Losing Mum and Pup (14 page)

We hauled the fish aboard—a beautiful, iridescent creature. I reluctantly prepared to deal the coup de grâce with a heavy
winch handle. No, no, someone said: Pour vodka into the gills. It deoxygenates them, producing swift, painless death. I did.
It shuddered violently for a second or two and then was still. I recommend this protocol. And if you don’t die at first, keep
trying. It’s a nice way to go.

We made three landfalls on our way to New Guinea, each one something out of Gauguin. After the weeks at sea, we were avid
for R&R; for a swim that didn’t involve someone having to stand shark guard with an assault rifle. For cold beer and hot showers.
For a stretch of sleep longer than four hours.

But the moment we dropped anchor, my father would look at his watch and say, “Okay, it’s ten o’clock now. What say we shove
off at two?”

Danny and I would look at each other and shake our heads. I was learning that for my father, it’s the voyage, not the stopping.
Great men are not dawdlers; their idle is set too high. They’re built for speed. I myself was built to lie on the sand and
drink beer and be fanned by island girls.

And so at two o’clock, it was up anchor and off to the next idyllic atoll, some thousand miles away. I scribbled in my journal,
“We are racing through Paradise.” Pup liked that and used it for the title of the book he wrote about the trip.

We did, however, manage to convince him to stop for a whole day at a place called Kapingamarangi. You may not be familiar
with Kapingamarangi, but it’s there—on the chart, 350 miles northeast of New Guinea. We sailed over the reef into a turquoise
lagoon fringed with white sand and swaying coconut palms. Natives came out in a launch to greet us. This was 1985.

“Is there anything you need?” we asked, thinking perhaps batteries, antibiotics, tools.

“Among my people,” the headman said gravely, “there is a great hunger for videocassettes.”

There was a plane in the lagoon. It was still shiny bright beneath the water. It had been there for forty years. I scuba dived
on it; saw the “U.S. Navy” markings and the bullet holes that had brought it down, hem-stitched along the fuselage. A quarter
mile away was a sunken Japanese vessel, the object, perhaps, of the American plane’s last attack.

“What happened here?” I asked the headman.

He shrugged. “First the Japanese bombed the shit out of it, then the Americans came and bombed the shit out of it.” There
you have it: World War II in a nutshell.

We were navigating again by sextant and the stars. But Pup had always been on the cutting edge of the latest gadgetry, so
we had with us a prototype of a satellite navigation device made by the Trimble company. My father had gone to enormous pains
to procure it from his new best friend, Charlie Trimble. It was the size of a steamer trunk and had more dials and knobs and
oscilloscopes than Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Pup would crouch before it for
endless
hours, twiddling the knobs and calling out numbers to us, which we’d plot on the chart.

“Where does
that
put us?” he would groan hopefully.

“Here,” I said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest.

It was back to basics, to the sextant and the stars. He preferred those, anyway. I can still see him standing on the deck
at twilight, searching the sky for Spica and Vega and Deneb, one hand wrapped around a stay for support, the sextant in his
other, calling out, “Mark!”

A month after sailing out of Honolulu, we anchored in Kavieng Harbor on New Ireland island. That night we had a celebration
as liquid as the vast Pacific. I toasted him, “To Pup, who shot the sun, shot the stars, but who most of all shot the moon.”

I
T WAS OUR LAST LONG SAIL TOGETHER
. He was getting older now. So was I. I was a father of two. Then came the episode of October 1997.

We’d made a date the month previous to have an overnight sail to Treasure Island along with Danny, our old sailing partner.
I took the train up from Washington, D.C., to Stamford. Along the way, I looked out the window and saw gray, stormy skies.
I checked the weather in the paper, where I saw the word
northeaster
. To anyone who’s grown up along the Connecticut seashore, this is not a word congruent with “overnight sail.”

My father was standing there on the train platform to greet me. This had always been a welcoming sight. But I noticed, through
the train window, that he seemed to be holding on to a sign, as if for support. Had he injured himself?

No, for when the train door opened and I went to disembark, a violent gust of northeast wind blew me back into the train.
I crawled out, practically on all fours. Loose objects in the railroad parking lot were being blown about. It looked like
the tornado scene in
The Wizard of Oz.

“We’ll have a brisk sail,” my father said.

Danny was there with him. I looked at Danny. Danny looked at me.

“We’re going
out
in this?” I said incredulously.

“Sure,” my father said nonchalantly.

We arrived at the marina. The wind gauge indicated steady at forty-five knots, gusting fifty. To put that in context, hurricane-force
winds start at sixty-four.

“Pup,” I said, shouting to make myself heard above the wind, “
ought
we to be doing this?”

“Take in the fenders,” he replied merrily.

He had brought with him a friend of his from San Francisco. Poor, innocent lamb. He had never been on a sailboat before.

“Should I take a Dramamine?” he asked me nervously.

“Nah,” I said. “You’ll be too scared to throw up.”

And so off we sailed into the storm. This was in my father’s last sailboat, a thirty-six-foot fiberglass sloop named
Patito
. (Roughly translated as “Ducky,” which my father and mother called each other.)

We somehow made it across Long Island Sound, through a screaming, dark night and fifteen-foot seas. I kept the radio tuned
to the Coast Guard frequency. I thought of my two young children. I thought of my warm bed in Washington. I thought,
What the f——am I doing out here?

The next morning, after a sleepless night at anchor listening to the halyards slap furiously against the mast, a greasy dawn
arrived. The wind had increased; it was now gusting to fifty-five knots. The radio reported that over half a million homes
in New England were without power. Various governors had declared a state of emergency. We had gone for an overnight sail
in a state of emergency.

I proposed that we row ashore and flag down a passing car, or perhaps a FEMA vehicle.

“No, no,” said my father. “We’ll be fine.”

It was daylight now, so we could see the seas we were up against, and there was nothing pleasant about them. Perhaps you’ve
seen the movie
The Perfect Storm
? Something like that.

We made it—somehow—back across Long Island Sound. My mother had spent the morning on the phone to the Coast Guard. The Coast
Guard kept saying, “But Mrs. Buckley, what are they
doing
out there in this?”

Good question, I thought, draining a glass of brandy with trembling hands.

I simmered for a few days and then wrote my father a blistering letter.
Never again
, I vowed.

S
INCE THEN
, I’ve taught my own son to sail. I remember the first time I placed his small hands, along with mine, on the tiller and taught
him the feel of the boat and the wind and the sea. I thought back to when my father had first taken my small hands in his
and taught me the rudiments of the same art. Now I was imparting to my son what my father had passed along to me: something
elemental, thrilling, and joyous.

Pup had furled his sails now and was preparing to shove off on a different kind of voyage. I wonder—will the angels scatter
as he approaches the Pearly Pier?

I think back to that night in 1997, to my vow that I would never again set foot on a boat with him. And now I think I’d give
almost anything for just one more sail together, even in a howling northeaster.

“A gone shipmate, like any other man,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “is gone forever, and I never met one of them again. But at times
the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts
a ship—manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal
sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Goodbye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with
wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a
westerly gale.”

G
etting from the house to his garage study, a distance of about fifty yards, had become difficult for Pup in the months following
Mum’s death. Despite my insistence to the staff and Danny that he must not be allowed to get behind the wheel of a vehicle,
he had—prior to the hospitalization—gotten into his red Pontiac Montana minivan one day and driven himself to his study. Later,
returning to the house, he had decided it was too irksome to execute a three-point turn and so had backed the van to the house,
slamming into an ancient apple tree, resulting in $3,000 damage. He emerged unscathed, luckily, inasmuch as he disdained seat
belts, even on long drives.
Please, Pup,
I would plead.
Among other things, it’s the law. I’ll get a ticket if we’re stopped.
His answer, delivered with a dismissive snort:
We won’t get stopped.

Pup’s aloofness in the matter of seat belts and stop signs and speed limits and other nuisances had long puzzled me, in a
bemused sort of way. As his driving came more to resemble Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, my bemusement diminished. One
day Aunt Carol—Pup’s youngest sister—and I were chatting. Being the tenth and last of my grandparents’ children, Carol has
a wry and perceptive take on her siblings.
Oh,
she said with her beguiling and beautiful double-dimpled smile,
don’t you understand? The rules don’t
apply
to him.
I chuckled and filed it away under “Pup, Mysteries of.” When he published his umpteenth book,
Miles Gone By
, a collection of autobiographical pieces, I came across something he had written that unlocked it for me, while in the process
making me marvel that he had survived as long as he had.

It was an article he’d written about owning an airplane when he was at Yale. It was called an Ercoupe. He and five other classmates
had bought it jointly. One day, one of Pup’s friends, a pilot veteran of World War II, bemoaned to him that he badly wanted
to see his girlfriend in Boston but had no way of getting there. Pup, ever the gallant, said, “Never fear, I shall
fly
you to Boston!” He had at this point in his flying career exactly one and a half hours of cockpit time. He had never soloed.
So he and his friend flew to Boston, the friend doing the flying, which left Pup at Boston Airport all alone and now having
to get the plane back to New Haven. I was a licensed pilot in my youth, and I simply shudder to relate the rest of this story.

Pup revs up the Ercoupe for the return flight and takes off, at which point he notices that, gee, it’s getting kind of dark.
He’s neglected to factor in last night’s switch from daylight savings to eastern standard time. This being way before GPS,
he navigates back toward New Haven in the gloaming by descending to one hundred feet and following
the train tracks
. This somewhat basic mode of navigation begins to fail him when it turns pitch black. The situation now seriously deteriorating,
he makes out—thank God—the beacon of the New London airport. He manages to set the plane down there. He then hitchhikes back
to New Haven and goes straight to the Fence Club bar to steady his nerves and share his exploits. Next day, his flight instructor,
upon learning of the episode, goes completely ballistic.

I’d been unaware of this tale of—what should one call it?—derring-do until I read his piece. (I’m not sure “bravery” is quite
the right word, though Pup was the bravest man I knew.) The only Ercoupe anecdote I knew was the one where, flying into Ethel
Walker School for his sister Maureen’s graduation, he crashed the plane in front of the entire assembly and was carried off
the field by the graduating class. As to the moral: A man who would think nothing of flying a plane solo from Boston to New
Haven, having had a total of one and a half hours of—well, put it this way, this is not a man who is going to waste a lot
of time in life on seat belts, stop signs, or worrying about going for a cocktail cruise in a northeast gale. At any rate,
his rear-on collision with the ancient apple tree turned out to be impactful—as it were—not only on the Montana, but on him.
After that, he consented to be chauffeured the fifty yards to and from his garage study.