I dreamed my high school was turning the band hall into a multi-use facility where there would be band practice, standardized testing, and rented office space. The company I worked for was renting space, so I was back at my old school.
As part of getting things set up for our office, we started finding a bunch of drawings and poems I’d done, that had gotten tucked in the back of my instrument cubby. So that was kind of embarrassing. But I also found out a community band was going to use the space in the evenings, so I joined up, and started playing my trumpet again.
I decided to go on a trip then, and ended up on the southeast coast. I planned to take a boat home, and there was this company that rented boats that were towed by river dolphins on their migrations down or up river. I was in luck, as I needed to go down river to Houston, and it was a down river time of year.
Part of using this method was being part of rounding up the dolphin that would pull your boat, so you would know what was involved in hitching the dolphin up and letting it loose in an emergency. So I helped the handler catch three river dolphins. They were leaner and more fishlike than I was expecting, with pointed, streamlined faces. Still, they were definitely air breathing, and their tail flukes lay horizontally, not vertically. They were a shimmering, glittering, deep, electric blue color across their backs, and a pearly silver underneath. Their skin felt cool and smooth.
One dolphin had no marks from previous hailing’s, and there was a rule that no new dolphins would be taken, so that one got released. The other two had markings and scars along their tails showing where they’d been rigged for hitching before. I helped the handler remove an old hitching stud that bolted on either side of the tail.
Very early versions of the hitching gear had involved piercing through the tail muscles with gradually larger gauges, until a thick rope could be passed through. If a dolphin still had the large gauge hole, this could still be done. So the handler had some fittings for this. The fitting was like a large, thick bolt, about two inches in diameter at the head and an inch and a half at the shaft. The heads had a groove and a complicated quick release mechanism which was still more humane than the early methods of just bolting the lead cord through the dolphin’s flesh, but they looked just brutal, and I was glad I wouldn’t be using them.
The small stud we replaced was part of the release for the more modern harness. This was rigged around the dolphin’s tail, then hitched to my boat. A crowd of children gathered as we were hitching the dolphin up, and most of my job of helping was continually shooing the kids away from the dolphin and our equipment. Over and over again. The little brats just wouldn’t listen, and one of them almost drowned after they spooked the dolphin and got tangled in the rigging as the animal thrashed.
Finally everything was hooked up, and we paid out the line to give the dolphin room to be comfortable. It wasn’t so much about harnessing and controlling its motion as taking advantage of the energy it would already be using. By then it was night, so I bedded down in my boat. When I woke the next morning, the handler had unmoored me and I was on my way.
I traveled slowly and steadily westward, giving a light pull on the lead every so often to judge from the tension how the dolphin was swimming and whether debris was tangled in the line. The river banks were grassy, muddy, marshy, stony by turns as we went. We made good time. The next day, as evening drew on, we entered a channel of sand as white as sugar. The water was a brilliant turquoise around us.
I thought about staking down an staying the night here. Staking down involved wrapping the line around a stake with a sort of rounded M for a head. The downward legs of the M on either side were spikes to anchor the lead line, passed through the M arches, firmly to the ground when the stake was pounded into the earth. But the sand was too soft and loose, so nothing could be securely anchored there.
Not far ahead the river went through a city in a series of canals. I knew my dolphin knew the way and would stick to the best course. The boat rental company had a deal with some lodgings in the cities along the route, so I decided to stay on land instead of in my boat. I tied off at the company’s anchorage and walked up a cobbled path into a lamp lit courtyard.
There was a coffee shop there, and I saw a friend sitting at one of the tables. I sat with her as she read the paper, because no one behind the counter seemed to hear me when I tried to talk with them. I knew they had a shuttle to a hotel I could stay at, but when I asked they ignored me so I sat with my friend and drank a coffee she ordered for me and fetched new sections of the paper for her.
I finally decided to go back to my boat, and as I stood on the quay, a wavering, red light sprang up down the street. I looked over to see one of the brick townhouses halfway down the block was on fire! As I watched, the building next door to it, closer to us, caught fire as well. We yelled for the people in the coffee shop to come out, because the fire was now only two houses away.
I figured my dolphin was the safest creature around, but I followed the line down river to check on it. I found it had used its slack to swim into a deep canal that ran beneath a hill. It had been shepherding a bunch of street urchins to safety down here. There was a little girl with long, tangled, dark hair, crouched at the water’s edge, sobbing with fear, as the smooth, blue head raised out of the water to look at her. And then I woke up.
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