By now you've heard of the winter storm that struck the Northeast over the weekend, killing tens of thousands and severing large land masses from the continent. Through the divine hand of Providence, however, my village was saved from the maelstrom that swept out countless other municipalities to sea — "Gonna have trouble getting to Grandma's this Christmas, her house has drifted into international waters. Find the kids' passports."

Fate was not so kind to my new career, however. In sparing my town from destruction, the storm instead took wrath upon the harbor. Piers and docks were buffeted, buoys were tossed about, seagulls were forced inland to poop. And some boats were lost to the sunken depths.

Among the dead: the Nosferatu.

The harbormaster called "Smelly" Dave with the news Monday morning. Dave's wife called me soon after, saying he wanted all his hands to stop by his house. So I drove over to his little Cape near the harbor, expecting to find Smelly distraught beyond consolation, weeping over any wreckage he'd managed to salvage from shore. Instead, I pulled into his driveway and saw him laughing next to a flaming grill in the middle of his freshly-shoveled front deck, the snowpiles around it impaled by pink flamingos. Far from a requiem for a boat — Smelly appeared to be tap-dancing on its watery grave.

"Hey, grab a beer," said Smelly, pointing to cans of Bud jammed into the snowpile nearest the house. "Gotta talk to you about something."

Seems that Smelly had been looking to get out of the fishing business for quite some time, and he couldn't be happier with the weekend's meteorological assault. The nor'easter had just done half of this work for him; the creative selection of insurance policies was about to do the other half. He told me he and his wife would be moving to South Carolina within the month to open a restaurant in Charleston. He also said he had taken the liberty of figuring out what I would have earned from a full month's work, and asked if I wouldn't be so kind as to accept that amount even though I'd only worked with him for one week. He handed me a check. I quickly finished my beer and muttered something about being late for the post office, leaving him with the friendliest "good luck" I could muster.

Not that I was terribly upset, of course. I was paid four times what I earned mostly from staying out of the way, vomiting over the rail, and looking through binoculars for harbor seals. The scalloping was a short-term solution to begin with, though I didn't expect it to be as short-term as "The Chevy Chase Show." But now I was back where I was two weeks ago, desperate for income and dreading the thought of foreclosure.

I was able to get a part-time job with the town, helping collect from residents involved in vehicular collisions with wildlife. It amounts to little more than stuffing an envelope with official papers and mailing them to someone who was unfortunate enough to clip a deer crossing the state highway at dusk, informing them that they need to cover some of the cost of having two guys with a pickup truck and a lot of rope take the animal off the shoulder, then deliver it to the smokehouse of some other guy thirty miles away. Be ye not wasteful, not even of roadkill.

Should I go back and beg for my old job? Maybe. These last two jobs have helped turn living creatures into tasty foodstuffs, which makes me feel like I'm contributing to the community. But I like eating animals better than enabling the processing of them, and that costs a lot more money. And I certainly wouldn't be setting a new precedent by begging.

After all, I've been married nearly nine years.