We come here to feel. To be in these waters. To sail across the bay into the channel where waves soak us so completely that we wonder why we didn’t just wear a bathing suit. I come here to count my blessings.
Mary and I swam to the light house and back yesterday. Through the swell that rose with the inevitable South West wind.
“That happened fast,” Mary offered looking through a new picture window in the kitchen of a house I’ve lived my whole life.
“It’s swung around from what was a north west when we arrived.” I say. Noting flat water turned to the chop we have come know and love.
“It’ll be sporty, that’s for sure,” I say, of our swim.
“Where are the Herreshoffs?” Mary asked.
“Rock hopping up the other side.” I say of the fleet that a second ago almost crashed into our jetty. Rock hopping a description of what you do when avoiding the tide and waves in between Wings Neck and Scraggy Neck, racing between two spits of land just shy of the Cape’s canal.
We no longer race, Mary and I. Our Herreshoff Puffin instead the family’s connection to past generations, to my mom and her family on North Haven where these boats flew marconi rigs instead of gaff. Now, we watch the races from our bluff, noting how many on the line, who’s ahead.
“The Chases are in fourth,” we say of their tell-tale red twelve. I used to know half the fleet. Not so much anymore. Mary and I would bring up the rear with a few other familiar faces, all wondering why we weren’t faster. I begged perennial winners into handing over the secrets to moving these boats through the water more efficiently.
“It’s all in the start,” most would say with a knowing smile, adding nothing much more.
“Don’t pinch,” my mom’s familiar chorus.
Sitting on the patio this morning, I feel a possible long single tack out to Bird Island and back. It’ll be wet. It might even be wild.
Yesterday’s swim a marvel as darker waters overtook me just to my right. Subtle, but unmistakable. A cloud? Mary? I didn’t panic. Instead, I took in the miracle of a school of small fish swimming through and past me. Harmless jellies too remind us both of the warm temps that make this an optimal place and time to get in this healing salt water.
Forecast partly sunny. We come to get away from the noise that makes up our lives in the city. From the confines of a pandemic that limits our existence to unhealthy amounts of screen time. Swimming. Sailing. Walking. Reading. Writing. All salve to sores scabbed over by a year and a half of COVID, no clear end in sight.
“Thank heavens,” my mom would say, not of the pandemic, but of this place. Yes. Thank the heavens for this place and these chances to be in and with nature — bathed in the ocean, awash in salt air, wind taking us to places we can barely see. I come here to remember. I come here to feel. I come here to be.
Wings Neck!
