BOATS
Name your boat with care. She will become the person for whom you name her.
Canoes. Runabouts. Supertankers. Barges. Schooners: Boats do not envy each other. They envy only clouds.
Boats respect each other, with one exception: Jet skis — upstart watercraft — respect no one, and are treated in kind.
A boat might or might not object to what you name her. And you cannot control what she calls you.
When you run a boat you become an air-breathing fish.
A boat is a vessel of faith: Behold the miracle of floating.
Boats share secrets with each other — their fear of St. Elmo’s fire among them.
Know that whenever you’re aboard your boat, she is listening to you.
Boats never tire of admiring their reflections. But they are not vain.
A boat that handles well is “sea kindly.” Do boats think of you as “boat kindly”?
Boats worry. About a leaky bilge. A fraying shroud. Rogue waves. Williwaws. Collision courses. You falling overboard.
A boat can take you where you imagine you want to go, and show you what you haven’t imagined.
When you step off your boat, she feels a loss and a release.
A shipwreck is to a boat as a graveyard is to a child: reason for holding your breath as you pass.
A dream of a boat is a gift from a boat in mourning.
Boats like to be sung to.
* * * * *
COVE
They’ve seen it all — the seven fishing boats pacing on their moorings, their brows furrowed.
They’re tough ones — fifty footers mostly, draggers, gillnetters, longliners, lobster boats — scraped and rusted and stained.
They stick their chins into the icy rain, their battened down pilothouse windows battered in the gusts.
They wait out the storm, passing the time telling tales in low tones — a groan, a creak, a gulp, a rap, a splash.
They speak of the rips, the shoals, the canyons, of halibut holes and dead hauls.
Always the talk swings back to other blows, the hurricanes and gales they’ve weathered or dodged, the lost trawls, the close calls.
The wind streaks the cove with windrows of foam.
They sit solid in the crawling gray water, moving with the stolid grace of whales.
In their businesslike way, they say nothing about today’s weather — nothing that would tempt it to test them.
Blowing thirty. Barometer falling. Wind backing to the nor’east. Rain going over to snow.
Never would they say they’d seen worse, this is nothing, bring it on.
They ride out the storm, keeping to themselves.
Squinting into the wind, they note the storm light darkening, and pull themselves deeper into their shells.