The Seafarers

Photo Credit : wheelerstudio.com

One summer, Roy Mar stood outside his house on the porch, bored and a little sweaty. His parents were inside taking a nap--the heat had gotten to them. They had insisted he play outside (despite the heat and the sun and the bugs).

    

"What am I supposed to do?" Roy asked.

    

"Be creative," they said before shuffling him out of their air-conditioned house.

    

Creatively, Roy sat on the porch, but not really. He wasn't truthfully, actually very good at being creative. He had never been as fascinated by fairy tales and adventure stories, not like his sister anyway. His sister would do everything she could to get him to play make-believe games and explore regular-looking things, like big rocks and trees. She would call the inside of trees, "tree worlds." Roy called her weird.

    

But sitting on a porch in the heat of the day was not his idea of fun, so he decided to head down to the end of the lane where the old-man-of-the-sea lived. Norm used to be a seaman, retired to spend the latter of his days in the company of curious cats, a pipe, and the daily newspaper. Despite living on land, he called himself a sea veteran. He was a former warrior of the sea. Roy thought he was strange. How was a fisherman a warrior of the sea?

    

Strange or not, Roy would visit him sometimes to make a trade. Chocolate fudge ice cream for an hour or so of listening to his old "seaweed adventures." (This was what Norm called them, not Roy, who did not even like seaweed.)

    

Halfway down the lane Roy's sister caught up to him, twirling a flower in her fingers.

    

"Don't follow me, Trisha," Roy grunted.

    

"Why would I?" She snapped, and then continued to walk at a small distance behind him anyway.

    

When they arrived at Norm's house, the old-man-of-the-sea was standing in his front yard with the sprinklers splashing on him. The water soaked his blue vest, the same blue vest he always wore, faded and torn and threadbare. Pieces of the sewn-on badge with the strange symbol were coming loose. Roy always wondered why he wore that vest and what the symbol meant. It had never come up in any of his strange stories. He also wondered why Norm was standing in the middle of his lawn with the sprinklers running.

    

"Hello, Norm," Trisha saluted as if he were a member of the Navy. She was not surprised about him standing in the sprinklers.

    

"Hello, Norm, why are you standing in the sprinklers?" Roy asked.

    

"It makes me feel closer to home," Norm said without explaining any further. He squished as he walked over to them by the gray unpainted fence, and said, 

"Hello Roy and Patricia Mar. Have I ever told you your name means sea in Spanish?"

    

"Yes," Roy said, "Almost every time I see you."

    

Norm's eyebrows rose for a moment, but he did not let his short term-memory loss bother him. "You," he pointed to Roy. "You want ice cream, and you," he pointed to Trisha. "You want a story."

    

Both Roy and Trisha nodded.

    

A few minutes later they were seated in the water-soaked lawn, none of them complaining about how water soaked through their clothes. It was hot and no one cared. Besides, fudge ice cream made everything good.

    

"Children," Norm said even though Roy believed he was at least as old as a young adult. "Have I ever told you about how I got this vest?"

    

Trisha, excited to hear something new, shook her head. "No, we have only heard about the days you were a fisherman in Alaska."

    

"Well let me tell you about the day I was fishing in the open sea, and I came face-to-face with every sea traveler's worst enemy."

    

"Pirates?" Trisha asked.

    

"Of course not. Those people hunt for treasure, not fish. Besides, they have a horrible sense of direction and they'll believe anything you tell them. No, every sea traveler's greatest fear is falling prey to the Black Winds."

    

"What's that?" Roy asked. Norm paused, a little distracted by Roy's sudden show of interest.

    

"It's a kind of storm that comes every few years. It rolls in during the coldest month of the year. It comes out of nowhere, rain, sleet and powerful winds. It could be daylight one minute, and the next it's completely black. And the worst thing about it is the howling from the wind. Some have said that the weak of heart turn insane at the howling from the Black Winds. But I was no virgin sailor, I knew I had to keep my wits." Norm lifted his knee and pounded the ground for emphasis. "No, if I lost my wits, the Black Winds would do what every sea traveler fears, it would throw me off-course, further than any kind of storm could. I heard one sea vessel was sailing up the coast of Africa when they ran into the Black Winds. By the end of the storm they found themselves on the Carribean coast. Only three survived that one."

   

Roy and Trisha were silent. This story was much more interesting than any other fishing story the-man-from-the-sea had ever told them.

    

"But we were lucky, our fishing boat shred to pieces before the winds could carry us too far."

    

"Lucky?" Roy asked.

    

"Yes, we were lucky because they came to rescue us."

    

"Who came to rescue you?" Trisha asked impatiently.

    

"The ones from underneath the sea."