Southport Harbor in the Late Summer TIM NORTHROP The painters come to the harbor to make paintings, their easels standing tall on the green. Southport Harbor is nestled between a peninsula occupied by a large, open golf course and a little town. The water never gets choppy or violent; it’s too far inshore. The painters come in the daytime, and they leave before they should. They miss the times when the sun becomes lazy and strikes the ships’ masts as if they were purposefully constructed sundials. The sun’s radiance plays like a movie across the water. Tonight it’s calm, and the water submits to the show. It’s high tide, and as a result, the only odor present is that of what breeze there is. Members of a cocktail party sit astern on their boat, fast to the dock. Marbella. A man is being hoisted up the mast of another boat, working on a system to keep the birds away. Libertas. A guest’s boat is crawling down the channel preparing to pick up a guest mooring. I’m the driver. The dark water’s my road, the north anchorage my route. This place sees seasons come and go, members pick and choose the days they come, and golfers on the course across the harbor go home for the winter. But I stay, and I see that when it’s time for everyone to return to the undesirable part of their lives, the dock’s nails rust. The varnish on PYC 1’s tiller becomes rough. Ice creeps over the channel in the coldest months of the winter. So while the others drag through their monotonous days, I take out the work boat to break the ice. I take a pry bar to the rusted nails. I strip the tiller of its varnish. Tonight, however, driving is my sole responsibility. The hard noise of sailors calling over the radio. Another trip across the mirror. As the hull of the launch splits the water like scissors, I watch the sun part greens into the blues and yellows that made them. A bell rings. Ben yells, “Please rise for colors!” Shortly thereafter, the ambience of the harbor is shattered by the sound of the cannon. My passengers turn to the flagpole on the green and watch the flag slowly make its way toward the earth, like a curtain over the falling sun, where it lay dormant until the morning. I pull up to my passengers’ boat and grab a stanchion to let them get off. An older woman is getting off. Her recently-ironed slacks make a zip sound with every shuffling step across the deck. Her son, who’s already onboard their yacht, gives her a hand for the small step up to his level. She gets up onto the yacht and I push off and start heading back to shore. As my boat rounds the end of the mooring row, a cormorant crosses my path. The flap of its wings causes a disturbance in the water that soon gets covered by the wake of the launch.
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