The Plover: A Novel (2 page)

*   *   *

On this voyage, this particular jaunt, this epic adventure, this bedraggled expedition, this foolish flight, this seashamble, this muddled maundering, this aimless amble on the glee of the sea, we will navigate not by what’s
in
the ocean, which is elemental but really
in
cidental if you take the long view, but by the wilderness of the bottom, which is … fundamental, so to speak, says Declan to the floating gull, who appears to be paying close attention. In my view the
water
of the ocean is essentially fascist, trying to dictate all life and action by weight and violence, whereas what is beneath it, the bones, the skeleton, the actual warm skin of the planet, is generally unremarked, unsung, unknown, but, as a population is the foundation for a government, the bedrock, the necessary and patient mattress for what sprawls upon it, so to speak. So a real journey into the Pacific ought to steer by the mountains below; and wouldn’t that show more respect for the planet we are actually
on,
rather than steering by the light of stars we will never actually see? Are you with me here, bird? Why should water have the last word, you know what I mean? Let’s take the long view. Let’s forget the past and keep an eye on the horizon. Let’s think of this as an expedition of inquiry, during which a man, let us say a former dairyman and sometime fisherman, sails west and then west, curious about seamounts and fracture zones, and vast epic valleys into which light has never penetrated since the dawn of time, and caves and intricate wildernesses in which reside creatures never seen by the eye of man or gull, and soaring mountains on which live ancient eels and squid the size of ships, and he conducts experiments into fauna and flora as such opportunities present themselves, and earns his protein with his longlines, dipping into ship’s stores only for the occasional lime, doing his best to avoid demon alcohol which has never served him well, and keeping an eye on the shape of his sanity, such as it is, or was, and leery of such things as talking freely to gulls, for example, which may be a sign of incipient something or other. You with me here, bird?

*   *   *

Neither the
Plover
nor its master had the slightest initial experience with sails and masts and rigging and wind management, but Declan, having dreamed of a footloose voyage on the ocean since he was the boy who tripped over a ratty rug in the library and fell facefirst into
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft,
by Thor Heyerdahl (followed in dizzying succession by Robert Gibbings’s
Over the Reefs
and
Coconut Island,
and James Norman Hall’s
Faery Lands of the South Seas
and
Under a Thatched Roof,
and Jack London’s
South Sea Tales,
and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
In the South Seas,
and Joseph Conrad’s
Typhoon
and
Youth,
and
The Journals of Captain James Cook,
and Captain David Porter’s
Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean,
and Richard Maury’s
The Saga of Cimba,
and Herman Melville’s
Typee,
and Edward Frederick Knight’s
The Cruise of the Falcon,
and
The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss,
and then literally hundreds of books about the islands west and south of his muddy tense pained angry lonely home in the rain), had bought the old trawler when he was seventeen, from an old man who built it half-size because he had half the money he needed half his life ago and only used it half the time now that he was half the man he used to be. Declan then used it for fishing the near coast, generally for salmon and halibut; but always in the back of the back of his mind, tucked away beyond conscious thought, was the irrepressible idea of someday heading west and then west, for no particular reason, just to see what he could see; and so he had edited and amended the boat slowly and idiosyncratically over the years, adding a mast and standing and running rigging so as to use the wind wherever and whenever possible, thus saving gobs of fuel, and becoming familiar with such mysterious and obdurate words as batten and clew, and luff and leech, and toggle and tang, and reaching and running, although the
Plover
did not do overmuch reaching and running, more like shuffling and shambling, as Declan said, not without a deep affection for the old cedar creature. He built a simple hoist for the engine, and a cedar weather box for the engine to sleep in, for when the
Plover
had sails on, in winds that looked like they might last; and when razzed by other fishermen, and by the weekend sailors in Newport and Depoe Bay who laughed aloud at the little trawler with its mast like a grade-school flagpole and its sails made of old kitchen towels, as a wit from Waldport sneered, Declan thought happily of all the fuel he was not expending, and gave everyone the cheerful finger; his usual digitous discourse.

*   *   *

And no
thinking
on this trip, either, he said to the gull floating over the stern. No recriminations and ruminations. No logs and journals and literary pretensions neither. Thinking can only, like the boat, proceed forward. We can only think west. Sweet blessed Jesus. Four days out and I am already talking to a fecking gull. Why are you here, exactly, bird? What’s in it for you? Because there’s not a whole lot of food available here, my friend. This is a working boat. Everyone on or over the boat has to work for a living. That’s why I am fishing for my supper, and no, you cannot have half, although yes, you can have the head and tail and innards. Did you
want
to be going west and then west? Because that is where we are going until further notice. And what are
you
doing on behalf of the boat, may I ask? Are you providing some rudderly service that I am as yet not aware of? Are you protecting the boat in some mysterious capacity? And don’t give me any of this spiritual crap. And don’t get all literary on me either, talismans and metaphors and symbols and crap like that. You are most definitely not a metaphor, my friend.
You
are a herring gull and this is a boat and I am the guy on the boat. It’s that simple. You are no albatross and I am no ancient mariner. I read my classics. In fact I vow that if an albatross ever hangs in exactly the same position you are hanging in right now I will strike myself three times on the breast and intone prayers and imprecations. This I swear. You are welcome to hang there as long as you want but don’t steal anything. I cast no aspersions on gull people. I am just laying out the rules. Maybe you are unlike all the other gulls who ever lived and you are the first one who won’t steal whatever he or she can at the drop of a fecking hat. In which case we will get along fine. If that is not the case and you steal anything from the boat I will catch your raggedy ass and cut you into filets and savor each and every gullicious bite. Are we clear here? On this boat there are no gray areas. There are no misunderstandings. There are no misapprehensions. There are no infinitesimal gradations of emotions and feelings. No one makes mistakes as regards anyone else. There
is
no anyone else. There’s no past and there’s no future. We are stripping it all down here, my friend. No man is an island, my ass.
This
is an island and I am that very man.
You
are a guest nine feet in the air over
my
island. Are we clear here? You can visit any time you like, but don’t expect anything from me. We are all islands, my friend. We are all playing it straight for a change on this island. I expect nothing and you should expect nothing. The rules are simple here, bird. No emotional complications can ensue if we lay it out clear as day in advance. We can crash, sink, burst into flames, get smashed by a huge squid or a whale or a cyclone or pirates, or I can die in any number of interesting ways and the boat goes on by itself skipperless, but that’s the sum total of possibility, understand? We are stripping things down to the bones here. No more expectations and illusions. No more analysis and explications. We are going to live a real simple life here, my friend, and deal with what is, rather than what seems to be. We have wind and fuel, we have food and water, and we have the biggest fecking ocean on the planet in which to putter around, and we are damn well going to putter around until further notice, is that clear? Are you with me here, bird? Hey?

*   *   *

In the first four days alone Declan saw so much stuff bobbing in the ocean that he started keeping a list with a pencil: sneakers, hockey gloves, the top of a coffin, a poem in Japanese carved into a maple plank, half a bottle of wine, a plastic turtle, two dolls’ heads taped together with a huge tangle of duct tape, lots of seeds of various species, what looked like the keel of a fishing boat, three oars, most of a fishing net, an enormous root ball from what Declan judged to be a Sitka spruce, the tiny skull of a sea lion child, two life buoys, a very old basketball on which every hint of nub had been eroded so that the ball shone like a dark sun when he scooped it up with a net, ropes of every sort of shape and color many of which he salvaged just in case, a ukulele he thought about salvaging but recovered his sanity, every sort of tampon ever made on this blue earth, a cassette tape that he carefully dried and rewound and tried to play in the boom box in the cabin to no avail and the shrill awful screeching of it made the gull launch shocked off the cabin roof, all sorts and shapes of seaweed, seven dead murre chicks, and what certainly
looked
like a muscular squid tentacle about twenty feet long, although he saw it from a distance at last light, so it
could
have been a whip of bull kelp, or God knows what else, though probably bull kelp, probably.

Probably bull kelp, he said to the gull, who was staring at it too, looking nervous. Don’t you think that’s bull kelp? Bull kelp gets to be like a hundred feet long, you know. Grows like a bastard. Grows a hundred feet in three months, that’s
a foot a day,
that’s just disturbing. Imagine if
you
grew a foot a day, pretty soon you would be an albatross, and then where would you be? Albatrosst, albalost. Sure that’s bull kelp. It just
looks
like a tentacle. And tentacles don’t travel solo, you know. So it has to be bull kelp. Sure it does. Well, hey, full dark,
I
am just going to step into the cabin here and buckle up, might be weather coming, better tether the old ball to the old chain, you know what I’m saying? If a squid bigger than the boat comes for you just give me a holler. Squawk three times so I’ll know it’s you. Or do that disgusting barf thing I love so much when you do it on the roof of the cabin. A truly endearing habit, barfing up fish guts. Is that what your mama taught you for manners, barfing on other people’s property? Because that is not what my mama taught
me
. Ah, you ask, what
did
my mama teach me? And the answer is my mama taught me jack shit, because she wasn’t around much longer than it took to pop out four kids and drag the old suitcase down the old driveway and leave the old man and the four ducklings, but she taught me
that,
bird, yes she did, she taught me there’s times to cut and run. Taught me that good, yes she did.

*   *   *

Why did I name the
Plover
the
Plover,
you ask? says Declan to the gull, who had not asked. I’ll tell you. Listen close now, because I have not explained this before and will not again. Far too much repetition in life altogether. We should say things once and let them just shimmer there in the air and fade away or not, as the case may be. The golden plover of the Pacific, the Pacific Golden Plover, is a serious traveler. It wanders, it wends where it will. It is a slight thing, easily overlooked, but it is a heroic migrant, sailing annually from the top of Pacifica to the bottom. It forages, it eats what it can find. It talks while it travels and those who have heard it say it has a mournful yet eager sound. This seems exactly right to me, mournful yet eager. We regret, yet we push on. We chew the past but we hunger for the future. So I developed an affection and respect for the plover. It’s a little thing the size of your fist, other than those long pencilly legs for sprinting after grasshoppers and crabs and such, but it can fly ten thousand miles across an ocean itching to eat plovers and reaching for plovers with storms and winds and jaegers and such. You have to admire the pluck of the plover. It doesn’t show off and it isn’t pretty and you hardly even notice it, but it’s a tough little bird doing amazing things. Also it really likes berries, which appeals to me. Most of them fly from Siberia or Alaska to Australia and New Guinea and Borneo and such but some of them camp out awhile in Hawaii and just cruise around in the long grass in the sun eating and dozing. This appeals to me. So when it came time to name a little drab boat that wasn’t dashing and didn’t weigh much and no one notices much, but that gets a lot of work done quietly and could if it wanted to sail off and go as far as it wanted way farther than anyone could ever imagine such a little drab thing could do, that might pause here and there at an island so as to allow a guy to eat and doze in the grass, well, that’s why we are the
Plover
. So now you know. Don’t keep badgering me with questions.

*   *   *

On the seventh day there arose a tempest such as man nor bird had never seen and the
Plover
was tossed hither and thither as if by a vast and furious hand not unlike an idiot boy in a bathtub slamming the water with his fool flipper because he can, the cretin!, shouts Declan at the gull. The Pacific never being particularly pacific, the storm raged for two days, and was followed by another day of immense uneasy swells; Declan, who had never been seasick in his life, threw up every hour on the hour as if he were a broken alarm clock, and by the time the swell finally eased he was as limp and pale as a rag in the rain. Then the
Plover
came within yards of being crushed by a vast grim oil tanker at four in the morning, at exactly eight bells, as Declan realized with a shiver, the traditional nautical slang for death; and had he not been clipped onto the boat’s jackline, the safety rope he rigged before a storm, the savage bucking of the boat would have tossed him into the endless fog. Then it began to rain, not hard but steadily, for days and days; then he discovered that one of the extra fuel tanks aft had broken off and been lost sometime during the last few days; then he hooked, fought, and lost a tremendous bluefin tuna that would have been glorious eating for a week and lovely dried salted savories for a month; then the rudder fouled on what appeared to be the biggest fecking gill net in the history of the universe where no one but a fecking idiot would set a fecking net; and then, on the first dry hint of sunny morning in weeks, Declan realized the gull was gone.