The month of December, nature’s fist, had made its descent. Like poverty, it had arrived without ceremony, though certainly without subtlety. We were sound asleep for months and then early one morning, there it was, pounding on the forward hatch, demanding breakfast. It’s been with us ever since. It could not be ignored, but it could be tolerated, and it was best to do that down below, where Melissa had ignited the small alcohol stove. I’d done my duty. I’d checked the mooring, and I couldn’t wait to dodge out of the wind and a night so wet and slippery the stars had lost their grip and slid off into the blackened sea, never to be heard from again. I rapped twice on the cabin before I made my move.

My name is Aaron. I don’t even know what I look like anymore, in case you’re curious.  I’ve got other priorities, but I’d like to think I’m at least half as handsome as Melissa is pretty. She tells her friends she’s married to John Lennon. I’m a head taller than she is, and we’re both a little too slim. Her hair is long, and dark, and straight; mine is a bit more complicated, and I’m probably overdue for a haircut. I might consent to that the next time we’re in Avalon to hit the laundromat, but the beard is here to stay. When Neil Young sings “Twenty-four and there’s so much more” we both know what he’s talking about. I hope that helps.

I came below as deftly as I could and shrugged off my armor. I eased my peacoat between the third and top step of the companionway thinking maybe it would drip itself dry if it had nothing better to do, and I dusted excess moisture from my watch-cap before setting it on the mahogany chart table. Even at anchor, even tucked away in our little corner of the harbor, you could lose your lunch in a single stroll from stem to stern. Bobbing up and down as we were, walking was comedy, but it didn’t stop me from being serious about everything else. I couldn’t help notice when I drew Melissa to me, and put my arms around her, her hug was obligatory, and conspicuously brief.

Faded wool, this sweater of mine, and swollen tight with water. I believe in its youth, maybe even as late as last summer, it was peach colored. It’s the color of oatmeal now, which is to say, no color at all.  I imagined her nestling her head there, on my chest, but the dampness (I choose to believe only the dampness) cut it short. I stood in her presence like the wet wood of a dead fire, extinguished, smelling and tasting of steam and of smoke and dead abalone. How could she resist my charm?

I was looking for something in her face, in her eyes, but I could see nothing at all. She dutifully tugged the sweater over my shoulders. It was adhesive with water, and surrendered its grip to hers kicking and screaming. I carried in a lot of rain and I made slick her only dry shirt. I should have known better, but I selfishly wanted that re-assurance a man gets when woman parts are firmly up against him, especially a woman he loves. Apologetically, I drew aside the hair fallen upon her forehead, making a little room for myself. Only the dampness, I thought, a kiss to set things right, but as my fingers grazed her skin, she surged back. “That’s cold!”

I withdrew my rejected hand, as if it were not mine. I cradled it in my other hand and looked it over as if I were examining a shell or a stone found on the strand, turning it, intrigued by its tumbled symmetry. It was bright and the fire-pink of the inside of a shell, but I felt nothing.  I palmed my forehead for a second opinion. Nothing.

I had considered my forehead warm, but felt nothing from my palm, my forehead having joined in the conspiracy of winter, equally cold. Through the buttons of my flannel shirt, over my breast. My heart pounded violently, like storm surf on a wash-rock. Yes, of course she would pull back. That is cold. I am vindicated.

I sat at the table, fisting and opening my hands to rekindle the warmth, and I rubbed them together brutally to get the fire going. Eight o’clock was approaching, and I needed them dressed and sober.

I tested my fingers, drumming them a bit on the side of the radio bolted squarely to the table where it joined the hull, and as I turned it on, its red light glowed like the beacon light of a jetty. But for a burning candle, and the low blue flame of the alcohol stove, it was the only illumination from within the cabin.

My hands were obedient but unfeeling. One of them rotated the dial and tuned the radio while the other one stood watch. I cranked up the volume as high as it could go, while a bucket of marbles was bouncing on the roof, even out-doing the thunder. My marine-band wasn’t a particularly bad unit— navy surplus, in fact—but reception on the windward side of the island was always difficult, and as the boat shifted on its mooring yet another time it made intelligible reception almost impossible. I experimented with my fingers as faintly, sandpapered with static, the Notice to Mariners was broadcast. “Catalina Island…wind out of the southwest…twenty-five to thirty knots…” The voice seemed so distant. “…six to eight foot wells at ten second intervals…”

The voice was so distant that it made it hard to believe that the mainland was less than thirty miles away. The impartial, detached voice that I couldn’t believe belonged to someone continued, “…currently raining…visibility four miles with low clouds and fog…estimaxxxx……”

Damn! The critical part, I couldn’t get it, the forecast. Just when I’d dialed in a fix an errant gust of wind spat at us from out of the north-east, shifting the boat, changing everything. If the battery had been stronger, or my fingers more nimble, I could have, I know I could have picked it up. I looked at my fingers. Give me a cleaver and I’ll chop them off and use them for bait.

The radio just screeched and wailed like the wind through the struts of the jetty beacon which stood on Cat Head. If I could only have heard the prediction, I could have had something to grapple us through the night and into tomorrow, and (more importantly) something other than the crush of monotony to fill the cabin and to fill the time. The prediction might even have offered hope.

I stopped the nonsensical radio, put it out of its raspy misery with a flip of the toggle-switch and the red light went out as a beacon burns out. The radio smoldered in the dim darkness like a finger of land on the glassy mahogany water leaving only the moonlight to guide home the seamen. In slow motion, I pressed my shoulders back, and muscled them into the bulkhead behind me, as if to move it, as if to part the joints and escape through the hole I would pry open. It was through my shoulders and into the wood that I directed my wrath, for there was just no other place for it to go. I certainly couldn’t let it loose in the cabin.

While Melissa had her back to me, I swear just looking through the teary-eyed windows shattered the glass and I could breathe fresh air. I’ve been breathing the same air, over and over again, for quite some time, now, and it tastes like wet cardboard. The eight o’clock weather report had become an important event in our lives.

My rage, my stare, diminished into nothing more than a slow drip of water as the moments drifted by. Anyway, the reports always seemed to be so unrealistic, so indifferent, almost sadistically indifferent.

An old gull, gray and huddled for the last two days between two salvaged lobster traps on deck, I have more faith in him, and I trust his intelligence. In his wings, the weather recorded, and his dulled eyes a prediction, and I imagined the seaman-first-class, who delivered the eight o’clock Notice to Mariners back at San Pedro to be warm and dry and accordingly ignorant to what was really going on out here. God, the weather reduced to static and a voice, while the gull on the stern deck, while I myself in the cabin, knew it for what it was.

The sweater I had just taken off had not been dry for three days and the watch-cap had not seen the sun in twice that long. But, in spite of their dampness, they locked out the wind the same ironic way a deck swollen with water stays water-tight, and on the strength of that, I was not about to cut them loose. In anything over twenty knots, it was quite acceptable to put them on for warmth. Though I had just barely wrestled out of my sweater I crawled inside it once more. “I’m going out to take another look at the mooring, see how we’re holding.” I just couldn’t keep still.

The statement carried an implied advisory. It meant that for a moment the aft hatchway would be open and that exposed a candle we had on the table to the possibility of sudden death by wind.  But you’ve got to understand, it’s not really like the wind would invade this little cave of ours, it’s more like it passed by us so swiftly it could suck the air out with a single gulp. Melissa responded instinctively to protect the flame. It was understood, sensed, though never articulated, that the candle was something more than just light. Frail though it was, it had become our most convincing evidence that we were not yet completely done in by the storm. It burned with passive defiance in the small cabin, while darkness, as if an innocent, fluttered outside the windows like a moth, drawn to the flame.

I carved my way back into my peacoat as well as the sweater, took the latch in my hand, and turned to see if Melissa had canopied herself over the candle. I opened the hatch and stepped up and out on the deck, as Melissa did her part and huddled over the flame. Less than a year ago we’d be flipping TV channels about this time, or raiding the refrigerator during a commercial break. I could almost feel the muscles of her back contracting to the cold, but when I passed through the hatch and firmed it behind me, I could see the light glowing through the stern port and it just made it all so clear that we were not through yet. We even used to pretend that it was warm inside the cabin, and having the candle helped us believe in that lie. It made what did not feel warm, look warm, and that was fine for me. I don’t even remember either of us talking about it being cold inside there. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep up the bluff.

I was half hunched over, but when I knew the hatch was fast, I stood full, and it was the fullness of the night that I felt. It seemed to want to carry me off with it, as it did the wind, to join the decomposed and just drift off into the darkness. It required only that I nod in consent. But how can I drift? There is a woman down below who loves me, and she’s counting on me. The mooring, yes, wake up. That is what I’m here for.

The trek against the wind to the bow was of course unnecessary, the mooring being just as secure now as it was a half an hour ago. Confined to the harbor, though, and unable to fish as a result, checking the mooring while braving bullets of rain was the only act resembling courage or self-sacrifice left me. I wanted to Melissa to see. I did it, too, because it seemed the only way I could burn myself out and get tired enough to get some sleep, to fall into it, but she didn’t need to know that.

From the bow I scanned the horizon for a break in the storm, but the mouth of the harbor was black as blood, and I saw only the lights from the few other fishing boats bouncing my way like drunken fire-flies. It was a mistake to have wasted the power from the twelve-volt on a weather report that told me nothing that I did not already know. That Gray-Marine engine was going to be hungry in the morning, needed a full charge to get itself going. I would like to have heard if the swells were changing direction, though. That would have been helpful. Even if it were raining hard in the morning, still raining hard, I might be able to pull some traps if the swells changed.

As things were, the swells were not placidly rippling down the coast as they usually do, but were getting backlogged and bulking up directly on the face of the cliffs, and punching it out, making an approach to the traps death by stupidity. A smaller boat, maybe, but not mine. Even in good weather it was a hard boat to maneuver near the rocks. It was a soft-chine Monterey boat, too big and with too much roll to fish lobsters, but it had headroom, a vee-berth up forward, a galley and head, a settee and even a hanging locker.  We couldn’t get that in a skiff, not even a Radon boat. I suppose we could have fished broadbill with it, but I didn’t have the eye for it. That I knew, and I did not have the experience and maybe not the desire to harpoon them. Maybe, if I didn’t have Melissa, but she thinks I’m so gentle.

It was, of necessity, a lobster boat.

Like a weather vane, we were pointed directly into the face of our assailant, and I knew that unless the wind changed and did so radically, the next day would be hopeless. It would not be enough just for it to lie low. It would have to sustain its intensity and change its direction to undo what it had done, to slap down the swells. If the wind died, fishing in two days, it seemed. But if it could change direction, tonight, right now, I might be able to fish in the morning. It had only to change direction.

I would have to believe that, small lie that it was, for reapportioning our food to last another two or three days was just totally out of the question. You can only eat so much Top Ramen.

With one hand choking the grab rail of the cabin, and the other cowered in the pocket of my peacoat, I held my ground at the bow in a darkness two hours old to see what I was up against. The sky and sea sloshed together like bilge oil, too dark and heavy to even tell where the island ended and open water began. A sporadic pulse of lightning lit up the sea, and it was ugly. I could make out a lot of kelp drifting by the boat at a good clip towards the beach, telling me that bad water at the harbor entrance was bound to seal us in a few days more. The wind must be reasonable, I thought. It would have to change direction.  In the distance I hear a fresh volley of rain open fire.  Before it finds its mark in the dark water below, it is intercepted, seized by the gale-force wind. I brace myself. I can feel it coming. I hastily check the mooring line that is still lashed firmly to the Sampson post. Isn’t that why I’m here?

I pass on the blindfold and cigarette.