The Accordion: An Introduction

He had reminded himself not to board the whole way down to the terminal. The town was on an island halfway up the Sunshine coast - a name which had a strange ring on these dismal days. The afternoon shifted into evening with a dimming so subtle that the dusk, when it came, seemed to settle without warning - the sun presumably had set somewhere behind the grey blanket that covered the sky.

You left town on a narrow two lane road, a few hundred meters of gravel spotted asphalt. It swung steeply down around a bend in the coastline before coming almost level with the ocean at the terminal gates. The ferries docked more or less right below the town itself, separated by a moat of fir and pine that climbed back up the escarpment. Walking down was an awkward thing, especially if you were in any kind of hurry - the angle just enough to jam your legs back up into your weight like down-shifted pistons.

Stan was in no real hurry, but it was awkward all the same because of the accordion he had slung over his back. At every step its hardness knocked against his hip bone and sighed. step knock sigh step knock … He was grateful when the road leveled off. He nodded to Marlis behind the ticket counter – “just going to sit on the dock” he explained as he walked by, his according still wheezing quietly like an organ with asthma.

There is a strap that’s supposed to stop that, stop the halves from moving. But with so much walking over the past year Sam’s had stretched leaving just enough play for the instrument to sag open and closed. He’d been meaning to fix it. Absent mindedly he scanned around to see if there wasn’t something of us, a length of wire or string maybe in among the scraff that accumulated just outside the gate leading to the docks.

If you hooked left just before the ferry loading area a short set of stairs led down to the private moorages. Bobbing there was an odd selection of wooden hobby boats, small aluminum fishing boats, and new white sailboats. An smattering of houseboats in various states of repair cropped up between them like oversize mollusks. He came here often. Whenever he had to wait for the ferry. Sometimes he would even come down early and sit on the porch of a grey old houseboat to practice. Dilapidated, it had two windows and no one inside. The attraction was a comfortable old wooden deck chair an no one to tell him to leave. It’s hard to find sympathy when you are learning to play the accordion.

He’d thought of buying it once, the houseboat. But no one had ever answered the letters he’d sent. It wasn’t abandoned; the moorage fees where paid every year - checks mailed from the mainland. But no ones seemed to sure who had lived there.

It had been 6 months he’d been coming out to this town. The only real work he could find had been out here but it wasn’t regular so he ferried back and forth every 4 days or so to do day work on one of the construction sites. Not his thing but as everyone said around him: it paid the bills. He’d taken the accordion up to pass the time during the crossings. He wasn’t very social, or much of a reader, but he like to do things. The boat and the instrument sometimes fused together when he dreamt: A huge sighing machine leaving notes trailing out in the froth behind it.

Now the instrument seemed like it might be his ticket to stay. He’d been invited in on a regular gig at the Pub and it might be a beginning he though. No money, no fame, but an invitation to be part of this community that lived out here. Just off the coast.

He was playing a reel in the houseboat's old wooden chair when the last call came to board. The ferry had gotten in without him realizing it somehow. He rushed along the dock and up the stairs, rounding the corner just in time to slip on before they cast off.

He sat, panting, momentarily pleased with himself for having cut it so close. The lights from town came into view, emerging from over the bluff of pine and beginning to shrink away as the boat pulled out of the harbour and swung around to make the crossing. Dusk had settled with an East wind scattering the clouds and in the clear cold sky a host of stars started to make themselves visible.

Night time was his favourite time to cut across the straight. Especially on clear nights like this when the sky glimmered with light. Navigating by the stars had been an abstraction, something only vaguely real, until one night when he had walked out on deck in the middle of the straight. There was a point where, equidistant from both harbors the ship seemed lost in darkness -- the lights from both terminals hidden by the land that protected the harbour-mouths. Standing at that point, lost in the watery darkness he had looked up and the only thing that seemed real, the only thing that he could grab onto to tell him where he was were the stars and the cold railing of the boat. He was just a passenger, but he imagined how it might feel to have a destination and to look up at the stars like a map – to journey through the sky to get back to the earth. Looking up at the sky again all those memories came back to him and he unslung his accordion to practice on of the tunes that he was going to play that night.

It was as the bellows stretched over his knees that he realized his mistake. He had gone down to the docks to practice - not wait for the Ferry. Even though he had reminded himself not to board the whole way down to the terminal, he’d fallen unthinking into his habit of heading back to the mainland after a few days work. The town lights were disappearing like a train into a tunnel as they slid behind the hills that flanked the mouth of the bay.

Back there now, the distance growing, was a bar, and a stage, and a sign: “This Thursday, House band with Special Guest Accordion ”

The wind picked up, tussling his hair. He cast around looking for a way back. The next ferry wouldn’t leave until the morning. The lifeboats were secured and alarmed. He was frantic, briefly. But he quickly resolved that he would play - somehow he would play. His mind fluttered through all the possible solutions he could think of, like the pages of a book laid open in the wind.

Two things: the accordion had to stay dry and he had to be quick.

All the darkness and the cold, the starry sky, were severed by the clunk of the heavy ship’s door. Inside, glaringly bright, people, the smell of food, children running… he moved through it unaware and single minded. In the washroom he flipped the garbage can on its side and slid the bag out all in one motion. The sound of industrial plastic on teal linoleum tiles echoed against the stalls. At the bottom of the container were two fresh bags, slick black and new.

Unslinging his accordion from around his back he lowered it sighing by the strap into one of the bags and blew in a few quick breaths, knotting it tight against the water that would come. Crossing the hall he was out on deck again, under the stars, with the children still running now muted behind the door.

These were transitions that he noticed only in passing, thinking of another one -- What would the water feel like when it hit his chest?

He took the stairs to the car deck two by two, counting off minutes and distances in his head: All in all maybe five minutes, seven maybe since they have left the terminal.

How far was that?

On the last step the bagged accordion knocked against the railing making the sound of a melancholic machine held hostage.

Two hinged sections of frost fenced connected with a padlock, and a short ramp section of ship deck -- then the black edge and the white caps of the ships wake that stretched out below.

The bag came loose from his hands as he fell into the water. He bobbed to the surface seeing first the ship, another set of lights receding, then the stars, and finally the bag bobbing behind him - leading the way back. His body already ached from the cold and rivulets of salty water slicked his hair onto his forehead and ran into his mouth. Everything seemed to slow down: the waves, the ship, his mind. Thinking about it more clearly now, his hand reaching out for the wheezing bag as his legs treaded water, he wondered briefly why it was so important that he play tonight. But it was his direction. He’d been looking at a map and finally found a destination. He began to swim.

Under the stars the waves seemed to move like paper cutouts, rising and falling one behind the other. The boat and the swimmer moved mechanically across the scene, pushed in opposite directions by some hidden lever.