Boaty: Stories from a Life on Mobile Bay
In the spring of 2020, Boaty Campbell sat on his porch on Mobile Bay and talked for seven hours across three afternoons. He was seventy-eight and eleven years into a cancer fight, and he knew what the recorder was for.
What he gave was not a memoir. It was stories.
His great-grandfather came off the boat from Edinburgh a cabin boy in 1850 and ended up captain of a Confederate gunboat at the Battle of Mobile Bay. Boaty spent thirty years on the same shift at the same fire station downtown - the tunnel, the coal ships, the night Hurricane Frederic tore the wheelhouse off a fireboat while he and another man tied themselves together in the dark. He fished the bay for a living on his days off, a hundred and fifty crab traps, alone, and paid his daughter through Auburn one crab at a time.
He also washed a dead cat, blow-dried it, and put it back in a widow's rocking chair - and that is the funniest thing in this book by a distance.
Here it all is in his own voice, cut down from the tape and left otherwise alone. The grammar is his. The endings land hard and stop, the way he told them.
I hope you live to be a hundred, and I never die.
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