The Lady Rose

The Lady Rose, built for a millionaire's wife who couldn't sleep ashore, drifted sleepily about the bay and gleamed in the sun and turned deliberately on her hawsers, like a sun-dial's shadow swinging slowly with the sun. Many coats of paint and many years of wavelets lapping at her blunted bow mellowed the Lady Rose and her owners.

This might have been eternity for the gently rocking Lady Rose.

But cast ashore in the midnight of an autumn storm that tore down lines and stove in sections of the seawall and undermined the further pilings of the pier, the Lady Rose dug deep into the beach, smashing her end-timbers. A crew of men came out and stood around her in the white exhausted morning, poking her thick plank sides and feeling places where steel cables sawed deep trenches in her deck. They beached her for all time and hauled her to a vacant lot across the boulevard, mooring the faded Lady Rose at a genial angle in the weeds.

And so her final cruise began, with a housewife at the helm and a gang of children screaming on her after deck, with a level lawn that spread about her like the water in a calm anchorage, with rooms and roofs added topside and an unaccustomed clutter of plumbing down below.

So she plows through years and fogs and unmoving areas of sun that peel her paint, the smoothest riding craft along the coast in the wildest storms. On quiet nights, the neighbors say, they hear a wistful whistle from the Lady Rose, blowing for the right-of-way at traffic running by in Mission Boulevard.