hit a particularly large swell. Hank and Jimmy’s faces are splattered with mist and glee.
Abruptly, Alison spins, leans over the edge of the boat, and throws up. It is a gut-wrenching heave that sends her chest smacking into the side. She opens her eyes. The water is only feet away and she swears it reaches for her. Its frigid spray clouts her face. She heaves again. The retching comes from deep in her belly, and she feels like her organs are coming out. With her chest against the cold wood, and her head loose over the side of the boat, she wonders which is worse, this actual all-encompassing sickness, or the stinging embarrassment. Even doubled over, ill as she is, she is still the lady her dad raised, and this is humiliating. And in front of Hank, and Jimmy, and this stranger. In ten years of marriage, her husband has never seen her shave her legs, floss her teeth, or go to the bathroom; she has always maintained her gentility and now this! She heaves again. It is the old seafarer’s irony that she is now desperate for water to cool the acid in her throat and cleanse her mouth. She flops back into the seat. Her skin is pasty, her eyes are bloodshot, and the tip of her nose is mulberry. Cautious to keep his balance in the unpredictable lurching boat, Hank starts toward her, but she warns him off with a shake of her hand. She can’t have him near her right now. He sits back down with no idea how to help her. He knows her well enough to know how she must be feeling. She places her head deep between her legs and her body sways limply, without resistance, as if she’s been deboned. Hank looks to the captain.
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Nope” he responds with little interest, “them people just gotta ride it out.”
Jimmy slides in next to his mother, “You okay, Mom?”
She responds without lifting her head. “Peachy.”
Hank trades a sympathetic shrug with Jimmy and for the first time, all kidding aside, Hank realizes this is stupid. Look at her, crumbled up, sick, miserable. Shit, what was he thinking?
“How much farther?” he asks the captain.
“Almost there.”
He yells over the motor, “Honey, we’re almost there.”
Alison doesn’t move, or respond, but she thinks, somewhat prophetically - just shoot me now.
A few minutes later, the captain’s gloved hand turns the tiller and angles the boat toward shore. He spies the small dock up ahead, and the raucous waves now pummel the side of the boat as he powers toward it. Alison looks up and sees beyond the dock a woodsy wall of green; woods so dense the ground never feels the sun’s warm palm; a world that never completely dries out, damp and lush with birch, cedar, pines and wild orchids. The captain gestures to Hank to leap out. Hank bolts up and jumps off the boat and onto the shaky floating pier. He almost loses his balance as he lands one-footed, but manages to hang on. He knows that Jimmy is watching him with a son’s eyes and Hank is excited to parade his colors. The captain tosses him the dock line. Hank snatches the rope out of the air with one hand. He is energized, something here connects him to other men in older times, men who worked the land, men who fished for their meals, men who provided in the most fundamental way for the lives of their families, and he feels the history like remembering something he never knew. He pulls the rope toward the dock cleat. He knows today’s men have lost something being tied electronically to their lives, instead of through their bodies. How would he survive if confronted by the Earth’s untamed elements? How would he light a fire in this dampness, or trap an animal for food. If he could trap an animal, how would he kill it? He’s never killed anything larger than a spider. He has no clue which plants are edible or which are poisonous. He could never make a piece of clothing from an animal skin, and has little hope of constructing a viable shelter from twigs and leaves. Hell, now that he is being honest with himself, he doesn’t even really know how electricity works - only that when he flips the switch - it does. If there were nuclear war, or a planetary disaster, he would be less useful than Stone Age