Chapter 13

Gee’s turn:

Dry land. I suppose if I was Christopher Columbus or Ferdinand Magellan I’d be a lot happier. I’m neither. I’m Gee Bertrand, wife of Josh Bertrand, river rat, and we met and fell in love on the water. Part of me wants to be back there.

Other part, though, is daughter of Zach and Sharon, and my dad just suffered a circulatory event. They used to say ‘heart attack’ but these days that’s entirely too general. I was suddenly faced with the mortality of my parents.

I would have kept on going on the journey with my new husband, but my new husband is not a stupid person. That’s a plus. He loves me. Might be his biggest flaw. We turned the boat around, two days out of our home marina, and putted our way back home. And all the time I’m thinking to myself that I’m sitting on my ‘home’, making nine miles an hour up the brown waters of a South Louisiana canal.

It IS home. I have, in order of precedence, a husband, a cat, and a dry, clean place to live, and it’s all compactly contained within a space of fourteen by forty feet. Big enough to hold three hearts, two human, one cat.

It’s not that Josh’s house, and by inference, MY house, isn’t nice. It IS. It carries on Josh’s desire for controlled amounts of solitude, stuck back off the road in the woods. You can’t even SEE the road from his house. The driveway makes a dog-leg turn. The yard is small, more of a clearing, really, just to keep the woods back a bit from the house.

And that makes me torn. This would be a perfect house if I didn’t know the guy who owns it. I mean, I didn’t meet him in a bar or at a church social ... Well, it was SORT of a church social, a park party for the teens at church, but I MET him on his boat. The guy caught a catfish and cooked me dinner. On his BOAT.

Now we’re in the house after dinner with my folks.

“So what’s YOUR idea of a plan, sweetie?” he asks.

“Out on the water. This is nice, though...”

“I tried to build the kind of place that replicated the boat experience. The isolation part.”

“And then I came along and spoiled it all.”

“You spoiled NOTHING, Gee. What better reason to be out away from people than to have this perfect friend, this perfect partner...”

“Are you sure, Josh?”

“We belong together and I’m very sure.”

So we DO belong together. We spent three days onshore. We visited with Dad and Mom, and honestly, I think dad connected with Josh and spent more time talking with HIM than he did with me. I love it.

Josh knows a couple of people who still fish the river and sell their catches, so he and I made a visit to one of those old guys and came back with fresh blue catfish. We invited Mom and Dad to OUR house for dinner cooked by Josh with my assistance.

Josh and I had an argument – a silly argument, but an argument nonetheless, over whether we did a semi-formal table setting or did the old, rustic Cajun thing – pots on the stove, fill your plate, go sit at the table. He won. The pots stay on the stove. That’s the way HE grew up, and that’s the way I grew up, and the value of the meal was the quality of the food and the quality of the friendship.

More and more, Mom sees WHY I fell so hard, so fast, for Josh. Dad? He’s got the son-in-law he should have had the first time around. Oh, well – I did learn. Yes, we took Mom and Dad out for a day on the water. Josh and Dad argued about an overnighter, but Dad likes his cotton sheets and air conditioned bedroom so that’s probably off the table.

Still, they enjoyed the ride and they enjoyed fishing off the back deck of Dorable, a very sedate and genteel method of passing time, what with a cooler full of good beer and other comforts of home just a few steps away. On that point we all agree. Having a hot skillet ready to pan-sear the filet of a fish that was in the water ten minutes ago ... I could get spoiled. I am.

We brought Mom and Dad back from that day trip and went back to our land-side house.

“Josh...”

“Yes, my love?”

“We need to get back out on the water. We can stay within a day’s scooter ride of here, like we discussed.”

“We can do that. I know ... we talked about places. There are some that YOU haven’t seen and I haven’t seen, and we need to see them together...”

“So let’s plan.” ‘Plan’ in this case meant a mental inventory of what non-perishables were on board, what perishables we might bring, and the time we’d stay gone.

“We’re not Columbus sailing for the Indies,” Josh laughs. “We dock the boat near a road, take the scooters to the grocery store, come back with fresh stuff.”

That’s what he was doing the day he met me – going for groceries. I totally derailed his plan. Maybe that’s what the whole thing was – I was meant to be there with that menagerie of church teens just so I could catch Josh going for groceries.

Pickles thinks we’re schizoid. He’s used to spending weeks on the boat. Since I came into his life, we’ve moved him back and forth quite a bit. I think he knows things. When he saw us stacking bags by the front door to leave, he went to his carrier and sat on top, waiting.

We did a week. Came back in for a couple of days, did another week. Josh tells me that with MY family around, he now has a reason to visit land more often. I believe him. I want to believe him. I love the guy and never wanted to disrupt his happiness.

It was late June and we were anchored for an overnighter in the middle of a big lake.

“This is what I worry about, baby,” he said, looking at his laptop.

“That weather system?” I asked. The weather service had said something about a cluster of thunderstorms in the Gulf of Mexico. Josh tells me that early-season hurricanes from there are not uncommon. Some are disastrous events.

“Old folks in Cameron still talk about Hurricane Audrey in 1956,” Josh said. “Killed hundreds there.”

“You think we’ll...”

“We will watch.”

“If it comes this way, what do you do? We evacuated a few years ago for that last one.”

“I rode it out at home. I couldn’t see myself leaving for who knows where, me and Pickles.”

“You had Pickles then?”

“Yeah. And Dorable was on shore at the shipyard. Otherwise...”

“So that’s what we do? Leave Dorable and stay at the house with Pickles?”

“That’s one thought, but that wasn’t my plan.”

“What do you mean?”

“That hurricane tore up the marina. The storm surge raised every boat there seven or eight feet, and when they came down, it was chaos. I don’t want to risk Dorable.”

“You think we can outrun the storm? See which way? Go east or west?”

“Let’s see what it looks like tomorrow.”

Anchored in the lake, the mesh curtains down and zipped against the hordes of mosquitoes, the water mitigated the temperatures as soon as the sun set. We slept on the rear deck. Sex? Oh, yeah ... After sunset, the moon reflecting off the waters when it broke through increasing clouds, very nice. And I got this guy who worships me.

In the morning, first thing, though.

“It’s a hurricane,” Josh intones solemnly.

“Path?”

“We’re in the middle of the three-day cone. The edges of the cone are about as far as we could run in either direction.”

“So?”

“We go up the river. I have a plan.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “Wanna let me in on it?”

“Of course.” He didn’t exactly smile. “I have a place that’s gonna be a hurricane hidey-hole. We go there, tie up in the middle of the channel, and we ride it out.”

“Uh, I’m no naval architect, baby, but Dorable is NOT what I want to face a hurricane with.”

“Here’s the deal, punkin. We’re way up in the river. The hurricane starts shedding windspeed as soon as it starts over land. We likely won’t see hurricane winds. Second, we’re at water level, below the treetops. That cuts the wind. We’re sheltered. That’s the way people did it for centuries.”

I looked at my husband. Nothing suggested that he was some suicidal daredevil. “You sound confident.”

“Our choices are kind of laid out. We evacuate with the rest of this corner of the state and the southeast corner of Texas. No telling WHERE we’ll end up or how long it will take us to get there. Or we sit it out at the house, a pretty safe option, but we come back to find Dorable damaged or sunk. Or we do just like sailors and rivermen have been doing forever. D’you see any other options?”

“No,” I said.

“Uh, what are your mom and dad doing?”

“I’m going to call them,” I said, “but Dad’s pretty conservative. They’ll evacuate.”

I called. Got Mom. Talked with her, explaining our plans. She gave me her best shot, trying to get us to evacuate with them. Finally she put Dad on the phone.

“Lemme talk to your husband,” he said. “Your mom says you’re hard-headed.”

I handed the phone to Josh. He very carefully explained his plan and why it was going to work out. There were a lot of ‘yessirs’ and ‘I know. Love ‘er myself, you know... ‘ statements. Finally he passed the phone back to me.

“Hello, Daddy...” I don’t know if ‘Daddy’ still works to manipulate my dad, but it’s always worth a try.

“You got yourself a real husband there, punkin,” Dad said. “You two be careful. Call and keep us posted, okay?”

“You know the cell system’s gonna go down, right?”

“They said they hardened it since Hurricane Rita, baby. Whatever. As soon as you can, call us.”

“We’ll do that, Dad. I love you. Hug Mom for me. You two be careful, too.”

I punched the ‘end’ button and turned to my husband. “You are to take care of me and make sure I’m okay, Dad says.”

“I’ll do that. ‘Specially since we’re in the same boat...”

“Literally,” I laughed.

“And I have to protect Pickles, too,” he said as the big cat jumped up to look out the window.

I grappled with Josh a little bit, purely recreational, you know, then, “You get us under way, I’ll do breakfast. You liked those bacon and egg sandwiches.”

“Mmmm, Bacon. Possibly the ONLY thing in the universe that tastes better than you,” he laughed.

He took care of getting the engine started, then I felt the slight movements of the deck as he pulled in the anchor. We drifted a bit in the wind as he washed his hands, then put us moving forward, turning, heading to the outlet of the lake and into the channel.

He was perched at the lower steering station when I handed him his sandwich. I sat in the chair beside him.