Read Online Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley - Free Book Online

master’s office and chandlery at Town Creek Marina are encircled by a wide covered porch on which the staff has thoughtfully placed a number of high-backed rocking chairs. I found one of these and took my place, looking out over the water to the south. I was alone. The harbor was dark. The intermittent light rain of the day had eased. I could see the lights of the low bridge, not a quarter mile away, and the now-thinning automobile traffic that rumbled across it. No one and nothing stirred in the marina. All was quiet and still, as though the assembled instruments of the harbor’s orchestra had come to order, awaiting the rise of a conductor’s baton.
    I am not what most religious people would call a praying man, which is not to say that I do not often pray. I readily give thanks for all that has been given to me, which is mountainous, and beg forgiveness for my lack of faith, which is cavernous. It is rather that I feel a strong impulse toward formality, humility, and decorum when presuming to importune the Almighty.
    Part of this attitude, I suppose, comes from my earliest years in the Episcopal Church, where purse-lipped communicants rarely break into spasms of ecclesiastical joy for all the world to see. Part of this also comes from my life in the law, where a lawyer’s remarks to a judge are brief, to the point, made from a posture of respect, and mindful that the court’s considerable power must not be invoked unadvisedly or for any trivial purpose. Most of my reticence in prayer, though, is owed to the knowledge that the winds that bear aloft my petitions carry with them the prayers of some poor soul with malarial fever, a father keeping vigil over a sick child, or a wife on the eve of a battle from which her husband may not return. I am a well-fed lawyer playing about on a pleasure yacht, a stranger to illness and hardship, and a free man living in the most affluent nation on Earth. I am ashamed to be a supplicant in their company.
    And yet I pray, because that is what children do. Well do I know that whatever I truly need, my Heavenly Father will grant, and that the burden of what I truly deserve has been lifted through no merit of my own.
    I prayed that night, on the porch, for guidance in making a decision whether to go. I knew that I was committing myself to a journey that would take not weeks or months to complete, but years, and from which I or my boat might not return. I knew that it would cost money—not an inordinate amount (the boat is paid for, and the wind is free), but not an insignificant amount, either. I wanted to go and felt that I should, but I knew from long experience that I have wanted many things that I should not want, and that my judgment has not always served me. My self-esteem and self-confidence were not at a high ebb in that hour of my life. I wanted guidance. I wanted fatherly advice.
    There are some who say God speaks to them. I am not so sure. He has spoken through the prophets, according to my creed, but He has never spoken directly to me. I have, however, felt the presence of God. And from the perspective of the higher altitudes that the passage of time affords, I have seen the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life. All the same, I can’t say that I saw, heard, or felt anything of the kind, in the half hour I spent rocking and praying on the porch at Town Creek Marina. It seemed that God was leaving this call up to me, and so I made the best one I knew how to make.
    If I was looking for a sign that I had made the wrong call, it would not be long in coming. It was dark in the marina, for sure, but not nearly so inky black as it was out in the creek. The markers in the spur channel leading through the mud flats from the marina to the main waterway were not lighted. I should have laid out a compass course to follow, but it seemed too short a distance to bother. It had been easy enough three months earlier, when I had arrived there in daylight.
    Not one minute away from the dock,