“LET GO THE SHEETS!” I shouted.
“WHAT SHEETS?” Ana shouted straight back.
Then the wind burst into the sail on the other side and, with all our weight on the wrong side, we rolled into the water and the boat on top of us.
“Bugger!” I burbled as the icy water closed over my head. I scrabbled my way out from beneath the sail and scanned the water for my girlfriend.
Before long she bobbed to the surface and we clung together to the upturned hull. I looked sheepishly over at her. She shook the water out of her hair and spat out a mouthful of sea. “I knew this was going to happen,” she said and nodded toward her wrist. “Look, I even left my watch behind with Rosemary.”
And as she said this she smiled—a big, broad, watery smile over the upturned bottom of the boat—and then laughed out loud. It was a moment of epiphany for me. This is a most singular woman, I thought to myself. There she is down on her beam ends, bobbing about in the water, and she’s laughing. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the cut of her jib. I realized then, fully and emphatically, that I’d found the woman that I wanted to live the rest of my life with. You might even say—though perhaps best not in front of Ana—that I’d finally come ashore.
The Jumblies
BY EDWARD LEAR
I
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
II
They sailed away in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;
And every one said, who saw them go,
“O won’t they be soon upset, you know!
For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,
And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong
In a Sieve to sail so fast!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
III
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, “How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
IV
And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
“O Timballo! How happy we are,
When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
V
They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
VI
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
From Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense
Acknowledgments
I’D LIKE TO THANK Tom Cunliffe—and, of course, Ros and Hannah—for letting me go along with them to see the sea; Tim, for showing me the mountains of Greece; Florika, for much generosity and friendship; Nat and Mark at Sort Of, without whom the whole crazy episode would have been lost in the mists of oblivion; and, of course, Ana, the “girlfriend” in the book—and subsequently the wife—for putting up with me.
About the Author
CHRIS STEWART SHOT TO fame with Driving over Lemons in 1999. Funny, insightful, and real, the book told the story of how he bought a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river, with its previous owner still a resident. It became an international bestseller, along with its sequels—A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society.
In an earlier life, Chris was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), then joined a circus, learned how to shear sheep, went to China to write the Rough Guide, gained a pilot’s license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking.
Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Chris Stewart
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in Great Britain by Sort of Books, London, in 2009.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Chris, 1950–
Three ways to capsize a boat : an optimist afloat / Chris Stewart.
p. cm.
1. Boats and boating. 2. Sailing. 3. Stewart, Chris, 1950–
—Travel—Atlantic Ocean. 4. Stewart, Chris, 1950– —Travel—Mediterranean Sea. I. Title.
GV775.S828 2009
797.1—dc22 2009044105
eISBN: 978-0-307-59238-5
v3.0
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Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Page 14
