Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

We Transit

177 We Transit Rolled by breakers,weightless but confused,Gulliver washes ashore.Stands up in the surf,heavy and off-balance,backwash pulling strongly at his shins, can’t get a footing in the fluid sands of a new country. r Sometimes our ambitions are big enough that they pull others into our orbits. My then-girlfriend moved to Miami with me so I could do grad work, and her folks, Margaret and Fred, retired to Fort Myers to be near their daughter, their only child. r The hms Bounty,in transit from Connecticut to Florida,sinks in Hurricane Sandy, ninety miles southeast of Cape Hatteras.Two Coast Guard mh-60 Jayhawks arrive in the dark, turbines screaming, lights aglow, convex-eyed insects in the maelstrom. Dark water rolls in from every direction, thirtyfoot swells, a rescue swimmer in the lead chopper says it’s like looking into the agitator of a washing machine. They orbit two life rafts in the water; one man in a Gumby suit floats separately at a distance. The hoist operator names him, in the calm speech of the well trained, “the free-floating gentleman.” Wouldn’t it be a comfort if we knew our gods spoke with the same professionalism and respect? 178 we transit r When I met my mother- and father-in-law to be in 1994, they’d already lived two entire lives. They were from Inverness, Scotland, originally. Fred was a little too young in World War II to fight on the continent, so he served in the Home Guard instead.The rest of his regiment was trapped at Dunkirk and taken prisoner by the Germans. Margaret was in the postwar Royal Navy. She and Fred had lived in England, the Highlands, and the Orkneys before immigrating to Chicago in the late 1950s.Margaret worked as a dental assistant and then for many years as an accounts manager for a food-service conglomerate. Fred was a dental technician and made appliances and prosthetics, and after a while he had a basement workshop in their home, so he was able to provide childcare for their daughter. When we met he had advanced emphysema from breathing the plaster dust of his trade.They had lovely stories to tell about the Scots community in Chicago, and how one time Fred brought home a touring Canadian pipe band that had been playing at the local mall. It took multiple trips in his car to get them all to their house, but there was music and laughter and good scotch whiskey till the wee hours. r Louisiana isn’t the same South as lower Alabama, for example. Softer, and sometimes I hear Tidewater-like accents.The kindness of a courtly, sympathetic , older man, his wish that children be in peace and grow to be strong, is enough to cause tears. r Fred died in Fort Myers, a place I don’t think he ever really liked and certainly had never planned to live. Accompanying his wife and daughter, I carried his ashes through airports and placed them in a hole in an ancient cemetery on a hill overlooking Beauly Firth. At his wake I met his old friend Tommy McDonald, one of the men taken prisoner by the Germans at Dunkirk. He was a comical, randy old man with terrific hair, chatting up all the widows and telling stories he acted out with a glass in his hand. He’s dead now too. we transit 179 r The young barber looks very southern. How do I mean that? It’s in his eyes and styled into his own hair, inspiration of pompadour. The low, oldfashioned establishment is just off campus, a barber’s pole outside, the barbers often unoccupied. He greets me so enthusiastically that he forgets to ask me to sit and begins to prepare his tools while I stand awkwardly in the entry. His electric trimmers are dull and yank my short hair, but I’m afraid to move. He makes hard work of it, so he has plenty of time to tell me he’s not a reader, but he picked up a book the other day and couldn’t put it down, it was just really great, and I should read it. He wants to know if I’ve heard of historical fiction, and I say I’ve heard of it. Have I heard of the author? I haven...