When the ferry rounded the boulders dyke the harbor showed its assortment of fishing boats, oil company barges, tugs and service shuttles. She was not there. I couldn't believe my eyes, but the sole elegant craft amidst the stinkpot fleet was missing. She was gone. On a quick sortie to kill time perhaps? No, I felt a punch in the gut, she was gone and I was stranded. She couldn't have done this to me, this slap in the face, damn it, we were sailing buddies by now. At least I believed so. But I had this sick feeling, she was gone, gone with my pay, my flight home.

"You must be Sam," said the harbormaster. "Please come in and sit down; there is a couple of fellows at the cafeteria who want a talk with you, I'll let them know you are here." I didn't like this at all, but what could I do, where could I go? The fellows, a policeman in uniform and a suit with a briefcase, were there in minutes. The cop said I was not charged with any infraction of the law, but my employer was a person of interest in a possibly illegal transfer of funds and, perhaps I would be willing to share information with the victim's legal representative, the suit.

I was beginning to get a clue. My employer was on the run and my ATM cash was my only chance at financing a return to the clam flats back home. I had to get back on the ferry and catch a plane somewhere. Fast.

"I am hired help," I said. "I was told to go ashore for supplies and given an ATM code to secure the necessary British currency, that's all I can tell you."

"Why go as far as Edinburgh," asked the suit, I had to think fast.

"Tea," I said. "My employer is very fussy about her tea and what she wants, you won't find here." Rocking back on his chair the harbormaster appeared to be suppressing a chuckle, the suit raised his eyebrows and the cop mentioned that CCTV images at ATMs were easily available and he pressed a business card in my hand while noting that he would appreciate my keeping him aware of my destination should I desire to leave the island.

"We have a room across the hall for stranded chaps," said the kindly harbormaster with a smile, "there are some who get sick of the oil platforms, some can't handle salt water conditions, some get drunk and miss their ride, Sam will be welcome here." That was alright with the cop and the suit. I was trapped. I followed him to the room and threw my duffel bag full of oats and powdered eggs on a bunk. Three guys there took a look at me and went back to their phone. The harbormaster was looking out a window; the suit and the cop were boarding a police car.

"They will be on the ferry in a few minutes," he said, "don't worry about the officer, he has already forgotten your name and everything you told him. No one likes American solicitors around here." That was good to hear, but the harbormaster had even more encouraging words. "Your boss is a very generous person," he said. "She has made a substantial donation to our community. She also wants you to take anything personal out of your sea bag, the rest is going to our church for our ladies' free suppers for the poor."

They sure are welcome to it, I thought and returned with him to his office where we had some more business to settle. He secured the door and unlocked a desk drawer for a sealed document file. I was to verify the amount within but I quickly lost my way through this unfamiliar plethora of bank notes and he was kind enough to count the equivalent of five-thousand American dollars. "Your employer wishes you to keep the harvest of your recent excursion to Edinburgh as a bonus for your valued collaboration; I assume that includes that very special tea," he said with a straight face while he pulled out of a closet my very own sea bag with my belongings laundered and folded. I could not help but join him in a laugh and I fished out of my loot a few hundred pounds for his church's ladies. He appeared genuinely touched and told me that cash transactions and other services were common in his office given the nature of the oil business and its need for many subcontractors, but his church didn't usually benefit from these transfer of funds. Actually a grateful deacon had already volunteered to take me to the mainland where transportation had been secured for me to the local airport. A commuter plane would take me to Edinburgh, then I would be on my own.

After he called the deacon I asked if my employer had spoken to him of her next destination. No, she hadn't left word, and she had sailed on the ebbing tide the day after I had gone to Edinburgh. She was seen traveling north, perhaps headed to Norway. North might mean south by dark given April's habits, but a terrible doubt came to mind, Svalbard.
Later I asked the deacon about the weather. Beautiful today, he said, but there's a strong gale coming from the North, the ferry will not run tomorrow. And he fired up his twin 100hp outboards, to soon catch up with that ferry with a police car on deck and pass it halfway to the mainland with me buried in foul weather gear, hood on. "Could these gentlemen catch up with me at the airport?" I asked. The deacon looked at me with a frown, as if I had lost my faith in the Lord and told me that my employer, a very thoughtful and kind person had made the arrangements for the flight. "The pilot may be running through his take-off checklist as we speak," he said, "you will be his only passenger." I will never forget that churchy fellow, I have yet to encounter another deacon with twin hundred-horse outboards on his boat.

I passed out more bills to the deacon for his church ladies, the taxi driver for his wife, the pilot for his kids. I thought that money was easily spent when you didn't have to count it. Compared to the austere faces on our greenbacks, the pictures and cheerful colors on the pound notes made it feel like I was passing out Halloween candy. I came to my senses at the airline counter where many of my pretty pictures were swept away by a surly clerk who looked at my attire with disdain and my cash as an obvious clue to malfeasance, but I finally relaxed on my transatlantic flight while I reflected on the extraordinary adventure I had lived and all of a sudden it was all I could do to keep from breaking in tears at the thought of April and Onward.

A kid on the next seat was tapping and scrolling on a tablet and I asked him if he could show me some weather. "Sure! Boston, New York, Chicago?" I spelled Svalbard for him. An image popped up in beautiful colors, jet stream in red, precipitations in swarms of typographic notations, the asterisks of snow everywhere, radar images darkening in green swipes, cold areas in concentric zones of light blue to black, Onward underneath that, somewhere. "It's not in English and it looks like all of it is ocean," said the kid. I pointed to Svalbard's islands in indigo and the 'English' option button at the top corner of his screen. The first line was in scarlet, Times New Roman bold: "Hurricane Force Wind Warnings."

"Wow!" said the kid, "looks rough, have you been there?" I said I had not, but perhaps a friend of mine was aboard a boat in that weather now. "I want to go there," he said. "Kid," I said, "you will dream about it all of your life."

"Yeah," he said, "Svalbard..."

I thanked him and turned to the window, seeking sleep. What have I done, I thought, I couldn't help April and now I may just have drowned that kid. It was crazy, I had to go home, get my firewood, calm down.

HE CALLED YOU A BLOKE

Digging clams in the winter is a bitch. The demand is down, so is the price. The weather is usually discouraging, the short hours of daylight are a problem. Some mornings you can't see enough to dig a full tide and in the evenings it's the same. The ever nasty trouble is the cold. The sun's rays are a joke, the icy wind seldom slows down.

Working on a boat is worse. The boss is at the wheel, running the winch from the shelter of the house, the sternman is out in the weather tending the drag, picking the good stuff out of the mud and the stinking, crushed waste that must be shoveled overboard. You work all day, dawn to dusk. The money is better. I figured I would dig clams until the holidays and after the kids left to go back to school I would get on a boat.

For once I had cash on hand. I could have stayed home, sat by the smoky stove and listened to the radio, but I would have been bored. Before daylight in the village you notice some houses with a few pickups parked in the yard. They are the friendly places, those with the good coffee where the lady of the premises doesn't run off the loudmouths or the half-drunks, where she even sits in her robe and laughs with the regulars until everyone gets up and goes to work. There you get the news; who had an engine that quit and the expected cost of the damages; who got nailed by the wardens or the cops; who just came back after a summer of sailing with a girl. I was the oddball, I was from away, I had no family locally. So I was welcomed everywhere but I did not belong anywhere. I was the butt of all the good natured tasteless jokes; I was the stud on the girl's boat. I could not tell the truth, no one would believe it. So I spoke of the hard times, the cold, the storms, April running off the trawler with her spotlight, the oats and peaches diet, the green water coming over the bow. That one, they all had seen it at least once, they did not laugh. Then I put in my day's work, went home and thought of April.

I was not in love with her, but I missed her terribly. She was dead, I could have saved her, I could have talked her into running before that storm, we would have found a fjord to hide in somewhere on the Norway coast. But no, she had not gone north, she was in the Baltic, in Finland somewhere, why was she leaving me in the dark? Because you never told her your last name, remember? You were Sam, just Sam. And on, and on.

The weeks, the months passed with more and more of the same. Eat, work, sleep, repeat. A boat went down. Same old story probably: hard running tide, drag caught down, the stern goes under; three men missing. All the draggers were out the next day crisscrossing the site, sonars putting out their bottom images, crews looking for pieces of wreckage, finding nothing until someone noted a red something doing odd moves on an island beach nearby. It was one of the boys, the one who couldn't swim. When the boat went down he got hold of an empty five-gallon gas can and beat his feet until they found bottom. He didn't see the others go down. No life-jackets. We don't bother with those, too clumsy to work with, you understand. What happened? Drag caught down.

After that we didn't laugh that hard at the morning coffee gatherings. I wasn't the only one with a story of a drag caught down; I thought of finishing the season and give it up. No sense in tempting fate. Then one evening the dockmaster called me to the shelter of the bait shed.

"Some strange guy is looking for you," he said, "a foreigner with an accent, he called you a bloke, a bloke named Sam who went to sea with a lady on a sailboat. I told him I wasn't sure, but I would ask around. He said he would be back tomorrow to check with me." I thought it could be someone associated with the suit at Colbeth Harbor. Good luck to him trying to get my wages back, but maybe he knew what happened to April.

"Call me when he shows up," I told the dockmaster, "I would like a word with him." I went home and called my boss to tell him I could not work the next day. He was good about it, said he could use a day off himself. Then I cleaned up, made dinner and went to bed. There was no way I could sleep. I tossed and turned, so restless the cat even bailed out from his preferred night spot, on the pillow next to mine.

He was a suit alright, but an odd one in his belted raincoat. He had on the sort of rubber overshoes grandmothers wore years ago and a clear plastic sleeve on his hat over the steel mounted half-glasses accountants wear. Ready for the weather no doubt, though anything but local. The dockmaster walked out to the shed to give us privacy and the suit explained that he was representing a long estranged cousin of my late mother's who was trying to research family ties but only recalled a boy named Sam. The deal was not about Sam, it was screaming "Scam," and he sure wasn't very good at it, but I thought I would ask the question that was burning my lips, "what about the girl in the boat?" He was struggling with his answer, "ah, yes, yes, the girl, your cousin, she's supposed to have taught you the family motto, something about tomorrow, in French..." I knew that answer: "Demain n'en sera pas la veille," I said. "Pffwew," he sighed, "I have been to every harbor in over hundred miles for that line." On a hunch, I gave him another one: "How is that Porsche going?" He was surprised, but we were on program, "not quite five-thousand kilometers on her, I treat her like a baby," he said.

He followed me to town for a lobster sandwich and a beer and gave me a card from my mother's long estranged cousin: "Buy yourself a good boat," signed A. Then we walked across the street to the bank where the manager and my pal in his rubber shoes created a new investment account. I signed on it as the administrator of an initial fifty-thousand dollars deposit. Facing a road trip to New York and at least twenty-three hours of flights to Australia and Hobart, he was in a hurry to leave and we shook hands outside the bank. I thanked him for trying so hard to find me and for helping April. "No problem," he said, "thank you for helping her." I was beating around the bush with the thank you routine, "be sure to thank her for me when you see her," I said and I could not help but ask if he knew where she was. "The tropics somewhere, I would guess, but really I have no idea." I believed him.

SHIP AHOY

Holy Molly, fifty grands! At first I thought of a dragger of my own; I could make some money. Why? Why not a sailboat, not quite as big as April's, maybe a thirty-six footer, something I could handle on my own. I could get a six-pack license, all I needed was to go through the study course and I sure had logged enough time on the salt water. I could take tourists out, locally, I could take the kids offshore, they were getting big enough to get out of the bay.

By the end of the summer I would stock up on oats and peaches and sail south with a bottle of Jack Daniels, just in case. I could picture my boat rafted with Onward at some fancy anchorage in the Caribbean, April and I, arms around each other's shoulders, drink in hand, belting out "Yippie-yi-ohhhhh Yippie-yi-yaaaaay Ghost Sailors in the Sky," her crew laughing about our cold water memories. Best times of my life, so far.

THE END

Fragments of maps copyrighted by National Geographic and Rand McNally & Company. Photographs by the author. With apologies to the late Johnny Cash and songwriter Stan Jones for the bastardization of their hit Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Author's Note: Most of the jargon and technical terms about sailing gear and practice are easy to find online. Commercial fishing is something else... A reader's inquiry, What is the purpose of dragging? prompted this explanation:

Dragging gather edibles (scallops, mussels, quahogs -also called little necks, etc.) in the first step from the bottom of the sea to the table. Towed by boats, some drags just sweep everything on the seafloor (for scallops and mussels,) others have teeth to plow the seafloor and collect burrowing targets like quahogs. Everything hauled aboard is picked over for the desired species and then shoveled off. That's the task of the sterman (-men). A 'productive' area is worked over and over. You have no idea of the stink from organisms decaying in anaerobic conditions... It's an extremely wasteful process, worse than mining. I have shoveled back to certain death thousands of quahogs -too big, too tough- that were decades old (you can count the growth rings on the shells, just like trees.)

Drag widths vary from the old-fashioned 2-foot hand drags (one on each side of say, a 25ft boat,) to 6 or 8 feet (worked over the stern of boats up to 40 feet) to 16 feet or more. Larger sizes are worked in pairs, one on each side of a boat and towed from outriggers (the 'batwings'.) With the holidays approaching, shelled scallops are worth $10 to 20 per pound off the boat. Regulations limit the harvest per-boat per-day in coastal waters, offshore there are no limits. Commercial fishing is said to be the second most lethal occupation in the US.

THANK YOU FOR READING