Middle River, like every working river, makes its own world small, just big enough for the men of the river and their women, and a woman or two of the river, too. When those who favored sailboats celebrated Wednesday night races, the river folk stood back and waited for those my Wyoming friends called GMIS —Grown Men in Shorts— to finish up their drinks with parasols and return to far suburbia in their fancy cars.

I had a sailboat, but I didn't have a fancy car and I live downtown. But that wasn't what made the difference. I couldn't afford the fancy racing sails and I worked on my own boat, and I had fiberglass dust in my hair and bottom paint on my jeans and oil stains under my fingernails. And I drink beer. So I was allowed to stay, to sit first near the end and then gradually to move to the center with the men and women of the water, at the waterfront watering hole.

Driftwood, The Inn

Driftwood.
Flotsam, jetsam, riprap, bilgerats:
Can these hoary terms describe the lifers of the water
Condemned by sail and tide to float propelled,
Impelled, compelled, roaring, puttering, luffing, slipping—
Air, diesel, gas paddle, it matters not. They drift
Like remnants of their predecessors, changing and unchanging
Like the rippled surface of their Bay.

With sunbleached hair, suncircled eyes, and reddened skin
They gather at the always gently rocking bar to drink
The camaraderie of their kind:
Blowboaters, stinkpotters, raghaulers,
Dragmen, racers, watermen,
All gather to review the water of the day and sing the sorrows
Of the life they share:
the price of gas and shattered shackles,
parted lines and bitter ends, of burnt-out hulls refurbished
On a workman's hourly wage:
And simultaneously they more softly sing the quiet comfort
of the not so gentle air, the hidden cove where crabs convert the cost of bait and sailboats dare not go and cut trap lines, and coupled peelers drag their lissome cores towards well-conditioned palates unabashed.

Later, when the lights go down, Karen Carpenter croons of love
And beers devolve to rum & Coke,to purple-pinkish daiquiris.
The bearded barkeep moves more slowly;
dockside, gimbaled lanterns flicker and fade to smoky gray.
The table in the corner orders two last pitchers
As the kitchen closes slowly, running out of food on Monday —
Unseasonably hot, the unexpected certain hunger of the people
Of the water unpredicted by the hairy chef in ragged shorts
And Moses-like demeanor topping fishing tourney T-shirt.

The late shift straggles in:

Docklights blur the moonlight on the River in the smoky air.

Flotsam, jetsam, riprap, bilgerats.
Driftwood.

©Elizabeth Dunbar

Continue to The People of the River