We threaded our way through the buoys and fishtraps as the pine and oak covered shores of the Tred Avon narrowed and the waterway twisted out of sight. We were listening to a scientist by the name of Lovelock laugh and sigh about the future of this planet (we’re screwed) on NPR as we made a right turn around the Oxford peninsula and skimmed through the thin water towards the marina. J maneuvered the boat through the wooden pilings towards our slip as I flung fenders over the side to protect the hull. As he nosed the bow in, I noticed a thin, ancient man standing on the dock. A look of confusion crossed my face as he motioned for the bow line. I didn’t want to break him with the weight. Just then, a woman walked by and smiled, “This is Jimmy, the world’s best dock-master. And oldest, I think. How old are you Jimmy? Ninety….four. That’s what I thought.” This didn’t make me feel any better about tossing him a soaking wet coil of rope. As J hovered in the middle of the slip, I dropped the line to Jimmy, who tied it slowly but expertly to the nearby cleat. “Where’s the next?” he called up to me. I threw him the next line and then headed to the stern to fasten the aft end of the boat to the splintered pilings. When we had the boat secure, J jumped off the boat to talk with Jimmy while I finished straightening up on deck. Almost twenty minutes later I jumped off the bow onto the dock and joined J as he listened to the history of Jimmy.
Jimmy grew up in Carolina County, Virginia on his family’s farm, and began helping out when he was “too small to know what to do, but I did it.” He made his way up to Maryland and settled in Oxford in the 1930’s when he found that people here treated him like family, or even better than family. (“Can you ask for anything better, for folks to treat you better than your own family?”) He started working at the Oxford Boatyard when he was 19, and has been working ever since. He shuffles around the yard checking on boats, and door-locks, and dock-lines, making sure everything is secure. He used to be the all-star do-anything man; painting the bottoms of boats with both hands at the same time, tending on boats and lines during hellacious storms, lifting anchors off of hauled out boats and scrambling down the ladder (this was when he was 85!). Now he does his rounds and tells his stories and smiles and says, “There are no black people, there are no white people, there are no yellow people. There are just….people.” drawing out the last word for emphasis, a bit of a southern twang coloring his speech. He just wants to help, and doesn’t ask for anything in return. “My paycheck is knowing that I did something that made you happy. Isn’t that a nice way of living?” Yes, Jimmy, it is. And at 95 (his birthday was a couple weeks ago), he knows a hell of a lot more than most.
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