Nathaniel Stone - On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat

On the Water

DISCOVERING AMERICA
IN A ROWBOAT

Nathaniel Stone

Illustrations by Elizabeth Stone

BROADWAY BOOKS
NEW YORK

Contents

Leg Two

Leg One

Endnotes

1. Joseph E. Garland. Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary Adventures of Howard Blackburn, Hero Fisherman of Gloucester. Nelson B. Robinson. 1978.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. John M. Barry. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Simon and Schuster, New York. 1997.

5. Joseph E. Garland. Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary Adventures of Howard Blackburn, Hero Fisherman of Gloucester. Nelson B. Robinson. 1978.

Authors Note

THE FIRST BOAT I ever built swamped immediately. I built it out of a shipping pallet picked from the trash at my mothers wood-stove shop, scrap plywood from behind the garage, and, for flotation, stray Styrofoam Id collected along the shore. My skills with tools included hammering screws as if they were nails and trimming plywood with a coping saw. I was eight years old.

That was about the time, as I remember, I started looking out of windows. Out the kitchen window to a harbor deserted in winter by all but lobster boats, a vision of adventurous freedom cut short each morning by my sullen departure for school. And out the windows of classrooms as the minutes plodded by, to scenes of playgrounds and neighbors rooflines beyond wooden fences. But I was never rebel enough to occasionally ask the teacher for a bathroom pass, slip out the side door, and disappear over one of those fences.

I was no rebel at all, in fact. Far from it. I was just a geographical deviant, always thinking of someplace new, usually near water and requiring, of course, a boat. My favorite book was the world atlas, and it still is. I cant help wondering what its like to live on the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, and whether the Rio Grande is running at El Paso, and how the rapids are on the Olenek River as it descends to the Laptev Sea.

I was twenty years old before I slept in a tent, and twenty-two when I first paddled a canoe. I was a late bloomer when it came to anything adventurous, and its important for me to say so in case anyone gets the wrong impression that the trip described in this book required anything more than the skills and conditioning of most any outdoor enthusiast. I think of it myself as a weekend rowing trip, extended. But it was also, to me, another chance at the schoolyard fence, and once I hopped over it, I never looked back.

Nathaniel Stone

Zuni, New Mexico, February 2002

TO THE MEMORY OF PARKMAN SAYWARD
MY GREAT UNCLE PAT

ON THE WATER. Copyright 2002 by NATHANIEL STONE. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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Excerpt from Spring Pools from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Latham. Copyright 1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Copyright 1956 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stone, Nathaniel.

On the water : discovering America

in a rowboat / Nathaniel Stone.

p. cm.

1. United StatesDescription and travel. 2. Stone,

NathanielJourneysUnited States.

3. Boats and boatingUnited States. I. Title.

E169.04 .S77 2002

917.304'93dc21 2002018489

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIZABETH STONE

eISBN: 978-0-7679-1316-4

v3.0

Thats Just the Way It Was

I ROWED DUE WEST across Cape Cod Bay on a glassy calm, and then followed the coast from Duxbury to Green Harbor to Cohasset. I bypassed Boston, as Id already arrived there by bus en route to Gloucester, and rowed to my childhood home of Marblehead, whose rocky shores Id last coasted when keeping two dozen lobster traps at the same age, more or less, as when Id first noticed the island of the eastern United States. Having called in advance, I stopped at Gloucester and had lunch with Joseph and Helen Garland. Joe, whose biography of Howard Blackburn, Lone Voyager, had planted the idea of rowing a circuit in my mind, commented as we sat outside eating sandwiches that he was always afraid that book might put crazy ideas in someones head!

Over the following week I skirted my way along the New England coast, and within two days reached the rocky shores of Maine, and the final state on the route, whose broad bays, long estuaries, and hundreds of islands provide thirty-five hundred miles of coastline, a seemingly inexhaustible landscape for the imagination of any small boat adventurer. I rowed from Turbats Creek across Casco Bay to Small Point, and that night at anchor had the first dream I can remember about the trip, in which the boat, with me sleeping in it, was torn by waves from anchors grip and in the darkness tumbled ashore. I passed through Five Islands on my way to MacMahan Island, in Sheepscot Bay, and from there to oceanbound Monhegan, eight miles out from Port Clyde. I paddled a short distance across Monhegans harbor to granite Manana, now uninhabited but formerly the home of Ray Phillips, the island hermit Id once met as a young boy, which was the last time Id climbed ashore there. An old Coast Guard station, now automated, casts its lonely gaze toward open ocean, and a simple shingled hut with a pitched roof stands in its own solitude atop the island rock, which is coarsely carpeted with blueberry bushes and wild rose. But Manana was not deserted the day I rowed to it, for a group of kayakers, two families out on a picnic, had arrived shortly before me, and I was invited to join them. After four days of fog, I left Monhegan this morning and rowed across the outer mouth of Penobscot Bay, reaching the protective lee shore of Hurricane Island before a line of squalls caught up to me. In the late afternoon I arrive at Greens Island, near the town of Vinalhaven, where a family waves me into shore to include me in their evening picnic of freshly caught mackerel and mussels picked from the ledges at lowtide. Their dock, to which the boat is tied, is at the mouth of a cove where perhaps a dozen boats, mostly lobster boats, are moored. If I row farther into the narrowing cove, I am told, I will be able to anchor in safety from any traffic still to come at the end of the day. It is dark by the time I say good night and leave them. They escort me by flashlight down a wooded path to the boat.