Port Townsend, Washington
mid-sentence when Joan held up her index finger with a long, manicured nail. He waited a minute as she finished her conversation and tapped her headset.
She smiled at Hank and cleared her throat. With an official tone, “The clients are running late. It seems the rolling protest in Seattle inconvenienced them. Still, their person requests you be available at the designated time. Perhaps, they can make it up in transit.”
“Wow, you can talk hoity-toity,” Hank teased. Then he spoke with a highbrow Bostonian accent. “May I ask… have there been any inquiries? You know, pertaining to Mr. Henry Maximilian Gunn?” He chuckled, dropped the accent, and said, “I added in the fancy middle name just for fun. What do you think?”
“Well, Max, nobody in uniform has swung by. No calls either, but I’m still here for another hour. Do you want a heads up if anybody is snooping?”
“No, don’t bother. I won’t be near my phone.”
She gave him a sideways look and said, “Come on, Hank. What’s with the intrigue? You haven’t given me a direct answer all day.”
“It’s nothing. I said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
“What’s new?” Joan giggled. “I don’t know how you’ve survived so long…” Her face flushed red and flattened in embarrassment. She looked like she’d cry with her next breath. “Oh, I’m sorry Hank. I’m so stupid. I meant…”
“Joan, it’s okay. I’m the one that’s stupid for being paranoid.” He lightened the mood with a smile and pushed a postcard onto her desk. “Can you mail this? It’s for my mom. You can read it.”
She parked a finger onto the postcard picture of Mount Rainier and dragged it toward her. “What, no stamp?”
“Take it out of my paycheck.”
“It’s strange, Hank. I’d like to say giving you this job was an act of kindness. The senior staff always gets the plum jobs and low man… well, not so much. I had Charles listed for this spot, but the customer insisted their instructor be you. You just finished training and I haven’t even put your bio up on the website.” Joan held up her index finger. “It’s a call. I’ll text you the return ticket.” Her eyes got big. “They’re flying you back from Victoria.” Then she turned away, tapped her ear, and answered the call.
Hank decided his fear of being apprehended by the authorities was misplaced. Joan inadvertently reminded him he wouldn’t be getting any texts. When they looked for him, they would track his phone. Good luck with that, he thought, but decided it would be prudent to keep his hood up and stay calm. He strolled onto the sleepy floating dock where he knew all the cameras and the one blind spot they didn’t show. Once he settled down and accepted he might have to wait, he allowed himself to enjoy the soft rocking motion. Gentle ripples telegraphed restrained power from the sea, separated only by a man-made breakwater. As far back as he could remember, hanging out around water among boats had been a confusing balance of love and hate. Water was at the center of his birthright. Like most passions, it had two sides, both peaks—great joy and tremendous sorrow.
Hank’s childhood fascination with his ancestry had been fleeting, but he learned he had come from a long line of water people. His namesake, Henry James Gunn, sailed from Scotland to the Colonies and settled in Cape Porpoise on the rugged Maine coast. The result of a 1631 law determined to rid the New World of immorality brought the first Hank Gunn and his heathen adulteress, Maggie, into the public square. The church recorded ten lashes, a nominal fine, and the couple’s marriage. But the faith didn’t run true because it took two hundred years for the next relation to show up in the church records—as the new minister. Hank’s uncle summed it up by saying, “Some of our kin were preachers and drunks, but the only respectable Gunns have been lobstermen.”
Hank had wanted to be a lobsterman like his uncle and his dad. It might have been his destiny, but fate caused him to throw over that dream in an instant. Like a lightning strike alters a tree, the family’s legacy and his own future diverged in the blink of an eye.
From the stories and what little he remembered, his parents were in love. His mom worked at the hospital and his dad maintained a fast and reliable lobster boat. Only like a child could, Hank helped his father. On nice days, they’d pull traps, but if the water was rough, he helped his dad build commissioned wooden boats. In those good years, the young, hardworking family did well, and his father even negotiated pre-payment for a lifetime slip at the marina. But a lifetime can be short.
The Coast Guard saved the boat before grounding onto rocks, but they never found his father’s body. Wreaths were cast into the outgoing tide and Hank’s aunt and uncle bought the boat. A real estate developer gobbled up the house and twenty acres of hard rock coastline a couple of years later. At first, his mom tried to be there for him, but she became distant the more she drank.
His early success in elementary school gave way to bad behavior as he grew into his teen years. He often argued with other boys and one day it escalated—pushing, wrestling, and then Hank threw a punch that ended the fight. Later that day, the police report ignored the adolescent quarrel and focused on Henry James Gunn and the teacher he slugged. It was a single, crunching punch to the wrong face. Hank watched in horror as her eyes fluttered and rolled back into her head, blood gushed out of her nose, and she slumped to the floor. Time froze. He stood over her unconscious body, helpless, shaking, his own hand bleeding, sliced from the teacher’s nose piercing. Tears rolled out of his distressed eyes. She didn’t press charges, but Hank found himself expelled from school. Townspeople excused him and said, “The boy’s hormones kicked in.” Or “It’s the mother’s fault.” But Hank took full blame, and his apologies were sincere. The teacher ignored the union’s recommendation for a restraining order, and soon, the young woman had forgiven him.
Unlike his ancestors, there was no whipping, no fines, and no ceremony that could make it right with the establishment. Hank could never go back to public school, so his mother declared him a homeschooler, poured a drink, and left him alone. He learned to keep his head low, look after himself, and excel at World of Warcraft. But even Maine winters ended, and Hank got his first actual job as a dock boy. The next year he served as crew on a couple of southbound boats while his peers sat in classrooms. Flirting with the sea came easy, and at seventeen he waved goodbye to his mother and sailed out of Kittery, Maine on a restored sixty-foot sloop.
The boat started with a working crew of five, but three bailed at the first stop and left Hank and Oscar with the boat’s idiosyncratic owner. After far too long looking for hands, the duo convinced the owner that the two of them could handle the sloop. At first, the owner was reluctant, but it soon became clear Hank and Oscar worked flawlessly together and were more than capable of the requirements of maintaining, navigating, and handling the classic sailboat. Their cruise was going flawlessly until the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. Time in quarantine added a couple weeks to their stays at some ports and many countries simply forbade them from entering territorial waters entirely. Rationing food and water and even fuel became commonplace and hardships negotiating regulations, both real and imagined, took its toll on the vessel’s human cargo as well. A few months shy of two years, the sloop had rounded the earth’s circumference and landed at the Port of Charleston. The young men collected their pay, said goodbye to the sloop’s smiling owner, locked arms, and stepped off the boat at the same time. The sloop completed its journey as a broken mess, but Hank and Oscar had grown into men.
Hank called his mother at her new place in Florida, and a guy named Mario answered. In a resonant smoker’s voice Mario said, “So, you’re Hank.” Catching his breath, he continued, “I shacked up with your mom over a year ago. In that whole time, you never even bothered to call. What type of little shit treats his mother like that? I’ll get her.”
He told his mother he loved her and promptly caught up with Oscar at the Navy recruiter. They agreed they would do everything in their power to stick together, but soon found out that they had no power at all. In Hank’s eight years in the Navy, they only managed to see each other once—a beer at the San Diego airport in January, 2025. Fortunately, when it came time for Oscar to get married, Hank was a freshly minted civilian and made time to join Oscar’s huge family and be his best man.
A small sports fishing boat motored past, causing the dock to rise and catch against its stops and fall and catch again. The familiar motion drew his mind further back. Intractable memories flooded in with so much of his childhood spent hanging out around the docks where his family tied up their boats. He missed the texture of damp, weathered wood with soft splintered edges, fuzzy against his feet and knees and rough on his forearms. The resinous smell of creosote mingled with diesel and the sweet fog of engine exhaust was like incense to him—from a faraway time. Opalescent swirls of oil spun in his head, but now a uniform plastic tread secured into a rigid aluminum frame made up this dock. Clean and modern, the dock floated against unshakable concrete pilings.
The old docks and wharves were too appealing for the greedy politicians armed with eminent domain. Activists piled on. Lobster boats were too dirty, traps and lines too reckless. His aunt and uncle struggled until punitive regulations squeezed all profit out of their tiny family business. The small lobster fishers disappeared. There was no sense getting upset over it—not now. The gulls, noisy and quarrelsome and leaving their messes, seemed all too familiar. He closed his eyes and smiled, enjoying the afternoon sun and the lapping of water. Things changed. It all ebbed and flowed like the tide.
He let his seabag drop and scanned past the high seawall for his ride. The tops of a few small sailboats could be seen over the breakwater, but nothing resembling the blue water sailing yacht coming to get him. He checked his watch. Still early. The Wakefield chronograph had been a gift from a friend of his father’s.
The friend had commissioned a boat that sat unfinished in the shop. At first, Hank went to Spark, the Newick designed trimaran, for a connection to his dad. He even slept in her single berth on summer weekends. But he lost interest by the time the owner towed the boat away a year or two later. The ramrod straight man had a trimmed gray beard and thin wavy hair. He waited for Hank to show up after school to tell him a couple stories about his dad. When the man finished talking, he handed Hank a box, along with a wink and a firm handshake. In the box, Hank found the watch and a handwritten note which read,
Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship. - Omar Bradley
I hope you catch up with me someday. I’ll teach you how to be a pirate.
May God’s love be with you,
Thomas Allen Campbell (Captain Tom)
Psalm 86:15
Hank slid the loose watch back and forth along his forearm a few times and mused, Someday maybe I’ll see what that verse says.
Like a bad song repeating in his head the words, Don’t run if you can walk. Don’t walk if you can stand. Don’t stand if you can sit. Don’t sit if you can lie down. He hated most of the sayings and mantras of his military service, but they kept surfacing. He resisted the sensible urge to sit and stood there next to his bag, swaying to the motion. The rhythmic knocking against the pilings calmed him. He gazed out over the water, glad that some things never change. He scanned the view over the seawall and saw nothing coming his way. The warmth of the sun convinced him to sit down and soon the stirring water forced him to prop his head against his gear.