Odd Hours

land they meet, the ocean might have pressed into the canyon mouth, forming a cove with a deep-water approach.
    Considering the geological age of the California coast and the steepness with which this length of it descended to the ocean, I was counting on condition number two. As I leaned close to the sea-map monitor to read the sounding lines, I noticed that this task had been made easier by a color key on a data bar at the bottom of the screen.
    Land was depicted in gold. White signified deep water, which lay under my current position. Blue identified shallow water, and green warned of land exposed at low tide but submerged at high.
    An eastward-narrowing but still sufficiently wide channel, surely deep enough to take the draft of the tugboat, bisected the beach. It carried forward into a cove that was recessed in the mouth of the canyon.
    Bingo.
    Due west of Hecate’s Canyon, I changed course for the coast.
    No longer content to report on what now lay ahead, the radar seemed to express extreme dissatisfaction with the prospects of a lengthy journey on this course. I switched it off.
    By the time I had motored less than half a mile east, the communications officer aboard the distant Coast Guard cutter came back to me by VHF/FM. He was full of questions again.
    I felt that action would answer him better than mere words—and would be more certain to keep the cutter coming at the highest speed.
    Through the bridge windows, I could see not a single coastal light, only palisades of fog that parted to reveal more of the same, though soon I would encounter something more solid than mist.
    I throttled both engines forward and held the wheel steady. The sea map showed the tugboat driving precisely down the center of the Hecate’s Canyon channel, though still a mile offshore.
    Not six weeks ago, at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey in the High Sierra, I had seen the first snow of my life, and within days, I had endured enough of the stuff to last a lifetime.
    Magic Beach had been my first experience of a coastal town. At first it had seemed balmy and a welcome change from the blizzard that had buried the abbey.
    Perhaps I would feel differently in time, but at that moment, as I approached the coast aboard the tug, through fog on treacherous seas, I felt homesick for the dry Mojave and Pico Mundo, and sick to death of water in all its forms, except as it might be necessary for bathing and flushing the john.
    On Channel 22, the communications officer aboard the cutter, observing me by satellite, had stopped repeating the same questions and had begun to issue warnings in an urgent voice.
    I was tense enough without having to listen to his shrill predictions of disaster. I switched off the radiotelephone.
    The depth-finder began to pong more frequently.
    “Ode to Joy” played again. Based on my experience with Utgard Rolf, something by Wagner or anything by any gangster-rap group would have been a better fit with his personality.
    What had Beethoven ever done to Utgard that such lovely music should be used as a crime-phone ring?
    On the screen: the white of a deep-water channel narrowing and funneling toward a narrow crescent of blue ahead, and beyond the blue a crescent of green, and beyond the green a great stately gold swath of land as solid as anyone could want it, the magnificent western ramparts of America the beautiful.
    Motoring right down the center of the channel.
    No need to check the fuel gauge. Only a few ounces were required to complete the trip.
    The voltmeter. To hell with the voltmeter. I had no idea what a voltmeter did. Probably no more than one in a million people knew what a voltmeter did. Yet there it was, occupying a prime lower-left corner of the gauge board, so proud of itself, mocking everyone who was not a lifelong seaman with high voltmeter awareness.
    Gear-oil pressure gauge, engine-oil pressure gauge, water temperature gauge, tachometers: They were of no interest to me now, suppliers of useless data, silly instruments of no import.
    What respect I still had for marine technology was reserved for the depth-finder, the sonar soundings, ponging faster and louder, faster.
    My plan, as patchwork as it might be, had been predicated on the belief that nuclear bombs were pretty much as hard to detonate as were sticks of dynamite.
    You can throw a fat stick of dynamite against a wall, whack it with a hammer, stab it with a knife—and, at least as I understand the subject, it will not explode. A lit fuse will