Background

I used to think for many years that the reason my father didn’t teach me enough about how to operate his charter boat, how to run it, how to repair it, how  to set up the lines and where to fish and how to make the passes or how to spot the birds working on the horizon—was that I was a girl.

But when I was 21 and my stepmother Joan had died and he gave up chartering, he asked me out of the blue one day, “Pen, do you want the boat?”  That ugly 28-foot piece of crap that I had no idea how to run or maintain or stock with the right type of bait, tackle or rods, and he’s asking me if I want to continue the charter business?  Had he been living some sort of parallel life while I was growing up, in which he imagined he taught me everything I needed to know, and nurtured my love of the water and my fascination with that life?  So I said “Uh . . . no thanks” and went to graduate school instead, and seethed, and continued seething until the Jeff Brown appeared in my yard and Paul in his kindness said, “Here.  Here’s a project.  Get it ready,” and I started wondering why I knew nothing, really, about boats, or the water, or this area, or my family.

This isn’t the story of my father.  I don’t think.  It’s the story of my incompetence, and my continuous desire to be more than adequate at something, especially something that is an art on both sides of my family.  My mother Alma was Jack’s sister.  She died when I was 5 months old.  My father and Jack were great pals.  There was a great ripping in my father’s soul when she died.  I cannot explain it.  I never fully understood it.  But from that moment, he spent his life waiting to die.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  That stuff can come later.  But what I’ve realized in the few days since Jeff Brown arrived and I have faced my incompetence head on is that I didn’ t learn about boats and the water like other kids here not because I was a girl but because my father just could not push aside that curtain of despair long enough to do anything with a child that was remotely life-affirming for the child. He could sometimes make himself comfortable-that’s how he put it—on the water, and so we went on endless, and I mean endless, fishing trips.  I do not know how to repair or drive a boat but I know how to fish.  He was not a good teacher.  We learned through a frantic desire to make him less angry.

My stepmother Joan always wanted a sailboat.  My father hated them. They got in the way of fishing.  Which was strange, since his best friend, his brother in law Uncle Jack, built them—sloops and schooners and catboats—but Jeff Brown was built after Alma died and so to my knowledge my father and Jack never went sailing together—they preferred to commune on the Star, a 40-foot dragger Jack built—my father’d been a lobsterman before he bought the charter boat.  His first boat, the Dutchy was a beautiful little dragger. 

 Here's the Dutchy , c. 1962 or so, with Pop posing

He re-named it Yankee Girl II—a name I was never fond of, and then sold it and bought the piece of crap called Yankee Girl III. Which I guess now could be considered a “classic.”  The sight of it in vintage ads still gives me the creeps.

 

Feh.

 

We didn’t visit Uncle Jack or his family often.  My stepmother would occasionally take us to see them, or other cousins—she was friendly and outgoing and not a fan of 24/7 isolation.  But to my father, everyone was crazy, or had done him wrong, or not worth talking to.  What I know now is that everything hurt.  Seeing Jack hurt.  Living in the same town hurt.  It was a bottomless well, his despair, and we were down there with him, only we didn’t know why and he did, but he really wasn’t thinking about us.  It wasn’t selfishness really. . .  maybe it was.  It was the inability to care about anything that wasn’t part of the past.

So I learned nothing about boats not because I was a girl but because it would have been impossible for him to teach me.  That’s why when he asked me “Do you want the boat?” he really meant it, as though life had gone by with him showing me how to have a future and me learning it. And none of that had happened at all.

When my stepmother Joan died I was 21 and my father moved away, to be taken care of by a new wife who had known him since before Alma.  I decided to get to know Alma the only way I could, and I started visiting Uncle Jack.  I think he got it. He took me sailing a lot, and out on the Star with his old water rat geezer buddies.  He spoke of Alma as much as he could.  I remember him being glad to see me every time I visited. I tested his serenity many times, trying to get him into arguments about politics, or his life choices, which I didn’t understand.  When we were out sailing he’d tell me of his other boats.  When I knew him he had the Sea Mew which was a wonderful little catboat-ish thing with a gaff rig,  He also had built a little spritsail boat that you could sail, row or put a motor on.  He let me sail that but told me it gave him a heart attack to watch me.  I knew nothing.  But I had no fear.  I thought I could learn it from osmosis. I figured it was in my blood.  There was so much time to make up.  I could not learn it from osmosis.  There was only the time I had left.