The Soft Sea
The soft sea beguiles
rearranges your schedule
erases any memory of what you
might have had to do or be
The soft sea oh
the soft sea and me
and then even the last ripple
vanishes
25 July 2017
Texas Jim
North Atlantic off Prospect, Nova Scotia

May Be The Last Time
"I don't know, Bertie. Well, for one thing, rowin's easier than walkin' anymore. 'Cause sittin's easier than standin'. I never yet fell over while sittin'. So it just stands to reason I'd rather be out on the water."
"You can be on the water and not go so far. Mac, honey, that's a long way out there for a little boat. And for you. Anything could happen."
"No matter what, anything can happen. And I've been that far before."
"Not for years. Our daughter was a baby last time. She's a mother now three times over. And you are no spring chicken anymore."
"That may be it. You may have put your finger on it, Bertie. This may be the last time I'll be able. So I've got to try. I'm still cock o' the walk in my own mind. Now let's go over the list one more time and I'll shove off. I can't wait any longer. Wind'll be back if I do."
***
With the thaw, the ice had broken up and left the cove. Immediately Little Mac had launched his dinghy. Big Bertha had barely had time to make a bag of sandwiches for him. Now as he passed out of the cove and out of her sight, she went over the list one more time. He was wearing his float coat and he had its rubber diaper secured so if he did go overboard he would stay warmer longer. Long enough let it be so, she prayed. And he had his phone and his portable GPS in case the fog stole back in from offshore. His bitty anchor was under the seat. What he did not have was the yellow tea cosy she had made him for Christmas, that was his thinking cap and that he had been wearing for days, ever since a loss of balance had forced him to use two canes to walk. The omission of the thinking cap worried her. Even though it was only an eccentricity, she had made the cosy for him and she loved that he wore it as a source of inspiration and so she had had to ask why he was leaving it behind.
"Because," he had said, "I don't need it. I'm not going out there to think, just to be. Just to be and let be."
***
Big Bertha tried to let be. She didn't want him to feel his world shrinking and hemming him in. But he was the love of her life, as precious to her as the air she breathed. So instead of returning home to her sewing, she went instead to Gillie Christian's fishing stage, a one-room shed that he had clapped together out of plywood after the last hurricane had claimed his old one. Already the strain of the elements had the new one looking a hundred years old, with the blue paint worn so thin it might have been an exhausted extraction of the ocean itself. He had managed to salvage the old door with its porthole for a window though, so there was that bit of scarlet you had to go through. Bertha tested her weight on the weathered and flimsy-looking gangplanks that led from the land to the stage, and then threw caution to the winds and strode across resolutely and lifted the rusty latch and went in.
Instead of Gillie she found his wife Emma, who said, after hearing of Mac's intention to circumnavigate Betty's Island, "Well, it's a rare old day in Prospect. Gillie let me steer this morning, even though he says it worries him, and then he went and cut his hand hauling a trap." She leaned back in her chair from the battered old table and the ledger she was making entries in and puffed on her pipe. "So now he's off to Emergency and I'm here minding the store. And a cold store it is. Here, pull up a chair. You can shove all the gear to one side. And now they tell me Gillie's brother Billy's breathed his last. And your Mac chooses this same day to set out on the most damn fool adventure I have ever heard of. And you want me to take you chasin' after him."
"Well, I wanted Gillie to," Big Bertha admitted. "But you would certainly do. I mean, if you feel capable. And up to it."
"Hon, I'm plenty capable," said Emma. "Gillie knows that. He just worries 'cause he can. I'm made of sterner stuff. Of course we'll go. There's nothing I can do for Bill. I'll leave a note for them as meant to come and get their lobbies. They can drop by later." She pulled on her pipe, let the smoke out slow, a wispy tendril at a time till it wreathed around her woolen cap in a cloud, then she smiled. The blue eyes in her wrinkled face were friendly but tired. They were like the thin paint on the stage, like two drops of worn-out sea.
***
The placid expanse, relaxed in the cessation of wind, felt to Mac like a cool gentling hand on his mind. He rowed as fluidly as a fish, without visible effort, and he made splendid headway. He meant not only to go around Betty's Island but to fetch a wide loop that would include Bald Rock and Hopson, Duck, Burnt and Hearn islands, so that the majority of his voyage would be out where the land was the merest suggestion. Out in the open, open, open sea. Out beyond. His progress was so easy, he felt as if he were sliding again down a slide like a child. And before long, all the lobster boats having come and gone early, he was out there all alone, with a soft light shining all around him, so that he felt no loneliness at all. Perhaps a little drowsy, rocked as he was in the mild swell, lullabyed by the lapping of waves. Perhaps a little sleep was all he needed. Certainly his eyelids knew their business. If they wanted to close, wasn't that the right thing?
***
They found him on Hearn, on the sand beach on the back side. He had almost made it. Bertha hollered and Emma hollered and then Emma brought Serendipity in alongside Mac's dinghy till the high bow of the Cape Islander was just nudging the sand.
"I can't get out here, I don't think," said Bertha.
Already Emma was pulling on a pair of waders. "That's all right," she said. "He don't amount to a burden." She slipped over the side and waded up on the beach where he lay. "He's all right," she called back. "He's just sleepin'. Leastwise, he's still breathin'. He don't seem to want to wake up."
***
"Well," said Emma, back out in the hospital parking lot, "that was fun. For once, only the women left standin'."
"Feels funny to go home without him," said Bertha.
"That's what Billy's wife said on the phone. But you'll be comin' back for yours. And I for mine. So it's all good," said Emma.
"For now," Bertha said.
"Forever and for always, really," Emma said as she got in behind the wheel.
"I know," said Big Bertha, who was feeling that it was almost beyond her to step up again into the high-slung truck. "Really, I do know."
3 February 2018
Texas Jim
Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca