A Packrat’s Dream
Dockside Salvage is probably best described as a “packrat’s dream shop,” at it sits on dock 9. You get there by walking down Pier Street from the three-way split at Mel’s, past the market. Our town is small enough that you can see Dockside standing at the doorway of Mel’s.
The place was originally one of those small boat repair places, but when most of the business went south to Boothbay, many buildings like that were abandoned. We slowly became a tourist town, and people like Ira Finch purchased the empty places and made them useful again.
From the outside, Dockside looks a lot like the other small warehouses and boat repair places here. There’s the area where boats can be brought in and worked on. This is where Finch now keeps his mounds of packrattish stuff. Todd and Charles often work after school there moving and organizing things for him, and he likes having the company.
There’s a small shop that is attached to the warehouse. I guess it used to be a bait and takle shop, but Finch turned it into a tourist place where he sells the things that he’s salvaged and found.
When you walk into the shop, the first thing that hits you is the smell of his pipe tobacco. He is known in town for smoking Cornel and Diehl’s Autumn Evening during the winter, and the whole place smells like maple syrup and pancakes. If it’s during the summer, he changes out for Elizabethan, which reminds me more of a forest-y smell. There’s always coffee brewed, and if a tourist buys one of the “East Bay” mugs, he’ll offer to fill the cup for them.
If you move to the back wall of the shop, there’s bins with all sorts of small things you never knew you wanted. The bins are marked, but unless Charles sorts them, there’s no rhyme or reason to what’s in them. You might find an old compass, maybe a switch or knob off a console, little lights, things that have no real value mixed in with things you might expect to pay a pretty penny for. Finch never seems to care what something actually costs, he prices things according to how generous he’s feeling at the moment.
I don’t end up at Finch’s as much as Todd or Charles, but I do like going on the evenings that he has a fresh catch from one of his friends, and decides to grill and tell stories in the evening.
Finch is like a father to Todd. For all the years that I have known him, Finch has always been there for him. Sometimes he showed up for the school plays Todd was in. He came to the parade every year that Todd was the school Mascot. Many times he and Todd went out into the woods hunting or doing man things for the weekend.
The last thing that I’ll add here is that if you ever stop in at Dockside Salvage, never get Finch started on his old fishing stories. It will be dark, you’ll have had whatever fish someone brought by or he caught that day, and it will be well after dark before you leave. Finch takes his time, like time was completely irrelevant to him. That’s who he is.