Beginning with physical intolerance for alcohol,for years drinking only for the sake of comradeship and because alcohol was everywhere on the adventure-path,I had now reached the stage where my brain cried out,not merely for a drink,but for a drunk.
And had I not been so long used to alcohol,my brain would not have so cried out.I should have sailed on past Bull Head,and in the smoking white of Suisun Bay,and in the wine of wind that filled my sail and poured through me,I should have forgotten my weary brain and rested and refreshed it.
So I sailed in to shore,made all fast,and hurried up among the arks.Charley Le Grant fell on my neck.His wife,Lizzie,folded me to her capacious breast.Billy Murphy,and Joe Lloyd,and all the survivors of the old guard,got around me and their arms around me.Charley seized the can and started for Jorgensen's saloon across the railroad tracks.That meant beer.I wanted whisky,so I called after him to bring a flask.
Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and back.More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in,fishermen,Greeks,and Russians,and French.They took turns in treating,and treated all around in turn again.They came and went,but I stayed on and drank with all.I guzzled.I swilled.
I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my brain.
And Clam came in,Nelson's partner before me,handsome as ever,but more reckless,half insane,burning himself out with whisky.
He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle,and knives had been drawn,and blows struck,and he was bent on maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky.And while we downed it,we remembered Nelson and that he had stretched out his great shoulders for the last long sleep in this very town of Benicia;and we wept over the memory of him,and remembered only the good things of him,and sent out the flask to be filled and drank again.
They wanted me to stay over,but through the open door I could see the brave wind on the water,and my ears were filled with the roar of it.And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books nineteen hours a day for three solid months,Charley Le Grant shifted my outfit into a big Columbia River salmon boat.He added charcoal and a fisherman's brazier,a coffee pot and frying pan,and the coffee and the meat,and a black bass fresh from the water that day.
They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon boat.Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail set like a board.Some feared to set the sprit;but I insisted,and Charley had no doubts.He knew me of old,and knew that Icould sail as long as I could see.They cast off my painter.Iput the tiller up,filled away before it,and with dizzy eyes checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell.
The tide had turned,and the fierce ebb,running in the teeth of a fiercer wind,kicked up a stiff,upstanding sea.Suisun Bay was white with wrath and sea-lump.But a salmon boat can sail,and Iknew how to sail a salmon boat.So I drove her into it,and through it,and across,and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain for all the books and schools.Cresting seas filled me a foot or so with water,but I laughed at it sloshing about my feet,and chanted my disdain for the wind and the water.I hailed myself a master of life,riding on the back of the unleashed elements,and John Barleycorn rode with me.Amid dissertations on mathematics and philosophy and spoutings and quotations,I sang all the old songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the oyster boats to be a pirate--such songs as:"Black Lulu,""Flying Cloud,""Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly,""The Boston Burglar,""Come all you Rambling,Gambling Men,""I Wisht I was a Little Bird,""Shenandoah,"and "Ranzo,Boys,Ranzo."
Hours afterward,in the fires of sunset,where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together,I took the New York Cut-Off,skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past Black Diamond,on into the San Joaquin,and on to Antioch,where,somewhat sobered and magnificently hungry,I laid alongside a big potato sloop that had a familiar rig.Here were old friends aboard,who fried my black bass in olive oil.Then,too,there was a meaty fisherman's stew,delicious with garlic,and crusty Italian bread without butter,and all washed down with pint mugs of thick and heady claret.
My salmon boat was a-soak,but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry blankets and a dry bunk were mine;and we lay and smoked and yarned of old days,while overhead the wind screamed through the rigging and taut halyards drummed against the mast.