Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Two weeks later, on a Saturday in the middle of May, the weather was even warmer and sunnier. All four of us (plus the dog) went out to Clark’s Cove, a pond that had once been part of Hummock before the ever-encroaching ocean to the south bit the pond in half, leaving the small part of what had been a J-shaped pond off by its lonesome. A field of lush green grass surrounded the pond, its brilliant blue waters sparkling in the sun. Beyond, only a few hundred yards to the south was the ocean, where fishing trawlers from New Bedford dragged their nets along the bottom. The scene was almost mesmerizing in its beauty—Big Sky openness with an island’s intimacy.

  A ten- to fifteen-knot breeze was blowing, and with my trusty pickax and Clorox bottle in the cockpit, I set out to perform my now customary drills. I’d been sailing for a good fifteen minutes when I noticed something swimming out in the middle of the pond with me. At first the glare on the water made it difficult to figure out what it was—a muskrat, a beaver, an otter? It was Molly. She’d come after me.

  Molly is what is known as a Nantucket mutt—part yellow lab, part golden retriever, part who knows what. We’d first picked her up from the animal shelter almost seven years ago. Her previous owner had been a carpenter, and her childhood exposure to screaming circular saws and pounding hammers, not to mention the constant stress of trying not to fall off the back of a pickup truck as it careened through the crooked streets of Nantucket, had left Molly an emotional wreck. Despite her flaws, Molly is an extremely loving animal and considers herself a full-fledged member of the family.

  Now as I watched her swim toward me, her nose pointed urgently in my direction, it almost seemed as though she’d heard us talking about the River Race and wanted to make sure that we didn’t leave her out of our plans. Knowing that Molly must be approaching the end of her endurance, I sailed down to her, rounded up, grabbed her by the collar, and dragged her onto the deck. She was exhausted. As I sailed back toward Melissa and the kids, I patted Molly on the head and told her what a fine and noble dog she was. She lay across the splash rail, trembling affectionately.

  Unfortunately, this moment of human-canine bonding was not to last. Melissa stood up and called for Molly, but Molly was not about to budge. So I gave her a push. Shooting a sidelong glance of betrayal at me, she slid over the side and reluctantly swam toward Melissa.

  After another forty-five minutes of sailing, I returned to shore. As Melissa, Jennie, and Ethan lay on their beach towels and read in their sunglasses, I unrigged the boat while Molly, who already seemed to have forgiven me, luxuriated on the grass. It was good, it was very good. But something wasn’t quite right.

  With the advent of spring, the ponds that had given me the sense of security I needed to make it through the grim wilds of fall and winter had begun to feel more and more like a closed system. I now felt the need to try something different, to break out. After my April sail on Sesachacha, only a river would do.

  Power in the Pond

  ON FRIDAY, APRIL 23, Bruce Perry, a friend who was the administrator of the Conservation Commission on Nantucket, called to tell me the town was opening Sesachacha Pond that day. All winter he’d heard me talking about my dream of one day sailing “through the cut.” As it turned out, we were scheduled to have dinner with Bruce and his family that night, and since he planned to watch the cut’s completion that afternoon, he said he’d tell me about it in the evening.

  Bruce and family lived in what’s called an upside-down house (bedrooms downstairs, living room and dining room upstairs) overlooking Long Pond in Madaket on the western end of the island. It was the perfect place to hear about a pond opening. Apparently, Sesachacha had been at a record high, so that when they finally completed the cut it had come roaring out in a way that dwarfed the relative trickle I had seen in October. Bruce recounted how fish and even eels were caught up in the rush of water that had quickly carved out an opening the size of a small river. If anything, it should be even bigger by the next afternoon when I planned to go sailing.

  “But, Nat,” Bruce cautioned, “it’s nothing to fool around with. There’s an awful lot of power in that pond. And once you’re out there in the ocean, you’re gone.”

  That evening, during the drive back into town, I promised Melissa that I was more curious than I was determined to sail through the cut. I just wanted to take a look. And, to be truthful, Bruce’s words had had a sobering effect. I wasn’t going to go dashing out there like the Lone Ranger. I didn’t want to wreck my boat or drown myself. I really didn’t.

  I spent Saturday morning in the Nantucket Atheneum, the town library. The building, particularly in the wing where the archives were stored, had a Miss Havisham feel to it, as though it were still suspended in a time that the world had long since passed by. Although a spectacular and much-needed renovation project has given the building a whole new ambiance, that morning in the spring of 1993, as I read my way through a stack of ancient letters, I felt as if I too were a kind of artifact blanketed with dust.

  By the time I set out for Sesachacha around one o’clock in the afternoon I was anxious to wash off the past and rejoin the present. Melissa, the kids, and Molly were in the car with me. The plan was this: they’d help me with the boat on the southern end of the pond, then drive over to the other side where they’d walk the quarter mile or so to the cut. The subject of my sailing through the cut was studiously avoided.

  When we pulled up to the launch ramp, the pond seemed higher than ever. In the distance we could see the backhoe over on the barrier beach, but from our perspective it looked as though the cut might have closed in overnight—at least that was the claim of an elderly gentleman who’d brought his two dogs for a walk along the pond’s edge. “I tell ya,” he said, “they should let the old-timers do this kind of thing. These scientific guys don’t know what the hell they’re doin’ when it comes to pond openings.”

  I was reserving judgment. Appearances, particularly when you’re looking at a distant beach, can be deceiving.

  The breeze was moderate out of the southwest with plenty of peppy puffs. Soon I was sailing on a beam reach toward where the cut, if there was one, should be. I passed a father and his son fishing in a motorboat. As I entered the midsection of the pond, I saw that Melissa, the kids, and Molly had parked and were now walking along the pond’s edge toward the ocean. I waved, but they were too far away to notice.

  It was then I realized that there was a cut. It was wider than I would ever have imagined—maybe thirty to fifty feet. A virtual torrent of water was rushing through the opening, a white-water river that must have been close to an eighth of a mile long as it curved out toward the sea and collided with the ocean’s surf in a distant intermingling of brown and blue waters. I now knew what Bruce had meant when he had spoken of the pond’s power, a power that showed no signs of waning more than twenty-four hours after it had first been tapped.

  Someone was standing on the northern edge of the pond cut. After watching me for a while, he waved and called out to me. It was Bruce. The question was how to get close enough to speak to him without being immediately sucked out to sea.

  I approached cautiously from the north, where a sandbar had been formed by the turbulence at the cut’s opening.

  “Bruce!” I shouted. “What do you think?”

  “Don’t do it! The current is really ripping!”

  I decided to sail past the pond opening just to give it a look. Although I could feel the current grab my boat, torquing it seaward with a trembling, atavistic lurch, the cut wasn’t the all-consuming portal to destruction that I had first assumed it would be. There was enough of a breeze to let me flirt along the opening’s edge without losing myself to the current.

  The cut was wide. There was plenty of space for me to sail through it, even with my sail all the way out. It also looked fairly deep. I did notice, however, quite a bit of wave action at the end of the cut. In fact, it looked like a sandbar had formed out there
. Even if I did make it through the cut alive, how in God’s name was I ever going to sail back to the pond? But still the opening beckoned.

  Suddenly I was filled with a desire to just close my eyes and surrender myself to the flow. Meanwhile, Melissa and company were gradually making their way along the beach. Should I wait for them? If I did, I might lose my nerve.

  I tacked and began to bear away toward the cut.

  The Cut

  STEEP WALLS OF SAND loomed on either side, so steep that the sound of rushing water seemed amplified within this friable, curving moat. To my right, lodged within the sand, was the smooth, barkless shape of a tree. To my left I saw Bruce’s son Sean standing at the cut’s edge watching me.

  “Hi, Sean!” I yelled. He looked at me and smiled.

  There was a spasmodic, up-and-down motion to the waves, like the rinse cycle of a washing machine, and yet all the time the current was rushing me toward a bare ledge of sand where huge waves from Portugal burst against the pond flow. How was I going to make it across that shoal without getting killed?

  It was like a scene in a Fellini movie. Just before I slammed into the sandbar, I saw the figure of the elderly man, hunched over and watching me silently from the left bank. Then I was hurtling into the bar, yanking up my daggerboard and heeling the boat to weather in a desperate attempt to keep from rounding up as the shelving sand nudged my rudder out of the water.

  The first wave broke across my deck and swept across the entire boat, nearly filling the cockpit. The force of the wave, and perhaps a back eddy, slowed the boat to the point that I just sat there, hung up on the bar as the ocean ahead coiled into a liquid wall of water. I was a sitting duck.

  With my daggerboard and rudder all the way up, I had no steerage, and the next wave spun me around like a top. Now I was sideways to the surf. WHAM! The next wave flipped me over immediately. The water was colder than I had expected and moving very fast. Beginning to panic, I struggled to stay with the boat. I thought for sure the spars had broken like matchsticks against the sand. As the current carried me into deep water, the boat began to turtle—a bad thing to have happen if your daggerboard is all the way up—so I dived underwater and pushed the blade through the trunk.

  Climbing up onto the finlike projection of the daggerboard, I glanced toward the rapidly receding shore, a blank, treeless sweep of pale brown sand. Then I looked out toward the wide-open sea, an empty infinity of blue that blended seamlessly with the cloudless sky. A whole new set of fears began to take hold. What if my rig had indeed been damaged? There was no way I was going to paddle my way back to the beach. I was already close to a quarter mile out and going fast.

  I righted the boat and was relieved to see that everything was intact. But I had my work cut out for me. Like a furiously deflating balloon, the pond was still blowing me to the east.

  I scrambled back onto the boat, slammed the rudder down, yanked in the mainsheet, and started to sail for shore. I could see Melissa and the kids on the beach, waving to me. Bruce and Sean were also there. The old man had disappeared. I was now very aware of the ocean’s tidal currents working on the Sunfish, and I still had fears of being pushed out to sea before the eyes of my family.

  It was a beat back to the island, and I sailed off on a port tack. The ocean swells had a slow, powerful feel to them, as if I were sailing across the gently heaving breast of a giant beast. It was a lazy, disorienting motion. I tacked and edged over toward the cut, but the water was still wild and dangerous over there so I tacked away, planning my final approach to the beach.

  Landing in an ocean swell is not easy. One screwup and a wave can smash the boat into the sand and destroy both the boat and the sailor. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nantucket cod fishermen had performed this maneuver in their fish-laden dories on a daily basis, and more than a few of them had been lost on this very same shore.

  Soon I was locked on to the face of a big comber. As I teetered on the lip of the giant wave, my mainsail flapping now that the boat was moving faster than the wind, I pulled up my daggerboard and held on for dear life. It was like sitting on a boogie board with a sail on it. The wave took me right up the beach and deposited me with almost delicate precision at the tide line. As the wave retreated, I leapt out, grabbed the bow handle, and pulled my boat beyond the next wave’s reach.

  Only after my family and Bruce and Sean had joined me did I begin shaking. Bruce had brought a camera with him and had taken some pictures of my voyage through the cut, one of which now hangs in our living room. (If you look carefully you can see the hunched outline of that mysterious old man.) Melissa recounted how they’d watched the top of my sail bouncing up and down as it rushed across the sand and that Molly had run ahead and followed me along the cut. Reluctantly, they agreed to help me lug the boat back to the pond. After only a few rest stops, we made it.

  As my support team sat along the cut’s edge and watched the water go by, I sailed for another half hour or so. But I was too emotionally drained to do much more than relive what I’d just experienced. What had I been thinking? It had been irresponsible and imprudent, but, wow, what a rush. It occurred to me that I was lucky to be alive.

  When it came to pond sailing, I’d reached what the poet Robert Lowell, who’d spent two summers on Nantucket, had called “the end of the whaleroad.” I might not have sailed on absolutely every pond the island had to offer, but I’d come as close as I needed to.

  If I was going to move forward, to improve, I couldn’t do it alone.

  PART IV

  Down the River

  The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  Reassembling Childhood

  MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND brought to Nantucket the usual throng of tourists, many of them sailors on racing yachts participating in the annual Figawi Regatta. (“Figawi” comes from the phrase “Where the f— are we?”—a common query when sailing in fog.) Over the last twenty or so years, this race from Hyannis to Nantucket has evolved into a bigger and bigger party. It is also one of the first sure signs that the cold, fogbound state of suspended animation known on Nantucket as spring has given way to the sea breezes of summer.

  The Connecticut River Race (officially titled the Lions Club River Classic) was scheduled for the Saturday and Sunday following Memorial Day Weekend. We had reservations on the Thursday noon ferry. Prior to our planned arrival in Hartford on Friday evening, we had more than a dozen errands to run on Cape Cod, from going to the dentist to buying sunscreen and bathing suits. It was to be a typical Philbrick family off-island excursion—three and a half days of frenzy.

  Having arranged to pick up one boat at my parents’ home in Hyannis, we drove onto the ferry with trailer and one Sunfish in tow. It was a sunny, windy day, and the four of us lingered on the deck for most of the two-and-a-half-hour trip. The view was not only great, but the deck was also the best place to avoid getting seasick. As we approached Hyannis, a swarm of sailboards appeared off the port bow, blasting along in the southwesterly sea breeze and using the ferry’s wake to wave-jump as much as ten feet into the air.

  After securing my brother’s old Sunfish onto the trailer and making sure we had all the right equipment, we spent the night at my parents’ house, where Molly the dog would spend the weekend. By two on Friday afternoon we were on our way to Hartford. We were driving across the Bourne Bridge with the Cape Cod Canal stretched out below us when I realized that I had just spent the last two days reassembling my childhood. We had all the elements: two Sunfish (one of which, my brother’s, was the first one we’d ever owned), a trailer, and a car with a father, mother, and two kids. And, best of all, we were on our way to a
regatta in which all four of us would be sailing.

  These days it’s very rare that kids and parents race, or even sail, together. The tendency at sailing clubs across the country has been to promote junior classes such as the 420, a two-person racing dinghy, and the Optimist, an eight-foot Frosty-like pram for kids up to fifteen years of age. Since the Optimist is so small, it doesn’t intimidate the kids, and as a result they tend to learn much faster. After the kids have competed for five or so years in the Optimist, with their parents driving them hither and yon to regattas, they move into the 420 for three or four more years of junior racing. There is no doubt that this kind of progression provides the kids with a much more thorough and intensive racing background than I ever had. But it robs sailboat racing of one of its most attractive and unique aspects: that of people of all ages competing together.

  For me, one of the good things about being a teenager in a sailing family was that it gave the four of us something to talk about. Especially during a long drive to a regatta, my father and I would talk ceaselessly about sailboats. I’d ask him questions not only about the regatta we were going to but about sailing in general, and he would hold forth in his best professorial manner on all things nautical. In contrast to my monochromatic life as a shy, studious kid, sailing was an exotic, endlessly fascinating world, and I drank in every detail. I especially enjoyed my father’s tales of what it had been like in his day, when he was racing against future sailing greats like Ted Hood and George O’Day. So as we drove toward Hartford I felt it incumbent upon me to hold forth, if not as a professor, at least as a writer and father. I began a lengthy monologue on the history of the Sunfish class and the River Race, with enlightening digressions on the Philbrick family’s singular skill in the naming of boats. By the time we reached Rhode Island, Jennie was nodding, and Ethan was fast asleep.