He set the lemonade down instead, stood up slow, and looked Nolan dead in the eye. Then my son said, “Nolan, go out to the truck and get the green log book off my dash. And bring it in open to November.”
Nolan laughed and said he was not going to do that. So my grandson went and got it, which was worse for everybody.
A working boat keeps a log. That is not sentiment, it is law and it is habit, and Wes has kept his since 2006 in the same kind of green ledger his grandfather used. Date, weather, water temp, who was aboard, where he fished, what came over the rail.
Fourteen books. He keeps them in a milk crate in the garage and the current one lives on the dash.
November the eighth, 2016, is the page my son wanted read, and he made Nolan read it out loud at my table.
Two-forty in the afternoon, four to six foot, wind northeast at twenty-five. Assisted disabled 19-foot open boat, three aboard, no radio, taking water off Kelleys Island shoal. Towed to Marblehead. Then, in Wes’s handwriting, the last line: Youngest one was about eleven. Nobody had a jacket on. Do not write these down for credit, write them down so the Coast Guard has it if it goes bad later.
The Coast Guard letter is folded into that book. It has been there nine years and nobody in this family has ever seen it, including me, and I am the man’s mother.
There are eleven of those entries across twenty years. Assists, tows, one man off the ice in 2013. And forty-one entries that say ashes, with a name, because half the families on that shore ask Wes to take them out and he has never once taken a dollar for it, and he goes out at dawn so nobody has to do it in front of a crowd.
Nolan read that November page and then he stopped, because he had gotten to the part where he knew the name of the man who owned the nineteen-footer. It is the fellow who cuts his grass.
Then Wes said the only thing he said about himself. He said, “You have called me a drifter at every meal for twenty years. I have a course. It is the same one every day and there are people alive because of it.”
My daughter, who laughed at the toast, went out on the porch and did not come back until she had her face fixed.
Nolan sent Wes a check for the fuel. Twenty years of it, he figured it himself, and Wes tore it in half and told him the way to pay it was to be on the dock at five the following Saturday.
He came. He was sick over the side by seven and he has not missed many Saturdays since.
He is a bad fisherman. He is a genuinely bad fisherman, and my son has decided this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to him.
And I quit letting it ride. Twenty years I ate perch out of my boy’s freezer and let a man in my own kitchen call him a drifter.