CTAS 5: Save the Hat!

Cycling Through a Storm

Jan 13, 2024

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Previously, in Cycling Through a Storm 
One: Cycling Through a Storm
Two: A House, a Boy, a Girl, a Car, a Dock, a Boat, a Hug
Three: Starting Sequence
Four: Yacht Race

“Thank you, Bones!” Stewie yelled, waving at the committee boat.

“Thank you, sweetie!” Gust yelled to Bones’s assistant, Lisa, and Lisa blew a kiss and threw a hug back to Gust with a big windmilling of arms.

Wally was below deck packing the spinnaker into its launch bag.

“Hey, Sensuous,” Stewie said, leaning to look down through the companionway at Wally from his spot at the helm.

Wally kept working, carefully pulling the edges of the big sail through his hands from head to clew, making sure nothing would be tangled the next time it was launched.

“Hey, Sensuous!” Vic said, also staring down at Wally.

“Wally!” Gust shouted, much sharper and louder than was necessary.

Wally snapped to wide-eyed attention. “Oh, you were talking to me?”

“Since you was down there by the cooler,” Stewie said slowly, nodding his head, prompting Wally along because he’d heard the joke hundreds times, “will you please get us our victory beers?”

“Sure! Sensuous asking nicely!”

While Wally fetched cans of beer and snugged them into coozies, Gust went to help Lark lower the jib and secure it on the deck. With the jib down, the crew could relax and cruise to the marina with just the mainsail up. Big pink clouds slid on a crisp edge above the Wisconsin side of the river.

“Pretty!” Lark said. She climbed to her usual resting perch on the boom near the mast. She had relaxed the main halyard just enough so that the mainsail made a small hammock for her butt and she could recline into the sail with her beer.

“Good race, guys!” Stewie grinned, holding his beer aloft. “Thank you very much.”

Blow came up behind and Roger was hailing.

Stewie angled Corvus into the wind, letting the mainsail luff so Blow could come up beside.

Roger grinned and raised his beer can to Stewie. “Great Race, Asshole!”

“Thanks!” Stewie said, lifting his beer high. “You made us work for it!”

“I forgot about that fishing boat.”

“That’s what you get for spending so long staring at my stern!”

Roger let his head droop and wagged it sideways, then hoisted his beer again, this time acknowledging the rest of the Corvus crew. “Great sailing, everyone.”

All the crew on both boats lifted cans or bottles in toast to one another across the couple of feet between the boats. Gust stood at the bow, his green bottle of German lager held high.

“See you all at Squid’s?” Stewie asked.

“Oh yeah.”

Both skippers raised their beers again as Blow tacked away from Corvus.

“So, Vic, what happened on your ride down?” Stewie asked. “Aside from the weather, I mean. What held you up?”

Vic filled the four of them in on the details about taking the new demo race bike from work to test ride for the day and how that didn’t go as he’d planned and getting rescued and dropped off by Sequoia at Lark’s dock but forgetting about the bike and leaving it in her car.

“So,” Stewie concluded, barely containing his own laughter, “You were riding in a hailstorm, and you could have taken a ride from someone driving a pickup truck or an SUV, but you chose the gal driving a Prius?”

Vic nodded, smiling, sipped his beer.

“And,” Lark added, “the Prius was already full of clay bricks and a wheelchair!”

“Indeed.”

“So, this gal Sequoia,” Stewie said. “She must be awfully cute!”

“Yeah!” Lark said, leaning down from the boom.

Vic nodded, sipped his beer. “Maybe the cutest septuagenarian I’ve ever met.”

“She’s just seventeen?!” Stewie asked, cupping a hand to his ear.

“She’s in her seventies?” Wally asked.

“I thought you must have meant seventeen!” Stewie said. “I mean, it’s really the only way the rest of it makes any sense!”

After Corvus was all put away, secure in her slip, the crew walked together on the dock. They stopped to chat with crew from some of the other sailboats who were folding sails or just relaxing on their boats after the race, and others joined them as they made their way toward the marina parking lot.

Vic hovered near his son. What a beautiful hippie man-child he had raised. Gust kept his hair long, often braided when sailing instead of pulled into a pony or bun. One braid on the side was purple and beaded and tighter than the others. Gust’s beard was full, his checks and neck unshaven, rugged and Bohemian above the thin cotton button-down shirt with a colorful Aztec design.

When they reached the parking lot, some of the group broke away, found their cars or continued walking along the river toward the center of town.

“Coming along to Squid’s?” Vic asked.

“Maybe later,” Gust said. “I better get up to the house and let Maasai out for a walk, maybe play some Frisbee.”

“Bring the big pup down!”

Gust nodded. “Could, could.”

“Try to get Ragnar down here, too. The best way to start sailing is to drink with sailors, I’ve heard.”

“I’ll ask him, but he’s never gonna catch the sailing bug.”

“Yeah, he’s too much of a fisherman, I guess.”

Outside the marina, Gust kicked at a chunk of stray cement that had spilled onto the sidewalk from construction happening near the corner, then kicked it a couple more times to get it inside the yellow tape marking the work zone.

Vic changed the subject. “I need to tell you about the results from my cancer screening.”

Gust kept walking, head down, scanning the sidewalk like he was keeping watch for more errant concrete.

“The scans didn’t come back clear this time. They saw some new cancer cells.”

“Fuck.” Gust scuffed one shoe on the sidewalk, though there wasn’t anything to kick at.

“Yeah.”

“How bad?”

“Bad enough that my oncologist wants me to start chemotherapy again.”

“That sucks. But no surgery?”

“That’s the hope. Don’t know for sure yet.”

“But the chemo’s what really messed you up before, right?”

“Yeah.”

Suddenly Gust ran away. Or, more precisely, he shot off the sidewalk to chase after a bucket-style hat caught in a gust of wind, rolling and bouncing diagonally across the street toward the river. He narrowly missed intercepting it before it left the road and slipped through a gap in the iron rail on the river side of the sidewalk. Gust changed course sharply to backtrack and race around the fence, then down the grassy slope toward the river. He sprinted to try catching the hat before it reached the retaining wall where the riverbank met the park, but failed. Another puff of wind—the kind you feel on the very leading edge of a storm—whisked the hat away again and over the wall, into the river.

Gust stopped atop the wall, stared intently at the hat, now floating lazily downstream, cocked upside down, its bucket open, laughing at the shore. Gust looked up the hill at an elderly man leaning on a walker beside a van just ahead of where Vic stood on the sidewalk. Vic and the old man with the walker stared back at Gust. The old man was mostly bald with a few wispy strands of gray blown askew.

Gust turned, ran atop the retaining wall, jerking his head back and forth between the narrow top of the wall and the bucket hat drifting downriver. He ran with short stutter-steps until he reached the end of the wall where the embankment was no longer steep. The hat rode flat in the current, its bucket drowning, only its floppy brim partly visible in the waves. Gust jumped from the wall to the grass at the bank of the river and sprinted again, his gaze fixed on the cap as if spotting someone in a man-overboard drill. Then he stopped, kicked off his shoes, ran and then dove into the river. With firm crawl strokes he swam straight and fast. The gap between Gust and the hat narrowed steadily until the arc of Gust’s stroke splashed his open palm square on the hat. He halted swimming and clenched the hat in his teeth, then switched to a leisurely backstroke and made his way back to shore. To Vic, he looked like a very large otter.

Vic walked down to the shore and collected Gust’s shoes.

Gust made it to shore at the public boat ramp a little downriver. He strode casually up the ramp, nodded and said something to some fishermen busy trailering their boat. He waved with the wet hat, a polite tip of his cap to the fishermen, and then he jogged up the hill and crossed the sidewalk past Vic. He stopped where the elderly man waited beside his van.

Vic jogged up to join Gust and the old man, who was expressing his thanks. A puddle of river water formed at Gust’s feet, rivulets trickling across the damp pavement. Gust’s shirt clung to his chest and shoulders.

“It’s just an old bucket cap, but thank you!”

“Bucket cap?!” Gust panted. “This is a cashmere Borsalino!” Gust handed the hat to the man.

“How could you know that?” the man asked.

“It’s my super-power: I have the eyes of an osprey!”

“That was great of you to chase after that hat,” Vic said after they watched the old man’s van roll away.

Gust was laughing. “I saw it blow off his head and there was gauze on his head, like he might have skin cancer or something, so I didn’t really think—I was just, like, Oh my god that guy’s gonna die of cancer if I don’t save his hat!”