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I'm a story scavenger. I grew up around sea stories, mostly from my grandfather, who was a river pilot and a tanker captain. He'd tell stories to anybody who would listen. He'd tell them twice for good measure. It was how he interacted with the world, or at least how he interacted with me. When I was older, I tape-recorded hours of him talking about the old days on the river and didn't begin to scratch all that had happened.
Looking back now, his stories were ironic, with a twisted kind of humor to them. They were sometimes sweet, like how he met my grandmother on the river, but most of his stories weren't romantic in the least. They were chiseled down to the grit.
He grew up dirt poor and fatherless in old Sacramento. He graduated sixth grade and went to work on the boats when he was eleven, then went on to work 54 years on the water. A generation later, my dad went to college instead of to sea, so I didn't really grow up in that world, but on its periphery. I didn't grow up boating or sailing or anything like that. We lived in the Bay Area, though, so images of work boats were around me all the time: Matson freighters south of the Bay Bridge on the Oakland side, or red white and blue tugs in the Carquinez strait below the C&H sugar plant across from Cal Maritime, or Crowley tugs out of Pier 9, or oil tankers lying off China Basin. The idea of "going to sea" haunted me. I can remember standing at Point Richmond when I was eight or so, looking straight out the Golden Gate, which was wild and foggy behind, and cold out there, thinking that's it, that's where you go when you go to sea! I had recurring dreams of being lost at sea. I would wake up convinced they were real.
To this day I get bouts of deja vu when I'm anywhere near the waterfront. In my twenties I went to work on towboats in Alaska, where I was always drawn to the most eccentric people, because they were the best storytellers. By comparison, I was an uninteresting character, so I mostly shut up, worked hard, and listened. I'm not sure I would have continued working in that world if I'd not been a writer, but for a writer it was hard to beat. Not only was I exposed to a thousand strange characters, but I was paid at the same time. Now I find myself gravitating toward the most powerful stories I know. There are a thousand of them on every merchant voyage, on every towboat in Puget Sound, on every rice boat going up the Sacramento ship channel. I love that.
The mechanism of how they do it is based on real events and a very real problem, but the way I apply it is imagined. In the age of digitized document forgery, pirates can easily overtake a ship, kill or cast off the crew, repaint, rename, falsify registry papers, and sail off to China to sell the cargoes, and then to the ship-breakers in Bangladesh. For anybody interested, I highly recommend The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche, a journalistic tour de force on the subject.
While it's a problem that has only increased in the past twenty-five years, I do not treat it journalistically. I twist it all up with a pack of anti-social personalities. Western Limit is therefore based less on reality and more on a seaman's anti-authoritarian fantasy: what if we just killed the bastards and took over the ship and sold it on the black market, lock, stock and barrel? The crew I gathered together struck me as just the kind that would usurp authority in that way, and make for a fable of self-destruction and anti-authoritarianism.
As long as there are men and women in proximity, there'll be sex on ships, and wherever there is sex, it seems to me, there's bound to be love, at least once in a while. Is it common? I don't know. I know one chief mate who met his wife exactly as Snow sees Elisabeth at the book's opening: lying on her back wearing coveralls, cinching down a Dresser coupling with a giant box wrench, and wearing a spattering of oil all over her face. You can't get more romantic than that! Elisabeth's technique of taking a lover so that the other men won't harass her was borrowed from a female captain I sailed for in 1989. She said it worked remarkably well, but since it's a novelist's job to not let things work out so well, I wanted to push it, make the love unrequited.
I like unrequited love. I have a lot of experience with it. I like the idea that Harold and Elisabeth are "just friends" but the pretense of being lovers makes it kind of true psychologically, even if they know it isn't true in reality. It's Snow's relationship with another that forces him to take stock of his life, and think about someone besides himself. It's a rebirth, has a kind of primal power; you can reach back into the depth of human history and imagine it as the first moment of moral questioning. Love and empathy and morality and sanity are all bound up together. That's what the story is really about.
I always put character first, but that doesn't mean that the pacing and plotting aren't intentional. I like when a plot twist bubbles out of real people, because then the actions come off as real. I'm uncomfortable with the main character of adventure stories always being a heightened, comic-book kind of hero. I'm not a writer of plots in that sense. But it happens that I'm fascinated by marginal people, so their internal needs can drive some pretty weird plot elements if you just give them their head a bit. I like that, when characters surprise me. Even if I have no intention of using it to surprise the reader, I still don't want to be ahead of my own plot, I like to discover it as I go.
Reminds me of the character of Chef in Apocalypse Now, screaming "Never get off the boat! Never get off the boat!" and after that, the Michael Herr written voice-over of Captain Willard saying 'goddamned right, never get off the boat...unless you were gonna go all the way'. Of course, as a novelist, you have to get off the boat and you have to go all the way. The closed world of the ship at sea is dramatically useful, but in my story, the psychological tension isn't set in full relief until the characters venture ashore. Snow's goals are all centered around getting ashore: to retire, to party, to make his score, to find Beth's father, to get laid, to find his own half siblings – whatever it happens to be. There's always promise in going ashore, and there's always danger.
In an ironic twist, being at sea is their safe haven, like the island in Lord of the Flies, a place where the normal rules don't apply. The conflicts ashore reveal new truths about our people. The crew has a different hierarchy ashore than they do at sea. At sea, Bracelin is in charge, but ashore, we see everybody, Bracelin included, looking to Snow as the authority. I wanted the light of human society to shine on them, but I didn't necessarily want it to make things any clearer. I wanted more complications to result.
My first day offshore in Prudhoe Bay, I was sent to work down a string of moored barges with this old salt who couldn't stop telling stories. He reminded me of my grandfather, but one generation younger, WWII instead of WWI. He taught me the basics of line work, knots and splices, how to be a longshoreman, that kind of thing, what to look for to stay safe. All the while he rattled on with stories that would have made my grandfather blush. We ended up rooming together on the barge for two seasons during my first five. He had been on a fleet oiler at Pearl Harbor, survived a kamikaze attack in the Coral Sea, been through Vietnam on merchant ships during the war. He really did have sixty half siblings spread over the earth. He told me a personal account of being on a ship caught in the so-called Bhola tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, 1970. How the silt waters had sandblasted the ship down to bare metal. How the storm's sea surge drowned 250,000 to 500,000 people in what was then East Pakistan. By all rights, the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history. He had lived a wild, free existence, but he was also a morally ambiguous character.
After he died I ran into people who said some things about him that were hard to believe. I defended him, said no way, couldn't be true. Then the novelist kicked in, and I thought – this is the beauty of fiction – what if it were true? I not only heard some bizarre tales of his life, but from a longshoreman, I heard he'd died in distress, weeping over lost life. That began to work on me. I remembered how my grandfather had gone through something like that. Maybe they were alike that way, unapologetic hedonists in life, but facing death they were wracked by fear, self-recrimination, and spiritual crisis. Trying to make sense of life. In that way, Western Limit is a spiritual journey. Like any good adventure story.
Of course, I hope they find it compelling and haunting. I like stories you can't put down and can't forget. A story you can read again and find new things. Those are the kinds of novels I enjoy reading, and, hopefully, the kind I can manage to write.
I've quit all my addictions save for golf and writing. It sounds strange I know, but I rarely have a golf club more than five feet away from me, and I'm constantly putting, chipping, dry swinging in my house, and have been for thirty years. I'm currently working on several arcane bits of swing mechanics, including shaft plane at the downswing transition.
I'm also revising two short stories, and recently finished the first draft of a new novel. The latter is a family story about the summer of 1963 when my aunt's lover sneaked into my uncle's house, hit him over the head with a two-by-four, and shot him four times. That the man left him for dead is only surprising when you realize that the assailant was a doctor, and under other circumstances might have saved his life. As it was, my uncle did survive, but his family was never the same again – as any sane person might imagine.
The Western Limit of the World by David Masiel is out now Read more
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