The horn

From my apartment, with the window open, I can hear the Lift Bridge. I can't see it, but I can hear it. A boat comes up to the canal and blows its horn, and the bridge answers with the same notes, and the span goes up, and a thousand feet of steel slides through a gap in the town not much wider than a parking lot. It happens many times a day, and sometimes at three in the morning. People who move here complain about it for a month, and then they stop hearing it, and then, if they ever leave, they miss it.

I left, and I missed it, and I didn't know it was the horn I'd been missing until I came home.

When I was small, my mother would take me down to the canal when my father's boat was due. You could find out roughly when from the paper, or from a phone number that played a recording of the day's arrivals. We'd stand at the end of the pier with a thermos, and when his boat came in, the captain would blow the salute and the bridge would answer it, and my mother would say, every time, "That's for us." It wasn't. It was for every boat. I believed her until I was eleven, and after that I kept believing her on purpose.

He couldn't wave. He was down in the engine room, where the engineers are, and he told me later that he couldn't really hear the horn down there over the engines, only feel it in the deck. But he knew we'd be on the pier, and that was enough for him, and it was enough for me.

He died eighteen years ago this month. I walk down to the canal now and then, mornings mostly, and when a boat comes in and the horn goes, I still say it under my breath.

That's for us.