Dave, aboard Elsa. Photo courtesy David Roper
December 2024
By David Roper
We were just leaving Marblehead Harbor, headed for Salem, when Elsa’s old Yanmar began to surge before quitting altogether.
“Maybe we could get a tow?” my wife ventured hopefully. I rolled my eyes. “Elsa doesn’t do tows,” I said, haughtily. “You see,” I continued, “this is actually a sailboat.”
“But there’s no wind,” my dear wife said, looking around.
Elsa, heavy and somewhat sleepy, like a Saint Bernard on a hot, windless day, is subdued and even ill at ease in the lighter moments. But in tough situations, on high-wind days, she’s the six-ton Saint Bernard you want around. Because of these attributes, I never tried to bring her to life in very light-air sailing situations. Instead, I would fire up her old Yanmar 2QM diesel and we would go about our business.
Things were different now, because they had to be. I had played my final hand. I had played it to my wife. I was going to drift out of Marblehead Harbor, around Peach’s Point, and up Salem Harbor if it took ’til February. I was not going to fold. I hopped forward to the mast and grabbed the main halyard. “Come on Elsa, we’re outta here,” I said.
Nothing mattered now but the wind and the tide. My mind was absolutely cleansed of the exigencies of life ashore. Suddenly, life was all about watching for zephyrs. Looking for hints of tiny ruffles of wind, I scanned the glazed over, undulating swells from the east as they rolled into Salem Sound. I searched for what Thornton Burgess, author of “Old Mother West Wind”, called the ‘wilful little Breeze who was not quite ready to go home’; the breeze that “wanted to play just a little longer.” Now, I looked up at the telltales much more often than I looked ahead. “Men in a ship are always looking up, and men ashore are generally looking down” wrote poet John Masefield. And so, I watched for zephyrs. I became pure with nature. I was now in a world with no room for acrimony. No reason for distrust. A world that asked only one thing: that I simply pay attention. So, as nature’s devoted new servant, I lived for her gifts. First, I lived only to make enough headway to simply reach the outer harbor of Marblehead, thereby allowing Elsa to become enmeshed in the tentacles of the incoming tide to Salem. Then, I lived only to hook onto a little zephyr born from some lingering land warmth from Peach’s Point, allowing me the steerage to avoid some nasty ledges off my bow. And, at the success of each life, I felt pure joy. I patted Elsa’s teak cockpit coaming. I cheered. I shot a fist in the air. I suppose to anyone watching it all looked silly, such exuberance shown from a seemingly in-significant thing as a man on a little sailboat ghosting on a flat sea at nightfall; just one of earth’s eight billion humans doing his thing. What importance could that possibly have? A man in harmony with nature. A man using every sense he can summon to make simple progress in his own little world. A man focused on a simple yet universal goal: to believe he can make way on his own; to feel pride at each small success along that way; to move forward, always paying attention to what the natural world is saying and offering. And finally, to allow him to get to that place, that place in his heart or in his mind, that he calls home.
Hours later, Elsa drifted alongside her mooring with the last of the incoming tide, and just as the ‘wilful little Breeze,’ now tired itself, had climbed back into Mother West Wind’s bag, I reached over and grabbed the tall buoy, and walked forward with it slowly. There was no hurry. I was home. And on top of the world.
David Roper’s new novel, “The Ghosts of Gadus Island: A Story of Young Love, Loss, and the Order of Nature,” is now available. Dave is the author of the three-time bestseller “Watching for Mermaids,” as well as the sequel “Beyond Mermaids” and the novel “Rounding the Bend.” Buy them at Amazon.com or roperbooks.com.
