caught the first of the flood up bay, and raced along with a
spanking breeze. San Pablo Bay was smoking, and the Carquinez
John Barleycorn
75
Straits off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as I picked up ahead
and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned with Nelson
in the unreefer Reindeer.
Benicia showed before me. I opened the bight of Turner’s
Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of
the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen’s arks where in
the old days I had lived and drunk deep.
And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I
never dreamed for many a long year to come. I had had no
intention of stopping at Benicia. The tide favoured, the wind was
fair and howling–glorious sailing for a sailor. Bull Head and
Army Points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Suisun Bay which
I knew was smoking. And yet, when I laid eyes on those fishing
arks lying in the water-front tules, without debate, on the
instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and headed
for the shore. On the instant, out of the profound of my brain-
fag, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to drink. I wanted to get
drunk.
The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More
than anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind
wanted surcease from weariness in the way it knew surcease would
come. And right here is the point. For the first time in my life
I consciously, deliberately, desired to get drunk. It was a new,
a totally different manifestation of John Barleycorn’s power. It
was not a body need for alcohol. It was a mental desire. My
over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget.
And here the point is drawn to its sharpest. Granted my
prodigious brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past,
the thought would never have entered my mind to get drunk now.
Beginning with physical intolerance for alcohol, for years
drinking only for the sake of comradeship and because alcohol was
everywhere on the adventure-path, I had now reached the stage
where my brain cried out, not merely for a drink, but for a drunk.
And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my brain would not
have so cried out. I should have sailed on past Bull Head, and in
the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind that
filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my
weary brain and rested and refreshed it.
So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the
arks. Charley Le Grant fell on my neck. His wife, Lizzie, folded
me to her capacious breast. Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and all
the survivors of the old guard, got around me and their arms
around me. Charley seized the can and started for Jorgensen’s
saloon across the railroad tracks. That meant beer. I wanted
whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask.
Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and
back. More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in,
fishermen, Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in
treating, and treated all around in turn again. They came and
went, but I stayed on and drank with all. I guzzled. I swilled.
I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my
John Barleycorn
76
brain.
And Clam came in, Nelson’s partner before me, handsome as ever,
but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky.
He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle,
and knives had been drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on
maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky. And while we
downed it, we remembered Nelson and that he had stretched out his
great shoulders for the last long sleep in this very town of
Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and remembered only
the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be filled and
drank again.
They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see
the brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar
of it. And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books
nineteen hours a day for three solid months, Charley Le Grant
shifted my outfit into a big Columbia River salmon boat. He added
charcoal and a fisherman’s brazier, a coffee pot and frying pan,
and the coffee and the meat, and a black bass fresh from the water
that day.
They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon
boat. Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail
set like a board. Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted,
and Charley had no doubts. He knew me of old, and knew that I
could sail as long as I could see. They cast off my painter. I
put the tiller up, filled away before it, and with dizzy eyes
checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell.
The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a
fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was
white with wrath and sea-lump. But a salmon boat can sail, and I
knew how to sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and
through it, and across, and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain
for all the books and schools. Cresting seas filled me a foot or
so with water, but I laughed at it sloshing about my feet, and
chanted my disdain for the wind and the water. I hailed myself a
master of life, riding on the back of the unleashed elements, and
John Barleycorn rode with me. Amid dissertations on mathematics
and philosophy and spoutings and quotations, I sang all the old
songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the
oyster boats to be a pirate–such songs as: “Black Lulu,” “Flying
Cloud,” “Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly,” “The Boston Burglar,” “Come
all you Rambling, Gambling Men,” “I Wisht I was a Little Bird,”
“Shenandoah,” and “Ranzo, Boys, Ranzo.”
Hours afterward, in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and
the San Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together, I took the New
York Cut-Off, skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past
Black Diamond, on into the San Joaquin, and on to Antioch, where,
somewhat sobered and magnificently hungry, I laid alongside a big
potato sloop that had a familiar rig. Here were old friends
aboard, who fried my black bass in olive oil. Then, too, there
was a meaty fisherman’s stew, delicious with garlic, and crusty
Italian bread without butter, and all washed down with pint mugs
of thick and heady claret.
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77
My salmon boat was a-soak, but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry
blankets and a dry bunk were mine; and we lay and smoked and
yarned of old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the
rigging and taut halyards drummed against the mast.
CHAPTER XXIII
My cruise in the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready
to enter the university. During the week’s cruise I did not drink
again. To accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old
friends, for as ever the adventure-path was beset with John
Barleycorn. I had wanted the drink that first day, and in the
days that followed I did not want it. My tired brain had
recuperated. I had no moral scruples in the matter. I was not
ashamed nor sorry because of that first day’s orgy at Benicia, and
I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and
studies.
Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and
realised its significance. At the time, and for a long time
afterward, I was to think of it only as a frolic. But still
later, in the slough of brain-fag and intellectual weariness, I
was to remember and know the craving for the anodyne that resides
in alcohol.
In the meantime, after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with
my abstemiousness, primarily because I didn’t want to drink. And
next, I was abstemious because my way led among books and students
where no drinking was. Had I been out on the adventure-path, I
should as a matter of course have been drinking. For that is the
pity of the adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn’s
favourite stamping grounds.
I completed the first half of my freshman year, and in January of
1897 took up my courses for the second half. But the pressure
from lack of money, plus a conviction that the university was not
giving me all that I wanted in the time I could spare for it,