I pulled my boy’s boots out of the wreckage before I pulled my own spine straight.
They were still tied, still full of salt and silt, and I held them like they meant something more than rubber and habit. The boat had gone down in the black water like a stone with memory — and all I could do was stand there, kneeling in the wrecked foam of what used to be my life.
They said it was a rogue swell. I said it was a long time coming.
That crab boat had been mine since Reagan’s first term. Bought her used out of Port Orford, patched her up myself with beer money and elbow grease. Named her Nina Mae, after my wife, back when she still smiled at me from the porch light. Back before the fuel started costing more than the catch.
And long before my son, Jimmy, decided to crew with me because there was nothing else for a boy with strong arms and a high school diploma in a town with one grocery store and three gas stations.
That last morning, the fog sat thick on the water like a blanket no one wanted to lift. Jimmy stood on the deck drinking his coffee black like he was trying to prove something. Maybe he was. Twenty-five and already working like a man born tired.
“Should we wait it out?” he asked, wiping steam from his lip.
I shook my head. “Crab don’t wait. And rent’s late.”
Truth was, I hadn’t paid the slip fee in three months. Harbor Master looked the other way ‘cause we go back to Little League, but even that kind of mercy has its limit.
We shoved off into a swell that grumbled low, like the sea was trying to speak and we weren’t listening.
Crabbing ain’t romantic. It’s hauling steel and cutting hands, bait guts and diesel stink. It’s wind that feels like a curse on your skin. You learn early the ocean doesn’t care if your kid’s on board or if your knuckles ache. It just is. It takes.
That day, the pots were coming up light. Fewer crabs, more seaweed. Some of them dead before they surfaced, cooked in a patch of water that ran too warm for January.
“Could be a bloom,” Jimmy said.
“Could be the end,” I muttered.
We’d been seeing it for years. The water warming. The currents wrong. Storms out of season. Guys were pulling half what they used to in the ‘80s. Back then, we’d come back with a full belly and a check fat enough to buy steak for Sunday.
Now we were lucky if we covered gas and gloves.
The wind picked up mid-morning, sharper than forecasted. Sky turned the color of bad teeth. Jimmy looked at me and didn’t say it, but I knew.
Should’ve turned back.
But I wanted one more pot. Just one more.
We never saw the second wave.
The first rocked us. The second flipped us.
I remember the sound more than anything — like a freight train made of water and regret. The deck came up at me like a punch. The boom snapped like a tree limb. My shoulder tore like a wet rag.
When I surfaced, gasping, the boat was on her side. The crate of bait was bobbing like a coffin.
And Jimmy was gone.
I screamed. I screamed so hard I coughed up blood and salt and twenty years of hard pride.
Then he burst up twenty feet off the bow, clinging to a buoy, eyes wide as the sky.
It took everything I had to swim to him. My shoulder burned, and my lungs screamed, but I got there.
He was shaking. “I thought you were dead.”
“No,” I rasped. “Not yet.”
We were in the water for three hours.
The Coast Guard said we were lucky. I said they were late.
They hauled us out like sacks of wet sand, teeth chattering, muscles locking. They put blankets over our shoulders and handed us cocoa like we were kids at a campfire instead of broke men who’d just watched their last chance sink under a sick-colored sky.
The boat was gone. Just gone. No trace but a half-shredded rope and a gas slick the size of a promise.
Jimmy didn’t speak the whole ride back. Just stared out over the railing, jaw clenched like it was holding back a scream.
I haven’t fished since.
That was two winters ago.
Now I work nights at a grocery store that used to be a hardware store. I push carts, stock shelves, smile at people who don’t look me in the eye. Folks still call me Cap. Maybe out of habit. Maybe out of pity.
Jimmy moved up to Portland. Says he’s studying HVAC. I send him a check every month, even if it’s only forty bucks. He doesn’t cash them all, but he never tells me to stop.
I sit on the porch some nights and stare at the water like it owes me something. It doesn’t. It never did.
I used to think I was a provider.
That if I just worked hard enough, rowed fast enough, patched enough holes, I could keep the world turning for the people I loved.
But you can’t out-row the tide.
And you sure as hell can’t outlive a storm that’s been brewing since before your time.
The sea’s changing. Everyone knows it. The crabs are fewer. The storms come sooner. The docks are quieter now — fewer boots, more seagulls. Younger men don’t come around much. Can’t blame ‘em. Hard to build a life on something that keeps sinking.
One night, I ran into Mike Sutton at the tavern. He used to run four boats out of Crescent City. Now he tends bar for tourists with tie-dye shirts and questions about “eco tours.”
He poured me a bourbon and said, “You hear about Red?”
“No.”
“Heart attack. On the water.”
I nodded. “Hell of a way to go.”
“Better than pushing carts, huh?”
I didn’t answer.
Because here’s the truth no one tells you when you’re young and strong: Sometimes the quiet dying is worse. Not the death of the body — the death of what made you proud. Of walking into a room and knowing who you are.
Now I don’t know anymore.
I used to be a fisherman.
Now I’m just a man with old boots and a shoulder that clicks when it rains.
But every now and then, I go down to the harbor.
Just to look.
Smell the diesel. Hear the rigging rattle in the breeze.
I sit on the bench where Nina used to wait, back when I’d come in with fresh crab and frost in my beard. She’s gone now. Five years this spring. Cancer, slow and mean.
I talk to her sometimes.
Tell her Jimmy’s okay. That I kept his boots. That I still dream of the water.
And some mornings, if the wind’s just right, I swear I can smell the salt on her hair and the butter on her hands from the way she’d crack claws by candlelight.
I close my eyes.
And for a minute, I’m thirty again.
Strong. Foolish. Grinning at the tide.
The sea doesn’t apologize.
It doesn’t explain.
But it remembers you — in callused hands, in torn nets, in sons with your jawline and your stubbornness.
And sometimes, just sometimes, it leaves behind enough to build something new.
Even if it’s just memory.
Or a boy who made it out.
Or a pair of rubber boots that still smell like home.
