Ten Days on the Mary Ellen

The summer I was sixteen, my uncle Sal let me help load the Mary Ellen before she went out to Georges Bank. I went down into the hold to grab a coil of rope, sat on a bunk for one minute, and woke up forty miles out to sea.

Uncle Sal was not going to turn a boat around for one dumb kid. He radioed my mother, who said things into that radio I won’t repeat in front of you, and then he handed me a pair of boots three sizes too big. “You’re crew now,” he said. “Ten days.” I had a date that Saturday with a girl named Patty.

On day six a storm came up out of nowhere. Waves higher than the wheelhouse. The radio went dead, the net winch jammed with the nets still out, and Uncle Sal looked at me — the smallest one on board — and said, “Ray. Can you fit under there?”

I could. I crawled under the winch with a wrench in my teeth while the deck went up and down like a carnival ride, and I got that pin out. The nets came up full — the biggest catch of the whole summer. Uncle Sal laughed so hard he cried, and he never called me a dumb kid again.

When we came in, it looked like the whole town was on the dock. My mother was at the front with her hands on her hips, and I knew I was in more trouble than any storm. Behind her, waving, was Patty.

She married me four years later. Your grandmother still says I stood her up for a fish. I say I came back with the best story in Gloucester. We’ve been arguing about it for fifty-three years.