Narrow Dog to Indian River

by Terry Darlington

  Steve was slim, maybe fifty, with a soft voice—not a stage Southerner like many, but a normal chap you could understand when he spoke. I realized that I would probably not keep him off the tiller unless I drugged his coffee, so I settled on the gunwale beside him. I can honestly say, said Steve, I have never seen anything like the Phyllis May; I could never have imagined anything like her, and she's great.

  Frank Jr took us to lunch yesterday in Darien, I said—real southern buffet. Drove us all the way, and he's eighty-four. He has Third Infantry Division on his baseball cap. In Virginia Norwood Thomas had 101st Airborne Division. If I was a war hero I would wear a hat like that. Frank Jr knows everyone in Darien of course. Then he came along to the boat later with a pretty blonde lady. She brought us a pecan pie. I bet she made the pecan pie I had on Christmas Day—I have never tasted a pie like that in my life.

  The lady is late sixties, seventy, said Steve. She is not in Frank Jr's age group.

  Gaolbait, I said—he ought to be ashamed of himself.

  This is the area of Gone with the Wind, said Steve. But there are no slaves or rice fields any more, it's timber and shrimping. I hope you got some good photos of shrimp boats—the industry is dying—there are too many imports.

  I got some great photos at Oriental, I said, and I bought Monica a painting of a shrimp boat for her seventieth, with the clouds, and the reflection, and the yellow grass and the trees—oh while I think of it—there's a sandbar round the corner, Steve, just under the water. Yesterday I was chugging along the deep bits on the GPS and Monica said—It's a shoal! I said Don't be silly, the GPS says we are in deep water. Then I saw the sand and banged the boat into reverse. The tide was dropping and we could have been there all night. The GPS is fine, but it is not the real thing.

  Yes, it's a nasty bar, said Steve. But if you know which way the tides run, ninety-nine times out of a hundred you know which side of a point the sand will be. But everyone runs aground. I ran aground a while ago, but I was on a rising tide so I just sat there for a couple of hours.

  A couple of hours? But your boat only draws a few inches. How fast were you going when you hit the sandbar?

  Forty-five miles an hour, said Steve.

  Monica saw an otter on the bank this morning, I said.

  Yes, and there are mink. Otters are the worst—make a terrible mess of a boat. These creeks are full of fish—the trout are very tasty. There are alligators but they are tucked up asleep in mud-holes in January.

  What are those birds? They are a sort of a big hawk and they are everywhere circling around—they look just like the red kites in France but their tails are not forked.

  Buzzards—they ride on the thermals looking out for food.

  And that is a cormorant, just there, I said, as the cormorant disappeared.

  Yes, and we have the anhinga, which is similar but lower in the saddle—they call them snakebirds because you can only see the necks.

  I love the pelicans, I said. Their big heads and beaks back on their shoulders, and their satisfied smile.

  We were reaching the mouth of the creek and a sixty-foot sport-fisher came out of the Intracoastal Waterway on our left. Be careful, said Steve—they'll turn you over—they don't care.

  They are too busy taking pictures, I said. We have been lucky so far. Perhaps they think we are very fragile and will go straight over and drown and sue them—you go fishing a lot, Steve?

  Yes, off the coast. You saw my little boat, with the outboard. Frank Jr lost a son in a boat like that—he was twenty-Colonel Frank's brother. And his two friends. Never found them—never found the boat. It was a fishing competition in the ocean but it was cancelled because of the weather but the boys never heard of the cancellation.

  God how awful, I said, how awful, and I thought of the wind in eight thousand acres of trees, and the family, waiting.

  FOR FIVE HUNDRED MILES WE HAD NOT TIRED of water, grass and sky. I like Georgia best of all, I said to Steve. It is more remote, less houses, more space, and more bluffs and trees. I love the loneliness.

  Terry, over there, in the forest—see the digger? That forest will be a housing community soon. Georgia is being invaded again from the north. The baby-boomers are retiring, and there is twice the population in the US compared with fifty years ago. A lot of people made money in the eighties, and everyone dreams of a waterside home with a dock.

  I couldn't live here in the summer without air-conditioning, I said. But the winter is lovely.

  The winter kept on being lovely and the grass and the trees were January pastels and the wind was warm and the alligators lay snug in their beds and the cormorants peered and plopped and the hawks wheeled and the Phyllis May rumbled along and twisted a translucent wake that unfurled to foam and spread to ripples and reached for the bank but the Waterway was broadening and broadening and the ripples swam away and drowned.

  Out on to the Doboy Sound—the light, the light.

  A ragged black line a mile away—a little crowd of pelicans chatting to a crabber and following his boat. Steve passed close by and greeted the crabber and the pelicans and we pressed on, swimming on air.

  Then the sea

  And heaven rolled as one and from the two

  Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue

  IT WAS WINDY ON OUR OUTSIDE MOORING ON St Simon's Island and there was frost on top of the boat. We were grateful that our air-conditioner turned into a heat pump when it ran backwards.

  We had spent a couple of days lounging around in the marina and now we were impatient to get to Florida. There it was supposed to be warm and the coast had been put back together and you didn't have to keep sailing out almost into the ocean. Go the back way round St Andrew's Sound, said the dockmaster—it cuts out the worst and it's bumpy today.

  I put on my woolly jacket, and my yellow oilskins, and my life jacket and my gloves, and wished I had brought my Russian hat with the flaps. We splashed out into the wide waters, and after a few miles sidled into the creeks—the backdoor route for small boats and cowards.

  There were new hazards here—corners where you could scarce turn a sixty-foot boat, shoals and needle-eye entrances, but you were deep into the winding waters and safe from the waves and the currents and the cold sun was bright on the best of the best of Georgia.

  Monica joined me on the back. See that white bridge back there in the sun? I asked. It's over the Brunswick River and it's named after the poet of Georgia—Sidney Lanier. He was a bit of a William McGonagall, but he loved Georgia, and it's great to think he was appreciated.

  Oh what is abroad in the marsh and the

  terminal sea?

  Somehow my soul seems suddenly free

  From the weighing fate and the sad

  discussion of sin,

  By the length and the breadth and the sweep

  of the marshes of Glyn.

  When I was a boy Pennar Gut emptied in our windows twice a day, but at high tide it filled and we dove from grassy banks and walked on grass in the sea. In Georgia the tide was filling the creeks and flowing into the marsh grass, covering it to the knees, and sometimes only the tips of its fingers showed, and sometimes it was buried in silver and blue. Yellow grass and water and the encircling sky, and you drowned in space and light. Over the marshes Lanier's white towers in the sun—yes, there is something else in the world, something that will not melt or sway, something that can reach out of the flatness and prove the third dimension and stop you driving into the grass in an ivresse des profondeurs, like a diver taking off his mask, drunk on nitrogen, never to be seen again.

  Thank you very much and that's enough of that sort of thing, Terence my son. Just look ahead—the creek has broadened and you are going back out into St Andrew's Sound and do you know what those tiny white woolly things are two miles away? Those are white horses, Terence my son. You are going out into white horses in a canal boat. You know what that makes you, Terence my son?

  I jammed my elbow into the corner by the grab-
rail and settled in and we came nearer and nearer to the open water of the sound and then the wind and white horses set on me, shouting and shaking and crashing—Oh my God that was a thumper—she hasn't rolled like that before—I hope Jim was in his kennel or it would have slung him across the boat, and poor Mon—now, gently, loosen your armlock on the tiller and let her come round with the wind behind and she is doing her trick of riding the waves as if they are not there. Oh, yes, you yacht, you overtaker, flourish your camera, you are in the presence of one to whom fear is a stranger, who before this day sinks into the west with its sad discussion of sin will have sailed all along the coast of Georgia in a canal boat, contrary to reason and good practice.

  But of course, there were still the nuclear submarines.

  • • •

  MONICA WAS VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE NUCLEAR submarines. Some fool had told her that as they went down Cumberland Sound in their sailing boat a nuclear submarine had risen from the depths and it was a mile long and going like hell with a wake like a row of terrace houses and it had nearly sunk them. Since then Monica talked a lot about nuclear submarines, particularly late at night when she was tired, and wouldn't listen when I said there were really not that many of them and they were probably all broken down under the North Pole.

  Anyway this was it—here she was at the tiller and going down Cumberland Sound, and she had lost her way.

  The man who developed the Nautilus nuclear submarine programme, which saved the world from destruction by not destroying the world, was Admiral Hyman Rickover. One of our gongoozlers had been a naval officer and he was interviewed by Admiral Rickover for a job. It seems Hyman Rickover was brilliant to the point of genius, but very eccentric. He loved straight talking, but like all of us he had his limits. We are an élite force, said Rickover. The world depends on us for its safety. When the survival of the very world is at stake there are no short cuts—my men do no short cuts.

  Yes they do, Admiral, said the officer, all the time, and I take short cuts along with them.

  Hyman Rickover threw him out.

  Rickover looked at the next candidate across his desk and suddenly—Make me mad!—he shouted.

  The officer walked across the room and picked up a glass case containing a four-foot model of a Nautilus submarine and dropped it on the floor. The officer got the job.

  I was sleeping peacefully when Monica throttled back and sounded the horn twice. When you make arrangements to summon each other in an emergency you don't expect anyone to wake you up, and the boat seemed steady so I went up on top in a bad mood. I'm lost, said Monica, and that is the mile-long quay for the nuclear submarine, and some sailor is on the VHF saying Phyllis May are you familiar with these waters and telling me to keep away and go to the port side of the green buoys—that's the left, isn't it?

  The guardian of Admiral Rickover's heritage repeated his request and I took the tiller while Monica found herself on the chart. All the numbers on the daymarks had been changed—Rickover's final defence against an enemy desperate enough to penetrate to his very gates.

  Now we were crossing St Mary's Entrance, where the submarines slid out into the Atlantic to their fearful duty. But no Nautilus lurched from the deep, and we passed over the magic line into Florida, the sunshine state, and near senseless with cold turned into our marina at Fernandina Beach. Opposite us a paper mill as long as Wolverhampton, with tattered towers and ladders and columns which smoked and roared and stank.

  I've come on Floridas you won't believe.

  I'VE COME

  ON FLORIDAS YOU

  WON'T BELIEVE

  Florida

  Down Nassau Sound We Did Roam —He's Coming in on the Grab-rail — The Small Hairy Dog Began to Sing ‘Moon River’— Plastic Lawn Deer — Like a Truck Falling on You — In Defence of Their Eggs — America's Worst Defeat — The Failing Theme Park — You Jump out of the Capsule and Whizz down the Wire — Nothing Happening Out There Today — The Careless White Bone, the Excellence — He's a Shoplifter as Well as a Scrounger and a General Thief

  On the Phyllis May

  One sunny winter's day

  Down Nassau Sound we did roam

  Drinking all night

  Not feeling too bright

  Well I feel so broke up

  I want to go home

  ACTUALLY WE STOPPED DRINKING AROUND MIDNIGHT, and I didn't have much of a hangover, considering. But before we sailed this morning Monica looked at me in a funny way. Are you sure you are all right? she asked—do you realize the lives of Jim and me are in your hands?

  Such a lack of respect disturbs the natural hierarchy. What happens if there is an emergency and the crew has to respond without question to my curt commands? Monica will argue and Jim will run away and hide and we'll all go down, each blaming the others.

  It started yesterday afternoon in Fernandina Beach with a noise like a cannonball rolling across a sandy kitchen table—side thrusters bringing a big boat into the next dock. (The noise is caused by the propeller in the thruster tubes forming tiny vacuums—it's called cavitation—I won't tell you again.) Then there was a banging on the boat and a man shouting—I'm coming aboard!

  I didn't argue because he was big and old with a Breton sailor's cap and an English public school voice, though I suppose I could have had a go at fighting him off with a broom.

  I am David, he said—the captain of the seventy-five-footer that has just come in. I went to Portsmouth Grammar School—it's not a grammar school of course—the headmaster was the chairman of the Headmasters' Conference and it is a public school of some standing. What a fine canal barge—and you are a writer! Come over for a drink before dinner—bring your wife. My God that dog is thin.

  The big white boat had more galley than we have at home and four staterooms plus quarters for the crew. The bed in the main stateroom would have slept the whole ship's company and Monica and Jim and me. There was a cinema screen in the main saloon. In the engine room there were two turbo diesels, both six hundred and fifty horsepower, and plenty of room to walk around them, holding a gin and tonic.

  From the bridge the bow of the boat curved up magisterially but you were high enough to get a good view forward. The wheel had a thin wooden rim and shiny spokes and you spread your arms and embraced it like a woman. Unlike the tiller on the Phyllis May it probably had great influence on where the boat went. There were dials and screens and lights, and things that went beep.

  This is Jack, said Captain David. Jack was huge and bearded with big white teeth—he was nearly as old as Captain David. David and I are the crew, said Jack—the owner is Rob. What will you have to drink?—we have most things.

  A slim man in his late forties with a ginger moustache came on to the bridge. Hello, he said, I am Rob and this is Lila. Lila was blonde and looked as if she had come out of a yacht catalogue.

  So you are a writer, said Rob, and that is your painted boat from England. That is indeed a fine boat—a piece of England come to the South. I see there are logs on top to keep you warm in England, where it is very cold. I am familiar with England—I have been there many times. I have relations there—in fact I have my own coat of arms.

  I have often wondered what you do with a coat of arms, I said. Do you put it on your letterhead, and on your car bonnet, and on your tableware?

  Sure, said Rob, all of those places. And I am a Knight Templar.

  Good heavens—a Knight Templar! I thought they had died out or the Saracens had got them. Do you have to go on quests? I mean to kill dragons, or giants, or rescue maidens, or free Jerusalem, or find the Holy Grail?

  It's a secret order, said Rob, and I have only just been elected. No doubt my instructions are on their way.

  Lila sat by Rob on the bench seat with her legs under her and looked at him rather as Jim looks at me when he sits in the chair next to me when I am writing. She stroked Rob's thigh.

  Captain David and I talked about the English rowing scene fifty years ago and he told me how he went to Sand
hurst and Monica talked about our adventures. Let's all go to dinner, said Rob.

  On the way to the restaurant I walked with Jack. It has been eleven days since I had a woman, he said.

  Oh hard luck, I said, hoping that was the right thing to say.

  Fernandina Beach is like Stone—very pretty and most of the buildings are restaurants, but there is more space in Fernandina Beach and the main streets are hung with lights, even in January when the gift shops are full of half-price Santas.

  I am a Washington lobbyist, said Rob over the collard greens. It's not about influencing legislation—that is a long-term business—it's about getting things through the system. I used to work with a firm but now I work for myself. My clients are big companies, and on my website there is a picture of me with President Bush.

  Do you get fixed fees or do you get commissions from results?

  Both—this boat is part of my business—a good place to schmooze people. Get them on the boat and they are on your side.

  Rob and Lila came back on the Phyllis May and we drank a bottle of Sauvignon and talked about Life and Business and Dogs and I read them the bit about the youngish man in Savannah who bummed a cup of coffee and about his father the navigator and the death of the ball turret gunner and how the fighters used exploding cannon bullets that could cut a plane in half and how I was bombed and how I gave the bum four dollars and four thousand would not have been enough and I wept for the pity of it and because of the drink but no one seemed to mind. I don't know what happened to Captain David but I guess Jack went to look for a woman.

  When we sailed in the morning we idled the Phyllis May along the great white boat and back again and waved but no one waved back, but we had said goodbye last night so that's all right and here we are now on the South Amelia River and the water is getting bluer and bluer and the woods darker green and the Phyllis May is running like a watch. Her wake is green tourmaline with gold lights, fringed with lace.