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Voyager

    I once got busted by the Coast Guard. It was a proud moment.
    We lived near the Toms River, where it widens out into Barnegat Bay. My friend Danny had a 16' wooden sloop, and his "ship's boat" was a tiny little coracle made from a blue plastic sandbox, shaped like a boat. He made a plywood floor to strengthen it, so the little boat could be sat in and paddled, using a ping-pong paddle in each hand. Danny would use the little blue boat to paddle out from the bulkhead, to get to his sailboat moored to a buoy out in the cove.
    The lawn behind Danny's house sloped down to the wooden bulkhead, smelling deliciously of creosote, and beyond that you would be in two or five feet of water, depending on the tide. The river is more than half a mile wide there, as it opens out into the bay. You would throw the little blue boat in, and step off the bulkhead down into it, balancing to get seated without tipping into the drink. You had to learn the trick, like riding a bicycle, but once learned it was easy. I used to love paddling around the cove in that little toy boat. Your wrists would get tired quickly, using the ping-pong paddles, so I tried paddling with a short canoe paddle, but that was not so easy because the little tub liked to spin around like a teetotum. So I built a wooden rudder that hooked over the transom, and the rudder made a big difference keeping her going straight.
    Sometimes I would paddle out into the middle of the wide river, out into the chops of the channel. Heaving up and down into the swell of the incoming tide, the shore small and away, with the sun setting across the water behind you, you get closer to that feeling of flying than you ordinarily do.
    So one summer evening I was bobbing in the tiny boat, far out in the middle of the dark expanse of water (my wrists were tired, yes), and I was having that feeling; I felt that if I just kept up my steady rhythm of paddling, with the stars wheeling overhead and the hypnotic pitching of the deck beneath me, I might just get as far away as the moon.
    But now I was conscious of the deep throb of a motor; it was coming closer, with lights. Then I was blinded in the face by a searchlight, and a megaphoned voice out of the blackness, squawking: "Ahoy, the boat!"
    It was a Coast Guard cutter patrolling the river; of course they were concerned to discover me out there in an active boating lane on a dark night, with no running lights; no lights at all. I hailed back, with a brief account of myself.
    "You shouldn't be out here on the river in a little dinghy like that, without a light." There was kindness in the squawking voice, as well as unassailable authority. "I'll have to ask you to put back in to shore immediately." squawked the voice.
     They were right of course. I couldn't show a light, so I acknowledged and put about, though perhaps a bit grudgingly; the spell was broken and I was back in the world. I applied myself to the paddles, my wrists complaining, as I shaped my course back to Danny's dock.
    There was a long reach of water ahead of me, maybe three quarters of a mile; all of it wet, and all of it weary. But I smiled with exultation: they had called my boat a "dinghy"; it was real!

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