The Infirmity of Memory

Of course I know as well as you do that by naming this Newsletter, “Notes from a Decrepit Boat Ramp,” I’m endorsing the notion that the decrepit boat ramp is me, that I’m referring to my current physical or mental state, even that I’m confessing to being cracked along the edges and covered with seaweed, wet or dry as the tides might dictate.

But I like the metaphor anyway - probably because I have loved the boat ramp in question since 1949, when I was four years old and my family moved to a house just a couple of hundred feet down the beach from it.

In those days the boat ramp led to a boathouse, so its owner (Mr. Irwin) could lower his boat into the bay in style.  But even then it was, if not decrepit, constantly covered with driftwood and seaweed and kelp, its tracks magnets for cockles and mussels (“alive, alive-o”), and no one - not me nor any other kid - ever saw it do the job of lowering a boat.   

What it did do was serve as my boundary - “Don’t go past the boat ramp!” - and as a place to fish from.  It seemed I always roamed the beach alone back then, catching bullhead from the ramp, which I would cut up to use for bait to catch sole.  Here’s a slightly different picture of the ramp, so you can see for yourself how beautiful it is.  I took photos of it in 2019 - when my collection, Tacoma Stories, came out - for a lecture I gave on “The Literature of Place.”

Now, because last week I tried to make a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional,’ I want to turn the boat ramp into a different sort of metaphor, and also say something bold about a kid I knew back then, a kid named Gary.  The different sort of metaphor is this: I believe the boat ramp stands for - and helped form in me - the interiority necessary to make a writer out of a daydreamer and a pretender - things at which I excelled.   And the bold thing I want to say about Gary is: He was a jug-eared kid with buckteeth and a dumb expression on his face, and one day I shot him in the belly with a BB gun.

However unkind, I’m sure that my description of him is correct, for I saw Gary daily.  But that final part, “…one day I shot him in the belly with a BB gun.”  Did I make that up? Did I really shoot him or did I not?

What’s in favor of “did not” is that I never owned a BB gun and I was as non-violent then as I am now.  And what’s in favor of “did” is that I have a clear memory, not only of shooting him, but of seeing a welt rise up on his belly when he pulled up his shirt.  It was a round red welt, like an angry nipple suddenly dropped down from his chest.

The reason I am posing these questions now - honestly, for the first time - is that some months before the BB gun incident Gary had the audacity to stand at the end of my ramp, fall down, knock himself out, get carried into the bay on a flotilla of driftwood and kelp when the tide came in, only to be found and rescued by a passing fisherman… the kicker being that fisherman was his dad!

I know this is true because an account of it appeared in the Tacoma News Tribune (“Saves Son from Drowning,” 31 August, 1951).  I even wrote about it in a speech I gave at a PEN/Faulkner gala in 1989, the point of my speech being that some things are impossible to turn into fiction, belonging only in the annals of “real life”.  So I must have been thinking about it for a good long time.

Back to my questions, though…  Gary fell, got carried away and rescued by his father, yes, but if I invented the shooting of him in order to gain a connection, a little of the weird bravado, some of the panache assigned - by me and every other beach kid - to this momentarily famous but always irritating guy, then, more deeply, why?  

Was it possible that I wished I had been saved by my father, and not him, by his?

Or did I, in fact, shoot him, as my memory still insists, giving him that angry welt?

Those last two questions are not rhetorical.