Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Whether or not the people on the beach had anything to do with it, I don’t know, but I began my upwind beat like a hotdogging kid, grimacing heroically as I pumped the sail and rocked my upper body in the puffs. Two minutes into this shameless display of muscles I didn’t have, however, my body caught up with me. Soon I was hunched over on the deck, trying to catch my breath, and I wasn’t even a quarter of the way up the pond.

  Rather than telling the boat what to do, I began to figure out what the boat wanted me to do. A black cat’s-paw of wind tore up the pond ahead, and instead of letting the boat stagger in the puff, I eased the mainsheet, hiked a little harder, and then gradually trimmed the sail. The simple discipline of analyzing my movements distracted me from the pain my body was experiencing. It was as if I had stopped flailing my way across a swimming pool and stumbled across the basic mechanics of the crawl.

  Two hours later, I was standing on the launch ramp beside my Sunfish. I was totally exhausted, and yet I felt oddly energized. At one point during my sail—I wasn’t sure exactly when and for how long—I’d approached a Zone-like state, a flickering sense of focused intensity during which nothing except the boat, the wind, and the water had seemed to matter. If it wasn’t exactly like riding a bicycle, at least it was still possible for me to reestablish some semblance of how it used to feel in a sailboat.

  Soon Melissa and the kids drove up, honking the horn and waving. A sandpiper that had been patrolling the beach beside me took to its wings as Jennie and Ethan ran down the ramp, chattering about the swim meet. Melissa followed soon after.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “It’s a start,” I said.

  As the two of us lugged the boat back to the car, I realized that like this newly opened pond, something inside of me had begun to break free.

  Love’s Handiwork

  I KNEW THERE WAS at least one pond on Nantucket I would never sail. Lily Pond is the name given to a low, marshy section of bottomland in the northwest corner of Nantucket town. In the early 1700s it had been a true body of water about the size of Gibbs Pond. Lily Pond was extensive enough and deep enough that the townspeople had built a fort on an island in the middle in case of Indian attack. At an earthen dam in the easterly corner of the pond, where a restaurant now stands, was a fulling mill for processing wool, and fishermen wintered their sailing vessels in the lee of the dam. For a small island community in which sheep raising was still as important as whaling, Lily Pond was the town’s focal point.

  Then something happened.

  One afternoon in the early 1700s a twelve-year-old girl named Love Paddock was walking home from a friend’s house along the Lily Pond dam. She noticed that the waters of the pond were unusually high. Taking up a clam shell, she dug a small trench across the dam, and she watched as water began to trickle through it. Suddenly realizing that she was late for supper, she dropped the shell and ran for home, a house overlooking the pond.

  The next morning the girl was awakened by the cries of her father as he gazed out their front doorway.

  “O, what a wicked piece of work here is,” he shouted.

  “What is it?” asked his wife.

  “Some evil-minded person has let the Lily Pond out. It has run away the sand and made a great gully. The fulling mill is gone, and the fences torn up. Several small vessels have received damage, and some boats stove to pieces. A great deal of damage is done.”

  The girl trembled in her bed in terror. What should she do?

  On her deathbed sixty-eight years later, Love Paddock asked that her neighbors be sent for. Once they were gathered, she told the story of what had really happened to Lily Pond. Not until the 1840s was her confession made public.

  If I couldn’t sail Lily Pond, I could at least walk it. But I needed a guide: Wes Tiffney, director of the University of Massachusetts–Boston Nantucket Field Station. Wes is a great bear of a man, with stiff dark hair and, if it’s sunny, Wayfarer sunglasses. A plant biologist who has developed into the island’s premier erosion specialist, Wes was just the person to fill me in on the science of ponds.

  It was a dazzling blue Indian summer afternoon, and as we drove around what Wes said had once been the perimeter of the pond, the slanting yellow light seemed to evoke a sense of ancient, yet redeemable time. The outline of the old pond was clearly discernible as a rough triangle made by three streets. It was amazing. For more than seven years I had been completely oblivious to this dried-up pond bed, the evidence of which now screamed at me. It was not unlike oceanographers finally uncovering the evidence of the meteor that may have killed off the dinosaurs. The remnants of the pond had been there all along, right underneath our noses.

  Most of the old pond bed is now conservation land. Wes and I parked and followed a vague trail across a well-kept meadow punctuated by trees and wetlands. Every now and then Wes would stop to look at his compass and check the topographical map. He also took time to point out any interesting plants, always providing me with their Latin names. As we made our way across this craterlike depression, Wes filled me in on the nature of ponds.

  As landmasses go, Nantucket is about as close to being a sponge as you can find. Since the island is mostly sand, rain, and snowmelt percolate right through it until they reach a level at which all the spaces between the sand and gravel particles are already filled with water. Since fresh water is less dense than salt water and the two don’t mix very well, a lens-shaped mass of fresh groundwater actually floats on a layer of salt water that extends beneath the island and, for that matter, all of Cape Cod. Eventually, the fresh water moves downward and seaward, finally overflowing the edges of the island or escaping through springs in the shallow ocean bottom.

  Why hadn’t Lily Pond filled right back up again after Love pulled the plug? Perhaps the town fathers decided to leave well enough alone and not rebuild the dam. Surviving town records suggest that the demolished mill had never been very successful. As Wes pointed out, given the lay of the land, the pond could never have generated very much power for a mill. Maybe the area was more useful as fresh and extremely fertile farmland than it had been as a mosquito breeding pond.

  Wes also reminded me that the first English settlement on the island was not where the town stands today. Instead it had been situated to the west where a small circular harbor once existed on the north shore, a harbor that has been known for 250 years as Capaum (pronounced Ka PAWM) Pond. In the early 1700s a violent gale threw up a sandbar across this little harbor, sealing it off from Nantucket Sound. With what had already become a too-small anchorage on its way to becoming a freshwater pond, the Nantucketers decided to move their settlement east to its present location. It had been about this time that little Love Paddock took up her clamshell. With land values beginning to rise in the vicinity of the new harbor, no one was in a hurry to reclaim Lily Pond.

  That weekend I would voyage not only in space but also in time. I would sail from the new to the old harbor.

  Time Travel

  IT WAS A SATURDAY, the day after Halloween, and a whole new order of weather had set in—gray, cold, and winter-like. I wasn’t equipped for temperatures this low. My two-piece dinghy suit and fingerless sailing gloves were designed for summer. What I needed, what I planned to buy, was a dry suit, a one-piece suit with rubber gaskets at the neck, wrists, and ankles to keep the water out. But for the time being my old equipment would have to do.

  By now I was deep into my research on the history of the island, and I emerged from my basement study around noon, feeling strangely animated, juiced on the idea of validating the mental probings of the last few months by doing something in the real world. During lunch with Melissa and the kids, an on-island friend named Mark called, asking if I’d help him put his rowing dinghy on his car roof. He was taking it in for the season. I agreed, on the condition that he’d help me heft the Sunfish. We scheduled to meet at a beach by Nantucket Harbor.

  Alt
hough this meant that Melissa didn’t have to help me unload the boat, she wasn’t happy with the situation. Sailing around like a maniac in a pond was one thing, but venturing out of Nantucket Harbor, then sailing for a couple of miles all by myself in open water before I landed on what might be a dangerously wave-washed beach and then dragging my Sunfish across the sand and through the cattails into a pond, well, this was conduct hardly becoming a reasonable person. It was dangerous, foolhardy, dumb. Did I know how cold it was out there? How windy?

  I admitted that I hadn’t left the house yet. I pointed out that since the wind was coming from the north I’d be blown back toward the island instead of out to sea if anything did go wrong. Before leaving, I promised that if it looked too bad, I’d return after helping Mark.

  Of course I had no intention of returning. In fact, by the time I made it down to the harbor, I emerged from the Stinker like a man possessed, slapping my hands together and squinting into the wind (my God, it was blowing hard!) and shaking Mark’s hand.

  Mark designs houses. He is precise and careful, even meticulous. He had spent the last two years restoring a lovely twenty-three-foot pocket cruiser in his spare time—refiguring the interior, refinishing the teak deck, etc.—and whenever he ran into a job that required another pair of hands, I’d help out. Mark’s attention to detail, his devotion to doing it right, was truly inspiring.

  By comparison, I was a slapdash slob. After my windy sail on Sesachacha, large numbers of the sail sets—plastic curtain-hanger rings—used to attach the sail to the spars were either undone or missing altogether. I rummaged through the fetid back of the Stinker for line and improvised as best I could. Finally, I began to put on my dinghy suit. Mark had been extremely restrained as he watched me making it up as I went along, but now he was really worried.

  “Nat, don’t you have anything warmer?” he asked.

  I explained that I was planning on purchasing a dry suit.

  “But you’re going to freeze.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  With my Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap firmly lodged on my head, I pushed off into the harbor. Since this section of the anchorage is basically a tidal flat, I had to beat away from the shore with my daggerboard halfway up—not an easy maneuver, especially since the boom had to be manually lifted over the top of the raised daggerboard with each tack. Finally I made it into deep water, and with a final thank-you wave to Mark, I was on my way.

  Now that I was on the water, the realities of my situation began to catch up with me. What a cold, bleak day. The sky was low and gray, an overhang of slate above the harbor. It seemed more like evening than early afternoon. I felt an almost erotic stirring of fear. This was dangerous. My equipment was, to say the least, iffy. A rudder could break; my halyard was frayed; I could capsize, lose the boat, and die of hypothermia.

  At least I had a few compatriots out here on the water. A couple of fishermen were testing their boats in preparation for the first official day of scallop season. The average Nantucket scallop boat is the nautical equivalent of an island car: a floating junk heap that limps along for three months until the scallops run out and is then dumped back in the yard for another nine months of quiet deterioration.

  Today I felt a certain kinship with the scallopers. My boat was still a mess. Sap-sealed dirt glazed the hull, giving it the appearance of a speckled egg. My daggerboard was so nicked and gouged it looked as though I had used it to beat back a shark attack. And, of course, there was my mildewed sail. The scallopers and I might not be maintaining our boats in “Bristol fashion,” but, hey, who had the time for it? Our boats got the job done. At least I hoped my Sunfish would get the job done.

  The wind was coming directly out of the harbor entrance, making it a dead beat to windward. By the time I had reached the Coast Guard station at Brant Point, just across the channel from the tip of Coatue, my hands were numb and white. But I didn’t stop to warm them up. I was in too much of a hurry.

  Given the inadequacies of my clothing, it was in my best interest to complete the passage from here to Capaum Pond in as little time as possible. Melissa and the kids were scheduled to meet me in less than two hours, and I knew they’d worry if I wasn’t there before they arrived. Being in a rush also made it feel more like a race, and for the time being this was as close as I was going to get to simulating regatta conditions.

  So I continued past the Brant Point lighthouse, blowing on my hands and wiggling my fingers as best I could. The entrance to Nantucket Harbor consists of two long breakwaters that extend out from Jetties Beach to the west and Coatue to the east. This creates a rock-rimmed corridor that accelerates the current and increases the size of the waves, especially when the wind is against the tide—exactly the conditions I had today: a twenty-knot northerly with an ebbing, south-flowing tide.

  Just as I rounded the lighthouse I began to hear a distant, menacing roar. I knew almost immediately it must be the sound of the waves breaking on the jetties, but it wasn’t until I saw the leaping foam on either side of the channel that I began to appreciate what I was in for. Wow. This made Sesachacha look like the kiddie pool.

  Well, at least the feeling was coming back into my hands. As I approached the Coatue shore on port tack, the wind shifted to the right, heading me dramatically. So I tacked and followed the lift along Coatue, where seagulls and cormorants roosted by the hundreds on the sand. As I sailed past, only a few yards away, the birds took flight, squawking and flapping their wings and momentarily distracting me from what lay ahead.

  Then I saw the waves: so big and gray that each white-capped crest seemed capable of crushing my little boat beneath an icy avalanche of water. These were the kinds of waves that belonged in the open ocean. In a minute I would be among them in an ever-narrowing passageway bounded by jagged rocks.

  What if I turned back? Could I return to the house before Melissa and the kids set out to retrieve me? If I missed them, they might panic. If they showed up at Capaum Pond and I was nowhere in sight, they’d immediately think the worst. I glanced at my watch and did a few mental calculations. Meanwhile my noble Sunfish continued to blast along against the tide and the wind. I glanced nervously through the plastic window in my sail and scanned the shoreline to the west, where the shuttered windows of some of the biggest houses on Nantucket offered little comfort.

  It was then, as I mulled over the possibility of a tactical retreat, that a slanting shaft of miraculous sunlight pierced the clouds. With the sun blazing at an angle from the forbidding sky, it looked like a Thomas Cole painting. Then another shaft of sun punched through, this time up ahead and to the north: a spotlight trained on a distant bell buoy, now Technicolor red in a Caribbean blue sea. Then yet another shaft of light appeared, this one trained on me, its pure light bleaching out the Sunfish’s sail until it glowed like the cottony clouds they’re supposed to have in heaven. Was it a sign?

  I was on starboard tack, about halfway into the gauntlet, waves bursting against the jetties on either side of me as the seas inside the channel continued to increase. Instead of the short steep chop I’d experienced the weekend before, which had knocked against the Sunfish’s hull like body blows, these waves were so big that I was riding up and then down them, a rolling carnival ride that required me to head up the face of the wave before bearing off down its back.

  I knew there was a white buoy at the end of the west jetty, but all the turbulence at the harbor mouth was making it hard to find. There it was—streaked with rust and bobbing crazily in the waves. Once I reached that marker, I could begin to turn away from the direction of the wind and follow the north shore of the island toward Capaum Pond.

  As soon as I eased the sail and bore off around the buoy, my Sunfish leapt onto a plane. Sheets of spray funneled into my face, smearing my glasses with salt. Up ahead, about three miles away, I could make out a black water tower and radio transmitter in the general vicinity of Capaum Pond. But I n
eeded more to go on. I knew there was a large white house on the shore beside the pond, but it was difficult to distinguish against the beach. Then another one of those shafts of sun broke through, and, yes, there was that great big gorgeous house lit up like a beacon. Now I could start to enjoy the ride.

  Given the course I was sailing, I found it fastest to hold on to each wave for as long as possible, planing across the wave face like a surfer at Waikiki. It was wild, exhilarating, and terrifying, knowing that the forces I was flirting with could easily tear me from my Sunfish and leave me to wash up on the beach like that dead whale.

  Before I knew it, I was coming up on the shoreline. As any sailor will tell you, a lee shore is dangerous, and this shore was about as lee as it got. In a Sunfish, the trick is to spin the boat around before a wave has the chance to capsize you against the shore. I was searching for a good place to land when I noticed a purple Isuzu Trooper parked beside a dune. It was Mark. He jumped out and started to point to the west, indicating that I should land closer to the big white house. I planed up to the beach, pulled out my daggerboard, spun the boat around into the wind, leapt out into the water, grabbed the transom, and hauled the boat up onto the beach.

  Mark was holding three things: a camera, a towel, and a bottle of Mount Gay. I was elated and thankful enough to give him a hug, but given that I was soaking wet, I went for the rum instead. Mark explained that after dropping off his dinghy, he’d driven over to Jetties Beach to watch me sail out of the harbor. (Given what he’d seen as I rigged my boat, he definitely had reasons for concern.) He said that once I rounded the Jetty it took me all of fifteen minutes to reach Capaum. Now he offered to help me carry the boat into the pond. We found a trail through a fairly flat section of sand and cattails, and in no time I was sailing again.

  My hands still trembling with excitement, I was in no shape to make anything more than a ceremonial circuit of Capaum. In the main body of the pond a flock of swans took off the moment I started sailing in their direction, their wings making a bony, whistling snap. I had never realized how deep the pond was, particularly near the shoreline. No wonder the first settlers had used it as an anchorage, especially since a steep hillside to the west, now dotted with houses, provided protection from the northwesterly gales of winter.