Island Legends: The 3 a.m. Boat

L to r: Mary Litchfield Tuel, Thea Wescott, Dona Bradley.

A couple of weeks ago, Dona Bradley, Michael Shapiro, and I went over to Gig Harbor on a Tuesday night to play at an open mike that is run by Thea Wescott at a place called the Markee.

Dona, Thea, and I got to know each other back in the seventies.

Dona was singing in bands with David Conant and later Fred Schactler. Thea and Steve Fearey were working as the duet Bodacious when I met them. Rick Tuel, Chris Howie, and I worked together as Kanout Manufacturing in the early seventies.

As Dona, Thea, and I talked on that recent Tuesday night in Gig Harbor, the 3 a.m. ferry kept coming up. The 3 a.m. ferry was the boat that musicians took home. You played until the bar or club closed at 2 a.m., then you packed up your gear and beat feet for Fauntleroy.

If you missed that 3 a.m. boat, you either had to nap in your car or go find someplace to eat and hang out until the first ferry left in the morning.

A musician named Michael Murfin who lived on the island at that time had a ’58 Chevy from which he had removed the back seat. He put a mattress that went from behind the front seat into the trunk, and napped on the ferry dock when he missed the last boat. I thought that was ingenious but was not prepared to remove my ’58 Chevy’s back seat.

Later he moved to the city and joined the Love Family and his name was changed to Asaph.

But I digress.

Back to the 3 a.m. boat.

Rick, Chris, and I would go upstairs on that boat and go forward to the shelter deck, the covered area that had wonderful acoustics, and we’d sing a cappella harmonies: Amazing Grace, and I’ll Fly Away, and Daniel Prayed, and sea chanties. That singing was probably more fun than the gigs we played, come to think of it.

I remember being hit one night by the realization of what a miracle it was to be able to sing like that, to be part of making such a beautiful noise, to be filled with it, and carried by it. I was free of my own lousy self-opinion long enough to realize what a gift I had been given.

Thea and Dona have that gift, also.

I always had the greatest respect and admiration for Thea and Dona, because I thought of them as real professional musicians – they worked regularly with their bands and they toured around the northwest, and up into Canada and down into California. That’s what I thought of as the real thing.

I thought of myself as a folkie, playing irregularly at coffee houses and folk clubs and occasionally on the military bases for soldiers who for some reason were unable to get off base that night. My work paid a little, not much, but I thought of it as professional musician light, not like Dona and Thea, who were out there doing it.

We talked about musicians and other island people we knew forty-five years ago. Where are they now? We know where some of them are and what they are doing. Some of them we know are gone now.

The 3 a.m. boat was discontinued at some point, and many musicians moved off the island at that time. For those of us for whom the island was home, moving off was never an option.

The island music community is now booming more than ever. We have an embarrassment of riches here in singers, songwriters, and musicians. I am reminded once more that all art happens despite everything. I do not write because I’m organized and have a perfect little studio that’s all set up, for example. I write in chaos, disarray, and desperation. We do it because we can’t not do it.

Dona, Thea, and I are still singing. Still laughing. Still loving people. Still enjoying each other, perhaps more than ever now because of our long-shared past.

And Michael? Yeah, he was there, too. He was a kid, maybe twenty-one when we met him. But he had big aspirations. And I must say this: he has always had excellent taste in women.

That open mike in Gig Harbor is every Tuesday night at the Markee on Olympic Boulevard. Sign up at 6 p.m. We’ll be going back. See you there maybe.

Peace.

Blackberry Pie

It is blackberry season. I walk thirty yards from my front door carrying an old plastic yogurt container and start picking.

There is no need to bend over, no need to reach through or wrestle with canes to get to fruit that is hidden. This is the first picking, and all that is necessary is to walk along the edge of the patch grabbing the close, ripe berries. I leave the ones that are out of reach, and the ones that are not quite ripe. I especially leave the ones which I might come back for later, when I will bring pruning shears to clear a path to heavy clumps of berries which for now are inaccessible to a person who doesn’t feel like bleeding for pie. Yet.

When the container is full enough, I bring it in and set the berries to soak in cold water in the sink for a while. My hope is that this soak will remove British Columbian wildfire ash and other particulates which have settled on the berries, plus float little bits of vegetation that have been gathered along with the berries, as well as any living creatures that might be in there.

I know, I know – what are insects but a little added protein? And yet I resist their presence in pie. Let’s not bring up the time the cover fell off the range hood fan and all those desiccated bug corpses fell into the spaghetti sauce. It was a long time ago, and I picked out the large pieces. Nobody got sick or anything.

This batch of berries yielded grass seeds, some little leaves, and only a couple of tiny bugs. Having removed the detritus and rinsed and drained the berries, I mixed them with the sugar, flour, pinch of salt, and lemon juice, and set what was now pie filling aside to make the crust.

Just kidding. I don’t make pie crust. I did, back when I was young and trying to be a good hippie earth mama, embroidering jeans and making bread and so on.

My dad was a farmer. He raised apples. I have clear memories of my mother standing at the kitchen table, rolling out pie dough for apple pies. Whole lotta apple pies came out of my mother’s kitchen, each one with a light crust.

When my time came I tried to rise to the challenge of making pie crust, and I knew it was not a sure thing. I put a glass of water, a bowl, and some butter knives in the freezer twenty minutes before starting. Kept the shortening refrigerated. Assembled these cold ingredients and tools and worked fast, cutting the shortening into the flour, splashing in the icy water. Sometimes my crust turned out as light as a fairy’s fart. Sometimes I would do all that and my crust had the consistency of a hockey puck.

One year I was visiting my mother in California, and she had the pumpkin pie assignment at a friend’s Thanksgiving dinner. We were at the store, and she grabbed a couple of boxes of pre-made pie crusts. She said she didn’t bother with making the pie pastry anymore; too much trouble and these were fine. I tell you, it was like the clouds parted and angels sang hallelujah! I haven’t made a pie crust since.

So. Set the oven to 450 degrees, put the first crust into the pie plate, added the filling, put the second crust on top, pinched the crust around rim, cut a cute little “B” for blackberry in the crust and a few other vents in a sunray pattern, put the whole production on a cookie sheet, and after the oven beeped that it had reached 450, put the pie in and set the timer for the first ten minutes.

That was when I remembered that I had forgotten to dot the top of the filling with butter before putting on the top crust.

Oh well. Berries, sugar, pie crust. How bad could it be?

Next morning, I cut the first slice of pie for breakfast. I took a bite. I moaned with pleasure.

These are times that try human beings’ souls. It is good to have the respite of a slice of blackberry pie now and then.

Blackberry pie: 3 cups blackberries; 1 cup sugar; 2 Tblsp flour; 2 Tblsp lemon juice; 1/8 Tsp salt; 1 recipe pie pastry; 1 Tblsp butter. Combine berries, sugar, flour, lemon juice and salt. Line pie pan with pastry, add filling, dot with butter, cover with top crust. Bake in 450°F oven 10 minutes; reduce temperature to 350°F and bake 25 to 30 minutes (or until the pie looks done to you). Makes one 9-inch pie. – Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cook Book, ©1950

We Must Not Remain Silent

It is a pleasant sunny day in San Francisco in 1964 or ’65. My mother and I are walking westward on Market Street. Walking in front of us is a young family – mom, dad, boy of about eleven or twelve, slightly younger girl.

My mother pronounces the family communists.

I ask how she knows.

The boy, she says, is wearing a striped t-shirt. That means the parents are Democrats. Democrats are Socialists, and Socialists are Communists.

Another pleasant day, same era, my mother is driving the car down Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville, and I am riding shotgun. She is angry about the civil rights movement. She believes that black people have been put up to it by clever evil people who are trying to achieve domination of the world.

And who are the evil people?

The Jews.

I can’t believe what I’ve heard so I ask her to repeat that. “Are you saying that the Jews are behind everything?”

“Yes,” she says.

So that was my mom. She was racist, and she bought into all the extreme right-wing beliefs and conspiracy theories of that day, which seem to be circulating still.

My mother was an intelligent person. I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe it was being abandoned in that Texas orphanage when she was six. I don’t know.

Seeing the KKK and Nazis marching in Charlottesville, hearing them speak, reminded me of that part of life with my mother. I had not blocked the memory but had blocked the feeling of how profoundly insane it felt living with my mother in those days.

After one of the Nazis drove his car into a crowd of marching protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring others, one of the white supremacist leaders called the protesters, “Stupid people who don’t pay attention.” In his version of what happened, the protesters wouldn’t let the driver come through, so he was forced to run them down. It was their own fault and they deserved it.

I noticed in interviews with that Nazi and others that they called anyone who opposed them commies, or Communists, and they spoke of their hatred of Jews.

Not much has changed in the attitudes of racists, except the technology and the weaponry and the fact that there is a president in the White House whom the KKK and Nazis believe is their good ol’ boy. He has not done much to disabuse them of that notion.

There are survivors of the Holocaust during World War II still living, and they are speaking out. They say they cannot believe they are seeing people marching with torches and Nazi flags again. They are telling us, this is how it happens, it is happening again, it is happening now, and we must not remain silent.

We must not remain silent.

There are those who say we should laugh at the Nazis and KKK, and throw glitter on them. Perhaps because I grew up being hit regularly, I would not do that. You need to know what you are doing when you are dealing with people whose thinking is delusional and whose behavior is violent.

Other people advise that we have counter-rallies, somewhere away from wherever Nazis and KKK gather. They want attention, and reaction. If they are unable to get a response, they will be thwarted in their aims. I like this idea. If I had a better idea, I’d tell you now.

I see this as the latest development in America’s eternal struggle over race. Before we were a country, there was slavery. When this country was founded, it was done with a compromise: the non-slave states had to accept the slave states to form the United States.

The acceptance of slavery, of the dehumanization of human beings based on the color of their skin, at the beginning of our existence as a nation has been our downfall, our cancer, our paralyzing, strangulating, murderous birth defect.

We are all living in the profound insanity of being told lies all the time. We are all exposed to the corrosive influence of people telling us not to trust our own perceptions of what is real and true.

This isn’t new, but it is right out in the open now. We, as a people, have a little more power than I had as the youngest child in my family. We can disagree. We can call our Senators and Representatives to make our wishes and feelings known, for all the good that does us. We can call bullshit.

We cannot remain silent.

We must not remain silent.