Gallatin Canyon

by Thomas McGuane

  He slept, but lacked the humanity to dream.

  The yawl sailed on into day without his attendance. For hours the decks shone bright with dew and then dried as the sun arose. The telltale streamed from the masthead in the freshening breeze and the water was no longer purple as she had crossed the stream; now she pulled her thin seam of wake across the blue water of a new sea, one that grew steadily paler until the yawl’s own speeding shadow on the bottom preceded her, then rose to meet her when she ran aground.

  Unavailing curses poured from the companionway as Errol emerged to view his misfortune. The jib, the main, and the mizzen displayed their same wind-filled curves and emphasized the sheer peculiarity of the boat’s lack of motion. Looking in every direction, he could see only more bars and the dark shapes of coral heads, any one of which would have sunk the boat. Noon was rapidly approaching, and he dug out his sextant to take a sight of the sun, though he mirthlessly noted the irony of having two pieces of information, latitude and the proximity of the bottom.

  The sight reduction from his battered book of tables gave him to conclude that he was somewhere in the western Bahamas. He should pride himself on his effortless crossing of the stream, he thought sardonically. Once he’d accepted that he was immobile, he felt an unexpected wave of security at the calm translucent waters around him, the coral gardens that were pretty shadows beneath them, and he marveled at having sailed so far into this gallery before going aground on forgiving sand. The full moon was a few days away. If he was not too surely embedded on this bar, he had an excellent chance of floating free on a spring tide. He had enough food and seemed to exult in this absence of choices; he explored the idea that he was content to be stuck.

  The days began to pass, each more peaceful than the last. He had begun to think of his boat as an island, and in fact he could walk all around it or swim among the coral heads where clouds of pretty reef fish rose and fell with him in the gentle wash. He caught lobsters and boiled them in salt water while Radio Havana played from the cabin. He stretched out in the cockpit and read Frantz Fanon, experiencing pleasant indignation. After the first night, he had dragged a mattress from atop the quarter berth into the cockpit, and he slept there, watching expectantly as the moon grew full to bring the big tides that would float him off. Then, for better or worse, his life would resume. The boat had begun to float tentatively, lifting slightly at the bow only to ground again when the tide fell, but release would come soon.

  The last day Errol knew that at high tide, a few hours from now, the yawl would float, free to sail away. He took the opportunity to give the bottom a good scrubbing, breaking down the new barnacles with the back of his brush and then sweeping them off. Down tide, hundreds of tiny fish gathered in a silver cloud to eat the particles of barnacle. With the full moon, the weather changed and dark clouds gathered against the western sky. He would have to look for shelter as soon as he was under way, or at least find enough seaway to heave to. A storm was coming.

  He waited in the cockpit into the afternoon, and around three, with a light grinding sound, the yawl lifted off and turned into the wind. The anchor line, which had hung slack when he’d walked the anchor out into the shallows, rose and grew taut. If this were a safe anchorage, he would wait out the storm, but the anchor wouldn’t have to slip much under the force of the wind to put him atop the coral. He reduced the mainsail before ever departing, taking the sail down at the second reef to a cleat on the mast. The line leading to a cringle on the leech he wrapped onto the reefing winch and drew that down until the main was little more than a storm trysail. He brought the anchor aboard, hand over hand, the rode dropping into the anchor locker until the anchor was at the stemhead, streaming turtle grass and small snapping creatures; there he secured it and returned to the mast to raise sail before the yawl could make much sternway.

  Once sail was up, the yawl began to move obediently. Errol stood at the tiller, carefully conning his way through the dark coral heads in their white circles of sand. The shadow of the boat scurried alongside him on the rippled bottom. Gradually the shadow shrank, then vanished, as he found blue water. With a rising thrill, Errol set sail for the unknown. He knew that any piece of land at all was on the trail to hell, and that this ocean road put a good face on oblivion. A bad storm was coming; he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side—if he could get there—was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing.

  It was the season of equinoctial storms, and the halo around the sun made Errol see in this something of a larger plan for him. Still, the little yawl was indifferent to such things, a thought whose absurdity he recognized without quite believing. Like most sailors, he did not regard his ship as inanimate and extended his senses out to all her parts the better to understand the whims of the sea. This impulse came of a great desire to survive that he was not sure he owned. Nevertheless, he believed his ship wished to live, and perhaps he would defer to her out of respect for the adage that a good ship is one which, when her master can no longer take care of her, takes care of her master.

  Her purposeful obedience let Errol work his way through the coral heads to the dark blue of deeper water. Once she had way on, she never hesitated in stays—unless the man at the tiller was entirely lacking in skill—and moved from tack to tack like one of the domino players at the Cuban-American Hall in Key West. She’d been built forty years ago by a tidal creek in St. Michaels, Maryland, with a bottom of yellow pine from a church made by slaves, the marks of whose axes could still be found inside a hull so thick and hard that screws had to be drilled first; the topsides were single-length planks of Atlantic white cedar, the deck of native pine and canvas, Sitka spruce spars that had come on a train from Oregon a long time ago. When he reviewed her various attributes, as he often did, Errol began to feel responsible for her, and he recognized its absurdity without believing it. Whatever juju he believed her to possess was not mitigated by the fact that her previous owner was shot in a card game and she had sunk into desuetude at Garrison Bight until Errol rescued her for past-due dock fees and a modest bribe to the city council. He’d never find another boat with the marks of slaves’ axes in her timbers. She went up on jack stands at Stock Island, neglected sculpture among the shrimp boats, slowly returned to life by Errol and friends until launching day, when in an alcoholic crisis he sailed her away to the Dry Tortugas, anchoring in Mooney Harbor under the shadow of Fort Jefferson, to await a new day. His gratitude toward his little ship was evident in his belief that she had treated him like a cherished dependent and hung on her anchor, keeping a fresh breeze across his bunk until such time as he could return to the tiller like a man. When that day came, he sailed right past Key West and all his previous sins, and fetched up at Cortez, his current berth, where he met the cracker at a party on the latter’s sixty-foot Hatteras; and there he began his apprenticeship in the orange groves, where his command of Spanish was put to service exploiting the cracker’s laborers. Errol suffered no more than most over the plight of his fellow man, yet this was a bit of a problem. Some of the men were refugees from violence, and their children, though occasionally visited by well-meaning social workers from the State of Florida, clearly expected massacres at any time and so avoided anyone who was not obviously a mestizo peasant. One way or another, the oranges continued to head for the juice plant at Arcadia, and Errol came to be trusted by these lost souls, who forgave his being a perro infermo or perhaps even liked him because of it.

  The job now was to get to deeper water and plenty of it before getting knocked around by the storm. He had no destination other than the knowledge that in this ocean you could not go far before striking some community or another, a bit of shelter, perhaps some refreshments. The problem was that his slowly clearing mind wasn’t sure it wished to arrive. The gradual illumination—cramps, headaches, and diarrhea notwithstanding—was a substantial reward in itself, and the reattachment to reality bore a religiou
s quality, or at least rootless excitement. He imagined the storm as a cascade of invigorating challenges.

  A set of line squalls formed across the horizon, driving columns of seabirds before it, a thunder-filled cross-winded trough of weather. He traversed five miles of broken sea to sail right into them, lightning jumping around over the spar, an uprush of fragrant supercharged sea in omnidirectional winds. Each cell had its own weather and light, from near darkness and pandemonium to a fluorescent stillness walled by rain. Thus far, a pleasant exercise, for he sailed right through the squalls for a better view of the gray sky beyond, scudding clouds and building seas where a barometric trench made the rules.

  Foresight suggested that he feed himself in the time available. He lashed the tiller and went below to light the alcohol stove, dumping a can of chicken noodle soup into a pot. The yawl’s steady progress had acquired a kind of leaping motion, and he stirred the soup impatiently, as though that would shorten the time it took to heat it. He raised and lashed the weather cloths beside the bunks and stowed the few loose objects in their Pullman nets: a bottle of aspirin, a notepad, a dead cell phone, the Frantz Fanon book, a Key West telephone directory, spare winch handle, and flashlight. When he returned to the stove, a wisp of steam rose from the soup, but there was no time to enjoy it as the yawl was knocked onto her beam ends by the crush of wind, imprisoned in a bad angle by the lashing on her tiller. When Errol looked up through the companionway, a graybeard arose in the dim light, its top blowing off into spume, and subsided. It was a grim black-and-white movie, Down to the Sea in Ships, Clara Bow the It Girl, and dying whales. This sort of respite from reality had previously been his accommodation; but for better or for worse, reality would be back plowing irony before it.

  Errol half crawled into the cockpit from the companionway and snapped on his lifeline. Once the tiller was free again, the boat rose to the gusts and relieved some of the lateral pressure that had her on her side. The pool of water in the self-bailing cockpit roared through the scuppers and emptied quickly. The frontal storms that had met his requirements for a manageable challenge were beyond him now; in their place, the wind came in an unimpeded fetch from open ocean in a scream. The incessant movement of the boat gave him the sense that they were being chased by the increasingly enormous waves, whose breaking crests gleamed unpleasantly. A cabinet burst open in the galley, discharging all his canned goods, and when Errol looked below he could see the food racing about on the floor.

  The yawl rose as each great sea swept past with an uncanny hiss. His steering the boat now consisted entirely in keeping the stern presented to the waves and preventing the yawl from broaching as she sped down their backs. Thankfully, he detected a rhythm in this and, being able to feel the rise of sea without looking, made the proper adjustments through the memory of his muscles. Though reefed to a fraction of its original size, the mainsail seemed hard as iron and its leech buzzed like an electric saw. The black faces of approaching waves were so steep that Errol quit looking back; they were at the height of the spreaders and it seemed another degree or two of pitch and they must fall on him. If they did, they did: he wouldn’t watch that.

  A rain began, and then a pelting rain, which after a time flattened the sea. Now the yawl whistled along, seeming to enjoy its velocity undeterred by the recent mountains of water, the speed of wind for the moment little more than an inconvenience. Errol took this opportunity to go below and confront the disorder of the cabin. It was mostly canned goods and he stowed them frantically, knowing the calming rain wouldn’t last.

  When the violent motion of the ship resumed, he was reluctant to go above. He pretended the cabin was insufficiently tidy and lingered over trifles, the charts that needed rolling, the celestial tables that had somehow landed on the wrong shelf; he even renewed the paper towel on its roller. All this housekeeping betrayed a grim comedy as he was flung about performing it.

  A boarding sea fell with a thud on the cabin top. He watched the water roar through the cockpit, overwhelm the scuppers, and pour over the transom and the untended helm. He felt the weight of it press against the little yawl’s buoyancy in repeated attempts to overwhelm it. Recognizing a plausible run-up to drowning, Errol was swept by lethargy, not the same as peace but fatalist stupefaction. He was not afraid to die but very frightened of drowning, of filling his lungs with seawater and sinking to the bottom of the ocean; nothing could be more alien unless it was on another planet. That of course was just how his friend Raymond had departed, having once remarked that it would be an appropriate end for anyone who had trafficked in refugees. This thought produced in Errol an unexpected return of the heebiejeebies. He forced himself into the cockpit, and there he saw that the great waves had begun to cascade and he was sure the end was at hand. This gave him some peace at least. Now he went about his business managing the ship, exercising what few options remained.

  He replaced the reefed main with a storm trysail, now the only sail on the boat. He’d thought that the double-reefed main would be good enough but it wasn’t. If it had loaded up with seawater, it would have been big enough to take out the mast. Amid gusts that sounded like gunshots, he sheeted the trysail to leeward, lashed the tiller in the opposite direction, and produced a plausible version of heaving to: the yawl drifted and forged slightly into the wind, fell off, forged, and fell off again. The sea was now covered by flying spindrift, a gruesome fuzz that extended to the glittering wave tops. Errol could bear to see no more and went below and crawled into a bunk but was soon flung onto the floor where the oozing bilge emerged between the planks. He crawled in again, lashed up his weather cloth so he was secured in the bunk, laced his fingers behind his head, and entertained himself with ideas of death while disdaining those of drowning, fish eating his flesh, descent to a lightless sea bottom, et cetera. In the Pullman net beside him was a Cuban statuette of the Madonna, the gift of a refugee physician; he turned it until it faced him. “Our Lady,” he said. He liked her face. She looked a bit Cuban, actually; he was pleased she was not so universalized as to seem inhuman. He stared into the tiny face as the senseless chaos of the sea tried to destroy his home. The face grew larger and came toward him. He was falling in love.

  It was time to go topsides once again. He didn’t realize how peaceful the cabin had been until he was in the cockpit. The hove-to yawl seemed to follow a cycle. At the bottom of the troughs there was a kind of peace. This created a leeward eddy that moderated some of the more fearsome violence. At the same time, the troughs were so deep they actually protected him from the wind. Once the yawl rose to the crests again, the full force of the wind and its attendant shrieks could be felt.

  It was with welcome detachment that he observed the behavior of his boat and concluded that there was no more he could do for her; she had managed thus far, and to be ready to cope with any great change in conditions he would have to sleep. He hoped that the cooler sea temperatures outside the stream would restrain the storm, but there was as yet no sign of that. He went below once again and secured himself in his bunk, feeling, as he fastened the weather cloths that kept him from rolling out, an odd coziness that he guessed came from his now-rapt gaze upon his Madonna. It was not that he possessed a single religious conviction, but knowing millions worshiped her was consoling. He wished now to be among the millions, and this was a start. If he lived till daybreak, he would address his gratitude to Allah as well as Our Lady, and to their millions of worshipers, his fellow humans.

  First, he asked Her forgiveness for not helping Raymond back into the boat. True, he had not pushed Raymond overboard. The ocean had done that: the jib boom had come adrift and was beating a hole in the deck; Raymond had gone forward without his lifeline; the bow buried in a green sea and when it came up, in a white cloud of spindrift, Raymond was no longer there. He floundered alongside the passing hull, reaching toward Errol. The split second of ambivalence—as though Raymond were being swept to New Orleans with Caroline—was all it took, and Raymond was gone. Caroline had had h
er fling with pirates and was careful the next time to latch on to someone with a future and an office.

  He asked to be forgiven. Caroline was raising beautiful children in the Garden District, driving them to their swimming lessons from her home on Audubon Street, and Raymond, who had not known home ownership, was at the bottom of the sea. Errol understood that he was being shriven by the same sea and held the statuette in his fist, praying for forgiveness. Expecting his boat to crack open at any time and release him to his fate, he believed his request was legitimate. Certainly he’d never felt anything quite like it before. Such sobbing pleas were something he’d never heard from himself, as though he were being disemboweled by his own voice. His grief was possession and infancy, far more urgent than the storm and something of a deafening joyride. At one odd moment, he burst into laughter.

  He wished to live. He stared into the face of the little statue, absorbed by her high Latin coloring and carmine lips; she was devouring him with her eyes. He felt himself sink further into his bunk supinely awaiting her kiss. “You gorgeous bitch,” he murmured.

  If he could tell by the weight in his limbs, he had awakened from a long sleep. He moved his eyes and took in his surroundings warily. It required some time for him to understand what had changed so completely: the boat was still. As the cabin was sealed against breaking seas, he could not see outside, and the air within had become sultry and fetid. He untied the weather cloths and swung his feet out onto the sole, glancing at the gimbaled lamps that had swung so violently in the night. They were motionless, though their oil was splashed around underneath him, indicating to his relief that he had not imagined the storm. He reached a hand gratefully to the cedar planks of the hull, still cool, still fragrant, perhaps still trees. Pines and oaks and cedars had carried him safely.