Sea Over Bow

by Linda Kenyon

  As I watch the approaching tanker, I begin to understand why I’ve been caught off-guard — twice now. These ships really move when they’re out in the ocean. In no time he’s crossed our stern and is steaming over the horizon in the direction the first ship came from. Clearly we are crossing — or in — one of the major shipping lanes between Europe and North America.

  The lazy first leg of our journey is over. We’re going to have to keep a much sharper lookout now — which is actually quite pleasant. I’ve been missing a lot, spending my days with my nose buried in a book.

  Four greater shearwaters land in our wake. Perhaps we bring fish to the surface? But I don’t see them feeding at all. They just settle in, bob along behind us. Maybe they like our company? I try to think of four names that start with Sh — Shirley, Shelly, Sherman… Can’t think of a fourth one. “Sorry, buddy,” I murmur. Wait — Sheldon.

  They are watching something in the sky above the boat. I look — a beautiful white-tailed tropicbird floats above us. The same one we saw before? Maybe it’s following us, still looking for that squid?

  Beep. I scan the horizon. Nothing.

  Then it’s my turn to nap. It’s hot below deck, so I climb into the V-berth, open the hatch wide, and stretch out on my back beneath it, using the spinnaker we store below deck when it’s not in use for a pillow. Above me the sails breathe in and out, in and out. The sun plays across my face as we rock gently along. I close my eyes. But I’m too happy to sleep.

  Happy. Not something I expected to feel again.

  The first few months in my condo were pretty grim. I didn’t go out much, except to go to work. One morning, my car wouldn’t start. A sharp wind drove fine pellets of ice against my face as I stood helplessly looking under the hood. I don’t know what I was looking for.

  “What’s up?” Chris had come out to his car. “Geez, it’s cold.”

  “My car won’t start.”

  “Here, I’ll give you a boost.” He pulled a pair of jumper cables out of his trunk. It took a few tries, but finally my car started.

  “Thanks, Chris. Now I can drive it to the dealer.”

  “Why? You just need a new battery.” He put away the jumper cables, walked around to the passenger side of my car. “Come on, we’ll go to Canadian Tire.”

  I was dumbstruck. He was going to help me?

  You’re pathetic. Deal with this yourself.

  Half an hour later I was standing in the parking lot of Canadian Tire, hands burrowed in my pockets, watching as Chris hooked up my new battery.

  “Stand beside me,” he said, “You’ll be out of the wind.”

  Easter weekend I ventured to the woods for the first time. I’d never gone alone without Chester, my husband’s big bull mastiff. I kept looking around, half expecting him to come crashing through the underbrush, ears flapping, a big string of drool hanging from his chin. I had hung a picture of Chester on the wall above Emily’s bowl, at eye level for her. She misses him, I’d tell people.

  Emily looked very small as she trundled along the path ahead of me. She kept stopping and looking back at me. Are you sure this is a good idea?

  The woods were perfectly silent, not a bird to be heard. I checked the pond — no ducks. Then I spotted a wood duck in a tree on the far side, it must be nesting close by. Yes, there was a cavity in the trunk, just below where the bird was perched. It was too early in the year for the fledglings to be leaving the nest, but I watched for a while, just in case. When they’re just a day old, they climb up the inside of the nest and fling themselves over the side, landing in the water, if they’re lucky — on hard ground, if they’re not.

  As spring turned to summer, instead of eating bagged salad every night, I began walking to the restaurant up the street and getting takeout salad — spinach, pear, and gorgonzola was my favourite. I’d arrange it on one of my good plates, and instead of eating in front of the TV, watching reruns of Friends, I’d pour myself a glass of wine and eat at the table, watching the sun set. It would wash the room in gold light, picking out certain objects — the glass vase full of purple hyacinths, a bird’s nest, my new two-volume biography of Colette in its beautiful pale yellow binding.

  Driving home from work one Friday in June, I found myself thinking, I can do whatever I want this weekend, go wherever I want — no one knows where I am, no one cares. A couple of months ago, this thought would have reduced me to tears. Now it felt kind of good.

  I went to a movie alone for the first time in my life, watched a film about a housewife who ran away to Venice, where she found work in a flower shop and started playing the accordion again, and dancing, things she’d given up when she married a man who sold plumbing fixtures.

  Later that night, I was awakened by a cat in the garden below my bedroom window. She would cry out loudly, just long enough to make her need known, then give a couple of polite, quiet, almost apologetic meows. Traffic passed by in the background, either oblivious or indifferent to her cries. But I was listening.

  Summer came and my condo started to feel a little small. I would throw all the windows open, let the sun and fresh air in. On the July long weekend, I had the old school to myself — everyone else had left town — so I poured myself a glass of wine and went and sat on the back step. A bank of thunderclouds was rolling in, but I was sheltered in the big brick arch over the door. Emily sat beside me, ears up, keeping an eye on the sky. She would look at my face from time to time. You can feel the rain coming, right? I stroked her ears reassuringly as I sipped my wine, watched the sky darken. This is enough, I thought. This is enough.

  But it wasn’t enough for long.

  Emily and I started going for long rambles in the country. I’d get up early, put on my hiking boots, make myself a thermos of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich, grab a couple of oranges and my binoculars. Our first stop was the river just outside Cambridge. We’d park at the rowing club and walk along the trail to the top of the cliffs, keeping an eye out for osprey. After that we’d drive to the woods behind Langdon Hall, hop the fence and wander along the deer trails. Once we startled a young deer coming the other way. Neither of us knew what to do, exactly. I stepped off the trail into the thick underbrush and let it pass.

  When the sun was directly overhead, I’d eat my lunch sitting on a boulder overlooking the meadows, stretch out in the long grass for a nap, while Emily kept watch. Then I’d drive to the conservation area, follow the trail through the pine trees, around the shallow lakes, up the hill into the maple forest, back around the lakes. I’d watch the swallows skimming the water, catching bugs.

  I used to like to watch the barn swallows at the farm trying to coax their fledglings into flight. The young birds would teeter on the clothesline outside my kitchen window, flap their wings as their parents swooped overhead, feed me, feed me. No, come fly with me, it’s easy, you can catch your own bugs.

  Our last stop of the day would be Indian Lookout, where I’d sit on the damp ground, feet dangling over the edge of the bluff, eating my last orange as I watched the light in the river valley begin to fade. Once a bald eagle flew by, just below me, then circled back so close I didn’t need my binoculars. Enough, I said to myself. Surely this is enough.

  Some nights when I got home, I’d find a message from Brenda on my answering machine.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you all weekend.”

  I didn’t tell her I’d been out trespassing and sleeping in meadows.

  “Haven’t seen much of you this summer,” I said.

  Chris and I were sitting on the back steps, Emily asleep in the sun at our feet. The weather was still warm, but the leaves had started to turn. The roses and peonies had given way to purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans.

  “I’ve been up at the boat.”

  “All summer?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t get this boat thing. Tell me abou
t it.”

  “Better. I’ll show you some pictures.” He went upstairs and returned minutes later with a photo album.

  “My first boat was a Hughes 25.”

  He showed me a picture of a trim little sailboat, gazed at it longingly.

  “But I had to sell it when the kids started coming.” He furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure why. The MG had to go too.”

  After his divorce he bought a Grampion 30, which seemed huge to him.

  “I was getting ready to sail to the Caribbean in it, had installed a staysail rig and running backstays, but then I saw this — ”

  He showed me a picture of a much bigger boat. He had been sailing in Lake Erie, heading for Port Stanley, when he was passed by a big steel sailboat with beautiful lines. He’d always wanted a steel boat.

  “Fibreglass is great for sailing around in the Great Lakes, but in uncharted waters, a steel boat provides greater security. It’s also a lot more stable.”

  To his surprise, when he arrived in Port Stanley, it was docked at the marina there. Everyone knew the boat. It was built there by a guy named Marv, who had just come back from the Caribbean and was looking to sell it.

  “When Marv took me below and I saw the amazing job he had done on the woodwork, it was a done deal.”

  The name on the hull was Thursday’s Child, but in later pictures, it was MonArk.

  “You changed the name?” I said. “MonArk? First person singular? The animals go two by two, you know.”

  “I know that,” he said sadly.

  I was dreading my first Christmas alone, fretting about whether or not to decorate my condo. I couldn’t bear the thought of a tree. Maybe a big poinsettia?

  Then there was Chris at the door, with a beautiful poinsettia. His daughter’s swim team had been selling them to raise money and he’d bought half a dozen.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to me without ceremony.

  I put it on my dining room table. It was just right.

  Christmas Day dawned sunny and cold. I had it all planned, had even laid out my clothes the night before. As soon as I opened my eyes, I jumped out of bed, pulled my fleecies over my pyjamas, put on my warmest outdoor clothes, including the mad bomber hat my husband hated so much, and pulled on my big clumsy boots with the thick felt liners. I extracted a reluctant Emily from the burrow of blankets at the foot of the bed, packed her in the car, and headed off to the conservation area at the edge of town.

  We made our way across the meadow, Emily pushing through new-fallen snow up to her chest, looking back at me from time to time. Was this a good idea? I thought we would be the only ones out walking on Christmas morning, but a single set of bootprints told me that some solitary walker had been there before us. When we reached the creek, I was surprised to see that it hadn’t frozen over yet. I stood on the little wooden bridge, watched the cold, black water rushing by below me.

  I plucked some dried leaves off a beech tree beside the creek and dropped them into the water one by one, watching them until they either sank or disappeared around the bend. I thought about the first Christmas on the farm, unwrapping a pair of leather work boots with a bottle of Chanel tucked into them, remembered giving the sheep an extra armful of hay so we wouldn’t have to go out and do chores after Christmas dinner. I watched the last leaf float out of sight and felt sad, but a little lighter somehow.

  I spent the evening listening to Bach’s cello suites and rearranging the shelves in the living room. I put my collection of Edward Gorey books within easy reach of my armchair, arranged all my bird nests on one shelf, along with my collection of feathers and a couple of almost-perfect robins’ eggs. I put all the biographies of women I admire on another shelf, along with the books they had written, left the ones I didn’t particularly admire where they were. I dug some pictures out of a box in my closet — my mother, a baby sleeping in the curve of a violin, Virginia Woolf in her mother’s wedding dress — and stood them together on a shelf, placing a gold raku pear in front of them. I put a bowl of wild rosehips above the fireplace, scattered a handful of walnuts I had gathered in the woods around it, and sat back and admired my handiwork.

  Then I poured myself a glass of wine, settled into my armchair with the paper, turned to the horoscope page and found mine.

  The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. Don’t.

  The next time I saw Chris he was loading boxes into his car. A lot of them.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m moving out.”

  Oh no, I thought.

  He didn’t look like he wanted to talk. I just waited, something I’d learned from him. He put down the box he was trying to jam into his already-full trunk.

  “Cindy doesn’t have time for a boyfriend,” he said, leaning against the car. “I knew that when I met her.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll find some place to stay for the winter, then in the spring I’ll move onto the boat.”

  He looked up at the sky, not a cloud in sight, the kind of cold, clear day you get in January.

  “Wind from the north,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “The flag on that building — ” he pointed. “You should come sailing with me sometime.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I had never been on a sailboat before, was baffled by all the ropes, as I called them, not knowing a sheet from a halyard. Chris had me take the wheel as we motored out of the harbour and went forward to remove the sail cover. I watched him working on the foredeck. He’d stop from time to time, check our heading — “a little more to the right” — look around for other boats.

  “Ready to raise sail?” he asked.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just keep the boat pointing into the wind.”

  I could do that. In no time, he had the mainsail up. It fluttered weakly in the gentle breeze. So this is sailing? He came back and took the helm, and as we rounded the lighthouse and left the shelter of the harbour, the sail suddenly filled with wind and we picked up speed. He handed me a rope — “Make sure that feeds out and doesn’t get caught on anything, especially your foot” — and reached over and unfurled what I now know is the genoa, sheeting it in with one hand as he steered.

  Then he switched the engine off and the only sound you could hear was water rushing along the hull and the occasional cry of a gull. We were galloping through the sparkling blue water, wind in our hair. Free, I thought. I’m free.

  “You like it?” he said.

  “I love it.”

  Chris was watching the sails, adjusting the heading a little to the left, a little to the right, making the most of the gentle wind. We were just two big kids, playing outside.

  “What does a guy have to do to get some dinner around here?”

  “Okay, Captain Bligh.”

  We’re still just two big kids, I think, as I climb out of the V-berth. I rummage in the fridge, decide to heat up some leftover boat gorp.

  “This is my favourite,” Chris says, licking his fork clean. “Except, of course, for canned stew.”

  “Why do I bother?” I say, throwing my hands up in the air. “Canned stew it is, from here to the Azores. God knows we have enough.”

  We get the boat ready for the night then Chris goes down for his pre-watch nap. The sky is absolutely clear, not a cloud in sight. I watch the sun inch towards the sharp blue horizon, then suddenly plunge out of sight. Why does it do that? I scan the horizon — nothing as far as the eye can see.

  “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball,” I sing softly to myself. “Or a highway or a forest or me here, least of all.”

  I am very small out here, but it feels good. For the first time in my life, I feel like there’s enough room for me.

  THE CROSSING

  June 1

&
nbsp; Day 11

  On the first of June, we make the turn towards the Azores and the weather immediately gets colder, the sailing much rougher. The wind has suddenly gone east and is on the nose now. Instead of taking the seas on the quarter, we’re pounding into them. And there is only a sliver of a moon left to light our way at night.

  M is for Maude, who was swept out to sea, I think as I fret about the approaching dark. I check and double check the flashlight batteries, make sure we have everything we need in the cockpit — flashlight, binoculars, iPod, warm blanket, thermos of coffee, snacks, flashlight, where is the flashlight.

  As Chris naps, I watch the light slowly fade, then open my computer to read Brenda’s response to my last email, which I downloaded earlier in the day. One last look around, then I start reading.

  Dear Linda,

  Wow, that was quite a dream. And of course you have doubts — I would worry about you if you didn’t.

  Remember my trip to Sweden, my first big trip anywhere? I went — fled? — at a time when my marriage was a mess and I was struggling with so much confusion and pain. I just wanted to see my dear friend from school who had moved back home.

  The anxiety started before I got to the airport. I felt sick about leaving the apartment (what if the plants died?), about checking in (what if my luggage got lost?), and about everything (what if I fall asleep during the stopover and miss my connecting flight?). By the time I arrived I was miserable. Sweden is beautiful but I saw none of it, really, because I was so worried about something going disastrously wrong.

  On the afternoon of the third day we were sitting on a dock in Stockholm. I was swinging my feet over the edge, looking at the skyline but really just feeling anxious and miserable (what a dreadful guest I must have been). As I looked down at the deep water I was struck with the horrifying thought that one of my new sandals could have slipped off into the water! What was I thinking? The misery that had become so familiar surged until I had a different thought.