Southern Oregon Boyhood

Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air

Eastern Oregon began to settle into my bones. I loved the higher altitude, the crisper air, the snow in winter instead of rain. I loved hunting rabbits and deer with Bill Gano in the open country east of Klamath Falls. There were even good trout-fishing streams.

But there was no Rogue River.

I became nostalgic for the river. Jack Dunham and I had been friends in school before the summer of 1956 when Mom and Bill moved us to Klamath Falls. We were both skinny kids with glasses who didn’t have to study much, so we had time to prowl the hills and streams around Grants Pass like the couple of wild Indians we often imagined ourselves to be.

The Rogue River had flowed through our lives, a great presence at once mythical and real. When a heavy Spring rain would add its volume to that of the snowmelt from the Cascade Range, the Rogue would sometimes live up to its name and flood, suddenly and unpredictably, swatting homes and small motels from its banks with a casual power. But most of the time it glittered bright green and white over the rounded stones of its bed as it took sharp turns through the canyons on its way to slide into the Pacific at Gold Beach, or thundered over rapids into deep green pools where we'd swim and fish, with spinning rods and worms, for the rainbow trout we shared the river with, ignoring our elders' warnings about what a rogue the river truly was, and how many overconfident boys it had claimed.

August was a special time on the river. A critical component of that specialness was, of course ‑ no school! The felt approach of September would concentrate the urgency of our adventures, the long warm evenings allowing us to stay out later. The lower water level let us sidle right up next to the river's heart. The pools where we and the trout tried to trick one another shrank until we could wade into the edges of the dark secret rooms where they lived.

August air became hot and dry and still as it hung in the timbered canyons above the river, with western Oregon's rainy winter a doubtful memory as pickup-tossed dust rose in serpentine coils above the dirt roads that laced the woods along the riverbanks.

Blackberries would ripen. Having stored moisture from a wetter time, they hung - lumpy, whiskered obsidian pendulums - along road‑ and trail‑sides. The sun would hit the berries and the dark green leaves that crowded out from the thorny red vines and the air would thicken with more than odor: walking there, you breathed an atmosphere of hot blackberries and dust and pine sap that was so close and right that it seemed that that mixture, rather than oxygen, was what your blood waited to extract from the air and turn into cells of muscle and bone.

Sound would do its part along the Rogue in August. The near‑cessation of air movement through the canyons removed what had been, at other times of the year, a huge and constant presence: the low‑pitched but loud sibilance of the wind's passage through, and scraping together of, pine and hemlock and spruce and cedar needles, and the leaves of laurel, madrone, manzanita, chinquapin, chestnut, live oak.

Maybe the sun stirred the insects to make their buggy music, or maybe they were doing what they always did, but now we could hear them better in the absence of that larger noise. In any case, an electric buzz settled above the river, in which raspy cricket calls provided a rhythmic warp onto which was woven the buzzes, whines, and drones of deerflies, black flies, mosquitoes, and gnats that crowded the still, dusty air.

This electric buzzing air had another meaning along the Rogue: rattlesnake. Oddly, the received wisdom that we breathed in with the blackberry air had it that the snakes shed their skins in August, adding a new button to their rattles as they did so, and that late summer was the only time of year when rattlers couldn't be counted on to give their warning, as well as the time when they were out in greatest numbers. This made August the most dangerous time of the year, snake‑wise, along the river.

Whether or not the Rogue's buzzing August atmosphere actually included rattlesnake shakes, the mixture of dust and still air and heat and insect noise along the river had the meaning, for us kids who grew up there, of rattlesnake air. That was just the way it was. But the blackberries were still there, the river was still there, the trout were still there, and September and school were approaching. So we had to go to the river in August, fishing till dusk in the deep green pools, then gathering baseball capfulls of dusty blackberries along the roadsides and returning to the river to wash our berries, clean our trout and feed their guts to their still‑swimming cannibal relatives, and eat the berries and drink cool water from one of the little creeks that flowed into the river and take a final swim in the evening light to rinse the dust from us. We'd trudge home with our freshly gutted trout strung on forks of willow branches we'd cut with our pocket knives.

Tragedy struck: we began to grow up. Sports and girls and the awe‑inspiring world of junior high school pulled us back from the banks of the Rogue. During the summer after seventh grade ‑ 1956 ‑ Bill Gano had lost his job in a chrome mine just across the line in California, and the sawmills around Grants Pass weren't hiring. He and Mom had packed Darrell and me into the '53 Studebaker, stuffing it and a U‑Haul trailer with everything we owned, and set off looking for work. Where we found work was where we would live. Mom set a deadline of September 1st. We had to have found work by then, and had to have a place to live and have enough money for the first month's rent, so Darrell and I could start school with the other kids.

We made the rounds of small Oregon towns. My memory is of the dusty smell of hot velveteen seat covers, of Darrell and me squeezed into the back seat along with a pile of bedding; of Bill plodding the dust of sawmill yards, farms, ranches, and welding shops looking for work; and of Mom trying to get on at grocery stores or butcher shops as a checker or meat wrapper.

In late August, we ended up in Klamath Falls, still with no work. Mom dropped the hammer: this is it, the boys will go to school here. We had enough money from part‑time work over the summer to get us in the door of the Shasta‑View Apartments (even small towns have low‑rent districts). Bill haunted the personnel office of the big Weyerhauser mill outside town, and finally got on there as a welder.

Jack Dunham and I kept in touch through the eighth grade and the early years of high school. I'd write about hunting mule deer with Bill in the sagebrush, juniper, and rimrock country east of Klamath Falls; Jack would write about the river.

We decided to get back to the river one more time before adulthood pried us loose from it. We would get together in August, with a couple of Jack's friends, backpack down the Rogue from Galice to Illahe, then take the mailboats on downstream to Gold Beach where his folks would pick us up and drive us back to Grants Pass.

I'd done the same trip years before as a Boy Scout; Jack, who had lived his whole life almost within walking distance of the river, never had. We put our heads together. Someone couldn't make it in early June because of a family vacation, and some of us had summer jobs through the rest of June and through July into August. But the four of us blocked out everything else for the last week in August: we would walk the river, do it right, and enter our junior years of high school as seasoned wilderness explorers.

We knew August wasn't the best time: we'd have to watch for snakes.

It really was wilderness. The roads we'd used to approach the river as younger kids stopped at Galice, a few miles downstream from Grants Pass, at the beginning of a nearly 50‑mile stretch of river that was a legally designated wilderness area. This meant that no motor vehicles could enter the area. If you wanted to see this part of the river, you walked it, or rode a horse or mule, or were one of a few stalwart (and moneyed) souls who shot through the canyons in white‑water boats with professional guides.

Jack's family had a friend at Galice, a hoary‑headed émigré who had fled the Bolshevik revolution. The story was that he'd lived as a child and young man on a river in Russia, and had settled on the Rogue to live out his years. We spent the night at his place before our "jump‑off;" Jack's two friends would join us early the next morning.

The old man's cabin was on the inside curve of a big bend in the river, nestled on the bank just above the high‑water mark. The river went wide and shallow around the bend, making all the shades there are of green and silver and white as it riffled over the large stones it had rounded over the centuries. The afternoon we showed up, August's blackberry‑and‑rattlesnake air crowded around us, with sunlight slanting past barely moving leaves to aim dusty inclined shafts of light at the forest floor, leaving leaf‑shadows between them in a pattern so radically bright and dark that, just walking along, the pupils of our eyes would become confused about how much light to let in, so that we'd stumble over roots we'd easily have seen on a cloudy day.

When Jack's folks dropped us off in mid‑afternoon, telling us to have a great time and be careful, we dropped our packs on the old man's porch and walked around with him as he showed off his place. The river’s noise – especially to me, who hadn't heard it, hadn't really listened to it, for three years ‑ seemed nothing more or less than a delightful, continuous roar of water flowing swiftly over its rocky bed.

The old man lived off his Social Security check and his garden and fish from the river and venison in the fall. The garden grew in the rich silty soil the river deposited in its own bend during high-water times. Weedless rows of corn and green beans and radishes and lettuce were springy with life. Raspberry vines planted in the open to take advantage of daylong sun gave him a flavor to alternate with the fat blackberries he gathered from the roadside.

Afternoon slanted into evening. The old man retreated to the interior of his cabin, built of a single vertical layer of weathered boards, and insulated inside with layers of newspaper long since gilded by time and light. His furniture was a big old easy chair, a small wooden table and a couple of stools, and a phonograph. He had a stack of classical records in scuffed jackets.

A ritual began to be enacted, one of the most guilelessly reverent I have ever seen. As the newspapers on the wall began to glow with just enough of the day's last purple light to read by, the old man knelt and went carefully through his records. He read the labels as if we were not there, his inner ear hearing the choices he made. He settled on an inch‑thick stack of records, all he could fit on the spindle that would drop them, one at a time, onto the turntable.

With records in place, with evening fading to night, he lit no lantern. Indicating with a wave of his hand that we were welcome to stay, he leaned back in his big chair, put his feet up, and closed his eyes. Jack and I sat quietly for a while, watching the old man inhabit his own world in his own way, and listening to music we'd never heard before, knowing that although it was strange to us, it was right for hearing with the sound of the river. I imagine now that he was playing Rachmaninoff, but I don't know that. Maybe it's just that in my life now, whenever I hear Rachmaninoff, I see that old man and his cabin and his Rogue.

He'd set the volume so that when a symphony orchestra reached a louder part of the music, it would for a time drown out the sound of the river making its bend behind him. But when the music slipped into a quieter section, the river's chorus would return, would enter the old man's ears, and would, we thought, carry him back to the Russian river of his youth.

We tried to listen as we imagined him to be listening. It came to me that the river's sound wasn't uniform at all. If you paid close attention, some unknown watery event upstream and back in time, like light arriving from a long‑dead star, would change the volume or speed of the water, it would strike the stones differently, the sound would wax and wane and break into colored pieces, an aural rainbow of splashes and gurgles and wet black and silver whispers.

Two or three days later, a number of things had happened. We had cursed ourselves for bringing so much food that our packstraps cut into sweaty, salt‑rimed shoulders. Tennis shoe insoles had worn through where our toes dug into them from the extra weight and the gravitational acceleration of downhill slogging. We all had prize blisters. Our food ran low; now we cursed ourselves for bringing so little. The work of walking the trails from dawn to dusk had given us appetites we'd never dreamed possible.

Fishing became more than fun: it was between us and hunger. We washed the salt and dust from our trail‑weary bodies by diving off boulders into deep green pools. We walked through birdless forest cathedrals, where boles of Ponderosa pine shot up, branchless for a hundred feet before they put out the canopy that all but blocked sunlight from the forest floor. We passed places with magic names, places Zane Grey had written about in Rogue River Feud, one of his many books about cowboys and mountain men and mountains and rivers and deserts that I had absorbed directly into my bloodstream: Horsehoe Bar, Rainie Falls, Black Bar.

We stopped one thirsty afternoon at a miner's homestead cabin; he pulled a quart of home‑brewed beer out of a cold spring and shared it with us. It took our heads off: so cold, so good, so forbidden. We clowned our way off into the afternoon, acting drunker that we could possibly have gotten on a quart of beer split five ways.

We were in Hell's canyon, where the Rogue narrowed between steep rock walls and pounded its way through, the steepened gradient hurling masses of water at and past the rocks with a violence that impressed four teenage boys, as no parental warning can, that we were in a place wild enough to kill us if we screwed up. Or even if we didn't.

As we entered the canyon, we had a little talk. We didn't sound like kids anymore. We were impressed, even scared, by our situation. The nearest road or telephone was probably twenty miles away, in what direction was anybody's guess. A broken ankle would be a disaster of a high order; we discussed who would stay, who would go for help, in what direction, what to carry. And a snakebite here wouldn't be survived by making razor cuts on the bite, applying the Cutter's suction cups, and calling for help.

The trail in this part of the canyon was a notch cut in the canyon wall, about halfway up. It was less than two feet wide in many places, with a sheer drop below ‑ often too high to survive, should one turn suddenly to talk to the guy behind him and be jostled off the trail by his pack hitting the rock face behind him ‑ and a sheer climb above. We'd seen lots of bear shit and tracks; they were coming down to the river to feed on fish and berries. If we met a bear or snake on this part of the trail, there was only one way to go, and that was backwards. Fast. And carefully.

In our suddenly grown‑up conference, it was decided that I would lead down the trail into Hell's Canyon. I had the only real weapon, the .22 Ruger Single‑Six revolver my mom had helped me buy earlier that year, after my 16^th birthday. The wisdom absorbed from the older men in our families asserted itself. We agreed that it would be mighty stupid to shoot a bear with a .22 pistol, if the bear gave us any other choice. Someone said that black bears, the kind we had in that country, had thin skulls ‑ had seen such a skull ‑ the thinnest part being right over the center of the brain. If you have to shoot, shoot for that. If you see a bear, look for cubs, and for God's sake, don't get between a mother and her cubs.

Afternoon. We were moving through the canyon, hot, tired, exhilarated, scared. We were all fantasizing wordlessly about cold sodas at Illahe, about did they have cheeseburgers there, about putting our feet up and letting the mail boats speed us to Gold Beach, about soaking our huge blisters in the salty Pacific.

I heard something beside my ear. I stopped, turned, and looked a rattlesnake in the eyes, six inches away: yellow, round, unlidded, unblinking, with long dark vertical pupils slightly wider at the center of the eye and tapering to points at top and bottom. It seemed then, and seems to me now, that I exchanged stares with those eyes for a lifetime. They became, for the rest of my life, not a symbol (too real for that), but the incarnation of everything strange, dark, evil, dangerous.

The cutting of the trail in the canyon wall had left the top of the cut, at this point, exactly at my eye level, and the snake had been sunning itself there. It didn't rattle; what I'd heard was its startled movement in the grass.

Things seemed to move in slow motion, but they told me later I'd moved way too fast. I'd nearly knocked all three of them off the trail with my frantic backstepping.

I did all this at once, they said. I yelled "RATTLESNAKE!" so loud it must still be echoing in the canyon; I jumped back, slamming my pack into the face of whoever was behind me, starting an unfunny Keystone Cops chain reaction among the four of us; and jerked out the Ruger and cocked it.

The snake had moved as quickly. It had moved right at me, all but touching my face, dropping over the rock bank just under my chin, its head almost sliding down inside my shirt front, slithering down the five feet of cut rock to the trailbed where I'd been when I turned to look into its eyes, and started across the trail. Once it was stretched across the trail (it was about three feet long), it stopped, blocking our advance. I raised the pistol, sighted on the body of the snake, moved left along it to where its head must be in the clump of grass it had begun to enter. I had just had a nose-to-nose view of how a rattler's body is built, with the quick taper just behind the head. I couldn't see the head, but I saw the taper, so the head must be just here, where I'm aiming now. I remember to aim a little low, like Bill and my uncle Lank had taught me to do when shooting a pistol.

I squeezed. The pistol jumped. I don't remember hearing the shot, but it must have echoed in the canyon. The snake didn't move. I re‑cocked the pistol, pulled it back to the right where the thick part of its body rested just above my sights, and fired again. The part of the snake where the bullet hit twisted as the hollow point tore it almost in two, the exposed red flesh dropping back into the dust of the trail.

We backed off a few yards and set our packs down. Somebody got me a stick. I walked slowly up to the snake, pistol in right hand, stick in left, and pulled the rest of the inert body back onto the trail. I poked at it until we were sure it was dead, then we got up close to look. The first bullet had torn most of the tissue out from the head; one fang dangled from the skin.

August or no, the snake either hadn't yet shed its skin, was already wearing a new one, or

had skipped the process in the year humans called 1959. Anyway, it had a fine rattle of about 

ten segments. I cut the rattle off and put it in a small wooden tube we carried some kind of

medicine in. That night at our campfire, I held the fleshy part of the rattle against a hot 


ember, so it wouldn't rot and stink. There was a crackling sound as it cauterized; I snorted 


the smoke from it back out of my nostrils. Jokes about how they'd have had to put a 


tourniquet around my neck if the snake had bitten me in the nose sent our nervous, relieved 


laughter out over the lower reaches of Hell's Canyon.

A Dream and a Story

Chinese Soldiers

Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known teacher and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision.
During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war.
I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.
I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed.
But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.
I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.
I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had a dream.

Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, air cooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those marines killed the Chinese; they are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.
I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon. I drifted to Astoria and hung around the docks unloading albacore boats for food money, until I met Dick Mathews on an adjacent barstool in the Mermaid Tavern and he took me aboard the Anna Marie, a fifty six foot converted purse seiner out of Juneau, Alaska.
Dick couldn't afford to pay me. I worked for meals, figuring that the experience I gained could later get me hired on a different boat for a share of the catch.
The wolf dream had been the war's long arm yanking me out of graduate school. I guess I thought the war would leave me, or I would leave it, if I quit the situation where I spent so much time thinking about why humans went to war. But the war followed me to the boats - not, of course, in any way I would have expected.

Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove

The albacore, and a small fleet of jig boats following them, were off the California coast outside San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst had his castle built. It had begun to blow, with gusts in the range of thirty to forty knots. That made the seas too nasty for fishing from these boats. The wind itself made the trolling lines pretty useless anyway; they flailed about and jerked the lures out of the water too much of the time.
A dozen or so boats made for the anchorage at San Simeon. Dick Mathews pointed the bow of the Anna Marie a little north of east, and we pulled in among the other boats already at anchor about mid afternoon. He found a space open enough for the boat to swing on its anchor cable with a change in tidal current, and we dropped the hook. I stayed on deck to keep watch, lest we or a nearby boat should drag anchor and head toward its neighbor; Dick and his wife Ella went into the wheelhouse and relaxed with the two kids, taking their time and making an evening meal for all of us on the galley's diesel cook stove.
Shelter Cove was a good enough anchorage, but it wasn't perfect. It offered only partial protection from northwest winds, which was what we were trying to escape. And as darkness came, more and more boats slipped into the cove from outside, so that it would have been considered pretty crowded even in calm weather.
The weather wasn't calm. Though we'd escaped the brunt of the blow that was still howling offshore, the wind in the cove itself was maybe twenty knots, which is a little gnarly for being at anchor anyway. And the swells from outside continued to roll in under us, slide up the beach, and turn into a surf that pounded the rocks well within sight and hearing. No one, on any boat in the cove that day, could have been without some fear of dragging anchor and being swept onto the rocky beach. Dick got on the “Mickey Mouse” the short range CB radio and talked with skippers of a couple of boats near us. They all agreed to keep a continuous watch.
We ate our dinner as it got dark, and took our time cleaning the dishes and galley. Dick and Ella put the kids to bed in the forecastle, and we sat and talked awhile. Our conversation ranged here and there, to people we knew, places we'd been, schools we'd studied at Dick had graduated Summa Cum Laude after three years at Harvard but the talk kept circling back to where we were, and to the wind. We kept hoping the wind and seas would die down, but they didn't.

Our anchor was holding in the sandy bottom; so, apparently, were those of the boats near us. Things looked not great, but not terrible either. We all agreed that we could sleep, which we needed badly after bucking several days of heavy weather outside, but that I should bring my sleeping bag up and roll it out on the hatch cover, to keep a closer eye and ear on the boat, the weather, and the sea.
Sometime during the night, I started awake, feeling something wrong but not knowing what. Dick burst from the wheelhouse door, half dressed.
The anchorage was a snarl of frenetic activity. The wind had suddenly picked up, and just as suddenly changed direction 180 degrees. Boats pivoted too fast and too far on their anchor cables. Diesel engines roared into the wind as skippers maneuvered their boats up to now dragging anchors and raised them, while trying to avoid collisions with other boats attempting the same maneuver. Radio channels crowded with urgent voices as men shuffled who should move through which opening first, in the scramble to get under power and out of the cove. Too preoccupied to go into detail, Dick said something about having heard about occasional contrary winds that would swoop down one of the canyons that footed on the cove, then quickly die out and give way to another such wind howling down a different canyon from a different direction.

Dick started the main engine. Ella and I went forward to the bow to watch for other boats and make sure the anchor cable coiled properly onto its drum. Dick engaged the anchor winch. Nothing happened. The winch whirred, but the cable didn't move, didn't pull the Anna Marie toward her anchor, not a foot.
Just when we needed it desperately the anchor winch had failed. There had been no warning.
The kids woke up. An emergency at sea sends shock waves through a small vessel; something beyond unwonted noises or motions of the boat will snap sleeping humans back from any momentary forgetfulness that they are, after all, at sea, and that the combined power of wind and water can take you down quickly, without warning.
Dick and Ella at first thought to put the kids back in their bunks below decks, so we'd be free to work. But they looked at each other and I could see agreement pass between them. Huh uh. Not below decks, not now. Ella got them into their life jackets and told them to wait in the wheelhouse, where they could see us through its forward windows, and we could see them.
While she did that, Dick had been looking over the winch, trying to find the problem. He turned to us with apology, and the beginnings of panic, on his face. He directed a questioning look at me. "I'm not much of a mechanic," I said. I'd spent time at sea in the service, but as a Marine aboard ships of the "gator navy," not as a seaman. The Anna Marie was my first experience as a deckhand, and I'd only been aboard a couple of weeks since Dick and I had met at the Mermaid Tavern.

We knelt at the winch, while Ella made nervous trips from rail to rail, watching for other boats, pausing to reassure Christina and Alec at the wheelhouse window, tow heads sprouted from orange life jackets. I felt her conflict: one instinct told her to stay with the children, to hold them, to shut out the world for them. Her knowledge of that world told her in equally strong terms that the survival of her children depended more on avoiding a collision with another boat than on comforting them. So she had to endure the yawning distance of several feet from them, had to bear their pleas like a cross.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked Dick as we knelt by the winch housing, the size of a kneeling man, bolted to the foredeck immediately in front of the wheelhouse. "What's supposed to happen isn't happening," he said. I didn't know if I could help with the mechanical situation, but it was becoming apparent that Dick was beginning to be afraid that his spirit of adventure had gotten him in over his head, and that his life and that of his wife and their two very young children might be in the balance. But he was still the skipper, the only one who could really handle the boat. Somehow, I would have to help him, to inject some calmness into his bloodstream so that we didn't lose what was still our most valuable resource: our captain. As we knelt by the anchor winch, neither of us could avoid hearing the surf crashing on the rocks not far astern; nor could we shut out the knowledge that the wind was dragging us toward them.

"These two are supposed to engage," Dick said, putting his hand on the side of the winch where a heavy cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter rotated freely in the housing. The rotating part was connected to the winch's motor, and was turning fine. But the larger ring that was concentric with it, with a separation of an eighth of an inch, wasn't moving. That ring was the drum that, when the lever was thrown to engage the winch, was supposed to rotate along with the cylinder at its core, and reel in the anchor cable with enough power to haul the Anna Marie up to her anchor.
The winch housing was a smooth casting, with no way to even see inside it short of unbolting the whole thing from the deck and lifting it off, a job that would require a crane and much more time than we had. That was dry dock work.
"So, if this..." I pointed to the spinning cylinder – engages this..." – I put my hand on the larger stationary ring – "...and turns it, then the winch will work?" I asked. "Should," Dick said.
"Do you have any of those little steel wedges we use to drive into the end of a hammer or axe handle, to tighten a loose head?" I asked.
"No."
"Got any spikes, or big nails, or any other soft steel?"
He brightened a little. "Nails, I've got nails."
"Got a cold chisel?"
"Yes."
"Get me nails, cold chisel, hammer, hack saw if you got it, a pair of channel locks or vise grips to hold the nails."
He disappeared below, obviously grateful to be doing something, and for the appearance of another shoulder under his load.

I knelt on the deck by the large steel cleat between the anchor winch and the bow. Dick came back with the nails - 16 penny bright commons - and the tools.
"These your biggest nails?"
"Yes."
"They'll have to do."
Ella continued her patrol, slipping past us as she moved from one rail to the opposite one, stopping where the kids still had their heads and arms stuffed through open windows of the wheelhouse. She made an occasional quick detour aft to check for danger there.
I shut out the world of wind and seas and other boats. They were Ella's responsibility now; she would handle it. The world narrowed, slowed. Long instants, like fat ripe fruits of time, floated before me to be picked. The universe was a small ellipsoid with two focal points: the cleat and the winch. I used the cleat for an anvil.

"Dick. Hold this nail with the pliers, here." I hammer end of nail into wedge, cut it off with cold chisel. One blow, one cut. Quick, deliberate. Each piece a wedge. Blacksmith rhythm now, WHAMP ta, WHAMP ta, WHAMP ta.... A small pile of steel wedges. "Dick, disengage the winch. Drive these wedges into the crack, the ring between the cylinder and the cable drum. Ella. Need another hammer. Dick. Place each wedge across the circle from the last one; always opposite pairs, points of a compass. Try it now, engage the winch. "It turns! ah, slips again. Okay. Disengage. More wedges. Try it again. It turns, it turns!"
But it only turned with enough power to pull in slack cable. When the slack was taken up, and the boat's tonnage straightened the cable, it slipped again.
Ella, Dick, and I talk about options: we can hacksaw the cable, kiss off thirty or forty fathoms of cable, the anchor chain, the anchor, get the fuck out of this maelstrom. But then we'd be back out in the weather, with no anchor to get us behind shelter somewhere else, in case the wind out there gets even worse than it is now.
Can we pull it in by hand? Can we get a few feet at a time, use the winch to take up the slack cable, pull again? The cable has to go on the winch. If we just take it up and drop it on deck, it will turn into an unmanageable snarl. A coil or two falls overboard, slides aft, gets caught in the propeller, rips the drive shaft out through the hull, down we go, glub glub.
In a safe harbor, in quiet water, one strong person can get a line on a piling and brace against a boat's rib or a deck cleat and lean into it and move – very slowly - a boat the size of the Anna Marie. With no opposing force but the friction of the water, and no hurry, it can be done, a foot at a time.
In Shelter Cove, we were in a frenzy of forces so much bigger than our physical selves that we were toys, rag dolls tossed by a nasty sea.

What source of power do we have? We have the engine. "Ella. We're stronger. Take the wheel." (This is Dick talking now, he is the captain again). "Pull us forward, slowly, a little bit, until I say stop. We'll pull a few yards of cable onto the forecastle by hand, then you hold that position while we coil the slack cable with the winch. Then we do it again."
Ella tried mightily, concentrating, forcing herself to ignore her children in order to save them, trying to feel the wheel and the throttle and to translate our shouts into the right movements of her own hands. But Dick had always handled the boat in harbors and anchorages, in any touchy situation, the captain's job.
She couldn't do it, she hadn't been trained. She missed the timing, the Anna Marie lurched against its cable and made our wedges slip, or she went too far forward and the cable looped down in the water, slid aft along the gunwale, too close to the propeller. Dick would have to take the wheel; Ella and I would have to pull the cable. There was no other way. They traded places, remorse smudging both faces as they passed.

Dick got on the horn, tersely told nearby skippers our situation. They took responsibility for staying clear of us. They all hauled their anchors and turned out to sea. They kept in touch with us; one or two pulled away but stayed within sight, using their engines and rudders to buck this way and that into winds that would change direction ninety degrees or more in a minute.
O what a nice touch Dick had. He became inspired, a poet of throttle and kingpin. He relaxed, he rode the seas, he read the seas, he felt the tension on the cable, he watched the meager coils of cable we'd dump to the deck, he took my shouts and head wags as if made by parts of his own body, turning them into just the right easing forward, just the right holding of a position relative to the anchor. He timed the rhythm of his throttling with the rise and fall of the seas, so that when the bow dropped into a trough, Ella and I would have several feet of slack that we didn't have to struggle for, and when the bow started to rise on the next sea, he'd ease off so we wouldn't get yanked overboard, or have our hands slammed into the bowstem, or lose all the cable we'd just gained.

Ella pulled cable like John Henry's wife drove steel. We bent beside each other, on either side of the cable, each bracing both feet against the point where the two sides met at the bowstem, and we pulled, four gloved hands on the cable. She didn't care about the leather of the gloves tearing, she didn't care about her hands tearing on the broken steel strands, she just pulled, she didn't care about the slamming of her kneecaps against the bow, she didn't care about the ominous compaction of her vertebrae when her refusal to slide her grip, to give up cable earned, suddenly transferred the pull of a tricky wave along the cable to our coiled backs. She wanted every inch of that cable, she would by God have it, she didn't care about the hair in her eyes, she didn't care how she looked, she didn't seem to care about the fact that we were both pulling on the same cable, and that the bulkheads we were braced against formed a sharp corner at the bow which made a tight pile of our four rubber-booted feet and jammed her body against the body of a man she hardly knew, she didn't care that she mingled straining arms with me, she didn't care that she butted heads with me.
That, she laughed at. She laughed and pulled.
We would get some coils on deck; she'd jump over and engage the winch. Dick would keep us steady. I’d hold the cable to keep it from sliding back overboard, and feed it onto the drum. We'd reel in the cable. Then we'd pull again.
Slowly, over the minutes or centuries or whatever game Time was playing then, the angle of the cable, where it snaked down into the water from the bow, changed. It steepened.
Finally, the cable pointed straight down. We were directly over the anchor. Shit. We hadn't thought this far. It was one thing one groaning, tearing, tissue sacrificing thing - to haul fathoms of cable aboard the Anna Marie till she was above the anchor. But could we lift the anchor? "What does it weigh?" "175 pounds." "What does the chain weigh, the fathoms of heavy links between the cable and the anchor?" "I donno. Probably more than the anchor."

But now we have to raise it. We're no longer anchored the pick is bobbing up and down in the blackness above the ocean floor and we can't get under way either, because our forward motion would sweep the anchor aft, now hanging free on fifteen fathoms of cable and chain, and draw the cable into the prop. We can't stay in one place; the seas will put us on the rocks.
We must haul it. Ella and I look at Dick, at each other. We all know. I move my hand up and down, in the same rhythm as the seas. Dick nods. He comes out of the wheelhouse. The engine is at idle, which means we are drifting toward shore. The three of us lean over the cable, wait for the bow to drop into a trough, then scramble to beat gravity, to take advantage of the momentarily lesser weight of the anchor and chain and cable to take in a few feet more, then brace for the moment when the bow starts up the sea on the far side of the trough, making the weight we're holding multiply itself. The plummeting weight crunches us against the bulkheads, against each other, slams us to our knees on the plank deck, steals some of the cable we've just earned.

The Anna Marie, no longer under power, turns slowly sideways, lying in the trough, her bow shaking side to side like a terrier killing a rat. We can't handle the combined violence of up and down and side to side. Dick has to go back to the controls, has to wrestle the throttle and the wheel and the wind and the seas and the position of the cable and himself until we are again facing into the seas, with the anchor dangling directly below the bowstem. He must stay there. Ella and I must haul the anchor and chain. We are drifting closer to where the surf is crashing on the rocks.
Ella and I work with the rhythm again, stealing precious feet of cable from the ocean as the bow drops. One of us has an idea. Just before the boat starts to climb the side of a new sea, multiplying gravity's effect and tearing the cable through our hands, we push down hard on the cable just inside of where it crosses the bowsprit, so that it crimps just enough to give us a mechanical advantage. We become a two-human ratchet, able to hold against the extra weight.
We are pulling the cable and it stops dead, before we hit the bottom of the trough. Something's wrong, something mechanical. We crimp it and wait for the next trough, poke our heads over the bow, look down. The first fat link of the anchor chain is lodged against the steel plate at the point of the bow. "Dick, the chain! the chain!" We're only a few fathoms from the anchor now. There is plenty of space between the protective plate and the ring that arches over it like a ferrule on a fishing rod to keep the cable or chain in place. But the increased diameter of the chain means that we'll have to get the first link of the chain several inches higher, and without tension, to pass it through the ring.
For that we need slack.

"Ella. Next trough, I'll reach over, lift chain and anchor from outside, give you slack. Get the first couple of links through the ring, then crimp it down and hold for your life, that's all we need the first time is two links inside and hold."
We do it, I heave one lunge, she drops the links inside the bowstem and holds them, risking her hands. I swing one hand inside to hold with her, the weight tears the chain out of my other hand as the Anna Marie hits the far side of the trough and lunges skyward.
But we have captured the beginning of the chain. We keep working that way, pulling in the chain. It is very different from the cable. It gives us a better grip, and holds more surely when crimped. But slippage of a chain that size, pulling a committed grip across a steel plate, does not mean torn tissue. It means mangled hands, missing fingers.

More of the weight is coming aboard now. Our load is lightening. The coils of cable on the anchor winch are covered by coils of chain. Now comes the anchor, rusted flukes dipping in and out of the water. Ella and I lean over and just haul, straight up, knowing this is it, knowing that the few feet of chain still out aren't enough to reach the propeller and foul it, that our remaining danger is to leave the anchor dangling from the bow where it could knock a hole in the planking, but ho, there is no fucking way that fucking pick is not coming afuckingboard now, we reach down and grab the anchor together and heave it like Judo wrestlers over the bowstem, we fall in a wet clanking heap with it to the fo'c'sle deck. Dick guns the engine, the Anna Marie shakes her fanny at the rocky beach, we head for open sea, one woman, two men, a little girl named Christina, a little boy named Alec, and one GMC 671 diesel engine all screaming into the wind.

Weeks later, after I had hired on another boat, Dick and I ran into each other in the Caravan Bar in Monterey. We got to swapping stories. After he'd told me about putting Ella and the kids ashore in Bolinas and fishing alone for a few days, I told him about my new skipper and boat, Doyl Myers and the Dora B. We paused. Dick wanted to talk about the night in Shelter Cove.
He said he'd been scared, that he hadn't had a clue as to what to do about the anchor winch, that mostly he'd just had this dreadful feeling that things were falling apart, and that nothing he could do as skipper or husband or father would be able to hold his world together. But I had found a way, he said.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
I thought for a long moment. My answer surprised both of us. "Vietnam," I said. What did I mean, he asked. I said it had been like combat. I told him about things moving in slow motion, about there being enough time to move, about getting inside the fear and snuggling it and about making the situation into a technical problem rather than an emotional one. I told him about the time after Tho An when Captain Love had told us to be ready to assault with fixed bayonets into a village which sounded like it had .50 caliber machine guns on the other side, and I'd slept soundly for eight hours so I'd be ready. The other thing I learned about war that night in Shelter Cove I don't think I told Dick during our talk in the bar. It came to me gradually over the years. It was that working as we had on the boats, especially as Ella and Dick and I had done hauling the anchor, had satisfied some of the deepest hungers in me, needs that I'd come to know had sent me to war more surely than the reasons I'd been given, and which I had given to myself at the time: the need to be in danger and to perform my way out of it, to save something or someone precious, and to be recognized for having done it.