them, shaking their treat can, utterly ignored.
The next night, after a fruitless search for salmon and perch – “Is anybody catching anything out there?” our fellow fishermen called helplessly on the radio – we docked and had dinner after sunset. Our neighbors brought around their chairs and we chatted it up.
And just as Mark observed, the sailors liked us trawler-owners. We are not hard-and-heavy power boaters; we only go 7 miles an hour at the most.
Late that night, the sailors confessed they had always wanted a trawler. Mark gave them the tour, and along the way, he’s telling them tales of what went wrong with each piece. “And here’s the engine room, the battery chargers…you know, I made an expensive mistake with those battery chargers. I thought they weren’t charging my batteries – I thought the batteries were dead – I went through three new batteries before I realized I had to turn the damn thing on….” (The story of owning a boat, truly, is narrated by all the things that have gone wrong with it.) They’re all laughing, and then they tell their own stories with battery chargers, leaving them off so the refrigerator is not powered, the sump pump not powered, the batteries drained so low they have to rush out and buy distilled water.
My mom, sitting beside me in her pajamas, waiting for them to leave as it was nearly midnight, turned to me and said, “I have no idea what they’re talking about, do you?”
“Yes,” I told her, “Because I lived through it.”
But I can only tell you certain things about it. I can’t tell you the power of the generator, or which wire goes where, or even where the battery charger is and which of the countless Where’s-Waldo items down there are the batteries. I’m just not that interested. But I can tell you what it was like to watch Mark try to coordinate getting three 80 lb batteries from Monroe Street into the tender boat and onto Mazurka in the pinpointing heat of late July.
It grates me, just a bit, that I fit into the gender stereotype of the wife who doesn’t know nothing about those li’l electronic thingys. My training in that area ended in junior high when I built a pencil holder and earned an A in shop class. I’m sure I could learn, if I got a manual and muddled my way through it. Which is exactly what Mark and all these other boaters do – you keep making mistakes till one of the mistakes is right, and then you learn how to do it. Then you can tell your friends about the time you turned the battery charger off and your wife was upset because she had no refrigeration on board.
“Oh, you mean your husband’s boat,” is what the Westrec guy said to me when I called about the money they were trying to squeeze out of us. I bristled but let it go, though I wanted to say something like, “No, MY boat – I live here, too.” And I suppose in some matrimonial sense it is my boat, but really, I would never live here were it not for Mark. I would never cruise across Lake Michigan on this terrific vacation, I’d never live downtown lakefront Chicago, I’d never do any of this.
It’s kind of weird to let somebody else be responsible for your good time. Maybe that’s a good question to consider about the person you want to marry. If you relinquished control and let them be responsible for your good time, would they make sure you had fun? And could you do the same?
1 comment:
Letting someone else be responsible for your good time- that is a fascinating thing to consider.
Since there was no campfire, I'll make sure that your backpack sees one this week. It'll tell you all about it when it comes home.
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