Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  A few months after this, I wrote a piece about a B-24 bomber that had been simultaneously hit by Japanese flak and fighters while on a mission from the Marianas to Iwo Jima, and, although heavily damaged, had made it home again to its base on Tinian in a falling flight that stretched across eight hundred miles. Four of its crew were wounded in the battle—one of them, the co-pilot, severely—and the rest were banged up in the landing, when the plane, with one wheel down and no brakes, slid the full length of the runway and broke in half. All survived and all got Purple Hearts. When I talked to the crew, some in their hospital beds and others recuperating at a rest camp, I realized that some of them still didn't know how close they'd come to disaster. An aerial burst from a Japanese fighter had knocked away the top turret canopy, and the co-pilot lay semi-conscious in his blood in the freezing stream of air. One of the four engines was gone, another was leaking fuel at a perilous rate, and a third kept running away in mid-flight and had to be controlled by manipulating its feathering button, but most of the crew members only knew their own part of the picture. When I asked the tail gunner what he'd thought about the runaway engine, he turned pale. "What runaway engine?" he said. I wrote all this for Brief, and then, in a longer version, for The New Yorker (it was my first reporting piece for the magazine), but what the Army and Navy censors wouldn't let me say in the piece was the news that the pilot, although unhurt in the action over Iwo Jima, had gone to pieces on the way home, unable to fly or to speak because of his terror. With the co-pilot wounded, the flying for most of the journey was extemporized by one of the gunners, who had washed out of pilot training school back home. The pilot, a captain, composed himself near the end and pulled off the tough landing, when the brakeless, screeching hulk banging down the runway was slowed a little by parachutes that had been strapped to the waist and tail gun positions. Several of the survivors swore to me they'd never fly with that particular captain again.

  I'd become a wily old noncom, in suntans now white with laundering. I'd gotten tougher, and felt an old lag's distaste for the length of our sentence and our foul-mouthed, relentlessly male jokes and beefs. We Brief guys had our own jeeps and a weapons-carrier truck, and kept our own hours. We cultivated the right officers; knew our way through the red tape at Pearl Harbor (some days you could see Admiral Nimitz throwing horseshoes just below the balcony outside the censors' office); and hit up the best post bakery for warm, fresh-from-the-oven Danish at five in the morning. Hiding our stripes, we got into drunken officer parties, and picked up word about the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions before they happened.

  With the war in Europe ending, our style and sector of the fighting had already begun to prosper. Shiny, enormous new B-29 bombers flooded the fields at Guam and Tinian, and after some unexpected difficulties with the weather and Japanese fighters at the prescribed twenty-five-thousand-foot level of operations, went down to five thousand and with mass incendiary raids systematically burned Japan into submission. Our stories in Brief covered all this with restrained exuberance, mentioning the targets struck—Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and the others—but not the cost: three hundred and fifty-seven thousand civilian dead in sixty-seven cities. Eighty-five thousand died on March 9, 1945, the night of the great fire raid on Tokyo. A returning B-29 bombardier told me later that the updrafting torrents of flame at five thousand feet had blown some of the planes around him upside down. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they came, felt like more of the same. One of our writers, Bob Frederick, got into Hiroshima on the second day anyone was allowed there, and we ran his story, in our next-to-last issue, under the headline "Too Great for Tears."

  It wasn't until after I got home that I could begin a personal accounting. John Brackett, Walter Ebbitt, and William (Boopa) Sturtevant, school or summer friends all, had died in flight-training accidents. Freddy Alexandre went down in action over the English Channel while piloting an RCAF Mosquito fighter. Harry Blaine fell in the first wave at Saipan, and our college classmate Demi Lloyd, a Navy aviator, was killed there two days earlier. Orson Thomas was lost at Wake Island; Bob Nassau and Paul Carp in the Mediterranean. A childhood friend of Evelyn's, Gordy Curtis, died in the invasion of Sicily when the Army transport he was piloting was shot down by friendly fire. And so on. Three classmates lost their lives in B-17s or B-24s over Europe: Bill Emmett on his fifth mission, Frank Joyce on his eighteenth, and Robert Rand on his forty-third. At Hickam Field, I'd drawn straws one day with Larry Swift, to see which of us would go out to the Marianas for a stretch to write little hometown stories for stateside newspapers. He won the toss, and a week later got into a B-25 bomber and flew a low-level mission over Tinian, to see what that was like. He and I had come overseas together, as part of the Brief project. He was ten years older than I, and curious; in New York, in peacetime, he'd been a reporter with PM, the serious-minded crusading tabloid. He must have been excited about the B-25 run, with the fixed bow cannon and the frag bombs and the machine-gun bullets smashing men and buildings just below, because when it was over—these harassing raids only took twenty minutes or so, round trip—he got back on another plane, then another, all in the same day; it was never clear how many. In time, one of the B-25s he was in hit a tree or ran into Japanese ground fire, and went in. A little before this—in May, 1944—Evelyn's sister Tudie had married Neil MacKenna at Fort Benning, Georgia, two months before he shipped out to Europe as an infantryman. She got him back at Camp Pickett, Virginia, the following February, seven months after he was severely wounded at Belfort Gap, France. He'd lain semi-conscious for twenty-eight hours on contested ground, and played dead when a Wehrmacht patrol came by, shooting anyone who moved.

  I observed Christmas of 1945 on the homeward-bound carrier Saratoga, converted to a transport. I took another troop train, shivering in the winter weather, then checked out at last from Fort Dix and into the Algonquin Hotel, where I found my mother and Evelyn having lunch in the Rose Room. We'd not seen each other for twenty-two months, and in that space—with Hiroshima and the Holocaust a part of our consciousness now; with Germany and Russia and much of Europe laid waste, Hitler and FDR dead, and an end at last to the killing—our world had changed beyond imagining. I'd not been in the war, exactly, but like others back then I'd got the idea of it.

  Ancient Mariner

  MR. Hopper, paint me a seascape. Give us an islanded bay—a sunlit reach, with water moving around ledgy, beachless shores and bold rises of spruce and hackmatack. Darker water, please: we're Down East, and a fingertip trailed idly overside here comes up pickled. Next, as centerpiece, a classic little keeled sloop, gaff-rigged, as in your day, just now close-reached and throwing an occasional splatter of white off her starboard bow as she steps along in the first morning breeze. The man at the helm sits at ease, his right hand on the windward coaming and his left on the tiller; his sneakered right leg is comfortably up on the seat, and his gaze, behind shades and a faded Red Sox cap, is contented, for he has been here many times before. The islands here are unchanged except for their thicker recent growths of pine and fir. Without thinking he registers the nearer run of island shapes and shores: Conary and White, with Bear lower between them; the sweet cove next to Devil's Head, on Hog. There's the rim of Smutty Nose, up to port. Soon he'll pick up the "tongg" of George's Bell. With this breeze, why not stand right out into Jericho Bay? Forty years ago, in this selfsame Herreshoff 12½ (that's a waterline length), he might well have passed within a yard or two of this tack on the identical moment in August. The lone sailor is lucky and knows it, so why should he remind himself so perversely—I'll take it from here, Mr. Hopper—how many people, within view and beyond, begrudge him his happiness?

  He is an old summer sailor is why; he is me, and I know that the aversion, while mostly unspoken, runs wide and deep. It is not a burden, but it's there all right, a little onus that can never quite be shaken, and it turns an apparently harmless pastime into something only awkwardly shared, except with other sailors. Involuntarily, I am in holy orders. Let me l
ist a few of the disbelievers and disapprovers of my morning sail aboard Shadow. The preoccupied lobsterman who waves a gauntleted hand as he skews his vessel toward his next buoy. (He is working; I am playing.) The distant, growly yacht running down toward Swans Island, and the nearer, bouncing, earsplitting runabout. (They are going fast and straight; I am going slow and in zigzags.) The kids coming down the gangplank onto the club float, with their spinnaker bags and their tactics. (I have happily given up racing.) My local friends and neighbors, at the general store and the post office and the boatyard. (They live here; I am forever from away.) But I am thinking even more of city friends—at home or in my office, in New York—who do not sail and know that I do, and can hardly bear the idea. "Going—uh, sailing, will you be?" they offer a day or two before my vacation starts. "Going off in your—uh, boat, I suppose?" I nod, I hope not too cheerfully, and we change the subject.

  Some of it must be the language, although the argot of sailing, to my ear, is not much more arcane than that of golf or cooking or opera or flytying. But say "sloop," "close-reached," "starboard," or "tiller" (as I have done here), or murmur "halyard," "jibe," "headsails," "genoa," and the rest with any air of familiarity (it's "heads'ls," I mean), and you are instantly seen as a dilettante, a poseur or a snob, a millionaire, and, almost surely, a Republican.

  Is this fair? More to the point, is it true—can mere lingo do such damage? I doubt it. Out on the water, even during one of those eventless, inexorably slow, time-flattening stretches of sailing—nothing doing, nothing to do—I realize once again that my eye and hand are reacting almost on their own to the thousand sights and sounds and movements of sailing. The look of the mainsail along the luff, an infinitesimal tug on the tiller, the lift of the stern on a quartering sea—all lead by reflex to a countering small movement of my own. I am sailing and, like countless thousands of other summer skippers, old and young, I am calling upon knowledge and responses that lie dormant during long months ashore but are there to be drawn upon for a lifetime.

  I've sailed here in bigger if not better boats, as well, with summer charters of cruising yawls and sloops and cutters, ranging from thirty to almost fifty feet, which have taken me with friends and family up and down and east and west of this bay and archipelago, on day sails or easy overnighters or more, for over forty years. Boats named Hanau and High Heels, Eastward Ho and Pauline. Bermuda Forties by Choi Lee and Hinckley; sloops by Rhodes and Alden. Also Aquila, a stiff-bowed Crocker cutter, and the sweet Nasket II, a Crocker ketch redesigned and built by my brother. I've also passed countless undemanding hours and days aboard boats where we've regularly been invited along: Astrid, Mary Leigh, Hopeful, Jarge's Pride, Sprite, and Ellisha. Anyone with small boat experience and the extra bucks can carry this off, but given these ledge-studded waterways and stiff tides what you should also have at hand is a bit of local knowledge. Awake at night in the winter, I summon up visions of dozens of rock- and ledge-strewn bars and tricky narrows that I know the look of and have mostly managed to shun. There are the Triangles and the Boulders, Rudder Rock and Colby Pup and Spirit Ledge, and two or three Channel Rocks, all set off in italics and asterisks on the charts I first studied and shuddered over as a teenager. There's the notorious submerged knob or spindle just east of Bear Island which I have seen impale bigger and more impulsive vessels than mine, leaving them to teeter there like a compass needle until the tide relents. There was that overlooked small type "shl rep 1967" on my much-folded chart, there between Saddleback and its smaller companion Enchanted Island, which I bumped onto and then off of while reaching through this pretty passage with friends of ours aboard; embarrassingly, they were a summer couple new to the region who were thinking about learning how to sail. "It's simply a matter of knowing where you are," I said, with my suave fingertips on the wheel. "Oop." There's a much-visited flat ledge on the western side of the anchorage at the Barred Islands which I forgot about—we were easing along with sails down, looking for a place to drop anchor—because Carol and John Henry began exclaiming over a nest of young ospreys they'd spotted through their binoculars on a nearby niche: bang. Carol was embarrassed because we were under scrutiny by twenty or thirty landlubber witnesses aboard one of the Camden dude ships, but I insisted that this was one of those no-fault mishaps—we'd only bonked the ledge with our keel—that could befall anyone. A few days later, visiting my brother Joel in his office at the Brooklin Boat Yard, I asked if he'd ever encountered that flat ledge at the Barred Islands. "Two or three times, easy" he said. "We were there last in September"—he'd been aboard his Danish-built, Aage Nielson cutter Northern Crown, with his son Steven and daughter-in-law Laurie, among others—"and we smacked it hard. Laurie was in the head and she fell off the pot."

  Having Joe's yard so close to hand was a sweet convenience in my cruising years, and I used to turn up there every week or two with a wheezy engine or a jammed winch or stopped-up head. I awaited my turn and paid full rates, but the service was terrific. In time, of course, this imbalance between brothers—I the summer amateur in shorts; he the soft-spoken Down East sage and provider, in wood-smelling denim—began to get to me, and I reminded myself that I, too, had a profession. "Goddam it, Joe," I said one morning. "Couldn't you come around some day and borrow a comma?"

  Getting back to sea, there was also an early evening when, off on an overnight with Carol and young John Henry, I dreamily nudged our bow onto the mud bar poking out to the south from White Island, and stuck fast there on a going tide. There we lay, despite kedgings and curses, a couple of miles from our front porch but thankfully hidden from view by the loom of the island. No one came by as the sunlight and the water waned and we lay at last on our beam ends under the stars, drinking Scotch and listening to the trickling sounds of our diesel fuel emptying onto the gravelly mud. We found a Sox game on the radio, and along about the top of the sixth the returning tide gently took us off, and we went home.

  The rewards of mild summer sailing outnumber the scares and goofs. With my eyes closed again, I can run the obstacle course of hidden shelves and weed-buried granite outcroppings that delivers you into an overpopular anchorage at the bottom end of Winter Harbor, and I probably still could perform the sequence of short swings that take you into the dozen yards of safe water, too small to fit onto the chart, just inside York Island. There you awakened at first light to the sounds of cropping sheep and, up in the cockpit again, found the loom of Isle au Haut, closer than expected, on the other side. Still in bed in New York, I can bring back the faint squeezing sounds from our anchor rode, up forward, as a night breeze touches our sloop and sets her on a fresh heading. Or the look of our old fox terrier Willy sitting on the stern seat of our green dinghy while I row him back from an early morning pee on the beach, and now pricking up his ears as he looks over my shoulder and spots Carol coming up from the cabin with a towel to wipe the dew-drenched cockpit cushions. Or maybe it's the smell of bacon that's got him.

  A million such moments are in my sailing brain. The fog dispersing at Perry Creek to disclose a New Yorker colleague of mine and his wife quietly reading aboard their pocket-size schooner Tyhee, not twelve yards away. "Thought that was you," he calls over. Another day brought our fabulous twenty-mile dash from Center Harbor all the way to Islesboro in a smothering fresh northwester, closed hauled and rail down on starboard tack the whole way, doing seven-and-a-half or eight knots in our sloop Megaptera; and then, heading back, the same thing all over again, boiling along in the other direction almost faster now, with the sheets eased only by a foot or less: two fabulous slants in a single day. Or the afternoon along about 1939, back in my teens, when the thermometer and the wind went every which way and finally, as we tacked through the Bartlett Island Narrows, delivered a six-minute snow storm, there on the last day of August.