Love On The Tide

by Jim Sinclair

Downtown: Added on November 20, 2006

The Cold War was raging, the hot war in Viet Nam was not yet to a boil, and the Rose Festival Fleet numbered over 20 ships. We were young in years and yet on the trailing edge of the pre-hippy generation. I had left my ship to see what there was to see along the waterfront. The girl was a beauty and asked to get her and her friends on board for a tour. Turned out she was a junior Girl Scout leader with four or five of her young charges in tow. Somehow she dumped them with another leader and joined me to visit a Canadian sail training ship I was interested in. We talked boats. I had grown up with sailboats in San Francisco; she had grown up with power boats on the Columbia. An offer of a home cooked meal turned out to be a TV dinner and an evening of passionate youthful groping. Delivered back to my ship by Rose City Transit (the bus before Tri-Met), I soon left Portland with the rest of the fleet. But just like the old joke about sailors and salmon, I came back. And stayed.

Now almost forty years later I still enjoy that beautiful girl, TV dinners, and occasional passionate groping.