Stupid Kid Trick
Hurricane Carol hit Cape Cod in the late summer of 1954, when I was twelve years old, and the power went out for two days. At first, the “groan-ups” at the big summer house in Quissett rather enjoyed the novelty of playing backgammon and bridge by candlelight, as they got hammered on their usual lunchtime cocktails and “picnicked” on sandwiches made with meat and cheese from the ice-box – a real one, not a fridge, with ice provided by an ice-man who had delivered a big chunk of ice from his icehouse as soon as the storm warning came over the radio. The Woods Hole Golf and Tennis Club was closed, and the Ames Cup, the final sailboat race of the season, was cancelled.
The Quissett house was sturdy, and although it groaned and swayed a little in the wind, losing a few shingles, it came through without structural harm. To reassure my six-year-old brother Mike, our mother told him the worst of the hurricane had passed, and what remained was only the storm’s “tail-end.” She was wrong. Hurricanes are enormous circular whirlwinds, and in the northern hemisphere they spin counterclockwise. Carol’s leading edge, blowing west to east, had passed by, and we were in the hurricane’s calm eye. But her trailing edge, howling in the opposite direction, was yet to come. However, I didn’t know that, any more than my mother did. All I picked up on was that the wind had subsided because the hurricane was coming to an end. I was glad – tail-end or not, it had been powerful enough to knock down all but one of the elms that grew on right edge of the bowl-shaped hollow below the house.
I ate my sandwich quickly, and put my yellow slicker on over my bathing trunks, because it was raining a little. Popping my sou’wester onto my head, I set off for my best friend Freddy Houston’s house. It was bigger than my family’s place on the hill, but almost identical, because my great-grandfather, John Marshall, a wealthy Scottish émigré, had built both houses to the same design back in the 1880s. The house on the hill had gone up first, on a point that divided Quissett’s outer and inner harbors, and as his family grew, Marshall decided he needed more room. So he bought the hill, its surrounding fields, and the bowl-shaped hollow at the hill’s base from a family of Swedish-American fishermen-farmers, and went to Boston to hire a gang of Irish laborers to lift the place, with all its furniture inside, off its foundation using house-jacks, set it down on rollers, and hitch up three teams of draft-horses to haul it up the hill. It took two weeks to transport the house, and the only damage done to it was cosmetic: a crack in the plaster of one wall of the dining room. The Irishmen were paid well, by the standards of the time, and Marshall also provided them with plenty of whiskey to help them through their work. Although as a Scots Presbyterian he had little use for the Catholic Irish, his practicality outweighed his prejudice, and he knocked back a tot or two of the Water Of Life with them when the house was settled down on its new foundation.
Then he hired the same carpenters who had built the original house to construct the second house on the point. Like most Cape Cod carpenters of the period, they doubled as shipwrights, building boats of many different sizes, from dories through small fishing smacks to the steamships and ferries that plied Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound; and their seamanlike concern for strength and water-tightness explained why the “cottages” they built for summer people from Boston and New York survived bad storms with only minor damage.
The rain slackened off as I walked across the Woods Hole road and down the Houston’s driveway, but the wind freshened. Freddy’s elegant, soft-spoken father had been suddenly called back to India, where he worked for the U.S. State Department in some arcane capacity. My family always thought he was a senior CIA spook, because he never talked about his work at summer parties, but of course we had no way of finding out for sure.
The Houstons employed a cook, a chauffeur who doubled as a butler, and a nursemaid who helped take care of Freddy’s little sister Molly, who was the same age as my brother Mike. Mrs. Houston needed the help, because she had been crippled by polio as a child, and used crutches that fit around her forearms to get around. All three servants were Indian. Freddy had told me that the nursemaid was called an amah in Hindi, the language spoken by the Hindus, who believed in many different gods and goddesses. I knew a little about that, because I had begun reading Rudyard Kipling’s stories about India, and I thought it was wonderful that such exotic people worked for my friend’s parents.
I climbed the steps to the front door and knocked. The butler opened it. He was a tall man, mahogany-colored, with a trim black moustache and beard, and he wore a starched white jacket, dark pants, sandals, and a green turban. He smiled when he saw me, and said, “Ah, Mistah Toby! It is very good to see you. Come in, come in!” He spoke in a British accent, laced with a Hindi lilt. “We have had a big storm, eh? But it is over now. I hope your family is well. Mistah Freddy is in the sun room, though there was not so much sun yesterday morning, neh?” He laughed at his own joke, and I laughed with him. “Dark as night, Mister Singh,” I said. “Is the power out here?”
“It went out for some time, but it came back on just fifteen minutes ago,” he said. “Perhaps it is the same at your house.”
“I hope so,” I said. “We were running out of candles for the hurricane lanterns.”
“Would you like a Coca-Cola?” he asked. My parents frowned on Coke, because it was bad for my teeth, but I loved it. “Yes, please, Mister Singh,” I said.
Freddy was sitting on the padded bench that ran around three sides of the sun room. “How’s it goin’, cat?” he asked me. I sat down next to him.
“Reet and sweet, man,” I said. We enjoyed talking like beatniks.
Mr. Singh brought our Cokes, in two glasses with ice, on a silver tray, and set it down between us. “Dyanavaad, Mistar Singh,” Freddy said. ”Aapaka svaagat hai,” said Mister Singh, and walked silently away.
“What’s that mean,” I asked.
“Just ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome,’ in Hindi. Indians are very polite. Well, Hindus are, anyway. Muslims, not so much. They only have one god, Allah, and there’s this holy man named Muhammad who brought Allah’s word to the people, and if you say anything bad about either one of them, you might get your head chopped off.”
“For real?”
“Really truly for sure. You’ll get condemned to death in a religious court, and some guy with a scimitar will lop off your head, snick-snack.”
“It’s like the Lord High Executioner in that play we saw at the Penzance Players.”
“’The Mikado?’ Yeah, kinda like that, only the Muslims mostly live in Pakistan, not China.”
I was dimly aware that India wasn’t a British colony any more, the way it was when Kipling wrote his stories, but I’d never heard of Pakistan. My geography class at the Fessenden School didn’t mention it, and neither did anyone in my family. Freddy knew all kinds of cool things, maybe because his father was a spy.
The view from the sun room showed that the sailboats and power boats in the outer and inner harbors had been knocked around a bit by Carol. One big cabin cruiser – Freddy and I were sailboat snobs, and called power boats stinkpots – had slipped her mooring and was canted halfway over on the rocks of Tick Point, to the right of the entrance to Gansett Harbor. My family had already arranged for our Herreshoff 12, the Moonshine, to be towed to Charley Eldred’s boatyard and laid up until next summer, but Freddy’s green-hulled Cutlass was still at her mooring. And that gave him a Big Idea. We’d both graduated from the Quissett Yacht Club’s little fleet of Beetle Cats to the Herreshoffs, and had participated in the Junior Races earlier in the summer. I had also crewed for my dad in Moonshine a couple of times, though we hadn’t done very well, largely because of the “ballast” Dad kept in the bilges – a couple of six-packs of beer which he started in on before we even reached the starting line. Dad had been an officer in the Navy during the war, but serving aboard a destroyer escort didn’t make you an expert at racing small sailboats.
“Hey, man, the Cutlass is still in the water,” Freddy said. “Let’s take her out.” I thought about that. Freddy usually came up with the Big Ideas, but I always found myself having to make them work. And I wasn’t sure this Big Idea was a good one. It was still blowing pretty hard – there were whitecaps in the channel leading out to the bay – and I remembered the downed trees at my house. But I wasn’t about to wimp out in front of my friend. Freddy was fearless. He liked to jump from the railing of his family’s dock without even testing the temperature or depth of the water, and he ignored the rule about waiting an hour after you ate before going swimming, because if you didn’t, you’d catch a cramp and drown. He dared me to swim under the diving float with him, saying he’d already done it, and there was plenty of air. He also challenged me to swim with him all the way out to the Knob, the promontory that marked the eastern entrance to the harbor, in defiance of our families’ rule about staying out of the channel because boat skippers coming in or going out might not spot our heads in the water. And in fact we did have a close call on that swim: a commercial fishing boat coming back from collecting the catch from the weirs off the Knob almost ran over us. Its skipper cussed us out, and Freddy shouted something that sounded like “Kutikabachi!” which, he told me, means “Son of a bitch!” in Hindi.
So I went along with his Big Idea, even though it made me nervous. I put my slicker and sou’wester back on, Freddy dressed in his, and we walked down to the beach. My family’s heavy wooden dinghey had been pulled up above the high-tide mark and turned upside-down. We got the dinghey’s oars from the boathouse, righted it, and pushed it into the water. I did the rowing, while Freddy sat in the stern and urged me on.
“Pull, ye scurvy swab!” he yelled.
“Avast yer yellin’, ye puling posey!” I yelled back at him. We also enjoyed talking like pirates, aptly enough, given the boat’s name.
I pulled the dinghey up to the weather side of the Cutlass, letting the wind keep it in contact with the sailboat’s hull, and Freddy scrambled aboard, taking the painter forward and clipping it to the ring on the mooring buoy. Then I boarded and picked up a section of the floorboards to check the bilges. Carol had left a foot of water in them, so I got out the pump, told Freddy to hold its hose over the side, and began to work the handle up and down. It was tiring work, and after ten minutes or so, we switched places. Finally the bilges were almost dry, and I used the boat’s big sponge to blot up the last of the water.
“Still blowin’ like stink,” Freddy said.
“Arrh, ye lily-livered landlubber, ‘t’ain’t but a gentle breeze, by gar!” I responded, in my best imitation of Robert Newton’s gravelly voice as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a movie we’d both seen two summers previously. The mainsail and jib had been left furled along their booms, and I removed the canvas stops and shook them loose. Then we tightened the outhauls on the jib boom and the mainsail’s boom and gaff and uncleated the jib and main sheets.
“Second set of reef-points, I think,” I said.
“Aye, aye, captain,” said Freddy.
“Actually, it’s your boat, so you’re the captain.”
“Oh, right. Make it the second set of reef-points, ye worthless son of a sea-cook!”
“Long John Silver never said that!”
“No, but Manuel did, in Captains Courageous.”
“Okay.”
We used the reef-points – stout strings attached to grommets in the sails – to furl the mainsail down to half its normal size, and used the halyards to sway it up, throat first, then the gaff. Freddy took the helm, and I crawled forward, uncleated the mooring line, lifted it from its chock, and cast it overside. Even with the “handkerchief rig,” the main filled with a loud crack, and I was almost spilled overboard. “Head up!” I yelled.
“Up where?”
“Into the wind! Like when you’re coming about!”
“Oh, yeah. Ready about, hard alee!”
“No, don’t tack all the way! Let her luff!”
“Let her what?”
We’d studied nautical nomenclature during our sailing classes at the Quissett Yacht Club, but Freddy had missed some of them. His family spent part of their summers at their home in Meridan, Connecticut, because Mr. Houston was the mayor of the town.
“Uncleat the main sheet! Let the sail flap!”
He did, and I clambered back into the cockpit, put the tiller hard aport, hauled the sheet back in. We set off on the starboard tack, and made our way toward the entrance to Gansett Harbor. Cutlass was heeled hard over, but Herreshoff 12s hardly ever capsized, because they were so beamy the windward sides of their hulls blocked the wind from the luffs of their sails. My uncle Bungie King was the only person I knew who had ever sunk a Herreshoff. Back before World War Two, when he was a kid, he’d taken out the King family’s Psyche, and foolishly cut a channel buoy at low tide. A rock ripped Psyche’s hull open below the waterline, and down she went. The Eldred boatyard raised her and repaired her, but it was as if she remembered Bungie’s misuse of her, for afterwards, she never did well when he was at the helm. Only his mother, my grandmother’s sister Aunt Giddy, could get the best out of her, and for many years she dominated the races.
We passed the cabin cruiser, which was being methodically battered to pieces on the rocks by the wind and waves, and I tacked again. The sight of the wrecked power boat sobered me, and I almost asked Freddy if maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. But he was wildly excited, and insisted on taking the tiller. “Aye, aye, sir,” I said. “We’re in all respects ready for sea.” I’d learned the phrase from my father, the proper response when a ship’s captain asks the first mate if a vessel is prepared to begin a voyage. I took over the management of the main and jib sheets, and we went sailing, by gar!
Cutlass smacked through the chop in the channel and, seated on the windward bench, I got sprayed with every smack, but it felt good.
“Are we old salts, or what?” Freddy yelled.
“Jolly jack tars, arrh, arrh!” I yelled back.
We tacked back across the channel, and I let the sails out a little, because the wind had shifted to the northwest. On a close reach, we passed the red nun halfway to the harbor mouth, and Freddy came about again. I had caught his excitement, and I actually shouted “Yay!” as if we were on a roller-coaster. Not too far from the truth, but Carol was running the ride, not some amusement park carny, and she had no brake lever. If anything, we went even faster as we neared the light buoy that marked the harbor’s entrance. The tall buoy was plunging up and down, exposing its barnacled bottom half on the upswells and vanishing almost to its lantern as it sank back into the water.
But then we passed it, and I got a look at what Carol was doing to Buzzard’s Bay. The waves were enormous, and the wind was so strong it snatched the foam off their crests.
“Jesus Christ, come about!” Freddy put the tiller over, and the boat started to turn. But she didn’t complete the tack. A wave smacked the port side of her bow and stopped her dead. We were in irons, rocking helplessly, the sails rattling so hard I thought they might get ripped away. Cutlass began to drift toward the rocks of the Knob. We weren’t old salts any more. We were two terrified kids in a foundering boat.
“Give me the tiller,” I yelled. “Go forward and back the jib!”
“Do what?” he yelled back.
“Shit, never mind! I’ll do it!”
I shoved the jib boom over until the sail filled. The sloop’s bow swung around, and the mainsail bellied out with a crack. We heeled hard over, and water poured over the leeward combing. But at least Cutlass was answering her helm. She wasn’t Carol’s bathtub toy any more.
Coming back in was a little tricky. We were sailing directly before the wind, wing-and-wing, the jib all the way out to port and the main to starboard. Cutlass was still rocking hard, and I was afraid of a “gooseneck jibe,” when the wind suddenly backs the sail, lifting up the boom and slamming it down hard enough to break the halyards and drop the gaff boom into the waterd. So I hoicked myself up on the starboard gunwale and sat in the pocket of the mainsail. My weight was enough to keep the boom down, and even with the handkerchief rig, we were scudding along faster than I had even gone in a Herreshoff, even on the down-wind leg of a race with the spinnaker up.
The run in was glorious, and I sang a snatch from an old whaling chantey I’d learned from a recording of sea songs: “We’ll rant and we’ll roar/Like true-born young whalermen!/We’ll rant and we’ll roar/On deck and below,/Until we see bottom/Inside the two sinkers,/And straight up the channel into Huesco we’ll go!”
We made our mooring perfectly, furled the sails and tied the stops around them, and rowed to the beach. After hauling the dinghey back up above the tide line and turning it upside-down, we stood for a moment, grinning at each other.
“Quite a voyage, matey,” I said.
“That it was, shipmate,” Freddy said.
“I pissed my pants.”
“Arrh, that’s nothin’, ye posey. I shat mine.”