“My Dad and I Sneak on the HMS Bounty” By Miranda Morris

Dad surprises me with a call. He’s on his way to the city for the day, so do I want to meet up for a visit?

It’s not what you think– Dad didn’t plan this visit as a fun daddy-daughter activity day. He was heading down anyway to check out a used van he found on Craigslist, then going to watch a football game with my uncle or something. My company is an afterthought- a convenient space filler, a way to kill two birds with one stone. He expects my availability, which irks me even though I’m woefully unengaged. I’m between jobs right now and even when I am working, I always end up making time for these spontaneous swoops, because my parents live three hours away and because I don’t have the gumption to deny Dad or set boundaries about planning in advance. I want to say that I’m an adult now, that I have a rich life full of social and professional engagements and it’s disrespectful of him to expect me to drop everything to see him just because he needs to kill an hour or two. But I don’t. I grit my teeth as I feed him directions on the phone, repeating myself over the cranked stereo strains of Bob Seger or George Thorogood on his end. Turning it down for ease of comprehension is an alien concept. Relentless classic rock is Dad’s white noise.

He expects me to offer up a plan. I have no idea. He’s the one who sprung this on me out of the blue. Then I remember that the tall ships are in town and today’s the last day. Dad’s a sailor without a sailboat now. He loves the nautical, the heroic. When I was a kid we had a 22-foot ketch for a while, aboard which I was a reluctant mate, clinging to the lifeline or hiding in the cabin with an Animorphs book. I felt dizzy and sick when we heeled over, never fully trusting in the keel physics Dad assured me would right the hull. Every time the deck tilted and pitched toward the whitecaps, I saw death’s jaws yawning open below.

He’s stoked about the tall ships idea. The HMS Bounty will be there- an icon and one of Dad’s favourite narratives. The serendipity of this situation, with no foresight on his part, is typical. I can’t be too annoyed though. After the initial pettiness wears off, I find myself anticipating the potential for a genuine bonding experience with Dad like we haven’t had in over a decade. I cross my fingers that it will go smoothly.

Dad and I have always had a tumultuous affiliation. The cumulative hours of electric shouting and millilitres of shed tears over the course of my adolescence could artifice a squall to rival the maritime drama of The Perfect Storm– another of his go-tos. Countless times I’ve watched him yearn through the screen for the tragic stakes of mortal peril on the high seas, desperately fantasizing his way out of a riskless existence as an unemployed stay-at-home parent. When he was young he hitchhiked and slept by waterfalls and climbed a mountain in the Rockies that no one else had climbed, and was allowed to name it. (It’s not labelled on any map.) Now he was living off disability in a rural town devoid of ambition or intrigue. The existential frustration ricocheted around his innards like a wayward pinball, like a fork of lightning reeling out for the closest point of contact to discharge into. I was that point of contact. The conduction rod grew taller with me, the incoming bolts fiercer. Whenever I discovered a new hole in the sleeping bag of contrived reality that Dad had zipped over my childhood, I couldn’t help poking a finger through it, stretching it wider, demanding its acknowledgment. Every inaccuracy in his elaborate cosmology was a betrayal of my juvenile trust. By the time I took off for university, I’d installed breakwaters high enough to shelter the inlet of my mind from the slightest ripple of deceit.

It’s mid August and the city heat floods every public space with claustrophobic angst. I live in a dilapidated brick house with four other people and two cats and sheets tacked to the living room windows to keep out the sunlight so my vampire housemates can play Skyrim all day. We’re one of the last slumlord rental spots in the neighborhood, whose rapid gentrification has made an island of our low-rent hovel. There’s nowhere nearby that I could take Dad, even if he were willing to come pick me up, which he isn’t because he hates city driving. Instead, I have to take two subways and a streetcar to the harbourfront, then wait half an hour in a parking lot for him. By the time he pulls up, it’s nearly five and the souvenir shops are closing. Turns out he took the wrong exit, because Bob Seger doesn’t know the downtown core as well as his daughter does.

He combs his mustache in the rearview mirror and puts SPF on his nose and I try to tactfully relay a sense of urgency when I point out that the tall ships probably won’t be open for tours much longer. Urgency is something Dad simply cannot abide, unless it’s his own. Luckily, in this case, we’re bound by a shared interest.

We walk the pier, flanked by the vast spiderweb riggings of sleeping giants that creak and knock along the wharf. Their structures feel predatorial, encroaching. The air is full of the treacherous smell of contaminated urban water. It’s not the air we knew. Dad complains about the guy selling the Craigslist van. Other people don’t know how to take care of their stuff. He bemoans his bad back, public smokers, the price of gas, the incompetence of other drivers and of my generation in general. He doesn’t ask me about my friends or my job and I don’t bother volunteering anything. He’s not in a listening mood. Under the late afternoon sun’s ruthless glare, I feel tired and deflated and coated in the thin sadness of missed opportunity. When we get to the Bounty, a young guy in a polo shirt is cordoning off the boarding ramp, because tours are over. Because of course they are. The tall ships leave tomorrow. Dad tries to plead with him, underscoring that he drove four hours to see the Bounty. Polo Shirt puts his hands up in a helpless gesture, then chuckles nervously and scurries off. Historically, I’d be embarrassed by the attempt at bartering with a low-level employee in the face of plainly stated policy. Dad’s always seen rules and schedules as constructs meant for other people. This time, though, I feel a protective sorrow. I see the light of playful appeal in his grey eyes dissolve into weary acceptance. The pulsing ache of age is worse than anger. It tenderizes all past transgressions.

Then Dad looks up the closed ramp, and back at me. I feel a stomach flutter familiar to the risk-averse, but suppress it when Dad’s crow’s feet uncoil the secret code for mischief. I don’t know which of us says the words.

“Let’s go!”

In ten seconds we’ve hopped the chain, clambered up the gangway and alighted on the deck of the HMS Bounty. This isn’t the original vessel, but a larger replica constructed for the 1962 movie, designed to accommodate two engines and a film crew. It was meant to be set on fire in the South Pacific, but Marlon Brando refused to finish shooting unless it was spared. It was too beautiful to burn.

We skip and stumble across the deck, two tipsy mutineers, poking our heads in hatches and clutching the epic wheel, all with the fevered rush of borrowed time. I feel lightness in my feet and I’m giggling like I just guzzled a jug of smuggled rum. Our joyride is over a moment later with the reappearance of Polo Shirt, who looks thoroughly agitated. We walk the plank back to reality, a vigilant security escort behind us. Dad apologizes and we run all the way back to the parking lot.

Two years later when I read the news about the shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, I feel torn. It’s strange and sad, the way it was bungled and swallowed by Hurricane Sandy’s Atlantic, even taking a woman who claimed to have been a descendent of Fletcher Christian himself. She was a volunteer deckhand, a former beauty queen, new to sailing. She’d joined the crew because of that blood connection. I wonder if her faith in physics was upset when the terrible waves broke over the bow and the Bounty swooned into the sea. Or maybe she grinned into her fate. Maybe she felt cradled by her kinship to myth.

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Miranda Morris is a writer, illustrator, and multi-instrumentalist currently based in Hamilton, Ontario. Pre-Covid, she played trombone in the New Orleans-based funk band TV Pole Shine. Her non-fiction has been published in Critical Read and she was recently shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Literary Prize for Short Fiction with her story "Stump".