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TH EAMAZONTRAI L l3Y LEE LYNVCI-l

Future Dyke

SHE WAS THE MOST ENDEARING BABY BUTCH _ Q

I’d come across in a very long time. Slight, fine-
boned, with country-cut light hair just short of a

pudding bowl-do, a walk that was half-strut, and 

a face that was all eager bashfulness. She was like
sunshine breaking through a cloud of straights.

I saw her in the old fishing town where I live
now. The town is filled with hills and old buildings
and fishing vessels to spare. The old bay front is
crammed with tourist shops, but they have to
share space with fish processing plants. There
are crowds of sightseers, but there are
also lazing, lolling, barking, panhandling
harbor seals out on the docks.

' Sometimes I feel a little guilty about
living in such a place. Surely the
Plains dwellers
love" their flat,
dry spaces and
East Coast
residents don’t
mind the cold
and urban
sprawl. In D.C.,
AP $»i.%l«rnt.°-we: 
apparently don’t
mind the drought of reason either. The Supreme
Court is _about to seesaw to the right. Isn’t there
some way to find a balance before the guys
ir1 robes make or affirm laws that will take the
starch out of that baby dyke when she tries to get
a job or marry her girl or adopt a baby?

Here, it’s been raining a lot, sometimes for
days on end. The wind rattles and whistles past
the cozy home I rent like it’s trying to break in
at the sliding glass doors or lift off the roof. Yet
the next day, or even the same day, the town will
go all balmy, the storm having swept in negative
ions and ozonated the air. I can’t help thinking
that here I am basking in the beauty of it all while
people who lost so much in the hurricanes may
not even have homes. _

This town that’s rich with nature’s bounty — the
ocean, the bay, the river, the hills, the storms and
the sunshine _and rainbows — is an economically
poor town. How do the people on the fish
processing lines make it? How do the crabbers
get any medical care when the buyers won’t pay
as much as last year and less still than the year
before? There’s a memorial walk along the bay
front with tiles commemorating fishermen lost at
sea. They do this for $1.35 a pound. '

It’s always relatively cool here. We complain
if it gets much over 70. Locals know shorts are a
bad idea any time of year. The shady forests are
dense with ferns and mushrooms, trees dripping
even after the rain. It’s beyond me how American
troops survive in a climate like Iraq's or how
the powerful can sit in air-conditioned rooms

    

 

\1[*.()',i'.‘y"

_ deciding to send kids like the baby dyk’e into a

   
  
  
  
  
 
  
   
   

place with some of the highest ten1por‘atur<~s
anywhere in the world. Bad enough the soldiers
risk injury—tl1ey’re also felled by l1eatstroke.I
feel spoiled because I wouldn’t. last an hour in
that climate.

By night, here on the Pacific
coast, I can see the lights of
the marinas, the white masts
of boats bobbing on the water,
the fishing vessels gliding out
under the bridge to the open sea.
The Coast Guard station is all lit up,
its ships glowing white and every
light set like a jewel in a rich
blackness that gives the night a
feeling of adventure.

    

c How do the crabbers

get any medical care

  when the buyers

won't pay as much as
last year and less still
than thevyear before?

By day, I can walk along the beach, though it
is sometimes strewn with birds dead of toxins
we put in the sea. Twice a year there are beach
cleanups, with hundreds of volunteers picking up
tons of litter, from dumped refrigerators to miles
of tangled fishing line, from rafts of Styrofoam to
flofillas of plastic pop bottles. Now and then oil
slicks or entire ships must be cleaned from the
innocent shores.

Did the baby butch grow up walking‘ the
beaches? Is she from a fisherman’s family? Does
she know how lucky she is to live in this beautiful
place or does she only feel her isolation? Willshe
go away, find a girl, bring her back? Will they help
to take care of the beaches, fight to elect people
who’ll spend our tax money at home instead of
squandering it in hotlands?

I can picture them, not all that long from now,
walking the bayfront at night, refreshed from
the rain, holding hands. I want them to have that
future. V

Copyright Lee Lynch 2006. Lynch's 12th book, the novel Sweet Creek, (Bold StrokeslBooks) was reviewed
in the December issue. Lynch lives on the Oregon Coast. Her web page is at http://|eelynch6.tripod.com.

I

ll

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