Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Warnings applied to the ocean surrounding Cape Cod sound especially dire. But if you took all advice and heeded all warnings and obeyed the opinion of scare mongers, you would never go anywhere. Most people who hand out advice are incapable of putting themselves in your shoes: they fear for their own safety, and impose this fear on you; and when they are speaking of a place with a bad reputation near home, they can be bullies. There is no terror like the terror of what is nearby. The vaguely familiar can be worse than the unknown, because any number of witnesses have supplied spurious detail, the hideous certainty of specific fatal features, and the lurking idea that if you go, you will either die or be horribly disappointed.

  Such opposition can be stimulating, perversely inspiring. Everybody and his oceangoing brother told me not to try to paddle to Nantucket. I listened to them and then, that morning, I rose before dawn, got the latest weather report for Cape Cod and the islands, and prepared my kayak for the trip I was determined to make.

  Cape Cod is not one little jigjog of land. It is vast, composed of all the seas around it, the sounds, the channels, the fetch and chop of the tide races, the sandbars, the islands so small they appear only twice a day at low tide and have scarcely enough room to serve as a platform for a sea gull's feet.

  The sea is a place, too, and it is not empty either. It contains distinct locations, shoals, rocks, buoys, cans, and nuns—and wrecks that stick up with the prominent authority of church steeples or bare ruined choirs. The angler facing south from the jetty at Hyannisport sees just an expanse of blue water, yet there are nearly as many features on the nautical chart of Nantucket Sound as there are on the adjacent map of Hyannis. These are not only the sites of nameless wrecks and gongs and bells, but memorable and resonant names. Crossing to the Vineyard from Falmouth, you pass L'Hommedieu Shoal, Hedge Fence (a long narrow shoal), and Squash Meadow, and if you cross from there to Edgartown, you pass many named rocks. The current—its changing speed and direction—is another serious consideration, and the water depths range from a few inches to more than a hundred feet. But it is misleading to think that because the sea is a place, it is safe and hospitable. In his book Cape Cod, Thoreau wrote, "The ocean is a wilderness," and he went on to say that it is "wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters."

  In bad weather you can't see the Vineyard from the Cape shore, and even on the clearest day you can't see Nantucket. The challenge to the paddler is more than open water; it is also a swift and changeable current, a strong prevailing wind, and scattered shoals that send up a steep chop of confused waves. Nantucket Sound has a long history of being a ship swallower, one of the most crowded graveyards of any stretch of ocean. It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for a whaling ship to leave Nantucket and spend two years sailing around the world, crossing the southern ocean, going around the Horn and through the Roaring Forties, only to be smashed to bits on the rocks or shallows at Nantucket, within sight of the harbor.

  Nonetheless, I was thrilled by the warnings. For a number of years I had wanted to cross the sound, head for Nantucket through open water, and get there in one piece, in my own craft, by using dead reckoning—a chart, a compass, and vectoring on the incoming tide by my estimated speed. I knew it wasn't simple. Nantucket lies far below the horizon, and only its "lume"—the flaring halo of its harbor light—shows at night from the nearest part of the Vineyard.

  Whenever I spoke about paddling there, people tried to put me off. They were sailors with boats that drew five feet of water, or else fellows with speedboats who had never been out of sight of land, or tourists and partygoers who knew the route only from the long, cold ferry ride from Hyannis.

  My dream of paddling through the wilderness of open water was the dream of an Eagle Scout (I was in Troop 24). It was also the dream of someone who had had enough of foreign travel for a while, of places that were crowded and thoroughly tame, of the tedium and sleep deprivation of a long plane journey, and of the yappy turbulence of other travelers. I had recently been to Tibet, Polynesia, northern Scotland, and the southern island of New Zealand; I had not been alone. Tourists have penetrated to the farthest, wildest parts of the world. An article I would prefer not to write, about the spread of tourists, might be titled "They're Everywhere."

  They are not in the Muskeget Channel. I knew I would not run into anyone on the way. I had never heard of anyone making this crossing, or even wanting to. Small craft warnings are frequent. The Eldridge Tide and Pilot Table shows a four-and-a-half-knot current running in some places in the Muskeget Channel, and with a strong wind and tide it would be much greater than that. To cap it all, it is illegal to camp on any of the outer islands. It was dangerous, it was unlawful, it was foolhardy, it was forbidden.

  Catnip, I thought. Who wouldn't choose to paddle a kayak to Nantucket?

  I left Green Pond Harbor in East Falmouth, paddling my folding Klepper kayak, the nearest thing there is to an Inuit kayak.

  An Asian man and woman were fishing from the breakwater. Perhaps to amuse the woman, the man shrieked at me, "You'll never make it!"

  I considered this remark and kept paddling into the slop of the sound. Among the Klepper's many virtues are its seaworthiness and stability, its lightness, its ample storage space, and its portability—it can be taken apart in about fifteen minutes and stuffed into two bags. It can't be rolled over easily, and if you fall out, you can climb back in, which is almost impossible to do in other kayaks.

  It was one of those beautiful mornings in early September, after Labor Day, when the Cape has a bright, vacant look—no traffic, no pedestrians, no swimmers, and only fishing boats on the water. The sky was clear, the wind was light; a low dusting of haze prevented me from seeing the Vineyard distinctly. My plan was to head for East Chop lighthouse, continue on that shore for a few miles, and have lunch on the beach below Oak Bluffs. My afternoon plan would have to depend on the wind and weather, but the outlook was good.

  Crossing Nantucket Sound is the Cape sailor's first psychological barrier. I had rowed and sailed across it before I paddled it, but paddling was the simplest of the three. The sound can be dangerous to vessels of any size. On August 20, 1992, I was crossing from Green Pond to Oak Bluffs and saw a passenger liner anchored off East Chop. I paddled toward it, and the rising tide, flowing east, gave the illusion that the ship was moving slowly west. In fact, I was being tugged away from the anchored liner. Approaching it, I saw that its main deck was as tall as a twelve-story building, and rounding its stern I saw QUEEN ELIZABETH II — SOUTHAMPTON. Passengers were being taken ashore to Oak Bluffs, a mile and a half away, in whale boats. I paddled to the gangway and struck up a conversation with the mate.

  "I've never seen the QE II here."

  "We call here every few years."

  "Where are you headed?"

  "New York City. We're sailing tonight."

  "I just paddled from the Cape and crossed several shoals. I know there are plenty up ahead. How does a big ship like this manage?"

  "No problem. We come through here all the time."

  That night, the Queen Elizabeth II ran into an uncharted rock at the western edge of the sound, near Sow and Pig rocks, causing millions of dollars' worth of damage to the hull. The passengers were taken off the ship and ferried to New Bedford, where they were transported by bus to New York City. It was a whole year before the ship was repaired and put back into service.

  The tide can also be a problem. On the morning of my dead-reckoning departure it was against me—I knew it would be, because I needed it in my favor that afternoon. The tidal current creates the strangest effects. A mile off Green Pond there was a tide rip, a mass of spiky white waves drawing me toward them from my patch of clear water. The thing to do was stay upright. I paddled through them, and after a while I saw that I was way off course, nearer West Chop than East Chop (these are the separate arms of Vineyard Haven, and each indicates a patch of rough water). I struggled against the current, feeling that I was paddling upstream, and
about an hour and a half after leaving the Cape I was at the Vineyard shore. Thirty minutes later I was lying on the beach at Oak Bluffs, drinking Chinese tea and eating a cheese sandwich.

  Here, as postprandial reading, I looked at the Tide and Pilot Table and saw that everything was in my favor: the tide had just turned, and I would have a cooperative current to lead me to Edgartown and Katama Bay. And if I eluded the ranger and camped on the beach at the southern point of Chappaquiddick Island, I would have a merciful current tomorrow on the way to Nantucket—that is, it would carry me safely northeast. But it was not endlessly merciful. If I was delayed, or if I didn't paddle fast enough, I would be carried into the Atlantic Ocean when the current reversed in midmorning.

  The great fear that everyone had expressed to me was the Muskeget Channel, which is a sort of teeming drain capable of sluicing any craft into the Atlantic. No boats dared enter it. How could they? If the currents didn't get you, the sandbars or the rocks would. But a kayak draws only a few inches of water. And anyone could see that the dangers of the channel had to be set against its advantages—it was only an eight-mile crossing to the nearest piece of land, uninhabited Muskeget Island, where I could trespass if the weather happened to deteriorate. What tempted me most to cross the channel was that no one I had met or spoken to, and no one I had heard of, had ever done it. It meant that I might be the first non-Indian to do it alone in a self-propelled boat. I might even discover that it was not dangerous at all.

  The traveler is essentially an optimist, and in that hopeful mood I paddled all afternoon, south to Edgartown. This is one of the loveliest and snuggest harbors anywhere, a tidy town of brilliant white, slightly haughty houses and brick walls and shady streets. Just across the harbor is Chappaquiddick, with low woods and sandbanks and expensive, hunkered, furtive-looking houses, mostly the seasonal haunts of fleeing New Yorkers.

  I pulled my kayak onto a public landing and walked into Egdartown to buy some beer and verify tomorrow's weather report (sunny, scattered clouds, light winds, ten to fifteen knots). I considered staying the night at a hotel, but that would have complicated my trip. I needed the earliest possible start from an advantageous position on the coast, and this I had designated as my campground: Wasque Point, on the southeastern corner of the island.

  So, although I had been paddling for more than seven hours, I crawled back into my kayak and paddled another hour across Katama Bay. The sun was setting and the air was turning cool; it was twilight and chilly by the time I got to the sand spit. I was so tired I could not pull my loaded kayak over it. I sat and rested among some nervously bleeping oystercatchers, and then I gathered armfuls of slimy seaweed, spread it on the sand, and pulled my kayak up this slippery track into the dunes.

  A few four-wheel-drive vehicles—fishermen—were leaving the beach, and there was a tawny Bronco with RANGER lettered on its door. I ambled around the beach until sunset, then tipped my kayak on its side and spread out my ground sheet and sleeping bag. I drank a beer and had dinner in the starry, moonless dark as the waves monotonously dumped and broke on the sand with the sound of someone sighing. I wanted to be invisible, so I did not build a fire. Just before I turned in, I walked to the edge of the beach and looked east-southeast with my binoculars and saw the lume of Nantucket—no land but a definite light, like the dim flash of a thunderstorm or the glow of a distant fire in the sea.

  Then I lay down in my sleeping bag and murmured,

  Oh, God, make small

  The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

  That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

  I woke often in the night—listened to the waves, listened to the wind in the sea grass and the drizzling sand grains—and I felt like a savage, just as portable, just as naked and vulnerable to attack. I lay there like a dog on a rug. I was exposed, but I was in an out-of-the-way place. No one came here except fishermen, and they wouldn't return until after sunup. By then I would be gone.

  With good food, tucked in my expensive sleeping bag, lying alongside my unsinkable kayak, as an early September dawn was breaking, I did not feel that I was roughing it. This merely seemed an eccentric form of luxury: I was comfortable, I was alone, and I was successfully trespassing.

  Sunrise was a messy reddened eruption out of the sea, and it kept spilling garish light everywhere, draining the redness into the water as the sun rose like a squeezed blood orange. A cloud the shape of a huddled animal soon smothered the brightness, and the sea turned the blue-white color of skim milk.

  By then there was no sign of Nantucket, which lay below the horizon. The wind was light, though the sea swell was pronounced, and the waves were still dumping steadily. I ate a banana, drank the last of my tea, took a bearing with my compass, and headed east-southeast into a wave that broke over my deck and into my face. There were no other people on the beach, no other boats on the water. The sea was clear, the sky was empty. The Chappaquiddick shore was just a sandbank, a bluff with a whiffle of sea grass on top. Light and water and sand: it was a minimalist landscape, three bands of light, dawn pouring over it, and all of it looking like a just-emerged corner of a continent, bobbing at the surface of a watery planet without a soul in it, a sort of prologue to Paradise.

  The rest was oceanic, endless and eternal: I was paddling into nothingness. Behind me, Chappaquiddick had begun to drop into the sea. I was nervous, because I am not much of a navigator and I could see rough water ahead, and beyond it only more water. But it was not even seven o'clock in the morning. I had a whole day to get where I was going. If something went wrong, I had twelve hours of daylight in which to save myself.

  The rough water looked like a river flowing swiftly through the sea. This jumble of steep breaking waves was the result of the tidal stream being pushed upward by a shoal. The vertical current produced an "overfall" of turbulent surface water. The waves broke over me and drenched me as the current pulled me sideways. I braced myself with my paddle and didn't fight the current. I had included it in my crude calculations. That is what dead reckoning is—getting to a hidden destination by figuring your average speed and true course after leaving a known point of land. I was counting on the current taking me northeast as I paddled four knots an hour east-southeast, and I assumed I would get a glimpse of Muskeget Island after an hour or so. Traveling hopefully into the unknown with a little information: dead reckoning is the way most people live their lives, and the phrase itself seems to sum up human existence.

  I had not known that Muskeget Island was so flat and hard to spot. On all charts certain prominent landscape features are indicated—a dome, a water tower, a radio antenna, a steeple. There was nothing shown on the chart for Muskeget Island. From my boat I thought I saw a smudge, which could have been an island, but I kept losing it as my boat slid from the crest of a wave into the trough. Then it was like sitting in a box, unable to see over the sides. What might have been obvious from the deck of a sailboat was impossible to see from my kayak, so low in the water.

  And what water. Now I understood why larger boats never crossed this channel. There were waves, breaking in the middle of nowhere, indicating a sandbar or some rocks. I crossed at least three more overfalls—one was fifty yards wide and had the look of a maelstrom. In the distance I saw more waves breaking, and no land in sight. That seemed ominous—I might find myself surfing out to sea. But I was still paddling hard. I did not want to turn back. And the smudge in the distance was definitely a piece of land. Now it was off to the far right, which meant that I was being carried faster by the current than I had calculated.

  By midmorning I was paddling off Musgeket, the flat island that is one of the most remote and least visited pieces of land for hundreds of miles—just a low ledge in the sea. Shaped like an anvil lying on its side, it is about a mile long and half a mile wide. No trees grow on its windswept surface, only blowing grass and rose bushes. At its western end sits a single unoccupied house. I paddled to the back of the island, out of the wind, and went ashore. There wa
s no need for me to shelter here. It was not even noon, and I could see Nantucket through the smoky haze, the western tip of it, Eel Point, the northern arm of Madaket Harbor; and ahead, as Robert Lowell writes in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," "a brackish reach of shoal off Madaket." That was about five miles away, beyond another island, Tuckernuck, beyond two shipwrecks hulking out of the blue sea, ocherous with rust.

  My nervousness about the open-water crossing was gone. Having gained confidence in my use of dead reckoning, I felt stronger. Now I could see where I was going. I paddled through the miles of shallows off Tuckernuck and onward to a beach where I lolled in the sand and had lunch. The tide had long since shifted: the current was against me; I battled it all the way to the long breakwater that guards Nantucket Harbor, and I glided past Brant Point to the landing.

  I had been to Nantucket on the ferry many times. But because I had come this way—plowing the waves alone, seeing no one, not saying a word, only trespassing on the beaches and on the notorious channels—the place seemed new. I now had some sense of its distance and its uniqueness, of how much of it there was, and how from the sea it seemed to stagger westward in a succession of sinking fragments.

  Yachts bobbed in the harbor, and people strolled among the bright white houses, buying ice cream and T-shirts. Nantucket town is always in a state of high excitement, because so many of the visitors have come for the day and want to make the most of it before the ferry leaves. The place is full of fishermen and millionaires, Yankees and Ivy Leaguers. It is, as Melville wrote, "a mere hillock, an elbow of sand," and yet if you somehow delete all the Jeeps and sport utility vehicles, it has one of the most beautiful main streets in America. As for the rest of the island, it took Melville a whole chapter of Moby-Dick to describe it properly—its look, its meaning, and its moods.