It is a special feeling when your boat fills.

A nautical term, “fills.” Dispassionate.

It means that your vessel, the displacing entity in which you ride atop the soul of the world, is awash. It is stunning how limpid water resides quietly inside the boat, the clarity of a different reality.

On the beach at Hagios Nikolaos, at the eastern end of Crete, four middle aged men and a younger one slid a boat toward the Aegean. It was of wood, newly painted, white with cobalt blue gunwales and stem. One man slathered on red bottom paint while others aimed her trailer down the hard sand.

The boats in the harbor were also wood, mostly open, with small roofed cabins on the foredeck and inboard engines amidships. In the brilliant sun their colors blend to their purpose, cobalt of the sky and sea, green of the pines, blood red, salt white. The water was clear to the bottom of the harbor.

The young man, perhaps in his late teens, paced silently. The driver of the faded pickup opened its window, once stopping and leaning out over his elbow as if disbelieving his mirror. The one with red paint was already in the sea, mopping the last from the bucket, slapping it under the stern, when someone said something. They all laughed. The young man stood holding a rope leading to the bow.

Launching a small boat from a trailer should be a simple thing. If you turn the steering wheel of your vehicle hard over, the trailer starts to back the opposite way. Then you turn the wheel in the opposite direction, bring it back and follow the fair curve of truck and trailer square on to the shore. Assuming you have removed tethers holding the boat to the trailer, you can watch through your mirror as the boat lifts, floating free while its trailer follows the sea bed down. When you drive forward, the boat is in its element, the balance of load against displacement, of graceful bow cleaving unsuspecting water.

Which is not how it went with our own boat the year before.

Steve had come with me to launch our runabout at a ramp two miles across the lake from our Wisconsin cabin. I backed the trailer, freed the straps, checked the bilge plug and slipped our seventeen-footer into the cold, still surface of a new boating season. Engine started, Steve stepped in and I drove off.

Back at the cabin, I was waiting on our dock for him when the phone rang. The boat was not quite a third full, he said. He was ashore a quarter mile from the ramp on the sand beach of a Mr. Vann who was working on some paving stones in his yard.

During the ten-minute ride over I had time to think. It took about three minutes to run through the possibilities. Could the prop shaft bushing have come loose, like it did on our 29-foot sailboat off Raspberry Island, taking on six inches of Lake Superior when I wrapped the dinghy rope? On that one, our sailing partner Gary had boarded, responding to our frantic calls. Leaning into the aft berth and sliding the door aside over the engine, he looked at me, my door open, waiting on the opposite side. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he intoned before helping me stuff the bushing into place.

Nope, this was an inboard/outboard, no prop shaft.

Could it have opened a seam, like our elderly plywood dinghy with two children rowing madly back to the dock? Not that either, this was a virtual fiberglass bathtub.

Could it have been holed? Maybe. Its 25-year old predecessor, Sea Sprite, partly filled at the same launch ramp two years earlier through a gash from a misplaced trailer roller, punched through the fiberglass the previous autumn. But there was nothing to hit between the launch ramp and where Steve now sat alongside our partly filled, slowly emptying boat, its electric bilge pump humming.

I took off the engine cover. A pair of blue hoses hung off into space. Cooling hoses for seawater, left unconnected when someone serviced the engine. We reconnected them, pushed the boat out, started the engine. No more water. An uneventful ride across the lake to our dock.

At the harbor of Hagios Nikolaos, we watched the young man, now in yellow rubber overalls, move around his boat, swaying gently as he shifted lines and nets to their working positions. No quick movements, just setting up gear. The morning air would be chill and dark, the land breeze at his back. He would start the engine, slip the lines and slide away from the dock, motoring quietly with the brightly colored fleet to the sea outside, where the men of Hagios Nikolaos would go fishing.

 

 

 

 

In the Border Museum at El Paso, there is no natural light. Its home is a purpose-built, windowless concrete box opened for business in 1994 on the Rio Grande, the Texas side, across from Ciudad Juarez.

Working the reception desk when we visited in 2001 was a pleasant, angular man with glasses, wearing a beige cotton shirt and blue jeans. No uniform, no pressure, no visitors except the two of us. Carolyn remarked on the forecast of rain.

“We’ll get our share, looks like,” he replied. He disappeared into a back room and returned with a photograph of yellow flowers.

“Poppies.”  He angled the snapshot to divert the glare of overhead fluorescents.

   “The whole desert. A sea of gold flowers. Six years ago. The last big rain we had.”

   He laid the photo on the counter, letting us soak up the image.

“Beautiful,” we managed. He smiled.

There wasn’t much to smile about in this place, a homegrown repository dedicated to the agents and families of the United States Border Patrol. It is a personal and political history made of guns and pictures, letters and news clippings, handwritten memoirs and historical documents. It’s family, the collective memory of people who lived the job.

A sheet metal rudder welded to an iron pipe stuck off the stern of a flatboat constructed from sheet metal scraps, the inboard end of its propeller shaft buried inside a precarious-looking engine. Border Patrol agents, Carolyn read from a typewritten index card, apprehended the occupants off Florida. Across the way, a display of confiscated knives and homemade guns described in hand-lettered signage their use by illegal Mexican border crossers to prey upon those following them.

We remarked to the counter man that we were on our way to San Diego. He suggested a videotape, motioning toward a TV monitor in front of a row of brown steel folding chairs. We found the tape, slipped it into the VCR and pressed “PLAY.”

 As it begins, an elderly man in a red and white checked shirt stands in his front yard talking to an interviewer. He feels safer, he says, since the fence went up. There is less drug trafficking in his part of town, which for him means Imperial Beach, across the Tijuana River from Mexico.

Carolyn and I look at each other. We have rented a cottage for a month in Imperial Beach, sending reservations and money a month ago over the Internet from our home in Wisconsin. The tape continues, reeling off short clips one after the other: a corrugated iron fence snaking through southern San Diego before poking hundreds of feet out into the Pacific; people apprehended at night swimming across a drainage ditch to the United States; sunlit graded dirt paths on the U.S. side showing crisp footprints of people who got through overnight.

The southern edge of the U.S. human containment effort, parts of it physical and parts natural, starts at the fence’s wet, salty end in San Diego. Running a hundred fifty miles east along the cultural fault between North and Meso-America, it turns briefly southward at Yuma by the Colorado River, then angles in a straight geopolitical line southeast through six hundred miles of desert to El Paso. Its eastern end follows the Rio Grande’s eight hundred fifty-mile drift to the Gulf of Mexico.

Before we happened upon the Border Patrol Museum, we were stopped by police in Zapata, Texas, a faded town on the Rio Grande four miles downstream from Laredo. The cop came to the passenger side of our car. Carolyn handed my driving license to him. He said we were going 45 miles an hour. We agreed.

We missed a “25 MPH” sign a block back, he said. He pretended not to peer intently into our back seat where there was nothing. He eyeballed our stuff filling up the open space in the rear of our SUV. Nobody there either. He sent us off with a warning. 

The border seems virtual enough when you get away from steel walls, wire fences and dirt surveillance tracks, out of reach of the floodlights. Radio stations along the road from Harlingen to El Paso carry five or ten Spanish language stations for every one in English. Yellow road signs miles from the border in California show running figures of a man and woman, the woman holding a child’s hand. Above them it says CAUTION. 

So I’m thinking, what is “alien,” really? How do I define myself at the border of my own country if I can understand, on a good day, 20% of what’s on the radio?