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.