Flotilla

by Daniel Haight

  Our current position is: 34° 6'54.35"N 120°17'31.99"W

  Chapter Four - Main Street and The Big Fourth

  Because Dad was a long-timer, ‘a lifer’ he would say, I got a lot of latitude in people treated me. I found out just how far I could push it during the Big Fourth when Miguel found me passed out on a dock and hung me up by my ankles.

  The Big Fourth was the weekend where 4th of July, the Pacific Fisheries Founders’ Day and several large fish harvests fall on the same weekend. A three-day weekend was declared by silent majority and the party lasted all 72 hours of it. Everyone went crazy and I could only remember what happened up to a point. The next week, productivity was down to almost nothing as people recovered from whatever their substance of choice was. We were lucky that nobody died.

  The Big Fourth hit about a month after I arrived – I had gotten used to the place and my time at the Grill had ended. I was starting to come out from under the hoodoo that mom put on me at the Denny’s way back when. The pills weren’t making me as sleepy and things were generally getting dialed in. I wasn’t supposed to be drinking: sobriety was a condition of my probation. Then I had a slip-up.

  The Colony is a weird place. While you are here, you’re constantly involved in this bizarre human experiment. Dad says that you can’t read too much into it. We were hauling supplies back from the dock – enough food for an army. Dad was busy organizing a barbeque of meat that included a special shipment of mesquite charcoal in from the mainland. He wanted to celebrate in style.

  Once inside, we were chopping vegetables for salsa and measuring out ingredients for the three different kinds of marinade he wanted to use. “The collision of bohemian and blue collar in a space smaller than the footprint of your average shopping mall,” he said over a sizzling pan of roasting garlic. We were having eggs and hot dogs for dinner. “This is a melting pot full of people who refuse to melt.”

  “What does ‘bohemian’ mean?” I wondered out loud. Dad grumbled something about my ‘lack of vocabulary’. I’m not an English major so it’s like, get off my back already.

  I gradually understood that he was talking about the different cultures we had out here. The fishermen who had left the East Coast were from Gloucester were these throwback square-jawed types and they were constantly at odds with the ‘Children of Black Rock City’ who used their catch money to finance art projects and annual trips to Burning Man.

  Dad and I were out in the Colony yesterday, looking for a few items he forgot to order. He located the kosher salt we needed at one of the floating restaurants. The owner was an old Asian guy who told us over a lunchtime plate of egg rolls about sailing junks on Victoria Harbor while growing up in Hong Kong. Now he is here, experiencing the mañana culture of the Baja fishers who lived on the boat next door.

  “Everything is a bit new,” he said in a British accent, which was a surprise to me.

  “Are you from England?” I asked.

  “No, Hong Kong.”

  “Why do you sound like you’re from Eng-“ I began but Dad hissed and gave me the cut-throat sign.

  “Eat your lunch,” he broke in before I could embarrass myself further. The old guy was laughing and I think Dad was amused too. It would be easy to say that a constant state of conflict existed on the colony, and some conflict did occur. For the most part, everyone just wanted to make it through another day and live to see their catch get hauled in. Getting used to everything, figuring out how to grow the fish and sell them at a profit didn’t leave you with the time or energy to be angry at that guy next door with the weird accent.

  I got upset one night when we found a logo tagged on our porch with yellow mustard. It was from the ‘Children of Black Rock City’ over on B-Ring. I was upset but Dad told me not to worry. “You gotta have a thick skin,” Dad reminded me before cleaning it off with the salt-water hose. “You can’t survive out in the rings otherwise.” On the other hand, you couldn’t afford to annoy your neighbors too much…you might be relying on them to save your life in the next day or so.

  We had a lot of prep work to do for the barbeque. Dad’s lecture continued over shucking a few dozen ears of corn. “The threat of violence exists out here but it was more of a social contract,” he paused to light a cigarette. “You can only get away with so much before you receive a visit from someone asking you nicely to knock it off. If that doesn’t work, the possibilities of reprisal were endless and everyone knows it. Weirdness that doesn’t harm you directly is condoned … real antisocial behavior is discouraged.”

  He looked thoughtful … like he was making a decision about something. Then he told me a really creepy story. “One time, a fisherman who had lived on the colony for almost six months, a recovering alcoholic, fell off the wagon and started assaulting his live-in girlfriend. None of the boats are soundproof and so of course, all of his neighbors heard it. So far no one has come forward to say anything so what happened next is pure speculation.

  “The next morning, we get up and … the guy? He was just … gone – clothes and personal effects were missing and his girlfriend was in the process of packing. She returned to the mainland later that day. The security team on the Phoenix did what they call a ‘thorough investigation’ but it went nowhere. The girlfriend refused to talk about it, threatened to sue them for not stopping the fisherman after her first complaint and just wanted to go home. They let her go, but they passed it off to cops on the mainland for follow-up. Either the guy committed suicide or he was dropped off the dock wrapped in anchor chain or he was simply put in a dingy pointed in the direction of the mainland and told ‘Row…or die.’ Nobody knows for sure. Balance was restored to the Colony and things went back to normal.”

  “Except for the missing guy,” I said. He shrugged.

  “People still gossip about it. You’ll hear a few ‘Davy Jones Locker’ jokes if you hang around long enough.” He stood up and I could hear his knees crackle. “Let’s get the dry rub together.”

  I had yet to see any violence from people in the Colony, but I saw a lot of weirdness. Since we were alone out here, people felt freer to do whatever they felt like in their off hours. You had to accept the fact that life in the Colony was like a non-stop performance art piece. You were going to see things here that you’d never seen before and never would see anywhere else. In a fit of whimsy, someone hung hand-made street signs all over the colony. C Ring-1 was now “St. Charles Place”, D-Ring-4 was “Illinois Avenue” and of course, the dock right in front of the Phoenix was called “Boardwalk”.

  It was like entire colony said “Yes, of course our docks should be named after the streets in Monopoly. Why wouldn’t they?” I never got it.

  The Colony seemed to immediately accept or discard weirdness or questionable behavior and I couldn’t figure out where the line was drawn. Why this weirdness? Why was this little debacle tolerated and other ones were reason enough to bounce a person (or an entire boat) from the group? They let the street signs remain even though Pacific Fisheries refused to acknowledge use them in official memos. Sometimes I felt like I was in a weird movie where everyone was crazy except for me.

  The “Children of the Black Rock City” were in the process of re-inventing themselves for The Big Fourth. They renamed themselves to “Tribe of the Burning Man”, stenciled and spray-painted a Burning Man logo on the sides of their boats. Someone must have been going for a viral marketing thing because all of a sudden they started posting complex and ridiculous stories to their blogs to ‘explain the mythology of their group.’ Then they spammed up the community social pages with links to this trash. Riley started a backlash movement by posting the video he took of their ‘parade’ last year – a bunch of ugly, semi-naked people with paint all over playing marching songs and inviting other people to get naked and join in. Rude pictures and videos started flying back and forth – it was only a matter of time before it got nasty.

  I couldn’t figure this place out and the questions were driving me crazy. I finally decid
ed to ask Dad. “So what’s your theory?”

  “Huh?” he replied. We had mostly been silent for the last half-hour. Dad and I finished preparing the ‘chili corn’ – the ears would marinate overnight in a mixture of water, lime juice and hot sauce before going onto a grill. He set me to slicing a ton of vegetables for grilling while he put chicken, beef and pork into bags for marinating.

  “Why is this place so weird? It can’t just be about different cultures.”

  “The colony is like a boom town, Jim,” Dad said to me. “The Colony has this ‘kindred spirit’ thing going on with the Gold Rush camps that grew overnight into cities of twenty thousand and then disappeared from the map just as quickly.”

  “Dad,” I pleaded. “English … please.”

  “Tal vez debería empezar a hablar en español para usted,” Dad said suddenly.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” he grinned back. No explanation, no warning … sometimes Dad dropped a knowledge bomb on you to remind you that the world was bigger than you knew. Then he went on to tell me about how the Colony was the great-grandchild of certain eras throughout American history and it attracted a special branch of anthropology that wanted to study a boom town in progress. There hadn’t been a legitimate occurrence of one in over a century and scholars nationwide did not want to lose the opportunity.

  “They descended on us like a plague,” he said darkly. “I blame Pac Fish for not doing more to discourage it. Grad students kept talking their way onto a boat for a few weeks or months to collect data for a thesis. At first, it was kind of cool … like we were all celebrities. But then it got old. The regulars, the lifers, started calling them ‘the tourists.’ You’d see a digital recorder and hear ‘I just want to ask you a few questions’ – you wanted to toss them overboard.”

  “What would they ask?” I wondered.

  Dad snickered. “Dumb questions. They come up on this poor Mexican family, just trying to get enough fish to pay for a real boat and get out of the shakedown shack they were living in. ‘Why are you living here? Why did you leave the mainland?’ Why do you think?”

  “Miguel was like, 'What are we, the Gorillas in the Mist? It’s getting so they need to kick everyone with a college degree out of this place.’” Miguel knew about Dad’s college years and liked to yank his chain over it every chance he got. “I was like, ‘This ain’t Utopia, babe.’ People have done engineered towns and settlements before. Every single one of them had resulted in dismal failure. You can’t legislate happiness, even when you have the resources to do so. This is a weird little place and it’s constantly pushing against itself. Communities like that never last long.”

  “So why are you here?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged. “I like the hours.” We finished slicing veggies and putting things away in the fridge. Food prep had taken several hours but it meant that Dad could get right to work on the grill tomorrow morning. We celebrated with a Coke for me and a beer for Dad.

  Success had a lot to do with how you got along with other people. Getting along with people was based on a lot of factors. A lot of it had to do with the amount of time you’d been on board. The politics of the scammers, legal or illegal, that figured into it. How many times you’d helped out your neighbor fishermen versus how many times they had to pull your fat out of the fire. How much fun you were in a bad spot, how many times had you returned a tool or how many times had you stopped an act of unpleasantness? All of these little pieces were fed into a large, nebulous equation that everyone collectively knew and understood but never talked about. This gave you where you stood in the Colony.

  The connections all ran deep and out of sight, like the massive crossbars that connected all of the docks together. The Phoenix was connected to the docks through the crossbars and all of the ships were tethered tightly to the docks. This was allowing the motion of the Phoenix to keep the Colony moving through the ocean and more or less stationary against the current of the sea. It was a common joke: if the Phoenix goes down, cut your lines or you’ll go down with her. Every boat kept hatchet on deck for that reason and I had to learn about it pretty soon after I arrived. The connection of the Phoenix was unseen, but always there, like the connection of the community itself.

  That night I was lugging garbage bags full of wrappers, corn husks and other junk down to the Garbage Barge when I came up on one of the Burning Man kids. It was just after nine o’clock…what was this kid doing outside? He was four or five, well past the age when kids were allowed to run around naked, yet here he was with a bare butt and chattering quietly to himself like a wolverine.

  I approached him cautiously and tried asking where his boat was. It is common courtesy to immediately return any lost child to his boat before he falls overboard or something. I got within five feet before he jumped up like a scared dog and ran away hooting and gibbering in a high-pitched voice. The sound was creepy and it echoed off the hulls of nearby ships. It was so weird … all I could do was stare after him, long after the wails had faded to the slap of water and cries of seagulls.

  I thought the noise would attract someone. Maybe the boy was in trouble … being naked in public certainly violated the public nudity rule. Wasn’t there something on the books about feral children? No one stirred, no one noticed. When I got back to the Horner, I told Dad about it.

  “Told you those nouveau hippies were trouble,” he grumbled. Then he told a similar story of encountering the Tribe at full howl when the moon was full. Everyone was either naked or scantily clothed in loincloths made out of red vinyl seat covers. “They said it was an ancient American Indian tradition – the Thunder Ceremony.” Two more nights of this and the bare-skinned tribe had to beat a hasty retreat against random pepper-sprayings.

  We were supposed to relax and sleep in on The Big Fourth but when I woke up on Saturday, I could hear Dad thumping around in the galley. I dozed for another hour but the sounds were getting louder. Dad was blasting some ancient dub music through the speakers to compete with the ranchero music next door. I tried burying my head under like five blankets but it was no use. Finally, I got out of bed.

  Dad was putting dry rub on some steaks and it was only nine in the morning. We didn’t talk about it but it was understood that the Colony was going on a bender. What would I do, being the kid who was Absolutely Not Supposed to Drink or Take Drugs? Dad’s answer was to leave me to do whatever on my own. “We’re gonna be doing a lot of drinking,” he said with his hands in a bowl of dry rub. “You’ll be okay, right?”

  “Sure…of course,” I replied. Why wouldn’t I be? I’d been tending bar at the Gun Range and selling beers at the Grill. Although it was tempting to bum one or two, I managed to leave it alone and I was pretty proud of myself. I felt like the bad times were behind me and things would eventually get back to normal after I went back to the mainland.

  I got invited to a party on Graham Cracker, a C-ring boat that did crabs, lobsters and other shellfish. The larvae were incubated before being put out to sea to mature – it was a complex series of tanks and docks and it was a pain to maintain; very profitable though, for the Mormon family that lived on board. Mommy and Daddy Mormon didn’t approve of the Big Fourth and used some vacation time to go back home to Oregon and see the folks. They entrusted boat-sitting duties to the teenager next door, one of the Children of the Tribe of the Burning Man.

  Now, I would have that guy on principle. His sense of group dynamics was as dumb as the group he belonged to. However, the kid had access to the place and had scored some free booze and suddenly, the Graham Cracker was the party headquarters for every person under sixteen. Even if you weren’t going to drink –you’re your friends were going to be there and who wanted to sit this one out? Parents heard that their children were going to be on the Graham and didn’t think much of it. Weren’t Ray and Madison responsible people? It took a while for the truth to be told and by that time, the party itself had been going for 36 hours.

  One of the kid scammers w
as there, providing booze and other supplies for a truly debauched teen party. At first I hung back, meeting people and generally chilling. The beer and cheap plastic-bottle vodka was flowing and I kept turning down Red Cups full of vodka and Red Bull. The third or fourth time a cocktail came by I said ‘Why not?’ and took a sip.

  So…if you asked me at that moment, I couldn’t have been able to tell you why I decided to drink. It was just like diving off of the dock and into the water. One second you’re dry, one second you’re soaking wet – there’s almost no space between. Now that I think about it, the fact that Mom blew off a chance to visit on the Big Fourth was part of it … I know I forgot to talk about that. It happened. Dad’s constant do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do lifestyle was also getting under my skin. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I didn’t realize I was going to do it until I did it.

  Still didn’t get blitzed right then…I nursed the first couple. The party migrated here and there as the day stretched into the evening and then into the night and in the dark, no one was checking IDs. I didn’t realize it but Miguel had seen me with a cocktail around 9 o’clock, but assumed it was soda or water. A few hours later, midnight and the party was still raging – they were shooting a boatload of fireworks off of the back of the Gun Range and Miguel happened to catch me cruising by with a can of beer in my hand.

  Things faded out after that. I don’t remember how much I drank or if I had some pills along with it. It’s kind of hazy. I didn’t know that Miguel had seen me and that he was staring holes through my skull while I bounced from one party to another. It all faded to gray until the next morning and that’s where Miguel found me: lying on the dock minus my shoes but with lipstick on my face.

  If I were in his shoes, I probably would have done the same thing but I’ll never admit that to him. He’s grumpy even on the good days but at this point he was double-fisting plastic bags full of glass and metal and stepping over sleeping forms and puddles of vomit. Then he has to decide whether to bust me, ignore me or help me. The word ‘patience’ just wasn’t in his vocabulary.