The Edge of Maine (2 page)

I
'd first come to the edge of Maine at fourteen from the sky, riding a DC-3 into Bangor a few minutes after a midsummer sunset and then by Pontiac station wagon to Castine. I was visiting a girl I scarcely knew; we'd met during a glee club concert at my school. She was fifteen, an only child, and her dad, driving along the Penobscot River, was asking questions—where did I expect to go to college and did I sail?—and his wife was trying to draw my attention to points of historical and topographical interest out there in the night. In the back seat the girl and I were already holding hands and I wasn't looking out any car windows. After Bucksport the parents clammed up the final half hour as their headlights bounced off streaks of fog swirling at the shoulders of country roads. The station wagon poked hesitantly down a finger of land bounded by the Penobscot and Bagaduce Rivers, to its tip on Perkins Point. The drive must have tired them, because after feeding us hot chocolate in their big country kitchen, they sent us off to bed. My room was upstairs at one end of a long hall with creaky pine floors; their daughter's was at the other end; mommy and daddy slept between, with their door open. The next morning, anxious that I might be called on to show what I'd meant when I'd answered that I “liked” to sail—without mentioning that I had been in a sailboat once in my life, and hadn't been happy to be there—I woke soon after dawn, and before me I saw for the first time one of coastal Maine's representative prospects. The house was set on a bluff above Wadsworth Cove and my bedroom windows were aimed to look across a few miles of Penobscot Bay to Islesboro. The curtains hung still and heavy at my open windows, and for a moment I believed it was drizzling rain from my ceiling. Outside was milky, thick. Whatever sailors did, I reckoned, was not going to be done this morning. I gathered my damp sheets around my damp flannel pajamas and fell back asleep. The fog was as lazy as I; it stayed put the whole week. I had much opportunity to study this fog. Its physical properties—droplets responding sluggishly to gravity and stirred gently by an occasional breeze—were dynamic, but the affective atmosphere of the matter—gloom, dampness, a shutoff of the world—was static and unrelenting. A couple of days before I was scheduled to leave, my hosts didn't even try to disguise their anxiety: DC-3s weren't flying into or taking off from Bangor. I manfully volunteered to hang around till the murk burned off, but these considerate folks wouldn't hear of monopolizing more of my summer and sent me home by bus. My soi-disant girlfriend seemed stoic about my leave-taking. Rumbling along Route 1 during that long, long journey to New York—past many a roadside enterprise selling garden gnomes or lobster traps, and crossing the occasional bridge with the rumor of water below—I realized that I'd have to wait to “see” that part of Down East beyond the low tide line. Maine was in no hurry to show its stuff to me. Meantime I began Dickens's
Bleak House,
which my hosts had given me as a souvenir:

Thirty years later, asked “Do you sail?,” I'd respond with a straight face: “Do I sail? Are you kidding?” In 1982, aboard our thirty-foot cutter
Blackwing,
clearing Race Point northwest of Cape Cod's tip at Provincetown, on an offshore course bearing northeast 112 nautical miles for Monhegan Island, my wife asked, “Are you sure you can do this?” I gave the only possible answer.

Priscilla and I had sailed a good deal by then, in the Caribbean and Europe and along both American coasts. We'd bought
Blackwing,
our second cruising boat, three summers before. Now she was nicely broken in, sturdy and reliable, rigged with a self-tending jib and driven when necessary by a diesel auxiliary. She was beamy and heavy, built to go offshore and stay awhile. This was to be her first overnight passage offshore. Typically we sailed her within a fifty-mile radius of Jamestown, Rhode Island, where we lived then: to Cuttyhunk, Block Island, Nantucket, Stonington. These were frequently open-ocean passages, subject to what seemed like an impressive inventory of perils: storms, heavy seas, rain, patches of fog from time to time. But we'd depart in the morning, allow generous time to alter our course or destination to adjust to the weather, sail until late afternoon, provide a comfortable margin of daylight to find a mooring or drop anchor, watch the kids fish, have the Mount Gay poured before dusk, congratulate ourselves on our prudence and competence.

So we had decided soberly to let
Blackwing
convey us in measured stages from Jamestown to Penobscot Bay. First night at Cuttyhunk, second night at Wings Neck, riding the dawn tide east through the Cape Cod Canal followed by a nice downwind sail to Race Point. The final leg would be the new experience: sailing twenty-plus hours out of sight of land with virtually no seamarks, aiming for Monhegan, a big bold island with a lighthouse.

Assuming a clear night to let the full moon shine down its nighttime consolation, our enterprise nevertheless presented for us challenges of stamina and navigational sagacity. Priscilla—bearing full-time duties as cook, lookout, and general counsel—would give limited service at the helm. My sons could each keep a steady course, but they were kids: Nicholas was just shy of fourteen, Justin was eleven. Holding a precise course across the Gulf of Maine was no petty imperative. The currents swirl erratically, and given poor visibility an on-the-button landfall would be a matter of blind hazard. This dilemma kept circumspect sailors far from Maine. Its chief topographical attraction—rock-strewn coasts and myriad islands—makes close-to-shore sailing a grim option. Sailing Down East once upon a time separated lambs from wolves. The advent of affordable electronic navigational instruments teased the lambs forth, and here we were, bubbling “downhill” as sailors in those waters say of our course before the wind.

The state of electronic navigation in 1982 was transitional. Global positioning system (GPS) receivers, today almost as ubiquitous as the compass, were still a glimmer in the Pentagon's eye. Radar was big, clumsy, ruinously expensive, and unsuited to small sailboats. Prudent mariners who had experience sailing offshore in Maine were equipping themselves with Loran. This device, using land-based signals to triangulate positions, was tricky to tune and use, and it cost a pretty penny back then, maybe two thousand dollars. We must have spent half that sum on the cases of wine now being shaken to ruin stowed in our bilge. Still, I felt good vibes, the kind I'd once felt kicking the bald rear tire of a used street-racing Norton motorcycle and telling the salesman that I had a hunch the bike (dripping oil and festooned with lightning-bolt decals) had been fastidiously cared for, so didn't he agree I was wise to buy it? Besides, I was going to use a radio direction finder (RDF), a device that was basically a little radio turned this way and that to locate the null—or dead spot—on a radio transmitter signaling at known intervals from a known position. In our case this position was a tower atop Monhegan Island. Theoretically, one could sail along the path of this radio beam to its source. Aircraft had used RDF for many years. I had practiced in daylight with an evolved version of the instrument—a silent radio shaped like a pistol and with a compass for a sight—and I was satisfied with the approximate accuracy of the outcome. Nothing was perfect, and, as experienced sailors never tired of repeating, electronics were meant to be used as backups. A far-sighted offshore mariner navigated by visual reference and DR, dead reckoning, defined by one dictionary as “predictive calculation based on inference,” defined by seafaring folk wisdom as “dead wrong.”

After sunset I went below to catch a couple of hours of sleep, leaving Nicholas at the helm. I could feel the steady waves lift our transom and slew us a bit windward and feel him correct in the deliberate manner—nothing panicked or forced—of someone who knows what he is doing. Justin was in the cockpit with him, looking around for traffic. Their voices were low and steady, intimate. Priscilla was below, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp, as I listened to the weather radio. The Maine coastal forecast was summer-generic: wind southwest ten to twelve knots, with a chance of fog. This hard chance was forecast in a bored, matter-of-fact voice. In the twenty-first century marine forecasts are delivered by computer-generated voices,
^*
but in 1982 the dispassionate voice we heard was enough to chill me in my bunk. I poked my head through the companionway hatch to remind the boys that if the fog came, to wake me right away. The moon was dimmed by a screen of thin clouds, but I could see it. Went below; lay down; closed my eyes. Was gone.

Nicholas was talking. “It's here.”

He sounded grim. It sure was there. My sleeping bag was heavy with it. My glasses were wet. I had no right to be surprised. Just before I went below I'd wiped moisture from the compass dome and cowl, and when I'd spoken to my boys in the cockpit I'd seen my breath. That had been more than two hours ago. Now Priscilla was sleeping.

“Did you see other boats?”

Justin said it had just happened. Not there and then there, moon blinking off like a burned-out bulb.

“But before it happened, did you see anything?” I willed my voice to hold steady. It was 3:35, and we were approaching the Portland shipping lanes. With any luck we would spot the big light on Monhegan in a few hours. Now I couldn't see the top of our mast, the bowsprit, anything out there that wasn't within touching distance. Like the Beaufort Scale used to grade winds systematically, meteorologists convey specific qualities by what sound to be loosely descriptive words: “fog” occurs when horizontal visibility is reduced to less than two-thirds of a mile and “heavy fog” when it declines to a quarter-mile. This was past heavy. “Dense,” you might call it, “thick o' fog.” To describe the experience of this degree of fog at night, Roger Duncan—co-author of
The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast,
an East Boothbay citizen, and author of the authoritative
Sailing in the Fog
—abandons the language of exact measure and declares “you might as well have your head in a bag.”
Sailing in the Fog
wasn't published until 1986, so how could we have known four years earlier Duncan's advice: “No one who goes to sea for pleasure would sail a boat among the ledges and islands of a broken coast at night in the fog. Anchor. Stay where you are.”

I asked my sons again to tell me the last sights they had seen. They agreed that they'd noticed a set of fast-moving lights to seaward, heading across our bow. Pretty far ahead.

“How far?”

They couldn't say, they said. It was tricky to judge light at night, whether it was far off and bright or dim and near.

“Any other shipping?”

“Something on our course, coming up astern. A sailboat, maybe. I don't think it's moving faster than we are.”

But we weren't moving. We might as well have been anchored. We were becalmed, rolling gently in the oily seas. The sails dripped dew; the boys dropped and furled them. We were “off-soundings,” in water too deep to measure. That was good, I guessed. I fired up the faithful Yanmar diesel, never a missed beat these three years. Breathing felt difficult, as though a barber were holding a damp towel to my nose and mouth while I waited for a tanker to crawl into our cockpit. I posted Nick at the bowsprit, resumed forty-five degrees, smelled coffee cooking. Priscilla was looking through the hatch at the sky, ahead, astern at me.

“Priscilla …” I began.

“Just keep your head,” she said.

 

F
OG IS:
A
METAPHOR.
A
BANK.
A
BLANKET THAT MAKES
you shiver. Wet blanket. A wall. It's a bitch, a son of a bitch, everywhere in the universe (till it scoots away as slippery as it came, “scaling it up,” as sailors say). It's a scare, a horror, can blind you to the ledge that will grind your keel and tear your rudder out, stonehearted, a stone killer. It's cunning and reckless, a damned freak, a dirty trick. It's ugly or beautiful, depending on whether you're a navigator or an aesthetician. Jack the Ripper used high humidity to cloak his bloodthirsty prowlings; J. M. W. Turner found filtered loveliness in vapor, steam, and what came to be called smog, the coal-fired, greenish-yellowish-orangish-brownish infernal fog Dickens saw as “soft black drizzle.” Edward Bullough, a Cambridge don, chose fog at sea to illustrate his influential theory of “psychical distance,” adumbrated in 1912 in the
British Journal of Psychology: