Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [57]
“Man, you never ate a lobster?” he questioned me in amazement. “Why, we’ll have one right away. I got a whole heap of ’em in back of the truck.” And there, on a warm late summer afternoon by the clear water of the Bras d’Or lakes, he persuaded a reluctant lobster to get into the cooking pot, and together we dismembered it with our pocket knives and devoured its sweet pink flesh.
I arrived in Lunenburg before Hirta did and checked into a white wooden hotel just behind the waterfront. I was the only guest in the place and it wasn’t very big anyway, so I had the undivided attention of the beautiful Martha, who ran the place and exuded such a welcome aura of warm femininity and subtle scent that it quite befuddled my brain. It was then that I fell prey to homesickness; it came in waves, colored with tender thoughts of Ana. I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for the boat, so I decided to channel my seething emotions into art. I bought a sketchbook and set about immortalizing the pretty little town in ink and wash.
In the morning I would wander out to the rocks on the point and eagerly scan the sea for the sight of a red sail. Later I would walk on the hills around the town, sit in the street and sketch or play some guitar, until I could wander back for dinner. Ah, dinner … I sat alone in the dining room with a candle on my table, freshly picked flowers, and a bottle of wine, and I swear I have never eaten such food. It was mostly the vegetables, the crisp pungent flavor of them, and their moist and glistening hues, but when the dessert arrived, creations of succulent berries gloriously enhanced by the products of the dairy cow and the humble hen, well, I was almost in heaven.
Perhaps Hirta would never come, and I would spend the rest of my days, sitting on the point watching for a sail, munching on exquisite vegetables. Half a week passed and I became fretful, wandering out at first light to scan the horizon or distractedly penning portraits of the boat in small heroic sketches.
Then at last, on the seventh day, in the late afternoon light, Hirta appeared, cutting through the bay with all sails billowing, gleaming crimson in the low rays of the sun. I watched, entranced as she tacked in a graceful extended zigzag toward the harbor. They knew I would be watching from somewhere, so they were putting on a show, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was so excited to see them again that I jumped up and down and hooted and hollered from the cliffs, but it was too far off, so I ran down to the dock, arriving just in time to take the lines.
How strange they looked, my shipmates. We had been used to one another huge and amorphous, swaddled in layer upon layer of woolens, topped by shiny oilskins. But now we had been slipping down the lines of latitude toward the warmth of late summer, and bit by bit we had shed our protective clothing, revealing ourselves as less substantial beings. We had become etiolated, too, like plants growing beneath stones, denied the light and warmth of the sun. The skin that was on display shone in mottled shades of white and pink, with here and there a dash of livid red from the saltwater boils. Hannah, who was cavorting around in red cotton shorts, giggled inexplicably when I strode up the gangplank wearing much the same.
“Tell us of the lakes and the Torrible Zone,” demanded Tom, “and the hills of the Chankly Bore.”
I was happy to be back on the boat. It gets to you like that. I had traveled on foot and in cars and trucks, and even once in a bus, but none of these conveyances made such marvelous use of the wind, that glorious resource that girdles the planet and takes you wherever you want to go, if you happen to have the skills and the time. And I hadn’t been ready yet to leave my shipmates.
I could tell by the warmth of their welcome that everyone felt the same. We needed these few extra days onboard to take proper leave