Issue 19 : Jul/Aug 2001
I liked the job, and I was beginning to make friends. The sense that I was doing something important, and that Washington was the place where things happen, was still fresh. After six months, I hadn’t begun to exhaust the capital’s many fine museums. Still, something was missing.
I was homesick.
In the middle of the summer I met Winnie. She was rediscovering her love for boats, though she wasn’t yet sure that she was a sailor. Just in case, she kept Senja, her Beneteau First 235, at Solomon’s Island, Md. She liked the idea of being on the water, and she needed a quiet place to write.
I needed to sail.
Soon I was engaged in the happiest of symbiotic relationships. Winnie believed I was doing her a favor by teaching her what I knew about sailing; I thought she was doing me a favor by letting me.
“Whenever I find myself going grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” Ishmael tells us on Page One of Melville’s Moby Dick.
I can relate.
For as long as I can remember, wind and wave and the stinging salt spray over a plunging bow has been my refuge from life’s troubles. The magic of sail provided respite from everything: schoolyard taunts, acne, unrequited love, a lousy grade on my most important midterm, a bad day at work — none could withstand a clear day and a fair breeze.
So, at last, I found myself on the water again. This time on the storied Chesapeake, more than 1,000 miles, four addresses, and half a decade from my boyhood on the Texas Gulf Coast, but undeniably home.
Winnie was generous with Senja, and soon I was on intimate terms with the seascape of John Barth’s Tidewater Tales, a book that had inspired imaginative reveries years before.
I learned a lot that summer. I learned that Cove Point Light meant Senja’s slip was just around the corner and that Tilghman Island didn’t mean I was nearly to Oxford, Md. I learned that not all crab-pot markers are visible at night, even in the glare of a spotlight, and that two-foot seas on the Choptank or Patuxent Rivers may easily translate into four-foot seas on the bay.
And I was reminded that I’m still a part of the same community, bound by a common passion and similar experiences that I knew as a boy in Texas.
Henry, a bartender in Oxford, recalled that to me. When I asked where I could provision for my sail back across the bay, he told me. And then, to save me the walk, he suggested I take his truck. “Keys are in it,” he said.
Nicki and Tucker, old friends from the sailing club of my youth, reminded me when I ran into them at the Annapolis Boat Show. A charter skipper from Maryland’s Eastern Shore reminded me when he recounted meeting those same friends in the Abacos several years before.
As the days became shorter that year in Washington, I grew busier. I didn’t have time to sail as I had before the leaves began to fall. Winter descended upon that hospitable coast with a shrug and a hurried step, and its frigid winds brushed past me with all the indifference of a D.C. commuter.
But I knew that in just a few months, those cold winds would rush back to the north country whence they came, and I would again make time for the important things.
I knew this, for that summer taught me one thing more: wherever there is a boat to carry me, I can always go home again.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
