I’m not sure if my father ever crossed the bar. Twenty something, Astoria in the seventies, an infant at home. I can’t remember if he ever said anything about it, his days with the Coast Guard.

The Columbia River bar, where the river meets the sea, is one of the worst bar crossings in the world, where enormous standing waves can easily engulf the bow of a tanker.

If you’re caught, say, in a small craft when things go south, your odds of survival would make a bookie blush. I wonder if my father was ever out there, watching a wall of seawater well up. I mean, I suppose I could ask him, ask if he was scared, if he thought about his young wife and son at home. I suppose I could ask.

I recently “crossed the bar.” From drinking on one side of it, to working on the other side. Really, the crossing was not that exciting. As expected, I have experienced some exhilaration and panic, but mostly the transition has been smooth. There’ve only been a couple of moments where I look across at some patron and regard, with a certain amount of horror, some quality in them which I then recognize in myself. That can make all your inner shit run cold for a bit. That, and watching someone do shots of Jager… Yikes.

I meant for this to be some sort of parallel, but I’m not sure it works. There’s a big difference between being awash in the tumult of an angry ebb tide and being awash in a thirsty and impatient mob. Sure, I believe some qualities remain- a certain exhilaration, a feeling of focused purpose, cold sweat, all that swaying and the fact that I can curse like a sailor, but mostly the experiences are worlds apart. Why wouldn’t they be?

But I think of my father and how he worked when I was a kid and how he drank and how I work and drink and I pour a Jager shot for some barfly and hope that someone will pay me, someday, for being smart, or funny, or good looking, or just to sit down and shut the fuck up.