Sunrise with Seamonsters (61 page)

Mine is the deluxe model. It has a sliding seat for sculling, out-rigger oarlocks, and three rowing stations. It is equipped to sail, with a dagger-board, a rudder and a sprit rig. I have three pairs of oars and two spare thwarts. It is a very strong boat, with a flat and markedly rockered bottom and the most amazing stern, tucked high to prevent drag and steeply raked, tapering at the bottom, which makes it extremely seaworthy for its size. The high waves of a following sea don't smash over it and swamp it but rather lift it and help it escape the swell.

"We used to make those for $35 each in Marblehead," an old man told me in Harwichport. "That was years ago."

That certainly was years ago. This skiff cost me $4,371 at Lowell's Boat Shop in Amesbury. I could have had it made for half that, or less, but I wanted the extras. Most good wooden boats are custom-made—no two are strictly alike. They are made for particular coasts, for a certain number of people, for the size and shape of the owner, for specific purposes. "If you were sea-mossing you'd say, 'Put on an extra plank,'" I was told by John Carter, curator of the Maine Maritime Museum. It was Mr Carter who told me that this sort of boat had no business on Cape Cod. It is a North Shore boat, made for the waters off Cape Ann, where a shoal draft and a flat bottom are helpful in the tidal rivers. The dory style of boat wasn't a suitable fishing boat for the Cape; here, people fish farther out and often in very rough water.

Lowell's Boat Shop originated this skiff's design in the 1860's and made thousands of them. It was a working boat—for hauling pots, hand-line fishing, and ferrying; and it was for river rowing on the Merrimack and also in protected harbors, like Salem. Rowing was one of the great American recreations, and the rowing age stretched roughly from the end of the Civil War until the invention of the outboard motor,
in
the 1920's. The outboard motor, which is one of the ugliest and most bad-tempered objects ever made, changed the shape of boats and also made them ugly and furiously turbulent. It is not very difficult for the average twin-engine cabin cruiser to swamp a thirty-foot sailboat. Motorboats are the rower's nightmare because the shoebox-shape creates a pitiless wake. I tend to think that only a motorboat can swamp a skiff.

My skiff had an old pedigree. It was based on the dory that was designed by Simeon Lowell in the early eighteenth century, and it is related to the French-Canadian
bateaux.
There are family resemblances—and certainly connections—between it and the flat-bottomed boats you see in India, and the skiffs depicted in Dürer engravings. There are sampans on the Karnafuli River at Chittagong in Bangladesh which are certainly skiff-like. John Gardner, who wrote a history of this style of boat, found an Amesbury skiff in "Big Fish Eat Little Ones" (1556) by Brueghel the Elder.

The shore had begun to look as featureless as the sea had once done. The sea seemed passionate and enigmatic and the charts showed the sea bottom to be almost comically irregular—here, at Billingsgate Shoal, miles from Rock Harbor, I could stand up; and farther on I could lean out of the skiff and poke crabs scuttling along the sand. I saw the shore as something shrunken and impenetrable. I had never expected to be indifferent to it, but I had grown impatient. It was the result of that
awkwardness I had felt at going home. I rowed, and I stared at the receding shore as I had once stared at the brimming ocean. The shoreline was a smudged stripe: tiny boats, frail houses, timid swimmers—small-scale monotony.

A mile or so southwest of Billingsgate Light there was a large rusty ship in the water. This was the
James Longstreet,
a Second World War Liberty Ship that had been scuttled here to be used as a target ship. I was told in Orleans to look for it. A few Cape Codders set themselves up in successful scrap businesses by sneaking out to the ship at night in the early days and stripping it of its copper and brass. During the Vietnam War, ARVN pilots flew up from Virginia and dropped sand bombs on it. It was big and broken, russet-colored this bright day, and listing from the weight of its barnacles.

I shipped my oars off Great Island—the Wellfleet shore—and ate lunch. And then I made a little nest in the bow and lay there and went to sleep. It was hot and dead still and pleasant—like dozing in a warm bath, with a little liquid chuckle at the waterline. I was two miles out. I woke up refreshed, put my gloves on and continued, occasionally glancing at the long empty beaches and wooded dunes. My destination had been the Pamet River, but it was only two-thirty and I could see the dark tower of the Pilgrim Memorial where the top of Cape Cod hooked to the west.

Excited by the prospect of rowing so far in a single day, I struck out for Provincetown. I found Pamet Creek and Corn Hill on my chart and calculated that I had only about seven or eight miles to go. A light breeze came up from the west and helped me. But water distorts distance: after an hour I was still off Pamet Creek and Corn Hill, and Provincetown looked no closer. I may have been about three miles from shore. I began to suspect that I had not made much progress, and that gave me a lonely feeling that I tried to overcome by rowing faster.

Just before four o'clock a chill swept over me. The sun still burned in the sky, but the breeze had freshened to a steady wind. It was not the gust I experienced yesterday that pushed me back and forth; this was a ceaselessly rising wind that lifted the sea in a matter of minutes from nothing to about a foot, and then to two feet, and whitened it, and kept it going higher, until it was two to four, and so steep and relentless that I could not keep the boat straight for Provincetown. I thought of Alex saying:
The wind and the murderous waves! Please pass the spaghetti, mother.

I could only go in one direction—the way the wind was blowing me. But when I lost, concentration or rested on my oars the boat slipped aside and I was drenched. I had no doubt that I would make it to shore—the wind was that strong—but I expected to be swamped, I assumed I
would go over and be left clinging to my half-drowned boat, and I knew that it would take hours to get to the beach that way.

The discouraging thing was that I was nearer to Provincetown than to the Truro shore. So I was turning away. I rowed for an hour, pulling hard, and at times I was so tired I just yanked the oars, keeping the high sea behind me. Every six seconds I was smacked by an especially high wave—but even the sea's crude clockwork didn't sink me, and it gave me a special admiration for the boat's agility. The wind had beaten all the Sunfish and the windsurfers to the beach at North Truro, but there were children dodging waves and little dogs trotting along the sand, and people preparing barbeques. I pulled the boat up the beach and looked out to sea. Nothing was visible. That unpredictable place where an hour ago I was afraid I might drown now looked like no more than a frothy mockery of the sky, with nothing else on it.

"She was a hooker," the young man was saying. "She walked into the place and said, 'I can take all you guys on.' Everyone knew her—'Snowflake', they call her."

We were traveling on the coast road back to my Jeep. I had had to hitchhike—there was no other way to go—and I was picked up by two beer-drinking men in a jalopy. Their town was in the news for being the location of a particularly notorious rape trial.

"Then, after about eight or nine guys screwed her on the floor of the bar she freaked out and went crying to the cops. 'They raped me,' she says. But it wasn't rape—it was just a gang-bang. You sure you don't want a beer?"

It was so sudden after my long empty day that it was as if I were leading two lives—one on water and the other on land—with nothing to connect them, even though they were only minutes apart. This sort of travel made for a simultaneity that amounted to surrealism.

I had come to dislike the disruption of going ashore. The following day I rowed across the crook of the Cape to Provincetown, but I did not beach the boat. I tied up to someone else's mooring and had lunch on the water; and then I rowed towards Long Point Light and around the harbor; and I feathered my oars and procrastinated. Music and voices carried from the shore, the depressing hilarity of vacationers, shrill all-male "mixers" and party-goers queening it at the far end of Commercial Street; and glum couples kicking along the sand; and sunbathers, leather freaks, whale watchers, punks. At last, at sundown, I rowed in and blew up my inflatable boat roller until it became a four-foot sausage, and jammed it under the bow and wobbled
Goldeneye
up to a town landing.

I was watched by thirty-four men having a terrific time on a hotel veranda.

"Come on up and have a drink, darling. We don't have AIDS!"

I was ashore once again.

That became the rhythm of this trip: skimming on the water and almost hypnotizing myself with the exertion of rowing; and then, at the end of the day, being startled by the experience of touching land again. There was a serenity—something silken—in the worst wind, and the behavior of water was always fascinating and wayward. But this pretty skiff aroused a harassing instinct among bystanders. They shouted at me, they yodeled, they threw stones.

Long-distance rowing in a wooden boat attracts attention. It is one of those mildly frantic, labor-intensive activities, like operating a spokeshave or pumping a butter churn. It is difficult to indulge in physical exertion and not seem like an attention-seeker—most joggers are accustomed to being yakked at. Very few onlookers are indifferent to someone getting exercise in public, and there is something in the very sweat and single-mindedness of running or rowing that inspires admiration in some people and ridicule in others. An old square-faced hag in a motorboat nearly sank me as she swerved past the tip of my oar in order to shriek, "Guess you're not in a hurry!"

That was in Pleasant Bay. I had started at the top end of Meeting House Pond and had rowed south down what they call The River into Little Pleasant Bay. I stayed on the outgoing tide and kept on, past Chatham Light to the tip of Nauset Beach and into Stage Harbor. Some of the worst Cape currents sweep between Nauset and Monomoy Island, but I could cope with them much better than I could the inshore barracking of "Good exercise!" or "Faster, faster!" or "One-two! One-two!" I got it from people in other boats; I got it from swimmers and beachcombers; I got it from fat facetious people at the boat ramps. It was usually well-intentioned, but it was nearly always unpleasant. It was like having my bum pinched.

And there were the kids in motorboats. When I was young the roads of Massachusetts were full of hot rodders—pale pimply adolescents in jalopies. In a general sort of way, a car represented freedom, and driving—especially driving in a dangerous manner—was a form of self-expression.
He wrapped himself around a tree
was always said with a tinge of admiration. In those days, too, sex was impossible without a car, and I doubt whether there are many of my generation who didn't have their first sexual experience in a car. We were the first generation of adolescents
to drive cars in any great numbers—Driver Training, with its leering instructors, started when we were in high school. Driver Training was the state's answer to hot rodders, and when the roads improved and most of the main roads were highways, policing was stricter, drinking laws were enforced, and the jalopy—useless on a highway—became a thing of the past. At that point, hot rodding turned into an aquatic sport.

Every year, off Cape Cod, swimmers are beheaded by kids in motorboats; people wading have their feet chopped off, and other unsuspecting souls are mutilated in even more grotesque ways. There are spectacular collisions—boats ramming each other, or plowing into docks, or flipping over. Often the engine dies and if the boat is not swamped it is taken by the wind and the current into the open sea. You need a driver's licence for a harmless little moped, but any twelve-year-old with a free afternoon is at liberty to whisk himself around in the family motorboat: there is no law against it, there are no laws at all about motorboating—there aren't even rules. There is boating "etiquette", but virtually the only people who observe it are people in sailboats.

I was on the southern side of the Cape. It is densely populated, full of pretty harbors and ugly bungalows—and blighting the once-charming towns are the fast-food places and the pizza parlors, the curio shops, the supermarkets. On the bay side of the Cape there are miles of empty beach and barren cliffs; but here the shore has been entirely claimed by developers; the shoreline is a cluttered wilderness of fences. Here and there are grand houses, even mansions, but there is little solitude. In a way, the mansions are responsible for the overdevelopment, for it was the boasting ostentation of the newly rich that attracted the seedy developments. The pattern is repeated all along the Cape, but it is at its ugliest at Hyannis where the dynastic Kennedys—still breeding after all these years—are the chief attraction. The Cape is a subtle landscape: there are few places on it to which people naturally gravitate—no mountains, no valleys, only harbors. So the settlement has been based on social insecurity—people have planted their bungalows around the mansions of rich families (much as they have in Newport), proving once again that all classes have their snobberies.

And everyone there seemed to have a motorboat—especially the teenagers. Boys in baseball caps, girls in bikinis, they went in circles, beating the ocean into a fury.

I rowed as fast as I could—dodging the sea traffic and the shouters—from Stage Harbor in Chatham to Wychmere in Harwich. The prevailing southwesterly wind was always opposing my progress. I continued to Bass River, but this time did not go to my parents' house. I slept at my own house now, and my routine was to sneak the boat into the water early and head west. I rowed to Hyannis and was surprised by the strong current
and the protruding rocks. The Cruising Guide said, "Out here, too, a brisk afternoon southwester blowing against an ebb tide can kick up a short breaking chop, unpleasant in any boat and possibly dangerous in a small open boat." But I stayed afloat. I crossed Lewis Bay. I rowed to Hyannisport and Wianno; and there, where overdressed people sheltered behind hedges, grimacing at the sea with expensive dentures, I stopped. Rowing around the Cape had become routinely pleasant. I needed another challenge.