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Below the WaterlineBrian Friesen
It wasn’t until the sailboat swung back eastward and I passed under the Astoria Bridge late in the night, heading upstream, that the hallucinations subsided, and I began, finally, to notice real things. Small things on big water. Tiny flashes of light on the surface of the river that reflected in wide arcs the illuminated bridge high above. The rope in my hand, its frayed ends thin as hair. The horizon, a long, broken line of faint lights in the distance. The vast expanse of the river was made up of smaller, more tangible parts now. For many days I had missed seeing these things. There is so much to attend to when you are sailing alone on the Columbia River. Air and water become charged with turmoil. And at night, phantom islands pass by in the water, and boats that cut wakes of white foam: islands and boats and wakes that aren’t really there, and you know it even though you can see them, feel their weight in the water beside you and sense the wind shifting to accommodate their presence. There is so much to attend to when sailing alone. So many lines to work with only two hands. So many dangers to anticipate. Your eyes make their careful choices.
But late that night, heading back upstream, something shifted, like a switch behind my eyes, clicking on. Writing helped, I suppose, and turning the bow of the boat homeward. It helped to get rid of the chart book and its ubiquitous hazard symbols. Under the light of the bridge, and the light of the lantern that swung from the boom just above my head, I started writing on notebook pages rippled from the moist air. I wrote about the lantern. I had been lighting it on deck every night since departing from Portland: the soft glow of it swaying through the rigging, the lines and sails luminous in the night air. Then came some thoughts about seasickness, and about the phantom shapes in the night and the unseen dangers lurking just under the surface of the river—the rocks, logs and shipwrecks all ominously labeled in my chart book—all those jagged edges waiting to punch a hole through the bottom of the sailboat and make a widow of my wife, and an orphan of my infant son.
I hadn’t written much until that night under the Astoria bridge, partly because of the frantic attention I gave to the depth soundings in the chart book and its symbols of impending disaster, and partly because I kept dropping pencils into the river. The biggest scare came on the first day of the journey, a dozen tacks and jibes after raising the sails just north of Portland. I was sailing too close to the shore, trying to get as much distance out of a port tack as I could when the keel slammed into something hard under the surface. I spent the next six days focusing my mind’s eye on what I could not see. Sometimes, even during the day, I swerved to avoid objects that weren’t there. At one point, I tried to hide the chart book down in the main cabin, but it never stayed down there for long. Finally, near the mouth of the Columbia, heading back upstream, with the lights of the Astoria bridge glimmering up ahead, I set fire to the chart book and dropped it, burning, into a deep, aluminum mixing bowl that I used for washing my hair in the morning and peeing in at night when I was too sleepy to climb on deck to lean over the rail.
You never know what all a bowl might be good for until it’s one of the only containers you’ve got as you bob along in the current. You never know what all might need containing—soup, soapy water, piss, flames, ash—little things you might not stop long enough to see in the presence of graver concerns. I had hoped to start writing about the big picture—my life on the water, living aboard a sailboat, the characters I had met on the dock—and yet here I was, writing about a cheap aluminum lantern; about a silver mixing bowl; about getting up at night to pee. Who needs a river to write about these things?
As the flames poured sideways over the lip of the bowl, away from the wind, I watched until the light had burnt a flame-like shape into my vision, and the rest of the world turned dark. The surface of the river continued its rhythmic folding, washing against the side of the boat. I could hear the dance of the water in the dark, feel it vibrating through the line in my hand.
•••
For two days and one night, I had been sailing up and down the Pacific coast in the deep, rolling water, following the compass needle north to the tip of Long Beach, and then south, always into the wind, always keeping one eye on the shoreline and the other on the chart book. But after turning back into the mouth of the Columbia, with the Astoria Bridge looming above me in the night sky, I looked down at the water passing by, as if for the first time, and at the flecks of light on the waves, and at the jib sheets in my hand, and I spoke out loud, saying, “Hello. Hello. Hello,” to one thing after another. Hello, rope. Hello, bowl. Hello, lantern. Hello, smell of the sea. Hello, cracked lips and the taste of salt and blood. Hello wave after wave of folding gray water. You. And you. And you.
For the whole trip, up until now, I had been squinting my eyes into the wind. Now, under the light of the moon, with the Astoria Bridge looming above me, the breeze blowing over the stern, and the boom hiked out over the water, the wind scooped us into its arms until we ran with it, until I could barely feel its breath on our way upstream. The hull seemed to sigh with relief over the swells after a long week of heeling over into the wind with the lines taut and singing. Now the jib sheets hung in easy loops, warm and smooth in my hands. The smell of the sea hung in the air just below the canvas. The lamp handle creaked softly where it hung in the rigging above me. On the incoming tide, the water rushed upstream under the bridge, bubbling around the base. Upstream became downstream. The river was illusive here at the mouth. You could no longer properly call it a river. So many other voices pouring by.
•••
It was the lantern that saved me from seasickness. The first few nights were the worst. My throat and stomach burned. My breath would only come in short, scattered bursts. Down in the belly of the boat at night, I couldn’t steady myself by keeping my eye on the horizon. The lantern became a steadying presence. If I kept the flame going, I was OK. The yellow light swung from a hook above my bed in the forward cabin - the flame a fixed, flicker of movement, my horizon, translating the river’s dance to me in the dark, windowless cabin.
But I didn’t have any extra lamp oil, and I couldn’t find any in Astoria when I stopped there for food and pencils on my way toward the Pacific. Whatever oil was left in the lamp would have to last. My insides shuddered to think that it might not.
•••
In the days after I passed under the Astoria Bridge on my way upstream, I began writing about the river and the people who lived on boats tethered to the docks that had been my home for a couple of years before Larissa and I were married, and for a year after, until Larissa became pregnant.
The marina attracted a fascinating array of characters. There was Lee, the Australian who sailed around the globe until he found the Mouth of the Columbia and decided to drop anchor in Portland for a couple of years. Lee told me never to bring a lifeboat along when sailing in blue water. “People get into them too quick when they are in a tight spot,” he said. “Like my grandfather always told me, ‘the only way into a lifeboat is from the top of the mast.’”
There was Norm, the elderly man who had been born in a house right on the banks of the river back in the 1930s. His eyesight was nearly gone, and yet, every morning and evening, he still patrolled the marina in a small skiff. He said he was keeping watch over the place. Actually, what he really told me (with his index finger stabbing me in the shoulder) was that he was “watching the bullshit that floated into and out of the place, and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be fucking with my marina.” As bad as his eyesight was, no one dared to suggest that he stop making his rounds. He might give you one of those looks he gives, or worse, unload his sailor’s mouth in your direction.
There was Barry, the bus driver, who lived on a tiny 25-foot racing boat. Barry had an acute stuttering problem. He seemed young, but most of his hair was already gone. I’d sometimes meet up with him on the way up the ramp in the morning, or in the parking lot above the river, and it would take him a good ten seconds to wish me a good day. One morning, he couldn’t get past the first “G.” I waited patiently beside him at the top of the ramp. I didn’t want to interrupt his concentrated effort. Barry ran his fingers slowly through what was left of his hair, and I suddenly wondered if he had been pulling it out. Finally, he shook his head, waved a hand in front of his face, and turned to look at the river below. I turned too, and we stood there for a moment. The clouds that reflected off the surface of the water seemed to be drifting upstream. When Barry turned to face me again, he was smiling. He shook my hand and made his way toward his car in silence.
•••
By the time I reached Sand Island late in the night on my return trip upstream, the last night of my journey, just downstream from Sauvie Island and the mouth of the Multnomah Channel, the lamp was still burning through the night. The oil hadn’t run out yet. I tied the boat up at the transient dock on the downstream side of the island, climbed ashore, and made a fire out of driftwood I had gathered down by the waterline. I boiled coffee in a pot of water, sifted it into a large mug, and wrote in my notebook for a couple of hours, stopping here and there to stoke the fire or to add more wood or to stretch my legs.
I wanted to write about my life, and about things that had actually happened to the people I knew. I started writing about some of the liveaboards I had met at the marina, random stories I had heard about them, or that they had told about themselves. I was pretty sure that most of the stories weren’t completely true, but they were the only history I had to work with, official or otherwise. Creative nonfiction territory. Most of what I had heard, and most of what I was writing was riddled with large holes. I tried to fill in some of the holes, but then I no longer recognized the people I thought I knew. There by the light of the fire on the island across from St Helens, the world was turning fictitious.
I started making lists. Solid evidence I could trust. The names of the boats back at the marina. The names of people. Items my friends had dropped into the river: keys, wallets, rings. Then, I remembered what had happened to my own wedding ring.
•••
I lost it to the river before Nathan was born, while Larissa and I still lived on the boat just north of Portland. It had been my grandfather’s ring, a gift from my grandmother.
Larissa and I were cleaning the boat on the day it happened. I was shaking a small, round rug over the water. The dust and food-crumbs from the rug collected on the surface of the water and held there. It was a cool winter day. My fingers were stiff and cold and unswollen. On the final shake of the rug, the ring slipped off my finger and bounced three times on the dock and I saw its reflection on the water for a moment before the ring and the reflection joined in an instant, just before the river swallowed them both. The flecks of dust hung on the water below me and then moved away with the current, and I was left gazing into my own wavering reflection. Up on the deck, Larissa turned her head when she heard the sound and saw me leaning over the stern, not moving.
“Oh no,” she said.
I turned to face her and nodded and closed my eyes.
As I have told it and remembered it over the years, that story had always ended there on that final, painful note. What more is there to say? I had dropped many things into the river.
Gone.
The End.
Move on.
•••
The air on Sand Island turned cold. I smothered the fire and walked back to the boat. In the forward cabin, I struck a match and reached quickly under the glass of the lamp while the match head continued its slow flaring into life. The flame caught the blackened tip of the wick, and the familiar golden light filled the cabin. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I thought about Lee, Norm, Barry, and others that lived on the water. I tried to write, but was soon stuck again, wondering about these people I thought I knew, the ones I thought I would have something to say about. All I could come up with were character sketches, half-truths and gossip, dead ends. Like the dead-end story I had written about the lost wedding ring.
But the wedding ring’s story didn’t just end there. Larissa and I hired a diver to go down into the river after it. He was a man old enough to be my father. His hair was mostly gray, his weathered face the color of wet sand. When I pointed to where the ring had gone in, the diver removed his own ring from his left hand, fed a thin fishing line through it, and dropped it into the river.
I looked at him.
“It’s from my ex-wife,” he said with a grin. “I tell you, it’s good therapy throwing it into the river over and over again. Someday, I’ll actually lose it for good.”
We waited while the fishing line ran slowly through his fingers until it finally grew still. Then he wrapped it tightly around a dock cleat and lowered himself into the water, following that thin line down to the bottom. For half an hour, Larissa and I watched the current bubble and churn from the expelled air of the diver’s oxygen tank below.
When he surfaced, mask still on, he was shaking his head. His wet-suit was torn slightly at the shoulder: a hole the size of a silver dollar revealing a blood-red gash surrounded by red, pimpled skin. He removed the dark gloves, untied the fishing line from his ring and worked it back onto his finger. I asked if he had seen anything. He smiled and said there was no seeing anything down there, even with his headlamp. The light of the sun faded into darkness at about ten or fifteen feet below the surface. During the spring runoff, he couldn’t even see the fishing line that led him down into the depths, though he kept the line mere inches from the glass of his facemask. You just get to where you knew where the line was, he said, even if you couldn’t see it. Going down there wasn’t about seeing anything, it was about feeling and sensing what you could through the thick gloves, which was quite a lot if you spent enough time below the surface.
He said he was pretty sure he knew where my ring was, but he couldn’t get to it. A large mass of twisted metal had dammed up a lot of other stuff below us - trees, tires, a shopping cart - a whole mound of debris over ten feet tall and several times as wide. There was no way to pull it all apart. Rust and years of pressure from the river current had locked it all together.
I pointed to the hole in his suit where the blood fell in a thin line down his arm and he nodded and told us he’d better get going so he could clean out the wound. He said he’d been infected a number of times from the toxins in the water. Once, he’d almost lost a leg to infection.
I pulled out my wallet to pay him, but he shook his head as he tossed the oxygen tank over his shoulder and turned to walk away. “Tough luck,” he said, “but look at it this way: you’ll always know where your ring is.”
•••
I stopped. All I could see were more dead ends. The storylines seemed to disappear into the dark or drift behind me in the current down to their frayed ends. Unless I started forcing connections. Making things up in order to fill in the gaps. Bearing witness to what wasn’t even real. Bearing witness to phantoms.
I added to Norm’s story, and to Lee’s. I wrote that despite Lee’s aversion to life boats, he had dozens of life jackets scattered topside and in the main cabin. I wrote that Lee had shipwrecked along the Pacific Coast, the dark sea around him littered with bright, orange shapes. And then there was Norm. I had Norm going blind completely, getting lost one morning while making his rounds, heading upstream and down, searching for the dock, and when he ran out of fuel, putting up a makeshift sail and letting the wind carry him for days, until he ran out of food…. I even wrote that Barry was able to leave his stutter behind whenever he sang, and that he began to communicate clearly to others by singing his thoughts to them.
Bull shit like that.
Was this stuff even creative nonfiction anymore?
I decided to stick to the image of the wedding ring. It was one of the clearest of my memories: one I felt I could trust.
The ring struck the dock like a tiny bell, three times, on its way into the river. Ding. Ding. Ding. Its shadow passed beyond the wood planks of the dock and its inverted reflection flashed on the surface of the water. It was only an instant, but the image of the reflected ring hung suspended in my mind. For a brief, confused moment, before I could label with words the thing that was happening, I saw two rings, rather than the one I knew. A stab of wonder and grief pierced my chest in that moment as one ring rose and the other fell and they joined with a small, under-whelming “plop!”
The diver was right. I would always know where that ring was, the one I had worn, the one that had begun to reshape my finger. But the other ring, somehow just as real for all its brief existence, hung in my mind too, and strangely, like a sharp sting in my chest. Lost. It seems absurd, but a small portion of my grief over the loss of the real ring was also for the other one, the one I found for that brief moment before it too vanished into the dark water at the same time that it seemed to ascend into the gray sky. I tried to tell myself that the other ring should have been just a reflection, not worth noting, just another phantom, evidence of an isolated mind roaming too long in the dark. I dismissed the ring, and yet, to my relief, it remained in my mind.
I would always know where my wedding ring was, but what about that other ring? If it was as real and important as it suddenly seemed, where was it now? Where had it gone? Down into the dark water, to be entangled in a mass of twisted debris? Up into the sky? Or had the ring sunk somewhere deep inside me?
It is here, in the final moment of this story, after pursuing it as far as I knew how to, that it cracked open, or cracked me open, and curiously, that other ring, that glimpse of light on the water, had fallen in. There was room enough inside me for this other ring, perhaps room enough for many rings, room enough for whole worlds that could cry out to the world of tangible things—tangible rings that rest on the finger and flames that burn and lines that hold fast or that hang loosely in the hand, or lines that guide to what lies in the vast spaces below the waterline.
I looked down at my dry, callused hands. If the story threads I had been following were only mere reflections of the real world, why did they suddenly strike me as more real, more true than what my eyes had seen and my ears had heard and my hands had touched? It is as if the very stories themselves need to offer this other way of seeing. As if a story, too, has a life of its own, a living perspective that speaks about our lives even as it speaks into them. As if the story lines that run through our lives pass within us and without, through unseen wind and water, quivering, going slack, or stretching, singing at the slightest touch.
•••
Above me in the cabin, the lamp leaned into the night, rocking and creaking lightly, answering the pull and stretch of the dock lines on the other side of the hull. I closed my notebook and climbed into the V-shaped bunk in the forward cabin, the image of that other ring hanging in my mind. I drifted toward sleep, sensing the dim heat of the flame dancing in the air above me.
Each morning of my journey from Portland to the Pacific and back, I expected to see only the darkened glass of the lantern. But each morning, I reached up and rolled the glowing wick down to snuff out the flame for the day. On the final morning of the trip, as the sky began to lighten in the east, the flame continued to burn, its light unwavering in the soft glow of the rising sun. I climbed up on deck and hung the lantern from the back of the boom while I loosened the mooring lines and raised the sails. I pointed the bow of the boat back downstream and the wind carried me quietly around the island and into the main current. The lights of St. Helens were beginning to blink on as the sun rose over the Cascades. From the center of the Columbia, I turned toward the mouth of the Multnomah Channel and adjusted the sails. The channel was a thin strip of water that passed through the forests and farmlands of Sauvie Island before it met the Willamette, which would then bring me back into the Columbia many miles upstream. Someone had told me—Norm, come to think of it—that the channel would offer a slower, quieter journey home. Maybe Norm was steering me wrong, up a shallow rivulet, in order to get a laugh when I finally returned to tell about running aground and sinking into the mire on a low tide. Without my chart book, I didn’t know what the channel would bring. I’d have to trust what Norm told me.
From the middle of the river, the mouth of the Multnomah Channel looked more like a small bay. You could go right by it if you didn’t know it was there. I aimed the bow for it and adjusted the sails. When I reached up to hike out the boom even further, the back of my hand brushed the warm lantern. Inside, the flame still burned. I wondered what the channel might reveal. With the sun rising behind me, I passed between the two islands, pulling away from the main current of the Columbia, listening as the bow of the boat began slicing through the channel’s smooth, still surface.
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