Losing Mum and Pup (13 page)

“So that was Christmas Eve,” Dick concludes in the interview. Shirley, next to him, is at this point convulsed with laughter.
“You can imagine how pleased your mother was,” he says.

Yes, I could. I’d been there many times.

P
up was an avid sailor. He had learned to sail as a child in upstate Connecticut, on a not very large lake. Now we lived on
the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound and kept a thirty-eight-foot wooden sloop. It was named
Panic
, a name my mother found all too apt.

In his garage office study, there is a framed photograph of
Panic.
It was taken by a news photographer at the start of the 1958 Newport–Bermuda race. In it,
Panic
is lying on its side at a more or less ninety-degree angle, its mast submerged in the water. This undesirable nautical posture
is called a “knock-down.” It was thrilling for me as a six-year-old to hear my father’s crewmates describe the sensation of
thousands of gallons of the Atlantic pouring into the cabin at the start of a five-day ocean race.

I now “get” that Pup’s greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas
up. Great men take great risks. It’s the timorous souls—souls like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail
when they see a storm approaching and look for snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill, why are you trying
to kill us?”

Great men are also impatient. This particular aspect showed up most vividly in my father’s manner of docking his boats.

Most people, when guiding, say, a ten- or twenty-ton vessel toward a dock, approach slowly. Not my old man. His technique
was to go straight at it, full speed. Why waste time? This made for memorable episodes.

At one point in his life, he owned a seventy-two-foot-long schooner. It had an eighteen-foot-long bowsprit. With my father
at the wheel, going hell-bent for leather toward a pier, that long bowsprit became a jousting lance. What vivid memories I
have of people scattering like sheep at our approach. One time, someone actually leapt off the dock into the water in an attempt
to escape. Over the years, my father took out entire sections of docks up and down the eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed
on him the nickname “Captain Crunch.”

When I was six, he contrived a treasure hunt. He bought an antique wooden chest and filled it with silver dollars. Also with
some of my mother’s jewelry. He and a friend sailed across Long Island Sound one weekend and buried it on a sandy spit called
on the chart Eaton’s Neck but which I will always call “Treasure Island.”

He told me that he had come into possession of an old treasure map. It was something out of Robert Louis Stevenson, scratched
on thick parchment in bloodred ink. The location of the treasure was indicated with compass bearings. I couldn’t sleep the
night before we set out, I was so excited.

We sailed across. After digging up half of Eaton’s Neck, we found the treasure. I can still remember the thrill as my fingers
scraped the chest’s wooden lid beneath the sand. When we got home, my father said it would be a nice gesture to give my mother
the pirate jewelry. Okay, I said grudgingly, but I was keeping the silver dollars.

It had been such an adventure that I persuaded my father there must be another chest buried there somewhere. I was quite persistent.
In due course, he relented and procured another chest, which he filled with another fistful of my mother’s jewels, this time
adding—without telling her—a few pieces of her prized Queen Anne silver. He sailed across and buried it.

On the weekend appointed for the treasure hunt, Hurricane Donna struck. Donna was a Katrina of her day. She hit with such
force that she rearranged the entire topography of Eaton’s Neck, making nonsense of the compass bearings on the treasure map.

We sailed over the next weekend. We dug and dug. And dug. By the time we were finished, Eaton’s Neck looked as if it had been
ravaged by a thousand prairie dogs. We never did find the treasure. For all we know, it’s still there.

How thrilled my mother was to learn that her jewels and Queen Anne silver were now a permanent geological feature of Eaton’s
Neck. I wonder what the reaction of the insurance company was.

I’m not sure I understand. Was the jewelry
stolen,
Mr. Buckley?

No, we buried it. Is there a problem?

The next hurricane landed poor old
Panic
atop the Stamford Harbor breakwater. My father used that insurance payment to buy a successor yacht, a sweet, forty-two-foot
Sparkman & Stephens yawl, Hong Kong built. She was named
Suzy Wong,
and she was a real honey, all teak and mahogany and carved Buddhas.

Every summer, we would cruise the waters of Maine aboard
Suzy
. Sailing in Maine was always an adventure. The water is scrotum-tighteningly cold, the currents swift, the tidal drop pronounced,
and the bottom un-forgivingly rocky.

We’d drop anchor, a maneuver called “kedging,” have a merry, kerosene-lamplit dinner, and then drift off to sleep. Soon, invariably,
there’d be a sound under the hull:
thunk, thunk, thunk.
This announced beyond reasonable doubt that our kedge had slipped and that we were now positioned over a sharp rock, on a
falling tide. Depending on how many bottles of wine had been consumed, the grown-ups were not always quick to respond. In
due course, my mother’s voice would call out in the dark, “Bill, what do you propose to do about that
sound
?”

My mother deserves a word of appreciation here. She was a dutiful yachtsman’s wife. Lord, how she worked at it. In earlier
times, the term for this occupation was “galley slave.” She had been raised as a debutante, a beautiful, delicate orchid from
Vancouver, Canada. Now she found herself cooking for eight men and scrubbing the toilet aboard a small boat with no hot water.
She would mutter darkly, “I was made for better things.”

In those nonrefrigerated, premicrowave days, a lot of our food came in tins. These were stored below the floorboards in the
ship’s bilges. The bilges invariably filled with oily seawater, causing the labels to decompose. As a result, we never knew
what, exactly, we’d be having for dinner on any given night. If we were lucky, Dinty Moore beef stew. If not, we might well
dine exclusively on Harvard beets and creamed corn. Some tins contained crêpes suzette. My father, no cook himself, loved
to douse them in copious amounts of Grand Marnier. At the climactic moment, he would drop a match into the skillet, causing
a Hiroshima of flame to lick the cabin top. Again, my mother’s voice was heard: “Bill, why are you trying to set fire to the
boat?”

Some afternoons, my father might say, “Shall we have lobster tonight?” He’d steer for the nearest lobster pot. As a child,
I found this thrilling beyond belief, for it was established lore that a Maine lobsterman could legally shoot you on sight
if he caught you plundering his livelihood.

After laborious heavings on the line, the trap would come up, suddenly alive with frantic, jackknifing lobsters. The trick
was getting them out without having them clamp down on your fingers. My father would then put two bottles of whiskey into
the lobster pot as payment. I always wondered what the lobsterman thought upon bringing up his trap, to find two fifths of
Johnnie Walker Black inside. Did he scratch his head and say, “Reckon Mr. Buckley is back”?

Sometimes we barbecued on a little grill that hung off the transom. One night, as I was cooking six expensive filet mignons
that Mum had asked me
please
not to burn, the grill suddenly swiveled 180 degrees. Six expensive filet mignons and charcoal briquettes plopped hissingly
into the dark, swift waters of Penobscot Bay.

It was either rescue the filet mignons or another night of Harvard beets. My friend Danny and I grabbed a flashlight and leapt
into the dinghy. We fired up the outboard and roared off into the night. The current was running five knots. It was tricky
work corraling those fugitive filets. We ran a few of them over with the out-board propeller, turning them into Salisbury
steaks. No one asked for salt that night.

Such were our adventures. Larger ones loomed.

My father had always had the notion of sailing across the Atlantic, and this we did in 1975. The story is told in his book
Airborne
. We set off from Miami on June 1. A month and forty-four hundred miles later, we dropped anchor in the shadow of Gibraltar.

He taught me on that trip how to navigate by the sun and stars with a sextant. It’s a skill that today, in the age of satellite
navigation, fewer fathers impart to their sons. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father
can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of our ancestors.

I was twenty-three now. I’d spent a year between high school and college working on a Norwegian tramp freighter. I’d gone
around the world, been in rough situations among rough people. I’d steered a twenty-thousand-ton ship through sixty-foot seas
in a force ten gale in the South Atlantic. I knew my way around a boat.

One midnight, I relieved my father on the twelve-to-four watch. He told me to put on my safety harness. “Yeah,” I said, “don’t
worry, I’ll get around to it.” He let me have it, in harsh words—perhaps the second time in twenty-three years he’d spoken
to me that way. Falling overboard at night in the middle of the ocean without a safety harness is not a thing to be taken
lightly.

I obeyed, but later that night, still simmering over my affronted manhood, I made an entry in the log to the effect that Captain
Crunch could take his safety harness and shove it where the sun don’t shine. The next morning, upon examining the log, he
smiled, delighted at the mutiny.

What a trip it was! We sailed into the Azores, accompanied by a thousand dolphins; camped out in the crater of an extinct
volcano; sailed through the spot where Nelson sank the French and Spanish fleets; and finally reached the place that had once
been called the Pillars of Hercules, end of the known world.

We had such a good time, in fact, that Pup declared that we must sail across the Pacific, from Honolulu to New Guinea. We
did, ten years later.

I was now thirty-three, recently married.

“By the way,” I said to my new bride on our honeymoon, trying to sound casual, “I won’t be around much this summer.”

Lucy was a pretty good sport about it. The first time I’d brought her to Stamford to meet my parents, my father insisted on
taking us out for a cocktail sail. It was a bright, beautiful summer day, but the wind was blowing about twenty-five knots,
with six-foot seas.

She had been in a sailboat exactly once before, on a lake, in flat, calm water. The waves crashed over the cockpit, hurling
her to the deck. She smiled bravely and said, “Is it
always
like this?”

My mother, hearing this account after we got home, drenched to the skin, remarked acerbically, “Yes, Lucy. With Bill, it is
always
like that.”

Off we set across the great Pacific.

We made our first landfall a week later, at a strange little archipelago called Johnston Atoll. It’s here that the United
States stores its most lethal nerve-gas weapons and God knows what else. For that reason, any ship sailing into the harbor
is greeted not by lovely island girls bearing leis and rum punches, but by grim-faced Halliburton contractors aiming .50-caliber
machine guns at you. Welcome to Johnston Atoll!

We made our peaceful intentions clear to the frowning colonel in charge. It was an ironic encounter, for that same day, back
home in Stamford, Nancy Reagan, then first lady of the United States, was spending the weekend at our house with my mother.
The colonel was unimpressed with my father’s desperate name-dropping and informed us dourly that we must be on our way.

Somewhere between Johnston Atoll and our next port of call, we caught a dolphin (the mahi-mahi type, not the Flipper type).
We were thrilled at our good fortune, as by now we were down to the detested Harvard beets and squishy, malodorous rotting
fruit.