I don't know what it is with old sailboats boats; I’m not sure of the spell cast on me. But, like a distractible child, I can't put them down. I can't tuck them away on some sensible and well-ordered shelf. And it's more true when they are old, worn and rich in rot and history. The bulging seams and weathered mast hoops bring out the irrational in me. They make me forget I am trapped in a time of gigabytes and reality sit-coms; they make me forget my classrooms waiting for their assignments. They make me forget the oil bills, car loans, mortgages and 401 K's; I forget town meetings, CCD and piano lessons. I forget I ever tried to make my lawn green. I’m in a cloud of unknowing; my thinking is a fog of dreams rolling in under a full moon. I forget and they become me, and I become them.

Still, despite the raging voices of common sense, I forge on with my lifelong madness. I chart a course over the familiar shoals and note my log at the changing of the tides. My eye is always searching for a lost shoreline. Sometimes I can't turn away. And so it is with this old catboat--a forty-year old, 25 foot Wittholz, owned by The East End Classic Boat Society, and offered to me for the ungodly cheap sum of $6000.00, payable in t

wo installments. It almost seems doable, but ultimately, after the reality check, it's not; and so I live with a dream deferred. It's a dream of pulling our dory alongside a big boat; it's a dream of passing the kids up to Denise, steadying the tender as she hauls them in over the taffrail. It's a day spent fishing and jumping from the toe-rail—and then sailing on a morning tide to some other harbor or cove. It’s a firing sun setting down across Penobscot Bay. It’s the smell of coal burning down below: wet wool, coffee and biscuits.

We do have a boat: a 17 foot Wittholz catboat, solid, tough and pretty as all hell; and I wonder why that is not enough? Why can't I be happy just day sailing around the coves and beaches of Cape Cod? The kids love it; Denise loves it. Her Uncle Bee built "Lolo" in his barn in New Hampshire, used it for a few years and gave it to us. We took our honeymoon on that boat, sailing from the Cape to the Vineyard, and then back to Boston. Why do I want the bigger boat with the bigger headaches and expenses? Why would I be willing to live so close to the bone just to get closer to the water? 

My life is full of the flotsam of sailing; a patchwork of memories stitched together by a common yarn: I worked as the deckhand on a Scots Zulu, a massive beauty of a ship, sailing out of Vineyard Haven: fifty tons of Scottish larch, white oak, hemp and pine tar. She’d plow like a bull through the maddened waves of the sound, splitting walls of water, upending the passengers and wine-coolers in a torrent of seawater and seaweed. Clinging to the topmasts, I’d free the jammed blocks and unfurl the ships pennant; I’d rest sometimes in that holy place, far above everything I ever was before—always looking eastward; my heart pounding. I remember coiling lines, making beckets, splicing lines and winding marlin. I remember the brilliant ornery Captain, barking incessantly at me to hop to, bitter at having to sail rich folks around the bay, struggling to finance his own dream of sailing again around the world--a dream that has him now with his wife and two boys somewhere in the South Pacific. 

I’ve sailed since I could almost wonder. On White Pond in Concord, I sailed the plywood sailfish my father built in our garage; all day, every day, whenever the day allowed; no life jackets, no soccer practice to get to. Eight years old and I was leaping into the sails as she flipped, later mastering a dry scramble over the leeward rail and onto the dagger-board, posting a triumphant salute to my father watching amazingly unconcerned from shore. On my beloved Stinson Lake I sailed our fiberglass sunfish until I recognized the signs of every different squall line coming in from every direction over the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I ghosted in the calms and fished for bass and trout. Even then I imagined myself going over the lake falls, down Stinson Brook to the Pemigewasset, into the Merrimac, and finally, out to the sea. Later, when I got out of school, I bought an ancient catboat in New York and sailed her to Cape Cod—me and three friends ignorant as all get out, punching our way through a raging Northeaster, laughing and singing, pretty sure we knew where we were, oblivious to our idiocy. She sank the next day in the bay near Monument beach—a small stub of mast pointing to the sky; a beach-load of tourists gathering at the disaster gawking from the beach. After that I bought a thirty-foot plywood sharpie and had her battered by Hurricane Bob. I rebuilt her at a greater cost than I paid for her. I never even gave her a name, just MS5781; sailed her up Maine and back to the Vineyard. Almost lost her—and myself—in a fifty-knot squall while cutting across the Gulf of Maine. 

That wasn't enough. I bought another catboat, tired in the stem; tired in the keel; and tired in the ribs. I proposed to my wife in that boat as she sat high and dry in my front yard. I never did get it back in the water—or the next boat after that. We're sailing in Lolo now. She’s a good boat. We keep her on a friend’s mooring in the water off the beach in Eastham. We’ve had many good sails, never more than a half an hour from shore. We play in the mudflats until the tide comes in, and then Denise and I drag all six kids in a line out to the boat, kicking and splashing in their Scooby -Doo life jackets. They think they're in heaven. They probably are.

You'd think that was enough.  But then I'd be taken again by the dream. Shaking out a reef off Lieutenant’s Island, I'd make a sight towards Stellwagen and imagine us in a bigger boat, something I didn't have to take back to shore—a ship we could call home. I'd imagine a quieter time with just us sailing on a boat for the whole summer: maybe a scow sloop, or a small schooner; or a big beamy catboat. Sometimes I'd get practical (to my eye) and plot ways to get my Captains license and sail folks around, and not be bitter like my old boss. I'd read literature of the sea with anyone willing to share and keep logs of our adventures. We’d dive and fish and swim in the cold waters and live on clams and scallops and pringles. I even got so far as figuring what it would take to make it a reality. It's money. It always boils down to money...  It still does.   But my head is always calculating for when another boat comes along.

And then this damn old catboat. I never should have let it root in my heart. I never should have made the call or listened to the man describe her—like a child or a grandfather remembered. It is something that words don’t explain. My words are only the finger pointing at the moon; never the moon itself. That moon is arcing over a horizon. It is not a desire to get away. It is a need to get on; to get on the water and listen for the selkie; to know the tides and learn from the stream flowing through me; and when I have learned, to teach others; to teach my kids, to shout like a man overboard, lost in muffled darkness; or at the very least, to speak from my experience, though it is experience I lack. Everything I've done on boats is a transient memory; a fleeting glimpse into what can only be my soul. In the greater scheme of seafaring I am still a greenhorn. The winds and the tides still fill me with fear. But still, I keep making my way down to the water.

I stand on shore, in awe of the mystery.