Articles by David Roper:
David is a well known Marblehead sailor and author of many articles and stories about his time and adventures at sea. The following article was published in Points East magazine (www.pointseast.com) and is reprinted with their permission.
WATCHING THE NEST
by David Roper
The wing of sail divides wind and then wind joins it together again.
Nothing is used, so nothing is wasted.
The Tao of Sailing
Hold those words and bear with me. Think about cycles – life cycles. I know I was, as I sat under Elsa’s furled mainsail and looked up at the osprey nest above us, crafted into the pines and cedars of magical Quahog Bay. We were all alone, my daughter and I, anchored under this great nest of small branches and twigs. It had been a good trip east from Marblehead over the past few days, and now the weather had deteriorated. But Alli and I were happy here, in one of our favorite spots. There were no other cruising boats and no distractions. It was just us and the osprey nest. And so began a kind of vigil, or I guess a co-vigil, involving both us and the osprey parents. Day and night we listened to their peep, peep, peep, and watched the mother or father leave the nest to scan for predators and search the abundant waters around us for prey to feed their young one.
“They never both leave the nest at once, Dad. Did you notice that? One always stays back and stands guard, always looking around.”
“That’s their role, sweetie. That’s why they exist: to get that chick of theirs big enough to someday fly away and then have a chick of its own.”
She thought for awhile.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why go through all that just so you can then be a grown up and then sit there your whole life yourself and watch for predators all over again? Seems like a pain. What’s the point.”
Hmmm.
It all got me to thinking about our family and the last couple of weeks. Our son Nick had had a tough surgery and, though he’s twenty-four, my wife watched over him like a hawk (or osprey) over a chick. Her constant vigilance was remarkable. Or maybe not. She would make sure he survived, even if that meant almost 24x7 vigilance, because that was her role. Mother osprey in action. Though when it was more than a week after he had come home after surgery, I still felt guilty leaving on the boat and so delayed our departure another day. My wife insisted we go. After all, my business was closed for vacation, Alli had taken time off from work, and the weather was right. So we cast off.
Life’s biggest nightmare is the loss of a child. To me, the nightmare of that nightmare would be having it happen at sea, under my command, so to speak. So I equipped Alli with a whistle around her neck, a brand new submersible hand-held clipped to her belt and set on Channel 16, and a harness. I wasn’t taking any chances. Still, I suspect the longest time in three days she was alone on deck out of my sight was three minutes. Father osprey in action.
Life moved on. Nick recovered and went back to work. And Alli had to return to work, so she said goodbye to the osprey family. We motored Elsa into the always welcoming Great Island Boat Yard at the head of the bay for crew change. Alli’s friend Brad drove up for her, and my wife, Mary Kay, arrived by car that evening. Out we went again to the spot under the osprey nest, and Mary Kay took over Alli’s observation of the ospreys. The weather stayed nasty, so we stayed put. Mary Kay, like Alli before her, was content to just be there, anchored under the cedars and pines, and watch the ospreys.
Sadly, when the weather finally did clear, it was time for her to go back by car, while I awaited still more new crew in a couple of days. Though the boat would seem empty at first, I knew I would have company in the trees above me, and I looked forward to some solo time for thinking and writing.
“I know you love to also be alone, but why don’t you drive home with me for a couple of days, see how Nick is feeling, and then come back with your crew?” Mary Kay asked. It was not a pressurized question, just a thoughtful suggestion. I was torn. And then the cell phone rang. It was Alli.
She was scared. “Dad, I’m broken down in a tow zone in Boston. The brakes went out on the car. I called AAA, but they need to talk to you.”
Then the cell phone range again. It was Nick.
“Hey, Dad, are you coming home with Mom?”
“Ah, no, pal. Staying out another week.”
Long pause.
“Oh.”
“That ok?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. I guess. I do have two tickets to tomorrow night’s Red Sox game and the Jim Rice Hall of Fame ceremony, so I thought...”
There was no longer any hesitation in my mind after those two phone calls.
“We’ll be home tomorrow morning,” I said.
I felt at peace with the decision to leave, poured a class of wine for my wife and myself, and settled into my favorite corner of the cockpit. It was then that the sound came. It was the primal sound I’ve heard only twice before in my life, both times from people experiencing the horrific. But this was not from humans. It was from two ospreys. Somehow, vigilance had been relaxed for just one moment, and the eagle had struck. I looked above to see the pieces of nest and the chick in the big bird’s talons, as the frantic osprey parents screamed and then circled the now-empty nest for the next fifteen minutes.
The cycle of life will go on here. There will be more baby ospreys, more osprey parents, more eagles, and more fish spawning around us to feed the cycle. It was time to go. I raise Elsa’s well worn mainsail in the gently lifting southwest breeze, and watch silently as the wing of sail divides wind and then joins it together again.
Big Red and Driving the Bend
by: David Roper
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The year I met Big Red I was living alone in an ark under a bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota on the Upper Mississippi River. Dave’s Ark was a 42 foot home-built steel houseboat which, due to its ancient and long ago seized up Ford 302 engines, never went much of anywhere. But that was ok because I spent most of my waking hours running a 135’ stern wheel cruise ship along the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. On the rare Saturday evenings I had off, I would climb over a tired security fence on the shore beside my houseboat, ascend the 100+ rusty steel stairs that led to the top of the Wabasha Avenue Bridge, walk across the span of the Mississippi, and stand outside the World Theatre with a tall shy man in a white suit. Together, we would try to muster in enough people to generate audience noise for his local radio show. The year was 1978, the show was A Prairie Home Companion, and his name was Garrison Keillor. Later, he got real famous. I didn’t. But that’s ok too, because in watching and listening to his mesmerizing monologues I truly learned to appreciate the art of story telling.
After one particular show, and after an earlier incident on the river I’ll never forget, I walked back across the bridge, but didn’t descend the stairs to my houseboat as usual. Instead I continued on to a river bar called Awada’s. I was still jittery from what had happened that morning and thought a drink or two might calm me down. At this point I didn’t know many of the river pilots, as I was a new transplant from the ocean, and considered just a ‘cub pilot’– green, newly licensed and still learning the river. I functioned in a make believe, tourist-focused world, driving a recreated Mississippi River sternwheeler and narrating with authority about a river I knew little about. As a sternwheeler captain, I wore a uniform designed by the cruise ship’s marketing department and calculated to radiate authority and a sense of command. It consisted of white boat shoes, blue pressed slacks, a belt with a big brass buckle showcasing a Mississippi sternwheeler, a white shirt with four gold bar epaulets, and a name tag that said ‘Captain’. Thank God there was no hat. Believe me, I never wandered too far off the ship in this get-up. And the very last place on earth I would ever go in this rig was the world of Awada’s Riverfront Tavern, the domain of the hardscrabble commercial towboat pilots, whose uniforms consisted of what was closest to them on the floor when they got up each morning. Towboats, by the way, actually push rather than tow barges, and what they and their pilots do is extraordinary. Their job fluctuates between complete boredom and total terror. Pushing barges with a million gallons of gasoline through steel bridge spans in a fast running river in the middle of a city in the dark of night is not for the faint of heart, especially when the bow or ‘head’ of the tow can be a couple of football fields in length ahead of you. In fact, the largest tow ever pushed on the Mississippi is eight barges long by four barges wide. That’s makes it a 1600 foot ship with a 200 foot beam on a narrow river. So next time you think you’re hot stuff docking your 30 footer with your bow thruster, think again.
So I wandered into the smoke-filled darkness of Awada’s in my jeans and tee shirt, took a seat at the bar, and ordered a Grain Belt beer. Before long, four men came in and grabbed a round table just behind my bar seat. I stole a glance at them over my shoulder, but the big one with the red beard caught my eye. “Hey,” he said, in a deep, gravelly voice, “I seen you from my pilot house today…can tell it’s you there cubby, even without yer little Captain America suit. You’re that new one runnin’ that silly paddle boat that looks like a wedding cake, ain’t you?” He stopped to wave over the waitress, then continued. “Passed you kinda tight in Monkey Rudder Bend while we was pushing a couple of empties down from Lock 1 this morning. ‘Nother few feet and I coulda squished you down through that Mississippi River mud right to China. Mebbe you happened to notice me.”
“You’re off the Sadie Mae,” I said. “That’s why I’m here drinking. That mud you mention was in my Captain America pants when I came around the bend with my 400 tourists and there you and your 400 feet of barges were bearing down on us, taking up most of the river.”
“Yeah, I was drivin’ that bend with them barges there Cubby. Some guys, they’ll back a bend instead of drivin’ it…let the currents pull their lead barges through while backing slow against it to try to get control.” He looked over at the other three pilots at the table, and they all smirked. “’Backin’ Jacks’…that’s what we call them guys. Backin’ Jacks waste time, stretch their tows across the whole river, backin’ and trying to line up for the next bend. Them’s cub pilots, like you. You got to drive a bend, son. Kind of like a car in a skid. Got to let go the brakes, put the hammer down on them 3000 horses, and steer through it… also maybe hope there ain’t nobody around the corner.” Red smiled. “Look here Cubby,” he continued, “you might as well come over and join us. Might learn a thing or two.”
So I grabbed my Grain Belt and moved over and met the pilots of the Sadie May, the Mike Harris, the Itaska, and the Bull Duram.
The waitress came by and stood next to Red, who clasped her tiny hand in his mighty paw, and then released into it a one hundred dollar bill. “Sweetie, I want you to fill the top of this round table with open Budweiser bottles ‘til you can’t see the top no more. Then kindly go away, cause we don’t want no interruptin’ as we got some cards to play and some stories to tell, and it’s been one long day on the river.”
Then he looked over at me and winked. “Ain’t that right there Cubby?” he said, and, just light enough to not hurt me, my new friend punched me on the shoulder.
Watching Vastness
David Roper
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Late afternoon finds her standing at the very edge of the sea, waves just touching her toes, the rising onshore breeze lifting her hair, sunlight glowing against her skin and faded neon bikini. One of the locals, one of the women who brings no accessories to the edge of the world, stares seaward, watching something invisible to the summer people who walk behind her, between her back and the dunes. Now and then some inlander stops to follow her stare, focusing and refocusing on the immensity of waves beyond the surf, then gives up and strolls on, content to look a few yards ahead. Only the other locals know that the woman watches vastness.
So writes John Stilgoe in his book Alongshore. It makes me wonder: Why do we watch vastness? We sailors look seaward, yearning, searching, but it’s not just because we’re sailors. The landsman who lives on the shore does the same. Are we attracted to water because we ourselves are 72% water? Or that our earth’s surface is 79% water (79%)? Or do we look out to sea because of our inquiring nature as humans? Do we want something that is ‘out there’ because it’s not ‘here’? Why then, when we sailors are finally out on the vast empty sea, do we then look and yearn for land. Perhaps it’s all about ‘looming’. Herman Melville writes of it early on in Moby Dick, on how, on any Sunday afternoon, there are “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China…as if striving to get a better seaward peep.” Seamen knew this act of gazing over the horizon as looming.
I remember first thinking about this looming business during an offshore delivery from Rhode Island to St. Thomas, late one fall many years ago. I had a sketchy boat, and an even sketchier crew of three: two unsavory characters whom I’d found in a bar in Edgartown, and a big, tough, red-headed, ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot turned Mississippi River towboat pilot friend who had never seen the ocean but thought this was as good a way as any to get a strong dose of it. I told ‘Big Red’ as tactfully as I could that, well, it would be different out there on the ocean, that shore and society wouldn’t be close as it is on the river, that it would be day after day of vast open ocean, and, perhaps, huge waves and storms. Big Red looked at me, leaned towards me, and cocked his head inquiringly: “I ain’t afraid of any of that dying shit, if that’s what yer getting at,” he said. End of discussion. Anyway, when we got offshore, I noticed how every one on board, myself included, fell into “looming” mode, especially Big Red, who, despite any land being hundreds of miles off, just kept watching the vastness, looking over the horizon. One hundred miles short of Bermuda, the ocean began to get rough. Then it got rougher. When we went off a particularly large wave, and the combination engine box/ table in the center of the cabin lifted up off its mountings, we called it quits and hove to. When it got too scary up on deck, we all went below and lay on the cabin sole, except for Big Red, who squeezed into a port side pilot berth. When we fell off another breaking sea and Big Red was thrown out of the berth and into the cabin table, he sheared off half of one of his front teeth. “Makes me look tough I bet, don’t it?” he asked. And when we were completely submerged by a third wave and the cabin interior went quiet and turned Atlantic Ocean green, Big Red started calmly singing Dylan’s “Oh, Mama, Can This Really be the End”. Obviously, it wasn’t. When we finally did get to St. Thomas, I gave Big Red his return air ticket at a thatched bar on a pier end in Charlotte Amalie. He was staring out at the harbor’s mouth, lost in thought. I was doing the same. I was thinking of vastness and how, after more than two weeks at sea yearning for land, here we were staring out to sea again. I was thinking about how, as humans, we’ve been around for a mere 200,000 years, compared to our four billion year old oceans. Our planet’s highest mountains were once covered with water; up on Mount Everest, we’ve found fossils of animals that once lived at the bottom of the sea. Really, I thought, we humans are just highly specialized fish adapted to our 21% land mass. Our limbs came from fins; our jaws from gills. So maybe that’s why we still look out to sea, and then look back.
Just then, Red, still looking seaward, interrupted my thoughts.
“How about another Heineken there Cappy, before you and me dive into them fish tacos?” he asked.
I looked over warmly at my old friend; we’d been through a lot together, and his spirits had never wavered. I wanted to say that to him, but I didn’t.
“You know, you’re really a fish, Red,” I said instead.
He scratched his big red beard, and turned to look back at me, his broken front tooth giving him a jack-o-lantern look when he smiled.
“I been called worse,” he replied as he threw a big arm around me. And then he lifted his empty green bottle toward the bartender.
SOMEONE’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED
Dave Roper
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The most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you? Go ahead, name it. But you won’t top this:
Actually, the absolute King of All Embarrassing Moments was witnessed not by me, but by my boss the year I was the captain of his 58’ wooden schooner in Marblehead. But first, a little about him and the vessel. He was a great guy, but above all he was probably the most unflappable man I ever met. I remember him vividly, sitting casually at the helm of his great schooner, engaged intently in conversation with several guests, a gin and tonic in one hand, a couple of fingers of the other resting on a spoke of the big teak wheel, all while taking this huge vessel with her long bowsprit all the way to the head of crowded, tiny Manchester Harbor. I was his “captain” but he was the owner, so I simply crouched quietly by the bits at the bow, bit my tongue and held my breath, as the ten foot bowsprit whisked past the sterns and bows of several moored boats, missing each and every one by only inches. No one was ever sure if my boss just had an uncanny sense of the control of his big yacht, or he was just plum lucky every time. But he always missed.
He seemed such a care-free man, living for the moment, and never the moment after. One day, back on the mooring, as he looked down into the engine room, he said: “Say, Chief, why don’t you give that big old engine a coat of paint tomorrow. It’s all grey and black and greasy. And paint it white this time so it’s really shiny.” When I replied that that was fine, but it would take two days to do it, and he’d miss an extra sailing day, he asked me why the two days. I replied that it would take me one day of prep to degrease and scrape it, and one day to paint. “I don’t want to miss two days of sailing,” he said. “What will happen if you just paint it…just spray the thing white, nice and thick and pretty?” Well, I told him, the paint will fall off. “How soon?” he asked. I told him I didn’t know how soon, but eventually it would. “Eventually? What’s ‘eventually’? Everything that happens happens ‘eventually’. No, just paint it,” he said emphatically. “I’ll probably be dead before the paint comes off anyway, and this way I won’t miss an extra day of sailing.”
Anyway, you get the idea about this unflappable man and his living for the moment. Which brings me back to that really, really embarrassing, award-winning moment. I’ll set the scene: My boss lived in a huge house right next door to one of the big yacht clubs in Marblehead. It had a long front porch, great foyer with ship models, and a big, winding staircase leading up to the second floor, where the hallway led to several bedrooms, including the guest room. In fact, it was very similar to the front entrance area of the yacht club next door.
One summer an out of town couple came to visit friends who were members of this club. The hosts had arranged for the couple to stay in one of the hotel rooms at the yacht club. That evening, they all had dinner and drinks at the hosts’ house, and when the evening wound down, the visitors asked for directions to the yacht club, which was only a quarter mile away. The hosts offered to take them and show them the way in, but the guests declined, saying it was late, too much trouble, and they could find their way easily enough. The hosts gave them the simple street directions, detailed the yacht club’s entrance, the ship models, the foyer and the staircase. “The rooms aren’t numbered,” they said, but just go in the front, up the staircase, and your room is the first door on the right.” The visitors said they would be fine, got in their rental car, and headed for the yacht club. Though they followed directions carefully, they didn’t get it quite right, and instead entered my boss’s house, where everyone was asleep, but the big front porch and foyer were well lit and the front door not locked. Quietly, suitcases in hand, they made their way up the stairs, and opened the door to the first room on the right. It was a nicely made-up guest room, and, like Goldilocks, they fell into a bed that was just right, and they had a lovely sleep. In the morning, they made their way downstairs, suitcases in hand, and into the foyer. Looking around, they spied a man (my boss) sitting alone at a large table in a large dining room adjacent to the foyer. His housekeeper, dressed in white, was serving him something.
“Excuse me, is this where we sit to get some breakfast?” the wife of the couple asked, putting down her suitcase.
My boss looked up from his breakfast, cocked his head, studied the two as one might look at a wild new abstract painting, took a sip of his coffee, and said:
“Well, I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing in my house, but what the hell, since you’re here, you might as well sit down and have some grub.”
Go ahead, top that moment. I dare you.
I’LL HAVE ONE ORDER OF PARADISE TO GO
Dave Roper
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Years ago, back in my boat delivery days, I was hired to help a couple head off on the first leg of their dream. They were an anxious pair, long on their romantic vision of ‘escaping and living the dream’ and short on the practical part: sailing. That didn’t stop them, though. The were excellent at severing ties: they had sold their house, sold both their cars, quit both their jobs, and even cancelled their marina slip. They had read all the escapist literature, and even poked out on the bay a few times, but never too far from shore. Nervous about the first leg, they had hired me at the last minute. Forty miles out, on the way to Norfolk, it got rough and unpleasant, the wind brisk and astern. The following seas eyed their odd vessel hungrily. Strange creaks and groans began to emit from both the vessel and its owners. The missus came up to the cockpit, looked around frantically, and shrieked, “Where’s the land? Oh my God. Where the hell is the goddamn land.” Anyway, it’s a long story regarding what happened next, but the short version is I was told to ‘turn around and take us home’. So we motored upwind into steep seas for eleven hours, back to the marina where we had started. The owner sat next to me in the cockpit, looking aft and downwind at his vanishing dream. He never let go his grip on the big cockpit cleat beside him. He said nothing. He didn’t have to; his white knuckles said it all. In less than one twenty-four hour day, the dream was over.
Robert Persig, author of the 1974 mega best seller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, bought an offshore sailboat with some of the profits from his book, and headed for ‘The Dream’. Years later, he wrote an essay about it in which he said that all that really happens when one ‘escapes’ the realities of life ashore is simply the substitution of one set of shore-based problems for a new set of ocean-based problems. There is no real escape of problems, pain, pressure, discomfort and worry, only a different set of each, he said. If you understand that, that’s fine. If you understand that you don’t leave your soul or your past behind when you sail away, that they go everywhere with you, that’s fine. Otherwise, to quote Persig: “All this is just running away from reality. You never realize how good that friendly old nine-to-five job can be. Just little things - like everyone saying hello each morning or the supervisor stopping by to get your opinion because he really needs it. And seeing old friends and familiar neighbors and streets you've lived near all your life. Who wants to escape all that? Perhaps what cruising teaches more than anything else is an appreciation of the real world you might otherwise think of as oppressive.”
In 1980, when I captained a cruise ship on the Mississippi River in St. Paul, I had a friend who owned a barge company. He’d built it up from scratch into a successful business over many years, but he’d always talked of ‘getting out of here, building his dream boat, heading down the Mississippi and then to the Caribbean. Finally, he did it. He sold his company and left. Six weeks later he was back. “The islands all started looking the same,” he said. “I’d get up, worry about the anchorage, worry about where I would get water, worry about the next front coming through, and then worry about my next destination, which I wasn’t even particularly interested in going to anyway. One island started to look like the last one. I needed some sort of goal. After a while, the goals I did have began to seem empty. I missed my business and all its challenges.” My friend sold his boat, came home and bought back his company.
Tristan Jones, who wrote numerous books of his picaresque life sailing the oceans of the world in low budget craft, grew weary of his nomadic lifestyle also. Towards the end he discussed his thoughts about ‘the dream’ and ‘paradise’. Why, he wondered, was turquoise water and an endless white sand beach considered ‘paradise’?
What do you get with paradise, anyway? Challenge? Nourishment? Intrigue? If you anchored off it or sat on it for, say, several days, wouldn’t ‘paradise’ be eclipsed by boredom? Wouldn’t it then be time to ‘escape’ paradise?
Well, he’s almost convinced me. But maybe I’ll give it just one try and see for sure. I’ll see you by that fourth sand dune with the palm tree. (Bring the brie; I’ve got the wine).
MERMAIDS AND CONFESSIONS TO THE STEM
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July 12, 1959
44.04N/68.35W, a small island east of Isle au Haut, Maine
So I ran, as I always did. Actually seeing two mermaids was all too much for a nine year old to understand. Who in the world would ever believe me? Talking about it with humans was going to get me nowhere; even as a nine year old I knew that. No, I knew where I had to go, and I hurried along back to the beach and the dinghy, and rowed back to my father’s cruising sloop.
Dad was busy up on the bow, cleaning up after putting a coat of varnish on the forward hatch. He looked over his shoulder. “Beachcombing good Pal?” he asked as I climbed aboard the old sloop, and hurried below, uttering a quick ‘Oh, fine, Dad.” I worked my way forward past the galley, through the main salon and then the forward cabin until I reached the door of the anchor locker. The small door had an old rusty horseshoe on its face, which my grandfather had put there way back in 1939 when the boat was launched. The door gave access to an opening through which only a small boy could crawl. But it led to a world of isolation and insulation from the outside world, a world which was away from the cruelty of sixth grade bullies and disbelieving adults. It led to a world usually filled with soothing gurgling sounds, the cool dampness of aged wood, the smell of manila anchor rode, an undulating motion, and a half light that, to this nine year old, somehow felt like a protective cloak. But what was much more important was who lived there. It was the home of an ancient oak wizard: the Stem. I crawled in, and sat there and waited, peering forward into the true darkness of the bow, where the mahogany planks met the great wooden, sea-parting, guiding timber that held much of the boat together, while leading the way through the seas. I heard my father’s scuffing on the deck above while he worked with the anchor line. Still, I waited; perhaps ten minutes. And then, when a slight tidal surge began to lift the old sloop slightly, I heard that noise I wanted to hear; it came from the very farthest point forward. The Stem was awake. I leaned forward into the darkness, I could just make out the cracked face of the aged oak, the wise curve of the stem as it turned up to tie in the planks of the bow.
“I saw mermaids, Stem. Two of them. They were girls on top, and fishes on the bottom.” Then I heard my father coming down the forward hatch.
“This will be our secret, Stem” I whispered. I turned and crawled out, through the narrow space, and into the light of another world, a world where there are no such things a mermaids.
The next morning, as my father and I sat in the cockpit drinking our orange juice, we watched as a breeze began to develop from the northeast. “That’s not a good sign, Pal, a northeast breeze building this early in the morning in Maine in the summer. Wind could pick up pretty good.” He poured some milk on my Rice Crispies. “We should get an early start today.” I looked up at the canvas sun awning as it began to come alive for the first time since we’d been in this harbor.
But mermaids, not wind, was what was on my mind. “Would there be time for me to row ashore? Just one more time for beachcombing?” “Well, I think it best if I row you in, with this building wind and all. Finish up your cereal, grab your life jacket and we’ll go right away. Then we should head back towards Camden.”
Then I remembered. My heart sank. “Dad, I’m sorry, I must have left my life jacket ashore, near the spot where I’d beached the dinghy yesterday. Pleeeeese, just one more time ashore. You like the beach too.”
“Well, go get one of the adult life jackets from under the port bunk. It’s too big for you, so just hang on tight to it, OK? I’ll row.”
When we were about halfway to shore, the breeze began to pick up again, and the newly formed following seas started to smack the dinghy’s transom. I felt the cold fingers of spray on my back as I sat in the stern looking forward to the beach.
“Don’t move too far to one side; stay in the middle of the seat,” Dad said. Even to this day, I remember that edge to his voice, that tone of emerging anxiety. I looked down at the accumulated bilge water around my feet, and watched it search for the slightest downward slope, which was toward the very stern corners of the dinghy. The chop was now building such that waves were threatening to overwhelm the corners of the stern. The shore and the boat were now each about one hundred yards away. “I’m going to turn back,” Dad said. “STAY STILL AND IN THE MIDDLE.”
And then he tried to spin the dinghy quickly, pulling on one oar and pushing on the other. And it might have worked if there hadn’t been so much water in the dinghy, but the spinning motion sent the bilge water careening to the starboard side, knocking the little boat off balance, and driving one stern corner under, this time to stay. The swamped dinghy settled, slowly it seemed, into the surface of the cove.
My head went under. I popped up. The saltwater, stinging like tears, invaded my nose, my eyes, my senses. I remember blinking, wide-eyed while under water, seeing blurred blue everywhere. I came up again. I flailed, and in doing so I let go of the big adult lifejacket. But my eyes caught sight of my father, still many yards away but swimming towards me. I went under again. I choked spasmodically, my body to the sea just a confused void that needed invading. The sea did not discriminate; small boys were included, and this one gave in to it and just stopped fighting.
What happened next came from down under, rather than from the surface. Suddenly, I stopped going down and started going up, propelled by a soft, lifting touch on my rear end. I surfaced, chocked up seawater, and gasped at the precious air. A short time later an arm came around my neck; it was the big, hairy familiar arm of my father. “I’ve got you Pal. I’ve got you,” he said, and he pulled me toward the shore, the waves helping us along. We both crawled up on all fours. I remember my father lying on his back next to me, his chest heaving. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“Dad, I was going to the bottom! I was going to the bottom! I wasn’t going to come up that last time until you pushed me up.”
It’s no longer 1959. Fifty years have passed. But I’ll never forget that look on Dad’s soaked and shivering face, that questioning look of disbelief at what I’d just said about him pushing me up. He had said nothing, but because of what’s happened since in my life, I now know what he must have been thinking. He was thinking he was still ten yards away from me when my head popped to the surface of that cove. It wasn’t Dad who pushed me to the surface.
THE TRUTH ABOUT MERMAIDS
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15 June, 1608
In 1608, the English navigator Henry Hudson was skirting the polar ice off the arctic coast of Russia in his second attempt to find a northeast route to the spice markets of China. Near the coast of Nova Zembla, Hudson made his log entry of 15 June:
This morning, one of our companie looking over board saw a mermaid, and calling up some of the companie to see her, one more came up, and by that time shee was close to the ship's side, looking earnestly upon the men: a little after, a Sea came and overturned her: From the Navill upward, her backe and breasts were like a woman's.., her body as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of colour blacke; in her going down they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell.
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July 11, 1959
44.04N/68.35W, a small island east of Isle au Haut, Maine
When I was nine years old I saw two mermaids. Really. I understand why you might doubt me. So be it. But when I was nine years old I saw two mermaids. Period.
It could have been just another false sighting, another apparition, like the ones in those handwritten captains’ logs of square-rigged vessels roaming the oceans looking for whales, or from the sailors’ journals aboard the spice traders journeying back from Zanzibar. It could have been written off as just one more incident out of a young boy’s imagination. But a stream of events flowed forth from that moment when I saw them, on that hot, languid day in July of the year 1959, that made me much different from other nine year olds. But that’s another, much longer story.
Early on that morning of the sighting my father and I had hidden from the heat under the canvas awning in the cockpit of Phyllis, our old wooden cutter. We were anchored in a rocky Maine cove which was somewhat open to the Northeast. Dad had hoped for a breeze to cool us, but it was not to be. The anchor line lay limp off the end of the bowsprit.
“Why don’t you get in the dinghy and practice your rowing?” Dad asked. I nodded. “And don’t forget your lifejacket…and please wear your hat.”
The dinghy’s bow line hung limp like the anchor line of the bigger boat. The totally calm and clear sea appeared viscous, a thick gel that held the reflections of the bow lines of the two boats in its midst like fruit in a jello. My sudden movement into the dinghy was startling in the midst of a world so still. I untied the bow line and pushed away from the big boat, picked up the wooden oars and slid them into their oar locks. The sudden shuffling of the oars echoed against the shore. “I might go ashore. Ok, Dad? Might do some beachcombing,” I said.
I pulled toward shore, my eyes aimed down at my feet. The oars were adult oars, too long and heavy for me, and I had to concentrate. There was a small pool of water in the bottom of the boat, and I watched it move forward and aft with each motion of my oar strokes. I spread my feet to the side of the bilge, trying to keep them dry. Then I looked over my shoulder to check on my progress toward shore. The sandy beach and rocks and pine trees were getting close, and I began to smell the decaying seaweed left behind by the tide. The tide had been dead low and its flood was just now beginning. I knew that in its retreat six hours before it would have left other things behind. It would be a good time for beachcombing, I thought.
I walked perhaps a half mile, a long ways for a nine year old. Combing was good. I found three horseshoe crabs, those foot-long shelled creatures that look like miniature brown tanks, their tails like great canons coming out of the turrets. I moved on, lost in my world of exploration. I found a bottle with a cork in it (though no note inside), a bright yellow orphaned lobster buoy, and a broken hockey stick. The bottle excited me the most because someday I knew I’d find one with a note in it. It might be a note from someone who was in trouble, and needed my help.
I was thinking about that, imagining where the note would be from, and how I would help, when I rounded a bend in the shore. I didn’t realize it at first because I was looking down, but I was walking into a U shaped indentation made by years of hammering and then funneling of the Atlantic ocean against the shore. It was a secluded nook, about thirty yards deep and fifty yards wide, and framed by two high, narrow arms of protruding rock. The nook’s only access was at low tide, around these jutting walls, and along a short, normally submerged stretch of beach. The only other access was by boat, and I could see numerous nasty ledges now uncovered to seaward.
A gull flew close overhead, crying, but I didn’t look at it. I didn’t look at it because I was frozen by another sight. At first, it seemed just another scene from my vivid imagination, only this time I realized I hadn’t willed this. I was looking at two creatures curled against a smooth boulder near the sea. They glistened in the sunlight, their lower halves like scales… shiny, reflective. Their upper torsos were soft, pink and smooth like the morning’s sunrise, or like the skin on my friend Johnny Wyman’s baby sister. Motionless, mesmerized, my eyes wide with wonder, I simply and silently mouthed one word: ‘mermaids’. One of the creatures was running her hands through her long black hair. Her back was arched, her head tipped back. Then she shook her head, and ran her hands through her hair again. I looked at her whole body, up and down, over and over, my eyes each time skidding to a stop at her breasts. I looked at her face, and thought of the paintings of angels I’d seen at the museum, faces smooth and rosy with the kind of pink that comes from being a bit embarrassed.
But the tail. It was a tail, and it was bent around, partly under a rock, where the other creature, who looked about the same, lay curled up, perhaps sleeping. It was all too much for a little boy, and I backed away slowly. They were probably 150 feet off, and hadn’t heard or seen me. Never taking my eyes off of them, I backed around the corner of protruding rock and jutting shore that protected the cove until they were out of sight. Then I leaned against the ledge, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, counted to ten, and looked around the corner again. They were still there.
And then, I ran.
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