| The Fog | |
|
by Jim Hurt
“Jim,
what if that compass is wrong and we’re headed out into the shipping channel?”
Fred asked as he slowed the boat down.
I just looked at him with my mouth open. Very
large ships appearing out of the fog had not entered my mind before!
“Fred,
don’t scare me! Look at this
chart we’re nowhere near the shipping channel.”
“Well,
we probably aren’t, but if a big ship comes up out of that fog, we’ll never
avoid it in time! I think we should
go slow and keep our eyes and ears open.”
“Come
on, what would a big ship be doing around here?” I asked.
“Heading
into one of these little harbors to load some coal, or maybe something for the
nuclear plant.”
I
hadn’t thought about big ships going to the nuclear power plant but that made
sense!
About
that time, Fred did a deep-sounding fog horn imitation, and I damn near jumped
in the lake! “Dammit, Fred, you
asshole. Don’t do that!”
About
fifteen minutes later when he quit laughing, he said,
“Okay, let’s just go on in, nice and slow and keep our eyes and ears
peeled.”
He
headed us in once again, but I noticed he wasn’t going nearly as fast as
before. We were both staring into
that fog so hard our eyes were bulging. Fred
slowed the boat again, “Jim, I don’t like this one bit. We could be running farther out into the lake right now for
all we know!”
“I
know. Going slow it’s taking a
lot longer to get in than it did going out, so my feeling of distance is all out
of whack now. I wish we would see
land soon!”
All
of a sudden, land loomed up in front of us, and Fred slowed the boat down. We were just a hundred feet or so off the beach and could
barely see it. Of course, there was
no cooling tower in sight. “You
recognize any of this, Fred?”
“No.
That one hundred feet of shoreline
doesn’t look real familiar!
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