Allison couldn’t sleep so she was up at 3:30 reading and browsing the internet. Around 4:30 she started looking at a map of the canal. It wasn’t a small map and thus required a lot of folding and unfolding and this made not a little bit of noise. I woke up. “Can’t you sleep?”
“No, I was reading. There’s a storm coming.”
“What?”
“A storm. Storm Alley.”
I wasn’t quite yet awake. “Storm Alley? Where’s that?” I had the notion that we were heading into a place where storms happened all the time and considering the near death experience we’d had the day before, it made sense. The Leeds to Liverpool Canal might also be known as Storm Alley.
“No, it’s a storm named Ali. The BBC is saying winds up to 85 MPH.”
“Storm Ali? Like a named storm?”
“Yes. A. L. I.”
Some friends of ours called Allison “Ali” although it was something I did not. I called her Allison or Sweet Pea or Baby Cakes or Sweetie Pie or Pookums or other such things. Still, it was interesting that a storm named after my wife was bearing down on Ireland and Scotland and Northern England while we were here on a canal boat. “Uh, OK. Cool.”
I fell back asleep as Allison folded and put away the map. At 6:00 she woke me, “Do you want to take a walk?”
“Uh, OK.”
So we got dressed and walked along the canal for a bit. I was hoping for stars, but the sky was nothing but clouds, and even though we were near enough to a couple of roads, there were no cars either. There wasn’t any noise at all other than us walking. We stopped by a field of sheep, maybe fifty of them, or sixty. I didn’t bother counting them. We stood there for a moment watching. They weren’t doing anything. They weren’t bleating or milling about. They were just standing by the stone fence along the wooded side of their field. I looked at Allison and pointed, “You know, if you couldn’t sleep, you could have literally counted the sheep.”
She rolled her eyes and turned around and started walking back to the boat. She loves my jokes. Really.
A couple hours later we were all awake and had the boat turned around heading back to Silsden. We went through all the swing bridges along the way without incident. We laughed about the windy bridge from yesterday, and I tried multiple times unsuccessfully to keep from hitting my head on the bathroom doorway. These boats are not made for tall people, and my internal voice kept forgetting to remind me to duck or to duck enough. In the first few days, I must have hit my head on that damn doorway ten or fifteen times. There was even a cut. Being an Arsenal fan, it was suggested that I needed a Peter Cech style helmet just to go to the bathroom on the boat.
A little further up the canal, Allison—ever one to keep up on the news—informed us that the BBC had reported a woman in Galway had been killed when the caravan she was in was blown off a cliff. This Storm Ali was nothing to joke about, but that was in Ireland and Scotland and Northern England, not where we were. A little bit later we came upon a swing bridge, the last one before Silsden. There was an open valley to one side, a farm on a hill to the other. I asked Allison, “Ali, do you want to do this bridge?” It sounded odd until I realized it was the first time I’d ever called her Ali. It might have been the storm. Or the number of times I’d hit my head.
“No, you get it.”
So I grabbed the bridge key and prepared to step off the front of the boat. Michael was right behind me with the rope ready to tie it off while I took care of the bridge. When we were close enough to the edge I stepped off and felt the wind and wondered if it was the tail end of Storm Ali. No matter really if it was. This was the last bridge. We’d be in Silsden soon, which is where we picked up the boat to start this whole adventure. I had the laughable thought then that we’d get to meet the mayor. That there would be parades and we’d be given keys to the city because we’d managed to survive the wind yesterday and hadn’t crashed the boat. When I got to the bridge I turned around to see the boat pointing at me rather than down the canal. The wind was back. “Not again,” I thought.
Apparently after I’d stepped off, the wind blew the boat around so quickly that Michael hadn’t had the chance to step off. If David inched forward much at all the boat would have run aground. Not great, but at least then I wouldn’t be the only one to have done that this trip. He didn’t do that though. He used a bit of reverse to ease back, but with Storm Ali coming in, the stern was pushed around and the boat was now fully on the wrong side of the canal where going forward meant it would run into the bridge even though I’d got it open. This didn’t seem as harrowing as yesterday, but there was still a chance we could damage the boat or get it stuck in shallow water. So much for the parade.
Slowly though, Michael and David got it sorted and steered the boat through and we were soon in Silsden where we pulled up to Silsden Boats to refill our water and get rid of trash and recyclables before moving on down the canal. The guy working there, Jack, got us hooked into the water hose and told us we’d be crazy to continue on in this weather, that Storm Ali would still give us some good rain and wind, that there was a chance the wind could spin the boat straight into the swing bridges. We knew a thing or two about that, and though we’d managed both instances of strong wind without injury to person or boat, we decided to moor up in Silsden for the night rather than risk it. There wouldn’t be a parade, but after enough drinks—and there would be drinks—it might be possible to meet the mayor.