Let Me Finish (21 page)

I've sailed here in bigger if not better boats, as well, with summer charters of cruising yawls and sloops and cutters, ranging from thirty to almost fifty feet, which have taken me with friends and family up and down and east and west of this bay and archipelago, on day sails or easy
overnighters or more, for over forty years. Boats named
Hanau
and
High Heels, Eastward Ho
and
Pauline.
Bermuda Forties by Choi Lee and Hinckley; sloops by Rhodes and Alden. Also
Aquila,
a stiff-bowed Crocker cutter, and the sweet
Nasket II,
a Crocker ketch redesigned and built by my brother. I've also passed countless undemanding hours and days aboard boats where we've regularly been invited along:
Astrid, Mary Leigh, Hopeful, Jarge's Pride, Sprite,
and
Ellisha.
Anyone with small boat experience and the extra bucks can carry this off, but given these ledge-studded waterways and stiff tides what you should also have at hand is a bit of local knowledge. Awake at night in the winter, I summon up visions of dozens of rock- and ledge-strewn bars and tricky narrows that I know the look of and have mostly managed to shun. There are the Triangles and the Boulders, Rudder Rock and Colby Pup and Spirit Ledge, and two or three Channel Rocks, all set off in italics and asterisks on the charts I first studied and shuddered over as a teenager. There's the notorious submerged knob or spindle just east of Bear Island which I have seen impale bigger and more impulsive vessels than mine, leaving them to teeter there like a compass needle until the tide relents. There was that overlooked small type "
shl rep 1967
" on my much-folded chart, there between Saddleback and its smaller companion Enchanted Island, which I bumped onto and then off of while reaching through this pretty passage with friends of ours aboard; embarrassingly, they were a summer couple new to the region who were thinking about learning how to sail. "It's simply a matter of knowing where you are," I said, with my suave fingertips on the wheel. "Oop."
There's a much-visited flat ledge on the western side of the anchorage at the Barred Islands which I forgot about—we were easing along with sails down, looking for a place to drop anchor—because Carol and John Henry began exclaiming over a nest of young ospreys they'd spotted through their binoculars on a nearby niche: bang. Carol was embarrassed because we were under scrutiny by twenty or thirty landlubber witnesses aboard one of the Camden dude ships, but I insisted that this was one of those no-fault mishaps—we'd only bonked the ledge with our keel—that could befall anyone. A few days later, visiting my brother Joel in his office at the Brooklin Boat Yard, I asked if he'd ever encountered that flat ledge at the Barred Islands. "Two or three times, easy" he said. "We were there last in September"—he'd been aboard his Danish-built, Aage Nielson cutter
Northern Crown,
with his son Steven and daughter-in-law Laurie, among others—"and we smacked it hard. Laurie was in the head and she fell off the pot."

Having Joe's yard so close to hand was a sweet convenience in my cruising years, and I used to turn up there every week or two with a wheezy engine or a jammed winch or stopped-up head. I awaited my turn and paid full rates, but the service was terrific. In time, of course, this imbalance between brothers—I the summer amateur in shorts; he the soft-spoken Down East sage and provider, in wood-smelling denim—began to get to me, and I reminded myself that I, too, had a profession. "Goddam it, Joe," I said one morning. "Couldn't you come around some day and borrow a comma?"

Getting back to sea, there was also an early evening when, off on an overnight with Carol and young John Henry, I dreamily nudged our bow onto the mud bar poking out to the south from White Island, and stuck fast there on a going tide. There we lay, despite kedgings and curses, a couple of miles from our front porch but thankfully hidden from view by the loom of the island. No one came by as the sunlight and the water waned and we lay at last on our beam ends under the stars, drinking Scotch and listening to the trickling sounds of our diesel fuel emptying onto the gravelly mud. We found a Sox game on the radio, and along about the top of the sixth the returning tide gently took us off, and we went home.

The rewards of mild summer sailing outnumber the scares and goofs. With my eyes closed again, I can run the obstacle course of hidden shelves and weed-buried granite outcroppings that delivers you into an overpopular anchorage at the bottom end of Winter Harbor, and I probably still could perform the sequence of short swings that take you into the dozen yards of safe water, too small to fit onto the chart, just inside York Island. There you awakened at first light to the sounds of cropping sheep and, up in the cockpit again, found the loom of Isle au Haut, closer than expected, on the other side. Still in bed in New York, I can bring back the faint squeezing sounds from our anchor rode, up forward, as a night breeze touches our sloop and sets her on a fresh heading. Or the look of our old fox terrier Willy sitting on the stern seat of our green dinghy while I row him back from an early morning pee on the
beach, and now pricking up his ears as he looks over my shoulder and spots Carol coming up from the cabin with a towel to wipe the dew-drenched cockpit cushions. Or maybe it's the smell of bacon that's got him.

A million such moments are in my sailing brain. The fog dispersing at Perry Creek to disclose a
New Yorker
colleague of mine and his wife quietly reading aboard their pocket-size schooner
Tyhee,
not twelve yards away. "Thought that was you," he calls over. Another day brought our fabulous twenty-mile dash from Center Harbor all the way to Islesboro in a smothering fresh northwester, closed hauled and rail down on starboard tack the whole way, doing seven-and-a-half or eight knots in our sloop
Megaptera;
and then, heading back, the same thing all over again, boiling along in the other direction almost faster now, with the sheets eased only by a foot or less: two fabulous slants in a single day. Or the afternoon along about 1939, back in my teens, when the thermometer and the wind went every which way and finally, as we tacked through the Bartlett Island Narrows, delivered a six-minute snow storm, there on the last day of August.

Later—not long ago—here comes one of those fierce fair-weather afternoon squalls which descend so quickly in these parts, this time a bit north of Hat Island Ledge, blackening the distant waters and churning the waves around us to a froth. Aboard a sturdy forty-five foot cutter, we're in no real difficulty but we need to take in sail. I get the engine going and hand over the helm to a visiting friend of ours, a retired two-star admiral who had recently been an intelligence advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Just keep
her in the wind," I say and go forward with Carol to rein in and drop our big genoa. Only he doesn't. Down on my knees, with the wind grabbing at us and the rain streaming and our arms full of slippery flapping nylon, I feel the boat yaw this way and that while loose sheets and heavy blocks bang about over our heads. "Hans!" I yell back at the Annapolis-trained skipper astern. "What the fuck are you
doing
!"

 

I've given up big boats now that I'm in my eighties, and one repayment for this loss is that I will no longer find myself sailing grandly past that working lobsterman amid the pot-strewn waters of Western Way or Casco Passage. Boats like his are bigger and more powerful than they were when I first started sailing around here, and they're stuffed with electronics. But he's fishing four hundred traps now, a huge enterprise, and his loans have gone sky-high, even as his overburdened, over-managed fishery slides into decline. No reason remains for him to look upon me as a neighbor; he may even know my ancient waterfront cottage, which has been climbing crazily in value and remains one of the reasons he and his kids can't get access to our common shore. (All this pain and irony is reported on at length in an essential new book,
The Edge of Maine,
by Geoffrey Wolff.) There's still a chance, I tell myself, that he won't mind
Shadow,
since she's been around here even longer than he has. Mostly, though, I stopped chartering forty-footers because I'm afraid of making a dumb mistake. Everybody who has sailed this drowned coast of Maine, with its great depths and steeply shoaling ledges and tall islands, has had
the experience of idly watching the dark water below his hull turn a paler blue and then bring up the terrifying white of an unexpected shoal or giant boulder—
Christ, what have I done!
—just below. You swing the wheel and pray.

No, thank you. Here I am, still aboard
Shadow
and thinking about the pleasures at hand. Even at this easy level, I am dealing with shifts and forces and counter-flows—wind and tide and current—that are nearly invisible to the hapless nonsailing friend I have brought along this time, who now (the wind has freshened) looks at me with dislike, because I am in another realm: a medicine man in a baseball cap. It can't be helped, but sailing is exclusive. What the landsman senses and perhaps envies is exactly what grabs me at odd moments in a small boat in August. Here—for the length of this puff, this lift and heel—I am almost in touch with the motions of my planet: not at one with them but riding a little crest and enjoying the view. I smile across at my friend but say nothing. Eat your heart out, pal.

A S
ATURDAY
evening in May, 1949, and I am taking a moonlight leak in the garden at Ditchley. Hedges and statuary cast elegant shadows nearby, but I've had a bit of wine and it probably doesn't occur to me that this is one of the better alfresco loos I have visited—the Italianate garden installed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1935, as a culminating grace note to the celebrated Georgian pile of Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire, designed by James Gibbs and built in 1722. Ditchley, with a deer park and a village within its borders, is headed inexorably for the English Heritage Register but for the moment remains the country home of my old friend Marietta FitzGerald and her delightful, fairly recent second husband, Ronald Tree, who is standing a few feet to my left here, in identical posture, his chin in the air as he breathes in traces of boxwood and early primrose. Beyond him, also aiming, is Major Metcalfe, a neighbor of Ronnie's and another dinner guest of his on this evening. He is the
same Major Metcalfe who proved such a staunch friend to King Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere during the difficult abdication days, in 1936, and who stood up as best man the following year, when the King, reborn as the Duke of Windsor, married Wallis Warfield Simpson in Monts, France. Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe, M.V.O., M.C., I mean, who at any moment, surely, will invite me to call him Fruity, the way everybody else does. He and I are in black tie, and the moonlight lies magically on his satin lapels, just as it does on mine. Ronnie is wearing a beige velvet smoking, perfectly O.K. for a country host, I guess, but he looks less dashing or narrow, less
right,
than Fruity and I do. Good old Fruity.

 

Soon we three will amble back up the terrace steps, toward the tall lighted doors and the sounds of conversation and rattled dice within. My wife, Evelyn, ravishing in her silk top and shimmery gray skirt, will look up from the backgammon table, where she has taken on Ronnie's first son, Michael (he's in his late twenties), and has just realized that she's in over her head. "How much is eleven pounds?" she whispers urgently. It's around forty-five dollars, I figure quickly—big bucks, to us—but of course none of this is for keeps. Only it is, we find.

Memory stops here. Nothing more can be made of that ancient weekend. Evelyn and I were impostors—not members of the bon ton but a visiting, unembarrassed American couple, still in their twenties, on a lucky six-week dive into England and France, mostly paid for by the magazine
Holiday,
where I was an editor and writer. I was scouting the Continent for writers and picture ideas, or some such scam. We had married in 1942, were separated by the war, and when it was over swiftly acquired New York jobs and friends, an apartment in the upper reaches of Riverside Drive, a two-tone Ford Tudor, a bulldog, and, sixteen months before this, a baby daughter, now in the hands of an affectionate grandmother. The works. But, given this chance, we grabbed it, booked passage on the slowpoke liner
De Grasse
—the only French Line vessel as yet restored to the Atlantic run after the war—and after six entrancing days and nights debarked and did the tourist thing. Westminster Abbey, the bombed-out City, St. Paul's. Green Park in the spring sunshine. The British Museum. Oxford and the Trees. Paris. The Orangerie and the Cimetière Père-Lachaise. Our rented Citroën Onze—with its chevron-striped grille, crooked-arm gearshift, low power, and sneaky reverse gear—would carry us faithfully along the uncrowded two-lane routes to the south. What was the French word we needed for "windshield wiper," after ours gave out during a thunderstorm outside Le Puy? Why,
essuie-glace,
of course. Who could forget that? There was a funeral going on at the cathedral in Chartres when we arrived, the soaring gray columns enfolded in black at their base. The next noon, on Ascension Day, we walked into Bourges Cathedral to blazing candlelight and mauve sunlit shafts above, just in time for a raft of first Communions. "Be joyful,
mes enfants,
" said the white-hatted bishop to the three-deep rows of pink-cheeked, well-combed nine-year-olds. "You
are being accepted into the one true Church, here in the most beautiful structure in the world." Why, yes—where do we go to sign up?

We were lucky, but this was long ago and one wants more than a pee on the grass or the tink of a funeral bell, behind the altar at Chartres, to bring it clear. But only anecdote continues to work. Late at night aboard the
De Grasse,
Evelyn is dancing with our friend Tom Hollyman, a
Holiday
photographer, and Jean Hollyman with a young purser. At our tiny table, with its crowded champagne glasses and triangular white C.G.T. ashtrays, I am in deep converse with a fellow-passenger, Alfonso Bedoya, the Mexican movie actor who was such a hit last year as the bandito chief in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
(Encounters like this happened all the time on the Atlantic run just then. The dearth of shipping—the
De Grasse
herself had recently been raised from the bottom of the Gironde estuary, where the Germans had scuttled her—made for a travelers' bottleneck, where celebrities and the rest of us squashed cheerfully together for a few days at a time.) Here, sometimes in French, sometimes in Spanish, Bedoya is discussing monetary or agricultural issues—I'm not always sure which, though I nod in agreement—in emerging Latin America. Part of me is listening to him and another part following the ship's five-piece dance band as it shifts shamelessly from "La Seine" to "J'Attendrai," but in truth I am only waiting for my new friend to flash his enormous teeth and cry, "Badges, badges—I don't have to show you any steenking badges!"