Leeward ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

Halfway around the world from my family in New England, I stand at the edge of the Australian Pacific. Here, the Coral Sea unrolls against white shores and sometimes, if I wait for it, the sapphire horizon parts and I can see home. Clown fish, red emperors, polka-dotted potato cod and tropical currents give way to the temperate, gray Atlantic of memory; to mackerel and blackfish flashing slate and silver, darting over craggy pier stumps decorated with blood-red sea anemone and bearded mussels. Despite arthritis and arguments, missed holidays, all kinds of distance and thousands of geographical miles, there is still one story born of the Atlantic that draws this family together, no matter that it’s been 30 years since we were on that little boat crossing the Narragansett, heading homeward in a sudden and terrific storm. This is the old, salt-crusted tale of the Leeward, her skipper and the family she bore across a darkening sea. This is a story, like so many others which wash ashore barnacled and swollen with seawater, that buoys us, regardless of the riptides of our differences, silences, and the relentless undertow of aging.

I was eight when my father bought the boat from a retired fisherman. A 17-foot tri-hull, she had four slatted, wooden seats smothered in blue oil-base outdoor house paint, a peeling poop deck and a 50-horsepower Evinrude hanging off the stern like an old, knotted sailor. Unlike V-hulled motorboats, she was a weird old duck not meant for high seas but perfect for ‘puttering around Narragansett Bay in the morning when the water’s like glass,’ my father said.

All the way home from the close of the deal, I leaned over the backseat of the ’77 station wagon and watched her squeak against the trailer: a white whale; her broad vVv-shaped hull nodding with each bump.

The Leeward was christened with a can of Narragansett Beer in the driveway and berthed beside our house in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. All six of us attended the brief ceremony: my parents, two older, preteen brothers Lee and Christiaan, myself and the dog, a mustached stovepipe of a terrier named Kelly. My parents chose Leeward as a product of their names, Leonore and Edward, and as a directional term meaning to move with the wind or to be sheltered from it.

The Leeward was registered, nautical charts were purchased, and we hummed across the bay that summer over water smooth as glass. She didn’t go fast and her hull slapped rather than cut the waves, but she was our ticket off the beach to islands grown up from sandbars and piled seashells; to inlets where we caught flounder and skipjacks and mussels for dinner; to nights back home in bed where we rocked to a tide echoing within the conch spirals of our inner ears.

Of course at the start, it was an adjustment, particularly at launches and landings. Pushing offshore was always frenzied, with our oars poking into rocks and sand, as we waited to lower the engine in deeper water. Suddenly, our vocabulary had changed. From the first launch, my father used port and starboard instead of left and right, bow and stern instead of front and back, and the hours on the clock instead of pointing to objects. When a member of his landlubber crew couldn’t understand his command, ‘Get yer oar in the water on starboard side, we’ve got a rock off the stern and lobster trap at three o’clock!’ fast enough, panic ensued and my father hollered. Once, we mutinied and told him that if he didn’t shed the Ahab bit, we’d break open the cooler and let the boat drift into a sandbar. He toned it down for a while but just couldn’t help himself and we learned, like the sweaty crew of the Pequod, to grow our sea legs and roll with it.

Once the engine was lowered, my father stood at the helm, black fisherman’s cap pulled snug, clip-on sunglasses obscuring his eyes, unlit pipe clenched in his teeth, making him ‘quite the picture,’ my mother said. And it wasn’t long before the freedom of the tide seized him and he sprayed us with tall tales and salt water.

He began with local legends, though Christiaan just itched to drive and Lee read his Isaac Asimov paperback through a Ziplock baggie, opening it cautiously each time to turn the page. Dad told us about Ida Lewis, the turn-of-the-century lighthouse keeper whose name adorns a Newport yacht club and who still searches stormy horizons for sailors who never came home. He told us about the White Dove, the empty schooner that slid onto Newport’s First Beach in the 1800s. ‘Bob Dylan spent some time in Newport, you know,’ he said. ‘I think he was talking about this ship when he wrote “How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?” That old ship sailed into right his lyrics whether he knows it or not.’ My father continued in a most solemn tone, telling us how locals climbed aboard the sleeping dove, found breakfast on the table, coffee steaming in a pot and a dog cowering in the corner. ‘No crew. No bodies. No signs of struggle.’ He let the story hang like that, unfurled, whipping in the air.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘No one knows.’

‘Space aliens?’ was my answer for most mysteries when I was eight.

‘Or a kraken,’ he said. ‘A giant squid.’

I saw how close the water was around all our little boat and imagined seeing through the cool grey ripples of opaque current, beneath the waving sheath of sea and bubbles—a form. A great torpedo of translucent flesh and a flash of an exquisite single eye the size of a dinner plate, pupil black as the very depths of Davy Jones’ Locker. I was thrilled.

My father nodded into the wind, ‘“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’ The sea swept my father, all at once, into historian, cryptozoologist and mystic in wet docksiders with no socks.

Sometimes, as if under attack, he bellowed prose into the wind. My father, who would never catch or kill anything but always showed up for a fresh seafood dinner, did his best Gregory-Peckian-Ahab and shouted lines from Moby Dick: ‘“We’ll chase him ‘round the Horn, and ‘round the Cape, and through Perdition’s Gates ‘til he spouts black blood!”’ Kelly, who liked being onboard so long as it wasn’t choppy, barked at him.

‘You can’t even stand it when I catch squid for your calamari,’ my mother, his first mate as he called her, shook her head. ‘You tell me they’re the most intelligent of the invertebrates and walk away!’

Face in the wind, he pretended he didn’t hear her.

In quieter, anchored moments he rolled out with Poe in a voice that sounded, at first, like he was telling us his own story:

“‘It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.”’

One of my brothers would say, ‘That’s nice, Dad,’ hoping he was finished but it only prompted my father to burst loudly into the next stanza:

“‘She was a child and I was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,”’ he belted as if raging against the heavens above which sparkled in the blue-green Atlantic below,

“‘But we loved with a love that was more than love—

I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven

Coveted her and me!”’ Again, Kelly barked and my brothers sighed.

Plunging along the waves in our little boat, we darted between colossal yachts and 70-foot sailboats beneath the great spine and double archs of the Newport Bridge. My father yelled, ‘Avast, ye sea dogs! Hoist the main sail! We’re off to Port Jalaca!’

My mother winced in the wind beside him, a bright floral kaftan scarf wrapped around her head, her large black sunglasses and pink lipstick glistening.

‘Where’s Port Jalaca?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he laughed, ‘Portulaca. It’s a flower.’

Sometimes we dropped anchor at Prudence Island across Narragansett Bay, at places only accessible by boat. Approaching shore, I crouched in the poop deck and looked for rocks, learning to call out, ‘Starboard side, eleven o’clock, ten feet!’ When we found a good spot, Christiaan lifted the engine and threw the anchor while Lee unzipped his Ziploc again and turned the page. Mom pried open the cooler and produced roast chicken, salads, plums and always a bag of grapes. Afterwards, she collected wrappers and pulled out another plastic bag stuffed with damp kitchen towels that she ran under the tap at home for wiping our hands.

My parents liked to walk so they took the dog and jumped off the boat after lunch. Sometimes I went with them. Sometimes I stayed on the boat with my brothers and watched them: the smiling dog and her pink tongue over black fur, happy to be on solid ground; my mother, bright scarf trailing in the breeze, beachcombing and filling her pockets with smooth-as-a-pearl sea glass for the jar in the bathroom; my father with his hands on his hips looking like Prudence was his.

But it was one particular Saturday, while we anchored in a sheltered inlet called Sheep’s Head Cove, when the Leeward showed us the integrity of her white whale hull. The five of us and Kelly were onboard, eating fried peppers and eggs, cold on fresh rolls, when two black clouds arched up from the west and enveloped the horizon.

‘Oh. Look at that,’ my mother pointed.

‘Where’d all the other boats go?’ Christiaan looked around. The half dozen sailboats that once surrounded us had slipped away while we ate.

‘We’re doomed.’ Lee sealed the Ziplock containing his Fourth Galaxy Reader with a click.

Dad started the engine and told us to stow everything. Mom handed out lifejackets dotted with rain and sat the dog between her feet. The little waves that lapped in the cove grew into two-foot swells as we rounded the bend and entered Narragansett Bay. Rain fell harder. The waves grew a temper. Dad gripped the wheel and aimed the Leeward for Portsmouth, a couple of miles straight across that boiling bay. His glasses ran wet as he steered the tri-hull through waves that heaved whirling green wash over the rail and into the poop deck.

There was a rock he was trying to avoid, a jagged, Ice Age sentinel ringed with a halo of seaweed tucked just beneath the surface near Prudence, a rock marked on one of his stowed charts. His lips moved as he searched for it. Wind ripped at his face. Waves rose and fell like dark curtains parting and closing against a deeper darkness; froth rolled and water spiked into rain dappled points all around the Leeward.

My father squeezed the wheel as fog obscured both shores now. The archs of Newport Bridge obscured in the distance and then, were gone. No one said a word. We knew what he was looking for. It was there somewhere. We were near it. We gripped and craned and searched for it, too, as the wind and the rain ransacked us. We peered at the foam crested darkness. Nothing. In the heaving black, we had to find that rock before it found the bottom of our boat.

Then another shadowy curtain rolled back, beside us, parting right over the claw marked rock, seaweed waving all around its peaks and crooked maw before it disappeared again into the dark. I saw my father startle, then his relief rise like steam. We watched the stone disappear and reappear for a moment, opaque with Scylla’s complexion, as we lumbered past unharmed and windward, opposing the very namesake of our little boat.

Lightning flashed across the sky. The boat heaved in repetitive lurches followed by the sharp slap of the boxy hull against each wave. Each motion tossed us higher, getting us just a little airborne; and each slap grew louder, until the slaps became loud cracks.

My mother wept. Lee adjusted his paperback so he could read through the plastic, wiping away the rain with one of the damp kitchen towels.

‘You’re gonna puke!’ I shouted at him but he didn’t flinch. He couldn’t hear me. The wind pulled the words from my lips and cast them into the fog.

Christiaan sat on the edge of the boat, bouncing with the bucking motion of the boat. The only one enjoying the ride, he was smiling, and soaked with spray. If a wave knocked us just right, he’d have gone overboard and God knows how we would have turned around to go get him. My mother watched him for a while, waiting for him to move into center of the boat on his own. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she screamed something incomprehensible and pulled him down to sit at her feet with the dog. She sobbed, her lifejacket heaving, her hand on his shoulder like a sun-bleached claw.

That was when Kelly decided to get off. She stood, rocked with the motion, walked to the side and lifted her head. She stepped back, trying to negotiate where solid ground lay. We all watched for a moment, amazed at her determination, before Christiaan grabbed her and I tied an empty Hood’s milk jug to her collar.

All around us, the sea once of glass showed us another face: where black water and thunderous sky were one; where up was down; where churn blew and roared like a thousand elephant seals or the pounding of a million human hearts. So much water all around, in our hair, our ears, our nostrils, rolling off our chins.

The sea had at once reared up and showed us a power we felt in our eyes and tasted like sacrificial wine upon our silent tongues. We were helplessly entwined within the clutches of a terrific storm, cast across the contours of a liberated sea as if there never were any boats, no life jackets or maps or words, never any human beings at all.

And what we were told was this. There are primordial forces in this world far greater than anything we could conjure in our best or worst tales. And within them, we are totally, completely in love with life, just as we are with the story about it later. We roll with those waves, blow with them, bow to them, drift with the wind that is life itself. And if we survive, we remember, we tell it and retell it, and we’re grateful for the taste.

We made it across the bay, rounded the rocky jetty and puttered towards the abandoned boat launch. In the rapture of the wind, we winced towards shore, struggled against the pressure of the tide and somehow trailered the boat by reading each other’s gestures. Shouting was too tiresome. On the way home, my father announced that he was installing a CB radio for freak storms, the only words spoken.

So much memory fades with the wind, with the dog who was buried twenty years ago in a Portsmouth pine grove, but not this memory. We grew up, moved away, went salt and pepper gray. But none of us left the sea. We still stand at its edge from our different homes in New England, in Australia, and we remember.

How good that we are bound by that day—the last voyage of all six of us. All of us aboard the Leeward, as she carried us home. ‘That day on the Leeward,’ my father still says, ‘the sea let us go.’

And the Leeward. She was sold a decade ago. Taken away by another man who also spoke of summer, sheltered coves and seas of glass and surely, he found something more.

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Publication Pending, 2009