A couple of months ago I wrote a short piece on a man and his dog who lived aboard an aging sailboat in the harbor. Here is the latest news on them.
It turns out that the old man is much younger than I had thought. He just had his 58th birthday a few days ago, so now he is just ‘kid’ to me. The Italians distinguish between raggazzi (older boys) and babies. But then the Italians have lots of words for everything. It’s one of the reasons we love them so much. So far as I can tell, the French only have the word enfant for kids, whether they are one, or fifty-one. Someone may be able to correct me on this. Somehow it doesn’t seem proper to walk by him and say bonjour enfant. I need a better word.
Things haven’t been going so well for him recently. We had some big sea swells during the past weeks – the kind that toss huge waves over the sea wall and make the air electric with stray ions. The old man was tending two sailboats that were loosely rafted with his boat when the storms came. One boat ended up on the beach, but the other two seemed to be fine. A couple of days ago I noticed that his old three-master was missing. No one seems to know what happened to it, but he and the pup are now living on a twenty-one foot boat anchored in the same place.
I must admit that I worry about this man and his dog too much. The dog is getting old and can no longer easily jump from boat to dingy to come to shore. He now wears a bright red harness with a matching leash. I noticed that the leash has been chewed badly in quite a few places, indicating something not quite right. I’ve seen the old man hoisting him back and forth between the boats, but what will happen when the man can no longer do this? He drinks a lot, the man I mean. Most of his meals seem like they are liquid. Beer for the most part, although a friend who speaks with him frequently says that the man told him the story of drinking a bottle of whiskey on a friend’s twenty-five meter sailboat as it slowly sank into the Med. I only mention this because the boat was just hauled up from the bottom this week and taken to Nice for scrap.
I guess if I was on a sinking ship, it might be nice to have a bottle of whiskey to swig as I contemplated what the cold sea was going to feel like when it finally swallowed the last of me. I’d like to think that it would spit me back up onto the beach like Jonah, and say, “not so fast, kid. There’s a bit of work left to do.”
