A Day in Transit, a Night in Fort Pierce, aka Hell
Driving, driving, solving
Late last night, Aaron and I were on the highway, sides nearly splitting from the right-wing Christian talk show on the radio. It featured disturbing news stories about homosexuals wanting equal rights, Christians being arrested “merely because they’re Christians” and also happened to try to erect 10-foot crosses in the middle of a private gay rights event. Callers besieged the station, begging God to “not bless America, but have mercy on America.” The whole episode was amusing, and made me decide that future journal entries and the website in general needs to have more of a political slant. After all, this is a monologue.
Aaron and I arrived at our parents’ house in Atlanta at 1 a.m., and left with them to go back to Fort Pierce at 7 a.m. Once back, we discovered:
a) Our boat was not keeled over in the mud, halving the boat next to it with its mast
b) A chunk of our boat’s batteries did not have any power left in them
c) Fort Pierce had not improved in the 24 hours since we left it
From the last, we conclude that Fort Pierce is not our fault. The pickups memorializing Dale Earnheart Jr. (“in memory of #3”), the five-year-olds sporting mullets, the giant Walmart sucking the life out of everyone within a twenty mile radius… it’s not our fault. Furthermore, it’s no one’s fault. There’s no fault at all. This place is different than us. Its Cadillacs and Winn Dixies are foreign. But we can survive here, on hot dogs and chili and crooked boatyards and gray hair. We can talk to Pete a few boats down, Norm, the Sheriff, the Professor. They’ll tell us about smuggling Cuban doctors and selling second-hand washing machines, show us how to grind holes into our boat, lie to us about the power cord they just unplugged. They do this because we are like them, poor and living in a boatyard and looking just over the horizon toward the splash the ocean and the journey ahead.
We got the boat into somewhat deeper water (5 feet, even though we draw six and a half), and positioned it so that we could access the dock via an absent neighbor’s vessel. While Aaron and Dad fixed up the rigging, Mom and I went shopping for provisions. Afterwards we had pizza in the cockpit and watched the fish leaping to and fro in the harbor by the light of a single Citronella candle.