Annie was right that afternoon we’d said goodbye; the marina did close.
That fall, during my first semester of college, my grandfather and Marilyn moved our boat to another marina—one on the Cerritos Channel, on the border between the LA Harbor and Long Beach. You had to drive through an oil field to get there. It had better electricity and sturdy docks, a real office and a nice café, but no garden.
When I went back to visit Donahue’s over winter break, everything had changed. The breeze kicked up small clouds of dust around the abandoned office. Annie’s green garden was nothing but a few dried plants and a forlorn wishing well without its phone. She and Bob had moved to a trailer park in Long Beach. Jerry had packed up his RV and chickens and left for parts unknown. The only person I found still there was Wade, less than a year before his death, but at the time, still doing well. He didn’t know where he was going to live, he told me, but not to worry, he’d find a place. Oh, and hey, he had kin in Tennessee, not too far from my university, and did I want their number in case I ever needed help out there?
• • •
Years later, as I write this, I find an article that ran in the LA Times. Under the headline “Sea-Goers Seek to Keep Berth 117 Alive,” it describes how twenty marina residents and fishermen had spoken before the Board of Harbor Commissioners, asking them to keep the marina open. I didn’t know they’d fought the closure.
“‘A few of the people docked at this marina live on their boats and will be homeless if it closes,’” their attorney told the reporter.
“‘When boats are torn by weather, they either need to be destroyed or restored,’” Gunner had testified. “‘Without this marina, as boats get old, they will have no choice but to die.’”
I imagine Annie and Bill and Catherine and Wade and people like them, dressed in their best clothes, standing up, one by one, to speak to a panel of men in suits and fine shoes, some of the most powerful men in their world. They were never going to win. Closing Donahue’s was just one part of a city plan to industrialize the Southwest Slip and gentrify the harbor. Over the next decade, the city would make it impossible for poor people to live on their boats by imposing size minimums, safety inspections, licenses, and fees.
In the article, the reporter keeps referring to the Donahue’s folk as “sea-goers.” It makes me think of the Old English poem “The Seafarer”: “My soul roams with the sea, the whales’ / Home,” the seafarer laments, “wandering to the widest corners / Of the world.” I think of the marina people who had to leave their homes, imagine them wandering alone, trying to find another place to dock their boats, keep their cats, plant their gardens. I wonder where they all are now, how many of them are still alive.
If you take the 110 Freeway south to the Los Angeles Harbor and cross the Vincent Thomas Bridge, you can look down on to the Southwest Slip. All the dusty shores and reedy marshes are covered in impeccable asphalt and millions of neatly stacked shipping containers. And where there had once been a little dock and all manner of boats and people, there are massive cargo ships laden with goods imported for Walmarts and Targets and Walgreens. You would never know what was there before.