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Away All Boats
A Personal Guide for the Small-Boat Owner
By John N. Cole Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1994 John N. Cole
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6198-5
CHAPTER 1
Emma
Although there had been many times when my graduation from college seemed a most doubtful eventuality, the miracle of commencement was scarcely on my mind during the weeks that preceded it. All my waking thoughts had to do with boats, and nothing to do with the costs of renting a cap and gown. Even after seven years — three of them spent dealing with World War II from a Flying Fortress in Europe — my roller-coaster campus career in New Haven dissolved to an insignificant mélange of third-rate memories the moment I was offered my first job as a graduate.
It wasn't the sort of job a fellow might have discovered at the Career Counseling Office; nor was it one of those "business" opportunities that so many of my button-down, Harris-tweed classmates had been offered by the horde of Wall Street emissaries who conducted endless on-campus interviews with the best and brightest throughout our last term.
I had suffered no such indignities as an interview. My first job came to me through more accepted channels: from the father of a friend and fellow student. Erhard Matthiessen, the man who made the offer, was one of the few fathers I knew whom I could also claim as friend. For starting with my own male parent, and moving on through the list of nearly every other paternal figure I had contacted during my socially active youth, friendship had seldom been part of our relationships.
Fathers of daughters were particularly belligerent. To a man they made it clear they could see no shred of benefit of any sort accruing from my continued presence on their property or at their daughter's side. When we — the girl of my moment and I — were under the paternal roof, the paternal irritation was palpable. But when I escorted a daughter, any daughter, out from under the roof, that irritation quickly converted to open hostility, fueled by anxieties that would have been flattering had they any basis in fact.
My male friends' fathers were seldom so openly alarmed at my appearance on their doorsteps. They were, with one or two exceptions, cool and often made a point of asking what I had planned for the day, or the afternoon or evening — however long their favorite son might be in range of my hazardous acquaintance. None of my suggestions was received with enthusiasm; some were prohibited on the spot.
By my twenty-fifth year — which was where I was, what with the war and all — when my name so fortunately and inexplicably turned up on Yale's 1948 commencement roster, I had become downright discouraged with fathers. Little good, I had learned from a series of turbulent and harsh encounters, would evolve from any exchange with a male parent, no matter how diligently I remembered my manners.
Except for "Matty" Matthiessen. He was the glorious and happy exception to every paternal pattern of my life. Each time I visited the Matthiessen home in Stamford, Connecticut, at the invitation of their son and my friend, Peter, Matty's welcome rang true. His tall presence radiated good humor, a zest for life, not authority. His blue eyes danced and his smile banished all troubles. Unlike those grim paternal parents who cast their palls across my adolescence and young manhood, Matty had long since discovered some secret of fulfillment; he was, I knew, a supremely happy man, and the days and nights I shared under his roof were a tonic for my spirits, an affirmation of life that never failed to invigorate my own.
Matty could have asked me to become an account executive with Chase Manhattan, and I would have tried. I would have done anything he asked because he was, and had always been, one of the few among my older generation who gave me such good reasons to believe there could be life after youth.
I would, as I've said, have done anything he asked. But no one, certainly not myself, could ever have imagined that he would invite me to spend my first summer after graduation as captain of the Fishers Island Country Club launch. And, wonder of wonders, I would be paid for the privilege.
There is, and always has been, a great deal of loose talk and overinflated claims about how this or that experience, this individual, or that book, or those recipes can "change your life." Most of those claims are weak. Lives are seldom changed so much by a single event or insight that the change can be called significant. But Matty's offer — which I accepted on the spot — did indeed change my life, set my compass, chart my course, and move me toward a series of discoveries that continue still. For, among other things (and there were many), it marked the start of a forty-five-year intimate relationship with boats, a lifelong affair (notice I deliberately do not say love affair) that has shaped my values, and has introduced me to exhilaration, awe, terror, indignation, ecstasy, and debt, to name but a few.
As has so often been my experience, I realized shortly after my effusive acceptance that there were several intimidating problems I would have to resolve — and quickly, too — before my new job could become a reality.
My history as a small-boat skipper was vapid, to say the least. And yet, as I discovered a day or so after accepting Matty's invitation, without proper credentials my chances of getting past the U.S. Coast Guard's minimum requirements appeared all but hopeless. Because I would be paid for my time at the helm, and because the Fishers Island Country Club wanted all the insurance it could get, their newest marine acquisition would have to be operated by a certified captain, licensed, in Coast Guard language, "to carry passengers for hire."
Which meant that in less than a month I would have to clear every bureaucratic hurdle between my status as a student prince and my wished-for career as Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Of those hurdles, none was as intimidating as: (1) the Coast Guard requirement that I prove I had considerable experience as a small-boat skipper; and (2) that I take and pass a lengthy written examination (plus a one-on-one interview) at the Coast Guard's Manhattan headquarters on Cedar Street, one of those brief byways in the city's canyoned financial district — the very same place so many of my classmates hoped to be, but for quite different reasons.
If I had learned nothing else at Yale, and I surely had, I had solved a student's most critical problem: how to absorb enough information from the printed page to maintain the illusion of knowledge required by written examinations. Because so much of my stay in New Haven was spent in Manhattan and in making the journey to and fro, my actual on-campus hours had to be scholastically productive enough to avoid my expulsion — an eventuality I devoutly wished to avoid. For given my social appetites, there was no better status than student when it came to having the essential latitude my preferred behavior required. As a senior on the Dean's List, I was allowed unlimited cuts. This privilege, combined with my astute course scheduling, required my on-campus presence primarily on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
I had learned the importance of what to read, which accounted for my selection of Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling by Charles F. Chapman as the text that would allow my transformation from campus cavalier to certified captain. To my credit, I made a superb, indeed the only, choice. Today, the book is in its sixtieth edition and is as close to becoming a bible as the Good Book itself. When I plucked the volume from the jumbled shelves of the Yale Co-op (where I still had credit), the book had half the bulk it has since acquired. But it was then, as it is now, perfectly designed to take a neophyte boatman from ignorance to understanding in a relatively few crisply written and functionally illustrated pages.
With my Chapman at my side, as opposed to Theodore Green's Philosophy of Art — the book I was supposed to be reading in preparation for my final exams — I learned the first of what I still know and understand about the rules of the road (at sea), the language of buoys, the points of the compass, fundamental navigation (with compass, chart, timepiece, and common sense), useful sailor's knots, and the language of lights — red, green, and white. "White over white, fishing tonight" is as ingrained in my consciousness today as it was forty-five years ago. And I never hesitate to explain to anyone who will listen what those two white lights on a mast are saying when I can spot them on the horizon.
Charles Frederic Chapman surely never knew it, but his text got me prepared for the most important examination of my life.
But no book could meet the challenge posed by the Coast Guard's requirements for experience. Just to qualify to take the written test, I had to document a minimal amount of time as a small-boat skipper in northeastern coastal waters.
Those waters that I had sailed, rowed, or motored in the entire quarter-century of my existence were limited to Three Mile Harbor, Gardiners Bay, the fringes of the Atlantic off Montauk Point and East Hampton, and Georgica Pond, with my time on Georgica representing more than 90 percent of those hours. I was certain then, as I am now, that Georgica Pond was not included in the Coast Guard's lexicon of coastal waters. But it, and the Emma, were all I had.
These days, it would be difficult for anyone to visualize the Emma. They simply do not build boats like her anymore. I am reasonably certain they did not build many boats like her during the 1930s, when she was first launched.
How many boats that served as well as the Emma were discovered at Macy's? But that is where my step-grandfather, Rodney Burnett, first saw her and bought her as a suprise gift for my grandmother, Emma Darrow Dodd Burnett. Those grandparents lived in the last, outermost house on the Georgica side of Apaquogue Road in East Hampton, then a far different place than it has become. Where media luminaries now abound, families spent their summers — families of upper-middle-class gentry, but families nevertheless, with traditional opinions of how a summer should be spent. Fathers (and grandfathers) worked "in town" from Monday through Friday, and either "drove down the island" on Friday evening or took the Long Island Railroad's notorious Cannonball and were met at the small white station, with its red rambler roses in bloom, by mothers, grandmothers, and children in wooden station wagons, one or two of them with a name like "Dunedin" hand-lettered in black paint over the varnished panel of the driver's-side door.
For those children — like my sister and my two brothers and me — fortunate enough to live on that blessed strip of sandy land, there was adventure enough at our doorstep. With our neighbors and friends, the Helmuth, Scott, Keck, James, and Wainwright sons and daughters, we seldom left our home grounds. Why should we? On one side we had the open Atlantic, its heaving vastness stretching from the broad, white, warm sands of Georgica Beach across and across and across until at last ... Dakar. On the other, we had the infinitely more benign but no less awesome and mysterious presence of Georgica, with the main body of its waters spanning a reach that began just across a slim strand of beach at the Atlantic and probed perhaps three miles inland, where the tips of the pond's thin, final fingers wriggled through cattails, scrub oak, and pitch pine until they brushed the two-lane, concrete ribbon that was then, and still is, the Montauk Highway.
Often in the late fall and winter, when the Atlantic raged under the brutal hand of a southeast gale, the barrier beach at Georgica's seaward arm would be breached by heedless, surging swells. Pond waters, grown stale under a summer sun, would flush their own instant escape to the sea while that same sea left something of itself within the pond's muddy womb. From those seeds would spring lives not often seen in waters catalogued as fresh by most observers. Impregnated by the fertile ocean, Georgica gave birth to marvelous broods of blue crabs, spearing, alewives, giant silver eels, and sometimes flounder, all the while finding space for its natural children: painted turtles, mummychogs, sticklebacks, and some of the largest, meanest snapping turtles known to man.
Over the years, the Emma discovered most of Georgica's secrets. When she first arrived, brought to that outermost house in one of the Home Sweet Home moving trucks, I was too young to skipper the Emma on my own. She arrived early in the 1930s, about the time my father grappled manfully with the Wall Street disaster called "The Crash." A stockbroker of verve and optimism, he was slapped hard by the realities of called margins and closed banks. The family quit our duplex at 139 East 79th Street and moved to a large but definitely shopworn place in Glen Cove, Long Island.
For reasons that I have never discovered, my brother Chick and myself were enrolled as boarding students at Friends Academy in Locust Valley, a coed school that took only a few boarders. My brother and I were the youngest — he was nine and I was ten — and although Friends was a gentle and seriously Quaker school, we were quite miserable there.
I'm sure Roddy B (my step-grandfather's family name) and my grandmother sensed our loneliness, for as soon as they opened the Georgica house — often as early as March — they would make a point of stopping by Friends on their way down the island on Friday afternoon to pick up one or both of us boys. Those moments when a teacher came looking for us to tell us our grandparents were waiting at the school's front entrance were among the happiest of my boyhood. In those days, evidently a survivor of the financial quake, Roddy B drove a handsome Packard, large, black, gleaming, its spoked wheels as regal as the wheels on an emperor's chariot. With Roddy B in the driver's seat and my grandmother at his side, Chick and I would ride in back, choosing more often than not to sit in the two plush "jump seats" that folded down and faced backward. Cocooned in the Packard's humming and secure interior, we watched each familiar landmark glide by, knowing that as soon as the "Big Duck" showed up alongside the road outside Flanders, my grandmother would turn and say, "We're almost there boys." That Big Duck, I understand, is still there. Whether Long Island ducks — properly plucked and packaged — are still sold from within its ample frame, I do not know.
I do know that being told we were almost home made the rest of the trip seem even longer. But when the Packard swung right off the Montauk Highway just beyond Georgica's westernmost creeks, and we followed country lanes headed south to Apaquogue Road, when I could smell the soft salt of the rolling Atlantic, then my heart would pound and pump joy through every vessel. And when the Packard slowed for the open, white gate that separated our long, low, shingled house and its long, narrow lawns from the Campbells' house, then I loved that house, that ocean, that beach, that Georgica more than I have loved it any time since. And it is a place, my home landscape, that I have always loved.
Much of that love was fired by the intensity of the relief I knew because I had been granted a pardon from those empty Friends Academy corridors and classrooms that echoed their desolate weekend whispers. And more love flowed from both Roddy B and my grandmother; both enjoyed their role as surrogate parents and took from only the best parts. Discipline was all but nonexistent, school was never mentioned, and some of the most wonderful food any boys have ever tasted came from Roddy B's kitchen where he was the chef, keeper of the ponderous and mysterious coal stove, market shopper, dishwasher, and beverage master — all duties he executed with a delightfully busy, bustling good humor, and with fragments of old songs, whistled arias, and long shaggy-dog stories told over elaborate desserts that made each of his meals an occasion for joy.
He tended the fires, some wood, some flickering at the base of the portable kerosene heaters, that kept the March chill at bay and made that summer place as snug as any north woods cabin. He drove me on his shopping trips to stores that had not yet become supermarkets, stores where he knew each clerk and the proprietor's family, stores where the men and women seemed as happy to see Rodney Burnett return to East Hampton as I was to be with him to watch their welcome.
Every moment of those weekend boons was wondrous. Newly arrived red-winged blackbirds screeched from wavering cattail tops as the males claimed their breeding territories. And on March 23, every spring, the first ospreys would return, soaring in high circles above the Georgica Cove that fronted that house. I would lie on my back on the lawn watching those great fish hawks until one folded its wings and dived, a projectile shot from the heavens into Georgica's waters gleaming under a blinding spring sun. When the bird all but vanished in the white water of its splash, there would be a moment when motion ceased. Then, with labored, slow strokes of its broad wings, the osprey rose from the water, sometimes with empty talons hanging, but most often grasping a silver alewife, the sun flashing on its wet scales. The rising osprey worked hard to gain altitude and bank toward its nesting grounds high in a tree in the woods off to the northwest, on the far side of the Talmadge farm that filled the fields across Georgica from our house with Jersey cows, one fierce bull, and several huge workhorses whose hoofs sometimes thundered behind the fences as the horses themselves surged with spring's adrenaline.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Away All Boats by John N. Cole. Copyright © 1994 John N. Cole. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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