This piece is a bit longer than the others.
You are not dreaming. You are standing in the middle of a railroad track, bound to a post, stiff as Lot's wife, unable to move an inch, a finger, a toe, nothing, and a locomotive, the size of three school buses, is bearing down on you at top speed, nothing you can do about it, not one thing but watch it come. Don't quibble. You are dead.
Back some years I spent a good bit of time on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, windward islands of the West Indies, close to South America. People from St. Vincent, if they could afford it, often went to Venezuela to shop for things impossible to get on the island. I knew people who could afford it, and those who couldn't. The Punnett's were a family descended from the first Brits who colonized the island. centuries ago. Phyllis Punnett wrote the island's national anthem. They ran a boating supply business in Kingston, the capitol. Gombe' lived at the far edge of the bush. Gombe' the hunter. He was seventy years old and hunted wild boar with a cutlass. I knew these people, and through them I found the village of Barroulie, a village at the northern end of the island, where men went to sea in little more than leaking rowboats after gigantic whales, sperm and humpback. It astonished me that these flimsy vessels could outlast a storm as well as haul a fifty ton whale.
This was a far cry from corporate whaling, large ships outfitted with state of the art contraptions designed to locate and kill as many whales as possible. We are talking about four men - four much older men - descendants of Carib Indians and escaped slaves - in a twenty-three foot wooden boat, open to the weather, outfitted with a struggling outboard and a patched sail. Their harpoons had been fashioned from old automobile springs. This was mana a mano - "You will feed my village, or you will kill me." It had been their way for centuries. A large whale would support the village of Barroulie for a year. I wanted to meet them. More to the point, I wanted to go to sea with them.
Jamie was with me at the time, so we rented a jalopy and survived the pocked road that seemed no wider than a donkey path which curved up island to Barroulie. A village of shabby shacks and derelict houses in need of everything, chipped paint, rotting wood, cracked bricks, teetering buildings all around a town square patchy with weeds, with a goat tethered in the middle. I don't remember seeing anyone at all except a sour and wrinkled old woman behind the counter of the small, raggedy store stocked with tinned beef on every shelf. She made no attempt to hide her displeasure at having us anywhere near her. "You people ain't never here. Why you doin' now?" were the questions she didn't ask. Her face was tight lipped, angry, fighting not to say what she wished she could but had been taught since childhood that she couldn't. Children in ragged clothes congregated at the door and stared. We bought them all sodas. "Sunset.They be in sunset,", she volunteered, I think just to get us the hell out of her shop. The jetty, a cement and cinder block structure battered by waves on both sides, partially worn away - that's where the old woman told us to stand and wait. There was no one to see but those kids, the goat, and that old lady who stared bullets into our backs as we walked away. I gotta hand it to Jamie. She had guts for this one.
We waited on that jetty in the open sun for hours amusing ourselves watching the chickens snap up tidbits left on the fishing nets spread out on the beach. We graduated to making bets on which chicken would get the tidbit first. Or counting lizards. That was fun. An occasional seagull swooped down and broke the monotony. Late afternoon, when the sun was low we still had another hour before they came in. It passed, and so did they. With the sun lowering behind them, the village fishermen began coming back with their catch, mooring, unloading, brokering...When the whalers were initially sighted, every one stopped what they were doing and watched as the crew took down the mast, and the third man, Millington, started the outboard to navigate the rest of the way, as was the custom. They finally reached a spot on the far side of the jetty, where it dropped anchor and sat by itself.
We watched from the jetty as the four men anchored and stored their gear in a shed on the beach. It seemed they took no notice, however, as soon as the gear was stored, they turned in our direction, looked directly at us, and began to walk towards where we stood on the jetty. They were predators, and they looked like predators: strong, sinewy bodies, alert, loose, eyes that fix, eyes with no mercy, senses all systems go. Black as if genetics hadn't touched them since the beginning of time. The closer they came the fiercer they looked. The Caribbean Sea was our back-up. They had no idea who we were - rich tourists slumming? - and nobody else had any idea of where we were. Jamie was right next to me. Was this a problem in the making? I really didn't know. What I did was just go still and stayed that way. Kept my face still. Kept my mind still. My body simply there. Just be. Be. Just be. The man in the lead came within two feet of me. I still hadn't moved. He looked at my face the way I looked at his. It was time. I smiled and stuck out my hand. He smiled and offered his. I shook the hand of a man who could be no more authentic than he already was. All four of them. I was in the presence of men who did not pretend to anything.They were not well spoken but answered my questions, and I answered theirs. Did I hunt elephant? No, I did not hunt elephant. White bears? No bear at all. Horns? Yes, horns, also ones that fly - duck, geese...Shotguns were outlawed, so they trapped birds by stretching nets on trees. I told them I was interested in men who did what they did not because they liked it or dreamed about it or was passionate as a hobby, but the actuality that it is you to the core, not something you do, even if you do it well, but something you are, something you are born not made. Reading these words I'm surprised at how academic they sounded, but the crux of it all was that they agreed to take me to sea with them.
All this is prelude. Ten years passed.
It was the spring of '88. Mr. Punnett alerted me to the fact that this would be the final season of whaling in the Grenadines, banned forever, ordained by law, so this was going to be the last voyage of their lives - their last season to hunt the whales they've hunted forever - so, if I wanted to go, I'd better get down there. The Punnett's would find us a place to live.
So, Jamie, Sevi, who was a year and a half old, and I packed up for St. Vincent and went down there for a month, in which time, I'd be out with the whalers. Once again Jamie played guts ball. She manned the fort for sure. We bought mosquito netting, rented a modest place named Rose Cottage with lukewarm water and Rastas as neighbors. My problem was that all the men I had talked to years ago were dead or disabled, so I had to ask the current crew of three if they'd take me with them - the last three aboriginal whalers left in the Grenadines - I'd sit in the stern and stay out of the way, take a few pictures. The only man under seventy was the man who owned the boat - a Mr. Millington - and he was sixty-eight - bodies lean and strong from a lifetime of brutal work. Clothing so tattered the Salvation Army would immediately consign them to the burn bin. They barely said a word to me, made their points with chin and fingers. Often just a grunt. "Four a.m.," said Mr. Millington.
Of course, there's a whole lot more but none of that is the point. That locomotive heading towards you at full speed is the point. I'd been out with the whalers for three or four days. By that time, I was tolerated which basically meant I kept out of the way and bailed the water that constantly leaked with a gourd , Yes, the boat leaked. It's name was "Faith", just Faith no "The" in front of it, just Faith. One day nothing, nothing at all, ho hum, when suddenly the man on the bow, the main harpoon, begins yelling, "Aw, Lawdy! Aw, Jesus!" and pointing, and what he was pointing at was a fifty ton sperm whale churning straight for our boat. I really thought to myself, "Holy shit, is this the way I'm going to die?" Yet, it was the most mesmerizing sight, and I could not look away. I-MAX but real. I watched a sperm whale coming head on.
What I felt was disbelief, that this should be happening to me, that's all I remember: disbelief.
"They never found his body."
I snapped picture after picture as the whale came closer and I thought, "Jesus Christ, who the hell dies this way?" Maybe an archaeologist will unearth my camera on the sea floor in a few million years when the water is earth again. But, the weird thing was, I don't remember fear or anything but wonder and disbelief at this behemoth coming for me. What do airline passengers do when they know their plane is going to crash? What can they do? I stood there and kept snapping pictures. There it was, yards away, but, just before impact, the whale slowed to our speed, pulled up alongside and lifted his head as if to see into the boat. Just curious. The whale was just curious. It wanted to see what we were up to. I reached out and touched its head, rubbed my knuckles over its rough skin. I saw his eye looking at me. It saw me and I was no more man to it as so much flotsam , and uninteresting flotsam at best, but I wasn't dead. The largest living creature on earth had come to see what I was up to. Satisfied, it dove down and disappeared.
Death let me off the hook that time. Was it a training session? Had that whale been spawn of Moby Dick I'd have been chum. I don't know what my death will be like when it finally comes. I know I'd rather not linger. When Bob Hope's children asked him where he wanted to be buried he said, "Surprise me".
How do you top that one?
When there is no moon and it's a pitch black night in early June, you hold hands with a two year old almost three and walk with him through the darkest night he's ever seen in a field with grass almost as tall as he is to watch with wonder thousands and millions and billions of fireflies twinkling on and off as if the stars had fallen and were searching for a way back.
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