Like a camel when you frown

The beloved Yanmar

My dad woke me this morning, far too early, thrashing around before seven, and I realized it’s going to be a long week. As much as I love him, we’re two big, clumsy people in a very small space crowded with broken parts, scattered tools, and repair mechanisms. I went up on the bow to grumble to myself and sit in the wind and contemplate the prospect of no coffee. No coffee, and my dad and I alone.

After a while, I thought maybe I’d try to propane tank again. The tanks had been remarkably problem-free before, and we had sprayed WD-40 into the valve, so I had a meager hope of success. Dad was already hard at work on the diesel, beginning to remove the fuel injectors, the next step in our ongoing rebuilding project. (I fear this steop may come back to haunt us. But I remain silent.)

And the propane sizzled into pressurized life, the burner lit, and we have coffee after all! Hallelujah! It would have been a very dismal week indeed with no caffeine and no hot food. I spent the rest of the day holding the other end of a wrench for my dad, and reading in the breaks.

I feel some small amount of guilt for reading, but I have all of these books, and I’m going to have to leave most of them behind. My precious, beautiful books--it breaks my heart. So I’ll just read as many of them as I can before I leave. There’s not much room for more than one person at the motor repair station, anyway. It’s precisely the reason I wanted to spend some time here alone--when am I ever going to get the chance again to spearhead a rebuilding project?--but then again, maybe it’s why I didn’t want to be here alone, either. So I didn’t have to.