Wake

I went to a wake last week for a friend of the family, someone I’d never met. He was a life-long fisherman, from all accounts a wonderful man whose heart gave out while his body fought cancer. The wake was held at a bar on Newport’s bayfront. I stood at the windows for the longest time, nervous in a room where I didn’t really know anyone other than the chief mourner, the man’s wife and my mother's friend. Outside the water of the bay was standard-issue Oregon grey, dozens of sea lions lounged on the jetty and on decaying docks which are gradually sinking beneath their tonnage. It was a potluck and I sat with my stepfather and people he’d known for twenty years eating raw oysters in little Dixie cups, listening to stories of their migrations west. It seemed strange that I was the only one at the table who hadn’t been born on the east coast. The room was full of fishermen, men wearing unironic mesh caps and facial hair, about whom stories were told of brothers at sea chasing each other with hammers, threatening grievous bodily harm for some stupidity or other – something to do with pots or nets. It was not an experience I would have had in D.C.