New Name Needed, Apply Within

By now you’ve heard of the winter storm that struck the Northeast over the weekend, killing tens of thousands and severing large land masses from the continent. Through the divine hand of Providence, however, my village was saved from the maelstrom that swept out countless other municipalities to sea — “Gonna have trouble getting to Grandma’s this Christmas, her house has drifted into international waters. Find the kids’ passports.”
Fate was not so kind to my new career, however. In sparing my town from destruction, the storm instead took wrath upon the harbor. Piers and docks were buffeted, buoys were tossed about, seagulls were forced inland to poop. And some boats were lost to the sunken depths.
Among the dead: the Nosferatu.
The harbormaster called “Smelly” Dave with the news Monday morning. Dave’s wife called me soon after, saying he wanted all his hands to stop by his house. So I drove over to his little Cape near the harbor, expecting to find Smelly distraught beyond consolation, weeping over any wreckage he’d managed to salvage from shore. Instead, I pulled into his driveway and saw him laughing next to a flaming grill in the middle of his freshly-shoveled front deck, the snowpiles around it impaled by pink flamingos. Far from a requiem for a boat — Smelly appeared to be tap-dancing on its watery grave.
“Hey, grab a beer,” said Smelly, pointing to cans of Bud jammed into the snowpile nearest the house. “Gotta talk to you about something.”
Seems that Smelly had been looking to get out of the fishing business for quite some time, and he couldn’t be happier with the weekend’s meteorological assault. The nor’easter had just done half of this work for him; the creative selection of insurance policies was about to do the other half. He told me he and his wife would be moving to South Carolina within the month to open a restaurant in Charleston. He also said he had taken the liberty of figuring out what I would have earned from a full month’s work, and asked if I wouldn’t be so kind as to accept that amount even though I’d only worked with him for one week. He handed me a check. I quickly finished my beer and muttered something about being late for the post office, leaving him with the friendliest “good luck” I could muster.
Not that I was terribly upset, of course. I was paid four times what I earned mostly from staying out of the way, vomiting over the rail, and looking through binoculars for harbor seals. The scalloping was a short-term solution to begin with, though I didn’t expect it to be as short-term as “The Chevy Chase Show.” But now I was back where I was two weeks ago, desperate for income and dreading the thought of foreclosure.
I was able to get a part-time job with the town, helping collect from residents involved in vehicular collisions with wildlife. It amounts to little more than stuffing an envelope with official papers and mailing them to someone who was unfortunate enough to clip a deer crossing the state highway at dusk, informing them that they need to cover some of the cost of having two guys with a pickup truck and a lot of rope take the animal off the shoulder, then deliver it to the smokehouse of some other guy thirty miles away. Be ye not wasteful, not even of roadkill.
Should I go back and beg for my old job? Maybe. These last two jobs have helped turn living creatures into tasty foodstuffs, which makes me feel like I’m contributing to the community. But I like eating animals better than enabling the processing of them, and that costs a lot more money. And I certainly wouldn’t be setting a new precedent by begging.
After all, I’ve been married nearly nine years.

Before today, this website was rather inactive. I know the knee-jerk reaction is to blame that on laziness and my horrible inability to set priorities. This reaction is very understandable, and partially accurate. But something else has been stealing away my time. It’s something that many of you in this post-dotcom-boom down time will understand all too well, and the rest of you should be able to grok as well in only two words:
Job Training.
You see, due to certain incidents that were totally, inassailably my fault, I am no longer working for my now-previous employer. And since I’m responsible for feeding four kids and an inordinate number of varmints, I’ve had to move quickly towards securing a steady stream of income. Pickings are slim in coastal Maine, however. I’ve had to radically change industries and network with my neighbors with an urgency I never expected. But Nature has provided, both figuratively and literally.
I am working on a scallop boat.
I assumed I could find work as a hand on a lobster boat without much trouble. There are hundreds of boats docked here on the island alone, and even experienced fishermen like to avoid the more noisome task of baiting the lobster traps. But most of the lobstermen have come ashore until spring, and the few boats that still run out are fully manned. No time for a guy who knows “port” from “starboard” and not much else nautical.
The scallop season, however, has just started up. And through the connections of a neighbor, I’ve been able to land a spot on a boat captained by a guy who just needs a strong back for a few months, but not necessarily a seaworthy brain attached to it. Some locals say that scalloping is one of the easiest jobs that a fisherman will do over the course of a year, but it’s already kicking my tail most thoroughly. Waking up hours before sunset and prepping the boat in the cold is the easy part.
For several purposes — insurance issues not the least among them — I won’t refer to the real name of the captain, his vessel, nor the town from which we set out. As far as this site is concerned, I am a hand aboard the Nosferatu, docked in Somewhere Harbor and captained by “Smelly” Dave. My chief responsibilities are staying the hell away from the A-frame while the dredge is deployed, and aiming all vomit leeward when I can’t handle ten-foot seas. I am sad I hadn’t mastered the latter on the first trip out.
But at the very least, I’ve certainly got something to talk about on this site. If my fragile ego can handle it, you will receive daily updates on my incompetence at sea. Think of it as Paper Lion, only in installments, and with George Plimpton smelling like fish.