Drawbridges

Then he was outside with my friend Noel, with his bandana on now and they were smoking a joint, passing it back and forth and he was in the tree, the old gum, spot lights shining up the long trunk, turning it silver, while I sat inside with the others and didn’t care about trees and people who climbed them. He told me he had sailed here. And later he told me that he had been waiting tables where the curious customers had chatted and asked and asked, staring up at him, trapping him with empty glasses in his hands.

- And what now, Jacob, now that college is finished?

And he had thought of a place far from Vermont, a place where the seasons did not cut up the years, a place and a way of movement so unlikely they would be forced to look down to their full plates when he passed.

- I am going to Australia. I am going to hitchhike to Australia, hitchhike boats.

They snorted.

- Impossible. Can’t be done. 

They swallowed their rich food, swilling their wine around their mouths.

But he knew it could be done. He had done it.  As a younger man hanging from a bridge one night near Calais, late one night with his mate Jason-the-drummer, after playing three bars, and giving up on the dancing Virginias, they had decided to walk out of town and camp. The moon, of course, was full. They shared their last joint as they waited for the draw bridge. And Jacob impatient, could see nothing they were waiting for, no vessels, until he clambered over the barricade and saw a bobbing white yacht, small, about 28 feet long.

-Oy. And in jest had thrown his thumb up. The man in the dark let his engine idle and called up.

- Where you goin’ mate?

- England!

- Got any drugs on yer?

And truthfully, they had not, no longer.

- You’ll have to stay awake.

John Johnson steered the yacht over, pulled over to a place where the boys could drop onto the deck as light footed as any ship cats, while his family slept beneath. He had left them by England’s white cliffs in the new morning and the boy had understood that his road was not limited to land. The answer Jacob had given to those diners in New England had become his impetus. Once articulated, it was no longer far from real, as those things we say become true.