Losing Mum and Pup

by Christopher Buckley

  We sailed across. After digging up half of Eaton’s Neck, we found the treasure. I can still remember the thrill as my fingers scraped the chest’s wooden lid beneath the sand. When we got home, my father said it would be a nice gesture to give my mother the pirate jewelry. Okay, I said grudgingly, but I was keeping the silver dollars.

  It had been such an adventure that I persuaded my father there must be another chest buried there somewhere. I was quite persistent. In due course, he relented and procured another chest, which he filled with another fistful of my mother’s jewels, this time adding—without telling her—a few pieces of her prized Queen Anne silver. He sailed across and buried it.

  On the weekend appointed for the treasure hunt, Hurricane Donna struck. Donna was a Katrina of her day. She hit with such force that she rearranged the entire topography of Eaton’s Neck, making nonsense of the compass bearings on the treasure map.

  We sailed over the next weekend. We dug and dug. And dug. By the time we were finished, Eaton’s Neck looked as if it had been ravaged by a thousand prairie dogs. We never did find the treasure. For all we know, it’s still there.

  How thrilled my mother was to learn that her jewels and Queen Anne silver were now a permanent geological feature of Eaton’s Neck. I wonder what the reaction of the insurance company was.

  I’m not sure I understand. Was the jewelry stolen, Mr. Buckley?

  No, we buried it. Is there a problem?

  The next hurricane landed poor old Panic atop the Stamford Harbor breakwater. My father used that insurance payment to buy a successor yacht, a sweet, forty-two-foot Sparkman & Stephens yawl, Hong Kong built. She was named Suzy Wong, and she was a real honey, all teak and mahogany and carved Buddhas.

  Every summer, we would cruise the waters of Maine aboard Suzy. Sailing in Maine was always an adventure. The water is scrotum-tighteningly cold, the currents swift, the tidal drop pronounced, and the bottom un-forgivingly rocky.

  We’d drop anchor, a maneuver called “kedging,” have a merry, kerosene-lamplit dinner, and then drift off to sleep. Soon, invariably, there’d be a sound under the hull: thunk, thunk, thunk. This announced beyond reasonable doubt that our kedge had slipped and that we were now positioned over a sharp rock, on a falling tide. Depending on how many bottles of wine had been consumed, the grown-ups were not always quick to respond. In due course, my mother’s voice would call out in the dark, “Bill, what do you propose to do about that sound?”

  My mother deserves a word of appreciation here. She was a dutiful yachtsman’s wife. Lord, how she worked at it. In earlier times, the term for this occupation was “galley slave.” She had been raised as a debutante, a beautiful, delicate orchid from Vancouver, Canada. Now she found herself cooking for eight men and scrubbing the toilet aboard a small boat with no hot water. She would mutter darkly, “I was made for better things.”

  In those nonrefrigerated, premicrowave days, a lot of our food came in tins. These were stored below the floorboards in the ship’s bilges. The bilges invariably filled with oily seawater, causing the labels to decompose. As a result, we never knew what, exactly, we’d be having for dinner on any given night. If we were lucky, Dinty Moore beef stew. If not, we might well dine exclusively on Harvard beets and creamed corn. Some tins contained crêpes suzette. My father, no cook himself, loved to douse them in copious amounts of Grand Marnier. At the climactic moment, he would drop a match into the skillet, causing a Hiroshima of flame to lick the cabin top. Again, my mother’s voice was heard: “Bill, why are you trying to set fire to the boat?”

  Some afternoons, my father might say, “Shall we have lobster tonight?” He’d steer for the nearest lobster pot. As a child, I found this thrilling beyond belief, for it was established lore that a Maine lobsterman could legally shoot you on sight if he caught you plundering his livelihood.

  After laborious heavings on the line, the trap would come up, suddenly alive with frantic, jackknifing lobsters. The trick was getting them out without having them clamp down on your fingers. My father would then put two bottles of whiskey into the lobster pot as payment. I always wondered what the lobsterman thought upon bringing up his trap, to find two fifths of Johnnie Walker Black inside. Did he scratch his head and say, “Reckon Mr. Buckley is back”?

  Sometimes we barbecued on a little grill that hung off the transom. One night, as I was cooking six expensive filet mignons that Mum had asked me please not to burn, the grill suddenly swiveled 180 degrees. Six expensive filet mignons and charcoal briquettes plopped hissingly into the dark, swift waters of Penobscot Bay.

  It was either rescue the filet mignons or another night of Harvard beets. My friend Danny and I grabbed a flashlight and leapt into the dinghy. We fired up the outboard and roared off into the night. The current was running five knots. It was tricky work corraling those fugitive filets. We ran a few of them over with the out-board propeller, turning them into Salisbury steaks. No one asked for salt that night.

  Such were our adventures. Larger ones loomed.

  My father had always had the notion of sailing across the Atlantic, and this we did in 1975. The story is told in his book Airborne. We set off from Miami on June 1. A month and forty-four hundred miles later, we dropped anchor in the shadow of Gibraltar.

  He taught me on that trip how to navigate by the sun and stars with a sextant. It’s a skill that today, in the age of satellite navigation, fewer fathers impart to their sons. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of our ancestors.

  I was twenty-three now. I’d spent a year between high school and college working on a Norwegian tramp freighter. I’d gone around the world, been in rough situations among rough people. I’d steered a twenty-thousand-ton ship through sixty-foot seas in a force ten gale in the South Atlantic. I knew my way around a boat.

  One midnight, I relieved my father on the twelve-to-four watch. He told me to put on my safety harness. “Yeah,” I said, “don’t worry, I’ll get around to it.” He let me have it, in harsh words—perhaps the second time in twenty-three years he’d spoken to me that way. Falling overboard at night in the middle of the ocean without a safety harness is not a thing to be taken lightly.

  I obeyed, but later that night, still simmering over my affronted manhood, I made an entry in the log to the effect that Captain Crunch could take his safety harness and shove it where the sun don’t shine. The next morning, upon examining the log, he smiled, delighted at the mutiny.

  What a trip it was! We sailed into the Azores, accompanied by a thousand dolphins; camped out in the crater of an extinct volcano; sailed through the spot where Nelson sank the French and Spanish fleets; and finally reached the place that had once been called the Pillars of Hercules, end of the known world.

  We had such a good time, in fact, that Pup declared that we must sail across the Pacific, from Honolulu to New Guinea. We did, ten years later.

  I was now thirty-three, recently married.

  “By the way,” I said to my new bride on our honeymoon, trying to sound casual, “I won’t be around much this summer.”

  Lucy was a pretty good sport about it. The first time I’d brought her to Stamford to meet my parents, my father insisted on taking us out for a cocktail sail. It was a bright, beautiful summer day, but the wind was blowing about twenty-five knots, with six-foot seas.

  She had been in a sailboat exactly once before, on a lake, in flat, calm water. The waves crashed over the cockpit, hurling her to the deck. She smiled bravely and said, “Is it always like this?”

  My mother, hearing this account after we got home, drenched to the skin, remarked acerbically, “Yes, Lucy. With Bill, it is always like that.”

  Off we set across the great Pacific.

  We made our first landfall a week later, at a strange little archipelago called Johnston Atoll. It’s here that the United States stores its most lethal nerve-gas weapons and God knows what else. For that reason, any
ship sailing into the harbor is greeted not by lovely island girls bearing leis and rum punches, but by grim-faced Halliburton contractors aiming .50-caliber machine guns at you. Welcome to Johnston Atoll!

  We made our peaceful intentions clear to the frowning colonel in charge. It was an ironic encounter, for that same day, back home in Stamford, Nancy Reagan, then first lady of the United States, was spending the weekend at our house with my mother. The colonel was unimpressed with my father’s desperate name-dropping and informed us dourly that we must be on our way.

  Somewhere between Johnston Atoll and our next port of call, we caught a dolphin (the mahi-mahi type, not the Flipper type). We were thrilled at our good fortune, as by now we were down to the detested Harvard beets and squishy, malodorous rotting fruit.

  We hauled the fish aboard—a beautiful, iridescent creature. I reluctantly prepared to deal the coup de grâce with a heavy winch handle. No, no, someone said: Pour vodka into the gills. It deoxygenates them, producing swift, painless death. I did. It shuddered violently for a second or two and then was still. I recommend this protocol. And if you don’t die at first, keep trying. It’s a nice way to go.

  We made three landfalls on our way to New Guinea, each one something out of Gauguin. After the weeks at sea, we were avid for R&R; for a swim that didn’t involve someone having to stand shark guard with an assault rifle. For cold beer and hot showers. For a stretch of sleep longer than four hours.

  But the moment we dropped anchor, my father would look at his watch and say, “Okay, it’s ten o’clock now. What say we shove off at two?”

  Danny and I would look at each other and shake our heads. I was learning that for my father, it’s the voyage, not the stopping. Great men are not dawdlers; their idle is set too high. They’re built for speed. I myself was built to lie on the sand and drink beer and be fanned by island girls.

  And so at two o’clock, it was up anchor and off to the next idyllic atoll, some thousand miles away. I scribbled in my journal, “We are racing through Paradise.” Pup liked that and used it for the title of the book he wrote about the trip.

  We did, however, manage to convince him to stop for a whole day at a place called Kapingamarangi. You may not be familiar with Kapingamarangi, but it’s there—on the chart, 350 miles northeast of New Guinea. We sailed over the reef into a turquoise lagoon fringed with white sand and swaying coconut palms. Natives came out in a launch to greet us. This was 1985.

  “Is there anything you need?” we asked, thinking perhaps batteries, antibiotics, tools.

  “Among my people,” the headman said gravely, “there is a great hunger for videocassettes.”

  There was a plane in the lagoon. It was still shiny bright beneath the water. It had been there for forty years. I scuba dived on it; saw the “U.S. Navy” markings and the bullet holes that had brought it down, hem-stitched along the fuselage. A quarter mile away was a sunken Japanese vessel, the object, perhaps, of the American plane’s last attack.

  “What happened here?” I asked the headman.

  He shrugged. “First the Japanese bombed the shit out of it, then the Americans came and bombed the shit out of it.” There you have it: World War II in a nutshell.

  We were navigating again by sextant and the stars. But Pup had always been on the cutting edge of the latest gadgetry, so we had with us a prototype of a satellite navigation device made by the Trimble company. My father had gone to enormous pains to procure it from his new best friend, Charlie Trimble. It was the size of a steamer trunk and had more dials and knobs and oscilloscopes than Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Pup would crouch before it for endless hours, twiddling the knobs and calling out numbers to us, which we’d plot on the chart.

  “Where does that put us?” he would groan hopefully.

  “Here,” I said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest.

  It was back to basics, to the sextant and the stars. He preferred those, anyway. I can still see him standing on the deck at twilight, searching the sky for Spica and Vega and Deneb, one hand wrapped around a stay for support, the sextant in his other, calling out, “Mark!”

  A month after sailing out of Honolulu, we anchored in Kavieng Harbor on New Ireland island. That night we had a celebration as liquid as the vast Pacific. I toasted him, “To Pup, who shot the sun, shot the stars, but who most of all shot the moon.”

  IT WAS OUR LAST LONG SAIL TOGETHER. He was getting older now. So was I. I was a father of two. Then came the episode of October 1997.

  We’d made a date the month previous to have an overnight sail to Treasure Island along with Danny, our old sailing partner. I took the train up from Washington, D.C., to Stamford. Along the way, I looked out the window and saw gray, stormy skies. I checked the weather in the paper, where I saw the word northeaster. To anyone who’s grown up along the Connecticut seashore, this is not a word congruent with “overnight sail.”

  My father was standing there on the train platform to greet me. This had always been a welcoming sight. But I noticed, through the train window, that he seemed to be holding on to a sign, as if for support. Had he injured himself?

  No, for when the train door opened and I went to disembark, a violent gust of northeast wind blew me back into the train. I crawled out, practically on all fours. Loose objects in the railroad parking lot were being blown about. It looked like the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.

  “We’ll have a brisk sail,” my father said.

  Danny was there with him. I looked at Danny. Danny looked at me.

  “We’re going out in this?” I said incredulously.

  “Sure,” my father said nonchalantly.

  We arrived at the marina. The wind gauge indicated steady at forty-five knots, gusting fifty. To put that in context, hurricane-force winds start at sixty-four.

  “Pup,” I said, shouting to make myself heard above the wind, “ought we to be doing this?”

  “Take in the fenders,” he replied merrily.

  He had brought with him a friend of his from San Francisco. Poor, innocent lamb. He had never been on a sailboat before.

  “Should I take a Dramamine?” he asked me nervously.

  “Nah,” I said. “You’ll be too scared to throw up.”

  And so off we sailed into the storm. This was in my father’s last sailboat, a thirty-six-foot fiberglass sloop named Patito. (Roughly translated as “Ducky,” which my father and mother called each other.)

  We somehow made it across Long Island Sound, through a screaming, dark night and fifteen-foot seas. I kept the radio tuned to the Coast Guard frequency. I thought of my two young children. I thought of my warm bed in Washington. I thought, What the f——am I doing out here?

  The next morning, after a sleepless night at anchor listening to the halyards slap furiously against the mast, a greasy dawn arrived. The wind had increased; it was now gusting to fifty-five knots. The radio reported that over half a million homes in New England were without power. Various governors had declared a state of emergency. We had gone for an overnight sail in a state of emergency.

  I proposed that we row ashore and flag down a passing car, or perhaps a FEMA vehicle.

  “No, no,” said my father. “We’ll be fine.”

  It was daylight now, so we could see the seas we were up against, and there was nothing pleasant about them. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie The Perfect Storm? Something like that.

  We made it—somehow—back across Long Island Sound. My mother had spent the morning on the phone to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard kept saying, “But Mrs. Buckley, what are they doing out there in this?”

  Good question, I thought, draining a glass of brandy with trembling hands.

  I simmered for a few days and then wrote my father a blistering letter. Never again, I vowed.

  SINCE THEN, I’ve taught my own son to sail. I remember the first time I placed his small hands, along with mine, on the tiller and taught him the feel of the boat and the wind and the sea. I though
t back to when my father had first taken my small hands in his and taught me the rudiments of the same art. Now I was imparting to my son what my father had passed along to me: something elemental, thrilling, and joyous.

  Pup had furled his sails now and was preparing to shove off on a different kind of voyage. I wonder—will the angels scatter as he approaches the Pearly Pier?

  I think back to that night in 1997, to my vow that I would never again set foot on a boat with him. And now I think I’d give almost anything for just one more sail together, even in a howling northeaster.

  “A gone shipmate, like any other man,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “is gone forever, and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Goodbye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.”

  CHAPTER 12

  If It Weren’t for the Religious Aspect

  Getting from the house to his garage study, a distance of about fifty yards, had become difficult for Pup in the months following Mum’s death. Despite my insistence to the staff and Danny that he must not be allowed to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, he had—prior to the hospitalization—gotten into his red Pontiac Montana minivan one day and driven himself to his study. Later, returning to the house, he had decided it was too irksome to execute a three-point turn and so had backed the van to the house, slamming into an ancient apple tree, resulting in $3,000 damage. He emerged unscathed, luckily, inasmuch as he disdained seat belts, even on long drives. Please, Pup, I would plead. Among other things, it’s the law. I’ll get a ticket if we’re stopped. His answer, delivered with a dismissive snort: We won’t get stopped.