A drifter evokes pioneering explorers and the eternal quest for meaning.
Issue 148: Jan/Feb 2023
We hoist the drifter instead of the genoa, hoping the diaphanous sail will conjure a breeze. I pad forward clad only in swimming trunks, Everest: The West Ridge in hand. I stretch out on the teak foredeck in the shifting shadow, the wood warm against my stomach, and open my book.
The weather-balloon-like sail, so pale blue it blends into the hazy heights of the sky, slithers and rasps above me as the boat lolls on the listless water. My two older sisters sun themselves on the cabinroof. My father, standing shirtless at the helm, utters a quip under his breath at which my mother, perched against the coaming with her legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, grins below her large, dark glasses and floppy straw hat.
Thirty or so feet away from them, I am a world apart—inching up Everest’s Diagonal Ditch with the 1963 American expedition even as I ride the morning calm in the Chesapeake Bay aboard our family’s yawl, Carousel, in 1969.
I look up. The sun slides its hot tongue over my shoulder. The sail wavers, limp and languid with jellyfish-like grace, its silken folds breathing, whispering with the slow bob of the boat. I scooch back into the shade, losing my place in the book, my mind’s eye lighting on a Kipling line imploring me to find something lost, to go and find it.
I riffle back to ascent, conquest, descent, frostbite. A swish draws my eyes upward to the rippling sail. The sail bells, filling, tautening, the boat leaning forward, rigging creaking, and an image forms before me: I’m shimmying up the mast, scaling to the summit of the drifter, making my own ascent.
Yes, I tell myself, go find what lies lost in the blue glare. Up there I will scout outward over the breathing sea, look for that something lost, something pulling me onward.ÁI roll onto my back, using the book as a tent to shield my eyes.
Up there: Is that where I’ll find it?
The shadow caressing me, I stare upward, the boat’s slow roll rocking me, as it rocks me still, down all these lost years, to find my place on the foredeck below the drifter dilating in the promising puffs. Ghosting me back to the moment, the lost place in time, there with my family yet elsewhere, a moment in which I will forever stare upward, the summit rising higher, the sail lost in the blue glare.
Go, I tell myself, the boat beneath me picking up speed. Go and find it. Go and find what lies lost beyond.
And yet I have found it. I always find it, there on the foredeck: the something no longer lost behind the ranges of five decades, as I return again and again and again, and will always return, to the shadow of the drifter.
Craig Moodie lives with his wife, Ellen, in Massachusetts. His work includes A Sailor’s Valentine and Other Stories and, under the name John Macfarlane, the middle-grade novel Stormstruck!, a Kirkus Best Book.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
