Reaper
I didn’t often go for fisherman’s breakfast, but when I did I was shitfaced.
I don’t really get the obsession with fishing, and I certainly wouldn’t get up at 4 am to pound down a continental before heading out on the water to get bored and sick, but...since I was still up, a plate full of floured bacon and questionable sausages washed down with dishrag flavoured coffee made the stagger home a little less...hungry, I guess.
But we weren’t going home, not this night. We had a plan that was way better than fishing, and with the spirit of Earnest Hemingway when he said, “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk blahblahblahblah...”, we were determined to carry it out, so we broke into teams to accomplish our missions. First, Jupiter and I had to go steal a couple of boats. I knew where they were, so I led us down to the yard with the nice little boats on the beach and proceeded to poach them.
One of the boats was a nice little fibreglass number, kind of rounded and wide and pinched fore and aft like a bloated pea pod, and the other was a sliver of a dory made of 1/4 inch plywood, and looked tippy. We were also pretty tippy as we staggered the boats over the bouldery beach to push them alongside the resting log dock so we didn’t get our feet wet-weren’t we clever-before clambering in and pushing off. I gave Jupiter the peapod boat, and I took the sliver. I figured that would give us a higher chance of survival as Jupiter wasn’t as familiar with rowboats as I was, and the sliver was not for the inexperienced. It had, in fact been built around a surfboard, and then, when the foam had eventually gotten waterlogged, the bottom had been replaced with more plywood and a meager keel. Tracking was always a problem with this boat, it was difficult to stay on course while rowing it. It had handled better as a surfboard when I used to paddle it around the harbour when I was not of drinking age, because these were, of course, my Dad’s boats.
Rowing is not an overly complicated endeavour, nor is being on time, so we were feeling pretty good as we met Rabbit and his sailboat in the middle of the harbour before last dark. This caper was getting off to a great start. It got a little complicated when we had to disembark from our little boats to climb aboard Rabbit’s, but after a little grunting and laughing, and drunk hushed “Pass me the rope!”s, we had the tow set up, and we were underway. We thought we were stealthy, but 3 drunks in the middle of the harbour on a glassy calm pre-dawn, are anything but, let me assure you.
Stage 2 of our plan went off without any other hitch but a half. Rabbit, who had managed to continuously drink since breakfast, and was pretty sauced, towed us out past Crowe Island, and Jupiter and I climbed back into our little rowboats, and we set out to cross Barkley Sound while Rabbit headed back to the harbour to pick up A-Team, The Testicle, and Wrecking Ball. We’d meet on Clark and Benson Island. There are two Islands, one for each name, and we didn’t specify which Island and which spot, but, you know, see you out there in a bit.
It’s a really nice experience to be on calm water when the light begins creeping up over the horizon and your world expands as your hemisphere of visibility grows and grows, and you start to feel smaller and smaller, and you sober up some, and you actually start to think a bit, and you remember the rest of that Hemmingway quote, “that’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
At some point in our crossing-I think it took about 4 hours of rowing-I saw some seaweed that looked like it was attached to something, and I carefully leaned over a bit, not too far, to look down, and I saw a rock. I still don’t know which rock it was, but it spooked me. I looked up, and I looked around, and I thought a little bit, and I realized just how silly of an idea this really was. I did have a life-jacket, but I wasn’t prepared, in any other way to be out here, rowing an open boat 10 feet long and not much wider than my hips, and that would not stay on course, in open water. When I saw those shallows, I realized that I was out of my depth.
But, you know, we just kept going. And we made it to Clark and Benson Island(s), and we did what we always did when we got to the beach. We lit a fire, and we made it really big.
A few hours later, Rabbit sailed into the cove. Well, there was no wind at all, so he motored in on his sailboat. On board he had A-Team, The Testicle, Wrecking Ball, and supplies which largely consisted of hot dogs, chips, and beer.
He was really mad at us, and started yelling at us as soon as he spotted Jupiter and I, and long before we could actually understand him. Eventually we discovered that we had ditched him and left him to die when we departed at Crowe Island. Jupiter and I were very confused and had not the least idea what he was going on, at such great length about as he anchored the boat, and we busied ourselves by ferrying the others in to shore. He wanted to do some fancy anchoring manoeuvre, so we left him the Sliver and waited for him on the beach so he could tell us the whole story when he made landing.
Anchoring accomplished, Rabbit climbed down into the Sliver and began rowing. About halfway in, he fell asleep, flopped to one side, and spilled out of the boat into the chuck, flipping the boat entirely. Jupiter and I grabbed the other boat and rescued him, and we did a fine job I can tell you. The whole rescue went like clockwork until we came to the part where someone was supposed to climb into the sleeping bag with mostly naked Rabbit and share body heat with his drunk, angry, unconscious, hypothermic ass. There was a look, and then we just built the fire even bigger and put him close, like 501 the Ditch Sleeper close, to the fire.
We had some beers and hot dogs and granola bars and stuff, and the others told us what Rabbit was so cranky about. When we had untied from the sailboat at Crowe Island, he hadn’t pulled the rope up right away, and it had gotten all snarled up in his propeller. There was no wind, so he was dead in the water, and Jupiter and I were already out of sight. We were also out of earshot, apparently, because he said that it happened right after we disembarked, and he’d yelled his brains out for us to come help him, but neither of us heard a thing. We told him that when he woke up, but he didn’t believe us, and remained mad, and blamed us for him having to jump off his boat to swim down and cut the rope out of his prop, which was why he was hypothermic. The fact that he was still hammered was his own fault. It was his pledge to drink non-stop the entire time we were there, and he had to make a trip into Bamfield to get more beer and foodstuffs the next day.
We all drank a lot, and The Testicle, who was a very large individual, stupidly stood up in the Peapod, and it got a speed wobble and he fell in, but he was fine, and A-Team found a piece of an old boat, complete with fibreglass and green gunk on it and thought it would make a nice table, and Wrecking Ball.....didn’t break anything for once.
We left earlier than we had planned because the weather was getting pretty snarky, as in a gale force Westerly that Jupiter and I had no hope of rowing home in snarkey, so we tied the rowboats behind the sailboat, and we all piled in with the still drunk and possibly still hypothermic, and somewhat delerious Rabbit, who had spent all the time since waking in his cruiser suit.
One thing about this particular sailboat-I can’t recall it’s name, if it even had one-was that it was 19 feet long, and 4 of those feet were outside, and we were all freezing, and 6 to 8 of the remaining feet were fo’c’sle, and full of where Rabbit lived, and there was a galley, and The Testicle was well over three hundred pounds. It was a very long buck to get back home, and thoroughly exhausted, I had to return Dad’s boats in the daylight, which hadn’t been part of the plan. But that’s the thing about drunk plans, I guess. You rarely get past the starting point.
Do you ever look back on things like that and wonder if it was fun or not? Not like it matters. we did have some fun, and we definitely had an adventure. We lived. Nobody died.
I wrote a song once. It wasn’t about that experience, and it wasn’t even about my experience. It was about Rabbit and something that he told me about the first time he thanked god.
You see, Rabbit never stopped drinking.
We were friends for a long time. He was one of the smartest guys I ever new, he was always fixing and inventing stuff like a mad scientist, and he was never satisfied with how things were, so be tinkered. It was irritating sometimes, like, dude, can’t you just NOT build a tree fort right now? Could you not talk about inverters, and sailing shit, and concrete, and propellers, and fibreglass, and the fucking jetstream, just for a bit? But he was a bit touchy, and didn’t take suggestion well at all. He was an ornery drunk, and as we drank more together, and I got into other drugs, we both started to fade out, retract, and we didn’t see each other very often after that.
He reached out to me after I got out of rehab. I was really happy to hear from him, and we agreed to meet up and go for a hike. He showed up flat-eyed drunk and carrying an opened 15-pack of Luckys. It was the first booze I had seen, and I told him I didn’t want to go driving anywhere with him, and he said that I could drive, and stop being such a pussy. I continued to decline and it took me the better part of an hour to get him to leave, and he was..unkind. We’d speak occasionally over the next few years, but the conversations always ended the same way. I was trying to protect myself, and he was wasted and angry. I started drinking again, but that had nothing to do with Rabbit.
The story goes that, as always, he was living on his boat, and he was very depressed, and didn’t want to live, and he was drinking whiskey from the bottle, and there were demons in it, and they hated him, and he was drinking them down, and he was so full of hate and hopeless, and angry, and he smashed the bottle on the deck and passed out, wanting to die.
And he woke up covered in blood, and he was pissed about that, and he looked out the hatch and he saw the sun, and it was beautiful, and he was glad to be alive, and he thanked god for the day, and he showed me the glass-cut scars on his wrists, and I couldn’t stand it, and I never saw him again, but I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and I wanted to forget, and I wanted to be doing so much better than that, and better than I was, but I can’t forget, and I can’t stop feeling, and I wrote this horrible song in tribute to his struggle, and Wretch performed it so many times, and I sang it over and over and over, and nobody knew what it was about, and it hurt me, and I screamed my guts out every time, and I just wanted to do better for somebody’s sake, even mine. Even for me. Even alone. With my demons. With me.
Alone with me
Spawn from the underbelly of mind
Leads my hands to hate
Painful self infliction
I must reciprocate
-
Tip my head offer sacrifice
To thin the blood enough
Demons laugh as life drains
Devil calls my bluff
-
Music from the foreign shores
Of pain that I’ve not yet explored
The face of its dark composure
Shares a mirror
With mine
-
Haunting darkness tracks my fear
Death rattles in my ear
Reaper’s coin before my eye
Heads you suffer Tails you die
-
Alone with me
Alone with me
Alone with me
The one I hate
-
With the lights of dawn I wake
And rise to kneel before a god I know is real
I hear him laugh at me
He shares a voice
With mine
-
Haunting darkness tracks my fear
Death rattles in my ear
Reaper’s coin before my eye
Heads you suffer tails you die
-
Alone with me
Alone with me
Alone with me
The one I hate
-
But Rabbit never quit drinking, and he never stopped falling off his boat, and he died, in the water, in the dark.
And I’ll never forget him, even though he was kind of an asshole sometimes. So am I. Even though he succumbed to his pain. So did I. Even though he was walking around with little light left. So was I.
I have no higher ground than my friend. I just got a few more breaks, maybe. I don’t know.
It doesn’t matter.
I miss him though. He had the most inquisitive mind. I like to think that it rubbed off on me a bit, and that’s how I can keep him around for the rest of my life.
I managed to quit drinking. It’s been three years as of today. I’m not alone, and I don’t hate myself. I look back on the past three years and I know that I’ve enjoyed myself. I’ve also struggled. I’ve followed through on a variety of plans, good and not so good, and I’ve had a fucking adventure, that’s for certain
But it’s too bad that my friend died. I hope his next life holds some peace, comfort, and a cool workshop for him.
It’s too bad that somebody died.
But it wasn’t me.
Not today.
Today I just want you to understand that I take this seriously, and one of the many, many reasons why.
