Sea Over Bow

by Linda Kenyon

  “I wasn’t a sailor when I met him, but I think I am now.”

  “And how did you met him?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time,” she says, closing her book.

  I set the bag of rolls on the bench beside me, put my feet up on the sea wall. The sun is warm on our faces the wind teases our hair. She watches my face, waits. I have missed having a woman to talk to. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s something about the way she holds my gaze, leans slightly toward me, as though she doesn’t want to miss a word. I find myself opening up to her.

  I tell her I was living alone in my condo with my little dog when I met him, tell her a bit about my marriage, about how shattered I was when it ended.

  “You had broken your heart,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  Then I tell her how kind Chris was to me, how good that felt. I was completely unguarded with him. I had decided never to get involved with a man again, never again to let anyone close enough to hurt me.

  “We were just friends,” I tell her. “And anyway, I learned long ago never to trust a man as good-looking as he is.” People often stop Chris on the street and ask him if he’s Richard Gere. Which is just silly. He’s much better looking than Richard Gere.

  “Yes.” She smiles. “He is too handsome. So when did your mind change?”

  “The first time he took me sailing.”

  I look down at our boat and I can see Chris standing on the stern, looking towards shore. He’s wondering where I am. Or at least where his lunch is.

  “I must go,” I say, standing, picking up my bag of rolls.

  “À bientôt,” she says. “I like this, to talk to you.”

  “Me too.”

  Chris has spent the morning trying to help Niles start his engine. He has lots to tell me. It turns out Niles is at the tail end of an around-the-world cruise. He bought his boat on an impulse, intending to sail from England to Australia, where he had a contract to work for a few months. He signed up for a two-week sailing course before setting out across the English Channel. Two weeks.

  He went from harbour to harbour down the coast of Europe, but he didn’t like the looks of the African coast so he just kept going. When he reached the Cape of Good Hope, he holed up for several weeks, spending most of his time in the pub, in theory waiting for the right weather to round the treacherous point. One night the bartender told him it was time to go, so he just left and sailed all the way to Australia. In one shot. On his own.

  After he finished his work in Australia, he just kept on going — across the South Pacific, up the coast of South America, through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, then across the Atlantic to the Azores.

  “He’s on his way back to England now,” Chris says, “but it’s funny — even after circumnavigating the globe, he considers himself a computer programmer, not a sailor. And he may be right. He said he was knocked down in the gale — just a minor knockdown. I asked him what that looked like, and he said, ‘You know, when the whole sail doesn’t go in the water, just part of it.’”

  Our sail has never been anywhere near the water.

  “What were you and the French woman talking about for so long?” Chris asks. “I thought I was going to have to make my own lunch.”

  I tell him about her long list of repairs.

  “We’re pretty lucky, aren’t we?”

  “Not lucky,” he says. “We have a sturdy boat.”

  “And you’re a real sailor.”

  “So are you now. You’ve sailed more miles than most people do in a lifetime.”

  He’s right. I am a sailor now. I have sailed across the ocean.

  “Hey,” I say, “Come to shore with me. There’s something I need to do.”

  He eyes the bag of rolls hungrily but doesn’t question me. We dinghy to shore, where I take his hand and lead him out along a country road. I have a pair of scissors in my pocket, which I use to cut a huge armload of hydrangeas.

  “No one will miss a few of these.”

  Back at the boat, I fill several jars with water, place big bouquets of purple blossoms on the table, in the galley, in the bedroom. The lilacs at the farm pale in comparison, just a distant memory now.

  “There,” I say. “That’s perfect. Let me make you some lunch.”

  That night I can’t fall asleep, thinking about the French woman. I try to picture her living in an old stone cottage beside a river. Her backyard is overgrown with French lilacs, which I’ve never seen, only imagined. Her next-door neighbour tells her she should prune them but she can’t bring herself to do it. Her husband is off on a call — do country doctors still make house calls in France? Now that both her children are in school, how does she spend her days? Does she pour herself a cup of coffee, stare out the window? I think she goes swimming in the cold river, and goes for long bike rides when the sun shines and even when it doesn’t.

  I give up on sleep, get up quietly, make myself a cup of milky tea. Maybe that will help. My mother used to drink a glass of warm milk every night before she went to bed. I can’t quite bring myself to drink warm milk, but my tea has been getting milkier and milkier over the years. I’m sure that day will come.

  I take my cup of tea above deck, and a blanket, and my computer — I’ll write to Brenda. I curl up on the foredeck with my back against the mast, tuck the blanket around me, listen to the strange calls of shearwaters jostling for position on the cliff face behind me, look up at the night sky.

  I think Brad loved me once. Where does it go? Is it a gradual thing, I wonder, does it just fade away? Or is it a sudden thing, like my mother’s stroke — one minute you’re fine, the next everything changes.

  I see a blinking light overhead; it’s a tiny plane moving across the sky, heading out over the Atlantic. I think of Chris’s father in his Tiger Moth, helmet and goggles in place, silk scarf tied firmly around his neck, heading out on his first solo flight across the English Channel. Was it cold up there, I wonder? Did his leather jacket keep him warm enough? Did he bring a sandwich and a thermos of tea? I pull the blanket more tightly around my shoulders.

  I don’t understand how a plane can fly. Sure, something like Frank’s little biplane makes sense, like a kite, only bigger. But the fighter planes he flew during the war were much more substantial — I’ve seen pictures of them — and much less plausible to me. I don’t know how he made it to the end of the war without crashing or getting shot out of the sky. But I’m glad he did.

  He was almost ninety when I met him. Get a haircut, were the first words he said to Chris when he opened the door. Stand up straight, Dad, Chris said. Then he introduced me. I don’t know how you keep finding these nice girls, his father muttered as he led us to the living room. I found this flattering and more than a little disconcerting.

  Though he kept asking when Chris was going to get a real job, I think Frank was secretly pleased that his son was setting off to sail across the ocean. He did the same thing when he was a young man, earned his passage by shovelling cattle manure on a cargo ship bound for England. Then he joined the Royal Air Force.

  He must see something of himself in Chris, his youngest, the son who looks most like him, and I can certainly see him in Chris. I think Chris will be a grumpy old man, frustrated by his shaky legs, by how small his life has become. I reach over and pat his hand. Would you like more tea? What did you say? Quit mumbling. I pour him some tea anyway, go back to my book. He gets up and puts another log on the fire. At least that’s how I hope it goes.

  It’s too cold on the foredeck, so I move into the cockpit, settle myself on the bench with the blanket over my legs. I open my computer, turn off the alarm. No need to scan for boats here.

  Dear Brenda,

  Yes, my dear, we did make it to the Azores, as you’ll know by now. I hope the brief note I sent to everyone when we made landfall put your mind at
ease. I made light of the gales we came through — it was actually pretty intense. But here we are, bobbing peacefully at anchor in the sort of sheltered harbour at Lajes. We’re open to the east here, so if another front comes through we’ll have to get out of here in a hurry. But for now we’re just fine.

  I hope by now the bruises on your backside have started to fade. Your bruised pride will take a little longer, I suspect. I understand perfectly what you’re going through. The only thing more foolish than a middle-aged woman taking up horseback riding is a fifty-year-old running away with a sailor. I think I win on that one.

  After I read your letter, I kept thinking about a friend of mine who was paralyzed by anxiety at the thought of buying a new couch. People will know that you wanted a new couch, she explained, and that you chose that particular one.

  It takes a lot of courage to reach for the things you want, Beek. It’s so much easier to just keep using the second-hand couch that came with the place or work in your garden or sit in an armchair in your condo reading biographies of women who actually did something with their lives.

  When you do extend your reach, it’s absolutely thrilling. You feel so alive. But when there’s a little setback, a very nasty little voice, the one that kept my friend from buying a new couch, says, “Who do you think you are? What made you think you could have that? Sit down. Be quiet. Be good.”

  I have struggled with that voice all the way across the ocean. At first I thought it was just Mom’s voice ringing in my ears. Be careful! What are you doing out in a storm? Get inside. Go to the basement. Stay there. It’s the only safe place.

  Then it started to turn nasty. What are you doing out here? Look at you. You’re pathetic. Afraid of everything. What did you think was going to happen?

  But here’s a funny thing. That voice started to quiet once I told Chris about that horrible last year with Brad. You remember what he was like. You couldn’t stand it when he berated me, which he wasn’t afraid to do in front of company. You and Chuck stopped coming round to the house. I don’t blame you.

  I still hear his voice, from time to time, and on bad days, I still wonder if he was right. What if I am too emotional, too fearful, too needy? Worthless. Unloveable.

  But telling Chris the story was freeing, somehow. Maybe I had to put a whole ocean between Brad and me before I began to feel that it was my story, too — that I had the right to tell it. And now that I have, I hear his voice less and less. It feels finished, somehow. I feel like I’ve put it behind me. And it feels good.

  So you tell that voice to shut up, Beek. The joy you get out of riding that magnificent horse, the way you feel so happy and alive in your new riding pants and chaps and boots — the people you imagine would think you are ridiculous (do they even exist, I wonder?) will never know how alive it makes you feel.

  And don’t worry about the fear part — I have felt afraid, Brenda, many times on this journey. I tend not to talk about it because I don’t want you to worry about me. (Will I tell you about some of our most frightening moments sometime?)

  But, holy cow, it’s worth it, eh?

  I can’t tell you what it felt like when the island first emerged from the mist and I realized that we had made it, we had sailed across the ocean, just the two of us. As Dory would say, it’s a big ocean!

  It’s so beautiful here, Beek. The village we’re anchored below (the island rises steeply from the water) is a collection of stone houses with red tile roofs, dominated by a huge church. Every house has a garden — no, every house is a garden. Every square inch of earth is planted with something. There are tomatoes growing in the front yards, and lettuce and onions and beans and potatoes. And flowers everywhere: roses, canna lilies, hydrangeas — these are just a few of the flowers I recognize. There are many more that I don’t. I’m sure you would know what they are.

  We’ve done some exploring already, and we plan to stay here as long as the weather stays settled. Then we’re going to sail from island to island here in the Azores, taking our time, moving when the winds are favourable, staying put when they’re not. At the end of August we’ll sail to the south of Portugal, where we’ll spend the winter. It’s a one-week crossing at most, which seems like nothing — and frankly, everything — right now. I’ve had enough of big seas for a while.

  Then who knows what? We’re making it up as we go along.

  I do hope you can come visit us in Portugal. I miss your face so much.

  Love,

  Linda

  I close my computer, look up at the night sky. Another plane is passing overhead. We must be on some kind of flyway here.

  Modern planes don’t make any more sense to me than WWII fighter planes. I wonder each time I’m in one if flying is really just an illusion that can and will pass. Sometimes I feel the same way about sailing. Why does a twenty-ton steel boat float? Are we just fooling ourselves? And what about love, what about happily after?

  The blinking lights get smaller and smaller as the plane heads out over the ocean. May the illusion last, I say to myself. At least until that little plane makes it to the other side.

  HARD AGROUND

  Chris springs out of bed trailing the blanket behind him. Holy cow, I think, he really has to go. Then I hear the engine start, a clear sign when you’re at anchor that something is really wrong.

  “We’re on the beach,” he shouts as he runs forward to pull the anchor.

  I can barely hear him above the howling wind, but I can see the beach just off our port beam. Another few feet and we’ll be on our side.

  We’re weathering our first levanter in a little estuary on the Atlantic coast of Spain called Sancti-Petri. Though the channel is narrow, holding is good, we’ve been assured. And our anchor set firmly and held fast as the winds built — twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five knots, gusts to forty sometimes. Around midnight we went to bed, sure that we were well down and certain that if there was a problem, the anchor alarm would alert us. It hadn’t let us down. Yet.

  Well, we now know that when gale-force winds are screaming through the rigging, you can’t hear the anchor alarm from down below. We also know that when the tide changes in Sancti-Petri, the current runs so swiftly it can pop your anchor out of the sand. If this happens in a levanter, you’re on the beach in no time.

  Chris tries to drive us off, but with no luck — the keel is buried in the sand.

  “Take the helm,” he shouts. “I’m going to try to kedge us off.”

  He climbs into the dinghy, zooms to where the anchor is dangling from the bow, grabs it and drops it some distance ahead of us. He climbs back onto the boat, runs to the foredeck, tries to winch us towards it but the anchor just skips along the bottom. We’re running out of options, when suddenly it digs in. The boat lurches and I feel the keel pop out of the sand.

  “Get us out of here!” Chris shouts.

  I’m already gunning for the middle of the channel.

  It’s just light enough to make out the markers that will guide us out of the estuary, through the shifting sandbars and jagged reefs to open water. So although it’s still early, we decide to get underway rather than re-anchoring. I go below to make us some coffee.

  “That was close,” Chris says as I hand him his cup.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “So much for one last quiet night at anchor. You got the next red, over there?”

  I point to a marker up ahead, just off to our left.

  “Yep.”

  The sun is starting to rise, the clouds above the low coastal hills washed with pink. We’re both quiet — tired, sure, but it’s more than that. We’re on our way home, which is both heartbreaking and embarrassing.

  You can’t just sail away, our friends and families told us. Oh, yeah? Just watch us. We really did think we could sail forever, living on my writing and the modest income from Chris’s company. We would live cheaply, at anchor most of the time, onl
y going into marinas occasionally to wash our clothes and fill our water tanks. We would catch fish, buy bread and fresh produce in little villages along the coast, splurge on the occasional bottle of wine. It would be perfect. And it was. Until it wasn’t.

  After a peaceful summer in the Azores, sailing from one island to another, from one sheltered anchorage to the next, we headed to the mainland, where we waited out the winter storms nestled in a marina on the south coast of Portugal. On a bad day it was cold enough to wear a light jacket, but no colder, and it was almost always sunny.

  Spring comes early in the Algarve, and in February, we started poking our way along the southern coast of Portugal, then down the Atlantic coast of Spain to the Strait of Gibraltar. By May we’d reached the Balearics, a group of islands in the western Mediterranean, where we planned to spend the summer sailing from anchorage to anchorage, from island to island, before heading to Italy, Rome maybe, for the winter.

  But things weren’t working out the way we had planned. So far I had sold just one magazine article, and that only because my dad went to see the editor of Grand, a glossy new lifestyle magazine in Kitchener-Waterloo. I’m sure he told her all about his dream of sailing away, in great detail. “And that’s exactly what my daughter has done,” I can hear him saying.

  She may have agreed to the article just to get him out of her office.

  Chris wasn’t doing any better. In fact, his company was quietly going broke. Sales had dried up since he left and the company was deep into its line of credit. It was hard to ignore the fact that we were running out of money.

  There is a photograph of me walking on the beach in Formentera, the smallest and least developed of the Balearic Islands. Behind me, the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean fade to light blue, then white as waves break onto the impossibly clean sand. The next island, Ibiza, is just visible in the background.

  It is a beautiful sunny day, cool and windy. I’m wearing a purple fleecy and my hair is tied back in a ponytail, the carefully trimmed layers and highlights long since grown out. A few wisps of hair have escaped and blow around my face, which is grim. We have finally admitted to ourselves that we have to go home.