Papa’s boat was called The Nereid - long, white low-slung, with a foredeck wheel cabin. They would have to check the nets again, and check the fuel tanks again, and run back to the grocery store for some more cigarettes, and then somehow everything had been done, and they were easing away from the wharf, joining the line of boats heading out past the lighthouse, into the harbor. My oldest brothers, Bill and Woody, were his crew. He had attended military school in Japan until the age of seventeen, and part of him never got over that. The water was clean, the sky a sharp Sunday blue, with all the engines of that white sardine fleet puttering up into it, and a lot of yelling, especially around Papa’s boat. In those days - 1941 - there was no smog around Long Beach. I remember it was Sunday because I was out of school, which meant I could go down to the wharf and watch. On that first weekend in December there must have been twenty or twenty-five boats getting ready to leave.
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