At the Yacht Club

I was thinking about an evening we spent at the Yacht Club. The club had fallen on hard times. It had been pushed out of a bigger, better, old clubhouse near the port gate, and given a small piece of land inside the harbour enclosure. We had to show passes to armed security guards before we could enter the main gate. Then we drove on rutted roads, weaving around heaps of coal and granite waiting to be loaded, with no signs to guide us, until we reached a low wall enclosing some shrubbery, and the club.

The clubhouse was like a child's castle. Blocks piled on top of blocks with grey gravel facing, topped with cement crenellations, a scrubby lawn fronting on a narrow channel, wooden skiffs - the yachts -- crowded together on the grass. The channel was busy with tugs and pilot boats. A tiny arched drawbridge spanned the channel, wide enough for two people to walk abreast. There was continuous traffic up the stairs and over of small dark men, their lungis folded up above their knees, workers on the docks.

The stern end of a bulk cargo ship loomed above us like the backdrop of a stage set, its generators producing a continuous hum, loading potassium with enormous cranes. I walked to the edge of the quay. The hull was a high steel wall, more building than ship - the cranes so massive that I felt vertigo, tilting my head back to look up to the top. The counter-weight, a cylinder suspended many stories in the air, was the size of a car. Small dinky lorries were lined up, their drivers like pygmies from another world than that of the steel ship. Ore was heaped in rough piles. The air was thick with the dust of chemicals already loaded.

A tug hoots for the drawbridge. The operator has left his cabin - the tug must back up, hooting impatiently - the bridge-keeper comes running up the cement steps, then scrambles up a vertical steel ladder and into the lighted cabin. Yells at someone walking toward the bridge to stand back, closes wire gates at both ends, raises the bridge and the boat chugs through, to berth at a parking area across from where we sit.

Inside the main room of the clubhouse was a peaked ceiling painted with the names of winning skippers in annual sailing races. Victory cups were displayed behind the bar. We sat outside at a table and chairs set up for us on the grass. We had the place to ourselves. The club's old waiter had been a welder on the docks. He shuffled back and forth, driven by our host's enthusiasm - bring napkins, wash the glasses, bring boiled peanuts. And just beyond our small perimeter, darkness, grime, warehouses, hundreds of yellow lights from ships' superstructures, tugs. Many cargo ships, and more lying out at sea, waiting their turn to come in. It was one of many times when I felt as though the scene around me had been made from two different jigsaw puzzles, somehow forced to come together.