Where I’m Writing From eli.cranor@gmail.com September 11, 2022 Eli Cranor is an Arkansas novelist whose debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is available wherever books are sold. He can be reached using the “Contact” page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor

I’m writing from a “pirate ship.”

That’s what my kids started calling the boat currently anchored in the lake behind our house. It appeared, as pirate ships do, in a storm. Despite the cloud cover and the sheets of rain, I could tell this was a different sort of vessel than any we’d encountered before.

The kids pressed empty paper towel rolls to the window as I dug for my binoculars. The boat was a mile away, over in the Arkansas River channel, the water there deep enough to hold the barges we sometimes spot trudging along toward the lock and dam.

This wasn’t the biggest ship we’d ever seen. It was just different.

It wasn’t a bass boat, or a party barge. Not even a sailboat, though there were three masts towering high above the strange vessel’s deck. I’d never seen anything like it. Not even in the ocean. I didn’t have a clue what to call it, but my kids sure did:

“A pirate ship!”

They were adamant, so confident as they ran to the window every morning, passing my binoculars between them — the cardboard tubes long since abandoned, traded in for the real thing now — whispering, “Pirate ship. Pirate ship. Pirate ship…”

I wanted — no, I needed — them to be right.

Just this once.

Maybe that’s all it would take for them to believe forever. In what? I wasn’t certain. Magic, maybe? The idea that the world is full of wonder. Yes. That strange, mysterious beauty can be found anywhere, everywhere, if you’ll just keep your eyes open long enough to see it.

That’s what I wanted to give my kids.

Long after the soft sheen of youth xxxfades into the jagged teenage years and eventually the grind of adulthood, I wanted them to have a pirate ship in their back pocket.

So, as soon as we got them to bed on Thursday night, four days after we’d first noticed the three-masted vessel, I set off across the lake on an adventure of my own.

The water was rougher than usual. Two-foot swells slapped at the starboard side of my 50-horsepower pontoon boat, a boat the kids had named “Spooner” after my mom’s recently deceased wiener dog, whom I’d long ago named after a pup mentioned in the Jimmy Buffett song “Death of an Unpopular Poet.”

More Buffett lines swam through my head the closer I came to the curious vessel:

“Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call.”

“Yes, I am a pirate, 200 years too late.”

It wasn’t until the boat was fully upon me that I realized I wasn’t just out there for the kids. I pined for mysterious beauty too. I wanted to believe that all those Buffett songs I’d grown up on were more than just beach tunes. I wanted to believe in the magic of the water.

Little did I know, that’s exactly why the boat floating before me had been built.

The SV Seeker isn’t a “pirate ship,” after all. It’s a Mandarin junk boat, handcrafted by Doug Jackson over in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The SV Seeker is Doug’s dream manifested, his “second life,” as he put it when I asked him that fateful Thursday night.

“Yeah, we live too long these days,” he’d said. “I got divorced, looked up and had all this extra time. I had to do something.”

Doug did “something,” all right (to get his full story, go to www.svseeker.com). He built a boat and now he’s sailing it all the way to the Gulf. He’s hanging out in Lake Dardanelle for a few more weeks, prepping for the next leg of his journey. In the meantime, he’s also opening the boat for tours on Saturdays.

I’ll give you one guess as to what the Cranor kids did last Saturday.

Watching them finally climb aboard the “pirate ship” (no, Doug didn’t correct them, and neither did I) was even better than I’d imagined.

They ran around the deck, petted the dragon statue, gawked at the bare-chested mermaid, spun the ship’s wheel, went below deck and peered out of every porthole.

It was a perfect merging of their dreams and mine, all contained within the dream Doug brought to life with his own two hands and a welding torch.

Seeing my kids on that day felt just as I’d hoped. It was enough to let me know they still believed — and maybe, if I could pull a couple more “pirate ships” out of my hat — they’d never stop.