We have never spent enough time in our slip to really get to know our neighbors. The fellow on the other side of our finger pier has been the only constant. Until this week, I’d never before seen anyone on the boat that shares our slip. Every other time we have come back to the marina after months away, it seems like everything around us has shuffled, and there are new boats and new faces each time. Add to that the fact that neither my wife nor I are particularly outgoing, social people, and it makes it hard to get to know people.
Still, I appreciate our neighbors, and all the more so when I find myself wandering down to the M-x (number have been obscured to protect the guilty!) restrooms in the mornings, as I must if I am to indulge myself in the occasional urge to have a Cherry Coke for breakfast; M-x is where the soda machines are. Our head has been torn apart for repairs for an ungodly amount of time now, so we have been relying on the marina restrooms more than ever this spring. Compared to our restroom block, M-y, going into the men’s room at M-x is like entering the fourth level of hell. There is always the potential for a certain tragedy of the commons to occur at marina restrooms, but our neighbors (at least our immediate neighbors!) keep it clean and respectful.
They are not without blemish, though, our neighbors. One fellow spent a recent evening pacing up and down our finger pier talking on his cell phone and blowing his nose. As I was trying to sleep at the time, it was somewhat unwelcome but not entirely unexpected. Close friends of ours lived on a houseboat on Lake Union for a time, and I had learned there that the dock is everyone’s front yard, and that life lived in such proximity inevitably exposes many of the ticks and quirks we all have to one another. A measure of willful blindness and a recognition that we are surely equally annoying to others on occasion improves tolerance.
So too does another result of living cheek-by-jowl, which I can’t quite find a word for. I see it in the fellow who dropped a bottle of vodka (an inevitable occurrence on summer docks) and carefully picked up all the glass from the dock and a nearby kayak it had sprayed into. Or the other gentleman I came across hosing bird poop (another inevitable occurrence) off the dock the other day, in front of someone else’s slip, who looked up apologetically (although I’m not sure why you would apologize for cleaning up bird poop) and said “These damn birds just don’t stop,” as if he held out a secret hope that someday, they might. Until then, I imagine, he’ll continue cleaning off the floats in front of other people’s boats, making it a nicer neighborhood for us all.
It’s an eclectic kind of community. Boats draw in all sorts of interesting folks. But there is something about it that does just make you want to clean up bird poop, tidy restrooms, and ignore sniffly folks just outside your portlights. That’s just what you do for good neighbors.