ESSAY AND PAINTING BY ROBERT BECK
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the burning boat MARK MAST’S BOAT BURNED this morning. Everyone who was talking about it—and believe me that’s all anyone was talking about—said it was a good thing Mark wasn’t out hauling traps when it happened. Not that anyone really knows what happened. First of all it was foggy as all hell. You couldn’t see any of the boats in the harbor. You could hardly see the end of the wharf. The sun was coming up—not really up but it was just starting to get light. There was this weird glow out in the mist. Nothing big, just a faint brightness. It was like, what is that light? Then the Mary B went up. Mark was in his dinghy halfway to the boat when there was this big whuff and orange flames. Smoke billowed up and the fog swirled around the Mary B, lifting with the heat. You could see her now, with fire in her ports and coming out of the wheelhouse. Even from the wharf you could feel the heat. At first Mark sat on the water with the oars in the air, light flickering on his face, stunned to see his boat in flames. But when he noticed that the mooring line had nearly burned through his thoughts quickly turned to the eighty gallons of fuel in her tanks. All the boats are moored pretty close. This could get much worse. He yelled back to Calvin Porter on the wharf that the boat was going adrift. Calvin grabbed a mushroom anchor from beside the shed and lowered it into Stan Warren’s skiff. He climbed in, started the outboard, and turned her out from the dock towards the burning boat. That was about when the fire truck came down Wharf road. Calvin swung the skiff around the Mary B’s bow and heaved the anchor over the rail—that’s what, fifty pounds with chain? He’s a big guy. Big arms. Burned the hair right off them. Burned his face, too. But the anchor took hold
and he was able to start pulling her back from the other boats. The fire truck backed onto the wharf as far as they dared. Chief Daub climbed down into Bill Groffer’s outboard and they lowered the hose to him. Daub held the nozzle end tight over his shoulder and leaned forward, bracing himself in the bow. Bill steered around the moorings and boats, trailing the hose as the guys at the truck played it out. It was a heavy pull, and Bill had to weave through the water to keep from wrapping the buoys. Calvin Porter towed the Mary B away from the other boats and closer to Daub’s hose, uncoiling as much line as he could to get some distance from the blazing boat and still keep her in check.
Even so, it was hot. The Mary B’s black hull was a silhouette in a furnace, floating on the reflection of its flames, snapping and crackling. A column of acrid smoke roiled from the burning fiberglass into the parted fog. The cabin was mostly gone. Chief Daub started the spray as they got close, shielding them from the heat. The force of the hose shoved back at Daub, pushing aside the bow of the skiff, but these men have lived their lives on the water and know it like the land under their feet. Bill kept them in position as Daub made sure the cockpit decking got doused where the fuel tanks were located. From the beginning there was no saving the Mary B and she would likely burn right down to the water line, but they had to make sure nothing hap-
pened to those tanks. Being that close took nerve. They poured some fifteen hundred gallons onto the hull and that held her off until the Coast Guard showed up and finished the job. Good thing, since that’s all the water they had. When the Mary B cooled they hauled her out at the Carver’s Point ramp, drained the fuel and took the hull, which had twisted and folded in on itself, over to Preston’s yard for the insurance investigator to look over. Folks are saying it might have been the electronics on the new engine. They never really turn off, with all those computers talking to each other. Or maybe it was a battery. Who knows. But yeah, it’s a good thing that Mark wasn’t out hauling traps when it happened. n
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