A Crack of Light

I remember the salt-stained boulders, encrusted with mussel shells, which flanked the levee to my father’s Coast Guard base, reaching like a prickly arm around the Port Angeles harbor.

I remember delivering casseroles late at night in the pilot’s hangar, being driven through the gates-the guard’s salute because of our officer’s bumper decal. Delivering casseroles to my father as he pulled all-night duty flying his lumbering H-52.

I remember my father, at dawn, dragging his heavy boots across the threshold, peeling his orange flight-suit halfway down, a snake shedding his skin as he chugged milk from the up-turned jug, draining its contents in front of the open refrigerator.

I remember watching him from the crack of light in the swinging kitchen door as he told his wife about his latest search and rescue case, “I lost him,” he whispered in a milky gravel. “Twenty-foot seas, winds at 50 knots, only five feet of rotor-clearance on either side— It was the water’s temperature that killed him.”

His voice was tired, but without emotion, not like when -that same summer, in the middle of the night, when he thought I was asleep in the back seat- he sobbed behind the wheel, a forceful engine choking into gear while listening to the radio, listening to how Thurman Munson –his favorite Yankees catcher- had perished in an airplane crash.

“Augered in—” he cried. “My boy has augered in…” as I watched him through the rear view mirror, the intermittent streetlights staining his warm, wet face.