On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  After ten months of quiet, the radio and sea are crowded. I can see three boats, and I leave on the VHF all day, listening to the colorful chatter: complaining about the “fucking cold,” hopelessness of the catch so far, the calling up of wives at home to order parts, arranging to have a gas truck meet them at the dock, a wife asking for a lobster for dinner, one guy cynically saying, “Ya, I can’t keep up with ‘um, they’re crawling all over the boat, chewin’ on me boots.” (It is rare to hear a local say he is doing well; “Not too bad” is about as good as you will hear.)

  Quiet beauty all over. I am rejoicing at how thin my walls are right now. In my other life I’m not able to leave my heart out front enough, “wear it on my sleeve,” but here I can’t help it. It strikes me that this is how humans ought to be, that I am experiencing merely what it is to be a human in a natural state of being. I think if I were suddenly deposited in New York City I would become lost like a tear in the rain.

  DAY 301—MAY

  Stephan begins to massacre the kitchen, making, besides a massacre, what he is calling French toast. His unique style involves frequently putting his hands in his pockets—a look designed, I think, to impress us with how casual an activity this is for him: drop an egg on the floor, put hands in pockets while saying, “Oops!” Pour half a cup of cinnamon into a bowl, say, “Oh no,” and put hands in pockets. Melt the spatula, hands go in the pockets. Slip on the egg on the floor, knock over the bowl and the last bit of milk, then put hands in pockets.

  At first Wendy and I are edgy, offering suggestions, making sympathetic noises, and secretly relieved that we are on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. Is this our son, the fruit of our labors, our hope for tomorrow? (A hint for kids: Next time a parent criticizes you, say “Hey, I’m the fruit of your loins, leave me alone!”)

  After a hurt look crosses his face, Stephan grins and then immediately starts sneezing from inhaling the half cup of cinnamon, which somehow landed on his chest. We just give up the entire parent thing and begin to laugh, to howl with joy. Abby begins licking the cinnamon, and then she sneezes. The spatula bursts into flames. Soon all of us are paralyzed on the floor and clutching our bellies, tears streaming down our faces. I manage to reach the spatula just before the spice shelf catches fire. I throw it out the porch door.

  We have cold cereal without milk for breakfast.

  DAY 302

  Invisible ships at sea blew their Goliath foghorns at one another last night. The deep sound is more felt than heard—a rumble you expect would cause ripples in your hot chocolate. Even with all its fancy radar, a ship may still not see a fishing boat. The horn simply means Mmmmoooooooooooooooooovvvvve.

  By morning it is still foggy, but also bright. We can hear the local boats working their traps. From his camp north of Whale Island, Percy’s Heavenly Girl appears, Jarvis barking on her bow, and in a moment they are gone.

  Day 306

  Beautiful clear north-wind morning, still cold. Colorful boats and lobster pots everywhere, the season is on! Between clouds Stephan types a report, using solar power to run the laptop. Peter calls on the VHF and invites us all for lobster at his camp. “When Stephan finishes his report,” I tell him. The keys immediately start clicking away at twice the speed they had been. I had no idea Stephan could type. He’s so excited that clouds seem to scurry out of the sun’s path, the solar panels drinking deeply.

  Stephan likes Peter, loves to be around him. They don’t really talk that much. I think Stephan just likes being with another man. He and I can be so locked into fixed patterns with each other, automatic, predictable. I think he feels heard by Peter, and I know Peter enjoys the company. Stephan listens to Peter’s words as if they are the best bits of bait in Nova Scotia.

  DAY 307

  This whole year seems a love story. Wendy and I go to bed as early as we can and just snuggle, lying nose to nose, and it’s been so wonderful, so rich, like sleeping on a mattress-sized slice of warm rye bread, sinking in with wisps of steam floating by, and pulling another warm slice over you for a blanket. We huddle down till the sun’s well up, till we can’t even pretend it’s not lunchtime . . . and the day goes along with brief hand-holding, rubs, and glances. Wendy likes nothing better than a steamy fondle while she’s making bread. Her head arches back just a little.

  The intensity of this happiness obliterates the memory of past hardships. What value is there in listening to what those gargoyles who wait at the doors of perception are yelling in their contorted voices? Should our lives be spent wrestling, and thus becoming these demons? I think not. I prefer to expose them to intense bursts of joy. Who’s to say which is real? I’d rather live with my illusions.

  DAY 308

  Swallows, yellow-rumped warblers. A big female hairy woodpecker lets us get within about fifteen feet of her on the trail. It is spring on our island, and around here, that means fog! I’m stuttering to describe it, to convey all the emotions it elicits. It can be so thick and enfolding, and when you are boating in it, strange urges take you over, saying, “No, go this way, the compass must be wrong,” and when you think you’re going straight, in just a quarter mile—five city blocks—you can make a complete circle, crossing your own wake. Rocks, trees, buoys, boats, birds, shallows, waves, and any number of objects you can hallucinate—all these things can suddenly loom up before you. Uncertainly, you stare—which is a mistake—at some shape. It vanishes, then closer something else appears. And when you’re really lost, maybe an island appears where it can’t possibly be, and your mind is trying to explain what force put it there, moved it there, rather than comprehending that you are utterly lost.

  I’ve heard screen doors slamming and a “Here, kitty kitty” when I was sure I was miles offshore. I have heard a woman’s throaty laughter just feet away. Once an angel appeared, her wings spreading, stretching, and then she vanished, lightly pulled apart by wind, and I suddenly saw a big ugly rock with surf over it just where she floated.

  I have wandered like a billiard ball careening off imaginations gone wild. One big uncontrolled therapy session.

  DAY 310

  The woodpecker visits on the roof, tap tap tapping, doing some drilling too, but then she gives up and is gone for grubbier pastures.

  Sometimes I worry: What will I have to panic about tomorrow? I handle transition by being only a day or two ahead, but it is spring now, and that definitely means that summer is next. We will have to leave here then.

  We’re about out of money—just enough to get back to Idaho and pay a few months’ rent. We need jobs. Though Stephan wants to stay here forever, I think Wendy is beginning to feel like a prisoner. I try to ease this with trips ashore, and I give her lots of chocolate, but it’s not enough. There is a limit to how self-centered I can be. I don’t mean to imply that I am not way past most people’s limit—I know that I am. But this is my Wendy, my love, the woman I want to grow old with. She isn’t happy here.

  Still, I am avoiding making plans. I am a little kid with his fingers in his ears yelling the national anthem in an attempt to drown out any unfamiliar thoughts.

  We’ve no jobs in Idaho, no place to return to, but Wendy already knows her dog-walking route. I’m stretching my ability to think ahead, wondering if using acetone on the windowsills will help the new caulking stick better. I’m very happy with this scope of responsibility, essentially that of a child defending a sand wall on the beach from the incoming tide, as noble a cause as any.

  Wendy eagerly balances our checkbook. All those little numbers have been getting smaller. I think she is happy with that; it is an inarguable reason for us to have to return to Idaho.

  That night I dream. Wendy is a great big plant that has been pulled out of the ground. Her roots are wiggling in the air and looking for nourishment. Stephan comes upstairs from his room; he wants to play cards. He too is a plant, also rootless, with small clods of dirt falling about him.

  Each branch of their roots become smaller, eventually ending as a small roo
t hair. I can see that each of these are hungry, wiggling in search of water and minerals. I run to the sink and begin filling a bucket with water. I pour in a whole bowl of sugar, some leftover bread, and an apple. I look around the room in a panic: What else can I add? In a frenzy I pore over my precious bookshelves and choose a field guide to butterflies, an abridged encyclopedia, and Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins. I throw in a Chopin CD, a flashlight, a candle, and a pair of wool socks.

  I bring my bucket to my family, but it is too late. Their leaves are drying, withering before me.

  I wake up.

  17. A Place I Never Meant to Leave

  Only in silence and solitude can you find your true self.

  —A YOGI I SAT NEXT TO AT A MOVIE THEATER IN 1976

  DAY 311

  I want to stay forever. I want to become a professional scrounger, find a way to make seaweed taste good, trade labor for outboard-engine gas—better yet, trade the boat in for an old sailboat. Something small, flat-bottomed, easy for one person to operate. Grow potatoes, set out fish traps, hunt, grow a beard, forget my social security number.

  Stephan will become a child of the forest, moving silently through the brush and catching animals with his bare hands. With one of those Russian Women Seeking American Husbands catalogs we will get him a wife raised barefoot in the Siberian tundra. We will build them a log house in the darkest center of the island. He can raise wolves! And Wendy could—

  With a screeching halt my fantasy comes to an end.

  DAY 312

  Two days ago I watched something odd float by. It was sort of yellow, looked to be maybe four feet by six feet, and it was conforming to the ocean’s surface, shaping itself into waves, like a big paint spot, or a sheet of cardboard maybe. I watched it through binoculars—it was just that sort of day, I guess—and then it drifted out of sight behind some rocks.

  The next day Wendy and I were walking around the island, stopping every so often to smooch . . . and there, laid out on the rocks before us, was the mattress last seen on Day 196 skipping over the trees. It’s back!

  We continued our walk around the island and almost had sex in the moss, but I inhaled a blackfly and while I was hacking, I farted loudly and Wendy seemed to fall out of the mood. Sigh. It’s okay, though; I’m sure I’ll remember it as having been better.

  DAY 314

  Gorgeous morning. I’m off to help Peter pull his fishnet. He generally catches schools of mackerel, which appear this time of year. The trap is about a quarter mile of straight net, fifty feet high (from the surface of the ocean to the bottom). Fish hit this wall and follow it into another net, which traps them. There are thirty-six anchors, hundreds of buoys, probably five miles of heavy line, and a drawstring on the bottom of the trap net—I think. Honestly, I haven’t been able to figure out how it really works, despite numerous descriptions. Anyway, it’s a big deal to haul it up, so friends show up and each’ll get a percent of the catch. If it’s empty, the net will take one or two hours to haul. Full of fish, half a day.

  We meet at Peter’s wharf as the sun rises. There are eight boats with eight guys waiting to get started. There is a lot of scratching and smoking, and I’m trying to fit in. Just trying to understand what is being said is difficult for me, because when in even small local herds, men’s language can become very dialectal. Even Peter’s words are hard to follow. Suddenly over the VHF radio comes my wife’s voice. On fishing boats the radio is always on. It’s also loud enough for you to hear it over the engines. On eight boats, over eight speakers, Wendy wants to discuss what I’ll be making for dinner, and she starts off about pasta and sautéed chicken and, well, my cover is blown: around here no guy would admit to using the word sauté. The guys cough and pretend not to hear.

  The haul is difficult, lots of back and forearm stuff. A hundred-pound seal has gotten tangled in the net and is dead. Seals are smart enough to know that a net provides good fish, but sometimes they get caught and drown. They can also tear the net and ruin the catch. I remember in the late 1960s, when I was a feel-good liberal, a real “save the seals” kind of kid. Now here I am with these guys, who absolutely hate the things; a single seal can cause hours of repairs and thousands of dollars in lost fish, maybe a fifth of a yearly income.

  It’s a good lesson for me. Most environmental causes are funded by people like me who want to save the forest but live in a wood house, buy fish from the store and have SAVE THE SEALS bumper stickers, want to preserve the Alaskan wilderness from oil drilling but drive a climate-controlled luxury vehicle and complain about gas prices. The guys here cut trees for their homes, shoot seals when they can, hunt, and spend their lives far closer to the cycles of our earth than I ever will. Are they better? No. But they are congruous.

  More hauling . . . and amazingly, in this whole huge trap, we get a total of two fish, two crabs, the dead seal, and lots of tiny crustaceans, which look like the ocean’s version of stick bugs.

  DAY 320

  Is it just me, or do many men occasionally find themselves in hiding from their families, a refugee?

  Right now I’m sitting in the boat, high and dry on the ramp. I’ve just finished bending the prop back into its general shape, filling the gas tank, restowing the life jackets, drying out the lines, and taking inventory of the survival gear. I am Robinson Crusoe locked in his stockade, clutching his few possessions and peering out for savages.

  My fort, this boat, is the only comfort I can find right now. She is a small masterpiece, her readiness and willingness to survive being my best creation.

  How like a child I am, at thirty-nine, a guy hiding in his secret fort. I could take her to sea right now, alone. Perhaps this fantasy of escape is what allows me to stay. That and some rum.

  Near my head is a small globe of a compass mounted out of harm’s way, under a seat. I’ve watched its direction for years now, and it always works, always sits on the surface of this earth pointing out where to go. Just beyond it are some courses written in Magic Marker on the inside of the boat. To get from the harbor here on Whale Island to the mouth of Strawberry Passage (passing perfectly between the hazards of Black’s Ledge and “The Breaker”) I must go 257 degrees. Then 215 degrees to the rocks by Jason Island, 265 degrees into Jason’s Channel, and so on, till 355 degrees brings me to Junior’s dock. I love my compass. It responds to forces unchanging, unlike my stepson.

  Two pieces of plywood cover the fore and aft aluminum floors. They are less slippery than the aluminum and reinforce the hull so that when I drop heavy things, assuming they’ve missed my toes, they stay in the boat, thus preventing the ocean from coming in.

  Next I have a big blue Tupperware bin, two feet by three by one. It sits low and stays closed no matter what. From this box I am equipped to deal with most of what this life throws at me . . . except for the world of people. For that I have the rum. Anyway, the box contains a collapsible fishing rod, a mess of lures and hooks, a fishing reel, a bag of plastic bags (small zipper-locks, garbage-bag size, and one big enough to drive this whole boat into, twenty feet by ten by ten), a collapsible shovel with a saw hidden in the handle, binoculars (adjustable, 8 to 20 power), three plastic adapters for gas-line hose, and a chart of this shoreline (double-laminated). Naturally, there is also a hundred feet of parachute chord.

  Next are two packages—the ones to grab if I’m washed ashore, or out to sea, or if I have to establish another consumer-based society on an island, for instance. First is a small bullet- and waterproof black case containing a portable VHF with three battery packs, two 20,000-candlepower flashlights with two spare battery packs, one spare bulb, two spare spark plugs, and some copper “paint,” which conducts electricity. The next grab is my favorite. It is a fanny pack, and with it on I feel invincible: four candles, three lighters, and one flint-and-steel fire starter. Hypothermia medicine (Jell-O powder). Pliers, screws, hose clamps, cotter pins, pulley (eight-hundred-pound), and spark-plug wrench. Flare gun with five flares, signal mirror, and a six-by-
six-foot neon signal cloth, “the loudest whistle on earth.” (It also works underwater. You never know when you’ll need to call Flipper.) One quart of water. A hammer, a twelve-inch screwdriver, a roll of duct tape, an assortment of stainless steel bolts, vise grips, a Phillips-head screwdriver, pliers, one of those plier tools that claims to be a whole tool kit, an eight-inch tube of epoxy, another two of those twenty-by-ten-by-ten-foot garbage bags, two handheld flares, and three ten-inch bigass motherfucking nails. Also thirty-six hundred calories of compressed Coast Guard–approved “food.”

  Outside the Tupperware box now are fourteen gallons of fuel, two liters of oil, one liter of “dry gas,” a handheld bilge pump, a funnel, a canteen, an extra drain plug, a fifty-foot coil of line, two stainless steel knives easily accessible by reaching under the fore or aft seats, my 25-horsepower outboard, two oars, a spare 3-horsepower engine (stowed forward with three sets of foul-weather gear), a block and pulley, another fifty-foot coil of rope, three life jackets, one army poncho, a twenty-foot bowline always attached to the boat, and 250 feet of anchor line coiled down in a bucket and ready to feed out, one end already secured to the boat . . . and a bottle of rum. Did I mention that already?