Beaker Chronicles

July 31, 2008

Consummate travelers probably already know things that I have to keep teaching myself, like how to recognize bad ideas and bad omens.

The fundamentals of a good trip evidently do not include going out to the Astoria Beer Garden the night before a 7:50 a.m. flight and then sitting drunkenly in a Greek restaurant eating spicy feta dip while an overweight woman analyzes why her overweight boyfriend wants to move to a certain neighborhood in Queens (answer: Your cousin lives next door!).

I guess I have learned this now, though the trip didn’t seem real to me on Wednesday night, despite how much preparation it took, the frantic writing of four stories in one day for the paper. It didn’t strike me how bad an idea that little beer garden jaunt was until we were back at the apartment at midnight and Valerie was exasperated at how much time we had wasted.

Neither of us had packed. Neither had we cleaned the apartment like we had planned in order to deter the rodent invasion. It seems every time we get ready to take a trip, a mouse shows up. It was no different this time. On Tuesday, after four months without a trace of mice, I heard the little bastard rummaging around for the carbonized rice grains that fall under the burners of the stove. I threw the stove lid open and saw the mouse skitter toward the back. But then it paused at the gas hose which evidently is its bridge to this magical kingdom of charred food scraps. I called to Valerie to grab me the bottle of 409, hoping to give the critter a squirt of caustic kitchen cleaner. She didn’t hear, and after 10 more seconds, the mouse leaped off into the netherworld.

On Wednesday night, knowing we had frittered (and fetaed) away an evening better spent sweeping the crumbs from our cluttered floors, Valerie put her hands on either side of her head.

“That was a really bad idea going to the beer garden,” she said. “There’s just so much left to do!”

She promptly crawled into bed for a three-hour nap. I cleaned the apartment and tried to put together a list of what I would pack. Up at 3, out the door at 5, no sleep. That was the plan. While I was sweeping and doing dishes, Val’s phone rang twice. It’s not unusual to have callers this late, since friends and family are on the West Coast, so I didn’t think much of it until after I had crawled into bed, expecting to sleep for an hour before a panicked packing session.

After I tossed and turned for half an hour, she got up to stop the phone from beeping about its unheard voicemails. She didn’t come back for several minutes, so I walked into the living room. She was sitting doubled over on the floor, phone to her ear, scribbling frantically on our trip itinerary.

“Our flight’s been cancelled,” she said. “They rescheduled us for 2:45 p.m.”

And so the fallout from American Airlines’ colossal baggage fuckup came home to roost for us. In actuality, it was kind of a relief. Valerie was happy to be able to sleep a few more hours, and so was I. The pressure was off, and though we’d wind up in Hawaii at 10 p.m. instead of 1 in the afternoon, it still seemed as fortuitous as a massive equipment failure could be. Oh how wrong I was.

A little information about the baggage problem: American Airlines had just debuted its brand-new baggage checking system at JFK. They were so proud of it that they put out press releases. My newspaper wrote about how they claimed it would drastically cut loading times and save passengers all kinds of hassle.

Then they put it to use and it broke. A software problem caused the entire baggage system to go down. No suitcases could move anywhere. They piled in lobbies like the personal effects of dead refugees. American started delaying, and then canceling its flights to buy time. They had no baggage system for nearly 24 hours.

That all happened on Wednesday, the day before our flight. When I checked the New York Post Thursday morning, all reports were that the baggage system would be up and running at 6 a.m.

We hopped in the car and got to the terminal just after 1 p.m., giving us the allotted 90 minutes before departure time to deal with any unexpected problems. We walked to the electronic check-in terminal and plugged in our information. The machine promptly told us there was an error. In lieu of the boarding passes it was dispensing to everyone else, it printed out a little receipt that said, “You may check in no earlier than 24 hours before departure time.”

“Bullshit,” I said, loudly enough for an American Airlines employee to overhear. He walked over, asked us what the problem was, walked us through the touchscreen checkout again, and then nodded.

“Your flight’s not until tomorrow,” he said. Val and I looked at the itinerary in disbelief. She had written the information from the voicemail correctly: August 1^st. But at 2:30 in the morning, what constitutes “yesterday,” “today” and “tomorrow” get pretty blurred.

The terrible realization dawned on us that we had stressed, woken up early, put the car in super-expensive long-term parking a full day earlier than the airline wanted us. It also dawned on us that American Airlines was hoping we would politely swallow the fact that they had bumped us a full 30 hours from our carefully planned flight time. When you’ve got five days of vacation time, every hour counts, let alone every day, and we had a pre-paid hotel room waiting for us in Waikiki.

I was livid. I don’t deal well with transit inconveniences when they’re as minor as poorly publicized weekend subway service changes. When it means spending an entire day sitting sourly in my apartment instead of strolling on the beach 6,000 miles away, it’s a whole other ball game.

We got in line at the check-in desks behind about 75 other people and I mulled my building rage. I also called the airline a few foul names, which was enough to attract the attention of a TV news crew who were looking for just such a hapless traveler.

“Have you been affected by the baggage delays?” the well-coiffed black-haired woman with the microphone asked me. Yes, I told her. We were going to lose a day of our vacation.

“Well could we interview you about it? We’re trying to cover this story,” she said. “We want to help you by showing what’s going on.”

Ah, pandering to one’s sources. How charming. I explained that we were reporters ourselves and that she should find someone else, but she pleaded a little and I relented.

“Are you angry that their baggage problem is affecting your vacation?” Yes, I said. We had a very short vacation planned, and it’s unacceptable to lose an entire day.

“Have they offered you anything?” she said almost breathlessly. Here it is, the big scoop, the aha moment. “Any vouchers or compensation for your inconvenience?”

She wanted me to erupt with more of the shouting she heard before the cameras started rolling.

“Well, we’re waiting in line right now to talk to them, so I have no idea what they will offer,” I told her evenly.

“First American Airlines is the first airline to start charging passengers a fee to check their bags, and now this. As a traveler, what’s your reaction to that?”

She was really trying to bait me.

“Economic times are tough,” I said. “I’m not going to get mad at the airline for charging the fee. I’m just going to carry my bag on the plane instead.”

That was that. The TV crew wandered off, and we waited for another 15 minutes to get to a clerk. To American’s credit, the clerk was very helpful. She first told us that she could bump us up to 6:50 a.m. tomorrow, but that all Hawaii flights were booked solid today. I asked her to see if she could transfer us to another airline serving Hawaii, and without a word of protest, she did. It took her about 10 minutes of searching databases and she warned us we would have to hurry to catch the flight, but she put us on a plane to San Francisco at 2:55 p.m. where we transferred to a United flight to Hawaii.

Relief. Exultation. Tears of gratitude, almost, except for the realization that American thought it would be more acceptable to cost us an entire day of our vacation than to first try and get us on any other flight to our destination on the same day. I do not appreciate that.

We thanked the clerk profusely and rushed off to the terminal, but the circumstances stuck in my craw. I still don’t know if I’ll ever fly American again.

Everything went smoothly after that except for the TSA people. They pulled us aside at both JFK and San Francisco to search us and our bags. It’s a minor indignity, I realize, but that rationale kind of embraces the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about” mentality. It also screws with my brain. I’m Mr. Unassuming White Guy. If you put a little pomade in my hair, you probably couldn’t tell me apart from the wholesome, gee-golly spawn of some insurance-selling Levittown dweller from the 1950s. I realize the TSA is trying to avoid racial profiling, but twice in a row?

Maybe this is an omen, too. If they do it again on the way back home, I think I’m going to go get a different haircut or something.

When we awoke Monday morning, the first thing I did was call the airlines to check on our bags. The automated system told me they had made no progress on our bags. We walked out of our bungalow into thick heat—high 80s at 9 a.m.—to breakfast with the rest of the hotel guests. We sat on the large deck of the main house and dined on small Danishes and bagels with a number of middle-aged guests talking about a tiny Air Force settlement in Arizona. When we mentioned our luggage predicament, and the hostess said that late bags usually arrived the same evening as their owners, implying something more permanent had befallen ours.

Unwilling to surrender all the near-tropical activities we had planned for, we made reservations for various boat trips and set out for Duval Street to replace our clothes and swim gear. Unkempt and wearing the same (full-length) clothes as yesterday, we ventured out into the stifling daylight.

There's little I can say that properly conveys the feeling of being under the Key West sun. It's like being in the most desolate place on earth and being the only thing God is paying attention to--simultaneously. You step into the light and begin to sweat before you can spell the word in your head.

Duval Street is the primary attraction on Key West itself—a 2-mile stretch lined with bars and touristy shops that teem with boneheaded T-shirts and thong panties with slogans like “LICK ME.” It’s optimistic to think that any woman who would wear that underwear would look like anything else but a trussed ham in them. But a few of the shops had clothes we were willing to be seen in, and soon we had spent more than $100 each on swimsuits, shorts, sandals and sunscreen.

Then, as I lurched around American Apparel in my sweat-soaked corduroys and Stones T-shirt, thinking this was something I could be doing in Brooklyn, my phone rang. The airline had just delivered our bags to the hotel. I thought back to the stores we had visited. Each one had a “no refunds” policy.

Val has a theory that the merchants of Key West have a pact with American Eagle to “misplace” travelers’ luggage in order to stimulate business on the island. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether a contractor like American Eagle would jeopardize its contractual relationship with a global carrier like American Airlines with such dirty pool. But it’s an agreeably romantic notion that harkens back to the scrappy entrepreneurship that made Key West the wealthiest city (per capita) in the nation during the 19^th century.

Key West was founded by wreckers—that is, men who salvaged the cargo from ships run aground on the reefs surrounding the dangerous Florida Straits. The wreckers’ first priority was to rescue the poor souls aboard the ships, but after that, the cargo was fair game. At least one of the three wrecker museums in town proudly proclaim that 125 years ago, nearly every household on the island had its own handmade set of silver—never mind the fact that the monogram on the forks and knives didn’t match the families’ initials. The town was built by people who made their fortunes on the misfortune of others. Now that steam power and more reliable navigation has made wrecking obsolete, it’s refreshing to think the natives have come up with a metaphorical wrecking trade to keep the spirit of their ancestors alive.

Musing on this fact, we wandered back to the hotel, where we promptly collapsed in a heap in the air conditioning. Final first-day tally: eight clothing stores, zero museums.

Sunday, July 22
3:08 p.m.

We’ve made it as far as Miami International Airport, where we will spend an hour and a half waiting for a connecting flight to Key West. It’s been an oddly long day already—the first time in ages I can remember getting up before 11 on a Sunday. Brooklyn is a wasteland at 8 a.m. on the day of rest. We had free rein over Atlantic Avenue all the way out to JFK. The airport was practically deserted, too.

The plane wasn’t, though. It was an American Airlines Airbus A300, which, judging from the rickety CRT television screens mounted in the center ceiling console, could have been among the first to roll out of the Airbus factory 30 years ago. It was packed to the gills.

A300s are larger than most of the planes I’ve flown in lately. Boeing 737s and A320s are single-aisle planes, and because of this, the cramped space is a little more forgivable. This A300 had three rows of seats and two aisles. I had an aisle seat. People kept brushing their asses against the side of my head. If anything, it felt MORE claustrophobic than those smaller planes.

And, after feeling strangely relaxed all morning, leisurely eating the mediocre greasy airport food and breezing through the security checkpoint in all of 2 minutes, finally that familiar feeling returned: I wanted to beat to death half the people within earshot. A girl and her mother occupied the seats across the aisle to my left. She looked to be 14 or 15, and her tight jeans, striped socks and carefully loosened designer sneakers hinted at a healthy mall addiction. But she acted as if she were 6 or 7, draping herself sullenly across her mother’s lap and dangling her legs over the armrest into the aisle, kicking incessantly at my armrest. I wanted to smother her with an airsick bag.

The flight attendant was strangely surly, too. He looked like Vincent D’Onofrio with a tan and a 5 o’clock shadow. As the plane was climbing into the sky, one of the overhead bins popped open two seats away from him. Another passenger and I waved his attention and pointed to the bin. He shrugged the way a tow truck driver might shrug while impounding your car.

And what was our televised entertainment for this two-and-a-half-hour flight? CBS’s morning show plus an episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” Headphones for this scintillating bit of programming were $2 each.

I shouldn’t complain too much, though. The flight left on time and we arrived in Miami early. Of course, then we were stuck on the taxiway because a thunderstorm was approaching and all workers were being called indoors until the lightning threat passed. But even that took less than 10 minutes.

Miami International looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher. It has at least five concourses, all of which are connected by a series of meandering, narrow, windowless corridors that arbitrarily send up and down escalators every 45 seconds. Around each corner are helpful signs that tell you how many more minutes it will take to reach each concourse from where you are now (15 to 20 minutes for us, I estimate). Big posters all over the walls herald the new airport (Being built right behind these walls!). Here’s hoping they figure out some way to make travelers feel less like they’ve fallen down a rabbit hole.

11:17 p.m.
Ah, Key West. What a quaint little town at the very tip of the ragged, spotty Florida Keys. It was dumping rain on the tarmac as we were bused out to the small turboprop that would take us to Key West from Miami. We climbed aboard and I listened to the portly, hibiscus-shirted middle-aged men sitting in the seats ahead of us opine loudly about the town. Then I passed out.

When I woke up, the sun was glistening on the ocean below as we descended on Key West. As the plane turned for final approach, I saw boatyards, elegant sailboats moored in the narrow channels clearly visible as dark patches of blue against the rich turquoise of the shallow seabed, and row after row of metal-roofed single-floor houses. It looked surprisingly low key.

I was enthused when we stepped off the plane and walked into the two-gate terminal. This place had a good, relaxed vibe. That all ended when, after five minutes of watching other people’s luggage whirl around on the carousel, the baggage handler stuck his head through the hatch and told us that was all the luggage there was.

Goddamned American Airlines lost our suitcases.

We waited for 15 minutes for anyone to show up at the American Airlines desk to help us sort things out. Evidently the employees, all two of them, were out helping load the commuter flight going back to Miami. They took a description of our bags, punched it into the system, and said most likely the bags just missed our flight and would arrive on the next plane coming into the airport. I gave my cell number and we went to the hotel. The taxi driver at the terminal took one look at our meager carry-ons and said, “Don’t tell me. They lost your luggage?”

Apparently that’s normal for Key West. It is normal for a fourth of the passengers to arrive on the island without everything they packed for the island.

So, mildly discouraged, we checked into our room and decided to venture out for food, expecting my phone to ring at any time with word of our newly arrived suitcases. We stumbled around Duval Street, the main drag, drank in the rows of high-end restaurants and self-parodic tourist trap chain stores. I tried conch fritters, ate three-fourths of a hamburger the size of my head at an outdoor restaurant and watched a wild chicken peck at the flecks of bacon on the floor before we wandered back toward the hotel.

10:45 p.m. Still no phone call. My battery is almost dead, and the phone charger is—of course—in my fucking suitcase. So we went to the drug store to buy the basic supplies that should have arrived with us on the plane: toothbrushes, toothpaste, sunscreen and contact lens accessories. Total cost to us: $37. We still have no fresh clothes.

I called the 1-800 number for the baggage claim at 11 p.m. No progress on finding our bags, but the electronic ladyvoice on the other end cheerfully informed me that most bags are found within 24 hours. Swell. We reported the bags lost at 6 p.m. Even if those clowns do find them, that still means we’ll waste one day of our vacation without camera, swimsuits, sandals or umbrellas.

The taxi driver told us the airline gives $50 vouchers for the inconvenience. He also said the last time it happened to him, he spent that $50 on getting drunk. This was the most reassuring thing I heard all day.

Tomorrow: Hemingway’s house and the shipwreck museums. In stinky clothes. And without pictures.

It was Easter weekend, and since it was a foregone conclusion that we would sleep through the Easter parade. It's probably better to let things be foregone and wake up at 1 p.m. with a clean conscience. I rolled over and looked out our bedroom window, vista of a brick wall and the blinded brother bedroom window opposite. The daylight peeked out from the building's margin on the right, and typically, it was impossible to tell if the haze I saw through the pane was the atmosphere outside, the accumulation of four decades of dust motes between the panes, or the murk in my brain. A collective memory of 25 other Aprils said it should be balmy and warm.

So up and out of bed, and to the task of not completely wasting a day of leisure. Val and I had talked about going out to see some of the ruins I blogged about a year and a half ago, never thinking I'd be living within driving distance of them. When she brought it up the previous night, it almost seemed negligent of me to not have organized an expedition sooner. Guiltily, I realized it was time to sack it up and go see what I could see.

So we ate, dressed, and hopped in Beaker for the trip out to Staten Island to visit the ship boneyard out along Arthur Kill Road, a place where a century of New York's distinguished and workaday maritime past now rusts in the reeking mud.

I had read about this place on Metafilter back in 2005, and it rekindled an old fascination for American ruins, for spaces long forgotten or neglected. I realize that those of us born in the '80s and '90s haven't got a fully formed notion of all the things our society has jettisoned in the name of progress. I wind up with a weird sympathy for older generation, for whom I'm sure "normal" has all been scrapped, razed, bypassed and buried.

I guess it was appropriate, will all these thoughts of the ghostly past, that the boneyard lies on the other side of a graveyard that dates back to the 18th century. It's a small cemetery, and many of the gravestones are crumbling. Some of them have worn away to blank slates of flaking, brittle stone, like pastry crust jutting from the earth. Their identities are dying just like the identities of the ships, whose nameplates have largely been scavenged for scrap, novelty decoration, or simply dropped into the water.

We pushed through the trees and through six-foot-tall reeds down to the tidal flats along the Kill Van Kull, dodging an international array of empty liquor bottles, old tires and driftwood. Once I think I saw a vibrator. When we emerged, we saw a stately red tugboat, a series of rotted barges to its right, and an undifferentiated mass of larger hulls and collapsed docks to the left. There were plainly more ships and boats on the other side of the debris, but there was no way to access it--it's fenced off from the road and abuts private property with well-posted warnings against trespassing.

We were silent for several minutes, just taking in the rank smell of the mud, the accumulated garbage sitting among the crushed-down reeds, and the warped vessels. There was little else to do but take a few pictures and try halfheartedly to figure out where some of the boats came from.

It was actually better than I had thought. Many of the pictures available online (That last one is NSFW!) were taken by kayakers who could actually paddle among these fascinating hulks. The posts I had read from visitors on foot were less descriptive. I had not expected to get as close as we did to these ruins. But even though we did, it feels like this ground has already been well covered. I can write about my reactions to this place, but I have to work hard to not simply repeat what others have said. And this site was once much more spectacular. Two decades ago, there were probably twice as many majestic hulks here. Gradually they've been scrapped or eroded until nothing existed above the waterline. Even the story of the afterlife of these boats is ending.

If I ever want to be able to write about something that hasn't been exhausted by time and prying bloggers, I'm going to have to get information firsthand. I don't know if I'm lucky enough to be in the right place to overhear a good tidbit.

Months have passed since the last blog entry, months that have blurred together and are punctuated now with funny television shows and occasional holidays, rather than spectacular sights.

I have been working at the newspaper, learning how to live with weekly deadlines and a dearth of spot news. It's different, and I feel more detached from the town since I spend most of my time scrutinizing budget documents. I hadn't realized how much I missed spot news until this week, when a house burned and the firefighters held a separate training exercise.

All of a sudden I was out of the office, watching chaotic things unfold, standing under the blue sky, realizing the slight chance of being crushed or soiled by flying debris. Driving home on Tuesday night after covering the fire that afternoon, I was struck with how little of myself I was able to put into the news item we released on the blaze.

It was one paragraph and a picture--all the available, relevant facts and a glimpse of the colors. There was nothing about the way the flames burst through a hole in the roof, the way a patch of snow sat intact just two feet from the fire, the way the spray from the hoses threw foam and debris a hundred feet in the air through the crumbling shingles, how the Kia Sportage parked in the side driveway was showered with broken glass and embers. There's no place in news for poetic details, and more and more in my own writing, I recognize the intense desire to get to the point. Digressions are painful. Clauses are unfortunate. Parallel structure is too close to editorializing. I'm beginning to seek aesthetic satisfaction from a good segue.

Even in this entry, I'm seeing no art. I'm thinking about the cloud of orphaned ideas that have been shambling around my brain during commute time these last few months. I'm thinking about how many of them will make it onto the computer screen. I'm not thinking about structure, or craft.

The world is immense. Ideas proliferate beyond our ability to cherish them. I need to find my muse again or I'm doomed to skid through my life flinching at the brilliance in others I don't want to see anymore.

This is a post about decorating. I have never before paid this much attention to the subject, and its sudden importance now frightens me a little. But I know what it's been like when I didn't pay attention. I know how the haphazard ("bachelor," even, should I think about it) approach to furnishing and appointing a living space has its own peculiarly lonely drawbacks.

The apartment decoration is in full swing now. For the past two weekends we have been scouring Craigslist and Target for the essentials of apartment living. We now have pots and pans, flatware, utensils, some furniture and a television.

At each step of the way I wonder if there isn’t something more to it. Then I go to some New Yorker’s home and realize there is. Or at least I’m more and more afraid there is. Don’t get me wrong—we found some great stuff, and it looks great in our new home. I just wonder sometimes if there isn’t some “style” gene that went all recessive for me when I was gestating.

I went into a couple’s apartment near the East River today. Guy didn’t look that much older than me. The place was filled with esoteric things that somehow spoke in that unmistakable thrift-shop harmony: We sing to praise the ordering consciousness who rescued us.

When I buy shit at the thrift store, nine times out of 10 I bring it home, put it in circulation in my life, and I wind up looking like I couldn’t find the American Eagle or Pottery Barn. My second-hand shit doesn't sing. It sits there showing everyone its popped seams and chipped paint.

Here in this couple's apartment, next to the ceiling-length wardrobe housing his fifteen western shirts with effortlessly nostalgic colors and patterns, sits a 19^th-century parasol and a vintage f-hole Harmony guitar. They were finds. I wonder sometimes if I just don’t have the audacity to decorate properly, if the visions in my head of the ideal apartment jumble up too many motifs and philosophies until an 8 by 10 room is filled with a heterogeneous universe of dressers, couches, wardrobes and dinner sets.

Still, we press on. Not because I’m shaking off these insecurities and making bold decorating decisions, but because there are more fundamental decisions to be made: do we wait more than a MONTH before we have a table? No. And I am happy with what we find. I feel accomplished, but the grass is always greener on the other island.

We bought a very nice set of dishes at Target. I like the design, and feel a little tinge of aesthetic satisfaction each time I eat macaroni and cheese or cereal from them. But I can’t help knowing that somewhere out there (read: Manhattan), some investment banker is laying down plastic to purchase a dish set spawned from the childhood dream of some esoteric French ceramics genius; a set whose manufacturing process was so painstaking, so filled with crisp, rustic adjectives that Hollywood optioned the catalog description and made a movie starring Diane Lane.

Meanwhile, I know that I’m going to continue to bumble my way backwards into the world of cooking, gauchely buying the next-best spice at the local store while Ms. Investment Banker has Italian contractors build a stone oven in her otherwise all-stainless-steel kitchen so she can make authentic … uh… spinach fattaiers. Fuck. I’m just guessing here.

I also read an article in the New York Times about apartment hunting in the city (it must be a monthly thing at the Gray Lady), how many landlords reject applicants whose annual income is less than 45 times their monthly rent, how big, successful, rich people can’t get the places they want when push comes to shove. What monstrous parody of life and success are the landlords and credit companies perpetrating here? What monstrous parody is the Times printing each month?

I have driven all over Brooklyn now looking at furniture. I have dodged people of all ethnicities fearlessly stepping in front of Beaker. I have gaped up at majestic buildings and claustrophobic streets lined with the kind of trendy stores and restaurants I would like to walk out my front door and find. I think about the Salinger novels that could have been written about these places I know nothing about. I steer around the bigger potholes and protruding manhole covers, listening to the Velvet Underground, convincing myself I am a scrapper. We got an apartment in the space of a month. We are paying slightly less than my annual income for our monthly rent. I can actually park the car within walking distance of our apartment. But I still feel like these other people are a few light years ahead of me in terms of having it figured out. Oh well.

They said the answer was to become a dancer. Hold your head high.

September 17:

We stumbled in to Port Orchard, Washington as we had (and would) at numerous other destinations: to sleep on a friend’s floor and swoon along the thin line separating genuine regional interest and cheap-laugh tourism.

It was a Sunday night, and we ate at a local brewery with my friends A. and W., with whom we would stay. Afterwards we followed them through a labyrinth of dark, evergreen-lined roads to their house. At one point we reached the edge of the treeline at the crest of a hill. Beneath us stretched Puget Sound and Seattle’s stately skyline mirrored in the black water. It was a breathtaking reward for a day’s worth of driving through light drizzle among the anonymous comb teeth of giant tree trunks.

The alluring lights of Seattle, almost tangible but distinctly distant, gave me my first pang of longing there, a familiar, mouse-eyed lust for something as unique in my own life.

So many of our friends live graceful lives, graceful in unexpected and perhaps unplannable ways. Often I see poetry in their prospects, in what the future must bring to them, how they must adapt or own up to mundane realities I’m sure they can’t completely escape in such exotic locales as Washington or Idaho.

I admire their bravery. One of Val’s friends moved with her boyfriend to Eureka, CA to be close to his son and his son’s mother. They had all been living near Sacramento, had an established social circle and habits, and jobs. Val’s friend moved to Eureka to make a go of it with her boyfriend, now fiancé, sans job, sans friends, and she’s well on her way in that quiet, mildly impoverished, sea-worn town.

It’s so easy to feel trivial, to marvel at the successes, the failures and the beauty of people—my friends and hers—and wonder how my story can ever measure up. With my bulging overnight bag, suitcase and suite of portable electronics, again and again I feel like I’m a toy nomad chasing after a wind-up dream in a Matchbox car, passing through the concrete lives of people who hike, who research, who tend gardens, who dress in historical garb for work, who own homes.

Which leads me back to A. and W., who own their home in Port Orchard. Husband and wife homeowners, and several months younger than I. They were among my closest friends in high school. W. helped me move two carloads of poorly packed crap into the dorms the summer of my freshman year in college. He stayed there with me for several days, sleeping in the lounge, confusing my floormates who thought he already had irreconcilable differences with his roomies.

At the time, he was contemplating skipping out on Navy boot camp to be with A., who was about to attend college at Humboldt State. He chose to honor his six-year commitment to the service, opting for a post aboard a nuclear submarine as a reactor technician. He never forgot about A., though, and after a couple years his home port was on Puget Sound and hers was, too.

It was a long, strange trip for those two. A. was a fervent hippie in high school (insomuch as the term applies to a person who didn’t go to Woodstock and who doesn’t continuously brag about how great her generation is). She always deplored war and violence (which meant epic arguments with my martial-minded best friend). But her decision to be with W. was about the man, not the uniform. In time, she became a Navy Wife, friends with the other wives whose husbands were at sea for months at a time, party to their celebrations and their complaints.

But A. is still green to the core. She’s attending Evergreen State College and working as a county building permits overseer, responsible for determining environmental mitigation. Apparently this is the crucial, much-maligned junction between the expansionists and the environmentalists, who accuse her of destroying homeowners’ dreams and of destroying the environment, respectively.

And they have a beautiful life together in a lovely, small home erected by a boat builder, with two cats in the yard and two trucks in the driveway.

W.’s life is in flux right now. Just a week before we visited—the week I had told them we were going to be there—he was discharged from the Navy. This was something he and A. had awaited with great anticipation, a final release from the unfortunate schedule and grim absurdities they had both endured for several years.

As we drove to Bremerton to meet them for dinner, I spotted the fleet of decommissioned Navy vessels moored at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Several retired aircraft carriers, USS Independence, USS Constellation, and USS Ranger, await their fates as museums and artificial reefs, along with one destroyer. When I mentioned the carriers to A., she said we might have toured one of them, had we arrived before W.’s discharge. Inwardly I lamented missing that chance.

This was the first time I had seen A. and W.’s home, and I wanted to catch up with them just as much as I wanted to explore the area. I got the chance to do both when the next day A. suggested going kayaking in the Sound.

I had never been kayaking. My familiarity with oar-powered watercraft comes from one (1) time at Disneyland paddling one of those giant canoes around the lake area haunted by a burning cabin and the Country Bear Jamboree; one (1) time trying to control an inflatable raft in the Santa Cruz surf; and the brief stories my father has told me about his solo canoe trips in the wilderness, mostly involving capsizing and the rat bastard raccoons that stole his dry sausage.

It was raining by the time we got to Gig Harbor, and though we all had packed extra clothes in the car for after the trip, none of us had expected to be out in a downpour. We stood on the party boat headquarters of the small kayak rental business, listening to the patter of droplets on the canvas roof, watching the once glassy surface of the small harbor erupt in a billion fleeting minicraters. The assistant, a young, friendly woman, welcomed us to think it over for a few minutes—just long enough for the weather to slacken and for us to get our resolve back.

The woman helped us each into a narrow, plastic vessel and secured our waterproof aprons around the raised lip of the cockpit. Then we were off. Recalling how I only succeeded in paddling in circles in the Santa Cruz surf, I was worried about looking dumb in front of my old friends. Fortunately, the kayak and its double-sided paddle was much more maneuverable and intuitive.

We paddled away from the dock, away from the lines of moored pleasure cruisers and peeling-paint wooden fishing boats. I told A. that this was my first kayaking trip. She was surprised and told me she grew up in kayaks.

“I know,” I said.

She looked back at me with a puzzled expression, as if to say how could you have never kayaked with me before? How could you have overlooked this for so long?

The same question was on my mind, among others. How could I not have done this sooner? How could this not have been a formative childhood experience for me? Did I somehow miss out on the chance to be rugged and outdoorsy growing up?

We headed further out, past the gorgeous two-mast schooner Kia Ora and toward the mouth of the harbor, where a tiny lighthouse sat on a sand spit. All along the eastern shore were immense, multistory vacation homes. On the flatter western shore, more modest homes came right up against the beach. Even these, I thought, are probably only affordable for millionaires.

This was the only discordant thought in my head, however. Anxieties about making a living, getting a job, being a success were muted by the silence and the immediacy of the water and the gentle ripples of our wakes.

We left the harbor and went out on the Sound. I gaped at the huge sky, divided from the water only by the chunks of rock and tree made symmetrical against the surface. Like so many other things, I’m clueless when it comes to sailing, but I realized I was out on the water next to a former Navy man. I asked W. if he had been drawn to the Navy because he wanted to learn nautical skills. He shook his head and told me he joined for the technical skills and for the relative safety compared to other branches of the armed forces.

“I don’t even know how to sail,” he said, adding few crewmembers learn anything about navigation or maneuvering. “A. knows more than I do.”

“I knew how to sail by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade,” A. called from her kayak.

“Do you think the Navy is suffering from the same recruitment problems as the Army?” I asked W.

“No,” he said. “If anything, it’s motivating more people to join because they won’t be in the infantry somewhere.”

I asked him if he thought the Navy is getting soft without major foes like the Soviet Union.

“They’re getting a little too, uh, emotional,” he said. “They’re maybe focusing too much on the feelings of their recruits. People going through basic training now get cards that will guarantee them 15 minutes without the drill instructors yelling at them. I didn’t have any trouble at boot camp, but I hear it’s undergone some grave changes since 15 years ago. I’m glad I didn’t go through then. I might not have made it.”

We drifted closer to the pebbled shore, near a dull wooden one-story house with a porch extending over the lapping tide.

“Are you going to miss anything now that you’re out?” I asked.

“The feeling of camaraderie, mostly,” he said. “When you’re on duty with one other guy for eight hours nonstop, you’re pretty much forced to talk to each other until you run out of things to talk about.”

I’m proud W. handled his service as well as he did. I don’t know what I would have done in his place, at sea and underwater for weeks at a time, only seeing sunlight on rare occasions when the crew got “steel beach” time atop the hull while the boat was surfaced [more on that and other submariner issues here].

As we paddled back in, I thought about how exciting it must be for W. to be on the cusp of a new and different life, to have a huge array of possibilities open up. I wondered if he had any of the fears I had about the unknown months to come, the shapeless time between jobs when you luxuriate in laziness and then lurk sullenly in the physical and mental chasm of home on a weekday.

But whatever happens, I believe W. won’t be awash in uncertainty.

“I feel like the Navy was one of those opportunities for me to really find myself,” he told me before collecting seashell fragments from the shallows near the lighthouse. “I’m glad I got it. That [experience is] college for most people. And if I go to college, I’ll get to have two of those times in my life.”

W. makes me wonder if I’ve ever really been tested or proven anything. I went to college, panicked as I wallowed around dazed in the immensity of literature, philosophy and history, and popped out the other side feeling almost like I had ducked whatever epiphanies there were to find. If this journey is anything, it’s a test. After going back to my hometown after college and attempting not to call it a retreat, I’m facing uncertainty. After two years of living at home, I’ve been carrying my world in a hatchback Honda for more than 3,000 miles. Now a foreign urban environment awaits. I hope what I find will give my life the kind of natural knowledge, the kind of grace I see in friends like A. and W.