An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  As our August departure approached, the daily to-do lists in my Day-Timer became more intimidating than any I ever had at the office: Get physicals, eye exams, dental checkups. Arrange out-of-country medical insurance. Work with family doctor on contents of onboard medical kit. Reassure parents that we really do know what we’re doing while doubting that we really do. Assemble navigational charts and cruising guidebooks. Buy new laptop and equip with software that will allow us—we hope—to stay in touch via e-mail with friends (including the two who are handling the guidebook distribution business while we’re gone). Reassure parents, who are not yet on e-mail, that there are indeed telephones throughout the Caribbean. Enroll in first-aid and CPR course. Reassure parents again. Sign powers of attorney to allow our accountant to handle our finances while we’re away. See lawyer and prepare living wills, just in case. Reassure parents (and self) again. Find a buyer for my car and convince Steve’s parents to store his. See every last friend we’ve got in the city, to say good-bye. Try not to think about all the things I’ll soon be required to do that I’ve never done before. Like sail at night.

  We cut things so close to the deadline that we’re on the deck locking the back door of our empty house as our new tenants are on the porch unlocking the front. I’ve lost ten pounds from stress, and my excruciatingly well-organized self is trailing loose ends in all directions. When Carol, the property manager we hired, tracks me down two days after we move out, she inquires sweetly, “Did you realize you rented the house with a load of your clothes still in the dryer?”

  Chesapeake Bay Crabcakes

  (in the Style of Ruke’s Store)

  What makes these cakes so delicious—besides the freshest possible crabmeat—is their meaty texture: They are almost entirely crab inside, with just enough bread crumbs to hold them together. The cakes are rolled in crumbs before frying, which gives them a crispy golden exterior. Serve with lemon quarters and tartar sauce, if you like.

  1 pound fresh lump crabmeat, drained

  1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

  6 tablespoons mayonnaise

  1 large egg, beaten

  1⁄4 cup finely minced onion

  2 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

  1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

  1⁄4 teaspoon hot sauce (or to taste)

  2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

  1 teaspoon Old Bay Seasoning

  Freshly ground black pepper

  1 cup fine bread crumbs or matzoh meal (approx.)

  Butter and/or oil for shallow frying

  1. Mix together all ingredients except the bread crumbs and the butter or oil. Add just enough crumbs—about 4 tablespoons—so the crab mixture holds together. Taste and season with additional lemon juice, hot sauce, and pepper as required.

  2. Form into 6 cakes. Roll cakes in remaining crumbs. Place on a baking sheet lined with waxed paper and refrigerate for about an hour.

  3. Heat a small amount of butter or oil (I like to use a combination) in a large skillet. Fry until golden brown on both sides, about 5 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels.

  Serves 2–3

  Tips

  • The cakes can be deep-fried if desired.

  • Make bite-size cakes to serve as hors d’oeuvres. They can be fried early in the day and refrigerated, then reheated briefly on a baking tray in a 350°F oven. Makes 25–30 hors d’oeuvres.

  In the Marshes

  Of course, just hearing the names of some of the places on the Intracoastal Waterway will never ease anyone’s mind about the trip: Dismal Swamp, Alligator River, Lockwoods Folly, Cape Fear River, Mosquito Lagoon, Haulover Canal, several Hell Gates . . .

  JAN AND BILL MOELLER, THE INTRACOASTAL WATERWAY:

  A COCKPIT CRUISING HANDBOOK, 1997

  Turn left at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay and you’re in the Atlantic, turn right and you enter the Intracoastal Waterway. Receta turns right.

  The Intracoastal Waterway—the ICW—is the highway from the Chesapeake to Miami, the watery equivalent of I-95. Also called “the Ditch,” it was created to provide a protected inside route for those—like us—who don’t want to go out on the open ocean when they don’t have to. Officially, the ICW starts in Massachusetts, goes all the way down the East Coast (though the stretch through New Jersey isn’t maintained at depths suitable for cruising boats), and then across the Gulf Coast to Texas. But the heart of the waterway is from Mile 0, at Norfolk, Virginia, at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay, to Mile 1,095 at Miami: a winding ribbon of rivers, creeks, and man-made canals just inland of the ocean. This narrow ribbon, protected by barrier islands and low coastal mainland, ties together pieces of American history—Revolutionary War battlegrounds, the haunts of pirates and smugglers, plantations once worked by slaves, Civil War forts—as it passes storied cities such as Charleston, Beaufort, Savannah, and St. Augustine.

  Occasionally, the route crosses gloriously open water—Albermarle Sound, Pamlico Sound—but mostly the ICW is too narrow for us to sail. The channel between the red and green markers has space for two boats to pass but often not much more, with shoals or deadheads or both off to the sides. The channel markers wear crowns of thorns, jumbles of sticks that mark the home of osprey and their offspring. October is too late for young to be in the nests, but sometimes an adult glares down its curved beak at us as we motor by, or one soars overhead, a fish clutched in its talons.

  And all along the waterway, herons stand stick-still in the shadows at the shoreline, flapping off with an annoyed skronk once they realize they’ve been spotted. Mistletoe decorates the treetops in the Alligator River in North Carolina, a novelty for northerners like us who only see it hanging in doorways at Christmas. We smooch in the cockpit every time we spot it. (Now I know how boating accidents happen in the South.) When Steve yells “dolphin” on the Pamlico River, I snap to attention but don’t see anything, and I’m sure it’s just a trick: He realized I had my eyes closed behind my sunglasses and was trying to put an end to my mid-morning nap. But, no, a slick gray back curves above the surface ahead of us, and soon three bottlenose dolphins are whistling by alongside, alternately diving and arcing, crisscrossing our bow wave with syncopated grace.

  The water is a just-polished mirror as we motor down Russell Creek toward Beaufort, North Carolina. Suddenly it’s broken by twenty or thirty fins: dolphins all around us this time, curving into the air in a slow-motion ballet that continues for half a mile. We are passing through a dolphin nursery area.

  This is what I had hoped for back in Toronto when I finally convinced myself to leave. Even though most stretches of the waterway only require one person on deck to steer, neither of us wants to go below even for a couple of hours to tackle some chore. “Forget it,” I tell Steve. “I might miss something.” Besides, we have a deal—the first one to spot an alligator gets to decide what we eat for dinner for a whole week—and I don’t trust him.

  One night, at anchor in the Neuse River off Oriental, North Carolina, small crackling noises resonate steadily through Receta’s hull. It’s a frightening sound, as if her fiberglass is slowly crumbling apart beneath us and the tea-colored river will soon begin pouring through the cabin floor. We search nervously for the problem, lifting up the access panels in the floor so we can inspect the bilges for cracks, and running our hands along the hull at the backs of lockers, checking for dampness. Nothing. The noise continues but we don’t appear to be sinking, so we eventually try to ignore it, have dinner, and start studying the section of the guidebook about the next day’s stretch of waterway. And there it is: Don’t be alarmed, the guide warns, by the “disturbingly loud” noise that “often goes on all night long.” It’s only krill—small, shrimplike creatures—munching the algae off Receta’s bottom. “Eat, eat,” says Steve, encouraging them mightily. The more they eat, the less we’ll have to scrub.

  Most nights we anchor in swift-running tidal creeks off the main channel. From our anchorage in Taylor Creek, at Beaufort, I can walk across the barr
ier island at low tide to the broad beach that faces the Atlantic. Chestnut-colored wild horses with shaggy manes roam the tidal flats, as they’ve done since the forties, when they were put here by a local doctor and left to fend for themselves after he died. Hundreds of shorebirds—sandpipers, sanderlings, ruddy turnstones—scurry past like fast-moving windup toys, as if they know they’ve got limited time to make their rounds before the flats are again covered by the sea. On the beach, I hunt for shells—and find a necklace of fragile white coins, the egg case of a whelk—until I begin to worry that the tide will start rising and strand me.

  Granted, settling into this new way of life is requiring more adjustment than just getting used to not having a two-storey house to rumble around in, with a dishwasher, telephone, TV, VCR, and unlimited supplies of hot water and electricity. I’m a morning person, Steve’s not, and his body clock has been winning. Receta is usually the last boat out of an anchorage in the morning. And as I begin to hear the clank, clank, clank of other anchor chains being raised, my stomach starts to churn. Those boats know how long it takes to get to the next good stopping place. They’re going to get there first and there won’t be any space left when we arrive. We need to get underway now. Steve, meanwhile, is just getting his second eye open and thinking about rolling out of bed and enjoying a coffee.

  In Worton Creek a few weeks ago, I was determined to get underway with “the übercruisers,” as Steve has dismissively dubbed the early-risers. So I shook him awake at 6:30, listened to the grumbling, pried him out of the berth, and considered it a major accomplishment when we were actually ready to hoist anchor at eight. Receta seemed sluggish as I motored forward so he could pull in the anchor chain. “Goose it,” he called back to me from the bow, and I revved up the engine. But it was as if we were moving through thick, gooey chocolate syrup.

  And then the syrup congealed. We were stuck fast in Worton Creek mud.

  Lake Ontario doesn’t have tides, so I wasn’t used to thinking about them. In my eagerness for an early start, I had overlooked one very important point: We had come into Worton Creek at high tide. At 8 A.M. the next morning, the tide was falling, and the corner of the creek we were sitting in no longer had the five feet of water Receta requires.

  It wasn’t until early afternoon that the tide had risen enough to allow us to pop free and push very slowly through the muck. During the intervening six hours, I got to practice cultivating patience—never one of my defining characteristics—and stew about losing whatever leverage I had with Steve on matters relating to early awakenings and early starts. He, meanwhile, yawned extravagantly and grinned like the Cheshire cat.

  Clearly, I’m going to need more patience if I’m to be happy in this new lifestyle. Just the daily act of anchoring is exhausting my limited supply. Figuring tide, current, and Receta’s 23,000 pounds into the anchoring equation is new to Steve. He likes to think it through. Carefully. Slowly. This is an admirable characteristic, but at the time he’s exercising it, I’m bristling with impatience to get the hook down, since after that I can relax. I realize that the better the spot we choose to anchor, the more likely we are to have a relaxing evening without having to worry about the anchor dragging or Receta swinging too close to another boat when the tide reverses. But as we circle the anchorage a second time, and I watch someone else take the spot I had suggested on the first pass, I’m about ready to explode.

  By the time we reach the Waccamaw River across the South Carolina line, Spanish moss drips from the trees like fringe on a pale-green shawl draped around an elegant southern lady.

  There’s no question we’re in the South now, with grits on every menu and accents like warm honey. “We don’t care how you do it in the North” is emblazoned on bumper stickers in Beaufort, South Carolina (pronounced Bew-fort, and not to be confused with Boh-fort, North Carolina), and cocktail napkins in Savannah, Georgia (just off the waterway, nine miles up the Savannah River). And far too many Confederate flags hang stubbornly, aggressively from the rural homes we pass on the banks of the canals and rivers.

  We’ve been seeing the flat-bottomed skiffs for a couple of days now, sitting low in the water off the channel, with one or two men onboard tossing nets over the side. From a distance, the nets look like ballet dancers’ sequin-studded skirts—billowing, swirling, sparkling as the sun catches the droplets that spin from them into the air. In fact, Steve has taken to spying on the men in the skiffs through binoculars as we motor past, studying how they throw, getting the nets to hang for a few seconds in midair, opened in a perfect circle, before they settle gracefully into the water.

  This isn’t idle admiration. The men in the boats are shrimping, and buried in the locker under the foot of our berth is a brand-new, still-in-the-package cast net, presented to Steve what seems a lifetime ago in Toronto, as a going-away gift from friends. He’s been dying to try it.

  Unfortunately, he’s not exactly sure how. The printed directions that come packaged with it are bewilderingly complex, and the helpful hints are not at all helpful when you’re living on a boat. (“An excellent way to practice, without getting wet, is to throw the net in your backyard . . . You can practice from ground level or you can use a pickup tailgate . . . An old tire makes an excellent target for improving your aim. Remember, practice makes perfect.”) One can only pick up so much by snooping through binoculars.

  Our planned stopping point today is Five Fathom Creek, near McClellanville, South Carolina, which turns out to have a lot less water than its name implies. As we inch in on a rising tide—note to self: Check tide tables before setting departure time—a commercial shrimping boat is coming out the creek, its nets dangling from outriggers like huge bat wings. Looking east, shoulder-high marsh grass extends to the horizon, unbroken by even a single tree; from water level, the creeks that cut through it are invisible. When another big shrimper glides by in the distance, it looks like a combine adrift on a sea of wheat. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we were anchoring in the middle of the prairie.

  But Steve’s not interested in anchorage aesthetics. He’s spotted one of those flat-bottomed skiffs just ahead. Faster than you can say jambalaya, he’s got Receta’s hook down and has dug out his net to see if he can get a lesson. “Fishermen don’t always like it when you horn in on their territory,” I warn when he climbs into Snack, as we’d named our 91⁄2-foot inflatable dinghy.

  But Orland T. Cooper was a high school teacher, and he’s delighted to take a student under his very southern wing. His two Coke coolers are almost full of shrimp, and he was about to call it a day anyway. “When the tide’s up,” he explains, “the shrimp retreat into the marshes where their food is. You don’t get many then.”

  Orland has anchored his boat—an aging cabin cruiser—and rigged his well-worn skiff so it can be pulled back and forth by a rope strung between the poles he’s staked on the edge of the marsh. Late sixtyish, wiry, with the sun-baked look of someone who’s spent a lifetime outdoors, Orland tells Steve the stakes mark where he’s put hockey pucks of fish-meal bait. “You need a license to bait,” he says. “I got mine after I stopped teaching, when the integration came along.” Steve never does find out what, exactly, Orland taught, but almost certainly it wasn’t multiculturalism or race relations. Steve’s net was made in China, and Orland inspects it approvingly. “Nobody can outfish a Chinaman,” he says.

  A good net thrown well settles into the water wide open, Orland explains, thus enveloping as many shrimp as possible. When you tug the net closed, the inch-long lead weights that line the circumference are drawn together and keep the shrimp from escaping. What Steve couldn’t see through the binocs is that shrimpers use more than their hands to throw the net: They also use their teeth. (“This product contains lead, a chemical known to cause cancer,” the instructions with Steve’s net warn. “Do not place the product in your mouth.”)

  “Put the loop of the line over your left wrist”—so you don’t lose the net when you throw it—“and then drape the net o
ver your left hand.” Orland demonstrates. “Then reach down and grab part of the bottom edge—not a lead weight—in your teeth, and grasp farther along the bottom with your right hand.” The actual toss is kind of a cross between a frisbee throw and a tennis backhand. Orland’s ruddy face cracks into a grin. “Now don’t forget to open your mouth.”

  During the lesson, he insists Steve take a couple of breaks in his cabin cruiser—one for some jug wine and one for tea and cookies—and stuffs him with stories of life in the Carolina marshes. “This one’s a favorite around here,” he says, launching into a tale about two “British lads.”

  “They were cruising at the low end of the scale, in an old World War I lifeboat, and got caught in a wicked storm off the coast. They holed up belowdecks to ride it out. Meanwhile, the wind pushed them right through the inlet here and into one of these creeks that weave through the marshes. When one of the boys finally came topside for a look, he told the other they’d washed up in Kansas.”

  I can believe it.

  It’s almost dusk when Steve roars back to Receta, his jeans and sweatshirt plastered with bits of marsh—strands of weed, splotches of creek mud, and hairlike pink shrimp feelers—to exchange a plastic bag bulging with shrimp for a couple of bottles of our wine. “For my pal Orland,” he says, as he grabs the wine and hands over the sack. I’m duly impressed—even when he confesses Orland had to supplement his student’s catch with his own shrimp so we’d have enough for dinner.