![[Photo: Lea]](leagrin.jpg)
Roche Harbor San Juan Island 1998 Aug 05 Wednesday
We rounded Battleship harbor and prepared to start the engine. I ordered the sails furled and dropped, not wanting another incident like yesterday, and powered into the harbor according to our charts. Pretty soon, Roche harbor was apparent. As we neared the harbor we could see the customs dock clearly marked, and maneuvered to come up against it. A man in a blue uniform with a cap came up to help us dock. He turned out to be the customs official. He was the oldest looking customs official I had ever met, but he was friendly. He patted me on the back, chatted with the crew, and asked everyone if they had had a good time in Canada.
I stood exhasted on the customs dock. My mind was blown. I was over my crisis limit for the day. Now a man with a gun was walking towards me. It was a U.S. customs agent, as played by Lyle Lovett. He asked me for my name. I told him. Then, he did something rather curious. He scooted his head forward rapidly, looking me straight in the eye as he asked me where I was from. Later on, I figured out he was maybe trying to get a reaction out of me, see if I panickedly reached for some hidden pocket. As it is, I reacted by forgetting where I was from. "Uh..." I said, I thought really hard, made a guess: "San Francisco?"
He nodded. I'd got that one right. "You look like a big spender," he said. I stared at him. "What did you buy in Canada?" he asked. "Uhm, some meals." "Good food there?" "Nothing too exciting..." "Tell me a meal you got there." "Uhm, well there was this multi-bean chili, and I had the orange juice with that, and..." "So what's your occupation?" "Uhm, I'm a technical writer." By this time, other members of the crew were wandering over to see what was taking so long. I think by this time the agent had figured out I was harmless, but still he asked questions. "A technical writer? What's that?" I said I wrote computer manuals. "Computers. Hunh. You know, computers are good with numbers, but they can't count from one to twenty without hitting each number in between." I stared at him, and asked for clarification: "Well, uh, actually. Uhm. Uh. What are you talking about?" Oh gawd. This crazy man was going to put me in jail. I was going to be put in jail by someone who looked like Lyle Lovett. This was just embarrassing. Oh, he was talking: "Like, when the computer's got 20 questions to ask, it can't just skip a few. It's got to ask every single question." I blinked at him, asked, "Like, the computer's giving a quiz or something?" He nodded. "Well, that's just how it was programmed," I gabbled, Oh no. He was having a bad computer day and was going to put me in jail, and after I'd been so lucky in surviving those rocks. I continued, "If the programmer let it skip questions, then it..." He nodded, "Yeah, I guess," turned around and walked back to the customs building. Later, it would occur to me that perhaps he was letting me know that he wasn't hitting me with the full barrage of questions required by law. Probably just as well. I'm not sure how well I would have held together.
I then came ashore with him with my materials and he checked me in through his computer, asking me for my driver's license, which I led him back to the boat to see. He gave me a customs receipt after that, and waved us along.
I radioed Roche Harbor and asked for a slip for the night, and Roche Harbor came back loud and clear. We were assigned a slip in due course, and arrived at it to find it already occupied by another boat. The dock boys came up, however, and assured that it was standard operating procedure to double-park us. "I hope we get a discount!" said Scarlet, a little miffed. We docked the boat with little incident (though the dock boys certainly had to help us cancel out the forward momentum as we came in), and then proceeded to try to wrangle a power cord out of the harbor administration.
The dockboy hung around, being generally unhelpful. He seemed more anxious to talk about some "Striking of the Colors" ceremony coming up at sunset. "It's a little thing we do around here," he said, grinning. How did he manage to pack arrogance into a grin? Better you should be doing your job, helping with boats, I thought. The dockboy left.
Lea said that we should think of an excuse to lure the dockboy back. He'd been handsome, after all. I think I gave her an unbelieving stare. (By this time, I was so drained that my full conversational repertoire consisted of the blank stare, the inquisitve stare, the unbelieving stare, and the syllable "uhm.") Scarlet rejoined, "We need a better dockboy, one more responsive to our needs. One who realizes that we might need an extension cord." Since we were sharing this slip with another boat, we were farther than usual from the recharging station, and our cord didn't reach.
I went off to try to work through the administration, and finally found the harbormaster office right next to the customs office (no wonder that bloody VHF came through loud and clear!). But by then they had already taken care of The Healer, so there was nothing to do but to get back to the boat. When I got there, Scarlet had gone ashore, and Lea had taken the dinghy to explore the dinghy experience.
I went ashore to use the restrooms, and then came back to find Lea and the dinghy had returned. I asked her if she was interested in helping me look for the fuel dock via the dinghy. No problem, she said. We got into the dinghy and rowed along. Rowing the dinghy is an interesting experience. I'm not particularly strong, but it doesn't take much muscle, and the stamina required seems minimal. Furthermore, the wind was with us, so all we had to do was to stay clear of others. Control, while not natural, wasn't unnatural, so we found our way to the fuel dock with little incident. On the way back, Lea spotted a beautiful wooden sail boat, and we stopped at the slip where it was parked to look at it. Her neighbor greeted us and kindly allowed us to tie up against it and look at the boat. We gaped freely and spoke to her inhabitants, and they told us that it had just been shipped over from Taiwan, where it was hand-built at the cost of five hundred thousand dollars. (I thought that was probably understating it a bit.)
When Butch had showed us the boat, there had been a cute little life-jacket, meant for a pet. It was at this time that I came up with the brilliant idea of photographing the Reverend Totoro in this thing. I opened up the lazarette (a storage area under one of the cockpit seats), and looked around for the mini-life-vest. I rustled around, not finding it. There was so much crap in there. I lifted the crab-pot out of the way, looked under human-sized life-vests. After a few minutes, I had to admit defeat. It occurred to me that if we'd had a little pet, me might want a big life vest for it--not because the pet needed it, just so that it would be easier to find in an emergency.
Then I continued on my progress towards land and restrooms. I started paying less attention to the boats and more to the people. This was a mistake. Now, I'm not going to claim that sailing is a sport with a diverse population. If you spend your days wandering yacht harbors, you're going to run into more than your share of wealthy white people. Still, there's usually some scruffy looking guys getting ready for a fishing trip. There's usually a few people of color wandering around. Many of the wealthy white people are kind of friendly. They've been on boats for a while, and are looking for a little conversation. Friday Harbor was friendly. Sidney Harbor was friendly.
Roche Harbor didn't feel friendly. Roche Harbor felt smug. Wealthy white people walked by with noses in the air. There were a few scruffy people, but not enough. There were perhaps two Asian families--again, not enough. It was a long walk to the restroom. Various smug people did their best not to acknowledge my existence. My simpering smile got few answers. I made it to a restroom, noted that showers required six quarters each. I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a juice, and with it some change. I instinctively smiled at the checkout girl, remembering too late that this was not a smiley place. When she smiled back, I nearly yelped with surprise.
On my way back to the boat, I endured more smugness. I was pretty sure I wasn't paranoid--these people were going by, looking at me out with their peripheral vision, but being careful not to look directly at me. What was with these people? Back on the boat, I sank into relieved conversation with Scarlet. I don't even remember what we talked about; I was just so glad that she unreservedly acknowledged my existence.
On the way back to The Healer, I somehow cut my right thumb on a line. "Ouch!" "Let me look at that," Lea said. Oh yeah, I forgot that we have a medical student on board. Conveniently, she had some alcohol with her, which she proceeded to dab on my wound with cotton. I breathed in sharply. "Oh, you're such a baby, Piaw" said Scarlet. "It's alcohol, it's supposed to hurt!" said Lea. Scarlet and I have this funny relationship where by we'll start a trip quite happy to be taking a trip together (especially when the trip has been as longingly anticipated as this one), but by the fourth or fifth day, we would usually have conflicts. I theorize that this is because we don't really see each other very much during the course of a year, so we don't have time to work out our conflicts in due time. When we do see each other we tend to go on trips that last for about a week or so, which forces us to be in close quarters all the time, producing conflicts of personality that don't show up on weekend get-togethers. We have altogether too many similar traits in both personality and interests for there not to be conflicts. Yet when the storm passes we'll find that our friendship has held fast anyway. If we had to put up with each other more often, I suspect that we would be forced to work things out explicitly, but as it was, we both simply just hung on and waited for it to blow over, as we knew it eventually would. One would think that on a small boat, there wouldn't be much room to avoid touching each other off without uncomfortable moments, but with two others on board, we could be very graceful about it and we had enough respect for each other that we could work together despite all that.
Then it was dinner time. Dinner was a nondescript affair, though punctuated by the one apparently interesting event at Roche harbor daily, which is the striking of the colors, also known as the flag lowering ceremony. You know that not much happens in town when the lowering of the flag is announced over the P.A. system, but there it is.
The last of the P.A. announcements was a congratulations on the birthday of Mike Hunt. Jeez. Someone really must have missed junior high school a lot.
We talked a bit about Tyrie, Piaw's friend who we were hoping to lunch with on Sunday back in Seattle. Piaw's been a teaching assistant in both Berkeley and Seattle. Once, in Berkeley, he put Jimmy and I up to a prank on his class. The class would be anxiously waiting to get their graded exams back. At the start of class, Piaw would put the graded exams on his desk, up at the front of the classroom. During class, Jimmy and I would burst into the room wielding Nerf(tm) weaponry and hijack the tests. The prank fell through. Jimmy and I had burst into the room with guns blazing--but the exams hadn't been graded yet, there had been nothing to steal. We'd left in defeat. In Seattle, Tyrie had helped Piaw with a similar heist. Unlike Jimmy and I, she'd used a SuperSoaker(tm), she'd dyed her hair blue, and she'd gotten away with the graded exams. I was looking forward to meeting her.
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