To the Ends of the Earth (47 page)

Three more bends in the creek and I could see the current stirring more strongly around me. A quarter of a mile away in the marsh was a Great Blue Heron—five feet high and moving in a slow prayerful way, like a narrow-shouldered priest in gray vestments. The boat slipped along, carrying itself between strokes. Up ahead on the beach was a person with a dog—one of those energetic early risers who boasts, “I only need four hours’ sleep!” and is probably hell to live with. Nothing else around—only the terns screeching over their eggs, and a few boats motionless at their moorings, and a rather crummy clutter of beach houses and
NO TRESPASSING
signs, and the ghosts of dead Indians. The current was so swift in the creek I couldn’t have gone back if I tried, and as I approached the shore it
shot me into the sea. And now light was dazzling in the mist, as on the magnificent Turner
Sunrise with Seamonsters
.

A
FTER AN HOUR
I
WAS AT
S
ANDY
N
ECK
P
UBLIC
B
EACH
—about four miles. This bay side of the upper Cape has a low duney shore and notoriously shallow water in places. The half a dozen harbors are spread over seventy miles and most have dangerous bars. It is not a coast for easy cruising and in many areas there is hardly enough water for windsurfing. There are sand bars in the oddest places. Most sailboats can’t approach any of the harbors unless the tide is high. So the little boats stay near shore and watch the tides, and the deep draft boats stay miles offshore. I was in between and I was alone. In two months of this I never saw another rowboat more than fifty yards from the shore. Indeed, I seldom saw anyone rowing at all.

Sandy Neck proper, an eight-mile peninsula of Arabian-style dunes, was today a panorama of empty beach; the only life stirring was the gulls and more distantly the hovering marsh hawks. A breeze had come up; it had freshened; it was now a light wind. I got stuck on a sand bar, then hopped out and dragged the boat into deeper water. I was trying to get around Beach Point to have my lunch in Barnstable Harbor—my forward locker contained provisions. I was frustrated by the shoals. But I should have known—there were seagulls all over the ocean here and they were not swimming but standing. I grew to recognize low water from the posture of seagulls.

When I drew level with Barnstable Harbor I was spun around by the strong current. I had to fight it for half an hour before I got ashore. Even then I was only at Beach Point. This was the channel into the harbor, and the water in it was narrow and swiftly moving—a deep river flowing through a shallow sea, its banks just submerged.

I tied the boat to a rock, and while I rested a Ranger drove up in his Chevy Bronco.

He said, “That wind’s picking up. I think we’re in for a storm.” He pointed toward Barnstable Harbor. “See the clouds building up over there? The forecast said showers
but that looks like more than showers. Might be a thunderstorm. Where are you headed?”

“Just up the coast.”

He nodded at the swiftly rushing channel and said, “You’ll have to get across that thing first.”

“Why is it so choppy?”

His explanation was simple, and it accounted for a great deal of the rough water I was to see in the weeks to come. He said that when the wind was blowing in the opposite direction to a tide, a chop of hard, irregular waves was whipped up. It could become very fierce very quickly.

Then he pointed across the harbor mouth toward Bass Hole and told me to look at how the ebbing tide had uncovered a mile of sand flats. “At low tide people just walk around over there,” he said. So, beyond the vicious channel the sea was slipping down—white water here, none there.

After the Ranger drove off, I made myself a cheese sandwich, swigged some coffee from my thermos bottle, and decided to rush the channel. My skiff’s sides were lapstrake—like clapboards—and rounded, which stabilized the boat in high waves, but this short breaking chop was a different matter. Instead of rowing at right angles to the current I turned the bow against it, and steadied the skiff by rowing. The skiff rocked wildly—the current slicing the bow, the wind-driven chop smacking the stern. A few minutes later I was across. And then I ran aground. After the channel were miles of watery shore; but it was only a few inches deep—and the tide was still dropping.

The wind was blowing, the sky was dark, the shoreline was distant; and now the water was not deep enough for this rowboat. I got out and—watched by strolling seagulls—dragged the boat through the shallow water that lay over the sand bar. The boat skidded and sometimes floated, but it was not really buoyant until I had splashed along for about an hour. To anyone on the beach I must have seemed a bizarre figure—alone, far from shore, walking on the water.

It was midafternoon by the time I had dragged the boat to deeper water, and I got in and began to row. The wind seemed to be blowing now from the west; it gathered at the stern and gave me a following sea, lifting me in the direction I wanted to go. I rowed past Chapin Beach and the bluffs, and around the black rocks at Nobscusset Harbor, marking my progress on my flapping chart by glancing again and again at a water tower like a stovepipe in Dennis.

At about five o’clock I turned into Sesuit Harbor, still pulling hard. I had rowed about sixteen miles. My hands were blistered but I had made a good start. And I had made a discovery: the sea was unpredictable, and the shore looked foreign. I was used to finding familiar things in exotic places, but the unfamiliar at home was new to me. It had been a disorienting day. At times I had been afraid. It was a taste of something strange in a place I had known my whole life. It was a shock and a satisfaction.

Mrs. Coffin at Sesuit Harbor advised me not to go out the next day. Anyone with a name out of
Moby-Dick
is worth listening to on the subject of the sea. The wind was blowing from the northeast, making Mrs. Coffin’s flag snap and beating the sea into whitecaps.

I said, “I’m only going to Rock Harbor.”

It was about nine miles.

She said, “You’ll be pulling your guts out.”

I decided to go, thinking:
I would rather struggle in a heavy sea and get wet than sit in the harbor and wait for the weather to improve
.

But as soon as I had rowed beyond the breakwater I was hit hard by the waves and tipped by the wind. I unscrewed my sliding seat and jammed the thwart into place; and I tried again. I couldn’t maneuver the boat. I changed oars, lashing the long ones down and using the seven-and-a-half-foot ones. I made some progress, but the wind was punching me toward shore. This was West Brewster, off Quivett Neck. The chart showed church spires. I rowed for another few hours and saw that I had gone hardly any distance at
all. But there was no point in turning back. I didn’t need a harbor. I knew I could beach the boat anywhere—pull it up over there at that ramp, or between those rocks, or at that public beach. I had plenty of time and I felt all right. This was like walking uphill, but so what?

So I struggled all day. I hated the banging waves, and the way they leaped over the sides when the wind pushed me sideways into the troughs of the swell. There was a few inches of water sloshing in the bottom, and my chart was soaked. At noon a motorboat came near me and asked me if I was in trouble. I said no and told him where I was going. The man said, “Rock Harbor’s real far!” and pointed east. Some of the seawater dried on the boat, leaving the lace of crystallized salt shimmering on the mahogany. I pulled on, passing a sailboat in the middle of the afternoon.

“Where’s Rock Harbor?” I asked.

“Look for the trees!”

But I looked in the wrong place. The trees weren’t on shore, they were in the water, about twelve of them planted in two rows—tall dead limbless pines—like lampposts. They marked the harbor entrance; they also marked the Brewster Flats, for at low tide there was no water here at all, and Rock Harbor was just a creek draining into a desert of sand. You could drive a car across the harbor mouth at low tide.

I had arranged to meet my father here. My brother Joseph was with him. He had just arrived from the Pacific islands of Samoa. I showed him the boat.

He touched the oarlocks. He said, “They’re all tarnished.” Then he frowned at the salt-smeared wood and his gaze made the boat seem small and rather puny.

I said, “I just rowed from Sesuit with the wind against me. It took me the whole goddamned day!”

He said, “Don’t get excited.”

“What do you know about boats?” I said.

He went silent. We got into the car—two boys and their father. I had not seen Joe for several years. Perhaps he was sulking because I hadn’t asked about Samoa. But had he
asked about my rowing? It didn’t seem like much, because it was travel at home. Yet I felt the day had been full of risks.

“How the hell,” I said, “can you live in Samoa for eight years and not know anything about boats?”

“
Sah
-moa,” he said, correcting my pronunciation. It was a family joke.

My brother Alex was waiting with my mother, and he smiled as I entered the house.

“Here he comes,” Alex said.

My face was burned, the blisters had broken on my hands and left them raw, my back ached, and so did the muscle strings in my forearm; there was sea salt in my eyes.

“Ishmael,” Alex said. He was sitting compactly on a chair glancing narrowly at me and smoking. “ ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ ”

My mother said, “We’re almost ready to eat—you must be starving! God, look at you!”

Alex was behind her. He made a face at me, then silently mimicked a laugh at the absurdity of a forty-two-year-old man taking consolation from his mother.

“Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” Alex said and imitated my voice, “Pass the spaghetti, Mom!”

Joe had started to relax. Now he had an ally, and I was being mocked. We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents. Home is so often the simple past.

“What’s he been telling you, Joe?” Alex asked.

I went to wash my face.

“He said I don’t know anything about boats.”

Just before we sat down to eat, I said, “It’s pretty rough out there.”

Alex seized on this, looking delighted. He made the sound of a strong wind, by whistling and clearing his throat. He squinted and in a harsh whisper said, “Aye, it’s rough out there, and you can hardly”—he stood up, banging the dining table with his thigh—“you can hardly see the bowsprit. Aye, and the wind’s shifting, too. But never mind,
Mr. Christian! Give him twenty lashes—that’ll take the strut out of him! And hoist the mainsail—we’re miles from anywhere. None of you swabbies knows anything about boats. But I know, because I’ve sailed from Pitcairn Island to Rock Harbor by dead reckoning—in the roughest water known to man. Just me against the elements, with the waves threatening to pitch-pole my frail craft …”

“Your supper’s getting cold,” Father said.

“How long did it take you?” Mother said to me.

“All day,” I said.

“Aye, captain,” Alex said. “Aw, it’s pretty rough out there, what with the wind and the rising sea.”

“What will you write about?” my father asked.

“He’ll write about ocean’s roar and how he just went around the Horn. You’re looking at Francis Chichester! The foam beating against the wheelhouse, the mainsheet screaming, the wind and the rising waves. Hark! Thunder and lightning over
The Gypsy Moth!
”

Declaiming made Alex imaginative, and stirred his memory. He had an actor’s gift for sudden shouts and whispers and for giving himself wholly to the speech. It was as if he was on an instant touched with lucid insanity, the exalted chaos of creation. He was triumphant.

“But look at him now—Peter Freuchen of the seven seas, the old tar in his clinker-built boat. He’s home asking his mother to pass the spaghetti! ‘Thanks, Mom, I’d love another helping, Mom.’ After a day in the deep sea, he’s with his mother and father, reaching for the meatballs!”

Joseph was laughing hard, his whole body swelling as he tried to suppress it.

“He’s not going to write about that. No, nothing about the spaghetti. It’ll just be Captain Bligh, all alone, bending at his oars, and picking oakum through the long tumultuous nights at sea. And the wind and the murderous waves …”

“Dry up,” Father said, still eating.

Then they all turned their big sympathetic faces at me across the cluttered dining table. Alex looked slightly sheepish, and the others apprehensive, fearing that I might be offended, that Alex had gone too far.

“What will you write about?” Mother asked.

I shook my head and tried not to smile—because I was thinking:
That
.