Portside

There is a kind of weariness known only to sailors.

I am no sailor, but I have climbed the coast in a little boat and arrived into a daydream spring, with mildew and mold blooming into every corner of my life, threatening to devour every one of my possessions. And so it was that we climbed off the Julep and onto the 90 foot fishing boat (a 100 year old oyster dragger, actually). Her name is Louis R, and she has a wheelhouse reached by a tall and rusting ladder. Up above the cove of our little island we look across the Reach towards town and the vantage point is supreme...

It was still cold in the evenings when we arrived from our long sea voyage and the three of us shifted into our familiar positions in our new tiny habitat. We carried trays of seedlings bound for our garden up the vertical rusting stairs, and each night hopped boats from the galley on our sailboat Julep, armed with steaming cast iron pans full of dinner across the oyster boat's deck and up into our tiny wheelhouse, with its kerosene heater. We awoke to the chatter of lobstermen on our VHF radio, laughing hoarsely and giving each other hell in the wide spaces of morning. Our shelter from the constancy of the rains was temporary, as everything around us buckled and pilled and faded and rotted as day after day we raced the clouds in our skiff, slept in our car in the parking lot by the town dock, waiting for a break in the weather to head back across.

We did get a break here in town finally, setting up shop in our friend's boathouse with its one big wooden chamber perched on the tidal rocks. A big, welcoming space with two lofts. We brought in our driftwood, we brought our little glass bottles and our spider plant and our seething arguments that filled the whole chamber and then the entire narrow cove, frothy words blowing back in our faces. We brought our big ambitions and ceaseless meal making and enthusiastic beer drinking, we brought our public radio with its twangy music and its interviews with park rangers and the fighting in Syria and the long campaign trail. We brought our snoring dog and our big strong love into those lofts. And that is how summer came to us, as a huge sigh of relief before a headlong rush of workaday activity, with only the shift in the cascade of wildflowers on the hill marking time.

The rhythm of the summer was too deep for conjuring words. The campaigners campaigned, the weeds crept out and devoured sunlight as weeds have for time immemorial. The island held me like a tiny figure perched in a teacup, clutched by a weaving cyclist. I climbed out of the teacup and already the fall's hurricanes threatened. 

Now the campaign is won! Now (this far north and east), the days are quick bursts of semiconsciousness abutted by the gathering darkness of the winter solstice. Now I've spent another month amidst stacks of boxes, another month of in-between days. 

What is not New York? Not the Old World? Not the island? 
Certainly not the South? This winter I take on Portland, Maine: it's shiny little highway and quiet, steady heartbeat. I have never spent so much time in a car in a city and as I case the streets (still the passenger), I feel like a reporter without a good lead. In other words, I am still unemployed, starting anew, and keeping at bay the flashbacks of last winter's starkly broke and bored Virginia days.

Portland is the East End and the West End, it's Munjoy Hill and Deering and Bayside and the Back Cove and it's the Old Port and the Promenades and spectacular captains' houses and hills that start off with elegant homes and descend into dingy vinyl-sided places with charming patches of roof lichen. It's still Maine, so it's stalwart in its loneliness, this confident loneliness that comes into sharper relief with each kissing ball and red and white lawn ornament that goes on display. I am eager to drive these streets at night, when the mansions and the rowhouses alike are all aglow. My island boy mocked my desire to do so as cloyingly domestic. It's not unadulterated domestic pleasure I'm after, though, but that dark and lovely loneliness of Americana, that is best experienced at Christmas, in a place that is familiar but also unknown. 

To fall down at your door

Through a queasy roll of soggy days, we arrive into warmth and sunshine, back to island life in the place that is the most stunning we have seen all along the way. These islands are the most impressive, and whereas before, each and every day hinged on the number of miles we could put behind us, now our world has folded down onto itself to untuck around the edges, origami-style, and we careen along a pale threaded sea scrim on our grey open Japanese crane of an inflatable boat, forever on the verge of arrival in home port, hair fluttering in the paper breeze. 

The island we are heading towards, the town island, is shaped just like a hurricane and nearby Hurricane Island is shaped like a crocodile. Ever since we made it back to these hometown waters to sit in our own cove on our wild little island with no town, and barely a roof in sight, I see that hurricane across the Reach and the giant sleeping reptile to our west with fresh and drunken eyes.

Just short of 1000 miles and exactly 35 days of motorsailing and we're back in this place of contoured steppes and dark blushing color. The land of 3 million shades of green, just around the bend, with summer pouring forth out of every sidewalk crack with her mossy forest breath, and the whole village chasing away the clean bitter aftertaste of winter. We turn to the long green tail of never ending afternoons. I am in love and planting potatoes. The bursts of bioluminescent algae, glimpsed all the way up the coast, are raucously beautiful here, sparkling in my late night toothpaste spit off the edge of the sailboat, and streaming behind us in a wide Peter Pan glow all the way home from town after work.

Thus go the first days; glittering and somnambulant go the days before the deluge.

Invisible towns

When there's no sun for days on end, life on the boat resembles some sort of colonial outpost in a cold and cluttered jungle. Gloves and stockings hang from the slim rafters used for storing charts, bed sheets are clammy to the touch and our jeans give off steam as we climb into them in the early morning.  We set out from each morning's cove and end up somewhere. Once we ran aground in the middle of a harbor, once we were taken in by strangers who knew these eastern waters well and treated us to drinks and the firing of their miniature brass cannon and the cannonshot rang out through the sleepy harbor, startling the legions of sleeping snowy egrets on the outer shores. Once we found our way to New York, to the great steel rush of the skyscrapers making contact with the harbor, and we were the only boat traveling down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, and I called my NY family on the Lower East Side and they ran to the balcony and watched us sailing, hearts singing, up and past the firefighter's practice rescue apartments, past the Rikers Island prison boat, past JFK where planes come down the runway straight over the mast and roar past like nothing. Whether we put up sail, and if our time underway will be a leisurely five hour trip or a strenuous 13 hour one, if we have removed our shoes and socks and rolled up our pant legs and taken turns diving down into the galley periodically and emerging with snacks like the seabirds themselves, all depends on the strange and ceaselessly varying confluence of innumerable factors: tide and current, distance to next hospitable cove, condition of skies and winds, hours to sunset, mental stability of crew.  I came into a town and the sidewalks were old and lovely flagstone. The houses perfect shades of cornflower blue and burnt umber and no one about but the occasional quiet landscaper. I came into a town and there was a lively little Main Street and everyone was jogging after work. Everything coalesced on Main Street into a shiny penny picture of a bustling town, before blurring out of focus, unsure of its own edges, it's own image past the main drag. We arrived in a town with the most dangerous inlet on the Eastern Seaboard. We were stuck there for days and climbed the ten turn spiral staircase of the lighthouse and looked upon things as a lighthouse keeper and his family once did, up under the enormous beacon that could not save so many a ship. Yesterday we walked past the sign for Interstate 95. We could be home in a few hours, we thought. But we travel by sea and it's a stranger and saltier path with a couple weeks of slogging through damp climes and encounters with the unexpected.

Dispatch from Little Nowhere (somewhere in Southwestern Jersey)

Trip log

Days underway: 5
States covered: 4
Nautical miles travelled: 252
Grog consumed: all of it
Purchases made: 15 gallons of fuel
Known songs modified so as to mock the dog'a newfound southern obesity: 27
Foil birthday balloons sighted: 5
Panamanian tanker ships with grandiose names: 3
Drops of valerian tincture administered to frantic seadog: 72
Top speed: 10.8 mph
Tiny boats crafted from food stuffs: one avocado shell, one sardine can, one Napa cabbage leaf
Current condition of hair (my own): one massive tangle
Record days passed without stepping foot on shore: 3
Natural phenomena observed: orange marbled clay beach, fish that are jumping, barn swallows attempting to nest onboard, tiny snake swimming just off the stern
Unnatural phenomena observed: rude, drunk jerkoffs in ugly powerboats (too many to count); waking to the national anthem at full blast in stereo drowning out all birdsong and all sense and echoing out from a deserted beachfront in Maryland

Postscript
Upon exiting the offending beachfront, crew glanced astern and grew more cognizant of surroundings than previous evening's fatigued travel mind had allowed. This new awareness came with the realization that said deserted beachfront abutted a powerful
military air base. What the crew could not SEE by dawn's early light was most certainly heard.

Shakedown

Not only did we leave on the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, but we left on a Friday, which is completely taboo in the ultra superstitious world a sailor inhabits. Really outdoing ourselves, in this case, we departed on Friday the 13th. Our friend who saw us off from his long and blustery pier suggested, that, as Julep was largely untested under current ownership, that this first day would be just a trial run, a shakedown. We were underway all day, as off in the distance those glaring white sea birds called gannets dive bombed into shallow Chesapeake waters, firing off little watery explosions now and then all along the surface of the Bay.

The first night we spent anchored in a pleasant upscale neighborhood inlet, and first morning found us out on the main watery passages and heading north for the first time. As I write this, we are still going, past the cheerily stalwart freestanding lighthouses, past someone's deflated foil birthday balloon, past tugs keeping barges about their business and now, in the dark, the astonished lighted suburbia of a cruise ship, stacked and glittering a few miles away. It was naive of me to think that I would read on this trip, or even tell you all that I wanted to in these snaking lines. There is nothing to do, nothing that can be done but sail and navigate and remark upon the most trivial things and the most crucial ones.

We are small little things out here, dreaming of our beautiful friends and the excitement that awaits us, dreaming each moment into being, and continually astonished by the suddenness of living in the great unknown.

Wind Delay

Soon and soon and stare and stare, the sun and warm gentle air seem forever until soon and stare, the cold and the winds move in and take over... 

Our big departure date has come and gone and we are still sitting here on the Severn River at the end of a very long pier, anxious to get underway. We're kept back by a few final preparatory details, but mostly by the western wind, which is gusting up to 35 miles an hour. 

It's probably a good thing that we didn't leave yesterday, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's big sojourn out into the icy Atlantic (although we may very well leave four days later, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's fatal rendezvous with that iceberg). 

 Luckily, we are not too big to fail or unsinkable, and there's plenty of room for all of Julep's passengers on our most luxurious of lifeboats.
  

                               

                           In the meantime, I wander the country lanes and tidal flats 

 

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees. 

 

-Adrienne Rich

Farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia

The pollen comes down in thick and lazy drifts from the pine trees. An unabashed yellow from a Third World preschool. A dull, pasty yellow that clings to everything. I find it on the door knob to the rusty marina bathroom, staining the dog's paws, swirling in puddles after storms, and stealthily topping each layer of paint I apply to the boat. We are unpacking and repacking: taking all our things out, and laying them one by one along the dock to sift through, even as the pines let down their bright dust, slowly and incrementally, to yellow the ground and all our earthly possessions.

It is April, and next week, as we set sail in our 26 foot sloop named Julep, we follow the spring up the coast. It is April, and it is Easter and it is the second anniversary of my little sister's death. When we leave, I will scatter some of her ashes here too, another place I have lived where I have loved and missed her.

We have readied for our voyage by bringing Julep around to a long pier out on the Severn River. Down the pier, where our friends run a boat carpentry operation and informal cat rehabilitation center, all is still. The earth is so flat that a topography of birds emerges. Little flighty bug eaters stalk and skim along the shortcut marsh grasses; crows flap past and into the trees; gulls, vultures and osprey send down shadows at this land's end. Out on the river, it is scarcely ever still, and we are kept up most of the night by the wild rocking of our little home and the ceaseless whine of the bumpers protecting the hull. 

Our days are blurry and shifting, chicken scratch lists on paper and orange violet moods: the thrill of imminent departure and the weight of a thousand chores.

We came to the Chesapeake in December with promises of work and a winter sail. Julep, a Maine-born vessel, had been languishing here for years. We arrived during the run up to Christmas, to a boat suffering the beginnings of mildew and rot, to a season of little work and we watched our trip funds dwindle and in February we came to terms with this being our winter destination. And so we made do with bloody marys on Sundays and slow cooked dinners and lately with the brilliant forest tapestries of flowering trees.

But this is a farewell song.  We've come to take Julep home. To return to our land of plenty.

Farewell Virginia, I see you in your closeup, I do not see you at all. 

My eyes are trained on northern nautical miles, on near and distant lands that do not bear your name. 

Farewell again, to my bright love, my fairy girl. 
Let us meet again someday on that warm and distant shore.