Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [58]
And then, Tom said, we would go on to Mystic Seaport: “A true sailor’s port, with sailing museums and shrines and old boats.” It seemed a good and fitting place to leave Hirta, the crew, and the sea. I phoned Ana with the news. I was on my way home.
Epilogue
FOWEY IS AS PRETTY as a place can be, the perfect Cornish harbor town with steep, wooded hills tumbling down to the still waters of its estuary. In the autumn, after I came back from the Americas, Ana and I drove there from Sussex to spend a weekend with Patrick and his family. We had a notion about moving that way and starting again with the sheep, although in truth I was having a hard job wrenching my mind back from the sea. My brain seemed to have been so addled by salt water that it teemed with boats and nautical allusions.
As we breasted the ridge above the harbor town, I was expounding a pet theory to Ana, that being an island race we have the sea embedded in our very language.
“Take the phrase ‘To the bitter end,’” I told her. “You’d think it meant the conclusion of something pretty negative and drawn out but—hah!—no, it doesn’t. The bitt, you see is a post for fastening the rope on a ship, so when you reach the bitter end it means the rope is all played out. Amazing, isn’t it?”
A silence. Ana ignored me pointedly. Indeed, she stayed a bit quiet until she was introduced to Patrick’s wife, Rosemary, and immediately recognized a fellow sufferer at the hands of the returned seadog, the transoceanic bore.
Ana was normally tolerant of my ways—after a few years of living with a person like me, you learn to make allowances—but I fear that this time my new obsession was getting beyond a joke. Perhaps I really was insufferable. I’m told I would walk with a roll, with what I took to be a seagoing sort of a gait, pepper my speech with nautical metaphors, and sigh at the merest thought of the sea.
Over breakfast of beans and eggs it occurred to Patrick that we might want to take his dinghy for a sail—“She’s small, but she’ll give you a feel of the wind and the water,” he said. I looked across the table at Ana.
“Come on,” I cajoled her. “You’ll see what I’ve been going on about. It’ll be a really nice morning’s sail.”
“It might be nice for you,” she replied, “but I think it looks extremely unappetizing out there. Besides, it’s hardly very warm, is it?”
“You’ll be in good hands,” Patrick assured her. “Your man knows his stuff. He’s a good man in a tight spot.”
This, from Patrick, was praise indeed. I strutted and preened a little and put a manly arm around my girlfriend’s shoulder. “If we only ever put to sea on a sunny day, then where on earth would we be? What would have become of our island race?” I insisted. This ought to give you some indication of just how bad things had become.
With untypical forbearance, Ana denied herself the obvious retort. “Well, all right, if we must,” she said. “We’ll see what you’ve learned out on the high seas.”
Patrick took us down to the dock where he kept his neat little fiberglass dinghy and helped me prepare it for sea. It was the work of a few minutes—child’s play after our Atlantic voyaging.
Ana, however, was wearing her womanly disapproval hat, the sort a woman wears when she can think of a dozen good reasons not to do a thing but knows you’re going to do it anyway. But as we bounded across the wavelets of the sheltered harbor, the sheer exuberance of it all blew that expression away and she, too, was soon wreathed in smiles. I swelled a little with pleasure and pride as she smiled back at me, then I