My resolve not to capsize wins. My stomach and thighs turn supple as a sea lions neck. But the wind snuffles against the bow like a pawing buffalo and turns the canoe back and back. I cannot reach the wharf, so I head straight toward the beach, and thankfully, find a lull between the fists of surf. The canoe picks up speed like a surf board and swerves sideways only at the last few feet, in time for me to grab up my novel in one hand and the rope to the bow in the other before it flips over sideways. My feet find their footing in the invisible sand, and I haul out of the water into the rain pulling my boat and my hopes after. A tall lone figure approaches from the steps of the Boardwalk. It is a cop who strides up to me and stays close as hand cuffs while he radios back and forth that the mayday call has been found alive and well. I leave my canoe where it is, my last mistake, and we walk to a dry car with dry insides and soon are on the wharf with several police and Gamil, who walks out of wharf headquarters in black leather coat smiling his bravest smile. The wind howls. I tell my story.

There is nothing more to do. As I get back in a warm car to leave, I see a large muscling set of waves start to lift the bow of the Por Favor like a little toy up to the moon. It mounts over the swell and dips way down in the trough before it begins to nose up to the moon again.

I cannot look. I know it cannot last. In a minute, Gamil comes to the car, gets in, and says still smiling his bravest mile, "it just sank-all of a sudden, it's all black. Nothing." I nod. "It's alright," says Gamil ever the optomist, "it is on sand and anchored, we can raise it later. It's fine." In the morning, we return to find the great boat has broken up in the night's pounding surf. And in the high overcast of the morning, it seems something unspeakable has happened. The attachment one extends to a fine boat is all out of proportion to other things. It is irrational; it is a love. To see the pieces of the Por Favor scattered down the beach is to see an abomination, a horror. It is to see pieces of your own heart crumpled over the sand and the slackening tide: a mad dream of Dali; a nightmare made flesh. Gamil wanders slowly down the beach looking at the pieces of his heart crumpled before him. He had lived on this boat when times were tough in southern California. His son had lived it as well when times were tough. They had pulled it on a burly WIDELOAD trailer all the way to Santa Cruz over four days.