Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Best of all, it would introduce me to the latest crop of hotshots in the class. As it stood now, the North Americans event was nothing more than a date on my calendar. Beyond some vague, romanticized memories from fifteen years ago, I had no concept of what I was in for, especially when it came to the competition. After an afternoon alone on the rim of the Atlantic, I needed something more than a goal or an event; I needed to draw a bead on some names and faces.

  In the Cocktail Glass

  BY THE NEXT WEEKEND the Stinker had developed a hole in the radiator. The hole was so big that the usual quick fixes were of no help whatsoever. Since I was not about to pay for a new radiator for a car that was already down to two forward gears, I decided to leave well enough alone. Who needed a radiator on Nantucket anyway? The most I ever had to drive at any one time was five or six miles. Sure, the temperature gauge would go sky high, acrid smoke would begin to billow from below the hood, but not once that winter did the engine seize up on me.

  The ponds were on the edge of freezing, and on Friday night the temperature dived into the low twenties and the wind died to nothing—the perfect conditions for a freeze. The smart thing to do would have been to go on a reconnaissance mission the next morning, but I was in no mood for being careful. I’d reached a difficult stage in my writing; things were not going in the direction I had planned, and a new direction had not yet made itself clear to me. I wanted to go sailing, and nothing, not even a little ice, was going to get in my way.

  I decided to sail Miacomet, a long, narrow, almost river-like pond only a couple of miles from our house. I was still testing the limits of the newly radiatorless Stinker, and besides, Jennie and Ethan were not about to follow Daddy to another pond. By going to Miacomet, Melissa could leave them plugged into the television and get back before any problems developed.

  By the time we made it to Miacomet—Melissa behind me in the Colt, the Stinker’s yellow warning light blinking in panic—I’d forgotten about the danger of freezing. And sure enough, except for a narrow strip of open water near the far shore, Miacomet Pond was completely covered with ice.

  “Well, shall we go back?” Melissa asked.

  “What the hell, maybe I can be an icebreaker.”

  “But—” She stopped herself. Saying nothing, she began to help me unload the boat. She had obviously decided that it wasn’t worth debating the point. Still, I detected a certain sense of irritation in the way she drove off down the dirt road, sand spurting from beneath the Colt’s tires.

  The ice was about a quarter of an inch thick. Once I’d rigged the boat, I used the bow to break an initial gap in the ice, then sheeted in the sail. In the relatively light air the big question was whether I’d have enough power to push my way through the ice.

  In a feeble puff, I took off on a beam reach down the pond, busting my way through the ice. It sounded like a toboggan on an icy run—a clattering rattle as the boat was occasionally shunted to the right or left by the ice. At first I feared for my Sunfish’s hull, but a quick inspection revealed no damage to the fiberglass. In my wake, bobbing ice chunks formed the precise outline of where I’d been.

  Eventually I decided it was time to try sailing upwind, so I jibed around and headed up, with the boat really bouncing around as it carved a turn through the ice. Unfortunately, the wind began to die just as I attempted my first tack. The boat rounded up into the wind but didn’t have enough momentum to make it through, and soon I was stuck, at least fifty feet from shore. I started rocking the boat. The squared edges of the hull chomped at the ice, gradually breaking open a section large enough for me to scull over onto the new tack. The sail filled, and I was off again in a rattling rush. Given my frame of mind, it was profoundly satisfying to be breaking up all this ice. I felt like a drunken cowboy busting up chairs in a saloon.

  I embarked on a relatively rigorous program of ice-breaking, cutting back and forth across the pond in an attempt to clear out a space in which I could do some normal sailing. About twenty minutes later I had done just that, although the constant tinkling sound of bobbing ice reminded me once again of the ice cubes in my grandmother’s cocktail glass, an incongruous summertime sound on an otherwise silent afternoon in winter.

  When Melissa finally showed up, she had the kids with her. All Jennie and Ethan wanted to talk about was their movie. At least Melissa was duly appreciative of what I’d accomplished. In what was otherwise a totally frozen pond, there was now a gap the size of a football field. After we’d loaded up the hull onto the Stinker and the kids were back in the Colt and listening to the radio, I jokingly complained to Melissa about the lack of attention my pond sailing was receiving from Jennie and Ethan. They were the ones who had told me, after all, to “get a life.”

  “Believe me,” Melissa sighed, “this is a winter none of us will ever forget.”

  Strolling Through History

  IT WAS THE FIRST WEEKEND in December, known as Christmas Stroll Weekend on Nantucket, when hundreds of fur-coated shoppers from places like Connecticut and New York City descend upon the island for two days of buying and being seen. Downtown Nantucket does its best to look like a Hollywood makeover of itself. Decorated Christmas trees line the sidewalks, shop windows are endlessly teased and fussed with, colored lights and sprigs of holly are tacked to every available surface, and Main Street is closed to traffic. If the Chamber of Commerce gets lucky, a light snow gives the scene a final, perfect holiday touch.

  Since prices start to fall in the weeks after Christmas Stroll, locals leave the shopping to the visitors. There is still plenty left to do, however, including holiday caroling, puppet shows, and house tours. But the main event if you have small children is Santa Claus at the Pacific National Bank.

  After waiting for an hour in the cold and swirling wind at the head of Main Street, Melissa, Jennie, Ethan, and I finally emerged into the bank’s main lobby, a high-ceilinged room with a mural depicting a whaling captain, a whaling merchant, and his bonneted wife, all portrayed as solid, substantial, and quietly heroic.

  As we waited in the overheated room for our children to make their supplications to Santa, I couldn’t help but feel that the Nantucket I was learning about had little to do with the Nantucket this mural told us there had once been. Indeed, by that point in my research I had begun to feel like a deer attempting to cross an interstate at night, astonished and overwhelmed by flash after flash of, if not insight, at least hints of a Nantucket that seemed utterly strange and new to me, particularly given the island’s reputation as an enclave of Quaker righteousness.

  There was, for example, the French privateer captain who claimed in 1695 that the island’s Indians actually encouraged his crew to pillage the English. According to the Frenchman, the English settlers had turned the Indians into “peasants” and refused to give them firearms. In 1822 a young greenhand from New York wrote in his journal that when his Nantucket whaleship sailed into Hawaii, nearly every sailor “took a wife” for the price of a checked shirt or an old handkerchief. Nantucket whalemen began to sound less like noble pioneers and seafarers and more like the arrogant sailors I’d known in my youth. Was I just playing out the historian’s destiny, another generation seeing the past in its own image? I wondered whether in forty years my own account would seem as dated as the bank’s mural.

  Soon we were standing on the wide stone steps of the bank. The downward, cobbled slope of Main Street looked like a giant streambed run dry. Jennie, who had merely tolerated Santa, and Ethan, who had pleaded earnestly for a new bike, were each sucking on a lollipop supplied by one of Santa’s elves. Melissa squeezed my hand and, assuming we were about to continue our stroll down Main Street, asked, “So what’s next?”

  I turned from the festive scene before us. “Head of Hummock Pond.”

  The Jibing Hamster

  HEAD OF HUMMOCK was about as small a pond as I could sail on. Even smaller and more perfectly rounded than Gibbs Pond, its surrounding
shoreline was also steeper, with high hills that would make an absolute mess of the wind. Since I had sailed Gibbs Pond in a calm, I wanted to try this little kettle hole in a hurricane, and more than thirty knots of wind from the northwest were forecast for Sunday. And besides, Head of Hummock was on the way to the farm where we planned to buy our Christmas tree. Melissa and the kids would follow me to the gravel launch ramp, help me with the boat, then stop by on their way back after buying the tree.

  A combination of wind and rain had rid the ponds of ice the week before, but by Sunday the temperature was once again below freezing. When we pulled up to the edge of the pond at about 11:30 Sunday morning, it was barely 25 degrees beneath a thin, blue sky. And the wind had come on as advertised. Dark jagged cat’s-paws clawed the surface of the pond with each thirty-knot gust. Random explosions of wind bounced off the hills and caromed across the water.

  Beside the launch ramp was a canoe with an icicle hanging off its bow. When Melissa and I took the Sunfish off the roof, a chunk of ice fell out of the cockpit. I knew I wasn’t going to last long in these conditions, so I encouraged Melissa and the kids to pick out a tree and return as quickly as possible.

  The wind was coming right at the launch ramp, challenging me to launch the boat without getting my feet completely soaked. I pushed the boat into position so that the bow was touching the water and pointed directly into the wind. Then, after adjusting my knitted wool watch cap, I picked up the transom, put the rudder halfway down, took a deep breath, and began to run. Pushing the boat ahead of me like a wheelbarrow, I ran until my feet hit the water, then, with a final shove, I leapt onto the deck, scrambled up into the cockpit, and slipped the daggerboard into the trunk.

  I hauled in the mainsheet, the sail filled, and the boat began to move ahead. Now I had to get the rudder all the way down. I was still aft, fiddling with the rudder and congratulating myself on a successful takeoff, when a huge puff slammed into the boat.

  I had never capsized that fast before. Usually there is some time to prepare yourself, but this puff was like getting hit by an express train. I had taken such care not to get wet, and now here I was getting thrown headfirst into what might as well have been a vat of acid. But the flesh did not start falling off my bones. Certainly my hands and feet were tingly, but the rest of me was just fine as I paddled around the boat, reached up for the daggerboard, and pulled with everything I had. In a few seconds the boat was back up, the sail was shedding water in the clear cold wind, and I was in the cockpit, desperately yanking in the sail and pumping on the tiller to keep the boat from backing up into the shore. Then the sail filled and I was off.

  This was going to be, if not the wildest, most definitely the weirdest sail of them all. The wind was insanity itself, going from five to thirty-five knots and shifting 30 degrees in direction in a matter of seconds. One moment I’d be hiked out all the way, the front half of the sail luffing to prevent me from capsizing to leeward, then WHAM, the wind would shift and die, virtually tacking the sail. Then I’d be on the leeward side of the boat, scrambling to avoid capsizing to windward. Then WHAM, the wind would sock in again from the old direction. I’d tack back, hike out, and wait for the wind to reinvent itself once again. There was no way to anticipate what was going to happen next. All I could do was react as quickly as possible and hope for the best.

  As the wind slammed me back and forth, I decided that I had better apply some method to the madness. So I began to sail around the perimeter of the pond in a counterclockwise direction, trying to translate the naked cold force of unharnessed wind and frigid water into the nautical equivalent of a hamster wheel.

  By my second lap, I was beginning to establish a routine. I’d sail past the launch ramp on a beam reach and on port tack. Then I’d round up, sheet in, and start to beat to windward along the northern shore of the pond, taking three, sometimes four, very quick tacks. Once up in the northwest corner of the pond, I’d crack off onto a wild reach on starboard, follow the curving contour of the pond until it came time to jibe. This usually occurred where the pond feeds into the much larger Hummock Pond to the south, an area of cattails that I used as an organic buoy—reach the cattails and jibe.

  A jibe is the inverse of a tack. You’re sailing downwind with the sail all the way out, and you turn the boat away from the direction of the wind till the wind is now coming from the other side. This brings the sail across the boat with the full power of the wind behind it, providing ample opportunity for a capsize if anything should go wrong. And so the cattails became a recurrent crisis point, the place where, ready or not, I had to jibe in thirty knots of wind before I began yet another circuit of the pond.

  Head of Hummock is on the edge of a vast tract of conservation land known as Sanford Farm. A trail leads to a hill on the southwestern edge of the pond, and sure enough, two people appeared and stopped to watch me perform my gyrations. What an incongruous sight—a Sunfish planing around a teeny-weeny pond in December! They watched one revolution and were gone.

  I was rapidly becoming exhausted, bouncing back and forth across the deck and constantly working the mainsheet and tiller to keep up with the changing wind. By my tenth circle, I found myself glancing over to the launch ramp, looking for Melissa and the kids. The last run from the northwest corner down to the cattails had given me some of the wildest rides I’d ever experienced, especially in the bizarre context of a pond that couldn’t have been more than an eighth of a mile wide. But as it turned out, I saved the best for last.

  I’d just sailed past the launch ramp when I heard that distinctive honk. There they were, with a Christmas tree on the roof, at the edge of the ramp and waving. I waved back, tacked, and began the sweep along the western edge of the pond. It was then that the biggest puff of the day hit. What began as a fast close reach quickly evolved into a broad reach like none other I had ever known. I was hiked out as far as I could hike; the sail was out and the boat was blasting across the pond, throwing up a blizzard of spray on either side. If only Melissa had had a radar gun. It may have lasted for just a second or two but it was the fastest I had ever gone in a Sunfish. And best of all, it happened in front of my wife and kids.

  Call me a showboat, but I launched into that final jibe with a will. I bore off and yanked the mainsheet and jumped over to the new windward side, then headed for the ramp with my afterburners on. After pulling out the daggerboard, I sailed up onto the gravel, my bow coming so close to the car’s front bumper that Melissa had to back up to avoid a collision. When I climbed off the Sunfish, the back of my lifejacket was a shelf of icicles. The deck was glazed with ice. Everyone, even Jennie and Ethan, was suitably impressed.

  This time Ethan volunteered to drive back with me to the house. Over the blast of the heater we talked about their tree-shopping. Then we talked a little bit about my sail. Ethan had been watching from the backseat, leaning forward between Melissa and Jennie in the front.

  “Jennie said you were showing off, but I said you were just sailing.”

  “You were both right,” I said.

  Coastal Retreat

  ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, Nantucket was hit with what is known as the Hundred Year Storm, the second such storm in two years. Seventy-mile-an-hour northeasterly winds and incredibly high tides transformed the streets of downtown Nantucket into raging rivers. In Siasconset, on the island’s east end, seven houses were washed out to sea. All week the local television station repeated a videotape taken of a house, curtains still in its windows and its chimney still intact, getting swept out whole like Dorothy’s home in The Wizard of Oz. Thirty or more seconds after floating free, the house was savagely ripped apart by the breakers.

  For Wes, the scientist with whom I’d walked the grassy crater of Lily Pond, it was like being a kid in a candy store. In the windy, sunny aftermath of the storm, he led a group of erosion experts from the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole around the island. Later that week I talked with him on the pho
ne about the long-term effects of this kind of erosion.

  “So how long is the island going to last?” I asked.

  “I give it six hundred, maybe six hundred and fifty years.”

  “What?” Common wisdom on the island put it at two thousand. Six hundred?

  “This is how I figure it.” In the background I could hear him punching the keys of a calculator. “Right now the island is losing an average of fifteen feet a year. In the next hundred years, global warming is going to double the rate of sea level rise. Since rising sea level is the driving force behind coastal retreat, that puts the annual figure up to thirty feet. Divide that by the average width of the island—about eighteen thousand feet—and I get six hundred years.”

  I remembered a recent town meeting during which the funding for an environmental study for a “beach replenishment” project, designed to save the homes of several summer residents in Siasconset, was being discussed. One man voiced his opinion that anyone who built on a Nantucket beach was a “damned idiot.” But it was a neighbor of mine who carried the day.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I don’t want my coffin floatin’ away toward Woods Hole. I say we help pay for that beach.”

  The warrant article passed.

  But were we just kidding ourselves? If this island was indeed doomed to become just another shoal—all its pristine ponds bubbling their groundwater into the salt sea, all our coffins bobbing like Queequeg’s in the waves—hadn’t we better get used to the idea of the ocean’s inexorable rise? Only later, once the rising waters had followed me and my Sunfish into the middle of America, would I begin to appreciate the impossibility of such a reconciliation. To die was one thing, but to be washed away?