It took me two months and a conversation with a harbor master three towns over to understand what those extra trips were, and when I finally did, I sat down on my uncle Rolands little sixteen-footer and cried like I had not cried at his funeral.
The second logbook was not a record of fishing. It was a record of names. Dozens of them, going back twenty-six years, and beside each name a set of coordinates, and a date, and a single word in Rolands hand, home.
The harbor master three towns over knew, because it was his stretch of water where the Marie Elena went down in a squall in 1997 and took six men with her, fishermen, in one bad night that emptied half a dozen houses along this coast. My uncle Roland was supposed to be on that boat. He begged off at the last minute with a bad back, and the six men he loved went out without him and never came back.
My uncle did not launch before dawn on the same dates every year to beat anyone to the fish, he went out to carry the widows and the children and the old mothers of six drowned men to the exact spot where they were lost, so the families could say goodbye over the water that took them.
He never charged a dime. He never told a soul. He registered the boat under a second name so that no reporter, no busybody, no well-meaning church group could ever turn a private grief into a public event. Each anniversary of the Marie Elena, and then the anniversaries of every other soul this coast lost to the sea over twenty-six years, Roland was out there before the sun, throttled down over the coordinates, holding a stranger while they dropped flowers, or ashes, or just their tears, into the deep.
The logbook told me why he remembered every boat by name before he remembered the owners. The boats were how he kept track of who had been lost, and who was still owed a trip out to grieve. He was not a marina manager who liked the water. He was the quiet keeper of this whole coasts sorrow, and he did the job alone, in the dark, for a quarter of a century.
My aunt said he thought I respected the water. Now I know that was the highest thing my uncle Roland could say about a person, because to him the water was a graveyard he tended, and respect was the least a man owed it.
I did not sell the boat. I found the next date in the logbook, a woman named Alma whose husband went down in 2003, and I called her, and I said, I am Rolands nephew, and I would like to keep a promise he made you. We launched before dawn last Tuesday. I throttled down over the coordinates. I held that old woman while she said goodbye. And I understood, finally, what it means to respect the water, and I will be keeping every date in that book for as long as I can tie a knot and start an engine.