Cork Boat by John Pollack

Author:John Pollack
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375423093
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

About a month later, some speechwriting work took me out to Palo Alto, California, for a few weeks. Since Cork Supply USA was located in Benicia, just fifty miles north, I decided to pay a visit. I wanted to meet my benefactors, see their operation, and thank them for all their support. I had another motive, too. In a recent e-mail, Chris had asked if Garth and I were still thinking about an overseas journey. I said that we hoped to organize one, but couldn’t really afford to without sponsorship. He hadn’t responded directly, but did mention he’d been talking up the boat with the company owner. It sounded like a hint.

Coincidentally, Garth was in Berkeley at the same time, checking out Cal’s graduate program in architecture, so I called Chris and set up lunch for the three of us. At the last minute, Garth bailed—his schedule was just too tight to work in a trip to Benicia—so I drove up alone. Fighting midday traffic up 680, I crossed the Sacramento River toward Benicia, which, a brown sign informed me, had been California’s first capital.

Off to my right, a mile or so up the river, were twenty-five or thirty ships, apparently derelict, anchored in a cluster midstream. Some were merchant freighters, others military gray. Had they been mothballed for salvage, or for use in times of conflict?

Honking cars brought me back to the moment. After paying the toll at the end of the bridge, I followed my directions to a nondescript industrial park along the water, Cork Supply USA’s home base. I hadn’t known what to expect, but definitely something more romantic than a series of modern warehouses and the rumbling trucks that came and went. Yet the view was not without a touch of the bizarre: there, standing knee-deep in the marsh, just beyond the railroad tracks, was a huge, life-size Brontosaurus.

Chris gave me the full tour. The number of corks in the Cork Supply warehouse staggered me. There were, literally, tens of millions of them in the big burlap sacks I knew so well, stacked on row after row of metal shelves that rose to a ceiling fifty feet overhead. “This is awesome,” I said. And I meant awesome in the true sense of the word—it inspired awe. For someone who worked in the cork industry, it was no big deal. For a guy who had saved corks one by one most of his life, it was almost beyond comprehension.

“There’s a boat right there,” Chris joked, pointing to a pallet taller than I was.

“Hell, there’s a whole cork navy here,” I answered.

On our way back across the parking lot to the Cork Supply factory, I asked Chris about the giant dinosaur out in the swamp. It was fiberglass, he said. It had originally stood watch over a gas station in the Central Valley, until bulldozers razed the place for a new subdivision. A group of pop-culture preservationists had organized a rescue to save the extinct vegetarian, enlisting a giant chopper from the Air National Guard to airlift it to its new home.

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