All Men Will Be Sailors

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

Jeff was such a good storyteller that you didn’t really mind that you’d heard all his stories before. He would half-apologize for repeating a story before repeating one anyway, and you’d listen, because he was charismatic, captivating. You’d listen because you could tell that all his stories—the teasing ones, the silly ones, the sincere ones—barely concealed a huge and simple love of people. Jeff died on October 6 at 71, after a long illness. He is at peace now, and has become what he loved best: a story. 

-Adrian Daily Telegram, 10.9.20

I could tell you what Martin said. What Robby said. What Kurt and Kat and Lucy said. Lucy sent me her condolences in a Facebook message that I still haven’t responded to. Everyone who knew him said something kind about him. I could tell you what Gauraa and Elliot said—everyone’s been very kind to me. I’ve been bad at responding to messages. I’ve been bad at remembering what people said to me, or what I’ve said to them. I’ve been bad at knowing what to say.

I wrote about him in the last issue I wrote for. I wrote about how he told me to try and empathize with the kid who jumped me on my way home from fourth grade, how instrumental Dad was to the best parts of me as a person. Dad didn’t remember telling me this, but he remembered that I brought the conversation up during one of his health scares. I told him how fundamental his display of empathy and compassion for a stranger was to me. That time, I told him that I loved him, and he replied, embarrassed: I’m not dying.                 

I wrote Dad’s obituary in an Airbnb in Lead, South Dakota. I sent it to my sister and she edited it and wrote a really nice sentence about our dad’s huge and simple love of people. I saw my sister in San Francisco last week, and I dreaded it—I showed up a day late because I wanted to delay this hypothetical conversation about how our dad is dead, a conversation we didn’t really end up having. We aren’t talking about it. I’m only barely writing about it. I started this in a hotel in Baker, Nevada and I’m finishing it in Monticello, Utah. I have been in many places since my dad died, but not Adrian, and I have no real plan to return. 

Dad read all my pieces. He used to call to explain what he liked about them, explain the references as though I hadn’t put them there myself. He talked like a professor about the things he read; he couldn’t talk about writing without trying to teach it. He explained my Leonard Cohen reference to me, in the piece I wrote about the college he used to work for. It was his way of telling me he was proud of me, just as me sneaking in a Leonard Cohen reference was my way of telling him that I loved him in a manner that wouldn’t make him uncomfortable. Dad loved Leonard Cohen—he bought, in 1970, two copies of Songs of Leonard Cohen and wore the grooves out. The last time we hung out, I fixed his new speakers and we listened to The Partisan, a live recording from when Cohen was about to die.

I was going to write a whole one—a usual, one-thousand-word piece about my father for the series; write about him like all the people who live and die in Adrian. I was going to lovingly-render scenes of him and me at Meijer’s on a Sunday morning after breakfast—no church for us, just coupon-shopping and doing the aisles, after putting the work in at the Big Boy Breakfast Bar. The waitress at Alpha Coney Island who always says, have a blessed day, and how dad, godless all his life, would always say right back atcha!, playful, polite. A huge and simple love of people. 

But maybe it’s wrong to write about him in this context, because his connection to Adrian was always tenuous. He grew up in New Hampshire, and spent as much time as he could at my grandfather’s lakeside Sears-kit cabin (his Camp—they used to call them Camps in New Hampshire). He used to take me with him in his Ford Club Wagon, Daddy’s Big Red Van, Dad at the wheel, me at the atlas giving directions even though he knew the way to Camp by heart. Camp is a museum: Raymond Chandler mysteries with tattered dust-jackets, disused day-hiking guides, needlepoints and tattered maps, rusty carpenters’ tools that he picked up when he was laying low in the 70s, following his period of radical left-wing activism. Grey, framed pictures of Berrys I never met: his father, who died when Dad was ten. Berrys don’t usually live long, TBH.

Dad’s sailboat is up on the beach at Camp. You’re maybe picturing something grand: it’s a blue and white fiberglass Sunfish with an eight-foot red and white sail. It’s rendered in needlepoint by my sister’s mother, his boat sails on cartoon waves beneath a caption: The Gods Do No Subtract From Man’s Allotted Time The Hours Spent In Sailing. It’s framed, at Camp, dusty and cobwebby as the boat itself. Dad never sailed as much as he liked to think he did. Ben Jones and I took the boat out this summer and it rides pretty low in the water; the Styrofoam liner is waterlogged but the sail still catches the wind. 

I was up in New Hampshire all summer, and I called dad every day when he went to the hospital. I didn’t go to see him because I knew it would embarrass him, and I think he liked the idea of another bearded radical laying low in another summer of bloodshed, pretending he knew how to sail. I was going to write about how Dad’s spirit is in New Hampshire; how he’s raised the red and white sail and how he’s crossing the silent water as the sun begins to dip below the mist-enshrouded mountains—and I would have given it some referential title just for him: but every image or reference seems trite, and everything seems foolish and incomprehensible when your dad is dead—and he’s never going to call me to tell me about the way I wrote this, or anything else, ever again.