The Map of True Places (21 page)

H
AVING FORGOTTEN THAT HE'D
agreed to teach the class tonight, Hawk had planned to go to Zee's after work to install the railing.

As part of his employment contract for the summer, he was to co-teach a celestial-navigation course sponsored by the National Park Service. Though most of the
Friendship
's navigation was done by GPS, Hawk was the only member of the crew who was proficient in celestial skills, and the captain wanted each of the ship's journeys logged as if it were still the early 1800s, when all navigation was done by the stars.

This would have been fine with Hawk, except that many of the classes, which were taught at the Visitors' Center and not at sea, conflicted with his duties on the ship. When he had agreed to teach, he'd assumed that the classes would be held on the
Friendship
as she sailed, allowing the students to learn to take the twilight sights. What he didn't know at the time was that the
Friendship
rarely sailed at all, and when she did, she sometimes carried a few VIPs, but almost never any regular passengers. Though she was coast guard–certified to sail, as a general rule the
Friendship
stayed in port except when she served as Essex County's or the National Park Service's flagship for maritime festivals up and down the coast. Most days she sat at the wharf while large groups of tourists boarded and disembarked.

Recently an application had been made to the coast guard to commission the ship, which, if accepted, would allow the
Friendship
to take passengers out to sea and provide students and any other groups with a firsthand experience of Salem's sailing history, something they were unlikely to understand any other way. But commissioning was a slow process. Hawk was able to bring the class aboard the moored ship to practice noon sights and learn to determine latitude, but he hadn't been able to take them out to sea. For the most part, this summer's celestial-navigation course had been confined to the classroom, something Hawk found appalling, and he didn't hesitate to say so.

He was no less vocal the night of the first class when the other instructor, a man who had been teaching the course for the last five years, espoused the theory that sun sights alone were sufficient for navigation and that he had made several trips across the Atlantic taking nothing but sun sights.

“What other instruments did you have?” Hawk sounded doubtful.

“Well, we didn't have GPS, I can tell you that much,” his co-teacher huffed.

Hawk's co-teacher was an older gentleman named Briggs, a seasoned veteran with good credentials, who had once crossed the Atlantic solo from Plymouth, England, to the United States in a sixty-five-foot multihull. Hawk thought the guy was lucky to have made it. He didn't criticize Briggs in front of the class, but he later expressed a strong opinion that the class should be taught using more than one navigational technique. Sun sights were certainly a part of celestial navigation, but so were moon, planet, and star sights, and Hawk could not conceive of teaching a course without all of them.

“They will learn to use a sextant,” Briggs said. “And for this beginning class, sun sights are quite satisfactory.”

In an odd twist, this year's class consisted entirely of women. The other crew members kidded Hawk because the online brochure for the class had featured photographs of both instructors, and they were
certain that this was the reason for the exclusively female enrollment.

“He looks like a young George Clooney,” one of the crew said, referring to Hawk's photo.

“Shut up,” Hawk said.

After the first class, Hawk wanted to quit. Not only did he think an inside class was ridiculous, but the conflicts in his schedule left the
Friendship
shorthanded. And there was another reason. For the most part, the class full of women was fine with him, but there was a small group of them, known well to the other instructor, that the crew had nicknamed the “Yacht Club Cougars.” Three of them attended the first class. By the second, the group had expanded to seven. It wasn't that he had anything against them, though they were a little cliquish and very outspoken, which tended to keep the other, less outgoing women from asking many questions. But their attempts at humor were fairly bawdy and were usually directed at Hawk, which might have amused him had it not made Briggs envious and argumentative. After one particularly disagreeable class, Hawk decided to talk to his boss. Contract aside, this class didn't need two instructors, and the two men clearly didn't like each other. Hawk would volunteer to quit.

But the other instructor beat him to it. “I can't work with him,” Hawk overheard Briggs tell their boss. “You're going to have to choose one or the other of us, and let me remind you that not only do I have seniority, but my family has donated quite a bit of money to this project over the years.”

Hawk quit the class. But a few weeks later, his boss came back to him. They'd had some complaints from the enrollees, who agreed strongly with Hawk's assessment that the class should be taught at least in part on the water.

“Great idea,” Hawk said, happy that the students would finally get their money's worth. “But why are you telling me?”

“We have an issue,” his boss said.

“Yeah? What's that?” Hawk said.

“Over the years Briggs seems to have developed a problem with seasickness.”

“You're kidding.” Hawk couldn't help but smile.

“We were hoping we could convince you to take them out in your boat. It would only be for one class,” he said. “And we do have a contract.”

Hawk was well aware that they hadn't docked his pay when he'd stopped teaching the class. “Okay,” he said. “Which class are we talking about?”

“The one on twilight sights,” he said. “We've titled it Rocking the Sextant. The sign-up sheet is already full.”

“I'll bet,” Hawk said. Behind his boss, some of the crew were snickering. “You wouldn't have had anything to do with that title, would you?” he asked one of them.

“Not guilty,” his friend Josh said. “But if you're looking for crew to help out with the Cougars, I'm sure you'll get some volunteers.”

“Funny,” he said.

“So you'll do it?” his boss asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not without a pay cut.”

 

H
AWK ARRANGED TO TAKE THE
class out in his boat, a 1941 Sim Davis lobster boat, a forty-footer with the winch and gear removed, which Hawk had spent last summer restoring and was now living on just a few slips down from the
Friendship.

 

T
HERE ARE TWO TIMES A
day when it is best to take sights: dawn and dusk. Twilight sights are taken just before the horizon
disappears into either darkness or light, in those few minutes when the planets and locator stars are still visible. It's a moment in time, and it takes practice. For the beginner especially, it would be important to get to a spot where Hawk knew that the stars would be visible along the horizon. Which meant they had to get away from shore.

They left an hour before sunset in order to make it to open ocean. It was a relatively calm evening, and his boat was sturdy, so they wouldn't have to deal with much chop. This was both good and bad. The sextant was a durable instrument meant to take vertical angles from a moving ship. One of the reasons for going out was that the students would get used to the movement of the boat and accustomed to taking readings in any conditions.

The women arrived early, with picnic gear and bottles of wine.

“I hope you also brought your notebooks and sextants,” he said when he saw the bottles sticking from their L.L. Bean canvas bags.

They headed out, passing the tiny lighthouse on Winter Island, then the Salem Willows Park with its long wharf lined with men fishing for stripers. When Hawk passed the confines of Salem Harbor, he gunned the engine, heading between the Miseries and Children's Island and as straight out to sea as was possible in the sheltered waters that ran between Salem and Cape Ann.

“Where are we going?” one of the Cougars finally asked.

“We have to get past land by twilight,” he said. They sat quietly in the stern. He finally stopped the boat at a spot he knew well, where the chop wasn't too bad. Behind them, fading into the distance, was the entire North Shore, and to the south the vague outline of the Boston skyline. But straight ahead, if you didn't look back, was a clear horizon line.

“It's a bit rough out here,” another student said.

“Not at all,” Hawk replied.

“What if we're in the middle of a shipping lane?”

“Sometimes a shipping lane is a perfect place to be,” he said, laughing.

They all looked around nervously.

“Relax,” he said. “We're not in a shipping lane.”

“Phew.”

“But can anyone tell me when a shipping lane might be a place you'd want to be?”

They all looked at each other.

Finally, one of the shyer women spoke up. “If you get in trouble and need to be rescued,” she said. “A shipping lane would be a good place to get to. Like if you're breaking down or something.”

“Are we breaking down?” Another woman asked, horrified.

“Relax, ladies, we're not in a shipping lane, and we're not breaking down. But I'm glad to see someone has been reading the book.”

One of the women had pulled out a bottle of wine and was looking for a corkscrew.

“I didn't know this was a party,” Hawk said.

“I generally like to have a little wine before I rock my sextant,” the woman said.

The other women giggled, and Hawk hoped he wasn't blushing.

“You ladies are relentless,” he said.

“We prefer to think of ourselves as focused,” one of them said.

“I think you'll focus better without the wine,” he said.

“You're not very playful.” The woman sounded disappointed.

“Work now, play later,” Hawk said, taking the bottle and putting it back in the bag.

They got out their notebooks and their plastic sextants, things Hawk hated but had to admit were adequate for this class. He kept one of them himself as a backup, though if he had to, he could get a reading without a sextant at all. Watches were another matter. In order to get an accurate reading, you had to track Greenwich Mean Time to the
second. If you spent enough time on the water, you planned for all possible worst-case scenarios. He knew at least three sailors who had horror stories about failed GPS devices. Some were ocean legend, but he knew that at least a few of them were true.

Tonight the ladies were all wearing quartz wristwatches, something you didn't see much in these days of cell phones. Hawk turned on the shortwave and tuned in to WWV to sync with Greenwich Mean Time. He listened to the tick and the tones until the time was announced, and he looked on as the women checked their watches. So far they seemed to know what they were doing. A good sign, he thought.

Only one of the women hadn't brought a watch, and he quietly handed her his. He had at least two more of them in the cabin—more worst-case-scenario planning. It was possible to figure Greenwich Mean Time by taking moon sights, but it was difficult and not nearly as accurate, and he didn't like to do it except in an extreme emergency. He wasn't going to even bring up moon sights tonight. He didn't want to confuse them. Let them master using the sextant first.

 

“O
KAY,” HE SAID.
“F
IND A
spot you're comfortable with and set up your sextants.”

He watched as the women positioned themselves in the stern, setting up their instruments and consulting their almanacs.

“Have you all done your calculations? Do you know what stars you're looking for?”

They couldn't have tracked their present location in preparation for tonight, but they were close enough to where they started that the locator stars should be the same. He walked around, checking their calculations. They looked pretty accurate.

“Now what?” a woman said.

“Now we wait.”

Hawk went below and checked the time. He had hoped to be back in time to do Zee's railing tonight.

“May I please use the head?” one of the women asked him.

Hawk pointed her to the bow of the boat.

When she came out, she spotted the brass sextant in the mahogany case that sat open on the table.

“That's a beautiful sextant,” she said. “Is it an antique?”

“It was my grandfather's,” he said.

“May I try it?”

“Sorry,” he said. “There's an aluminum one over there, if you want to give that one a try, but this one's off-limits.”

He handed the other sextant to her, and she went back on deck looking as if she had just won a prize.

“Hey, where'd you get that?” one of the other women asked.

“Jealous?” She laughed and set up the aluminum sextant in the stern.

Hawk came out on deck and checked the sunset. In the distance the landscape of Boston glimmered red and purple.

Seeing the trace of Boston skyline, Hawk's mind jumped to Lilly Braedon and her fall into those same waters. Though it hadn't happened that way at all, in his mind's eye her fall was in slow motion, the cell phone falling with her as it dropped out of her hand. It seemed such a surreal sight that his mind played it in slow motion frame by frame until she disappeared into the shining sapphire of the water below, slow, dreamlike, impossible to believe even in memory.

Quickly he turned away from the image and in the opposite direction, toward the horizon line. The sun had set about ten minutes ago. It was twilight.

“Check your watches,” he said. “It's time.”

The chatter that had been a low part of the sound level stopped.

“Tonight we're looking to fix our position on at least two of the three
stars you have chosen. With any luck we will be able to see all three. They should be low on the horizon. This won't be like the sights you took from the
Friendship.
There's a lot more motion out here. You will want to rock the sextants back and forth, watching the arc, and keep adjusting until the star you sight is sitting directly on the horizon line.