Chapter 2

When I opened my eyes, I was blinded by the sun directly overhead. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the daystar seemed to take up half the seamless cerulean. We were in the midst of one of Maine’s renowned Indian summers and the temperature tottered within fifteen degrees of a proximal seventy-ish.

I took a deep breath of the crisp ocean air, which is reminiscent of eating a saltine between gasps on an oxygen tank, and gazed across Mother Atlantic. There wasn’t much for waves on her this morning and it was hard to believe I was bobbing along in the second largest body of water on the planet. An osprey flew nearby and did his dive-bomb-fish-retrieval thing, and I couldn’t help feeling sympathy pains for the little silver guy in the osprey’s beak. One second he’s swimming downstream to visit his brother, the next second he’s superman, only to be superdead. Poor little fella.

I kicked off my khaki shorts, boxer briefs, and docksiders, then checked to see if there were any other boats in the vicinity before walking the plank él Natural. The Atlantic was freezing, but a good freezing, the kind you get in water above fifty degrees, but below fifty one. If you want to get technical, I wasn’t in the Atlantic per se; I was in the Penobscot Bay, which forty miles east invariably becomes the Atlantic Ocean.

Anyhow, the bay retained its summer heat a wee bit longer than say the English Channel, and I was frigid not freezing. I trod water and watched the predominantly white hull of The Backstern bob up and down with the current.

If you’re wondering about the name, my sister, Lacy, aptly named the boat after her pug Baxter. Alas, The Backstern was moving, but it was coming towards me, so no worries, right? Wrong. My entire body had turned into one comprehensive cramp. Now this could have been rooted in my not waiting a half hour after eating. Perhaps the five beers I’d guzzled in the last hour had something to do with it. There’s also a slim chance it was related to the two chunks of lead that had gone zipping through my flesh nearly a year ago. Most likely it was a combination of all three.