Free Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert

the Navy, Ruth. You don’t need to worry about port and starboard. The only direction you need to worry about is staying out of my way.”
    Ruth seemed to get on his nerves even when she wasn’t trying to, although sometimes she did so on purpose, just to pass the time. One wet summer day, for instance, they pulled up string after string of traps and found no lobsters. Ruth’s father got more and more agitated. He was catching nothing but seaweed, crabs, and urchins. Eight or nine strings later, however, Ruth pulled a good-sized male lobster out of a trap.
    “Dad, what’s this?” she asked innocently, holding up the lobster. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Maybe we can take it into town and sell it to somebody.”
    “That’s not funny,” her father said, although Ruth herself thought it was pretty good.
    The boat stank. It was cold even in the summer. In bad weather, the boat deck jumped and popped, and Ruth’s legs ached from the strain of keeping her balance. It was a small boat and had barely any shelter. She had to pee in a bucket and empty it overboard. Her hands were always freezing, and her father would yell if she took a break to warm her hands around the hot exhaust pipe. He never worked with gloves, he said, even in December. Why couldn’t she handle the cold in the middle of July?
    Yet when Ruth’s mother asked Ruth what she wanted to do with her summer, Ruth invariably replied that she wanted to work on a lobster boat.
    “I want to work with my dad,” Ruth said. “I’m really only happy out on the water.”
    As for her relations with the other islanders, she may not have been as perfectly understood by them as she told her mother. She loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the Addams brothers, and they loved her. But because of her long spells in Delaware getting educated, she was pretty much forgotten by everyone else, or, worse, disowned. She was no longer like them. Truth to tell, she’d never been all that much like them in the first place. She’d always been an inward-looking child, not, say, like the Pommeroy boys, who screamed and fought and made perfect sense to everyone. And now that Ruth passed most of her time someplace very far off, she talked differently. She read an awful lot of books. And, to many of her neighbors, she seemed stuck up.
    Ruth graduated from boarding school in late May of 1976. She had no plans for the future except to return to Fort Niles, where she so obviously belonged. She made no move to attend college. She never even looked at the college brochures scattered around her school, never responded to the advice of her teachers, never gave any notice to the shy hints of her mother.
    In that May of 1976, Ruth Thomas turned eighteen. She was five feet six inches tall. She had shiny hair that was almost black, and it came to her shoulders; she wore it in a ponytail every day. Her hair was so thick, she could sew a button on a coat with it. Her face was roundish, her eyes were wide apart, and she had an inoffensive nose and long, pretty eyelashes. Her skin was darker than anyone else’s on Fort Niles, and she tanned to a smooth, even brown. She was muscular and a little heavy for her height. She had a bigger rear end than she wanted, but she didn’t fuss about it too much, because the last thing she wanted to sound like was those girls at school in Delaware who fussed over their figures annoyingly, uninterruptedly, odiously. She was a heavy sleeper. She was independent. She was sarcastic.
    When Ruth returned to Fort Niles at the independent, sarcastic age of eighteen, she did so in her father’s lobster boat. He picked her up at the bus station in the rotten truck he kept parked down by the ferry landing, the truck he used for his business and shopping whenever he came to town, which was approximately every two weeks. He picked Ruth up, accepted a slightly ironic kiss from her, and immediately announced that he was dropping her off at the grocery store to pick up