On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  I have even been able to get a station in New York City! Thank God for Dr. Laura. She is the only high-intensity Jewish girl heard in this house. I got on the show once and her thoughts were valid, although too direct for me to hear. A hazard of a two-minute therapy session, I guess. Anyway, for no reason I can conjure, Wendy hates her and yells, “Shut up!” at my little radio. Many colorful and energetic discussions begin this way. Wendy says Dr. Laura is rude and insensitive. I reply, “Yeah, it’s refreshing, isn’t it?” Then Wendy says she doesn’t let people tell their whole story and I say, “Yah, like the story matters,” and so on. After all the counseling I’ve done with teens (for the past ten years) and the careful rapport building I do to let them hear truths gently, I just love how this woman spills it out. Perhaps her radio therapy is not so helpful for the twenty people she handles a day, but to the people who listen, it’s clear, insightful, and, once spoken, often becomes the henceforth obvious.

  I loved living in Idaho because, among other things, it taught me about guns, and owning my first gun taught me something about life: every moment I don’t shoot myself in the head, I am reminded that living is my choice. Radio DJs’ phrases like “hump day” or “thank God it’s Friday” really piss me off. VICTIMS!! By not shooting myself I have consciously chosen to be alive, and so having guns reminds me to shut up and get with the program. That simple sentence is the point of all therapy. Somehow a bullet can miraculously condense years of counseling into a single sentence, what therapists and psychiatrists don’t want you to know. The short course. It works for me because to stay undead makes me a verb choosing to live. That I got owning my first gun. Not bad.

  DAY 168

  Wendy and I have taken to lots of loud yelling and cussing and I recommend this therapeutically for stress release. She yells, “You do it now, damnit!” (Meaning hand-write twelve copies of our full-page Christmas letter.) I yell back, “We can wait to go ashore to a Xerox machine.” She says, “Okay, just only five, please. Please?” Later we compromise, and I write all twelve letters.

  DAY 169

  Howling east-wind storming day. I run between the electrical and water systems like an eager dad—chlorinating here, plugging in the saw charger there, siphoning off twenty gallons into extra tanks, disconnecting an old 12-volt battery that finally holds a charge (“Honey, I saved this battery—call your mom, I’m a Baptist now!”), and so on. I just love our systems, the independence, the contact with our environment.

  It’s a power-coffee day. When I played ice-hockey goalie in tenth grade I used to use caffeine as my secret weapon, my one and only strategy, since skill was not an option. Half a cup of instant coffee crystals, a quarter cup of sugar, a quarter cup of water. I’d drink this sludge thirty minutes before game time and went from being a fair goalie to an okay goalie. The problem was, I couldn’t skate either way, but with this jitter-mix cocktail in me I just vibrated around and was thus in more than one place at any given moment, sort of like an electron. Often when a puck came by it would hit me, and if I happened to fall forward I would land on it and my teammates would come by and hit my pads with their sticks and say “Good save” and I felt good. I remember once boldly skating twenty feet from the net. Someone on the other team broke free and rushed at me. I was just able to keep my balance as I skated backward. I remember being surprised when I passed the goal net, but then I knocked myself out hitting the backboards. I figure if you really suck at a sport, get a concussion early in the season so you have something to not quite have recovered from for the rest of the season.

  So it’s a coffee day. I play with our laptop. Since we had it fixed before we came here I haven’t been able to confuse it into busting again. I start pulling out its battery and disconnecting the power cord at the same time and am satisfied to see a sort of freezing sleet form over the “Welcome to Macintosh” smile face. It blinks twice and makes some boinging noises, then shuts off. Wendy is pissed at me—she’s the typist—but I feel good; another triumph for Dankind over the evil-machine empire. (It’s the sort of day where I must struggle to find meaning.)

  One hundred pages into The Fountainhead Wendy announces, “My heart is broken, I’m done with the book.” I point out that there are 350 pages left, and she should keep going.

  Last month Stephan got to the part in The Princess Bride where the hero dies. He burst into tears and threw the book into the ocean. I waded in, dried it off, and read it to him until the hero came back to life. He snuffled a little, and then he took the book back.

  Somehow this was an important fatherly moment for me. Something made Stephan unhappy, and I knew how to fix it. I could make him happy again, and I didn’t even need to be right about anything. I want desperately to have an unconscious ability to father well, a prehistoric ability to love at all times. Thinking about what to do seems so pathetic. But this one thing I did right.

  DAY 170

  Wendy is baking fiendishly. For New Year’s we’re giving a cake to Junior and Becky, a loaf of bread to Peter and Mary Ellen, brownies to Mike, and so on. She’s upset because she can’t cut pieces out of the final things; they have to be given whole. I watch as she eats spoonfuls of batter, trying to fill up her cravings before the actual baking begins. Even the dogs stare in wonder, because usually they get to lick a spoon or a bowl, but not today. I’m hungry but she won’t give me anything. I go downstairs and snack on Bear and Abby’s dried food, which actually is pretty good.

  One of Wendy’s creations is what she calls “Special K bars.” I grew up in Manhattan eating exotic eastern European cakes from Collette’s, baklava, and Russian Tea Room pastries, imported directly from only the most exotic of countries. “Special K bars” are made from sugar, Karo syrup, peanut butter, sugar, chocolate chips, Special K cereal, and some more sugar. I am wondering if my own evolutionary ladder travels up, down, or sideways.

  The house shakes. I luxuriate in remembering drilling into bedrock the sixteen holes that secure us to the rocks. I know what holds us to the earth here, and that warms me. I know how the nails connect the wood to frames to roofs to walls . . . and I know where to stand to avoid accidentally noticing where I can see outside other than through a window or door.

  When I go ashore for the mail I meet Becky by our shared mailbox. She looks a little sad and tells me how last night in their living room she said, “Junior, when did I get so old and fat?” To which he replied, “Jeez, I don’t know.” He just isn’t one to waste words. I get the mail and head home on the boat in the pouring rain. As I steer through the storm I find myself afraid, imagining what Wendy would do to to me if I ever answered her like that.

  At home I can’t help but notice there are quite a few leaks today. The wind is blowing over thirty knots from the east and driving the water in, probably right through the roof I built. I try to convince Wendy that a good house just has to breathe. She says, “It’s drowning I’m worried about.” I explain how it makes me feel as if I’m weathering a storm at sea. She says, “It makes me feel like I’m weathering a storm too, and it’s in my kitchen!”

  By four-thirty it’s dark. The rain and wind have stopped. The coffee has left me in a slump. I pour two buckets of overflow water I left on the woodstove into the bathtub, the second bath of mine ever out here, and settle in to soak. The tub paint begins to peel. I put my head underwater and hum “Amazing Grace,” with harmonies only the inside of a tub can give me.

  Wendy and I argue briefly—I think it’s something about a laundry bag (I enter best into the spirit of an argument and often do not pay attention to the content). Wendy storms out the door yelling, “Fine, I’m leaving you,” then comes back in and tells me, “No, I’m not running away! I’m gonna stay around to cause you perpetual hell on earth!” She says I’m frustrated at her about something and why won’t I talk about it? I yell, “I’m getting old and fat and bald and don’t have a job and don’t get to prove that I’m a man anymore by screwing lots of women and these are all complaints between my pity-ass
victim self and God, so stop trying to take the fucking blame!” She smiles, my outburst being what she was apparently after from the start. Damn, outsmarted again! Why is it I’m so unable to outargue this girl?

  DAY 171

  The pine floor continues to dry and separate. The lumber must have been not quite twenty minutes old when it was delivered. Though we built it tight and solid, the “tongue-and-groove” boards are now a half inch apart. Not fall-through cracks, but see-through. I find this convenient for sweeping but Stephan, who lives downstairs, complains.

  DAY 172

  Totally white ocean with big surging waves, foam flying off the tips and an evil dark mist. The windows fog up and our world gets small, very small. From miles of open to no more than twelve feet in any direction.

  Wendy’s baking cookies. This means that the moon is about full and she’s doing that weird girl thing again. She also bursts into tears for no reason and needs extra hugging at night. I’m liking her more and more. I find myself with teenager stomach love bubbles sometimes.

  I’m only just now, in my Neanderthal way, realizing that Wendy is the center of all our lives out here. I can’t even pretend to be more important. Stephan needs her for loving, games, and small things like room cleaning and motherly services. I just like to be near her. The dogs are worse. They follow her downstairs and watch her sweep, change, or go to the bathroom, insisting on going into the bathroom with her. All eyes are on her. Quite something, considering my belief that I am why the sun bothers to rise in the morning. At first I could joke about how if she dies I’ll get that Humvee to replace her. Now that’s not even funny; my feelings are deepening, uncomfortable for me and obviously good.

  DAY 173

  Now, here is a problem most people never get to deal with. Imagine a solid-as-ice block of shit three feet by two feet by two feet. That’s twelve square feet. The buried thirty-five-gallon drum under the house filled up, and so the last few flushes sat in the pipe between the floor and the dirt and froze. As I hammered away, the pipe separated from the toilet, and about two gallons of exceptionally foul, not quite frozen stuff rained through the bathroom floor onto me beneath it, hammer clenched tightly as I felt chunks drizzle about me.

  Being an optimist when bizarre things occur, I immediately thought (lied to myself) about how well I’d planned out making the toilet-room floor not waterproof, thus allowing proper drainage. As the sewage began to freeze my clothing and hair rigid I thought, “Oh good, an igloo, that’ll keep the wind out.”

  Sailboats really have the best toilets for adventure. On an old family boat I remember, I pumped a clogged toilet until enough pressure built up for the expected kerblam of what I thought was the clog passing from the pipe to the sea via the through-hull fitting. Only during the next week did I notice a bad smell in the bilge, into which it turned out I’d been pumping everything. Uncovering the bottom of the canned-food bin I found the torn hose just where it went into the through hull. The initial clog, packed like a brick, was all that had kept us from sinking.

  Years later I was sailing aboard The Bill of Rights, a 128-foot schooner and school ship I worked on. I was helping the guilty toilet-clogging student (discovered after a brief trial of twenty-seven “I didn’t do it”s, with one abstention). This toilet blew all over me and the kid. He was wearing a raincoat, and I was still laughing at him for his “shit phobia” when the fluid shot all over my face and body.

  The real highlight of today’s adventure was losing my temper and with a .30-30 Winchester applying a rather aggressive pipe-unclogging technique. As the smoke cleared, I surveyed the damage. Essentially no more pipe . . . but I’m not easily discouraged, and with ringing in my ears, I duct-taped the shit out of it (actually, I duct-taped quite a bit of shit into it). Right in the middle of this Wendy yelled, “I have to use the toilet right now, it’s an emergency!”

  I had to empty the holding tank, leading to my current dilemma of what to do with this mass of frozen shit. It is like an entity—I really want to just “let it go,” you know—a “live release” or something, like in Born Free. I have till April before it thaws and smells real bad, but still. It sits in the yard and I’m afraid to go out. Through the window I see Abby working on it like a cow on a salt lick.

  10. Trouble in Paradise

  Men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 174

  What a night. Our two main batteries are overfull of power, as the wind has been blowing forty-plus knots the last day. It’s a good opportunity to get all the batteries charged, so I carried the boat ramp’s battery from where it had died pulling the boat just halfway up. The solar charger is small and has trouble keeping the battery as charged as, say, a car would. These are big and heavy deep-cycle marine batteries, and I complained loudly while carrying the ramp battery between the harbor and the house (“Mom never told me where all the roots were” came to mind as the best excuse). I hooked it directly to the charger, topped off all the cells with water, and went to sleep blissfully happy knowing the wind was charging my battery. I sleep lightly when it’s storming—from my sailing days.

  I dreamed of dripping sounds: lava, waterfalls, and leaking roof, as I recall. Finally I woke up and still could hear dripping. In a space like this you learn all the sounds—like those from an expanding stovepipe, a draining sink, a cup blowing across the porch. This was a new sound.

  It turned out to be hydrochloric acid boiling out the top of the overfull, overcharging battery. It went through the floor and onto the tool area, soaking my chain saw and collecting in a bucket of galvanized screws (which turned black and now, eight hours later, are rusty). So there I was at four a.m. mopping up battery acid. My knees burned and I looked down to see them peeking through my dissolving long underwear. Then my fingers burned and I saw bubbles in my newest wounds (a daily event here, collecting small wounds). Things got more painful by the moment, and I didn’t know whether to cut bait or pray for a meteorite to hit me in the back and put me out of my misery. By then sparks were igniting on the terminals and I vaguely remembered how a warning on the plastic lids I’d removed earlier to add the water mentioned the words vapor and explosion in the same short sentence. A piece of fabric fell from my leg and a wisp of smoke curled from it and I was melting like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. My portable voltage meter was lying in a shallow pool of acid, and it began flashing signals and bleeping in a wounded way, as if to say that this particular activity was not within its specified parameters. I reached out just as a final burble of sound sighed from it. I thought “I’ve lost R2!” And then I screamed as something rubbed my leg. It was just Abby, curious. She left footprints, which smoldered, and as I watched she began moving quickly, a sort of erratic hopping dance, the point of which was to keep all of her legs in the air at the same time.

  Well, I’d had it. Sparks, acid, wounds, burning knees, a dying electronic device, and a dog about to ignite. Feeling very much like a Monty Python character yelling, “Run away, run away!” I bounded down the stairs with Abby tangled and falling on me the whole way. I yanked the door open and leapt into the near-frozen mud by the woodpile. I wobbled on my knees and plunged fingers into the ooze as Abby ran circles. The water cooled our burns.

  So here it is about five in the morning and I’ve worked up a sweat, am lying in the mud, wet, and trying to remember if the word is hyperthermia or hypothermia. Abby licks at the slightly thawing block and then my face.

  DAY 175

  Stephan finished his combined geography and history final and got an overall A–. We did some celebratory yelling and hollering, then got a good start on science.

  I often wonder what it is I enjoy so much about teaching Stephan. When it’s a subject I am passionate about, like science, I almost feel as if I can take a tiny bit of credit for all the miracles I am revealing to him. Like maybe I was the one who first figured it out,
that I have inside knowledge to the secrets of life. There is magic in being right there with him when an idea really takes hold, when either an old belief crumbles or a new idea fills a previously vacant part of his awareness—that is a moment of creation, and I just love being the witness. For example, discussing plate tectonics is interesting, but cutting out all the continents and making your own assembled puzzle of the earth millions of years ago—the significance of that one little act is tremendous! It explains how mountains form, it turns the earth and all rocks into things that flow, it explains the floor of the ocean, and, most of all, it flips your whole perception of time on end. I have Stephan write a paper called “If I Were Patient Enough to Watch the Earth for Three Hundred Million Years.”

  On a day like this, I am giving, not teaching. There is no effort, no struggle, no moaning or complaining. Stephan is wide-eyed and alive, and so am I.

  Fresh rye bread, red sunset. Seas still a froth, wind down to ten to twenty knots. Just an excellent place and an excellent family to be part of.

  DAY 176

  Beautiful clear afternoon, exciting ice-hockey game on the pond, with Abby sprawling about like a drunk sea pup.

  On the radio we hear a story about using jackhammers to dig graves for a funeral to the north.

  Cleaning up after dinner, I carefully sweep table crumbs into my hand as Wendy watches approvingly. She turns and I quickly dump them onto Abby, who I can always count on to move erratically and distribute the crumbs evenly. Wendy has somehow seen this and I quickly move in to hug her before she can get angry—an offensive defense, but I’m too late.