The Wood-Pussy

As I was spreading out a pile of duff and detritus gleaned from the side of the old family home, I decided to also clean up part of the driveway under the madrone tree, where we sometimes sleep out. The dirt hump was killing me during last night’s lunar eclipse. As the blood red moon crossed the sky, the Milky Way, the heart of our galaxy, was a brilliant swath of stars. The water road in full flood. Last night, I couldn’t get comfortable, so I decided to level the dirt hump out. There was one tantalizing red shag carpet thread poking out of the dirt that I pulled and pulled trying to get to the bottom of it. The hardpan cracked. I pulled and pulled that thread. No end in sight. Like a red herring leading me on. Like trimming a sail. Pulling the wind in close to your chest. Ariadne’s thread, a guide to the labyrinth of the past. I dug up a large tuft of rotted red carpet. And another. I found a huge colony of amaryllis, or naked ladies, nested on top of it, and flakes of embedded plastic and paint. It was from the hull of the old 1940s Wood-Pussy sailboat my uncle had raised from the bottom of Tiburon Harbor. Don’t know how it got to the West Coast. Uncle John thought he was going to restore the 13’ sailboat. A weekend project that never happened. Like the pile of galvanized sheeting he was going to make into a greenhouse. Never happened.  All those lost weekends of good intentions got away from him. And now it’s too late. My mother made a teepee from the old sails. The mast and rudder disappeared along with the centerboard. And I had turned the bow of that little sailboat into a planter circa 1970. But the gophers had drilled through the bottom of the boat and climbed up it to get to the bulbs planted in its bow. Only the toxic naked ladies survived their voracious hunger. Ah, but the imaginary trips we all took in the stern of that little wooden catboat sailing towards unknown shores. A generation of cousins sat in that boat, the wind luffing our hair. I thought the little dingy had long since been removed. But someone had filled it in with dirt. I had been sleeping on the carcass of the Wood-Pussy. A WoodPussy,  dubbed a Woodie by afficionados, is a Yankee name for a skunk. The little stinker became an archaeological dig, like a viking burial ship of the past. I found the rusted metal metal bars that bridged the sides of the boat, broken glass, toy wheels, brass screws, a doll’s white go-go boot, pennies, a soda straw, cigarette filters, more shag carpet in green. My inheritance. Now my penance is to clean up all that embedded toxic marine paint, punky wood, fiberglass and resin parches, and shag carpet that once lined the hull of the boat. And maybe to resurrect some of those old dreams.

• Excavating the Wood-Pussy, Part II