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When he was forced out of the mountains down to the coast he had met man who’d had a stroke. The man needed day and night personal care assistance, so he turned to the state for financial aid and the state granted him a weekly supplement, then took his home and his savings and his retirement and his self-worth. He stood one afternoon on Mitchell’s front walk, looking off toward the west. His clothes were rumpled, the brim of his Yale cap was pulled down to his eyebrows. His paralyzed left arm hung bent against his side with his hand closed in a permanent fist. With the other hand he squeezed the handle of his black cane, a nervous habit. "Do you think Socrates had it in mind like this?" He squeezed the cane not expecting an answer. "Only hemlock left." His gaze was fixed on the horizon and there was a profound resignation in his eyes. "Only hemlock," he said, as if he hadn’t mentioned it a first time. They lived in the same facility...
Mitchell’s thoughts wandered back to the year before that conversation. Julia had said she loved him. But she couldn’t commit to the physical aspect of his life. It was too overwhelming she had said. She was sorry. She said that, too.
Mitchell had realized then there would always be a blindness, a failure in others to see him as a man. During his first rehabilitation he had understood the enormity of his paralysis, the constant physical work it would demand, and the will, if he was going to live. Really live. He went into the mountains because doors were closed to him. Twenty years later they were still closed. Minds, too. Especially minds...
Off the starboard bow a great hill of sand appeared, stretched north and disappearing into the clouds of mist. "Land ho," Mitchell called and a bell clanged and then appeared, rocking ghost-like in the haze ahead.
Andy climbed lazily to the top of the ladder. "Approach that bell on course two-seventy-two," he said and rubbed his eyes.
"I’m on two-seventy-two."
Andy yawned. "There are shallows to port a half a mile past this bell. It’s another two-point-three miles to the next bell. Then it’s all shallows except for the channel."
Like a thieve’s boat the sloop stole noiselessly past the bell and the coast was vague beneath the haze but Mitchell could see the great dune to starboard curling away to the west. From the south a sand strip menaced the sloop’s port as they sailed past the second bell. The cloud ceiling heightened and the rain stopped as an offshore breeze lifted the humidity, relieving much of the pain in Mitchell’s body. They tacked the boat and Mitchell steered south into the channel with an eye on the sand strip, he could feel the shallows. Ahead, the channel turned southwest then west for three quarters of a mile and ran in behind a breakwater below a green-darkened forest that dwarfed a crowd of swaying aluminum masts.
Andy climbed below and then up again with the chart. "Do you want to find an anchorage in there?"
"Not me," Mitchell said. "I’ve had enough of the land for awhile."
"There’s a spot next to the channel beyond that dog-leg. We’ll have to catch it just right."
Andy dropped the genoa and lashed it quickly to the lifeline before setting the anchor on deck. He faked out the rode then climbed below and switched on the depth finder in the cabin bulkhead, his face was inches from the display.