Two Red Flags by James Lowell

The horizon wasn’t sewn in a straight line. It looked unstitched. Ruched. Wind torn whitecaps like stuffing clawed from a quilt.

He could see the silken clarity of cobalt blue interrupt the slate green water that dressed the shore. He didn’t have to question what the unruly pattern meant. The Gulf Stream was cutting into the bay, feeding on the shallow’s warmth, becoming a storm-sowing machine.

Looking at the crowded dock, he appeared to be the only one who could read the gust-stitched pattern. A storm looming. A blow being whipped up. Time to batten down.

 He made his way to his Albury Brothers, a center console built by fourth-generation Bahamians to move produce, people, and pigs fast through skinny water, yet able to take the hard slap of the North Atlantic when it turned cheeky.

She drew compliments wherever he went. Even if he went nowhere, people would come by her slip and say she was a looker.

Many eyes did follow him as he made his way to his boat. And if the wind had been right, he’d have heard murmuring begin to swell. He knew without hearing a word that they were talking about what he was up to. And he knew that as soon as he backed her out of the slip and headed to his piling in the middle of the harbor, there’d be a lull in speculation. A suspension of disbelief. Laughing eyes blinking to nervous smiles.

Towing a rowboat astern, he made for his piling where his boat could keep her knife-edged bow to the howl. She’d ridden out two hurricanes and a multitude of un-named storms this way. He knew everyone watching him knew this, and that soon there would be jostling along the docks as others began to rein in their fears with extra bow, stern, and spring lines on—all tied to the same old wobbly cleats that had a history of letting go.

In the Island Café, a wall of photos spans all the way back to 1938. Before and afters. Salty, shingled cottages known as “saltboxes,” reduced to pick up sticks. Boats in their berths tossed onto the dock, turned turtle or swamped. Toys a tantruming child abandoned in the sandbox as he stormed out.

1938’s no-name blow hit the mainland harder than here. The opposite happened with Carol. The before-and-afters of that ‘54 storm look like the whole island turned turtle. Nothing but sand dunes and rib cages of hulls picked clean by windblast and storm surge. But if you look closely in the lower right-hand corner of the after, you’ll see a boy in a nutshell pram sculling across the harbor, coming closer to where you’re standing. That boy is him, and that pram is the one he’s towing behind his Albury Brothers as he makes his way to his piling.

He lets the bow gently nudge the piling, like a pony sniffing a new post in the corral. This is before the whinnying wind stampedes waves, everyone’s electrified hair like a prairie on fire. This is that proverbial quiet before. And as he brings out his black double-braided storm lines, lines that could hold a boat four times the size of his, and two snubbers to absorb any sudden strain, he appears to be talking to her. Patting her bow, stroking her transom. And she doesn’t seem inclined to crow hop.

His bow has one significant center cleat and one significant bow eye. He threads the looped end through each, cinches them tight. Paying out, he uses a modified clove hitch to secure the ends of both lines to the piling. Redundancy is security.

He takes down the Isinglass. Stores all his rods below. Duct tapes his Garmin screen covers. Unplugs his Icom and pockets it. Doesn’t raise his twin Yamahas. Does tie the wheel with a bit of paracord to keep her engines straight as a keel.

All eyes on the dock have now adopted a serious squint.

Nothing left to blow around. Lines set. He pats her gunnel like a flank. Pulls his pram over a patter of wavelets to what is now the lee side. Swings his legs over the transom and balances his way into her hold. Shoving off, he lets the pram drift and swirl. His boat looks safe and sound. But it’s his pram that makes him feel most at home on the water.

He notices he can hear the wind now. He doesn’t have to notice that the docks look like a rodeo where the clowns are trying to calm bucking broncos. He doesn’t have to hear their disquiet over what his actions may portend. Instead, he feathers his oars and listens to his merry pram’s chortling hull.

He pulls on the oars to gain speed for pure joy. And as he has always done since Carol made a name for herself, he rows all the way past the chaotic dock and keeps rowing until he lets her loll in the felted cove, grazing sawgrass of what he knows will be the sheltering lee of the mounting storm.

He walks back to his shack. Locks it up for the duration. Then, seeing the increasingly ragged horizon, he walks over to the harbormaster whose cloudy eyes whisk worry. Hands him the pair of hand-sewn square red flags with black squares in their middle that his ex-wife left him, saying “I’d raise these no later than high noon.”

James Lowell writes from a remote, two-mile island in the Atlantic’s stream. Short- and long-listed Fish’s 2024 poetry prize, his work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Caribbean Writer, English, Fortnight, O Miami, Martha’s Vineyard Times, Texas Poetry Review, Orchard PoetryJournal, Gramercy, Fourth River, and the Sandy River Review.

19 September 2025