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WHEN THE RANGER AND most of the bystanders left, I didn’t think Terry would ever stop ranting about that officer’s threat and the stupidity and the injustice of a system that assigns numbers to everything, including our ship.
“You see what I told you about being nothing more than a number, Robbie? That’s all the Apocalypse is to them, all I am, all you are; all any of us are! They make us buy the damned numbers for the hull and then use the same numbers to keep track of us wherever we go to extract even more money by threats of jail! But what he doesn’t know is that this Mississippi state boater’s registration number doesn’t mean much where we’re going, and they’ll never find us once we get there. If it wasn’t for those damned locks downstream, and all those river miles we’ve got to motor, I’d raise sail and disappear over the horizon right now! Why should I waste my time and money fixing something that was broken by accident?”
“Probably because you were the one who broke it,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter who did it! With as much tax money as they get for funding parks like this and paying morons like him to enforce their stupid rules, they should have plenty left over to allow for maintenance and minor repairs. I imagine some of these idiots in their fishing boats have hit a dock or two in their day too. And look what they spend just on all the signs they’ve put up all over this place telling you what you can and can’t do! It’s bureaucracy, Robbie. Mindless bureaucracy! The only purpose for its existence is to spend the taxpayers’ money by making rules, and then spend even more money enforcing them. With all the tickets they write, not to mention extorting honest folks like us to do their repairs for them, they have even more money to buy their fancy trucks and patrol boats! I’m telling you, Robbie, the only answer is to get as far away from here as fast as we can before we go broke! But now we’re going to lose a whole day going to get lumber and fooling around with saws and hammers to fix this pathetic excuse for a dock.”
I thought we were lucky that Mom’s car was still here, parked at the lake until my cousins could come and get it. Without the car, we wouldn’t have had a way to go get the boards we needed for the dock repairs and may have had to pay one of the fishermen who had a truck to take us. The car wasn’t ideal, but since we didn’t need anything heavier than a few eight-foot two-by-sixes, Terry said we could tie them down to the roof of the car. He asked Jimmy where the nearest building supply store was and Jimmy said it was in Booneville, a little over twenty miles away. Terry cussed some more about how long it would take to go that far and back but asked Mom for the spare key she still had and told me to come with him. Mom and Janie would stay with the ship.
“I thought I’d seen the last of American roads when we launched our ship this morning, Robbie. But here we are again, once more behind the wheel of a car and at risk of instant death by blunt force trauma at every mile, all for a few boards! If we survive this last car trip, I’m ditching my driver’s license for good.”
“Don’t you need it to drive the Apocalypse?” I asked. This was something we hadn’t really discussed. I knew Terry was going to be the official captain, even though he said we’d all be taking turns steering. I figured he’d at least have to have a driver’s license.
“No, Robbie. As long as we leave now before they make a new law, we don’t need a captain’s license to pilot our own ship, at least as long as we’re not taking passengers for hire.”
“But I figured whoever was in charge would at least have to have a driver’s license to drive something that big. Just look what it did to that dock, and we were barely moving when it hit.”
“That dock was half-rotten and should have been torn down. If it hadn’t been there in the way, the bows of our catamaran would have just dug into the mud a bit at the lake’s edge and she would have come to a stop without a scratch. Now you’re going to have to repaint the topsides on both hulls.”
“Great! I figured it was going to mean more work for me.”
“Not work, just keeping entropy at bay, Robbie. Don’t forget what I said. By keeping on top of maintenance you’re making sure the ship beneath us won’t let us down when she’s put to the test by the sea. Thinking of it as work is the wrong attitude.”
I knew we had to do it, but it was still work. Work was anything that wasn’t fun, like riding my bicycle or swimming and diving when we got somewhere with the nice water that Terry had promised. I hated doing chores because they had to be done over and over again and they never got done for good. I could see now that painting the boat over and over and over was going to be almost as bad as having to mow the yard every week all summer long. In Mississippi, it was so hot and rained so much in the summer, by the time you got through mowing it once, the grass was already growing again in the first place you started.
We finally found the lumber store in Booneville, and Terry picked through the pressure-treated two-by-sixes until he found what he estimated he needed. Using some spare Dacron line he’d brought from the ship, he lashed the boards directly on the roof of the Camry by passing several turns through the open front and rear windows. I asked if the boards wouldn’t scratch up the paint and Terry said it didn’t matter since Mom had sold the car to my cousins for such a ridiculously low price.
“They shouldn’t even get to keep the wheels for what they paid, not to mention they’ll still have almost a half a tank of free gas in it when we get back to the lake. I should siphon it out and sell it to one of those fishermen to make up for some of the forty-five dollars we had to pay for lumber and nails for that stupid dock!”
On the way back, Terry launched back into a tirade about registration and licensing. He explained that he’d done his research on this and determined that despite what most other voyaging sailors did, he wasn’t going to apply for federal documentation of the Apocalypse with the U.S. Coast Guard. He said state registration was simpler and faster, and that while it might raise some eyebrows with customs officials in some countries, where we were going he didn’t plan to check in at any official ports of entry anyway.
“That’s another beauty of a Wharram catamaran, Robbie. Even though it’s a big liveaboard sailboat, it doesn’t draw much more water than a skiff. All those deep-keeled conventional boats have to follow the established and predictable routes. In most places sailors go, the port cities and their greedy customs and immigrations officers are located right next to the only deep harbors and channels that funnel in marine traffic and the money that comes with it. Those yachties sail right in and pay whatever is asked without question, but not us, Robbie! We don’t have to. We can slip through the back door and enter the most remote island groups by simply sailing over the shallow banks and coral reefs that keep everyone else out. We can find our own private anchorages in tropical lagoons practically no one else visits. We can stay as long as we want for free and leave without telling anyone. Once we reach the South Pacific we won’t be going back to any place where registration, documentation or license numbers matter.”
“How do you know it hasn’t changed?” I asked. “Maybe now they have webcams at those places and they know when you get there.”
“You still don’t understand just how isolated some parts of the Pacific really are, Robbie. Some of those island groups are so remote that the nearest other rock is hundreds of miles away...a thousand or more in some cases. There are no people on those kinds of islands, Robbie; no one to put up a webcam and nowhere to plug it in anyway, even if there was a way to connect it to the Internet. You’ll see. There are still places where everyone doesn’t have an iPhone in their pocket! There wouldn’t be much longer, if things keep going the way they are going, but there’s no way they can, Robbie. All this technology is bound to self-destruct! Even here, the ones who are left alive will be back to calling their neighbors by beating on a drum, if they call them at all.”
We made it back to Bay Springs Lake in the early afternoon and Terry rushed to get out his tools and replace the damaged boards on the dock so we could leave. I helped him measure and cut the new ones and we pried off the broken ones and stacked them in a pile near the boat ramp. Mom was busy organizing all the things in the galley to starboard and the big cabin she and Terry shared in the port hull, and I figured Janie was in her bunk with her ear buds in, blasting music. We didn’t need any help anyway, and after a couple of hours we were done. Terry told me to run up to the ranger’s office and tell him he could come take a look at our repair. The last thing we wanted was to get stopped somewhere on the river by a water cop he called because he claimed we didn’t fix it right. I couldn’t find the ranger though and the office was closed. When I went back to the dock to tell Terry, he said it was probably because the ranger was off writing tickets and hassling someone else. He said we would go ahead and leave and that we didn’t have time to sit around wasting all afternoon here when we had so many miles to go to get to the Gulf.
I was super excited that we were finally casting off. Terry made Janie come on deck to help, and when he finally got both outboards started again, he told us to stand by at the bow and stern where the lines were still looped around the dock pilings and to untie them when he said to. Leaving the dock was a little easier than pulling up to it, but Terry still managed to scrape the hull again. The new dock boards didn’t break though; they just took more paint off our topsides in an ugly scratch I knew I would have to fix later.
When we were clear of the pilings and in deeper water, Terry couldn’t make the catamaran go backwards in the direction he wanted it to. It would veer off to the side and then he would shift into forward to straighten it up and it would veer off the other way next time he put it in reverse. He said it was because sailboats were never designed to go backwards and that trying to back one up was stupid anyway.
“Once we’re free of this inland waterway we won’t ever need to back her up again, Robbie. Docks are for shore bastards who want to put on nautical airs to impress their friends. Real sailors drop the hook and anchor out; they never go into marinas and tie up in slips like a bunch of cars in a parking lot! It’s idiotic to try and make a boat go in a direction she wasn’t designed to go.”
“So are we going to anchor out tonight?” I asked.
He said that of course we were, tonight and every other night and said there were several coves in the lakeshore between here and the big lock and dam at the end. He wanted to spend one night on the hook in the lake and then lock through going downstream early in the morning. Although Terry explained to me how the locks worked, I had never seen one in person much less been through one on a boat. He said the one at Bay Springs Lake was the highest one on the Tenn-Tom Waterway and that it would lower us eighty-four feet to the next level. Motoring across the lake surrounded by woods that you couldn’t see through, it didn’t seem like we were that high above anything to me, but he said there were several more smaller locks that we had to go through too in order get all the way down to sea level.
Terry was right about anchoring out being easier than docking; at least that first night. We turned off the main lake into an area of quiet water surrounded by tall pines and oak trees and he just put the motors in neutral and let us drift. When we eventually came to a stop, about a hundred feet from the wooded bank, he showed me how to slowly let out the anchor rode so the plow-shaped anchor would settle on the bottom and dig into the mud. The lake was calm, with barely a ripple, and the big, wide catamaran was so stable it was almost like still being on land or a small island. It didn’t rock or move at all when you walked around on it, even out on the ends or near the edges. Terry said that was one of the advantages of sailing a catamaran, especially a Wharram.
“She won’t roll and make you puke your guts out like those lead mine monohulls, Robbie. You’ll understand the difference when we get to the Gulf and sail in a seaway. Catamarans have an easy motion for their size, and this Tiki 46 is big enough to handle any weather we’re likely to see.”
I didn’t know about that, but I liked the calm water just fine. It was quiet and peaceful out there except for the occasional sound of a distant outboard from one of the fishing boats. Later that evening just as it was getting dark, we saw our first barge go by. It was huge and all lit up like a small town or something. Terry said for what the government spent building the locks and canals on this waterway, there should have been a dozen of them going by every hour. But we only saw that one, and then I heard one more go by sometime in the middle of the night. When I woke up the next morning the woods were noisy with the sounds of chattering squirrels and birds. I heard splashes from fish jumping too but nothing as big as that first night at the boat ramp when I was sure I heard an alligator.
Terry was going on and on telling Mom how great the Apocalypse really was now that we finally had her afloat. He was happier than I’d ever seen him since he first came into our lives, probably because he was finally doing what he’d been talking about the whole time. He had us all right where he wanted us too; a full crew to help him make his dream a reality and keep it moving. But even though he was grinning now, I knew it wouldn’t be long before he was back to ranting, complaining or worrying about something.
All it took was the sound of a motor coming our way to completely change his mood. Somehow he just knew even before he looked through the big binoculars he kept by the helm, that the approaching boat was a law enforcement vessel. He was right, of course. As the dark green aluminum skiff drew near, I could see the blue light mounted on a short pole at the bow. It wasn’t turned on, but the man steering was wearing a uniform and a hat, and he had a big pistol strapped on his belt.
“Good morning! How are you folks doing?” he asked as he idled up close and tied alongside our starboard hull, probably scratching the paint even more I guessed since he didn’t have any fenders on his metal boat and didn’t wait for Terry to deploy ours. “Boy, this sure is some boat! It’s what you call a catamaran, ain’t it?”
“Sure is,” Terry said. “It’s a Wharram Tiki 46.”
“Well, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. From distance, it looked like an over-grown Hobie Cat like the ones you see on the beach down in Pensacola. But the closer I got, boy-oh-boy! This thing’s like a ship!”
“It is a ship,” I said. “It’s our ship and we built it ourselves to sail it to the other side of the world!”
“Is that right? Well, I reckon if you’re sailing it’ll take you about as long to get there as it did to build it. I hate to bother you folks so early in the morning, but I need to come aboard and check your registration and safety equipment,” the officer said.
“We’re completely legal,” Terry said. “This vessel is fully compliant with the law and properly equipped to go to sea.”
“Yes sir, I’m sure it is, but I have to take a look around. It won’t take but a few minutes.”
I could tell Terry was furious, though he was trying to hide it and act civil. The officer declined Mom’s offer of a cup of coffee and instead asked to see our PFDs, emergency flares and fire extinguishers. He said that although we had the correct number of life jackets—one for every person on board—we were missing a Type IV “throwable” PFD and that he was going to have to write us citation for that. Then he checked Terry’s boat registration card to verify that, and finally asked if any of us were planning on doing any hunting or fishing. Terry said we weren’t but the officer, whose badge read “A. Riley, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks,” saw the fishing rods, landing nets and spearfishing equipment stashed in the cockpit lockers.
“All that stuff is for when we get to the Gulf and later to the islands,” Terry explained. “We’re not planning on doing any fishing in freshwater.”
“The fact that you have it in your possession aboard a vessel in Mississippi waters is reason enough for me to write you a citation for fishing without a license. But since you’re already getting one for a safety equipment violation, I’m going to give you a break this time on the fishing. It’s a real pet peeve of mine when I see a fella like you out here with his family, not having everything you need to stay safe.”
Terry said that considering the size of the Apocalypse and all the safety netting and guard rails around the decks, he didn’t think it was likely anyone was going to go overboard, especially not here on the Tenn-Tom. He said he’d forgotten about the Type IV PFD and that he’d pick one up at the next place we stopped.
“You’d better, because you’re going to be running across wildlife officers and marine police patrols wherever you go, Mr. Bailey. I’d advise you to keep this fishing gear put away and out of sight while you’re in state waters too. Now, I’ve got to ask you one more question, have you got any firearms aboard?”
I knew the answer to that and so did Mom and Janie, but we all knew the drill too, because Terry had repeated it so many times that there was no way any of us could forget. Of course he had guns on board: a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol, a bolt-action .22 hunting rifle with a scope and a Chinese SKS carbine that looked as old and beat-up as most of Terry’s boatbuilding tools. He had all these on board, along with plenty of ammo for each one, but he had them well hidden in a secret storage compartment he designed and built into the boat during construction. He said that we might need them most anytime for defense against modern-day pirates. He said there were plenty of those in some parts of the world, like the Western Caribbean, through which we would have to pass on our way to the Panama Canal and the Pacific. But he said the main reason he had the guns is because we would certainly need them after the collapse, both to fend off attacks from the desperate shore bastards, and for hunting food, especially if it happened before we reached the atolls of the Pacific. He said it was vitally important that the weapons stayed hidden and that no customs or immigrations officials ever suspected we had them. He said most countries nowadays wouldn’t allow them in, and if they did, they would take them and place them under lock and key until we cleared out, and what good would that do us if we needed them while we were still in those countries? Although the guns weren’t illegal to have in Mississippi, I figured Terry was practicing his response to this question on Officer Riley. His face held no expression that betrayed his flat-out lie when he answered:
“No sir, absolutely not! Why would we need guns? I’m taking my family sailing on a trip of a lifetime. It’s going to be an educational experience for the kids and I figure there’s no place safer for us to be than out on the water, away from the drug-dealing, robbery, rape and murder of the mainland. Besides, I’m a teacher, not a policeman or soldier.”
“If I was you, I would be packing something, Mr. Bailey. There are crazies out on the water just like everywhere else. But at least you won’t look like some of these rich-assed Yankees we have coming through here on their way from the Great Lakes to Florida and the islands. You ought to see some of those yachts: Eighty, ninety-footers—some maybe a hundred—gotta be worth a few million, at least! They’re just targets of opportunity once they get away from developed areas. And they’re getting robbed and attacked more than you hear about in the news too, you can believe that.”
“Well you won’t see vessels like that where we’re going. They don’t have the fuel range to cross whole oceans the way we can with our sails. And after what’s coming, those big yachts won’t be anything but derelicts blocking the channels when they run their tanks dry. The oil will all be gone and that will be that.”
“I don’t see us running out of fuel anytime soon, Mr. Bailey. We’re doing more drilling in this country than we have in forty years. All that talk about the oil running out is just environmentalist nonsense. But I would still carry a means of protection on this boat if I were you, no matter where you’re going. Now get that throwable PFD as soon as you can and think about your wife and kids before you do anything stupid. The Coast Guard recovers bodies every day lost off sailboats and powerboats, big and small; mainly the inexperienced, unprepared and overconfident who don’t take the weather seriously. I’ve personally pulled a few floaters out of the drink right here on the Waterway. It happens a lot more often than you think!”
“Well we’re not any of those things and we’re not going to end up in the drink, either,” Terry said. “Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine. Now if there is nothing else you need to inspect, we’d like to finish our breakfast and get underway. We’ve got a long way to go today.”
When he left, Terry cussed Officer Riley for writing the safety citation.
“At least he didn’t write us one for fishing without a license,” I said.
“That’s just because it’s so early in the morning and he’s probably still in a good mood. If it was later in the day near the end of his shift and he hadn’t written his quota, he would have given us one for sure. That’s all they do; ride around in their boats looking for somebody to write up. They have to because the fines fund their salaries. But my money won’t. We’ll be out of state waters soon and over the horizon like a mirage.” With that, Terry tore the ticket in half and threw it overboard.
“He still seemed like a pretty nice guy,” I said in Officer Riley’s defense.
“What if he had found those guns?” Mom asked. “I still think it’s a bad idea to have guns on board.”
“They’re perfectly legal, Linda, especially here, since I bought them legally as a resident of the state of Mississippi. He couldn’t have said anything about them even if he had found them, and you heard what he said about thinking we should have at least one gun for self-defense. I started to tell him what we had, just so he wouldn’t think I was too dumb to know I needed one, but decided against it because I figured it would be a good test of my hidden compartment if he searched the vessel.”
“These redneck cops around here aren’t looking for guns,” Janie added. “All they want to do is bust somebody for having a joint, which is exactly what I wish I had right now!”
“Janie! Stop talking like that! You know you don’t have any business even thinking about illegal drugs at your age,” Mom said. Janie just rolled her eyes. Terry and I knew Mom was fooling herself. But Terry had had a long talk with Janie before we left about trying to sneak anything like that aboard our ship. He told her that most places where we might stop at first, like the Bahamas, had a zero tolerance policy against illegal drugs on vessels because of the drug smuggling crackdown that happened back when Reagan was president. He said they confiscated boats for having just one marijuana seed on board in some cases, and that we weren’t taking any chances with losing the Apocalypse over some stupid joint after all the time and money we spent building her. He told Janie she could smoke all the pot she wanted while on shore and that it would be easy enough to find down there. But he also told her that if he found out she brought any of it back on board with her he would send her to Arkansas to some boarding school for girls he knew about. He said if that happened, she would wish she had listened to him when she found herself spending her days memorizing Bible verses and learning how to sew.
After we ate, and Terry finished his coffee, we started the two outboards again and pulled up the anchor. Once again, the chain was covered in black mud and I had to scrub it down as it came on deck. We headed south, straight in the direction of the huge lock and dam, which you could see in the distance from the marked channel in the middle of the lake. Terry called the lock master on the marine radio mounted near the helm, and a man replied, telling him there was no other traffic and the lock would be ready when we got there.
I still wasn’t sure what to expect when we entered the lock, even though Terry had explained how it worked back when we first started talking about taking the Tenn-Tom Waterway route. Two huge gates like double barn doors closed behind us as we entered the box-like structure, with concrete walls on both sides and the same kind of double gates on the other end. A man working at the lock leaned over the railing above us and told Terry where to tie our lines. He said it was very important to tie them to the floating mooring bits that went down with the water, rather than the fixed walls of the lock, otherwise, the lines would either break when the water dropped or we’d be left hanging from the top. The man watching didn’t leave until he was sure we’d done this correctly. Then a horn blew and the water around us started swirling and gurgling. I could feel the turbulence and the Apocalyspe moved back and forth against her lines as the water began to go down. It was kind of like we were being flushed in slow motion down a giant commode and I wondered what would happen if the gates broke or something. They didn’t though; the walls around us just got higher and higher until it felt like we were way down in the bottom of a well. Finally, the water stopped dropping and calmed down, and then the horn blew again and the big gates on the downstream side started to slowly open. The man on the top of the wall who had been watching us waved as we untied our lines, and then Terry put the motors in gear and we headed out of the gate.
Everything looked different now that we were out of Bay Springs Lake. The Waterway looked more like a river now, except as we continued on, there were places where it widened out in a series of small lakes and then got narrow again. Most of the shoreline was nothing but woods, but in some places there was wide-open marsh with tall reeds and cattails. Just about every time we rounded a bend, water birds like ducks and herons would scatter and take flight at our approach. Most of them would land farther downstream and then just do it all over again when we closed in on them the next time. They were too stupid to fly around us and go upstream where we wouldn’t bother them, and I wondered if the same birds would keep flying ahead of us all the way to the Gulf.
We were in one of these narrow sections, when all of a sudden we came around a bend and there was a huge towboat pushing a long line of barges in front of it. The barges were tied up two wide and at least five long, with the towboat way in back. It was going a lot faster than we were and coming straight at us, and it didn’t look to me like we had either the time or the room to get out of the way. Terry called the barge captain all kinds of nasty names, as if he could hear him that far away and over all the noise of his engines. He steered the Apocalypse hard to starboard to try and get out of the way and we hadn’t gone thirty feet before the catamaran slammed to a stop, her bows plowing into the mud in an area of shallows.
The barge passed by just a few yards off our stern, but we couldn’t see anybody inside the pilothouse through the dark tinted windows. Terry flipped them the bird anyway and was answered by a loud, prolonged blast of the towboat’s horn. When the barge was gone, he tried putting both outboards in reverse to back off the mud bottom, but even at full throttle they didn’t have enough power to budge us. Terry cussed some more and said we’d either have to jump in at the bow and try and push it off, or waste an hour unpacking and inflating the rubber dinghy so we could set an anchor off the stern and try to winch ourselves off.
I was in favor of jumping in and pushing until I did. Since the Apocalypse only draws a little over two feet, Terry said we wouldn’t even get wet much past our knees, but when I jumped in, I found out he was wrong. The problem was the bottom was nothing but yucky, soft mud. I could feel it when my feet hit it, but it didn’t stop them from sinking at least another foot into it. I was in the water over my waist now and couldn’t move my feet. When I pushed on the boat to try and free it from the mud, I just pushed my feet in even deeper. Terry was bogged down in it too, but he said the way you get out of mud like that was to stop fighting it because that just made you sink deeper. He said we weren’t going to be able to budge the ship anyway, so we might as well focus on getting ourselves back on board. It didn’t seem like it would work to me, but Terry said the trick is to just get down all the way into the water and try to swim. He said it would get the weight off your feet and help you break free of the mud. When I saw it work for him, I tried it too and I was finally able to pull my feet out. The only problem was that one of my shoes got left behind, buried in the muck. Terry didn’t let us bring a lot of extra clothes and shoes with us, and these were my favorite sneakers, so I held my breath and dove under, feeling around blind until I had my missing shoe and pulled it loose. Terry said I shouldn’t have jumped in wearing shoes in the first place, but I told him that in muddy water like that you never know what you might land on. I was glad to get back up on the boat anyway; thinking all our splashing around might have attracted some alligators. If there were any around, you sure couldn’t see them in that kind of water until it was too late.
With the boat still stuck as firmly as ever, we had no choice now but to try and use the dinghy to set an anchor as far out from the stern as the rode would reach and try and winch it off. Terry said none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for that towboat, but it looked to me like the captain didn’t have much choice with all those barges he was pushing. He had to stay in the channel or run aground too, and it sure would have been a mess trying to get all those heavy steel barges out of that mud.
Terry wasn’t joking when he said it would take at least an hour to get the dinghy ready and get an anchor set out. We had to unroll it on the foredeck of the catamaran, and then inflate all the separate air chambers with a foot pump. Then we had to take the smaller of the two outboards off its motor mount on the retractable sled, and carefully lower it into place on the transom of the inflatable without dropping it overboard. Then one of the spare anchor lines had to be unpacked and I had to carefully pay it out to keep it from getting tangled while Terry motored away with the anchor in the dinghy, pulling out the line behind him. It was a lot of trouble, and I wondered if it was even going to work.
But once the anchor was set and the line was wrapped around one of the big sheet winches in the cockpit, the Apocalypse had no choice but to back off the mud bar into deeper water. We had to be careful too not to let her drift back to either of the banks and get stuck again though. There were some tense moments while we retrieved all the anchor gear and remounted the outboard on its sled, but we did it. By the time all this was done, we heard the engines of another towboat coming around the bend, and as Terry cussed, I wondered if we were going to have to do it all over again.