Good night Irene. A storm, a surgery, and a sea story.

What do you call a girl with a wooden leg? 

Ilene.

Ok then, so what do you call a Chinese girl with a wooden leg?

Hint - our latest hurricane... 

Satellite Beach

8pm  8/25/11

 Irene passing 200 miles offshore.

Oh, I shouldn't laugh, that's not nice. 

Haha - ouch. 

Karma.  Hurts. 

Especially if you had kidney surgery last week.

Looks like Irene is going to give us the brush off and go kiss some of the northern cousins instead.  

We call Pie Man and Scout, just in case they've been having too much fun in the Chesapeake to watch the weather.  Their cell phones were on, of course, and they have already found a mooring.  I laugh at myself, thinking even for a second that they might not be paying attention.  Of course they are. 

There are three kinds of sailors.  Smart, lucky, or dead.  

Planning ahead, thinking things through, being aware, can add a little layer of stress to cruising.  Much less stressful though, than dealing with the moment when all else has gone ka-blooy.


After hurting me sufficiently with his joke, Popeye pours coffee into a travel mug and leaves for work, promising to be back at 2 to take me to the doctor for the follow up.  One week and one day, and no news on the biopsy.  I get the feeling they are holding off to tell me in person.

After the 6 pronged assault to my abdomen, it hurts to laugh, or to sneeze.  Heck.  It hurts to breathe. 

Pain, hurricanes, sailing.  I check out my six new scars in the mirror, and suddenly notice all the old ones.  Long, artful incicions of years past, instead of these new raggedy holes.  Old, old scars, still there.  Just long forgotten.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Yes.  No matter the method, it is exactly the same sort of pain.  And, the same sort of prison created, keeping you from your freedom, dependent on others. I wait at home for 2 o'clock, while time runs back to a different day.

It is late summer in Vinalhaven.  I forget the year.  The breeze is light and capricious.  Corsair has been dragging anchor back and forth past a huge “Underwater Cable - Do Not Anchor” sign for two days, ever since my release from the Penobscot Bay Medical Center.

The Mate is characteristically unconcerned about dragging, and I am in no shape to argue.  I have a hard enough time just standing myself up in the cabin.

By the end of day two though, willing to risk rupture for a glimpse of daylight, I lurch my way up the ladder, and poke my head clear of the hatch. 

The scene (think technicolor!) is of the cockpit looking aft.  It is a brief moment, a still shot.  There is an unreal, movie set quality about it.  A sort of Indiana Jones comic moment. 

The Mate in the scene is fully absorbed in a posture of delight, pulling a mackerel on a handline up into the cockpit.  

Directly behind his head, on a spectacular background of ocean horizon, rises a huge bank of clouds, so black and so high, it might as well be a mountain range.  A mountain range moving right for us.

Spread east to west, horizon to horizon, it has already closed into the throat of the channel, ready to swallow us whole if we try for the exit.  

The calm before the storm.

It’s amazing the effort it takes to get someones attention when standing mid-ladder on a 35’ sloop with a 7 inch incision in your belly. 

Especially if they are preoccupied with yanking up a mackerel.  

An instant later the still shot jumps to a movie in fast forward. 

The mackerel splashed to freedom.  The Mate pelted for the bow.  After the effort of sounding the alarm, getting myself back down the ladder and out of the way was all I could manage. 

I feel a sickening drift backwards.  Anchor line being paid out. 

A handful of cockpit cushions and paraphernalia comes pelting down the hatch, followed by the Mate himself and the first hard spatter of rain.  

(Deal well with the moment sailor, for all else has gone ka-blooy.) 

The Mate stuffs me painfully into my wetsuit, not easy on either of us, but probably the most foresighted thing he has ever done, before or since.  We settle in by the ports to keep a bearing on the point, as Corsair jerks and slips her way gradually, incessently sternward, closer and closer to the rocks. 

50 feet.  

40... 

The Mate is on the second rung of the ladder with his hand on the latch when the bow snaps around and we fetch up hard into the wind.  

And there we stay, heaving into the spindrift, while David churns in from the Atlantic at 65 knots.   The anchor?  Dug in hard to the only good holding we'd found yet in Vinalhaven, the underwater cable. 

Irene, our hurricane of the present, demands attention, spattering rain across the dining room windows, like a vagrant knocking, then suddenly backing off to try a different door. 

We are back from the follow up at the surgeon's office.

The tumor wasn't cancer.  

It was a low-fat mass of blood and muscle, according to an Internet search using the 9 syllable word on the lab report. 

Treated like cancer until proven otherwise, hence removed.

So.  Still here.  Still alive. 

But somehow, not feeling especially smart or lucky.

It still hurts to breathe, dammit.
 
Even sighs of relief.

Good night, Irene.

I'll see you in my dreams.