The boat slid down the bank and without a splash into the creek, which was gray this summer morning. The air was woolly with mist. The tide had turned, but just a moment before, so there was still no motion on the water—no current, not a ripple. The marsh grass was a deeper green for there being no sun. It was as if, this early and this dark, the day had not yet begun to breathe.

I straightened the boat and took my first stroke: the gurgle of the spoon blades and the sigh of the twisting oarlocks were the only sounds. I set off, moving like a water bug through the marsh and down the bendy creek to the sea. When my strokes were regular and I was rowing at a good clip, my mind started to work, and I thought: I’m not coming back tonight. So the day seemed long enough and full of possibilities. I had no plans except to keep on harbor hopping around Cape Cod, and it was easy now going out with the tide.

My starting point was Scorton Creek, in East Sandwich. A nearby hill—one of the few on the low, lumpy terminal moraine of the Cape—had once been an Indian fort. Wampanoags. The local farmers plowed on this hill until recently, when the houses went up, and their plow blades always struck flints and ax-heads and beads. I splashed past a boathouse the size of a garage. A man told me that when they were digging the foundation for that boathouse, less than twenty years ago, they unearthed a large male Wampanoag who had been buried in a sitting position, his skin turned to leather and his bones sticking through. They slung him out and put up the boathouse.

My first stroke: the gurgle of the spoon blades and the sigh of the twisting oarlocks were the only sounds

Three more bends in the creek and I could see the current stirring more strongly around me. A quarter of a mile away in the marsh was a great blue heron—four feet high and moving in a slow, prayerful way, like a narrow-shouldered priest in gray vestments. The boat slipped along, carrying itself between strokes. Now the current was so swift in the creek I couldn’t have gone back if I had tried, and as I approached the creek’s outlet, the current shot me into the sea.

After an hour I was at Sandy Neck Public Beach—about four miles from Scorton Creek. This bay side of the upper Cape has a low, duny shore and notoriously shallow water in places. The half a dozen harbors are spread over seventy miles, and most have dangerous sandbars. It is not a coast for easy cruising; in many areas there is hardly enough water for windsurfing. There are sandbars in the oddest places. Most sailboats can’t approach any of the harbors unless the tide is high. So the little boats stay near shore and watch the tides, and the deep-draft boats stay miles offshore. I was in between and I was alone. In the two months I spent rowing, I never saw another oar-powered boat more than fifty yards from shore. Indeed, I seldom saw anyone rowing at all.

Sandy Neck proper, an eight-mile peninsula of Arabian-style dunes, was today a panorama of empty beach; the only things stirring were the gulls and, more distant, the hovering marsh hawks. A breeze had come up; it had freshened; it was now a light wind. I got stuck on a sandbar, then hopped out and dragged the boat into deeper water. I was trying to get around Beach Point to have my lunch in Barnstable Harbor—my forward locker contained provisions. I was frustrated by the shoals, but I should have known. There were sea gulls all over the water here, and they were not swimming but standing. I grew to recognize low water from the posture of sea gulls.

4849 View article pages

When I drew level with Barnstable Harbor I was spun around by the strong current. I had to fight it for half an hour before I got to shore. Even then I was only at Beach Point. This was the channel into the harbor, and it was narrow, the water swiftly moving—a deep river flowing through a shallow sea, its banks just submerged.

I tied the boat to a rock, and while I rested, a ranger drove up in his Chevy Bronco.

He said, “That wind’s picking up. I think we’re in for a storm.” He pointed toward Barnstable Harbor. “See the clouds building up over there? The forecast said showers, but that looks like more than showers. Might be thunderstorms. Where are you headed?”

“Just up the coast.”

He nodded at the rushing channel and said, “You’ll have to get across that thing first.”

“Why is it so choppy?”

His explanation was simple, and it accounted for a great deal of the rough water I was to see in the weeks to come. He said that when the wind was blowing against the direction of a tide, a chop of hard, irregular waves was whipped up. It could become fierce very quickly.

Then he pointed across the harbor mouth toward Bass Hole and told me to look at how the ebbing tide had uncovered a mile of sand flats. “At low tide, people just walk around over there,” he said. So, beyond the vicious channel the sea was slipping down—white water here, none there.

After the ranger drove off I decided to rush the channel. My skiff’s sides were lapstrake—like clapboards—and rounded, which stabilized the boat in high waves; but this short, breaking chop was a different matter. Instead of rowing at right angles to the current and getting hit broadside, I turned the bow against it, and tried to steady the skiff by rowing. The skiff rocked wildly—the current slicing at the bow, the wind-driven chop smacking the stem. A few minutes later I was across. And then I ran aground. After the channel were miles of watery shore only a few inches deep—and the tide was still dropping.

The wind was blowing, the sky was overcast, the shoreline was distant; and now the water was not deep enough for my boat. I got out and, watched by strolling sea gulls, dragged the boat through the shallow water that lay over the sandbar. The boat was not buoyant until I had splashed along for an hour. To anyone on the beach I must have seemed a bizarre figure—alone, far from shore, walking on the water.

It was midaftemoon by the time I had hauled the boat to deeper water. The wind seemed to be blowing now from the west; it gathered at the stem and gave me a following sea, lifting me in the direction I wanted to go. I rowed past Chapin Beach and the bluffs there, and around the black rocks at Nobscusset Harbor, marking my progress on my flapping chart by glancing again and again at an observation tower, like a stovepipe, in Dennis.

At about five o’clock I turned into Sesuit Harbor, still pulling hard. I had rowed about sixteen miles. My hands were blistered, but I had made a good start. And I had made a discovery: The sea was unpredictable, and the shore looked foreign. At times I had been afraid. I was used to finding familiar things in exotic places, but finding the unfamiliar so close to home was new to me. It had been a disorienting day—a shock and a satisfaction.

5051 View article pages

Mrs. Coffin, at Sesuit Harbor, advised me not to go out the next day. Anyone with a name out of Moby-Dick is worth listening to on the subject of the sea. The wind was blowing from the northeast, making Mrs. Coffin’s flag snap and beating the sea into whitecaps.

I said, “I’m only going to Rock Harbor.” It was about nine miles.

She said, “You’ll be pulling your guts out.”

As soon as I had rowed beyond the breakwater I was hit hard by the waves and tipped by the wind. I unscrewed my sliding seat, jammed the thwart into place, and tried again. I couldn’t maneuver the boat. I changed oars, lashing the ten-foot ones down and using the seven-and-a-half-foot ones. I made some progress, but the wind was punching me toward shore. This was West Brewster, off Quivett Neck. The chart showed church spires. I rowed for another few hours and saw that I had gone hardly any distance at all. But there was no point in turning back. I didn’t need a harbor. I knew I could beach the boat anywhere—pull it up over there at that ramp, or between those rocks, or at that public beach.

I struggled all day. I hated the banging of waves, and the way they leapt over the sides when the wind pushed me sideways into the troughs of the swell. A few inches of water sloshed in the bottom, and my chart was soaked. At noon a motorboat came near and the man at the wheel asked me if I was in trouble. I said no and told him where I was going. The man said, “Rock Harbor’s real far!” and pointed east. Seawater had dried on the boat, leaving the lace of crystallized salt shimmering on the mahogany. I pulled on, passing a sailboat in the middle of the afternoon.

“Where’s Rock Harbor?” I asked.

“Look for the trees!”

But I looked in the wrong place. The trees weren’t onshore, they were in the water, about twelve of them planted in two rows—tall, dead, limbless pines—like lampposts. They marked the harbor entrance; they also marked the Brewster Flats, for at low tide there was no water here at all, and Rock Harbor was just a creek draining into a desert of sandbar. You could drive a car across the harbor mouth at low tide.

I had arranged to meet my father here. My brother Joseph was with him. He had just arrived from Samoa.

He touched the oarlocks. He said, “They’re all tarnished.” Then he frowned at the salt-smeared wood, and his gaze made the boat seem small and rather puny.

I said, “I just rowed from Sesuit with the wind against me. It took me all goddamn day.”

We drove to my parents’, near Bass River. My brother Alex was waiting with my mother. He smiled as I entered the house, and said, “Here he comes.”

My face was burned, the blisters on my hands had broken and left them raw, my back ached, and so did the muscle strings in my forearms; there was sea salt in my eyes.

“Ishmael,” Alex said. He was sitting compactly on a chair and glancing narrowly at me and smoking. “ ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ ”

My mother said, “We’re almost ready to eat—you must be starving! God, look at you!”

“ ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea,’ ” Alex said, and, imitating my voice, “Pass the spaghetti, Mum!”

Just before we sat down to eat, I said, “It’s pretty rough out there.”

Alex seized on this, looking delighted. He made the sound of a strong wind by whistling and clearing his throat. He squinted, and in a harsh whisper said, “Aye, it’s rough out there, and you can hardly”—he stood up, banging the dining table with his thighs—“you can hardly see the bowsprit. Aye, the wind’s shifting, too. But never mind, Mr. Christian! Give him twenty lashes—that’ll take the strut out of him! And hoist the mainsail—we’re miles from anywhere.”

“Your supper’s getting cold,” Father said.

“How long did it take you?” Mother said to me.

“All day,” I said.

“Aye, Captain,” Alex said. “Aw, it’s pretty rough out there, what with the wind and the rising sea.”

“What will you write about?” Mother asked.

I shook my head and tried not to smile—because I was thinking: All of this.

It had been harmless ridicule, and yet the next morning I got into the skiff at Rock Harbor and felt my morale rising as I rowed away. In poking fun at me, Alex had come crudely close to the truth: All risk taking has a strong element of self-dramatization in it—daredevils are notorious egomaniacs. Of course it was foolish to be home eating and bumping knees with the aged parents after such a day! So, the next day, which was perfect—bright and still—I went out farther than before, and I rowed twenty-two miles.

“See you named it after a duck,” a lobsterman called out as I passed him that day. He was hauling pots out of the soupy water.

Goldeneye was carved on my transom and shining this sunny morning, gold on mahogany.

“Killed plenty of them right here!” he shouted. “What with this hot weather we probably won’t see any until January!”

He went back to emptying his pots— the lobsterman’s habitual hurry, fueled by the anxiety that the poor beasts would die and deny him his $2.70 a pound at the market in Barnstable.

But even in his frenzy of work he glanced up again and yelled, “Nice boat!”

It was a beautiful boat, an Amesbury skiff with dory lines, all wood, as well made and as lovely as a piece of Victorian furniture, with the contours and bronzework and bright finish of an expensive coffin. Goldeneye is pine on oak, with mahogany lockers and thwarts, and a transom like a tombstone. It is fifteen feet long.

My face was burned, blisters on my hands had broken and left them raw, my back ached, and so did the muscle strings in my arms; there was sea salt in my eyes

Mine is the deluxe model. It has a sliding seat for sculling, outrigger oarlocks, and three rowing stations. It is equipped to sail, with a dagger board, a rudder, and a sprit rig. I have three pairs of oars and two spare thwarts. It is a very strong boat, with a flat but markedly rockered bottom and the most amazing stem, tucked high to prevent drag, and steeply raked, tapering at the bottom, which makes it extremely seaworthy for its size. The high waves of a following sea don’t smash over it and swamp it but rather lift it and help it escape the swell.

“We used to make those for thirty-five dollars each in Marblehead,” an old man told me in Harwich Port. “That was years ago.”

That certainly was years ago. This skiff cost me $4,371 at Lowell’s Boat Shop, in Amesbury, Massachusetts. The shop originated this skiff’s design in the 1860s and made thousands of them. It was a modified working boat—for hauling pots, handline fishing, and ferrying; and it was for river rowing on the Merrimack and also in protected harbors, like Salem. Rowing was one of the great American recreations, and the rowing age stretched roughly from the end of the Civil War until the advent of the outboard motor, in the 1920s.

My skiff had an old pedigree. It was based on the dory that was designed by Simeon Lowell in the late eighteenth century, and it is related to the French-Canadian bateaux. There are family resemblances—and certainly connections—between it and the flat-bottomed boats that you see in India, and the skiffs depicted in Dürer engravings. There are sampans on the Khamaphuli River at Chittagong, in Bangladesh, which are certainly skifflike. John Gardner, who wrote a history of this style of boat, found an Amesbury skiff in Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556), by Brueghel the Elder.

5253 View article pages

The shore had begun to look as featureless as the sea had once. The sea seemed passionate and enigmatic, and the charts showed the sea bottom to be almost comically irregular—here, at Billingsgate Shoal, miles from Rock Harbor, I could stand in the water; and farther on I could lean out of the skiff and poke crabs scuttling along the sand. I saw the shore as something shrunken and impenetrable. I had never expected to be indifferent to it, but I had grown impatient. It was the result of that awkwardness I had felt at being with my family. I rowed, and I stared at the receding shore as I had once stared at the brimming ocean. The shoreline was a smudged stripe: tiny boats, frail houses, timid swimmers—small-scale monotony.

I shipped my oars off Great Island—the Wellfleet shore—and ate lunch. Then I made a little nest in the bow and went to sleep. It was hot and dead still and pleasant—like dozing in a warm bath, with a little liquid chuckle at the waterline. I was two miles out. I woke up refreshed, put my gloves on, and continued, occasionally glancing at the long, empty beaches and wooded dunes. My destination had been the Pamet River, but it was only 2:30 and I could see the dark tower of the Pilgrim Memorial where the top of Cape Cod hooked to the west.

Excited by the prospect of rowing so far in a single day, I struck out for Provincetown. I found Pamet River and Corn Hill on my chart and calculated that I had only about eight miles to go. A light breeze came up from the west and helped me. But water distorts distance: after an hour I was still off Pamet River and Corn Hill, and Provincetown looked no closer. I may have been about three miles from shore. I began to suspect that I had not made much progress, which gave me a lonely feeling that I tried to overcome by rowing faster.

Just before four o’clock a chill swept over me. The sun still burned in the sky, but the breeze had freshened to a steady wind. It was not the gust I had experienced the day before, which had pushed me back and forth; this was a ceaselessly rising wind that lifted the sea in a matter of minutes from nothing to about a foot, and then to two feet, and whitened it, and kept it going higher until it was two to four feet and so steep and relentless that I could not keep the boat straight for Provincetown. I thought of Alex saying, The wind and the murderous waves! Please pass the spaghetti, Mum.

I could go in only one direction—the way the wind was blowing me. When I lost concentration or rested on my oars, the boat slipped aside and I was drenched. I had no doubt that I would make it to shore—the wind was that strong—but I expected to be swamped. I assumed I would turn over and be left clinging to my half-drowned boat, and I knew that it would take hours to get to the beach that way.

The discouraging thing was that I was nearer to Provincetown than to the Truro shore. So I was turning away. I rowed for an hour, pulling hard, and at times I was so tired I just yanked the oars, keeping the high sea behind me. Every six seconds I was smacked by an especially high wave—but even the sea’s crude clockwork didn’t sink me, and that gave me a special admiration for the boat’s agility. The wind had beaten all the Sunfish and the windsurfers to the beach at North Truro, but there were children dodging waves and little dogs trotting along the sand and people preparing barbecues. I pulled the boat up the beach and looked out to sea. Nothing was visible. That unpredictable place where an hour ago I had been afraid I might be swamped now looked like no more than a frothy mockery of the sky, with nothing else on it.

The following day I rowed across the crook of the Cape to Provincetown, but I did not beach the boat. I tied up to someone’s mooring and had lunch on the water, and then I rowed toward Long Point Light and around the harbor; I feathered my oars and procrastinated. Music and voices carried from the shore, the depressing hilarity of vacationers, shrill all-male mixers and partygoers at the far end of Commercial Street; and glum couples kicking along the sand; and sunbathers, leather freaks, whale watchers, punks. At last, at sundown, I rowed in and blew up my inflatable boat roller until it became a four-foot sausage, jammed it under the bow, and wobbled Goldeneye up to a town landing.

That was the rhythm of the trip: I skimming on the water and almost hypnotizing myself with the exertion of rowing, and then, at the end of the day, being startled by the experience of touching land again. There was a serenity—something silken—in the worst wind, and the behavior of water was always fascinating and wayward. But this pretty skiff aroused a harassing instinct among bystanders. They shouted at me, they yodeled, they threw stones.

Long-distance rowing in a wooden boat attracts attention. It is one of those mildly frantic, labor-intensive activities, like operating a spokeshave or pumping a butter chum. It is difficult to indulge in physical exertion and not seem like an attention seeker—most joggers are accustomed to being yakked at. Very few onlookers are indifferent to someone getting exercise in public. An old square-faced hag in a motorboat nearly sank me as she swerved past the tip of my oar in order to shriek, “Guess you’re not in a hurry!”

That was in Pleasant Bay. I had started at the top end of Meetinghouse Pond and had rowed south down what they call the River into Little Pleasant Bay. I stayed with the outgoing tide and kept on, past Chatham Light to the tip of Nauset Beach and into Stage Harbor. Some of the worst Cape currents sweep between Nauset and Monomoy Island, but I could cope with them much better than I could with the onshore razzing of “Good exercise!” or “Faster, faster!” or “One-two! One-two!” It was usually well intentioned, but it was nearly always unpleasant.

And there were the kids in motorboats. When I was young, the roads of Massachusetts were full of hot-rodders—pale, pimply adolescents in jalopies. In a general sort of way, a car represented freedom, and driving, especially driving in a dangerous manner, was a form of self-expression. When the roads improved and most of the main roads were highways, policing was stricter, drinking laws were enforced, and the jalopy—useless on a highway—became a thing of the past. At that point, hot-rodding turned into an aquatic sport.

Every year, off Cape Cod, swimmers who stray from designated areas put themselves at serious risk of losing life or limb—if not both. There have been spectacular accidents—boats ramming each other, or plowing into docks, or flipping over. Often the engine dies, and if the boat is not swamped it is taken by the wind and the current out to the open sea. You need a driver’s license for a harmless little mo-ped, but any twelve-year-old with a free afternoon is at liberty to whisk himself around in the family motorboat: there is no law against it; there are practically no laws about motorboating—there are hardly even rules. There is boating “etiquette,” but virtually the only people who observe it are people in sailboats.

The shore had begun to look featureless. The sea seemed passionate and enigmatic

I was on the southern side of the Cape. It is densely populated, full of pretty harbors and ugly bungalows—and blighting the once charming towns are the fast-food places and the pizza parlors, the curio shops, the supermarkets. On the northern, bay side of the Cape there are miles of empty beach and barren cliffs, but here the shore has been entirely claimed by developers; it is a cluttered wilderness of fences. Here and there are grand houses, even mansions, but little solitude. In a way, the mansions are responsible for the overdevelopment; it was the boasting ostentation of the newly rich that attracted the subsequent seediness. The Cape’s is a subtle landscape: there are few places on it to which people naturally gravitate—no mountains, no valleys, only harbors. So the settlement has been based on social insecurity—people have planted their bungalows around the mansions of rich families (much as they have in Newport), proving once again that all classes have their snobberies.

I rowed as fast as I could—dodging the sea traffic and the shouters—from Stage Harbor, in Chatham, to Wychmere, in Harwich. The prevailing southwesterly wind was always opposing my progress. I continued to Bass River, but I did not go to my parents’ house nearby. I slept at my own house now, and my routine was to sneak the boat into the water early and head west. I rowed to Hyannis and was surprised by the strong current and the protruding rocks. I crossed Lewis Bay. I rowed to Hyannis Port and Wianno, and there, where overdressed people sheltered behind hedges, grimacing at the sea with expensive dentures, I stopped. Rowing around the Cape had become routinely pleasant. I needed another challenge.

5455 View article pages

I had been rowing through Nantucket I Sound. It is a reasonably safe stretch A of water near the shore, but a few miles out it is another story entirely. It has been called the most dangerous water on the New England coast. There are shoals, tidal streams, stiff winds, sudden fogs. They are bad, but worse are the currents. The tide ebbs to the west and floods to the east—twelve separate charts in the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book are needed to demonstrate the complex changes and velocity in the currents, and at their worst they surge to around four knots, creating little maelstroms as they swirl past the deep holes in the floor of the sound. It is like a wide, windswept river which flows wildly, changing direction every twelve hours; and the most unpredictable part lies, just between Cape Cod and the northwest coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where, a bit lower down, the current has proved such a ship swallower that the waters are known as the Graveyard.

I decided to row across it in my skiff.

There was a pleasing secrecy in rowing this boat—or boating in general. It only seems like a conspicuous recreation; in fact, boating is a private passion—you are hidden on the ocean, which may be why boat owners are independent, stubborn, finicky, and famous for doing exactly as they please. There are few seagoing socialists. I began to understand the weekend sailor, the odd, opinionated boat owner, the person urgent to set sail; I think I even began to understand those idiot kids in their motorboats. We were all keeping the same secret.

But in Goldeneye I believed I felt it more keenly: I was nearer the water’s surface, I was victimized more by the weather and the tides, I was moving under my own steam. These were all crucial factors in rowing across Nantucket Sound, where if I did not make careful calculations I would probably fail.

From the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book I determined that for an hour or so, twice a day, there was no current in the sound. My idea was to find a day when this slack period occurred in the early morning, and then rush across, from Falmouth Harbor to Vineyard Haven. If the wind was light and visibility fairly good, and if I rowed fast, there would be no problem. A certain amount of luck was required, but that imponderable made it for me a more interesting proposition.

The forecast was good—sunshine and breezes. I was not confident about succeeding, but I knew that I would never have a better chance. Consequently, I decided to take my fifteen-year-old son, Marcel, with me. I liked his company, and he was strong enough to help with the rowing.

We left Falmouth Harbor in the early morning. It was a mile to the harbor mouth, where the breeze was just enough to stir the bottom half of the American flag on the flagpole there. Once past the jetty it was too rough for the long oars and the sliding seat. I put in the extra thwarts, handed Marcel a pair of oars, and using the two rowing stations, we headed into the mist.

The Vineyard was hidden in the haze of a hot summer’s morning. We pulled, talking a little at first, but in a short time falling silent. It was hard rowing, it took total concentration; and we were both nervous—yet each of us was at pains to conceal it from the other. The waves regularly hit us on the starboard side, and the spray on Marcel’s back dried to white smudges of salt. Now the Cape shore had a veil of mist across it, and out of it came the ferry Island Queen with a bone in its teeth. It was just astern of us, and then it changed direction. I knew it was headed for Oak Bluffs, so I could guess where Vineyard Haven was in the mist.

About an hour after leaving Falmouth Harbor we were rowing in the black water of the sound, and neither the Cape nor the Vineyard was visible. In this misty isolation I felt a foolish thrill that was both terror and pleasure. I stopped rowing in order to savor it. Marcel said, “We’d better hurry.’’ Another hour and we were off West Chop Lighthouse— the Vineyard had gradually become visible, like a photographic image developing in a tray of chemicals, acquiring outlines, then solidity, and finally color. A cabin cruiser went slapping past, the bow of Goldeneye hit a four-foot curbstone of water, and we were drenched. But we had almost made it, and sheltered by the Vineyard, the water was flat enough for my long oars and my sliding seat. Marcel curled up on the stem locker and went to sleep as I rowed the two and a half miles to the head of Vineyard Haven harbor.

It had not been bad—I counted it as a small victory, and I was so heartened by it that I decided to row back after lunch. It was an ignorant decision. I had forgotten about the currents; I didn’t know that the afternoon winds on the sound can be devastating; I did not realize how tired we were from the morning trip. And I had thought that West Chop was just another comic Cape name.

I soon learned. The current had begun to run west, and the wind had picked up and was blowing to the east, fringing the manic three-foot sea with foam. About half a mile off the lighthouse we were powerless to resist the tipping wind, and the current took us into the chop—West Chop. The car ferry Islander went by, leaving vast corrugations on the water. We were no longer trying to get across to Falmouth; we were trying merely to stay afloat.

“Know what I think?” I said.

Bam went another wave, soaking us again.

“That we should turn back,” Marcel said.

Immediately we turned the boat, and we rowed as hard as we could; but it was two hours before we were back in the harbor and on a friendly beach. Now the fear was gone, and all that was left of my worry was exhaustion. The experience of the day was so strange it could be compared only to the abruptness of a nightmare—it was the experience of absurdity and danger, the surrealism of the unknown near home.

The next day the weather report was dire: A gale was expected, small-craft warnings, heavy seas. Everything looked fine in Vineyard Haven, but I was unsure about a safe return to the Cape in the skiff. I decided not to risk Marcel’s life and sent him back to the mainland on the ferry. I rowed over to Bill Styron’s, and though I was sorely tempted by his invitation to a sushi lunch, I felt I should try to return.

It was one o’clock. An hour later I was at the buoy that marked the harbor entrance, and making no progress. I was pushed by the wind, pulled by the current. Within minutes I was in West Chop again, but much farther out than I had been the day before. I put in the short oars, but the chop was too fierce to row through; I couldn’t row at all—I couldn’t even steady the boat. The oars were bending, and I thought it was likely that I might break one as I fought the current. Some boats passed me, riding high, and moved on without pausing. The wind was strong. Another hour went by: three o’clock—I was nowhere, still pulling.

I was blown aside and tugged toward shore, and it was another hour and a half before I got back to Vineyard Haven. Then I admitted to myself that I had almost been swamped —and it wasn’t seamanship but only luck that had prevented it. I might have drowned. I certainly had been frightened. They had been the worst waves I had seen all summer. It was almost six: I had spent half the day going nowhere. It would be dark soon—this was like the last hour of summer light for me.

I fretted in the harbor for a while, and then nerved myself and asked a boat owner for a tow back to the Cape. “I’d be glad to,” the man said, and tied Goldeneye to his cabin cruiser. I joined him at the wheel, and he remarked on the high waves and strong wind. He wasn’t bothered. He had a big boat and a deafening diesel engine: we were safe. I had been saved by the sort of boat I had been cursing all summer.

Goldeneye was crusted with salt again. Everything in it—the charts, the tide tables, my food—was wet and had to be thrown away. I found the boat ramp clogged with rubbish—plastic bottles, some rope, a smooth, swollen rat. I winched the boat onto the trailer and headed home.

“Here he comes,” Alex crowed. There were ten people in the dining room. “Big dramatic entrance! Look, everybody, it’s Ishmael! Aw, ‘It was the schooner Hesperus, / That sailed the wintry sea’!” He took me aside. “What took you so long?” he said. “You were supposed to carve the turkey.”