My moon walk, My Woodstock

I am of an age where I should have watched the televised moon walk fifty years ago. I was in Coast Guard boot camp in California, however. There were no televisions there. I could have been at the Woodstock music-fest that year also but I was painting the hull of a Coast Guard buoy tender in Seattle harbor while Hendrix sang the national anthem. I was eventually stationed at the Coast Guard base in Ketchikan Alaska. The following story, which is mostly or perhaps all true, was a definitive life experience. I hope that you find it interesting.

By Tim King

It had seemed an ill start.  

I'd taken my olive drab sea bag, which didn't bulge with the full collection of my clothing and possessions, and gone to the Ketchikan flight office to purchase a ticket for San Francisco.  As in all things, I approached going AWOL from the Coast Guard with an innocence and naiveté that horrifies me as much as it pleases me.

"I'd like a one way ticket to San Francisco," I told the clerk.

"You're from the Coast Guard base," aren't you, she, who was only making small talk, asked.

"No," I lied with a cold blush.

"Sure you are. I can tell," she looked at me with an odd questioning sweetness that suggested that I indeed was the branded and pitiful chattel of the US government.  

I'd been lonely, or something, all during that endless rainy Alaska autumn. Maybe I should have told her everything. Told her of the empty ache that was causing me to go AWOL, perhaps even desert. Maybe she would have cared. Instead I told her another lie. My name was Timothy Kayson. It wasn't a true alias. I was really one of five sons’ of Kay - but it certainly was a stretcher. I figured I needed to stretch the truth some to keep the MPs off my trail. The clerk issued the ticket under the near alias and I sat down, under her mildly quizzical gaze, to wait for the once a day flight to the south.  

I felt raw, alien, and exposed in the garish red and turquoise plastic chairs of that barren waiting room. It's a good thing the plane didn't come that day. Feeling that displaced is dangerous. Thankfully foul weather kept the flight out of the treacherous Ketchikan mountains and fjords.

That night I went underground to heal and wait. There was a man and woman who lived in a shack owned by an old Klingit woman who liked to go to Seattle to bet on the horses. Her dwelling hung out over the stream running through town on its way to the ocean. October was nearly over so there were fat orange salmon corpses, belly up, outside the door. The water was black and the dead fish glowed sadly up through it.

Taking turns on the crank, we made ice cream as night fell thickly. It was my first time making ice cream and my loneliness was as viscous as the dark and as sweet as the cream. The iced cream was sharply cold and the woman baked large toast colored chocolate chip cookies on flat silvered cookie sheets.  She packed a lot of cookies in a plastic bread bag that had printed on it the lie "Home Style". Then she put them in my sea bag. She made the lie true by her gift.

"You'll need these," she told me.

She had russet colored curly hair, unkempt mostly, and she smiled with a warmth in her gray eyes that I carried in the coming weeks all the way to California.  

I slept well on the floor and during the night the black water tumbled those sad salmon corpses back out into the sea's waiting arms.  

And in my sleep I decided to take the ferry, across the Alaska's Gulf to Prince Rupert, not the plane, to California.

Thanks to Wikipedia

I stood on the huge white deck of the ferry and watched as it slid powerfully past the Coast Guard base. The still water mirrored an image of the ship and, I suppose, me.  I knew, as I gazed across the watery mirror at each blocky white Base building, stacked one on one ascending the wet coniferous mountainside, that leaving was the clearest, most sharply defined act of my nineteen years of life.  

The ferry may have been white but it also was very large.  As dark fell I began an exploration. Below were two dimly lit decks stacked with cars and trucks smelling of oil and gas. Above was a passenger deck with benches made of iron wrought and later painted green, thickly. The flat hard wooden seats and bench backs were unwelcoming. The lighting above was just slightly better than below decks.  

Even with a hundred vehicles under my feet I could find no person on the passenger deck. And I was searching for companionship as well as adventure. The ship was as impersonal and lonely as a Coast Guard barracks. I sat down. Opened my "Home Style" cookie bag. And, closing out my surroundings, remembered gray eyes, russet hair, and sweet ice cream. A small kindness can carry me over an ocean of trouble, it seems, and the cookies tasted better than I remembered. I savored each bittersweet chip, buried partly in brown cookie, and licked my hands of crumbs after each cookie.

I sat in silence, in the dim light, for a long time, until my back and legs ached with stiffness and cold. I may have napped a little.  Time did seem to slightly slip. Getting up, I walked with false purposefulness around the enclosed passenger deck some, saw no one, and then came to a door to the outer decks. I opened it onto a darkness beyond dreaming. The door closed itself behind me.  There was only a silver sliver of light, knifing through the ship's bulwark, where a door had been.  

In the absolute dark the wind blew with an animal rage. Like a bully it shoved me back hard and up against the light sliver, using my body to block and disappear its only challenge. The door was icy and wet against my back. Fingers of cold spray, sharp - not visible, flew at my face.  

The ferry had left Alaska's islands behind and entered its Gulf.  The Gulf of Alaska is bigger than the Mediterranean and much less hospitable. We had passed into one of its pre-winter storms.  

I've always liked being in a storm. The immense energy charges me.  Enlarges me.  I become exhilarated.  This Alaskan sized storm diminished and frightened me, however. This was a storm to easily take one onto the other, wrong side, of exhilaration. I turned back toward the light. With a heave I opened the door against the wind's wishes and stepped back into the passenger deck.  

The door closed leaving me, more or less, out of the winds' howl. The cold, poorly lit and still uninhabited, inner deck seemed warm and welcoming. To shake off the storm I walked.  I still found no one on my part of the ship. It was turning colder and the storm's power had increased. I could feel it challenging the ship. I was feeling lonely and small when I finally rested on one of the hard green benches, pulled out my woolen navy Coast Guard pea coat from my sea bag, put it on, and tried to sleep.  

I slept. Later, when the storm, or something, brought me slowly back to wakefulness Gupta was sitting on the other end of the long bench. I didn't know his name until later, when he introduced himself, but it was a pleasure to have my unwelcome isolation broken. I'll always remember my first glimpse of him, as I came gently out of sleep. He was turned slightly away from me, and was not quite under the light, so his round faced profile was partly shadowed. He wore a yellow stocking cap the color of stars. His raven-black hair, glistening even in the dim light, came nearly to his shoulders.

Have you ever met any one who you knew instantly you needed to know? And then have you known them for an hour, a day, or a week, and they've left you richer and sadder, for their absence, for the rest of your life. Have you ever been touched, to the depths of your being, that way?  I hope you have had that in your life.  Gupta and I shared that as our ship fought through the storm toward Prince Rupert.

Gupta turned toward me and smiled as he sensed me waking.  His dark skin highlighted his bright teeth. He wore a thick quilted jacket colored like red earth and distant mountains.

It's been too long since we met to remember our introductions or small talk. Mostly I remember his smile, his eyes, our exchange which still holds me a quarter of a century later. He had dropped out of an American engineering school. I had left the University.  His father was a civil servant in Delhi. My father had died a few months earlier.  Gupta had left school to travel the world. I too joined the Coast Guard to be around on boats and ocean shores.

  

Gupta had hiked through rural villages of Afghanistan. There he found his quilted coat and learned to always carry a strong stick to ward off the snarling feral dogs that were the outer defenses of the brown villages. I had hiked up Deer Mountain and there, on a ridge above alpine meadows in twilight, watched two raven lovers fly as one night-black bird. He had sailed a storm, off the Ivory Coast, with an Australian gold miner. We were together in a storm in the north Pacific, two young men searching for themselves and having found them, however briefly, in each other.  

After an hour or so of conversation we grew silent. Each of us was reflective. We held our silence for a few long and pleasant minutes. Then Gupta suggested we step outside and visit the storm. I was, at first, against it.  The storm was too big, I told him.  It was a sullen killer of a storm, I said. He needed to go and I, feeling strongly buoyed by new friendship, finally agreed.

We walked through the dimly lit green hallway together.  I could hear the storm. Feel him in my feet and stomach as he moved under, around, and above the ship. When we reached the door that exited onto the outer deck its thick green steel seemed to hum.  Gupta looked at me and smiled. Then he turned the doors cold brass knob, put his shoulder into the door, and pushed out onto the deck. I followed. And the door slammed hard, shut behind me.

Gupta had been visible a second earlier. Now he was not. But I felt his bent left elbow lightly against my bent right elbow. He, like me, must have had his hands protectively jammed into his coat pockets. There was no hope for speech. A thrumming sound enveloped us. It was better just to lean into the gale and hope not to fall into the lightlessness. But the storm held us there, magnetized arm against arm, as spray whipped water pins into our faces. I’m not sure how long. Ocean storms twist time.

Then I felt him move his arm slightly. Fabric brushed fabric. He seemed to turn away and I lost contact. He could have been in the far dark of outer space rather than inches from me. I was frightened. For both of us.  

Then, in the same timeless time, the storm unwrapped from around me, I heard a small bright sound, saw a golden brassy light formed as a globe about Gupta and me, and Gupta was there with his arm extended just above his cap. He held a small brass bell there at the upper border of our light bubble. Gupta's round face radiated awe and joy in that strange light and silence he had created. He stood there, looking into me, for longer than my entire lifetime. The bell remained above his head, silent and golden also.  

Then, perhaps, he lowered the bell. Quick as a thought the dark and spray and bitter wind wrapped back around me.  Disoriented, I fell back against the door. The door handle poked me painfully in the lower back. Turning toward the door, I groped for the wet handle, found it, and with both hands yanked it open.  

I stumbled through the hatchway back into the green corridor.  Gupta was immediately behind me, actually stepping painfully on my heel. I turned to him. There were silver droplets of spray on his cap. His face was shiny wet. He looked exhausted and somewhat frightened but the amazement in his eyes was still burning.  

We did not speak.

We returned to our empty bench and fell asleep. The blast of the ferry's docking whistle woke us both. We mumbled something sleepily to each other, and found our way to the gangway. It was a few hours before dawn. The air was thick and wet with the tatters of the storm. The ferry had come finally alive with people and vehicles spilling off onto the slick brown wharf. I was heavy with sleep and, with Gupta behind me, got caught up in the flow toward the orange garish lights and business of the pier.  

Upon reaching land I walked a little out of the crowd, still feeling Gupta on my back, and turned toward him. I intended to ask him his plans. Immediately I met his fine chocolate eyes.  Looking into them was like returning to that bubble of light and quiet on the ship deck. Perhaps he felt the same. One always has that hope. He had his left hand in his coat and the other held his bag. He pulled the bell out of the pocket and extended it to me.  I broke the gaze and looked at the bell. His fingers were long and brown. The thumbnail was cracked. I reached out. I held his hand in mine. Felt its warmth. And he let go, leaving the bell in my hand. The bell still felt of his warmth.

We embraced and then he walked out of the light and into the darkness without looking at me again.

I hitched a ride that night that got me to Seattle two days later.  The bell was in my sea bag. It would be some years before Gupta and I met again.