by John Hersey
The prow moved smartly at first toward the teeth of the wind, but then, as the sail luffed, no longer pulling, and commencing again its racket of gunnery, and as Harmony’s generous cheeks presented themselves to the hurricane, the boat stopped with a kind of thud, so abruptly that Tom had a moment’s fear that she had run aground on a mud bottom. But then he saw that she was being hurled off again onto the same tack as before.
He decided to try once more, running off this time to get up as much headway as possible. But it was the same story: She hit that wall of wind and simply bounced off. She would not go round.
There was nothing for it but to turn downwind and try to get Harmony around with her stern to the blow.
He would need extra arms—one man at the helm, one on the main sheet to try to help the sail to flip over with the least possible damage. He’d better put Flick on the wheel and fight the sheet himself; it would be a matter of sweet timing—a chance on the wrong split second to lose the palms of one’s hands on the lay of the rope, to say nothing of toppling the mast.
He beckoned urgently to Flick, who was, however, so passionate in his celebrations of something he had obviously never experienced before—the naked, feral claws of man-killing weather—that it took him an eternity, a hundred feet of Harmony’s scudding across the pond, to react. Then he lumbered to his feet with the happy stupid look of a souse hearing the high-pitched inner squeaks of nerveless ecstasy; he was really in a state.
Tom made a hand-swimming gesture: around, we’re going around tail-to-wind. A gripping gesture: take helm. You. You take wheel. Me on sheet. Flip-flip: urgent. O.K., all set? Traffic cop stop gesture: hold it. Wait. Keep us on a broad reach.
The spit was coming close; the whole arm of land appeared to be moving, swinging like a huge club of earth in a nightmare of elements displaced and natural laws scandalously broken.
Then, with a hand to Flick: All right, swing. No! Less helm. Wide curve. Right! That’s right!
Tom uncleated the sheet but kept a full turn around the cleat. The moment of danger would come when the boom would go hurtling across the boat; he would try to ease it over by trimming and then letting it slip fast but not too fast, with always a turn on the cleat. There was no way of knowing how much strength he would need beyond all that he had.
How Harmony scudded down the edge of the big curve!
Now to the unlikely task of gaining a little on the rope. Now. Marvelous new surprise: He heaved and got some. Now. It was coming in. That tiny sail was a wonder. Once again.
Crouching and squinting upwind Tom saw the crucial instant flying across the water at them like a manifestation of the shortness of life—it was a moment he thought he could actually see winging like the fastest of birds.
Here! Let the rope run!
Harmony dug in on her starboard bow as if she meant to go straight to the bottom and end this mad game men seemed to want to play. But the boom had gone over with a bump, not a splintering crash; the mast stood like the noble tree-bole it once had been. Harmony came up with a bounce and heeled hard on the port tack. She had jibed.
Tom saw at once, recovering the helm from Flick, who looked goggle-eyed with his own accomplishment, that Harmony had run so far down the pond in this maneuver that she would never be able to climb back upwind sailing across toward the pier again. The main issue was settled: He would have to take her out to sea. His wild joy at having pulled off the jibe, erupting from his chest, was choked down with a dry-mouthed effort to swallow. There was much bitter salt on his lips.
They recrossed the pond, not fetching the marina pier. He set Flick at the wheel once more, jibed again in good order, and eased Harmony off toward the channel at the bottom of the pond, and he found that he was filled, now that the wind was at his back, with a fathomless calm. He would not probe that calm. It was not easy for the others to look at him here, for to do so meant exposing their faces to the buckshot of the rain; for a few moments he was in a way alone. But then, almost at the same instant, as though they were all wired to each other by some contrivance of Flick’s, those three seemed to realize that he was persisting down the gale, that he had given up so soon the effort to reach back and forth, and that he was going out, and they all turned, blinking and sputtering, and it was Audrey who raised an interrogatory hand pointing to the barely visible gap of the channel. Tom nodded. Yes, they were.
At this Flick raised two fists and pounded at the onslaught of wind. To Tom the gesture seemed an ambiguous display of rage-in-joy, of cruelty yet of a sense of sheer fun. A man might beat a drum with the same double energy. It came through that Flick had personified the storm; the storm was a shrew, and he intended to have his will of her. Some women had to be treated like alley acts. Poor Audrey, jilted so soon in favor of new proofs! Yet this sky-beating of Flick’s was pathetic, too, because—Tom could not help exulting even now—Flick was condemned here on Harmony to a passive role. He was a passenger, really quite ignorant of the power of the sea, and he could not fight but could only watch the fight and hold on for life.
Audrey, on the same side of the cockpit with Flick, did not seem concerned with his tantrum. She was a woman, and she was not interested in abstract ideas, of mastery and participation, or of the durability of the male spirit; she was concerned with practicalities, and she reached out the snaphook of her safety belt beyond the coaming and tripped it onto the lifeline, and she made signals to Dottie, who was in a daze across from her, to do the same. More significantly, she reached forward and picked up the strap dangling from Flick’s waist and snapped his harness to the lifeline; she seemed to know that he would never have done this for himself but that he would not restrain her from doing it for him. Tom, grateful for her alertness, attached his own.
Dottie seemed to be all of a heap—weakened by incredulity. When Harmony ducked and bobbed on a pair of seas outrunning the hull, Dottie’s head wagged as if it were afloat quite apart from her body, like a lobster-pot buoy. Yet when she understood Audrey’s suggestive hand-flips, she reacted soundly and quickly and fastened herself; to her the passive state was home. Though bewitched, she could respond and do what had to be done.
Fat Harmony almost planed like a Dragon or a Sunfish! Tom bent down to see the dial of the Kenyon. Wheel She was spooning along at her maximum hull speed under that tough little kerchief of a sail: nearly ten knots. Tom had flown often in jets—six hundred miles an hour through the thin fluid of the pure blue stratosphere—but this speed on the angry green water, with the forefoot plowing out curving sheets of white urgency and the following seas almost pooping the stern and the rain flying and the stays whining, this was surely faster than any other swiftness on earth. Yet the thrill of it, close and real as it was, scarcely penetrated the core of stillness at the center of Tom’s being. In a sense this calm was harder to face than the rain-pricked wind: a little sail, he was taking them out for a little sail as his unfaithful wife had said he would do. He was not at all afraid, but he was bathed, soaked, submerged in such profound doubt about his wisdom and indeed his sanity in doing what he was doing that he could only wonder at the calm. It must be the eye of his own personal storm.
And yes, how soon the pond was eaten up by that speed! The Coast Guard station was in sight to the left: the flagpole, the Stars and Stripes surprisingly left flying in the rain, and out to one side the two square hurricane-warning flags, red with black centers, one above the other, frantic at finding themselves out in what they were announcing. Too late to proclaim it! And the launching rails—succor, the shore people caring about mariners in peril on the deep. Tom hooked a knee over a spoke of the wheel and pulled back his wet left sleeve with his wet right hand and saw the time through the wet face of his watch: eight minutes to ten. Was that all? Three hours till Esmé’s eye would pass overhead between here and Montauk?
Tom was overcome with a need to enter one piece of intelligence—Passed CG station, 9:52 a.m., on way out�
�in his log book. He was convinced he would never be able to carry that in his mind, and he felt it was an almost historic item. He leaned forward, tapped Audrey on the shoulder, and made hand motions commanding her to take the helm. She looked up at him in astonishment but at once reached out, unsnapped her belt and re-snapped it on the after side of one of the lifeline stanchions, and slid back into position to steer. Tom sliced a hand toward the center of the channel, between the two long white lips of breakers on the inner shores of the pond, and she nodded with a grave, rather childish look—acceptance of a too-heavy responsibility. Tom, feeling sorrow pouring into the calm place, tore himself away, piled down the ladder, sat at the table, got down the book, and opened it. No time for endpapers now.
What were the other data he had wanted to remember to record?
For a moment his mind was totally white, then he saw Audrey’s face, a crease of concentration and willingness between her brows; and suddenly the blanked-out details came to him in a rush, and he jotted a series of telegrams to himself. And slammed the book shut and shelved it, recognizing that he was a fool to have come below to do this; and scrambled above.
They were already half way along the heavy jetty. He took the helm; patted Audrey’s shoulder. She slid forward, adjusting her safety strap.
Ahead Tom saw an amphitheater of gloom so deep-vaulted, so dark, such a mare’s nest of contending energies of air and water, that he suddenly wanted with a frenzy equal to that of the surface of the sea beyond the jetty—knowing that his yearning was hopelessly tardy—to turn back: not to go out there. The actuality of the jetty close at hand on the left, its huge jagged dynamite-sculptured stones glowing in the reflected light of myriad whitecaps, and the wet tubular reality of the channel buoys, black cans and red nun, their designating numbers ghostly white in the storm, past which marks Harmony now scooped in her headlong dash, and the evidence of the low land to the right, the pigtail of Indian Head, sandy, grassy, barren, anciently windswept and sea-swept yet still brownly there—the vivid clarity of these nearby sights of a stationary world made the distant view all the more appalling because so uniform. It was a huge arch of gloom in which there was no hope of seeing anything but wetness and motion. Nothing relieved the monotony of vague danger that lurked in motion. Clouds, rain, waves, darkness, all rushing into—what? Invisibility. A huge cone of uncertainty. The one element that rode all others, the dominating force of the seascape, the wind, could not be seen; but one could see what it was doing all too well. Tom realized that in erupting from pond to sea he was going to be moving as far as it had been to climb that morning from still cabin to hurricane abovedeck. He held himself tightly to meet this new shock.
At the same time he must think; he had only a hundred yards in which to make a decision. His original plan had been to trim sails and turn northward at the outer can off the end of the breakwater, and to sail up along the lee shore of Indian Head, clinging near to land, not more than a hundred yards off the long beach. But now that he had found that he could control a jibe in waters that were not too disturbed, should he not instead jibe as close as he could to the end of the jetty and reach southward under the lee of the much higher main body of the island, where Beacon Hill and Monich Hill rose to two hundred feet; and where, besides, there would be six miles of lee shore compared with four of the less good shelter to the north? A kind of whining buzz at the edge of his mind told him that it made no difference; there was absolutely no point in making a choice. He kicked at the loose sheet lying in disorder at his feet, as if trying to boot that sense of futility out of the vicinity.
Audrey saw his kick, and at once she bent forward and began to coil the line. There was only time for one short blurt of inner response: If only she knew how much she helped him!
Fifty feet left. The trouble with going south would be that the wind would be shifting as the eye of the storm moved through, and Harmony would be sailing more and more into the teeth of the gale—and toward the center of chaos. But there was the danger, to the north, of the long reef running off the end of Sandy Point, and one would never be able to see the black bell that was three miles above the tip of the point; after his search of the chart in the cabin before the cutting, its forms were engraved so clearly on his mind—light green land, blue shallows, white depths, compass rose off Cow Cove, another off the mouth of the pond—that he could almost read off the hair-raising soundings along the North Reef: four feet, one foot, three feet, four feet, five feet, a long comb of the sea to catch at the keels of fools. Oh, no, he wouldn’t let Harmony be tipped there.
The decision, as it came to him, was of a kind he did not like to make: almost on an impulse, and in fear of that hidden hazard. He liked to be more deliberate, to weigh and weigh and know he was right; but there was no time left.
He leaned forward and whacked Flick’s knee, and he shouted at the top of his lungs, almost screeched, “Prepare to jibe!”
Flick sat there, his face turned back to the storm and to Tom, grinning in his stupor of auto-intoxication. Tom could tell that the wind had torn the shrieked words from his teeth like bits of dandelion fluff and had blown them out to sea, where they would fall barren.
Audrey was pushing at his side; Audrey wanted the helm; Audrey had understood. Had she read his lips—or his mind? That same inner blurt: If you only knew!
Tom jumped to the sheet and hand-flapped to her to put the yawl around. Harmony had begun to buck, and it was harder here to keep a purchase. Here went the boom. Bang! That was too rough; but at a glance Tom checked the stays and boom and machinegunning sail, and all the gear seemed to have held. He trimmed in the sail, and Harmony began to move.
When he relieved Audrey at the wheel he was horrified at the first glimpse to see how far offshore Harmony had blown in taking this turn. Was it half a mile? He wondered if the dread that had come over him of the universal bleakness out there away from land made his mind exaggerate the distance the yawl had fallen away from the beach.
Flick had stood up. He was turning this way and that, and the motions of his face suggested that he was singing loudly and (for Tom remembered other songs at other times) badly off key, though of course nothing could be heard, and he was making hugging motions, opening his arms and grasping at the wildness and embracing it, over and over again. Tom, who was seated now, trying to concentrate on getting Harmony driving, nevertheless gave a split second of his mind to wondering what Flick was singing. “O beautiful for spacious skies…” “Embraceable You”…That nice old one, “Stormy Weather”?
Audrey, bless her, was not in the market for serenades. She was coiling the main sheet again.
Only now, after the flurry of action died down, did the shock of being outside suddenly grip Tom. The irrevocability was what hurt the most, for this lay heavy on the back of the judgment he had made. He had been inside, where he could have beached Harmony in shallows, and now he was outside in this infinity of wet motion, and there was no such thing as deciding that he had made a mistake and that he should go back in. He looked down: Someone—could it be he?—was clutching the wheel with white-knuckled hands. He looked quickly away from those bloodless joints.
The modes out here were darkness and confusion. The water was a dull greenish gray, and off the tops of all the waves the wind knocked breakers that were themselves gray and foul. The seas, behaving like those of a furious tidal rip, were not inordinately tall, but they were steep and foam-tipped, and they seemed to come from every hand at once in spite of the concerted drive of the wind in the one direction, and Harmony was thrown about without rhythm, with no steadiness of rise and fall. She pounded, shuddered, rolled, pitched, wallowed, and shook, heeling all the while under the wind, and her sail was now full and making her rush down a wet riffled hillock like a train of cars, and now luffed up, as the yawl’s headway was killed by a frontal crash of hard water, so that the cloth rattled with one of the few distinguishable noises of the general storm-racket: th
at machinegunning. Every time the bow hit, a blanket of green rose to windward, and the air shredded it into stinging spray that flew flat across the boat along with the rain. She was moving. He could see the end of the jetty; they had traveled perhaps two hundred yards more or less southward since the jibe. She was moving. Whether she was holding up to the island it would have been hard yet to say. He glanced at the compass several times and found that she was heading on the average almost truly south—in toward the bulge of the land; but doubtless, with the pounding she was taking from both wind and air, she was being set down to leeward as she went.
Something struck Tom a sharp small blow on the shoulder. At first he could not see what it might have been, but it beat him again: a rope end, standing out horizontally from the top of the cabin trunk and flailing back and forth—the free end of the jib sheet which had jumped its coil. Surveying the boat Tom saw that the whole vessel was a battery of such whips—loose ends of all sorts of lines, standing straight out from their fastenings and licking at whatever might be down wind: two from the lashings of the mainsail, the outhaul on the main boom, the topping lift on the other face of the boom, and many others. He was being flogged by an invisible hand on Harmony!—the grim seaman’s accounting of old tradition on sailing ships. The sight of all those whips stirred up the dregs of puritanism in Tom, and he was suddenly filled with a righteous anger, which was displaced from the storm and from the injustice and indignity of his position, and was now aimed at these reminders of unfair discipline of long ago. He tapped Audrey again—by now he had given up on Flick in his endless act of congratulating the wind—and urged her to the helm; then he began to climb here and there subduing the cruel ropes. He knew it was a mission of folly, but he could not help himself. His father had never punished him except with looks and words; but he thought of his father now as cruel—a tall, thin man in a carpenter’s apron; he was a schoolteacher, not a carpenter, but had a hobby of woodworking, and Tom visualized him in a cellar room under a cone of electric light. He thought, as he crept forward, hooking his safety belt as he went, of the boatswain’s mates on the square-sail frigates carrying ratline rope-end whips called colts coiled up in the straw crowns of their naval hats, and, conscious of the incongruity and on the edge of laughing at it, he imagined his father as one of those petty officers, with the colt coiled like a cobra on the top of his head.