Kira Rambles

Though all of us were broke, we started pooling our ones for a nice tip when the waitress approached the table of twenty three, dissociating, holding a fishbowl filled with something orange. 

“I have a piña colada for Boats,” she said, and the bosun jumped out of a wooden chair carved and painted with a parrot wearing a sombrero to claim it. He was trying hard to give himself a boat name, a nickname, and had chosen, literally, Boats. It wasn’t sticking. Maybe a boat drink for Boats could cement the attempt, but I doubted. We worked with people called Bear, Gator, Shiny, and Daisy (after the sour cream), but as a fellow sailor without a boat name, I knew you can’t force it. My identical twin and I worked on tall ships together in the Salish Sea as teenagers in the summers, and as much as I silently wished our shipmates would call us Port and Starboard for the different sides of our noses we pierced at sixteen, no one ever did. But I was never brave enough to order a drink as Starboard, so who am I to say what’s worth doing? 

Six years later, I worked winter maintenance on an environmental education boat, a sloop a continent away, where the engineer liked to rile up the port captain at lunch. 

“Is the diesel we burn really worth the good we do through environmental education?” they asked.

I don’t know. I do know not every tall ship sailor loves the job forever. I worked for a schooner captain in Spain whose uncle built the boat to retrace Magellan’s circumnavigation as a symbol of global unity in the 80s but lost his financiers and never did. Now his nephew feels obligated to keep the ship afloat. Literally. 

“My uncle used up all of my family’s luck building this boat,” he said. “There’s none left for my generation now.” And that feels like a metaphor for a lot else, like the world’s carbon capture capacity and natural resources and some semblance of financial security for young adults. Are we all using up someone else’s luck? 

That boat is now for sale. 

And even though I know everything wrong with it, if I had three million dollars, I would still buy it. My grandmother used to say everyone needs something to do, something to love, and something to look forward to. When we debated joining the Coast Guard at seventeen, Boats—though no one but him ever did call him that—told my twin and I with confidence that tall ships would always be there for us to come back to. My twin joined. I didn’t. And Boats was right. Against all odds, still running on shoestring budgets, after a global pandemic, tall ships are still here, and I do think the diesel they burn is worth it.