Most people do knot (pun intended, this blog is about boats; sort of) know what a davit is. Of course once upon a time neither did I. Back in 2007 I was going through a pretty rough patch. I had taken time off my more or less shitty construction job to go to Russia with a bunch of Russians. It was fun, but stressful. For some reason the fact that I was 28 years old an unmarried was so foreign that they treated me as defective. Or that is how it felt because what is "polite" in Russia is "fucking rude as shit" in the rest of the world. Either way, after many adventures (including hiding from the KGB in a public park) I came home. To say it was a rough landing would be to paint with very broad strokes.
My parents were nice enough to take me to the house I was renting. It is on a property/compound out in the woods which belonged to some family friends who were having a wedding at their part of the property the next week. I had previously been approached about letting the grooms family stay in my house, but as I was living with a guy named Super Dave and a real life incarnation of Napoleon Dynamite's uncle Rico, I thought the chances were slim. I even asked before I left and was given no answer. Thusly, I was sure as hell not interested in cleaning. I flew the coop.
When I arrived that day, I found people hard at work removing all traces of my residency from the cabin. This was never my plan. But I was leaving town again, so I gathered my cell phone from a pile which had been made in the basement, ignoring the fact that my entire life and home as being turned upside down. They already had made too much progress, so I figured that damage control was my best bet. Then I got the real message.
Larry (the lawyer who is the brains behind the compound) was on the phone in his truck out front.His conversation sounded very serious. He was talking about the hospital. I was preoccupied trying to get the "cleaners" to treat my stuff with some semblance of care until I walked out to leave (I was inside less than a couple minutes). He was off the phone, at which point he told me that my friend Koti had been paralyzed in a car wreck the day before. Immediately the natural beauty of my surroundings, my own petty problems, and the fact that I didn't bed any Russian beauties was rendered unimportant. Of course I could not really process it though. Hell, I had been awake for almost 30 hours, not to mention I witnessed the aftermath of an awful accident between St Petersburg and Moscow 24 hours earlier. It was information overload. I got in my truck and drove east for a couple hours to Ellensburg Washington.
That night I stayed with friends, still unable to process the accident. In those days I had no Facebook to help give me information. I was flying blind. The next day I stayed with my friends Dan and Miranda on a hillside outside of Yakima. They were living in what they had intended for a chicken coop. We were all friends of Koti's, so it was nice to share tears and prayers, but it still felt terrible. The next day during some free time, I went to a book store. Picking up my favorite (now defunct) music magazine No Depression, I opened it and immediately found an obituary of a mentor of mine from radio, Laura Ellen Hopper, she had offered me a job on air without ever getting a demo. I was wrecked. The walking dead at this point, I turned my truck east to visit some other friends. To have a drink. When I met them at the bar though I didn't even have the energy to lift a glass. I was at the end of my rope. That is where this story ends, still leaving you wondering what the hell a davit is. As you clearly have access to the internet, why don't you look it up yourself.
You call that a davit?!!!!
