It's still fairly quiet out on the Lake. Many boaters remain curled in crawl spaces and hidden in fruit cellars. So the view is limitless water and sky, going on forever, it seems, if you pretend Canada doesn't exist. The calming infinite is only interrupted, in fact, by one lone, broken sail boat. It never comes home. Sits out there all winter, drifting to and fro, never getting too close to shore nor far off into the freighter channels. The sails have all worn away and there is no crew. But the rich people and the coast guard agree: no one's going near it.
For the better part of 17 years now, that ship as been the sole providence of thousands of the town's bad luck cats. Police hire a local high school quarterback each year to throw feral and unloved kitties aboard it each fall. Since we went soft back in '87, no one can bring themselves to euthanize them. This seemed like the best compromise after the then-City Manager's ex-wife sailed out on the craft and held the town hostage with threats to stop believing in our existence, thus erasing us from all history. Not wanting to take that risk, and wanting to rid ourselves of more pet-related guilt, we started sending the cats over in baskets tied to balloons.
Now we're told the entire ship is protected by an enormous force field put in place by Bob Dylan. So it's made for some interesting post cards.
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