Perspectives Rejection from every quarter tepping out of the warm Victoria Station restaurant into the icy northeast wind coming off Salem Harbor, I dared only a quick look down from the pier at the rows of shrink-wrapped boats that filled the docks. I knew from experience there were a number of liveaboards down there; one could tell from the more substantial hinged doors built into the shrink, and the thick power cords, and the worn down foot tracks in the snow of the finger docks. This was home for the winter for some poor souls – hunkering down in a hundred or so square feet of condensed, condensationbreeding living space inside a plastic hull, under a huge white-plastic bubble. But, ah, how romantic! I knew better, for, as Huck Finn said at the end of Twain’s famous novel, “I been there before.” My mind flashed back to an even colder place than Pickering Wharf in January 2013: Gordy’s Marina on the frozen
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Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota in January 1978. Even in the bloom of spring, Gordy’s was certainly no Marina Del Rey. A patchwork houseboat colony, it looked more like a floating tenement row than anything remotely resembling a place for pleasure yachts. At my last count there were about 20 of us living aboard an assortment of craft resembling giant dilapidated floating boxes patched together out of plywood, pressboard, aluminum and steel, and tethered to rickety, rusty steel-framed and delaminated plywood docks that ran along the right-descending muddy bank of the Mississippi River. We ended up there for a number of reasons: fantasies of romance, realities of divorce, ravages of drugs and alcohol, financial ruin from job loss or failed business ventures, or from being general social outcasts due to various forms of mental illness. There was a
David Roper
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Points East Midwinter 2013
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