The Water Keeper(14)

My boat is a twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler. Called a 240 Dauntless. It’s a bay and backwater boat, though better suited to the bay. It’ll float in fifteen inches of water, but in truth I need twenty-four to thirty inches to get up on plane. She handles well in a one-to three-foot chop where I can lower the trim tabs, push the nose down, and skid across the tops of the whitecaps. But where she earns her reputation as a Cadillac ride is when the wind dies down. I push the throttle to 6000 rpm, trim out the engine to bring the rpm’s up to 6200 or 6250, and she glides across the water like she’s riding a single skid. In rare moments, she’ll reach fifty-five mph. True to the Whaler name, she’s unsinkable, which is a comfort when the storms come. And her range is decent enough. If pressed and conditions allow, I can run an entire day on her ninety-gallon tank, making more than two hundred fifty miles. The T-top is powder-coated stainless steel and built like a tank. It makes a good handhold for purchase in rough waters, you can stand on it if you need a better view, and it’ll keep even the hardest rain or intense sunshine off you—both of which are welcome after long days on the water.

I like my boat. It’s not sexy, but it is a comfort when other things are not.

When I was a kid, I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island a dozen times. Maybe more. I loved everything about it. And although it filled many a long night, I never learned to talk about boats or ships or anything having to do with seafaring vessels the way Robert did. He owned the language of ships and boats like he lived it. I, on the other hand, did not grow up a deckhand. I simply grew up with my hand on the tiller. Boats were boats. The left side was the left side, not the port side. Right side was right side; starboard always confused me. Fore, aft, forecastle—this was all Greek to me. Later in life, I’d find comfort in some of these terms but never like Stevenson. To me, he was the captain and I was just a pretender sailing in his wake.





Chapter 4


I idled out the creek toward the Intracoastal—or IC. Most just call it “the ditch.” Above me, gnarled and arthritic live oak limbs formed a canopy shading my exit from land and my entrance to water. Spanish moss dangled overhead, swaying slightly. Waving. I lit the Jetboil, then sat sipping instant coffee with my feet propped on the wheel while I counted the dolphins rolling off my bow. Over the next hour, I covered only four or five miles. I had no interest in pushing the throttle forward. No real desire to get going.

Saying yes was one thing; doing yes was another entirely. Besides, that purple urn awaited my return.

I traveled south into the larger waters of the Mayport basin and the intersection of the St. Johns River with the IC. The Atlantic Ocean was two miles to my left. On a calm day I could exit the jetties, turn south, and arrive in Miami tomorrow. Tonight even. The end of the world the day after that. Two days and I’d be done with all this. But that’s not what Fingers would have wanted. He liked the inside, and he always took the slow way home.

The radar on the Weather Channel on my electronics, along with the digital voice of Weather Radio, told me that a confluence of storms in the Atlantic was pushing a steady barrage of wind and water against the East Coast and would be for the better part of two or three weeks, maybe longer. Today, the average wind was thirteen knots out of the northeast. Tomorrow, it’d top twenty and then stay there a week, maxing at thirty where it would pause briefly, only to pick back up and hammer the coastline again. Those conditions would push all small-boat traffic inside the ditch. For protection. Much of the larger vessels would soon follow suit as seasickness spread. That meant everybody going north or south would be rubbing shoulders in the IC for the next several weeks.

To my right glowed the city skyline of Jacksonville. The detour was a long way out of the way, and it’d cost me a day’s time, but Fingers would have wanted to see it. Taste the water one last time. Black Creek is some of the prettiest and purest water in Northeast Florida. He used to make me bring him here, and when we’d pass under the Black Creek Bridge, he’d walk to the bow, tie both bow lines behind his back, and then give me his best Titanic impression. Every time. Without fail. Then we’d idle upriver, tie up beneath some giant cypress tree, and he’d pop the cork on some new wine. The earth in a bottle.

I turned right. Or, as a boat captain might say, “hard to starboard.” As a city, Jacksonville, or Cowford as it was once known, grew up on opposite banks of the same river as men brought their cows to ford at a narrowing of the river. As it grew in population, it spread out from its epicenter and became a city of bridges. While most rivers run south, the St. Johns River is an anomaly of geography and runs north—as do the Red River, the Nile, and a couple of big rivers in Russia. I ran upriver, passing beneath seven ginormous bridges of various colors and materials, including one aggravating railroad trestle, and eventually crossed the big water of the St. Johns where, at times, the breadth of the river spans nearly three miles.

Throughout her history, the state of Florida has been home to some great writers, including some Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners. Judy Blume, Brad Meltzer, Stuart Woods, Elmore Leonard, James Patterson, Mary Kay Andrews, Carl Hiaasen, Jack Kerouac, and Stephen King. Then there are the giants: Madeleine L’Engle, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Smith, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Preceding all of them was the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put a human face on slavery with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Maybe there’s something in the water.