Warm Coastal Waters (1)
It was fun teaching the little kids port and starboard. Dad would have enjoyed the lesson. He would have enjoyed giving it himself, but he’d been dead for seven months. So, if he was there, somehow, listening, he heard me pass the nautical knowledge on to his great grandchildren.
The youngest, Boden, who is six and lives in Colorado, told me later that he had a way of remembering: “Airport! Starburst! I left the airport… Starburst candies!” Starburst being the other side, the right side looking forward, the side that’s not airport.
We were motoring out of Avalon harbor in twin six-passenger runabouts: red and yellow painted hulls, with bench seats, high gunnels, and powered by appropriately unpeppy, but steady (like Dad near the end), 15-horsepower outboard motors. The skippers, Tom in one boat, me driving the other, steered with a starboard-side wheel.
We were twelve: my brother, Tom, his long-time girlfriend, Diana Burbano, and their son, Lionel, who is almost 11; my sister Wendy, with her daughter, Eliza; my two daughters, Cloe and Cecily, with their kiddoes, Alex and Lily (who live in high-desert Oregon), and Boden. Plus Ellen and me, the senior crewmembers, made twelve. I had done the pre-trip research from afar. Ellen and I live in Oregon, too, after nearly 40 years in Colorado. I’d talked on the phone with Jay Guion of Joe’s Rent a Boat, on the Pleasure Pier in Avalon. Ellen had carefully rationed Dad’s ashes into a dozen small, screw-top tins, one for each of us.
I liked Jay immediately, even though now, in person, he was telling me I couldn’t reserve the boats. This made me nervous. They didn’t do reservations, he said from behind the open-air counter on the pier. Come back when your whole group is here ready to go, and we’ll have two boats for you. He managed to be reassuring without budging on procedure. Sandals. Broad straw hat. Sparkly blue eyes. Gray handlebar mustache. He’s been working the pier on this island off the southern California coast his whole life, 80-some years. His dad, the original Joe, started the business 90 years ago. “We’ll have your boats,” he said again, island mellow.
He must have sensed my eagerness for this day to go right, my fear that some piece of the puzzle might not fall into place, might mess the whole thing up. There’d already been snafus that morning with my siblings and ferry travel over from the mainland. I could have blurted out to Jay that we really, really needed for him to not run out of boats, even as we waited on pins and needles for my tardy sibs, and Avalon’s morning beaches and shopping streets writhed with tourists. There was a cruise ship anchored off shore, its layer-cake decks having disgorged an untold number of revelers to the shore boats. Some of them were lined up to rent Jay’s boats.
Dad had said he wanted his ashes spread on the “warm, coastal waters off Catalina.” That’s a direct quote. He wrote to each of his children quite a few times over the last several years with thoughts on his mental and physical slowdown, his death, whenever it might come, which he said he didn’t fear – he was curious, actually – and how he’d like to see things go.
“The warm coastal waters off Catalina Island.” That was classic our father. He embraced a certain old-fashioned – you might say romantic – specificity in language, spoken and written. He could be formal without coming off as condescending, sentimental without seeming weak. People responded to his enthusiastic precision. He once signed off a note to the vice-principal, to get me out of school for a week of skiing, with the words, “Intense excitement!” She was a notorious sourpuss. But I got my excused absence. And we all use the phrase to this day. You’re coming for a visit? Intense Excitement! Cowboy Junkies are playing for free in the park? Intense Excitement!
We had half of Dad’s ashes. His widow (his second wife) had the other half and planned to take hers to the desert Southwest, to Indian country around the Four Corners, where the two of them had had some of their happiest times.
Among other things, I had worried about the weather. June in Newport Beach, where my crew of seven boarded the Catalina Flyer, can often mean “June gloom.” I remember the pattern as pretty common during our youth there: school’s out but the sun isn’t. Inland southern California is getting hot but the Pacific Ocean is still winter cool, and the resulting temperature clash laps ashore as fog, a marine layer, as the weathermen say. Some days the fog retreats off shore, and the beaching is fine. Other days, the layer stays put, pulsing inland, up the canyons of the coastal hills.
That marine layer can bring a serious chill. And what if it’s windy? Or there’s a big swell? Is it smart for us to cast off in two small, open boats, out of Avalon’s harbor with its calm-water bustle, and out along the island’s uninhabited coastline to a place that was quieter but more exposed, wilder, a place to get quiet ourselves and do honor to our dad’s expressed wish? So far, on this day, the sea shone like glass. But what if the wind kicked up before my sibs and their kids arrived?
I could have told Jay about my worries, told him about our mission, and he might have taken pity on me – I had the tins right there in my backpack – but I wasn’t sure if there weren’t some rule, some environmental regulation or local ordinance that prohibited scattering remains in the sea within drifting distance of civilization. Better to keep it a secret.
And so we waited. With no guarantee of boats for us. We waited for Tom and Diana and Lionel, and for Wendy and Eliza, who had taken different ferries from other embarkation points (Long Beach, San Pedro) thanks to the aforementioned snafus. Eliza’s flight from San Francisco had been delayed. Lionel wasn’t feeling well, and a sitter couldn’t come until later; then he decided to come after all. My plan, to have us all rendezvous at the Newport boat, to make the crossing together, had blown up. There was still a chance they’d all make it, and with enough time to get out in the little boats. (Our return, my crew’s return, via the Flyer, boarded at 1630 hours, sharp.) But who knew? It was hot. We had to drink lemonades and hog a bench that clung to a bit of palm shade at the foot of the turquoise-painted Pleasure Pier.
That was one good thing: the bright Avalon sun meant the marine layer of the past few days had disappeared. First thing that morning Alex, Lily, and Boden had stood clinging to the Flyer’s portside rail, sun on their cheeks, too excited to sit, as we rounded Newport’s jetties and headed west across the channel. The kids were sure we would see sharks, or whales, or dolphins. Or all three!
It was one of the smoothest crossings I’d ever experienced. There was barely a breath of wind on the sea surface for the 27-miles, just a blue-on-blue texture, like a fabric design, or faint rippling on snow. And there was only a light, short-period swell from off the starboard bow, a swell that rocked us side-to-side, more like a baby’s cradle than the headlong pounding one can sometimes get. We did see two sunfish, and a bazillion dolphins. And Alex, by dint of his desire, conjured a shark fin that nobody else saw, surface lolling in the distance.
Between the ages of eight and 18, before I felt the pull of the mountains, I made 56 round-trip Catalina crossings with my dad. (Like all good skippers, he kept a log.) Twenty of them were on board our first boat, the Mister Robert’s, a 27-foot, double-ended Navy “whaleboat,” and the rest were aboard her successor, the Good Grief, another surplus Navy hull, at 36 feet and beamier, able to accommodate the whole family. Both boats had maximum speeds of around seven knots. The Flyer, a 100-foot twin-prop catamaran, flew along at 20 knots plus. That’s where the wind came from that whipped back Lily’s seven-year-old curls, and Boden’s six-year-old buzz cut, and Alex’s 8-year-old shag. Their faces shone. They’d never seen or done anything like this.
The kids called him Geegeepa, great grandpa. And he remained hale enough into his 90s for them to really get to know him. Boden spent time with him in his garage woodshop in Corona del Mar learning to cut dowels with a coping saw, the easiest saw for little hands to work. And Dad visited all three at their homes in Colorado and Oregon. He was creaky and getting creakier. But his mind was still sharp, and he reveled in the very fact of having lived long enough to have “greats.”
Then last autumn, shortly after his 93rd birthday, things rather rapidly fell apart. He got up from the couch, and, even with his walker, couldn’t remain standing. He crumbled to the floor, too weak to move. At first he thought he was having a heart attack. He had dealt with hypertension for decades; he was on blood thinners; he had a pacemaker; he’d had at least one stent inserted into an artery. (A couple of years ago, he’d fired his cardiologist when he overheard her telling a colleague, “It’s amazing he’s still alive.”) He’d done about all the maintenance a man could do. In addition to the heart work, he’d had both hips replaced, and one knee. He drove an electric cart down the street to his beloved senior center so he could take balance classes and chat up strangers at the hot-lunch tables. “Four dollars!” he’d marvel. “For a hot lunch!”
But all the maintenance an accountable man might muster couldn’t delay forever the last fall.
To be continued…
Speak, Memory, Part 3
I don’t remember if we smoked any more of that cannabis on our trip around Catalina Island in wintertime 1967.
This lapse could be a result of the weed. Or it could be a slight slip in the continuum that is the past and the so-called present. Sometimes, memory has a mind of its own.
At any rate, after our first night anchored at White’s Landing, Jon Webb and I decided to take Ogress on a circumnavigation of the island. Maybe this had been the plan from the beginning. Again, I’m not clear about it. Maybe we used the marine radio to call home and discuss what were doing. I don’t remember that either. I will never forget that the radio was screwed into the bulkhead next to a brass plate my dad had affixed to each of his boats. In raised letters it said: “Oh, God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.”
This was not something we had done much, this circumnavigation. I remember only one other time when I was younger and we had slower family boats. The Mister Robert’s was a 27-foot converted Navy whaleboat, a double-ender lifeboat in its previous incarnation – unsinkable, but with a hull speed of only about seven knots. Its successor in the 1960s, the Good Grief, was a slightly bigger surplus liberty launch (a WWII-era ship-to-shore taxi, essentially), with a hull speed in the same general range. My dad worked all week, so we were limited to Saturdays and Sundays on the boat, with an occasional head start on Friday evenings. Catalina is a big island, 21 miles long and nine miles wide at the widest. Getting around to the backside, the windward side, took too much time out of a typical weekend. It didn’t help that there were only two protected anchorages over there; the rest of the coast was rocky and windswept compared to the relative sanctuary, and the sand beaches, of the leeward side.
But the Ogress was a different beast. She had a Volvo inboard-outboard motor and a chined fiberglass hull that could get up and plane at 20 mph, or better if the sea was calm. She was only 17 feet long but was beam-y and had an efficient little cabin in the bow. Jon and I probably figured we could circle the island in three or four hours, where it would have been a long day, more likely a couple of days, in the Mister Robert’s.
I can picture us in the morning flying along in the glassy lee of the island heading for the West End. There might have been flying fish, foot-long silver slivers, fins beating furiously like ducks taking off from a pond, finding a moment of glide and then crash landing into the next swell.
Rounding the arrowhead West End, we’d have been heading momentarily for Hawaii, then, past the point, coasting with the wind and whitecaps behind us. I’m quite sure I would have steered us into the deep, protected slot that is Catalina Harbor. I loved Cat Harbor as a kid. It was the quietest anchorage anywhere on the island, cut to within a half mile of Isthmus Cove on the other side – the island’s pinched waist. There were remnant ball fields on this rare pitch of flat ground, left over from the decades when the Wrigley chewing-gum family owned the island and brought their team, the Cubs, cross-country out of the Midwest snow for spring training.
I also loved that there was a shipwreck at Cat Harbor. I want to say it was a Chinese junk, maybe used in a Hollywood movie. Its ruination was a mystery, but its barnacled timbers jutted up out of the shallows like a fantastic work of juvenile fiction.
I surely wanted to show Jon Webb the wonders of Little Harbor a few miles farther on, but I’m not sure we took the time. This is a pocket cove, barely protected from the prevailing weather and with a surge-y anchorage. But it has the only sand beach on the backside, and a seasonal spring. The Gabrielino Indians lived there at least part time for thousands of years.
My dad and I dove for abalone in Little Harbor in a ritual we couldn’t have known would end a decade or two later with the virtual disappearance from Southern California of the iridescent mollusks. We pried them from their rocks, sliced and pounded the muscle with a wooden mallet, then breaded the steaks and fried them in butter. A boy doesn’t know about the ambrosia of physical love, but those bites of abalone were as close as I’d come.
On a bluff above the beach, the Gabrielino left a midden of glittering, broken abalone shells that must have been 20 feet thick.
On board Ogress, Jon and I raced past Little Harbor, past these memories (they wouldn’t have meant much to Jon, had I tried to tell him) to a wilderness I’d barely seen and never steered around. For mile after mile there were no harbors, no beaches, no other boats, no civilization onshore. Only the roaring cliffs of the Palisades where veins of quartz, like lightning bolts injected into the rock, crashed directly into the surf. How close should we get to shore? Were there reefs? The water churned a strange milky turquoise color. The unfamiliar brought an unformed dread but also a kind of hyper focus.
At last we rounded Seal Rocks on the East End and turned for Avalon, the one hill town on the island – very Mediterranean – surrounding its crescent bay. We may have spent the night there. I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure we radioed home. I know we did that. Or rather, I did.
I don’t remember if it was my mother or my father I talked to. I was still their innocent son. But I was different. Within the year I would go away to college. I would discover the blues. I would get a girl pregnant. I would make other mistakes and register a few triumphs. I would smoke more marijuana.
Maybe it was the awkwardness of radio-speak: “Yes, Mom, we’re heading back in the morning. Over.” “We’re fine. Over.” “No, we won’t be able to see the coast. We’ll have to use the compass. Over.”
I’m pretty sure I realized, but I probably didn’t articulate even to myself, what an act of kindness that trip had been. Their letting me take the boat and go. To trust me like that, to give me that kind of responsibility. I thought the big deal was that they were letting me ditch school. But it was a great gift to a young man in his last year at home.
Speak, Memory, Part Two
Jon Webb emerged from the little two-berth fo’c’sle in Ogress’s bow with a prescription pill bottle in his hand. “Know what this is?” he asked, twisting the cap and producing a slim, hand-rolled cigarette. (more…)
Speak, Memory
The sea off Newport Harbor was a silvery gray. Not a ripple of wind marred the humping line of swells that rolled through the Catalina Channel.
Between the sea and an overcast dawn sky, the outline of Catalina Island sketched a long recumbent figure on the horizon 27 miles away. It was February, not bitter, but not exactly warm either. I tried opening the throttle all the way on Ogress, my father’s white fiberglass, 17-foot, ocean-going inboard outboard. But the swell was a little too big, or the interval between waves a little too short. At top speed of around 20 knots we were slamming the troughs with a keel-shuddering thud. So, I backed off the throttle until Ogress found a smooth pace, nose up, not quite planing over the glassy undulations.
I pulled the cellophane off a celebratory package of Tiparillos, chucked the wrapper into the endless ocean, and offered one to my classmate and new friend Jon Webb. We stood together at the helm, feet spread for balance, smoking those nasty, cheap things with the white plastic tips, kings of all we surveyed. (more…)
Good Grief, Fathers Never Fail
What are fathers if not heroes to their sons?
My dad agreed to take me trolling aboard the Good Grief. I had a new trolling rig, a scaled-down version of one of those stout fiberglass rods with the massive reels you saw being cranked by marlin fisherman off the tip of Baja. If theirs were the size of coffee-tins, mine was more like a can of beans.
But I was stoked. And my friend Strany was stoked. We flung our bright-feathered jigs over the stern as Dad accelerated out of the calm water inside the jetties. I think we caught a couple of bonito right outside the breakwater. That got us jacked, but we were hoping for yellowtail, or something even bigger.
We were rolling downwind, southeast along the coast from Newport Harbor. The Laguna hills poured down into rocky coves. Dana Point was just visible through the sea haze. Dad thought we might get that far before turning around.
We hardly noticed the swell. It was maybe three-to-four feet to start, and growing. But when you’re running before a following sea, and at a leisurely seven knots – top speed for the Grief – you hardly notice the swell. With Dad at the helm, I sat on the transom eagerly eyeing my rod tip. (more…)
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