The Buldings Above

It's a fact to be believed at this time, and not mere, that whole towns were once built on boats.

You can read it if it's true, because it's written: during the rushes to gold, when half a village would empty to go looking for the necessaries that would build their futures in another place, they just upped and left boats. Big ones mind, not mine. Just left them at anchor and didn't think about coming back until all was over and the boats were gone.

Storms would pound them, and the wharves would clatter as the boats struck, clatter over and more, and filling the king tides and the streets with deck planking and ropes.

It all formed a kind of storm grid, a flotsam of sensible design. The men saw this, and the few of them that had arrived early and given sack to the gold at the earlier moment watched as the waters returned their foraging, and seeped into the sands and then brining back out to the open sea. Later, when all the gold was exhausted and the rest of the men too, they returned to see the town planning that nature does of its own and the men left abandoned there saw that it had logic.

They were smart men, and hard. They got to it and finished where nature had left off, and the streets were finished with the landfill of their diggings, and those cold and empty tailings were dumped on the carcasses of their vessels and their eagerness. They had the timbers of hundreds of deserted ships, and the words of their stories too. Some men found lamps and tea pots and shovels in the mess and kept them aside as they beat down their pasts and settled there with the sunken ships and abandoned future.

This is written now, but it's what my grandfather told. They were happy men there, and the storms let them be.