Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  The “hospital” was an old auditorium, something built for town meetings or a Rotary society. It had no air-conditioning and was stiflingly hot inside, and smelled horribly, mostly of chemical disinfectant. The building had no separate rooms—no rooms at all, in fact, merely sheets suspended from the ceiling by long, dark-stained, moldy ropes.

  I spoke with a doctor for a few minutes. He told me he thought that she would survive but that I should leave immediately lest I be in some way blamed. I took his advice, and quietly fled the area. Exhausted from stress, we took the long way home, stopping on the side of a mountain road where I found an elderly woman cooking over a wood fire. She sold me three pupusas with cheese and beans for one dollar. I washed my hands in a metal bowl half filled with soapy water, and bought a couple of Cokes in glass bottles for 25 cents each.

  We stopped at Super Repuestos and I purchased four very expensive car batteries. I tried, without luck, to find some cable tensioners and other fancy tools and boat stuff. I stopped at the lumberyard and paid for the piece of plywood we had used as a stretcher. And finally, drove back to the estero.

  There, I made my way out to Valkyrien and lay down in the cockpit, my back against the broken captain’s chair. I thought of this woman, shot in the back while riding her bicycle and her family, and said a few prayers. I thought too, of Vicki and our children at home, and how completely different our lives are. You can pull out of my driveway and ride down a single, unbroken piece of asphalt straight to San Salvador, and if you make a couple of small turns, you will end up on the roadside where that woman was shot. We are so connected to Central America and and so much apart from it.

  I wanted badly to leave El Salvador, but I also loved it there. I loved everything about the country, except the violence. I loved the food and the people and the dichotomy of law and social norms and the warmth of the climate and the extraordinary storms. I loved traveling up the estero to where Cesar’s grandmother lived in a grass-roofed mud hut with no electricity. But, my God, I wanted to leave. I assured Vicki that all was fine, we were making progress each day. But of course she knew by the sound of my voice that it was time for me to get out.

  25. Troy Returns

  Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—

  half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

  —Kenneth Graham, Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows

  One afternoon I decided to see how far up the estero we could get in the Whaler. Cesar and I sped across the harbor, then far inland until the water ended in a muddy swamp. As we passed farther and farther into the jungle, away from the roads, away from electricity and refrigeration, it was as if we were moving back in time. First the fiberglass boats disappeared. Then we stopped hearing the sounds of outboard motors; all the boats we saw up there were small and made only of wood. Most of the people were either very old, or children.

  One old man, an indigene, built most of the canoes in the estero. He agreed to build one for me. He chose a tree in the forest and chopped it down, then hollowed it out. This generational shipwright left a thick part in the stern so I could hook up a 9.9-horsepower engine. He also left a couple of seats, roughly a third of the way toward each end. When he was finished, he presented me with one of the most beautiful canoes I have ever seen.

  I had worked day after long day with Cesar, and we were completely sick of each other. I could not stand to be with him after he had refused to stop for the injured woman. And he was a terrible carpenter. Every carpenter makes mistakes. All of us are lazy at times. But you cannot cut a hole in a wooden boat without having the replacement wood on hand to repair the hole the same day. Wooden boats with holes sink. I needed to replace Cesar.

  Vicki could sense my desperation in our late-night Skype calls. She knew I would never get Valkyrien out of the estero without help. The one man who could definitely save the day was my friend Troy, but he had stepped off Valkyrien back in Monterey, having fulfilled his promise, and had no interest in coming back.

  Troy worked hard, long hours on complex jobs, managing the physical plant of a large building in downtown Los Angeles. He received ten days of vacation each year. If he came to El Salvador, Troy would have to use up all his vacation time, work harder, enveloped in heat, covered in sweat and soaked in diesel, tormented by mosquitoes and frustrated by the lack of supplies and tools. Somehow, though, Vicki convinced Troy that returning to El Salvador was the only sensible thing for him to do. She told Troy that this was the chance of a lifetime. She told him that he could vacation anytime, and that in twenty years all of those vacations would blend together into a single muddled memory of pleasant comfort. But if he joined me in El Salvador he would remember the trip for the rest of his life. She clinched it by saying, “Max needs you.”

  Troy showed up flush with cash and a brand-new Visa card from Vicki. I paid my outstanding debts to the hotel and various vendors, and everyone on the estero became much more relaxed.

  The minute Troy arrived, I dragged him down to the pier and we jumped into the Whaler so I could show him the estero before the sun set. We skimmed atop the calm waters, at full throttle but going only about half speed, with the engine screaming a rough clank as the driveshaft rattled against whatever gears Cesar had mashed when he struck that log. We raced past the grass-roof huts and rows of brightly colored dugout canoes at the edge of the estero. The beach, like so many others at primitive villages around the world, was covered almost completely in trash. Salvador provides no sanitation services to these villages, and the indigenous people continue to simply discard rubbish on the ground, as they have always done; the difference is that now, because so much is plastic, the trash does not disappear.

  We ran a mile or so up the estero and then turned hard around, tilting the Whaler, angling in a smooth arc, narrowly grazing the deep green mangrove banks overgrown on each side. At Cesar’s home they use the mangrove as charcoal in their cooking fires. Pottery shards—many of them from pre-Columbian times—litter the whole area.

  We sped back down and out of the estero, awed by its beauty but also worried about what it might look like in another ten years, and where and how families like Cesar’s would scrape by. I ran the Whaler past a small Indian village, their homes built on stilts along a narrow bank, then turned west toward the sea. I took the Whaler through the eight-foot standing waves at its bar, into the Pacific, as a full moon lit up a completely clear night sky.

  Later, we drove the Whaler back to Valkyrien, where I showed Troy the dugout canoe. Troy is a third-generation carpenter, and he marveled at the strength of the wood, and the difficult work of hacking the canoe out of a tree trunk. But he was horrified when he realized I planned to take the canoe with us; dragging it behind seemed a terrible idea, and lifting the heavy canoe onto our deck, even worse. In the end I convinced Troy that we could not leave this artifact behind.

  We checked the oil level in Valkyrien’s diesel, then started up the big engine. I tried the reverse gear, checking the wiring and the genset. Everything worked.

  I slept well that night.

  Mostly because of Troy’s know-how and skills, we were able to get a lot of stuff fixed on the Valkyrien that had been deemed impossible. Locals said the boat would have to be pulled out of the water to have the rudder re-seated, but Troy and I righted it in the water using scuba gear. I had propped up the worm drive with several 2x4s jammed into the sides of the cockpit. We were told that the entire worm gear would need to be replaced, but Troy rebuilt the steering box and magically repaired the worm gear.

  Troy also realized that it made no sense to head south with only one hundred nautical miles’ worth of fuel, especially as there had been no wind (apart from vicious storms) for most of our time in Central America. The Nicaraguan coast offered almost no opportunities to fuel up.

  Cesar had promised to repair the bowsprit, but had done no work on it, and the masts, without for
estays, were not strong enough to sail. That was another reason we needed to carry more fuel. I did not want to pay for fuel tanks to be installed, and even standard, portable diesel tanks cost a fortune in Central America.

  Troy is a meticulous man, and by the time he arrived in the estero, he had become a bit wary of some of my ideas. Though he was always up for adventure, Troy spent much more time thinking of what could go wrong than about how great it would be just to try. We complemented each other well in that sense. I envisioned great trips; Troy made them succeed. Buying the diesel drums, though, was a mistake we made together.

  Troy and I looked at dozens of different potential containers and finally purchased some inexpensive eighty-gallon drums used to transport water to cattle on local farms. I had not seen too many drums that were larger than fifty-five gallons. These tanks were humongous, nearly as tall as me, a few feet wide, and made of a material that would eventually be dissolved by the diesel fuel, but hopefully not before they had served their purpose.

  I purchased six of them. This was perhaps my best idea, and worst execution of the trip. Had we spent five times as much money, the trip would have been ten times easier.

  We realized that there was no way to safely secure the drums to the decks (each tank weighed about five hundred pounds), so we took some measurements and removed Valkyrien’s center hatch, then slid all six tanks, empty, into the main saloon. They fit tightly, which was perfect; we wanted them to move as little as possible. Even so, we strapped them together and tied the tanks down several times over with cargo straps and ropes. And then we filled them with diesel.

  Unfortunately, we spilled a fair amount of diesel while filling the tanks. The bungs on top of the tanks were designed to hold water with the tank motionless on dry land. The diesel sloshed against these weak plugs at every wave and soon dislodged the plastic tops. Diesel fuel spilled out the top and puddled on the cabin sole. Troy fashioned new bungs using cloth and plastic, and they held well, although the odor of diesel remained strong.

  We were disappointed about the spilled diesel, but all in all, the plastic fuel tanks really seemed a great, financially efficient solution to the fuel issue. It was possible, almost probable, that we could make it to Panama in one shot—a week or so at sea and then the Canal. That one-week jaunt developed into the most challenging slog of my life. Diesel became our maddening lifeblood.

  The fuel tanks leaked. The tanks, well anchored, did not move, but the diesel inside sloshed back and forth, especially when we began drawing down their contents to burn in the Detroit. It seemed that for the next few weeks Troy and I were always covered in diesel fuel. Diesel coated the floorboards of the boat and its fumes entered our lungs. Our food pantry was located in the same room as the diesel drums, so diesel eventually soaked all of our food containers. Diesel is a solvent of plastic, and all of our water bottles soon carried the acid taste of hydrocarbons. Our hair and beards smelled so strongly that in the end I grew used to and actually came to like the scent of diesel fuel.

  After several days of diesel poisoning, even walking can become an ordeal. For the most part the effects were a vaguely sore throat (not terribly uncomfortable, but unremitting); lost concentration (it became more difficult to fit screwdrivers into slotted screws or to choose the correct wrench for a given nut size); skin that got dry and became blotchy and red; irritability; and just a general tendency to become confused. (I think I actually liked the lightheadedness, but it did slow down our work.)

  We blamed these symptoms, at the time, more on the sun and the gentle rolling of the boat than the diesel, but upon returning from the trip, I noticed that virtually all of the symptoms resumed if I worked on a diesel engine and spilled any appreciable amounts of the fuel on my body.

  Sometimes, while pumping diesel from one tank to another, a hose clamp would come loose. The diesel, streaming from the hose, sprayed around the room like one of those children’s toys attached to a lawn sprinkler. I would look at Troy as if to say “This is the most effed-up thing I have ever done.”

  Troy would look back at me and say, “Man, what are you complaining about? This is fresh air compared to a day welding galvanized steel! Now, that stuff is bad for you.”

  I was so grateful every day to have Troy with me. He could fix anything, and no one can laugh more heartily at folly than Troy.

  26. Ghosts

  “Intimacy grows quick out there,” I said. “I knew him as well as it is

  possible for one man to know another.”

  —Joseph Conrad, Marlow in Heart of Darkness

  Late one afternoon, at no particular impetus, Troy and I decided to head back out to sea and points south. I do things often for no reason, like a cow choosing between which of two bales of hay to begin eating. Many more things needed to be done aboard Valkyrien, but she was packed with food and fuel, and Troy was running out of time before he had to return to his job. Whatever still needed to be done could wait for Panama.

  We cruised out past the harbor entrance, waving good-bye to Cesar. He told us we should not leave; he had a bad feeling about the boat. I thought to myself, Well, maybe you wouldn’t have such a bad feeling if you had done more to repair her. But I kept those thoughts to myself.

  When Troy and I finally departed El Salvador, we towed both the Whaler and the hand-carved canoe. Dragging two dinghies created new problems. The boats required a nearly constant watch to ensure that their lines did not foul. Every sailor in every port told me to cast the canoe adrift; it had no value and offered only hassles. But it was designed and built by a true master who had learned the trade from his father, and his father before that, going back to a time before the Spanish came. I wanted badly to bring it home to Cape Cod.

  As night fell, we cruised rather serenely along the shores of El Salvador. The sky grew black long before the sun disappeared. Troy and I started to think we heard a screaming. Neither of us said anything. But when the unnerving cry did not let up, Troy turned to me and said, “Do you hear that?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Troy looked at me, alarmed. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “What the hell was I going to say? ‘Hey, Troy, do you hear that ghost?’ ”

  Troy laughed uncomfortably. “What do you think it is, Max—some sort of animal?”

  “Not out here.”

  Troy was used to me inventing silly stories to create a sense of security on the boat, and I think he found it upsetting that I offered no explanation for the eerie calling.

  I saw a tiny light in the distance, barely visible, and dead ahead of us. I stared at the light for a minute or two. Troy looked ahead for the first time and saw the light. He shouted, “Do you see that? What the hell is that?” Troy realized as he spoke that I had been looking at the thing, quietly, for a while. This made him even more concerned. He knew then that I did not know what it was, either—a single unblinking white light, several miles off the shore of a deserted coast.

  “I guess it’s a fisherman coming in at the end of the day.”

  “But why is he screaming like that?” Troy asked.

  I looked up at the evening sky, which had become astonishingly dark in only a few minutes.

  “Maybe about the weather?” I said.

  By this time we could make out in the dusk a dark figure, standing over a small canoe and slowly swinging a lantern back and forth. The weather had become suddenly cold. Not merely cooler, but actually cold. The fisherman had pulled some kind of dark shawl over his body against the chill, making him look even more an apparition.

  His appalling intonation continued, and it became clear he was sounding an alarm.

  Troy said, “Don’t you think we should head away from him?”

  “No, if he is waving a lantern, either he needs help, or he is offering help to us.”

  “How could he possibly help us, with his little boat?”

 
“By giving a warning to people who do not know these waters and their weather.”

  Troy appeared both demoralized and distressed by my answer. It was unnerving that despite our obvious heeding of his call, the cloaked fisherman continued to howl.

  He shouted, long and slow, like a night watchman in a medieval village. His wail was both plaintive and commanding. And it slowly became intelligible. He was repeating the same sounds over and over. “Tee . . . ray . . . more!”

  He paused for a moment, then stretched the words out a little longer. “Teeeee raaaaay moooorrrrre.”

  A long pause and then: “Un teeee raaaay mooorrre.”

  Another pause, followed by: “Eaar eaar un tee ray moorrre!”

  The sea somehow absorbed the blackness of the sky. There was no wind. It is rare to have absolutely no wind on the ocean. But the sea appeared reflective, like glass, as we approached this lone fisherman with his lantern. He stood at the stern of his little wooden panga, dangling the lantern like a lit skull. He looked like Death as it is portrayed in medieval artwork, continuing to scream his shrill and piercing dirge. “Ear ear tee ray morrrrrrre!”

  What sounded like “ear,” spelled ir in Spanish, means “Leave!” or “Run away!” Staring at us through huge darkened eyes as though he were driving a raft across the River Styx, the old man shrieked at us to go back. He stood in his boat as we passed within perhaps six feet of his shadowy figure. For a moment, he stopped waving his lantern. It was clear to him, as he looked me in the eye, that I would not heed his warning, and he did not say another word. He simply stood, staring as we moved southward, silent, disappearing several minutes later below our dark horizon. I had no idea what the old man had been shouting, but I that he was warning us against something really bad. And it was headed straight for us.