River Man (2016 revision)

"Can I get you and your men a Coke?" I asked. "I've got ice?"

He looked around quickly, nodded his head, and I went to the icebox and pulled out a couple and poured them over ice.

"How 'bout the men topsides?" I asked.

"Hardesty! Miller! Come down and grab a Coke, but keep 'em outta sight. The old man will shit in my face if he see's 'em!"

"Yessir!" came the topsides reply, and I poured a couple more and handed them up.

"We'll need to go over your safety equipment, sir, then we'll be out of your hair."

"What are those two jets doing out here, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Couldn't say, sir. Need to see your man-overboard gear, please."

I took the officer and his men around the boat and showed them the requested items. The officer seemed genuinely disappointed that he hadn't uncovered any violations.

"Nice boat, sir. We'll be off now. Appreciate your courtesy."

"Right. You might keep in mind that people out here would appreciate a little courtesy too, now and then. Good day to you, too, by the way. Keep safe."

The men jumped off as quickly as they'd come, and buzzed off in their inflatable.

Betty looked pale, quite upset.

"Martin, you'd better sit down before you have a stroke!" she said.

"What . . . why?"

"Martin, you turned as red as a beet when that young officer popped off at you."

"Shoulda thrown his ass overboard!" I said.

"Glad you didn't," she rejoined. "Hate to spend the rest of our first trip sailing this thing back in by myself." She smiled as she said that, but still looked ill-at-ease.

"Yeah, well, how 'bout you? Want a Coke?"

"Sure. I could use one."

I went back below and reached into the fridge. No Coke left, just a couple of Diet Dr Peppers.

That felt about right. Just ducky, as a matter of fact.

_____________________________________

We got the mess cleaned out of the cockpit and I brought up some fresh fruit just as the sun dropped below the horizon. I could just make out land on the radar, out at it's maximum 36 mile range. Occasionally the radar would fill with pencil line beams as some destroyer or aircraft jammed every radar signal in the area, then just as quickly it would clear. All very weird.

I opened a bottle of port and we had a glass, and I began to settle down. The air cooled down after the sun disappeared and we put on jackets, then I steered by the soft red glow of the compass. By that time I cared not one bit about malignant Navy jets or Coast Guardsmen in need of an attitude adjustment. I could only listen to the music of the spheres and wonder at my place in grand scheme of things. And...Betty's place with me.

But those kinds of questions could wait. The wind picked up, a large swell too, and when I saw lightning flickering out to the east over deep water, suddenly the night looked very long indeed.

+++++

And we slept the next night at a marina in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, and we slept the sleep of the dead . . . Oh, we were tired, but Betty seemed right with things, as it happened.

We had raced a line of thunderstorms into the Chesapeake, then taken refuge in the first marina we could duck into as thunder and lightning rumbled and crashed all around this harbor full of aircraft carriers and weary looking warships. Too tired to cook, we had showered and slipped under the sheets even though the sun was still up.

I woke sometime during the night. Betty was sleeping with her back to me, and the world below decks was a smooth pastiche of gray-shaded memories, each calling me back to Ruth. I lay looking at Betty, the smooth line of her shoulder, the curve of her neck. There was a taste of the familiar in those lines, yet were they too familiar, I wondered?

It was as though I could see Ruth floating over the scene, looking down on me -- and Betty too -- as if she was taking stock of all my recent choices. Here in these shades of gray, the morality of chance was an ambiguous construct, but Betty didn't seem to believe in chance.

Was it too soon, I thought once again? Too soon to embrace such close company, another future? What I realized, when I thought about her laying there beside me, was that it suddenly felt vital to hold on to love when it's worked so hard to find it's way to your heart. Because love -- true love -- really is that precious and rare.

But, what was this, this looming affair with Betty? Simple infatuation or la forza del destino? Un voyage du coeur? Still, the more I thought about her the closer the galloping horse I was on drew near the precipice. Was I really ready for this leap of faith, or had I found myself moving to the beat of a slow-motion dance of contrition? Had I fallen again? Was I on my belly crawling to the edge? Was I really willing to stare down into an abyss?

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. So sayeth dear ole Fred, anyway. Maybe we face our ultimate moment of truth in that moment, when we're ready to make our just amends. The guilt is always there, no matter what you tell yourself, no matter how you sugar coat your lies. You still love your wife, and you always will, so this new love feels brittle and hollow, a counterfeit thing of no value. Then your heart tells you otherwise.

+++++

Love is an endless enigma, a Jeffersonian exploration of the dialogue between the head and the heart, and as such love is beyond the understanding of mere mortals. I woke up with that thought piercing my skull, and it left me feeling unsure of my footing all that next day.

We refilled water tanks, then motored across the harbor to a fuel dock and topped off the tanks. We were going to take the Great Dismal Swamp Canal today and tomorrow, so it would be necessary to motor the next two days . . . an unnatural activity for a sailboat, but one all too often unavoidable in a world so divided into parcels of ownership and outposts of oblivion. In this world, motoring becomes a metaphor of avoidance. Sailing is what you do when you're free of all that other bullshit.

Topped off, we made our way down the Elizabeth River to the Deep Creek cut-off, and as we left behind the suburban sprawl of Norfolk and it's environs we entered another world, a more primeval world. Reptiles of every kind swam in the iron-colored water beside us, and none seemed friendly, or even gently inquisitive. Trees hung over the water as we approached the Deep Creek Lock, and we motored slowly, reluctantly in. Once inside the lock, we were as held captive in a mysterious world cut off from the normal freedoms of the sea, we would be held in the embrace of a world distinctly out of the normal ebb and flow of time.

The gates shut and the water began to rise, and as we bobbed and shook in the rising flow this sense of isolation grew.

What was it? Could it be that I was now completing the first circle? I had just two weeks ago transited this very lock, headed into this very same canal, and I looked at my watch, saw the date. Ruth had passed, one year ago to the day. About this time of morning.

I remember the lock-keeper as he came alongside to tie off, as we entered his confined space, and he looked at me strangely, like -- 'what are you doing here again, mate?' -- and as I tossed him a line, he eyed me suspiciously.

"Weren't you just here a few days ago?" he asked. "Headed south, weren't you?"

"Ah, yes. I seem to be circling a lot these days, don't I?"

"Oh, well, s'pose so. Just wondering."

"Yes, me too."

Most voyages are circles -- in one way or another -- just as life tends to the circular, just as human history is cyclical. How do we keep focused, I wondered, within the ever changing music of repetition?

Against boredom, even gods struggle in vain. Eh, Fred? Isn't that what you said? Surely you weren't thinking of me when you said that?

Shades of gray? Circular abandon, all hands brace for collision!

Who, me? Struggling in vain?

+++++

Betty Hutton was, it seemed, a contradiction in terms.

In terms I could barely comprehend, too, as it turned out.

A lawyer, living in the political world -- what I regarded as a world of lies and false promises --and now she was running, too. Running from the ruins of her own shattered illusions, staking her claim with a chance inheritance -- and finding the need to keep running from her past now an undeniable need.

She steered the boat with pure concentration, like her life depended on the precision of the course she held. I looked at her as we exited the lock and motored down the canal, her hand holding the wheel tightly, her eyes squinting into the glare of our morning's sun. She seemed to want to be in this element, wanted to impress me. It was a funny feeling to me, really, to suddenly realize she needed to fit in, wanted to belong to these nomadic wanderings. This was a lawyer's calculation if I'd ever seen one.

Was the calling she heard last week, this chance voice she stated had connected us, really so strong she felt compelled to leave everything behind and join me? Had the past unravelled her present so completely?

And I watched as leaves floated from trees like snow that morning, the water growing rust colored from so much decay, and we drifted through time, into a rust colored afternoon, perhaps drawn inward by an urge so primitive it was beyond our comprehension. My past dissolved into hers as dying leaves coalesced in our wake, and in this weeping dissolution came a union of sorts - or was it a reunion? That's the thing with collisions and eternal returns. It's hard to tell 'what is' from 'what was,' but it's there if you look for it. I saw what was slipping away behind my boat, and I saw Betty -- what is -- there by my side.

Somewhere in that time we came to rest deep in primeval forest, tied up at a dock by a visitor's center fast in the grasp of denial and understanding, and she came to me. Birds flew overhead in dense overhanging limbs now bare of leaves, and dark shapes slid silently under the black water. Betty found her way to my need again, as we met within nature's womb - and we kissed within leaves as they drifted by - and somewhere in that darkness I told her I loved her.

I looked into her eyes; there was only love, sweet love, in that moment. She let go in my arms when she heard those words, tension dropped from her as words drifted over her, through her, and in the night she climbed on my lap and dropped into that comfortable union that now felt so much like home, so much like the love I had known in years past, and as afternoon gave way to evening once again we rocked gently in those waters, her face on my neck, her tears on my soul.

Maybe, I thought, maybe when we run away from our past, maybe, just maybe and without knowing why, we are running towards something vital. Maybe something unseen and undefinable, but forever real nonetheless. Are we running from emptiness, running from the emptiness that will too soon devour us, running to find love and to hold on to love -- and in the end -- to know love as the only respite for a weary soul?

What are we without love?

Falling leaves, waiting for the touch of earth?

+++++

We pulled up to the town dock in Elizabeth City just before noon the next day, and Betty jumped ashore. I told her that I loved her, again, and she said she loved me. I watched her as she said those words, but she never looked at me after she spoke them, and she walked away without saying another word. Without ever turning to look back -- at me.

I took a hose and washed the tobacco-stained water from the hull, and rinsed sea-salt from the decks of the boat while the sun beat down on the warm teak, and I thought how empty my world felt without that woman beside me. Was it really so simple? Is life really so simple?

Without union, love, must life really be so pointless? Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, all life pointless without the struggle. And in the blinding revelation of that moment, do we only then pass into night?

+++++

After an hour Betty hadn't returned. I felt anxious, but then again she hadn't told me her plans.

Two hours later and she wasn't back. Then three hours. Four hours.

I walked to her shop. The door was locked, the sign said they were closed.

I walked back to the boat, to my home, and suddenly my world was truly empty again. She was gone and I went below, cooked dinner for both of us, but I knew she wasn't coming back. I knew she was gone now, lost to me, and I heard a gentle voice reminding me that not all returns are eternal.

As the sun set that evening, I felt as bereft as I had just months before. I knew Betty Hutton had decided against our future, decided against her own voice, her own counsel. I turned the oil lamps down low and my world below was suffused in honey-warm glows that I hoped would keep the chill from my heart, and I listened to music as I drifted into dark, familiar corners.

This honied world, the illusion of permanence had all felt so real. Maybe that was what drew Ruth and I together. Maybe we had created an illusion so strong, so enduring, that even time couldn't rip us asunder. But maybe we can create illusions so powerful, so compelling but once in this life.

"Oh..."

The song changed, and I heard Nick Drake's River Man join me in the fading warmth...

Had Betty come to me in a word, as hope wrapped in a promise of the new? Hadn't she believed? Believed in her own perception? Oh, what had we lost? In the end, wasn't she bound to the illusions she had crafted throughout her life, just as I was bound to mine?

Had she unable to connect? Connect, to that geometry of hearts, to the geometry of chance, and in the end had she been unable to accept that my dark skies might blow away?

Another time, perhaps? Another man . . . another River Man, perhaps...

"Oh, how they come and go..."

Maybe the turtle-man had been right after all: maybe I should have run, run as fast as I could.

"Oh, how they come and go..."

+++++

I guess it's what happens when you hate Nietzsche but find yourself living in his world, or at least in the world he hated. There's just no getting past the cycles that come to our lives unbidden. Do cycles intrude, or are we simply enjoined by spreading ripples in time? Joining in the chaos of becoming, never the oneness of simply being.

Drake's song echoed in my head all night.

What had I missed? Had Betty been so damaged by her years working with her uncle in the political world? Had she had lost faith in herself -- in her premonitions -- or had she seen something new -- some new insight, perhaps -- while out on the water with me?

Had I done something wrong? Had the Coast Guard encounter been as disconcerting for her as it had been to me? Had she constructed a romantic's longing for a dream -- only to find the reality far less interesting? Or had she been seduced by my dream, felt compelled to make it her own -- without me?

Can you find satisfaction in the dreams of distant dreamers?

We had made such beautiful music together, so why had a connection so easily discerned, which had grown so palpably in our hands, dissolved so easily?

Indeed, had it?

Where was she? And why was she running? If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn. I know that's true, cause Fred told me so that night.

Yeah. You heard right. Nietzsche -- that bastard -- had joined in my quest to find the truth, and I found his appearance very disconcerting. What can you say to a man who's been dead for over a hundred years.

'Hey! How's it hangin'?' or 'Sheesh, what's that smell?'

No, I didn't think so either.

So, anyway. What had I missed about Betty?

And why the hell wouldn't that old bastard let me sleep???

___________________________________

I walked back to her shop the next morning. It was still closed, or so said the unturned sign dangling inside the door. No lights on. No one working in the shadows.

I returned to the boat and -- now feeling completely despondent -- cast off my lines, backed away from the dock and drifted into the channel. I unfurled sail and let soft breezes from the north carry us where they might. Carefully, quietly, I sat and watched as sails filled and luffed in a capricious breeze; I worked them softly, squeezed as much speed as I could from each passing eddy. Fred sat by me in the sun, feeling free, I suppose, as I suppose I might after being dead for a hundred years, but he was mumbling in German all the while, and looking very irascible.

Soon our morning gave way to a higher sun, and I found I was able to forget her. I was losing myself in the constant dance of being and becoming, wondering why I had consented to play this game again. I too old for this nonsense, wasn't I? Hadn't I had my one great love? Was I being a little churlish to ask of life that I might have another? Or was I indulging in something contrite, a contradiction in terms?

A few hours later we passed the spot where I had run over the stump and subsequently run aground, and I kept a wide berth as I passed, and all the while Fred and I talked about Hank and the vagaries of friendship. I felt a branch run along the keel, perhaps a subtle warning that failing to heed life's mistakes often only leads to a none-to-subtle recurrence.

Clearing the spot, I eased sail and we cruised along happily through the afternoon. As the sun set, I saw a full moon clearing the eastern horizon and decided to push on through the night. Fred -- him being dead and all -- didn't seem to mind too much, and we stayed up through the night talking about Wagner and Kurt Weill and the The Doors and how they were all one and the same. Take my word for it -- that was one wicked-weird night.

By morning I was predictably exhausted as we drifted into Beaufort, and I saw Turtle-man walking down the dock from the showers toward his boat. He looked up and saw me, gave me a little wave and walked down to the space next to his and took my lines as I slowed to a stop neatly in the slip.

"Didn't think you'd make it here 'til this afternoon," he said as I furled the main into the mast.

"Ah. So I was expected?"

"Yeah. They came down last night, picked up her car."

"I see."

"Left a note with me. For you. She said you'd probably get here today, so I figured you'd get in tonight. You made good time."

"Full moon. Sailed all night."

"No shit! In the Waterway?"

"Was erwarten Sie von einem Idioten zu erwarten," Fred said, and Hank shook his head in disbelief.

"Who's that?"

"Fred Nietzsche."

"Oh. You had breakfast yet?" he said.

"No, not yet. You?"

"Let me get some shoes on, then I'll let you buy me breakfast."

Ah, yes, just what I'd been hoping for. All night with Nietzsche, and now -- breakfast, with a turtle.

+++++

The three of us walked up to a diner that had a nice breakfast menu and sat in an old booth with a worn formica top and greasy red vinyl seats, and three cups of strong, black coffee magically appeared -- before burned bacon and runny eggs. Hank seemed quiet, unnaturally quiet, really, as he sat there -- his head just out of his shell -- basking in the mid-morning sun that slatted through dusty blinds. After a while he handed me Betty's note.

I looked at the crumpled paper on the old white formica. The paper looked full of malevolent purpose sitting there, like the paper knew it was destined to cause pain, and even relished the thought.

"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion," Fred said to me with a smile on his face, his eyes focused on the letter. What was there left to do now but read her note, then toss out a witty aside to cover the useless expenditure of feeling.

'Martin,' her note began, 'I wanted to thank you for an unforgettable five days. I will never forget them, nor your generosity of heart. I will never forget you, and will love you forever, and would stay with you as your friend and soul-mate if it was in my power to do so, but it is not. Please don't ask me to explain. Love, B.'