Issue 7 : Jul/Aug 1999
Summertime — and the cruising is easy, and its reason, really, for being. Summer is your two-week cruise to Maine, maybe, or to Cape Cod and the Islands, or to Newport and Mystic. It is fueling and buying ice and searching out a laundromat — and cruising right up to a restaurant to dine. Summer is homely little variety stores and choice S. S. Pierce-type markets and elegant gift shops dealing only in the select. (Also rakish ones dispensing plastic trinkets.) Summer is too many postcards to choose from.
Summer is five windjammers strung out in a row leaving Camden. And behemoths, one upon another, at Newport and Nantucket. It is a gaff-rigged yawl flashing like diamonds in the sun.
Summer is a horizon daubed with spinnakers, and “hundred-harbored Maine” absorbing boats as easily, it seems, as a garden does plants. And summer is ferry and excursion boats by the dozens, and barges and freighters with no one (or so you’d swear) aboard them. And the splendid arrival of the New York Yacht Club at Oak Bluffs, with cries of: “Where’s Charlie? Where’s George? Has anyone heard from the Wee Winks yet?” filling the air.
Summer is days soft as a Cezanne and “smoky southwesters” that finally blow themselves out. It is a day so perfect you use seven of its diamond hours to run all the way home. Summer is early departures and breathless noons and harbors at twilight — each boat unspooling a bolt of blue silk as it cruises slowly by. And summer is seagulls screeching and wheeling low over the water and then coming to rest in dories or as ruching on roofs. Summer is lobster buoys strewn like confetti across harbor mouths.
Summer is the unexpected repair work that reminds you (not that you need it!) that a boat is “a hole in the water into which you pour money.” It is strange movie houses and faces copper as pennies and friendships struck up and as quickly surrendered. Summer is anticipation, absorption, exhaustion: plans scrapped by the weather (among other causes) or happily carried out. Summer is being underway for so long your bones are turning revolutions per minute, or tying up (as you swiftly discover) too early. Summer is busily sightseeing or blissfully doing nothing. It is taking your father out fishing or your aunt for a ride.
Summer is pan-fried sole and a gin-and-tonic (or a Coke) and the delicious scent of steak sizzling on someone else’s hibachi. Summer is Bass Harbor Light set amid its battalions of spruce. Summer is seas smooth as pearl-colored oil or blue as a colleen’s eyes. It is each little pine-packed island, sprigged with flowers and frosted with clouds.
Summer is gorgeous horseflies with vicious bites and midges — making up in numbers (and a sense of purpose) for what they lack in size. It is coots, cormorants, porpoises — and the whiskered, mischievous seals sunning themselves on ledges or playing hide-and-seek with your boat. Summer is the bleak splendor of the Isles of Shoals. And the blue and cream of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace popping out like corn in Block Island’s fields. It is insects buzzing deep in the grasses at Menemsha; the latter’s fishing fleet and public beach and mountains of scallop shells.
And summer is the wave of a stranger in the Cape Cod Canal (or Eggemoggin Reach or Fishers Island Sound). It is donning a lifejacket and swimming through crystal-clear water to a perfect cove. And then looking up — so romantic is the spot — half expecting to see Long John Silver come hobbling over a dune.
Summer is endless — and over all too soon.
From Mary Jane Hayes’ new book, Eye on the Sea: Reflections on the Boating Life,
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
