4 - Sunday, Junuary 10, 1988 - North Shore News

ea I

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personal ©

WENT DOWN to my boat the other day. It was midweek. A cowl of fog lay over the water, rising proba- bly 50 feet into the air, leaving a midday winter sky wide open, with the keels of massive cloud formations drifting

calmly overhead, ablaze in the sun.

I could still see the distant, alien civilization on the other side ‘of Burrard Inlet, but the view was cut off below the knees, as it were, and everything on the other side seemed to be adrift on a piane of its own, like an outer ring.

As I descended from the park- ing lot to the dock's gate, | found myself wading into the shadow of what seemed like a dank, gaseous glacier capping the whole ocean: a universe of wisps and waifs and ghosts and dim shapes and blurs and bruises and hints and shades and tones, nothing moving very far up the spectrum from pure blankness. AAC

“TE paused for u while and stared down through the gin-clear water at the patient biind starfish...."°

EIT ASS TA

The boats at the end of the dock and along the furthest fingers were nearly invisible. As my eye moved closer to shore, the boats got clearer and more solid, as though materializing out of hyperspace, but still not quite teal — more like a slightly-opa- qued film print. Something | could watch but could not touch.

By an odd trick of the light — as though a hole had opened in the fog — the glass on one of the portholes of just one sailboat glowed with burnished reflected sunlight. 1 winked like a mirror sending lazy coded signals that bounced off the smooth-backed sea. Hot-coal light rippling...

As I unlocked the creaky metal

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gate I could hear the slish of swells rolling smoothly in at an angle — the wake of a freighter passing out there somewhere.

Just this line of advancing bulges, something lifting against the unbroken invisible membrane of the sea and collapsing without breaking through.

The boats all wobbied. The masts shifted and the image came to mind of a herd of unicorns Shaking their heads.

There was 2 general clicking of guy-lines and the skreak of sheets Straining against the cleats. Bumpers made their mouse-cries as hulls tried to grind against the dock.

A lone grey-white gull, perched on top of a pier silhouetted against the void beyond, seemed indistinguishable from a carved wooden Jawn ornament.

Then from somewhere out in the fog came a lost gull-call,

For the first time, after all these years, it occurred to me that they might not have radar, these gulls, and thus they could be grounded.

Then the one visible gull took orf, ignoring my reasoning. And vanished.

Leaving me alone.

There was no one else to be seen, | had the dock to myself.

It's a wonderful feeling to walk along a dock, alone, at any time of the year, but it is somehow much more haunting in winter, especially in the event of snow,

Snow is so exquisitely beautiful to look at, a mantle of micro- diamonds dumped with awesome

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abandon from the edge of space, etching every horizontal line in white, laying vanilla icing over the decks, piled up like soft ice cream concs on stovepipe covers, shaving lather spray-painted from above.

In winter the boats are alone, too. There is no one out on the back deck barbecuing or drinking or just plain puttering about. Ne smell of paint or dicsel furnes or coffee brewing in someone's galley,

Instead, just the sea-smell in the air: wet sand, the salt, the decomposition of a zillion animals and birds and fish, a glittery clear acid bath that devours everything eventually — except, oddly cnough, gold.

That sizzle you hear whenever the water moves against anything, that gentle fizz, an endless zipper being drawn, the hem of an enormous rabe being hauled in from the horizon — so soothing.

But it is death. How tong be- fore you dissolve down to the bones in the sea? Not long. And then those gone too; only metal left rusting back into the seabed.

I paused for a while and stared down through the gin-clear water at the patient blind starfish, their clockwork climbing never done. Immediately, my metabolism slowed down, My mind went into a crawling mode.

Barnacles were fitted like leg- warmers around the boney legs of the dock. Tiny fist darted around in the Jong band of shadow underneath me — and they didn’t even flinch when the mountainous gront of the depar- ting freighter’s foghorn caught me in the chest, staggering me.

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