Life in the boat / Phil talks about buying and selling cars

By now we had cleared the protected waters near town and the old boat came alive. 

After neatly hanging the tie up lines in a storage locker that opened on the opposite side of the deck from the entrance to the galley and lashing the bumpers on the inside of the pipe rails across the back edge of the upper deck, Jon and I went in to get warmed up and, check out Tom’s dinner.  By now we had cleared the protected waters near town and the old boat came alive.  The twelve cylinder Dutz in the always hot and brightly lit engine room directly under the mess room sped up to sixteen hundred rpm, creating a defining roar that was muffled by the heavy wood construction surrounding it so that in our living apartment one could easily converse in normal tones.  Rolling free and easy in a long low ocean swell, the boat was dancing with her natural partner, each step of the dance accompanied with a chorus of sound that is unique to these old vessels.  In addition to the drone from the diesel throbbing  below  deck, every joint and seam in the entire boat, wood and cotton, nails and pegs move against each other, giving tiny fractions of inches under the massive strain as the heavy structure worked her way through the water. Strength through flexibility.  The long ships of our ancestors, lashed together with leather thongs and wood pegs, often called serpents in the sagas not only for their long narrow shape, but for the way they moved and flexed while traveling in the open ocean. No structure could stand ridged against the relentless power of wind and wave without the flexibility of compromise.  In the Commander’s galley most of the creaking sounds probably came from the vertical tongue and grove wall paneling that created the partitions between mess room and sleeping compartments, and the bulkhead between at the back of the area, against which Phil was leaning, steaming plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes with brown gravy when Jon and I came into the heat and glare from the now pitch black early evening.   Still brushing ice from our sleeves with stiff fingers from the tie up lines, we set about washing our hands in the deep double sinks on the left side of the little galley room, then to the stove, eagerly filling our plates for our dinner.  Tom had finished first and relived Phil at the wheel above, taking an early watch while the rest of us got warmed up and fortified for the long night ahead. 

In the same way that a familiar smell can bypass recent memory, jumping to a specific time and place in the past, the sound of the old boat’s planks working against each other instantly conjured up pictures in my mind from childhood.  Family vacation back in the fifties, road trip from the dry August heat of the southeastern part of the state, sweltering in the car with all the windows wide open at sixty, through the pungent summer forest in the mountain passes, dropping down into the lush Puget Sound country, cool and inviting with deep green water surging at the base of the ferry landing, smell of creosote and tar as we waited for the boat that would take us out to Friday Harbor.  Noise and hubbub on the car deck, the little ferry Vashon in which my father had ridden so many times from the island home of his youth over into the city.  There were large round openings for light and air in the car deck, and I wondered if seeing the cable wrapped seagull white pilings the boat pushed against while loading counted as looking out from a port hole.  That summer it had occurred to me that my life was quite incomplete due to not having ever looked out through a port hole, my sea fairing having been limited to picture story books on the living room floor.  Up on the passenger deck, a long flight of thick treaded stairs above the cars we were treated to thick rich coca cola on a nagahide stools  at the little snack bar, heavy restaurant ware porcelain saucers with slices of pie rattling in their glass enclosed stack behind the horse shoe shaped counter.  As she rounded the point, pushing her way across Rosario the ancient ferry began to dip and rise in the ground swell that was marching up the channel from the open straights a few miles to the south.  As a little kid, constantly dreaming of ships and the sea from the pages of picture books the sound and feel of the old boat, huge heavy diesel rattling the doors and windows with each swing of the wheel, churning a white froth from the end that had been appointed to be the stern on that crossing, the wonderful song of her superstructure creaking and popping as she rolled with each sea under the keel was both frightening and thrilling.  How very different from the modern ships traveling these same ferry lanes, tall structures of steel and glass blasting their way through the water with only an occasional vibration or thump, even in the teeth of the gale I had been in a few weeks before coming north, crossing with a buddy who had taken a notion to shoot a deer on one of the islands with solid shot in his shotgun, the ferry only listed a very few degrees to leeward, occasionally shuddering through her hull when she crashed through a particularly big one in the channel.  Hardly the same experience, although the romance of the smaller older ferry may have quickly faded into apprehension if she got into a roaring gale on a dark November evening.

The clank of plates, steam from the stove top pots and hardy laughter from friends pulled my back to the present in an instant.  The green mesh matting, soft rubber over twine core, aided with a thousand drips of jam and gravy that added adhesive over the slick table top, kept the plates and mugs from sliding around in all but the most violent weather.  Phil, cleaning the last of the gravy from his plate with a folded slice of Wonder bread by the time Jon and I sat down on the slick topped benches, reached a large paw into the pack of bear claws that had been torn open on the table between us, relaxed back against the warm wall, cupped the other hand around the mug of fresh boat coffee on his left, and began to reminisce, “Dave and I used to have a system for buying and selling old, cars you know.” 

Jon and I ware all ears.  When we were growing up Dave and Phil had been our idols, about half way in age between other kids and our parents, adults yet approachable, and always up to something interesting and fun.  Dave haled from a branch of the family that we didn’t hang out with as much as Phil and Jon’s parents.  My father was youngest of nine, six sisters and two brothers, one of whom passed as an infant many years before my father came along.  After the baby passed things went along fine for a few years until the oldest girls were well into their teenage years when tragedy struck, and the beloved Joliette was taken by death.  Always occupying a prominent place in family stories, her memory still fresh in her sister’s minds when I was little kid a scant three decades after her passing, I never did glean out the cause of her death.  She was there and then gone, maybe they never really knew what it was that took her from the family circle.  The next loss from the children in the family was the first boy after five daughters, Paul.  Also in his teenage years had the misfortune to get a spider bite that went septic and killed him in what must have been an unimaginable trauma in the little clan.  Next in line for the hearse was Phil’s mother Ruth.  Grown and married to Simon Edwards, with a young family, Joyce and Loraine, Phil and Simone, Ruth fell gravely ill and her slightly younger sister Norma, by now trained into the nursing profession rushed home from the east coast to care for Ruth in her dying days.  A death bed vow to watch out for the family morphed into wedding vows with Simon, which put Norma into the role of Auntie and step mother.  Jon, Norma and Simon’s only child together then became step brother and cousin to the others, although in actual family dynamic he was brother and that was that. 

At the center of these family tragedies was the loss of our grandfather, Peter August Petersen.    Coming sometime in the nineteen twenties, after the loss of the infant son and Joliette, before the passing of Paul and Ruth, his story came down through the years almost as a separate narrative of its own, a mix of loving memory laced with a substantial dose of myth and legend, somewhat short on detail.  A turning point to be sure.  The most prosperous family in the community one day, nearly destitute the next.    Just a toddler at the time of his father’s death, my father only knew Peter as a character in his mother and sister’s stories.  A family portrait in which the departed loved one had been inserted with the 1920’s version of Photoshop served as his only direct contact, often calling out to Anna, “Mommy, Daddy is looking straight at me!”

Brilliant business man, started with nothing and built the company on a shoe string came down to the next generation as our legacy, an unspoken ideal to which we were expected to emulate on some level.  Oral tradition is good at preserving images and feelings about specific, often unrelated incidents, but can be lacking when it comes to a complete history with each part in sequential context.  We know that Peter owned a store and a feed business, selling locally on Vashon Island as well as shipping product via steamer and rail throughout the western part of the country.  Other stories recall a couple of lumber yards and an auto freight business, but all of these accounts are very short on context and background, beyond the brilliance of his ability to put this all together in a very short span of years, with the strong implication that his grandsons could and should attempt to follow in his footsteps. 

In Phil’s case this influence came in the form of working with cars, usually finding a recent model that had been totaled in a crash of some kind and rebuilding it in his tiny garage body shop over on twenty fourth avenue east, up the hill from U Village and selling the product of his handiwork for a profit.  With a large growing family at home he had to make something extra from what the day job paid, and it seemed like a good gig to us kids.  Until now I hadn’t heard about the partnership with Dave in the buying and selling process.

  Phil continued, licking the frosting from the bear claw off the tips of his fingers, “Every Friday evening we went through the newspaper classified ad for cars and circled the ones that interested us.  Then on Monday evening we got on the telephone and called each of these numbers to see if that car had sold.  If not, then one of us made an appointment to come round and have a look.” 

The boat took a particularly sharp lurch to starboard, something back in the galley clanked off the counter and rattled across the deck.  Phil got up and ambled forward to the ladder in a shallow alcove in the wall opposite the front end of the table and poked his head up into the wheel house to check on the course, while I went around the corner and retreated the empty sauce pan that was rolling around on the deck over in the cooks room on the far side of the galley.  Putting it back into one side of the deep sink so it couldn’t break adrift again, I came back around the corner with the heavy coffee pot to refresh our mugs before settling back in my place to finish enjoying the meal and Phil’s stories.

Phil settled heavily back into his place and washed down another bite of the pastry before going on,  “You see, if a guy put his car into the paper for the weekend and it didn’t sell, he is feeling a bit down about it by Monday.  He thinks that maybe the price is too high, or cars aren’t selling well for some reason now, or whatever.  Then Dave or I would go around after work the next day and check out the car top to bottom.  If it was a possibility for us to make some money on, we would really talk it up as a great car, act like we really knew what we were talking about, but at the end make an offer that was very low, much lower than we ever expected the guy to accept.” 

“Later, the next day or so the other one of us would call on the car, and go out to have a look, repeating the process of being an interested buyer.  This time the offer would be make half way between the original listed price and Dave’s low ball offer from the day before.  By now the seller is feeling like his original price was too high, he is thinking that the car didn’t sell over the weekend, then some clown comes around only offering half the listed price.  Maybe this sucker willing to pay at least three quarters the price is the only buyer I’ll get.  The chances were very good that he would take the offer.  Worked every time.”

Getting up again and taking his cup and plate to the sink Phil turned back toward the ladder to the wheel house, “You boys better get some sleep now; we will be there in about three hours.”      

I heard a few muffled words through the closed door of my compartment as Tom and Jon got ready for bed on the other side of the mess room, and thought about the comfortable luxury of this neat little stateroom.  Working in smaller boats things can get pretty nasty in  cramped crew’s quarters, usually crammed into the forward section of the hull, separated by a scant half inch of paint coated plywood bulkhead from a stinking, often screaming diesel engine.  Five or six guys working hard on deck with fish and slime all day, packed end to end in two tiers like sardines in a can.    But this was great!  A couple of heavy front, dark varnished drawers built under the bottom bunk to stash my socks and underwear, and since I wasn’t going to be sharing the room with anyone, I spread out into the second drawer for my extra shirts and britches.  On the right side of the room a small cabinet opened with a couple hangers rattling around as the boat rolled and pitched along through the night, enough room for me to hand the two sweatshirts and wool jacket I had to layer up under rain gear against the stinging cold.  Rain gear hung on the row of hooks in the now completely enclosed ante room outside the galley door,  protected from the elements, dry and if not as warm as in the galley certainly not frozen or soggy in a row of hooks along the back side of the deck house as it would have been on a smaller boat.    

I spread my sleeping bag out in the upper of the two bunks that ran the length of the room, opening the long zipper so that it worked more like a large heavy blanket than a closed bag.  This habit came about on stern warning from my buddy Graydon, who had been in a seine boat a few years before when it suddenly sank without warning.  He and his brother-in-law Tommy happened to be riding out on top of the deck house in the flying bridge with the skipper at the time the boat went down.  Scrambling off the boat as she disappeared under the black, ice cold water,  the seine net that was piled on the back deck floated up to the surface, and they had managed to hang on to it until someone came along and picked them up, but there had been three guys sleeping in the fo’c’sle below, in zipped sleeping bags who lost their lives in the incident.  As soon as I got back to my boat after hearing that story the zipper on my bag came all the way down and was never closed again.

 

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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