The Ship That Grew Trees
A Short Story Inspired by the True History of the Schooner La Merced
by Glen Harris
I. 1917 – Benicia, California
The shipyard smelled of sap and sea. Every plank the men raised sang a low, hollow note — a promise of voyages yet to come.
Tomás Varela wiped sweat from his brow and looked up at the half-finished hull. The La Merced towered over him, her ribs curving toward the sky like the skeleton of a whale. She was the biggest vessel he'd ever worked on — four masts, nearly two hundred and thirty feet long, built to haul oil for the great Standard Oil Company.
"She's a beauty," said the foreman.
Tomás nodded. He was only seventeen, a carpenter’s apprentice, but even he could feel the life being breathed into her timbers. The pine smelled sharp and clean. The oak beams were heavy with promise.
When she slid into the Carquinez Strait that spring, the crowd cheered — not for the oil she’d carry, but for the grace of her shape, the old power of sail meeting the new hunger of steam.
The La Merced sailed north, and Tomás with her. He learned to walk her decks as the Pacific rolled beneath, hauling fuel to the ports of Seattle, Bellingham, and beyond. She was swift, steady — a ship with soul.
But the years changed her.
By the time the Roaring Twenties blew in, her sails had been taken down. Her decks bristled with pipes. The smell of oil was replaced by fish guts and brine — her cargo now salmon instead of fuel, her voyage one of industry instead of adventure.
Tomás stayed aboard through it all. He watched her transformation from proud schooner to floating cannery. "Everything gets used," he once told a green deckhand. "Even us. The trick’s not to mind."
When his hair went white and his hands grew stiff, he retired to the Washington coast. He still thought of her — the La Merced — and wondered what sea had finally taken her.
II. 2024 – Anacortes, Washington
The tide was low when Maya spotted the dark shape across Guemes Channel. At first she thought it was a barge — an old hulk abandoned to rust. But as she walked the shoreline trail, the form grew clearer: long, wooden, half-buried, with thin alder trees rising straight from its deck like masts reborn.
"That's the La Merced," said a voice beside her. An older man, his jacket smelling faintly of diesel and rain. He nodded toward the wreck. "She’s been sitting there longer than I’ve been alive. They brought her in back in ’66 — filled her with mud and sand to use as a breakwater."
Maya squinted. "It looks alive."
He smiled. "In a way, she is. Trees grow right out of her hull. Roots in the old planks. Nature took her back, but gently."
That night, back in her little rented cabin, Maya couldn’t stop thinking about the ship. She found old photos online — black-and-white images of a four-masted schooner gleaming under the California sun. The name La Merced in crisp white letters on her stern. She scrolled through stories of the men who built her, the cannery years, the tow north to Anacortes.
And in the soft hum of her space heater, she imagined the voices — hammer on oak, the creak of rigging, the laughter of sailors. The same sounds now replaced by whispering alder leaves and the slow, eternal rhythm of the tide.
III. The Two Shores
At dawn, Maya returned to the channel. The fog lay thick, silvering the air. For a moment she could almost see the La Merced as she once was — proud, clean, sails billowed with wind, cutting through the Pacific with purpose.
And then, like a dream fading, the fog thinned. The ship returned to her present form: a half-buried hull, rooted in sand, carrying a small forest upon her back.
Maya touched the cold rail of the viewing fence and whispered, "You didn’t sink. You just changed."
The tide came in, lapping against the hull, and the trees above her swayed. A gull cried — sharp and distant — and she could have sworn it sounded like a cheer.
Epilogue
A hundred years after her birth, the La Merced remains — not at the bottom of the sea, but somewhere between ship and shore, dream and ruin.
The sailors who built her are long gone, but their work endures in the planks that now hold soil and roots instead of oil and fish. The trees grow tall where men once hauled ropes. The wind still hums through her ribs.
And so, in the quiet waters of Skagit County, the La Merced sails on — not across the sea, but through time itself.
Author’s Note
The La Merced was a real four-masted schooner built in 1917 in Benicia, California. After serving as an oil carrier and later a salmon cannery in Alaska, she was towed to Anacortes, Washington, in 1966, where her hull was filled with dredged sand and used as a breakwater at Lovrić’s Sea-Craft boatyard. Over time, trees rooted in her deck, transforming her into one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting maritime relics. She remains visible today along the Guemes Channel, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.