Departures: Sailing: Northwest by Sail and Rail: Part U

In which Larry doesn't kill anyone... 7 Year Bitch, Green Jelly, and a bell choir come up in the course of one conversation... Fins in the water...

A Loss to Good Society

Roche Harbor San Juan Island 1998 Aug 06 Thursday

Readying the boat while the rest of the crew was conducting their toilette, I cranked up Yiddishe Renaissance by the Klezmer Conservatory Orchestra up on the stereo. Let these WASPs listen to some nice Jewish music for a change.

Piaw writes:

We were up at 8 this time, and after morning showers Scarlet made pancakes, which we all proceeded to eat as though none of us had eaten for days. I'm surprised at how much I'm eating on the trip, since there's really not much physical activity involved when sailing. It's more energetic than driving, of course, but that doesn't say much. Then came the usual ritual of grocery shopping, filling the boat up with water (an exercise which required the help of our neighbors in supplying water hoses of the appropriate length), and then heading over to the fuel dock for some gas.

As part of the pre-launch chores, I was carrying our trash and our recyclables up to the bins on shore. I walked with a bag in one hand and a bottle in the other. One especially snooty fellow walked in the other direction, and I thought hard about smashing the bottle on the deck and slitting his throat. The thought was so vivid that for a second I thought I'd done it. "I've got to get out of this place," I said to no-one in particular.

At the grocery store, I wasn't having any luck finding tortillas. I was in the international section, which held cans of beans, but no tortillas. Jeez. Friday Harbor's store had had tortillas. It had even had masa flour. I looked around helplessly, saw the smiling clerk from yesterday. I smiled, she smiled. "Excuse me," I said, "but could you please point me at the tortillas?" I swear to god, when she heard the word "please" she looked surprised. It was proven, then: Roche Harbor was a den of boorishness, and heaven help the nice people who are forced to spend time there. She brought me to the tortillas (which were in the refrigerator).

Talking About Pop Music

There was a line of boats waiting for fuel. While Piaw manned the tiller, the rest of the crew sat on the foredeck and waited, listening to the cheesy recorded music playing from the church tower. I was thinking about Penny and Paul, down in Ventura disassembling a church organ. Scarlet, too, had a low opinion of this music. Scarlet, it turned out, was in a bell choir. I didn't even know what a bell choir was. A bell choir, as she explained it, is a bunch of people, each with four bells. They ring bells at the proper time and create a chorus. For a while, she'd tried being half of a bell duet, where each person had 20 bells to keep track of, but that had fallen apart. She'd stuck with the choir. I was plenty impressed. I figured the only way I'd be able to handle four bells is if I took off my shoes and socks. Scarlet said that her choir wasn't that impressive. The choir leader was a dictator. There was one old woman with no sense of rhythm who was seemingly incapable of counting to four. I nodded, but this was still sounding more impressive than my own musical experience.

Lea, on the other hand, had hung out with real bands (i.e., bands I'd heard of). Back when she'd been living in Atlanta, she'd had a lab job with some HIV research company based out of Canada. There had been three people to do about enough work for half a person, so her group had gone out to clubs often. She'd lived in a group house which often had people passing in and out. One house resident was from Seattle. This was probably the guy who'd invited 7 Year Bitch to stay at the house. Omigawsh. 7 Year Bitch. Only one of my favorite bands. I pressed Lea for details--what had the band talked about? What were they like? Well, they were fun, but there really wasn't that much conversation to report. They'd talked about living in motels while on tour. Their manager talked about what cities had the best food. Selene Vigil's boyfriend was catching up to her after a long period of tour-induced separation and they spent most of their time smooching and talking skateboards. I nodded unhappily. Yeah, most bands on tour didn't seem to have much to say. Man... or Astro-Man? had some good tour diaries, but only because they'd cloaked them in 50's sci-fi astro-speak.

Other bands were more interesting to hang out with, if not necessarily such great musicians. Green Jelly was just a name to me, but Lea had met them because they, too, had stayed at the Atlanta house. They were sort of like GWAR, but instead of tossing "blood" into the audience, they tossed "poop." They'd had this container of brown stuff, ready for scooping and tossing from the stage. One of her housemates had tried tasting the stuff. The report: it was chocolate pudding. Not bad.

It was our turn to approach the fuel dock. We approached. An attendant watched our progress. I got ready to toss him a dock line. He spun on his heel, walked smartly away. Well, the guy sure knew how to look busy. We stepped off, tied up, fueled up, paid up. I was just walking back to the boat from the cash register and the attendants were already motioning another boat forward to take our place. The other boat was crowding Piaw on one side, and he had to do some complicated maneuvering to get out of their way in time, getting close to yet another boat. A lady on the yet-another boat said, "Jesus Christ!" and was pushing our boat away with her feet. As I watched a metal protuberance from her boat zipping past about a foot from Piaw's head, I could see why she was concerned; still, from my vantage point, I could see that Piaw had the boat pretty well under control, and was pulling us out of a nasty situation. It occurred to me that if this had happened a year ago, we'd probably have hit something. Piaw had improved. Thank goodness. An accident would have meant spending more time in this place, talking to more of its stuffy denizens.

Piaw comments:

I don't know if I'd improved... That was a closer call than I cared to remember, and maybe that's why I didn't remember it until Larry just reminded me with this travelogue. But we were going so slowly we weren't in any danger.

Exeunt

We motored out of the harbor. "I would be gone from this place," I said quietly. I said it again, louder. We were leaving. It felt good.

Piaw writes:

Then we were off, at 12:30pm, the usual late start for The Healer. Back onto the Haro Strait, to make our way around Stuart and Waldron islands, with a short trip to the Canadian border to drop some more gifts for them. The wind was pretty dead that day, forcing us to turn the engine on before too long, and just putter around. It's not good for engines to be turned on and off repeatedly, but the wind patterns around the islands gave us no choice. Just as we approached Patos and Sucia islands, we saw fins in the water. They were dark and black, but moving slowly, unlike the dolphins we had seen in the Channel Islands sail trip. I idled the engine and we spotted several more mammals, but they never came close enough nor far enough out of the water for us to be able to tell what they were.

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