The Edge of Maine Read online

  “Did you see other boats?”

  Justin said it had just happened. Not there and then there, moon blinking off like a burned-out bulb.

  “But before it happened, did you see anything?” I willed my voice to hold steady. It was 3:35, and we were approaching the Portland shipping lanes. With any luck we would spot the big light on Monhegan in a few hours. Now I couldn’t see the top of our mast, the bowsprit, anything out there that wasn’t within touching distance. Like the Beaufort Scale used to grade winds systematically, meteorologists convey specific qualities by what sound to be loosely descriptive words: “fog” occurs when horizontal visibility is reduced to less than two-thirds of a mile and “heavy fog” when it declines to a quarter-mile. This was past heavy. “Dense,” you might call it, “thick o’ fog.” To describe the experience of this degree of fog at night, Roger Duncan—co-author of The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast, an East Boothbay citizen, and author of the authoritative Sailing in the Fog—abandons the language of exact measure and declares “you might as well have your head in a bag.” Sailing in the Fog wasn’t published until 1986, so how could we have known four years earlier Duncan’s advice: “No one who goes to sea for pleasure would sail a boat among the ledges and islands of a broken coast at night in the fog. Anchor. Stay where you are.”

  I asked my sons again to tell me the last sights they had seen. They agreed that they’d noticed a set of fast-moving lights to seaward, heading across our bow. Pretty far ahead.

  “How far?”

  They couldn’t say, they said. It was tricky to judge light at night, whether it was far off and bright or dim and near.

  “Any other shipping?”

  “Something on our course, coming up astern. A sailboat, maybe. I don’t think it’s moving faster than we are.”

  But we weren’t moving. We might as well have been anchored. We were becalmed, rolling gently in the oily seas. The sails dripped dew; the boys dropped and furled them. We were “off-soundings,” in water too deep to measure. That was good, I guessed. I fired up the faithful Yanmar diesel, never a missed beat these three years. Breathing felt difficult, as though a barber were holding a damp towel to my nose and mouth while I waited for a tanker to crawl into our cockpit. I posted Nick at the bowsprit, resumed forty-five degrees, smelled coffee cooking. Priscilla was looking through the hatch at the sky, ahead, astern at me.

  “Priscilla …” I began.

  “Just keep your head,” she said.

  FOG IS: A METAPHOR. A BANK. A BLANKET THAT MAKES you shiver. Wet blanket. A wall. It’s a bitch, a son of a bitch, everywhere in the universe (till it scoots away as slippery as it came, “scaling it up,” as sailors say). It’s a scare, a horror, can blind you to the ledge that will grind your keel and tear your rudder out, stonehearted, a stone killer. It’s cunning and reckless, a damned freak, a dirty trick. It’s ugly or beautiful, depending on whether you’re a navigator or an aesthetician. Jack the Ripper used high humidity to cloak his bloodthirsty prowlings; J. M. W. Turner found filtered loveliness in vapor, steam, and what came to be called smog, the coal-fired, greenish-yellowish-orangish-brownish infernal fog Dickens saw as “soft black drizzle.” Edward Bullough, a Cambridge don, chose fog at sea to illustrate his influential theory of “psychical distance,” adumbrated in 1912 in the British Journal of Psychology:

  A short illustration will explain what is meant by “Psychical Distance.” Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acute unpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms of discomfort such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements of the ship and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the passengers; and that special, expectant, tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all the more terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for the expert seafarer no less than for the ignorant landsman.

  Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness…. Direct the attention to the features “objectively” constituting the phenomenon—the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying-power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavor of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like a momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar physical objects—an impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direct extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marveling unconcern of a mere spectator.

  Now, writing this, I’m moved by the recollection of “curious creamy smoothness.” Then, afloat in it, I was utterly the creature of “peculiar anxiety,” exhausted and demoralized by “fears of invisible dangers.”

  Fog, we learn in the ninth-grade English class introducing us to metaphor, “comes on little cat feet.” But we also learn in science class that fog is not a mystery. Just a low cloud is all, a cloud that touches land, sticks to water. The wind that had been shoving us along came from the southwest, no surprise, indeed the prevailing summer wind in those parts. The south part made the air warm; passing over the Gulf Stream made it warmer still, and humid. High humidity brought a high dew point, the temperature at which the air could not hold moisture latent. As the sun dropped and the moist, warm air collided with the cold water of the Gulf of Maine, churned by tidal action, that dew point was reached: Bingo. Just a humdrum atmospheric phenomenon in the neighborhood of the fog factories of the Bay of Fundy and the Labrador Current, more common than sunshine. We felt as though we’d been kidnapped. Oh, how I had counted on the Monhegan Island light! But the light could have been fixed to my damned bowsprit and I wouldn’t have seen it. The decks were greased with wet and the gray swells were dirty. The air was like sour milk, dreadful yellow. The rigging, dripping morosely, brooded like gallows. I blew a foghorn with requisite regularity, and the dense, wet dark swallowed the doleful noise.

  The night it ended I composed a log:

  With Justin in the bow blowing a pitiful warning, with Nicholas below trying to recover from the night, with Priscilla deep in Duncan and Ware’s Cruising Guide to the New England Coast, day breaks. Day breaks my heart. Black obscurity gives way to pearly obscurity. Portland marine weather promises a great day ashore, sunny and hot, good beach day, maybe a little hazy. Oh, by the way, offshore? Fog.

  Priscilla doesn’t say, “How did you get us into this?” But how can I fail to know what she’s thinking as she reads Roger F. Duncan and John P. Ware, whose celebration of the water we now blindly bob upon bristles with warning labels of treacherous tides, rocky shoals, evil weather, fog?

  Priscilla reads aloud from the humid pages something she thinks I might need to know: “The on-shore tide set from Portsmouth onward is a major navigation hazard. In spite of the fact that we make a major compensation for this effect we almost always fall inside of the anticipated landfall….

  “Does that bear on us?” Priscilla asks.

  I nod, shake my head. Confess, “I don’t know.” Because the tide sets in an irregular circular motion alo
ng the course we have sailed, I haven’t the least notion where I am, not the foggiest, which is why this log is all description and no exposition. No facts to transcribe, just “beats me” and “dunno” and “huh?” As I will learn, at the helm I have indulged a known fog-bound sucker’s bias, always slightly favoring east over west, the sea over the coast, overcorrecting the helm when Blackwing swings to port, under correcting when she veers to starboard. The good news: I (probably) won’t run us up on a rocky beach in Muscongus Bay; the bad news: Between us and Portugal are few bells, horns, whistles.

  At ten o’clock, our ETA for Monhegan, the diesel coughs, sputters. Nick’s at the helm; I shout at him, assume he’s adjusted the throttle; he hasn’t. My irritated cry provokes alarm in the people I’ve brought here to make happy. I feel sorry for myself; I’m ashamed; I’m scared.

  I’d been in fog before, fog as thick as this. I’d run buoy to buoy from Pulpit Harbor on North Haven into Camden. That was five years before, and when I’d missed a mark, I’d known enough to motor the boundaries of a square, shutting off the engine to listen, and I’d found my way. It had been a strain, of course, cramping the neck muscles, all that tensing to hear, that fierce concentration on the compass, but I had known where I was when the world went blind and the whistling buoy I sought was four miles distant, halfway to Camden. Distance multiplies the effect of error, but earlier this year we’d been swallowed by fog running from Block Island to Newport, and I hadn’t panicked, just held on course fourteen miles for the Texas Tower, and there it was, its monster spider legs rising from the sea, on the button: There! That wasn’t so hard, was it?

  This was different. I tried to find Monhegan with the laughable RDF. The null suggested it was abeam, either port or starboard. Gee, thanks. The weather radio suggested a likely possibility of thunderstorms, and we prayed for them, to blow the fog away, part the veil for even an instant. A teasing zephyr astern drifted diesel exhaust at us.

  We didn’t speak. We listened. I dared not shut off the engine. I now believed so powerfully in entropy—in general disintegration and systematic failure, in bad luck—that I dared not alter anything: course, throttle, helmsman. We motored forward, forty-five degrees. Time had hung up. None of us had any sense of its duration. When the engine coughed (was even that reliable thumper preparing to stab me in the back?), I dumped into the tank our last jerrican of diesel, and I worried silently that we might soon run out of fuel. How could that be? Hadn’t I prepared? Done the math? I tried to do the math now in my head and it never came out the same twice. We were all seeing coronas, occasional flashes of light around us. Samuel Eliot Morison has written about the persistence of mist-shawled mystery along this coast, its sailors seeing “fantastic figures in a lifting fog, [imagining] the towers and battlements of a shimmering dream-city; and someone who knows the story will sing out, ‘Norumbega!’” The strobing phenomenon that day was sometimes a comfort—was the sun about to break through?—and more often a terror: What was that? These items we did not see: black cans or red nuns, birds, lobster pots, seals, boats, any way out of our fix. Now and then we imagined we heard a booming sound. We were listening for anything: a foghorn, a gull crying, a ship’s bell, a ship’s engine, surf breaking on rocks, something.

  I can recall my fear in its shaming detail all these decades later. Truth is, of course, that the terror was mostly unfounded. We had a VHF marine radio aboard, and trailed behind us a seaworthy rubber dinghy powered by an outboard. It was improbable, with my family scrutinizing what there was of a horizon, that we’d hit anything. That was the problem: There appeared to be nothing around to hit. And even if there were, our speed was four knots. We weren’t mountain climbers trying to get off the summit in a whiteout, but I was near frozen with anxiety and dread, and decades later, I came upon a piece of writing that suggested the elevator-falling quality of this panic, aggravated by the added dimension of altitude.

  In James Salter’s memoir Burning the Days, he tells of training as a pilot at the end of World War II. One May evening he was sent with others in his squadron on a navigation flight to Pennsylvania, from West Point to Scranton to Reading and home. They left while it was still light and soon were separated from one another. The information they had received about the direction and velocity of winds aloft had been inaccurate, and as the sun dropped and Salter flew west at an airspeed of 160 miles per hour, with “no one to see or talk to, the wind, unsuspected, was shifting us slowly, like sand.” In common with seventeen-year-old drivers and with sailors like myself, pilots at Salter’s level don’t think about what they don’t know, because they don’t know they don’t know it. Call it cockiness or call it blissful ignorance, it is dangerous. “Flying,” Salter writes, “like most things of consequence, is method. Though I did not know it then, I was behaving improperly.” He had failed to pay close enough attention to certain anomalies he might have noticed about the ground unspooling below, and he was unused to flying at night, “a different world” in the dark. “The instruments become harder to read, details disappear from the map.” Then, as night cooled the Earth, a scrim of mist obscured the lights below. Salter, attempting to navigate by the same RDF system that I was using thirty-five years later in Maine, tuned and adjusted the volume to find a clear signal from Reading, Pennsylvania. No matter what course he flew, the signal grew weaker. Now he was watching the clock, and his fuel gauges. “Something was wrong, something serious: the signal didn’t change. I was lost, not only literally but in relation to reality.” Now panic attacked:

  I turned northeast, the general direction of home. I had been scribbling illegibly on the page of memory, which way I had gone and for how long. I now had no idea where I was…. There was a terrible temptation to abandon everything, to give up, as with a hopeless puzzle…. I had the greatest difficulty not praying and finally I did, flying in the noisy darkness, desperate for the sight of a city or anything that would give me my position.

  Salter found in his map case a booklet, “What to Do if Lost,” which he tried to read by flashlight. A half dozen steps were listed, to be performed in sequence. Some he had already tried, he thought, and in the dark, running out of fuel, he lost faith in the procedure. This was not bobbing on a gray ocean. This would end sooner than later. And it did, with Salter crash-landing on a field and onto the front porch of a house in Great, Massachusetts.*

  PRISCILLA HEARD SOMETHING FIRST. THEN I IMAGINED I heard something and throttled back. We all cupped our ears, turning this way and that. Listening, Priscilla held her finger to her lips. Then we all heard it, a low moan, like the complaint of someone left alone with a bellyache. The resigned lament would come and go. For an hour we sought it, steering box courses as I tried for a change to follow some conventional navigational routine. This required discipline, or ignorance: Often the course I was running three minutes to each leg would seem to take us away from the breathy warning signal, or perhaps this was the effect of a slight wind shift, or of the buoy (if that’s what it was) ceasing to rock in those flat seas, or of an object—an oil tanker, let’s imagine—coming between the buoy and us, or … who knew? Then it appeared and once we saw it, we couldn’t imagine not having seen it. Reason told me that the whistle marked “SL” had not been placed to tell us where we were but to mark a hazard. Nick urged me to creep up on it and I did, because I was stalking the whistle, feared I’d spook it. But it stayed put, fifty feet off, anchored. I envied it. Now it groaned frankly, excessively.

  Justin took the helm and circled the mark while I went below to hail the Coast Guard on Channel 16. My voice did not reassure me. I had once had a bad stutter, and it had come back. Was there an “SL,” black and white, n-n-n-n-ear Mon-hee-hee-hah-heh-huh-hegan?

  That was a negative, skipper. We were circling a buoy on the Seal Ledges, a little east of Large Green Island, fourteen nautical miles east-northeast of Monhegan, which we had missed by a mile, exactly. We were in bad water, with a foot between our keel and a kelpy rock slab, and the Coast Guard
suggested we get ourselves out of there, “with all due haste,” to Matinicus Island, three miles southeast. Looking back, I guess we should have felt rescued. But our least desired course that afternoon was a course to seaward that would leave behind us the one thing we knew, yonder whining whistle. The weather radio was undecided between thunderstorms and dense fog, growing denser. We went for Matinicus and its little sister a bit seaward—Ragged—trying to pick up a red nun buoy on the Foster Ledges, R10, 155 degrees, a mile and eight-tenths, twenty minutes or so distant. No bells or whistles enhanced R10, and we missed it; it could have been thirty feet from us and we’d have missed it. We should have been near Matinicus. Priscilla was reading: “The region should be approached with caution. There are no really snug harbors … unmarked dangers are frequent, and tides are swift. In fog or storm the careless or inexperienced can get into real trouble.”

  Justin was on the bowsprit, shouting, “Look at those thunderclouds!”

  I looked up, saw black, smelled Christmas. Pines on a cliff, trailing beards of gray mist. And then we were among rocks, and a rocky beach materialized yards ahead. I swung the wheel over while Nick yelled directions, and we didn’t grind out on a ledge or tear open the hull, or even stub our toe. It was high tide.

  We anchored. I got on the radio: “Anybody on Ragged Island or Matinicus. Anybody. Please come back, please. This is Blackwing. I am looking at a rocky beach on the west side of one of your islands. We are tired. And lost. I repeat [sic], we are frightened. Please come back.”

  And there came a lobsterman, clear-voiced. Said he was pulling pots, he had us on his radar, would drop by in a jiffy, lead us into Criehaven, the harbor on Ragged. He had an extra mooring, he said, we could use it. Drink a cup of coffee, he suggested. Take it easy. Welcome to Maine, he said.