When I was 18 I had a girlfriend whose parents liked me well enough, I think, but they didn't exactly approve of me. Probably because I was three years older than their daughter.
Yeah, my girlfriend was 15. Jailbait. But hey, she was mature for her age! And I wasn't!
Anyway, despite his misgivings about me, my girlfriend's dad, Jean, got me a job as a lot boy at the car dealership where he was the sales manager. Lot boys are the guys or gals who move service customers' cars from the service department to the service bays...where they get serviced. After the cars were serviced, we'd move them out of the service bays to an outside lot, where we'd sometimes wash and vacuum them, depending on how pissed the customer already was about the repairs that were needed and/or how pissed he/she was going to be when he/she received the repair bill. In addition, I was also the designated morning courtesy driver, meaning I would drive the pissed-off customers from the dealership to wherever they needed or wanted to go.
One day, Jean ambled up to me in the service department and asked whether I'd be interested in joining him and some friends on an ocean salmon fishing trip on his cabin cruiser. As an avid fisherman and lover of both salmon and adventure—I had never been on a boat in the ocean—I of course said, "Sure!"
...and then immediately started having doubts. What had I gotten myself into? What were Jean's intentions? Was he a good skipper? Or would he be like the skipper in The Perfect Storm, who had been apprised of the weather forecast but decided to go fishing anyway (spoiler alert: everyone dies). Would I make a complete ass of myself by saying or doing something stupid? Get seasick and spend the entire day heaving ho? Catch zero fish while everyone else caught their limit? And so on.
Little did I know at the time that there was a much bigger concern than any of these: Boating down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, we would be crossing the infamous Columbia Bar, whose nickname, I learned later, is Graveyard of the Pacific. It earned that moniker by swallowing thousands of ships—most of them much larger than the dinghy we would be fishing from—and drowning more than 700 people. There are professional "bar pilots" who are paid $180,000 a year to help guide boats across the bar, sometimes by landing helicopters on boats in distress and commandeering them.
If all that isn't enough to scare any sane person away from trying to cross the bar, consider this tidbit from Wikipedia:
The nearby United States Coast Guard Station...is renowned for operating in some of the roughest sea conditions in the world, and is home to the National Motor Lifeboat School. It is the only school for rough weather and surf rescue operation in the US, and is respected internationally as a center of excellence for heavy boat operations.
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| This wasn't us, but it could've been. |
So the question, then, is: What in HELL was I thinking saying "Sure!" to this particular invitation? And further: What in HELL was Jean thinking when he invited me? "This'll be a great way to get rid of Rick and make it look like an accident!" The perfect murder!
The answer, of course, was that, since I was blissfully ignorant of the Columbia Bar's reputation, I decided to just play along with Jean's nefarious scheme and....see what happened. Perfect Storm be damned!
And what happened was...pretty much nothing, in terms of sinking or drowning.* I did, however, catch a salmon (a 21-inch silver)—and a baby shark (mini-Jaws!). Did I get seasick? Nah. Did I make a fool of myself? Probably, but nobody called me out on it. Did Jean make a hard turn and dump me overboard? Nope. In fact, Jean and I kinda...bonded. Or at least we moved an inch or two in a more-or-less positive direction: He quit fretting so much about my age, and I quit fretting that he would turn me in for statutory...thoughts.
Considering everything else that could've happened, I was OK with that.
*Apologies for the anticlimactic climax.
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