Sailing Alone After Sixty
Clara Stites
The wind has picked up, gusting from the southwest. My little boat rushes noisily through the water, and I have to loop the mainsheet once around the cleat on the centerboard trunk. I never cleat the mainsheet, always keep it ready to run out in case there’s a sudden knockdown; but when the wind is strong, I use the cleat to take some of the pressure off my hand. My other hand is on the tiller.
If the wind had been like this half an hour ago, I probably would not have ventured out. I think for a moment of turning back; I haven’t gone far from the dock in front of our house, the dock my husband built long ago when we were lithe and immortal. But I’m out on the river now, and the boat is foaming happily along, and this feels exactly right, this quick leaning and lifting of the boat, the light spray that rises in bright and intermittent bursts over the bow, the way the tiller tugs at my hand.
I have sailed small boats all my life. I am a good sailor, intuitive and experienced. I understand the wind and the water and why my boat reacts the way it does. When I am sailing, I feel that I am free and quick once more. I swoop. I glide. I escape my terrestrial clumsiness. This afternoon, an osprey circles high above me, watching for its chance to plummet down upon a fish in the shallow water near our dock. So effortless, poised there above the river, his wings two dark angles against the sky.
A sudden gust of wind makes the boat heel sharply, and I brace my foot against the centerboard trunk to keep from sliding across the smooth cockpit floor. This is a wooden cat boat, built more than 35 years ago. It is six feet wide and only 12 feet long, the forward half decked over, the after half an open cockpit. There is a single mast, a single gaff-rigged sail, a tiller made from a long, slim curve of locust. The cockpit planking is cedar, narrow strips snugged together and fastened to the ribs below. There are no benches, no foot rails. I sit on the cockpit floor or, if the wind gets stronger, I will crouch on the coaming—the low wooden rail that surrounds the cockpit. From there, I will lean into the boat so that I can reach the tiller, and with my other hand use the pull of the mainsheet to keep my weight balanced. That’s part of what I love about sailing—the push and pull of it, the balance between wind and water and my own weight.
My husband no longer sails with me. He does not like to change position from port to starboard and back again with every tack, and he is uncomfortable sitting on the cockpit floor. I urge him to come with me to yoga class, but he has given up, saying his body has never been flexible, why bother now. He has grown so stiff that he can barely reach his own feet. He wears slip-on shoes and struggles daily with his socks. He still does carpentry, but his projects have evolved as we have aged; instead of docks and swing sets, he builds the railings and access ramps that ease my way in and out of the house.
Our daughter, sensing something wrong, has suggested that I not sail alone. She is probably right, although I haven’t told her about my balance problems, how the sky seems suddenly to swirl. Or how I did, in fact, fall last week getting off the boat. I had been sailing alone that afternoon. The day was beautiful, mild, a light breeze, Canada geese grazing in the tall marsh grass. I sailed for an hour or more, then headed home, lowered the sail and tied up the boat at the dock.
As I stepped from boat to dock, the world spun. In excruciating slow motion, I tipped backwards and fell. My shoulders and head struck the boat, and then I was down into the water, trapped and flailing in the narrow space between boat and dock. The water closed over my head, snatching away my sunglasses and choking me with the taste of silt. I imagined my body trapped beneath the boat, crushed between boat and dock, and with a violent kick against the river bottom, I forced myself to the surface, spit away the murky water and managed, finally, to grasp the edge of the dock and hang there until I could rein in my fright.
Though I will keep this from our daughter, I did tell my husband, making it a silly story: how I swam away from the dock and crawled like a blind walrus onto the marsh. “Oh no,” he leaned toward me to touch the red welt that had risen already on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” When I laughed, shrugging away his concern, he simply nodded and said, “Be careful, please.” He understands that I will go again.
What I have not told my husband, and will not, is that my balance—or lack of it—frightens me. It is the M.S., I know. I also know that I’ve been lucky, diagnosed more than 10 years ago and still, at least for now, walking, though in truth I can’t manage for very far, no longer than five or 10 minutes. Lately there have been too many moments when I don’t know where my feet are, moments when the world twists out of focus. Fear is changing my life, making me tentative. I walk carefully, I hold stair rails, I dread the coming treachery of winter ice.
Our house is on the river, an estuary really, wide and tidal and curving out to the bay two miles beyond our dock. Today, my husband is playing golf, so I am more alone than usual; no one knows I am out in the boat. But it is early October, my favorite time. As I sail, the sun is bright. The tide is high, washing the tall marsh grass with silver and deconstructing the edge between land and water. The marsh grass itself is browning now and beginning to flatten so that the airy purple flowers of the sea lavender stand above the grass like a faint cloud of color. The high bushes of poison ivy and sumac farther back from the river have turned a rust red, but the larger trees are still green, a dark, end-of-summer green, just exclaiming here and there with a branch of red or yellow leaves.
For now the river belongs to me and a few other autumn boaters, most of us inhabitants of the houses scattered along the shore. Summer is over, schools have reopened, the noisy jet skis and powerboats are gone. I sail past an old man fishing from his dory. I don’t know his name, but we greet each other as always with raised hands. The river connects us.
I have known this river for most of my life. My husband and I bought land and built our house more than 20 years ago; our children grew up playing in the woods, the river’s marshes, the brackish waterways. Long before that, when I was 10 or 12, my grandmother often brought me here to visit her friends, the Stetsons, who lived close to the river’s mouth. They drank afternoon cocktails and laughed on the porch while I explored the shore and watched the river current. Even then I was intrigued by its swiftness and depth.
The river is shallower now, filling gradually with a dark peaty mud. A wide sandbar runs almost all the way across the river’s mouth, and the swift current has been slowed. The Stetsons are dead, but I remember Mr. Stetson’s stories. When he was a boy, he said, there were big boats on the river. A two-masted schooner came every spring to pick up a local farmer’s sheep and carry them across the bay to summer pasture on the Elizabeth Islands. What happened to the schooner? I asked.
Mr. Stetson wasn’t sure, but thought it had been pulled up into one of the side creeks and abandoned. “You could probably still find traces of it,” he said, “if you knew where to look.” Whenever I venture by boat into the narrow arms of the estuary, I watch for the shape of that ancient keel.
One hundred years ago, woods and scattered farms lined the river shore. Since then—50 years or more—the fields were left to tangle and reforest. Now some are farms again, owned by a single farmer instead of five or six. The new farmer has cleared the vines from the trees, rebuilt the tumbled stonewalls, planted cover crops to restore the soil. From the river I can see it all, like a map of yesterday, and I delight in the fretwork of the granite walls and the greenness of the land—the close-cropped hayfields, the springy life of alfalfa, the water-bright marshes. I hear roosters crow and watch a dozen black cows move slowly across a pasture.
So much is remembered, so much lost. I sail past houses that, like the Stetson’s place, have watched over the river since I was a child. Who lives in them now? The same cherry and lilac trees lean in the front yards, and I know just where the road behind the houses dips into the little whoopsy-daisy where my grandmother liked to drive fast.
Day to day or even year to year, the river does not seem to change; its steady shallowing takes place beneath the surface, detectable only to the careful watcher. Seasons come and go, and with them high tide, low tide, wind or no wind, dark blue, light blue, glaze of ice or shimmer of sun, each day minutely different yet essentially the same. I recognize the big oak tree over there on the western shore, just how it bends out over the marsh. I have anchored beneath its branches for picnics with my children. I know there is a submerged rock near that point, so today I keep my distance. The rock and I are old acquaintances. When by mistake I have hit it, the centerboard pops up in its trunk, the boat shudders, then bumps past the rock, the centerboard descends; these things seem eternal.
Down river, the flash of a kayak paddle catches the afternoon sun. A small red boat glides over the water near the shore, flickering in and out of the shadow cast by the trees. I know this late season paddler—it is my friend Kate. Even from a distance, her short hair shines like a silvery helmet and her yellow jacket defies the shadows. She is wearing her portable oxygen backpack, the two pale tubes running from the canister to her nose. Her doctors have told her she will not live till Christmas. A malignant tumor has entangled her lungs and her heart. Inoperable, they have told her, a rare cancer, no hope at all.
She has done the chemo, she has found a hospice that will take her when she needs to go, she has bought new appliances for the kitchen her daughter will inherit. Meanwhile she is living, doing what she loves, letting the river strengthen and soothe her. We are fortunate, Kate and I, to have such choices, though hers have become frighteningly immediate.
I greet her, calling out her name. She waves to me and glides closer. I let my sail run out and for a moment Kate and I drift side by side.
“You’re very daring,” I say, “out here alone.”
“What can happen?” she answers. She coughs. She laughs.
She’s right of course. What can happen?
“Have you seen the swans?” she asks. Her smile is as quick and wide as ever. Dear intrepid Kate, how I will miss her.
“I’m looking for them,” I tell her.
“Round there, behind the little island.”
Kate digs her paddle into the water, slides away from me. I shorten sail, and our two boats move apart.
I need to see the swans fly over me.
As I sail around the island, I pass Kate’s house and then the few others near it. These are houses where people are not sick, where families live their normal lives: pack lunch for the children; let the dog out one more time before bed; clip the spent flowers from the mums and marigolds to keep them blooming as long as possible; order seeds for next year’s vegetable garden in confidence that summer will come again.
There could be almost another month of this golden autumn light, but probably the New England winter will settle over us well before Thanksgiving. Ice will form at the edges of the river, the marshes will darken and freeze. My husband and I will stay hidden inside our house, hostages to the weather. Kate will be irrevocably gone.
Behind the island, I find the swans. They float like clusters of white peony blossoms along the river’s western shore, dipping their slim necks down through the water to feed on the eel grass. The swans are ruining the river, I am told by my conservationist friends. They foul the water, they uproot the eel grass instead of grazing on it as the geese do. They are an invasive species; I must go out in the spring to addle the swan eggs. That means finding the nest, waiting for the rare moment when it is unguarded, then shaking each pale egg briskly, so that the swanlet inside is scrambled and cannot hatch.
I have never done this and will not. Partly, I am afraid to get too close to the nesting swans; more than that, I am in awe of their fierce beauty.
I sail downwind toward the birds. Already they have sensed my presence. They do not turn their heads, but there is an extra awareness, a focus to their stillness. There must be 60 of them. I try to count, looking for the straight, upward line of their necks: 70, 80, a mass of white on the water, a brilliance of white.
I know they will take off into the wind, using it for uplift as they tear their bodies from the water. They will rise and go around and above me and my boat. I will be surrounded by the whistling sweep of their wings. I wait for their explosive flight.
Sometimes I can get within 100 yards of them, but not today. Today the wind has spooked them, and of course, Kate has been paddling nearby, so they are wary. One bird starts off, then another and another. They seem to run across the water. I am so close I can see their black feet pushing at the surface of the river and hear their footsteps, a bright, hard plashing against the water.
They stretch their long necks forward. Their great wings strike the air. Then they burst up and out of the water, free of its hold. Three, four, a dozen or more. The motion of their wings creates a throbbing, humming resonance. The swans lift higher, still low over the water as they pass my boat, but rising, spiraling, the sound of their wings a wild cry against me.
The swans come every winter and, at least for now, there are more birds each year. On frosted mornings, I will watch from my window as the swans glide in a silver line up the river. In the evening I will see them return, disturbing the water with only a single dark ripple that moves away from them, growing smaller until it laps the edges of the marsh and vanishes.
Though their motion through the water is almost imperceptible, in flight, they are fierce, powerful, noisy and completely free. This is what I have been searching for today. This I will keep, a talisman against all that is inevitable.
I let my boat lie motionless in the water. The swans wheel and circle above me once more, higher now, seeming smaller against the sky though I still can hear the whistle of their wings.
When the swans have flown down river, out of my sight, out of my hearing, I will turn toward home. But first, just for a little time, I will guide my boat into one more arm of the estuary and search again for the keel of Mr. Stetson’s two-masted schooner. I won’t find it, I know, but I will look.
Then I will sail home through water floating with the immutable white feathers of the swans.