Life at Sea: On the Pacific

By Barry Pomeroy

With his retirement looming and the sea his only goal, Sam could finally buy a boat. He would combine his pension and his dream to sail around the world. But when he begins to troll through the boatyards and docks he begins to rethink his imagined future.
Perhaps his wish to disappear at sea is a result of his background of loss, for his past failures come roaring in upon him the more he tries to escape.
The boat life is not what he imagined, and he is once again casting around looking for another option. His life on the water leads him to others who live on the coast. Before long he is building a float home while attempting to fix the broken relationships in his life. Equally frightened by the world, Leen helps him lift the timbers and install the windows of this last chance at happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781987922936

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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Life at Sea: On the Pacific

by

Barry Pomeroy

© 2021 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

ISBN 13: 978-1987922936

ISBN 10: 198792293X

With his retirement looming and the sea his only goal, Sam could finally buy a boat. He could combine his pension and his dream to sail around the world. But when he begins to troll through the boatyards and docks he begins to rethink his imagined future.

Perhaps his wish to disappear at sea is a result of his background of loss, for his past failures come roaring in upon him the more he tries to escape.

The boat life is not what he imagined, and he is once again casting around looking for another option. His life on the water leads him to others who live on the coast. Before long he is building a float home while attempting to fix the broken relationships in his life. Equally frightened by the world, Leen helps him lift the timbers and install the windows of this last chance at happiness.

Table of Contents

Chapter One ~ Preparing for the Voyage

Chapter Two ~ A Ship on a Desk

Chapter Three ~ Retirement

Chapter Four ~ Buying a Boat

Chapter Five ~ Collecting Materials

Chapter Six ~ Building a Float

Chapter Seven ~ Buying a Skiff

Chapter Eight ~ Leen’s Visit

Chapter Nine ~ Dump Visit

Chapter Ten ~ Relationships

Chapter Eleven ~ Leave-taking

Chapter Twelve ~ Leen’s Return

Chapter Thirteen ~ Cheryl’s Visit

Chapter Fourteen ~ Construction

Chapter Fifteen ~ Raising the Mast

Chapter Sixteen ~ Sailing the Float Home

Chapter Seventeen ~ Climbing a Mountain

Chapter Eighteen ~ Opposite Ends of their Lives

Chapter One ~ Preparing for the Voyage

His childhood was a dory with a hidden leak, a mess on the deck when it was least expected. He only recalled a few images, peeling paint on a bannister, the orange bleeding through from the past into the estranging time of beatings on the playground, the steps themselves foothills of a mountain he’d never be able to climb. He’d found a cigarette on the sidewalk and a candy by the porch. His hands were reluctant and his feet clumsy, and the salt air slicked his skin and ruined him for inland climates where he’d spent most of the money he’d made in his life.

His teens, when he should have been carelessly hanging from the brickwork of the justice building for a photo, he’d spent pushing a load of laundry into the window of an empty house. He’d found and lost a girl who still hung like a picture over his bed, and although they didn’t talk he knew she hadn’t aged. Even while wrinkles wrapped themselves around the back of his hands, he knew she was sleek muscles and a giggle when the eastern storms blew rain in from the coast. Somewhere out there Jennie was laughing, and he could see her calm gaze over the ocean while his was on her.

Everyone said his twenties would be the envy of all who came after him, but he’d spent his time being afraid to set a mousetrap in case he didn’t catch a mouse. He’d worried that one of the matches in the box wouldn’t light, and he’d kept his hands trapped under his thighs. His twenties were such a disappointment that he rushed into his thirties, only to find at thirty-five that he couldn’t stay awake the entire night without consequences.

The thirties became the best years, he belatedly realized. When he struggled there was someone to struggle with him, if even only for a little while. He lost his grip on the painter a few times, but the boat didn’t drift as far offshore as it had when he was young. He thought, for a brief moment that he would be able to hold a small hand in his, comfort a crying face turned toward the brightly lit window of a normal person’s life, but the careening car of his fate had torn her small hands away. His knuckles had become swollen with the grip he’d wished for, and his eyes squinted at the stop lights in the distance which defined how fast he could move and how far he would be allowed to go.

His forties meant that he needed reading glasses for smaller print. With half a hull buried in the sand, his life was rotting at the joins. He’d spent twenty years sitting at a desk, a model of a sailing yacht an arm’s length away. He’d ignored snide jokes at his expense, brush away the dead spiders and flies his colleagues used to crew his model, and concentrated instead on the old dream. The boat he’d spent months attempting to right on the Lunenburg coast was far away, and even the various canoe trips he’d taken in order to keep his hand on a tiller were but preparation for a larger boat and a longer voyage.

He’d watched videos on YouTube so he knew what to expect. He knew the bow could thrash into the waves until it seemed like it was going to dig its own grave, or that the boat might heel so far that the taffrail would drag in the sea, but a sailor had to possess confidence in his ship. The early sailors weren’t swimmers, and instead banked their life on staying aboard, and although he’d taken swimming lessons, he tried to keep that more important notion in mind. If he were kilometres off shore having no choice might be more effective than swimming.

He’d begun to pepper his conversation with nautical expressions as his retirement neared, and the supervisor had him in her office to explain that people were losing track of what he was saying.

It’s the idiomatic expressions, she said. You can’t just say that people who have been recently married have ‘tied a reef knot’ or that you are just ‘pulling someone’s lanyard’ when you’re teasing. It’s unprofessional. And worse, it’s incomprehensible.

To be fair, he had answered, every language has its lingo. Even the IT people, or those consultants you had in for a pep talk last Thursday. That was a calculated hit. He knew just as everyone else did that they were efficiency people, pulled in at the behest of main office so they could force someone to walk the plank.

Just try to trim it down. She left before the discussion became too involved. Sam grinned at her back.

And I wonder what idiom that is, ‘trim it down.’ Some kind of lawnmower-man talk.

Who are you talking to?

Kelly had been hired from the temp pool directly out of high school, and even though that was several years earlier she’d proved to be efficient enough at her job to get on everyone’s bad side.

I thought you could hear me. Sam leaned against his desk. You should get your hearing checked.

He didn’t mean to troll, but for some reason Kelly brought it out in all of them. It was her pressed skirts, her tendency to roll her r’s like she’d lived in France, and the fact that she had at least a dozen crosses that she wore with different outfits.

It’s fine. What did you want?

Staples. We’re always out of staples.

Sam would have fought if someone told him he’d end up in an office, but at least no one had ever predicted that he’d help people worse off than himself. He was as far adrift from his origin as possible, for he lived in the inland desert of Kamloops and worked for INTRN, the private company which supplied counselors for government agencies and some industry clients. Every day he listened to people curse their bosses, describe the depression they felt emanated from their job, and doubt his ability to help anyone.

He was especially interested in those who admired his ship, although not when they stretched out an arm to pick her up. An older client shared his interest and he fought his company’s insurance so that he could have a full complement of sessions. He met with the man every week for two-hour talks as they swapped nautical terminology and stories of desperation and glory that one who’d been on a boat would understand. They were both landlubber posers, but for a brief moment he felt like they’d got one over on the boss, that they’d found the pirates’ gold in the delight of spinning yarns. He took to smuggling rum into his desk drawer although he did little more than pull it out significantly when conversation grew too combative.

Such moments were the highlight of twenty years of counseling, after he’d started in adoptions and foster care where he spent the bulk of his time covering the agency’s butt. He remembered whole weeks devoted to purging files when investigations were getting too close to the truth, and when the dreaded FIPPA requests came, he had to work nights on the shredder. This is what had been done to him, he told people, but like a cold-war spy, he more than once lost track of information because he’d hummed Wagner while working and concentrated on his own daily opera.

Once he became an in-office counselor, his colleagues became even more drab, as though they’d been dipped in mop water before taking the position. He hadn’t had pleasant lunch breaks in so long that he’d become famous for banking his lunchtime and leaving early. He skipped breaks, and saw as many clients as he could on the factory floor—as he called it—although more often it was in sealed offices in pulp and paper plants that had been set aside for the purpose. When he dealt with government contracts, he needed to be in his office, so he positioned the plant so that it obscured his face. He didn’t need any more letters on his file complaining of inattention.

He worried that he was merely following the footsteps of Mel, who everyone in the office had made fun of and who eventually did buy a boat, although he didn’t do anything with it. Mel’s eyes were always fixed on the model he kept on his desk, even while he was supposed to be concentrating on the clients, and Mel constantly described a retirement in which he would be sailing around the world.

First I will sail the inner passage, get the sense of how the boat handles the currents and wind, and then I’ll go farther offshore, set sail for Mexico and Baja, and then Hawaii. Although everyone else in the office had learned to ignore him, Mel knew that Sam was interested in boats, so he’d become a captive audience as Mel explained exactly how to reef a sail, and how to discern when a storm sail might work better than a sea anchor when facing a wind running across the waves.

Once the shakedown is done, I’ll sail around the world, Mel had proclaimed proudly. Explore those hidden islands in the Pacific, the ones no one is talking about and which are barely on the charts.

Sam worried that his own dreams had become contaminated with Mel’s, that he’d become corrupted from too many fantasies over the long afternoons of government workers’ unhappiness. Cris had begun to encourage Mel, and she talked about how she would join him on the trip to Mexico, leaving behind the kids and husband to get a free trip and to save money.

Mel retired four years before Sam, and luckily, because Cris still worked in the department, Sam was able to hear frequent Mel updates. Mel had given his model to Cris once he bought a thirty-five footer, and she’d taken it home, much to Sam’s relief. He didn’t want any association with Mel’s eagerness for the same dream.

Mel’s boat was more than seaworthy for the trips he’d imagined, but he tied it to the dock on Vancouver Island, near Sidney Harbour, for three years. The first year he endured the endless rain of the Island’s monsoon climate below deck, a small electric heater keeping him warm while he read, and from what Sam heard from Cris, wrote a kind of memoir.

It’s a book about pranks in school, she told him, so proud that she knew someone who’d written a book. Kind of a boy-in-private-school thing. And he’s set it up so that the proceeds go to his charity.

Mel had soon sickened of shipboard life, and he’d begun to spend the winters in a small apartment near his son’s place in Edmonton. In the summer he was mostly in dock, and he’d even taken Cris out on a cruise with her husband and son. That wasn’t very successful, Sam was secretly gleeful to hear, for the men had argued about the best way to get in and out of harbour, and Mel had nearly wrecked the boat.

It was increasingly clear that Mel was afraid of deep water, and the closest he came to sailing around the world was a few short trips to Pender Harbour, the place where slightly more wealthy old men went to show off their boats to others who had almost identical craft. Mel spent most of his time on land, principally in a café run by a Peruvian woman. Perhaps he’d taken a shine to her—Cris wouldn’t comment on that in front of Sam—but whatever happened Mel soon began to fly to Peru in the winter and before long he’d set up his charity.

When Mel first bought a boat, people around the office said he should call it It’s Mel’s. He could have bathed more often but it was also a joke because he was so concerned about what people thought. Perhaps Mel’s vehement reaction to the name had stuck with Sam, for he was surprised when Mel called his charity by a similar name. Mel liked puns, and often pretended that he could do the New York Times crossword puzzle, but the name of his charity stood out: It’s Mel’s Like Charity.

He didn’t want to join another charity which delivered school supplies to children in Peru, or send money. Instead, he wanted to fly to Peru, although that wasted money and resources which would have been better spent contributing to the villages he would visit. His excuses aside, his motivation was obvious. Mel wanted to have hundreds of kids, and their parents, beholden to him. He wanted them to rush over and overwhelm him with thanks, to grovel at his generosity, and in other ways assure him that he was worth their expensive regard.

He came to the office asking for donations, but other than Cris, few did more than put a few socially-obligated dollars in Mel’s repurposed Halloween bucket. People began to say It Smells Like Charity when he was in the office and the phrase stuck.

Sam wasn’t surprised when Mel sold his boat, ostensibly to help with the charity. Sam knew Mel had actually long since given up on his dream of sailing around the world. Sam was determined to take the lesson of Mel’s lack of self-understanding to heart. His steps would be slow and steady, and instead of ending up in a dingy apartment in Edmonton because his son wouldn’t let him move in, his charity a sad memory for those who’d thrown him some change. Sam would make his own way.

Chapter Two ~ A Ship on a Desk

He was putting in his time, and although he kept his hand away from the calendar, not a day went by but what he didn’t mentally mark off another twenty-four hours, ensuring the prison sentence of his working life would eventually lead to a kind of parole, or purgatory. He had a brief affair with Cindy, a woman he met because she ate alone at the same Chinese restaurant. They exchanged bored glances for two years before they talked to each other, and then he said he was happy with his work. He didn’t know exactly how else to tell the story. He’d spent so many hours coaxing the truth out of clients that he had no words for it himself. Instead, he only knew words that were synonymous with endurance, and on bad days, despair.

Luckily, Cindy cared nothing about his working life, and she nodded when he told her that lines could become tangled in the standing rigging at exactly the wrong time, and storms would blow up from nowhere to become a dark line on the edge of the water that spelled doom for those who weren’t prepared. She talked about her dread of her mother’s knitting projects, about the sweaters she’d be forced to wear since she lived across the street, and how her insurance job was fulfilling. She said that word like a joke, and more than once offered that she was bored to tears, but when he didn’t take the bait, she reeled in her line and kept their conversation light.

As his retirement edged closer Sam ate out less often. Instead, he made root-heavy casseroles and stews, remembering his mother’s precept that winter food was heavy and summer as light as lettuce and tomatoes. He trimmed the edges of his life until he was only core. He stopped calling his cousin Herne. Their interactions became limited to occasional birthday greetings on Facebook, and once his parents died, he made few phone calls to anyone.

He’d left a scattering of exes around the country as he’d moved west, but he wasn’t on speaking terms with any of them. They’d complained that he’d been remote, as though the winter which drifted over his feelings while he’d lived in Winnipeg had affected his ability to be touched emotionally. The winds are high on the plains, he’d always joked, but that palled when he found himself behind a plastic sheet and the feelings of others were as distant as fog. The friends he’d kept because they knew how to fix a car or would go with him if he needed someone at an event had drifted away on their own. He was reminded that entropy tormented every vessel, especially one made of wood. He had been teredoed by worms, he complained to himself, as though he’d been moored in a tropical harbour and the anti-fouling had been scraped off with the weed.

In the last few years of his working life—as the promise of a small pension crept closer—he had even fewer clients who held his attention. He was briefly intrigued by the young man who had suddenly developed a taste for live dogs in the park. The parents worked for the department of transportation and were worried that their son felt their absence as a highway, but the case itself was straightforward. The police had already become involved, and hospitalization had given him a suite of drugs he’d find hard to kick.

Sam’s interest in the case was hard to define, although it had something to do with the man’s lack of affect as he described his behaviour. Sam could sense the creeping horror others might feel, but the monotone with which the man told of the screaming he would elicit from the people on the other end of the leash, or the dismay of the police and hospital staff, was strangely freeing. Sam pretended—when he kept asking questions instead of referring him to the treatment he so desperately needed—that he was interested in the human capacity for outrageous insanity, even while people were sure of their own perception of events.

That had always been his fear, that what he sensed around him was merely a dream, and that his notions of reality were so skewed that others were looking at him in dismay, even as he thought of his world as mundane. The dog-eating man was free, Sam realized, although not physically. Mentally he was free to see what he wanted in the world, and wasn’t held back by the conventions that tied other people’s feet to the sidewalk, and the sidewalk to the city streets.

He was primed for this way of thinking about psychological disturbance long before he encountered a man with the same name as him, but that Sam’s story was still disconcerting. He’d developed a paranoid fantasy that he was being followed, or at least observed by odd mythical figures. One of them was a childhood dog, which, from what Sam could gather, had died rather horribly. The others were more difficult to understand. There was a tall broad man with a Nordic-sounding name whose main emotion seemed to be anger and endurance, and a caveman who did little more than place wood on a fire. The man also imagined his best friend to be one of the panoply, although the role he played was more helpless than supportive.

The strangest figure was a kind of ghost, from the way the man described it, and when he talked about the flowing robes and round face whose mouth was permanently opened in a soundless cry, Sam recognized the empty eyes. The figure was too close to something Carl Jung would have gotten excited about, some avatar of mental instability and unconscious desperation. Its role in the man’s fears was too imprecise for Sam to get an exact fix on the figure’s purpose, however.

He spent the first dozen sessions merely laying out the different roles, and even used some flipchart paper to that effect, although he was careful to keep that hidden from the client as well as his other patients. He’d never had the talent, but he drew facsimiles of the different beings, relying on the man’s vague descriptions to guide his hand and asking for detail when his pencil faltered. Remembering an article he’d read about the outsider artist Henry Darger, he began to collect images from magazines to represent what he thought the figures should look like, and he even briefly toyed with writing a novel based on the fantasy, although by that time the treatment regime was coming to an end.

He sent the client off to a psychiatrist and neatly folded up the images he’d drawn and pasted, although when he began to see the figures around him in the street he checked his memory against his shifting reality. He wasn’t surprised that he’d see a dog on the boulevard, for there were usually a few mutts with enough wit to keep the dogcatcher at bay, but he began to see the same white dog in the city centre or on his commute past the pulp mill. The large brooding man in a few alleys when he was walking downtown confirmed that his world had subtly shifted, and that point was driven home when a blond woman in a coat stepped out of the bus station and the wind blew her hair across her face.

She picked her hair from her face and kept her mouth open, perhaps because she didn’t want to smear her lipstick. The effect was horrifying, however, for in a moment Sam could see what his client had imagined. He saw the long coat as a robe wrapped around a shapeless mass, and her open mouth and larger-than-average eyes—which surely was the result of makeup viewed from the distance—appeared open and blank. The soundless scream reached out to him and he hustled into a dollar store before his patient’s mind could fully infect him.

He’d heard that cross-contamination—although it hadn’t been phrased that way in the seminar he’d attended—could happen with patients if the therapist identified too much with their problems. He didn’t think it could happen to him, especially so close to his retirement, and when a boat bobbed such a short distance into his future. He’d never sympathized with his patients before. He was happy for the lawyer who felt guilty about stealing a family’s money after being their executor, and embarrassed with the man who was caught creeping into the women’s change room at the mall, but he never saw their problems as his own. He never thought that his dreams could be so narrow that they could fit into their shoebox-sized fetishes or pecuniary desires.

In a kind of ritual act, he burned the pictures he’d made of the different figures from his client’s fantasy, and then concentrated on the petty politics which seemed to enliven the faces of others in the office. One of the other counselors—a brash woman named Sircoon who seemed unable to care about others—was causing trouble. She felt nothing for her clients, and in fact, when someone suggested that she was taking their problems home with her, she laughed. Usually Sircoon was a problem around the office because she would pick an enemy—typically a woman working in a lower position than her. Once she had her in her sights, Sircoon would begin the whisper campaign and malicious behaviour that would lead to the woman taking a stress leave or merely making a lateral move.

Sam had a client years before who had encountered the same personality in a roommate, and he’d described how his roommate, completely without conscience, would put tap water in another roommate’s bottles. For the few hours he dared to go to work, she would spit in his leftovers after opening his containers in the fridge and leaving them on the counter. She changed the dials on his stereo and deleted channels from his cable selection on his television. Her moves were always subtle. They were passive aggressive attempts to ensure that the man felt ill at ease in his home. She liked his rent but hated his presence in the house.

When the man confronted the woman, she told him some of what she’d done, stopping at the actual illegal entry of his room, and suggested that he should move out, although that would mean forfeiting his damage deposit because he was breaking his lease. Sam had listened to the story impassively, although it reminded him of his colleague.