* At night a tug with a tow shows yellow white lights stacked vertically on a mast. Two lights for a tow less than 200 meters, three lights for a so called long tow, over 200 meters. The cables are that long because the tows can’t stop on their own, and the longer the cable the longer the margin of safety if something goes wrong. 

* Tugboats are well lit, but curiously their tows only display dim running lights, a smudge of phosphorescence on a dark foggy sea.  Heading west out of Admiralty Inlet toward Canada, or maybe Alaska, a dim green light shows. If the barge is long enough, two green lights. More light configurations exist for barges tied alongside a tug, or a barge being pushed by a tug. If you are at sea at night you seriously want to know these things and do not want to get between a tug and the tow for the obvious reason a cable connects them. A long time ago I read about a couple who sailed between a tug and tow at night. The cable snared their keel, and a minute later the barge ran them over. That happened in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts. 


* Occasionally letters come down from the far north woods. Anonymous and sometimes sweet. They don’t mention boats, or the sea, but speak of longing in the wake of deer tracks splayed in spring’s thaw. Which means the snow must be soft for part of the day. Mostly from my memory of snow. A few bird tracks too, and it’s about time for them to fly south if they’re going. I wonder if it’s hard for them to decide.

* The Blue Moose opens at Seven. Sit wherever you want, says Abigail, at that time of morning. It’s especially agreeable to sit down to a glass of cold orange juice at The Blue Moose after watching the lights of a tug and tow across the Inlet at 0400. It just is. And then, the company of all the moose. I’ve tried to count them a few times but always loose track. ( Get it?)  From the images, most moose are blue, but a few are brown. Most are painted, but some are on gift store style plates. There’s one painting I’ve studied pretty hard because out beyond the moose in the foreground there’s a mountain that looks like Mt. Katahdin in Maine, where I’m from. Katahdin has long been a spiritual place, going back to Pomona and other gods who hurled lightning bolts from the Knife Edge, all the way up to the present, when people leave the city early in the morning and drive to the mountain Thoreau wrote about in The Maine Woods, and climb in their pajamas.