Change of Course Read online

  To my brother. Who else?

  FORWARD

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  COPYRIGHT

  I should explain that, by trade, I am a lawyer first and a writer only second, at least in terms of the path my life has taken. I’ve been a criminal defense attorney for thirty years, but it’s only in the last few of those that I’ve found the time and inspiration to sit down and write half a dozen books. And as if that weren’t reward enough in itself, I’ve now had the exceedingly good fortune to actually see a few of them published. As might be expected, they include a couple of legal thrillers” (as they like to call them in the trade), a “caper” (for lack of a better term), and several accounts of real cases I’ve handled over the years.

  Taking stock recently of these accomplishments (modest enough by any objective standard, but nothing less than monumental to my way of thinking), it occurred to me that the only important book, about the singular event in my life that is truly worth telling, was the one conspicuous by its absence: the one I hadn’t written.

  This came as no startling revelation, understand. I’d known for some time that even by the process of turning out these “lawyer books” of mine, I’d been putting off recounting the one chapter of my life that totally dwarfs everything else I’d experienced in the forty-three years I’d lived before the event and the fifteen years since.

  But on this particular occasion, my awareness was heightened, something caused me to react differently. To be sure, the process took a full month to play itself out - a month of denial, of procrastination, of deliberately busying myself with a slew of unimportant chores designed purely to distract me, to keep me a safe distance from what was so clearly calling me. It was a month of false starts and last-minute hesitations. Several times, I got as far as the door to the bottom of the old wooden stairs behind the kitchen, each time I got no farther. But I knew with each trip that I was getting closer, I was getting ready.

  When I at last found myself opening the door and actually climbing the stairs, it seemed no great effort at all. It was as though the moment had finally arrived It was simply time.

  I hadn’t set foot in the attic for a decade and a half, and I saw right away that no one else had, either. I was struck not so much by the silence of the place as by its stillness. Nothing moved. No breeze reached here, no puff of air signaling the opening or closing of a door or window.

  There was a pretty impressive mountain of clutter on top of the trunk: diving gear and sail bags, boxes of charts and manuals, nylon lines smartly coiled, winch handles that had once gleamed like silver in the sunlight. I set it all aside, my fingers leaving fresh prints in the dust that had been quietly at work entombing it all.

  The trunk opened easily enough, ready at last to yield its cargo, as though it, too, sensed that the time had finally come. A sextant and two compasses rested on top, a pair of dividers and a set of parallel rules, books of tide tables and stacks of weather reports. There were star charts, correction tables, and repair guides; there were binoculars and tools. There were flares that would no longer flare and an air horn that had leaked the last of its air, as well as a folded radar reflector and a rusted fog bell. There were all manner of flotation devices and foul-weather gear, moldy from dampness and the passage of time.

  And at the bottom, right where I’d seen it in my mind’s eye every day of these last fifteen years, there it was.

  I took it in my hands and lowered myself to the floor, my back against the trunk. For a while, I did nothing but sit there, waiting for the trembling in my hands to subside. Then, carefully, I began stripping away the tissue paper from around it. Its red cover, faded and watermarked even before it had found its resting place, still bore the title that had been embossed in gold leaf, making it the handsome gift that it had been, presented to my brother by some friend whose name I can no longer remember.

  The Log of the Sea Legs is all it said.

  I opened it to what had been intended as a dedication page but had instead been used as a place for well-wishers to scribble their thoughts, a sort of “bon voyage” autograph page, not unlike what one might expect to find in a high school yearbook. As the names rushed back to me from over the years, a faded Polaroid photograph slipped from the book. In the half-light of the attic, I had difficulty making out the faces, but I knew most of them just the same. Looking back at me were my wife and our three children, my brother Jack’s ex-wife and their two children, and a good dozen friends, relatives, and well-wishers who’d joined us at the dock. There’d been broad smiles and crisp laughter in the warm sunshine that saw the two of us off that day. Someone holds an oversized bottle of champagne aloft, and the camera catches the sun glinting off it. We are all standing in front of Sea Legs, the single-masted sloop that was to be home for Jack and me for the next three months as we headed out into the open waters of the Atlantic. In the photo, she is freshly painted and scrubbed, her brass shined, and her teak oiled for whatever might lie ahead.

  I turned the page and came upon the first entry in the log. The entries were all in my hand; Jack had refused to contribute. “You’re the writer, Joe,” he’d said at the time, though all I’d written by then was a single manuscript, which I’d stuffed into a closet along with a handful of rejection letters. But by default, I’d been put in charge of the log, and I’d accepted my assignment without objection. For the next three months, I’d chronicled our adventure by making entries into the book with the red cover and the gold lettering.

  I’d tried to write something each day, and now - as I began turning the pages and reliving the voyage - I saw that I’d succeeded, for the most part. I was prolific some days and stingy others. There were even a few days with no entries at all. But the story was there; the story that I’ve been both putting off and getting ready to tell these last fifteen years.

  There, too, folded in quarters and stuffed into the very back of the book, were a dozen or so sketches that Jack had done on board. Some of them were good, others no more than a line or two, suggesting the shape of a wave or the bend of a sail. I’d forgotten all about them.

  My original thought was simply to edit and reproduce the original log entries, and I actually began doing just that. But very soon, I realized that to do so would be to ignore the fact that these last fifteen years have had their own impact on what happened; they have shaped the way I feel about the events. To deny the years the role they played in the process would, therefore, be to deny everything I’d been through since; the rage, the self-hatred, the struggle to understand, the long battle to forgive, accept, and go on. I decided that all of that aftermath had become part of the story, too, or at least how I’d come to see it. So I needed to tell it from here and from now.

  This, then, is the story of our trip, the voyage of Sea Legs It is not a sailing primer, and the serious sailor will be disappointed if he’s come aboard for a technical account of our months at sea. I have left it for other, more knowledgeable mariners to write about sailing dynamics, navigational techniques, and compass corrections. The difference between magnetic north and true north may be important business to those who go to sea under sail, but it can be pretty tedious stuff to the landlocked reader. My only resources have been the log itself and my own memory, sometimes imperfect, but sometimes so incredibly vivid that I find exact words and precise gestures are burned into my mind as though I’d lived them yesterday. I have edited some of the conversations between Jack and me, in an effort to provide better continuity and readability. But as to the content o
f those conversations, and as to the actual events that transpired, I have made no changes whatsoever: What follows is a faithful account of just what it was that happened back then aboard Sea Legs - to Jack and, ultimately, to me.

  New York, New York

  August 1996

  It was sometime during the summer of the thirty-eighth year of his life that Jack found out he was sick. It had begun simply enough, with a routine visit to his doctor for a checkup. Or so we’d been told at the time. Later on, he admitted that he’d felt a lump here, or noticed a slight discoloration there, or had maybe lost a few pounds he couldn’t quite account for.

  He’d undergone some tests, and then some further tests to confirm what the first tests had showed. Jack hated everything about the testing process - the bother, the indignity, the considerable expense, and, above all, the deliberate reluctance of the medical professionals to look him square in the eye and tell him what he already had to have known: that this was a disease that was going to kill him - perhaps not imminently, nor even in a year or two, but soon enough.

  There had followed a period of time during which Jack made it his business to share the news with the people in his life who were closest to him. Those people included his former wife, whom he’d married before his twenty-first birthday and divorced just after his thirty-fifth, but with whom he still kept in touch and whom he saw from time to time. He liked to say that they’d finally become friends, and it truly seemed so. It included his twin daughters, who by that time were in their first year at a small private college in New England. It included a handful of aunts and uncles and cousins, but no parents - they’d died in their sixties, seven months apart to the day. And it included me, his older brother.

  Comparing notes later on, it seems we all reacted to the news in pretty much the same way; disbelief, then denial, followed by anger at the unfairness of it, and then disbelief all over again at Jack’s own apparent lack of anger, his willingness to accept the verdict without railing against whatever gods or odds had handed it down.

  Jack had some work to finish up, and he set about attending to it. He hated leaving matters unfinished, whether that involved a project at the office, a chore in the backyard, or a meal on the table. He was absolutely driven in any endeavor he undertook (far more than I, who have always been happy to leave something for tomorrow), and he was good at almost everything he did. He was earning a decent living at the time, and even with two daughters to put through school, he had a comfortable place to live, an old Jeep to get him around, and some money in the bank. And, of course, he had his boat. And it was to his boat that Jack now turned his attention.

  She was a thirty-six-foot fiberglass sloop he had bought at auction some eight or ten years earlier, at a time when buying a boat didn’t necessarily require a mortgage, the way it does today. She’d been built in Sweden as an offshore racer but had spent her youth in and out of yacht clubs and marinas along the East Coast, in what might be likened to a series of one-night stands for a young lady with hopes of something more enduring. Jack had shown her a taste of that, taking her farther out than her previous owners, but the truth was that, for all our skills (and they were not inconsiderable), neither Jack nor I had ever done any long-distance sailing of the type that puts both man and boat to the test.

  Now Jack pulled her out of the water in early autumn and had her put through all sorts of stress tests to determine if her hull was sound and her fittings tight. It occurred to me at the time that he was subjecting her to much the same scrutiny as he himself had recently undergone. But where the news on Jack had been bad, the report on his boat came back quite the opposite: She was pronounced structurally fit, in need only of some relatively minor modifications.

  He spent all of that fall and much of that winter working on her. He reinforced the hull; he caulked and recaulked seams; he fitted steel plates to the interior and ballast to the keel; he added hundreds of pounds of fiberglass all around. He rerigged the lines so that they could be worked with one hand from the cockpit. While he was at it, he replaced the original winches with heavy duty upgrades. He installed furling gear for the mainsail as well as the headsail, in order to avoid the cumbersome (and often dangerous) business of lowering and tying sails in a tossing sea. He all but took apart the auxiliary diesel engine, tinkering with her until she purred to his satisfaction.

  “Where will you be taking her?” I asked. Given the amount of work he’d been putting into her, nothing would have shocked me.

  “Don’t know yet,” Jack confessed. “But I’ve always wanted to go on a real sail. Not just island-hopping for a week. A trip, y’know?”

  He did all of the work himself. On those occasions when I helped, or when my son and I both pitched in, it was always quite clear that Jack was in charge of the operation and that we were there to follow his directions and be guided by his specifications.

  That’s why it came as something of a surprise to me when Jack invited me to join him on whatever journey it was that he was preparing for.

  “So,” he said one afternoon, “you want to come along?” As simple as that.

  It turned out that “along” was to be a voyage of some 1,500 miles, the final leg of it a 600-mile stretch in the open waters of the Atlantic. The destination was to be a tiny dot of land rising out of the sea, formed by the overgrown tip of a long-dormant volcano. It was named Walker Island, after (or so Jack told me) its discoverer, the explorer John Ransom Walker, who two years later would die in a storm off the much larger Bermuda Islands, in roughly the same longitude but several hundred miles to the north. Jack had been planning the trip ever since the doctors confirmed his diagnosis. It was something he’d always secretly wanted to do but had always put off. Now the time seemed suddenly right. He was determined to do it while he still had the strength, before the inevitable downward spiral began taking its toll on his body. And he was prepared to do it alone, if need be.

  “But I’d sure love to have company,” he said, smiling and looking me square in the eye. He confessed that his list of acceptable crew members was somewhat on the short side: Mine was the only name on it.

  “I’ve got a wife and three kids,” I reminded him, “not to mention a law practice. I’ll have to think about it.” But even as I left him at the boatyard that afternoon, I knew full well that he’d made me the offer of a lifetime. My only brother, my best friend on the planet, figured he had one great adventure left in his life, and now he was asking me to share it with him.

  What kind of a choice was that?

  We worked on the boat into late winter, gradually transforming her from a recreational day-sailer to an ocean-going cruiser. While others huddled around fireplaces and waited for snows to melt, we lowered her into the water and began testing her in the February winds and whitecaps, learning how to compensate for all the modifications we’d made. With the added weight in her keel, we found she could take more canvas. Where once she’d had difficulty sailing close to the wind, now she could point smartly. We took her out in the rain to see how tight her fittings were, then in choppy seas to discover what needed to be lashed down. We tore sails, broke hatch covers, and lost gear overboard. But, day by day, we learned, and the boat never once let us down.

  By early March, we began provisioning her, laying in whatever supplies we thought we might possibly need for a voyage that could find us at sea for as long as three months. Food was not our biggest concern: While the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables we could take was limited by how fast things would spoil, we knew we had ample room aboard for a good year’s worth of cans and dry goods. It was water that we worried about, Jack had ripped out one of the berths to add extra tanks, which we filled for washing and showering; for drinking and cooking, we spent a small fortune on huge plastic containers meant for water-coolers, and broke our backs lugging them aboard and wedging them into places where they were least likely to come free and bounce around.

  We loaded safety gear and spare parts, repair manuals and hand tools.
We fought over how high-tech we were willing to be in terms of navigation. Radar, loran, and Sat-Nav were ruled out, since we were determined to do our own positioning and plotting. But we did opt for some fairly sophisticated radio equipment that would enable us to receive weather reports when we’d be well out of range of onshore stations.

  By mid-March, Jack had quit his job, and he spent almost every day at the marina, scraping and sanding, painting and polishing. I’d join him on weekends, and we’d spend mornings going over inventory, stowing and restowing gear, checking every system and every backup system. Afternoons, when the breezes picked up, we’d take her out of the harbor and into the bay, leaning her into whatever wind we could find, driving her against the biggest waves in sight, all the while fine-tuning her rigging and our own abilities.

  Then one evening, back on the shore after a grueling series of hard tacks and jibes in six-foot seas and freezing rain, Jack turned to me and said, “I think we’re ready.” I wasn’t sure if he meant the two of us, or was counting the boat as well, but - cold and wet beyond caring - I simply nodded in agreement.

  We wanted to leave early in the year - not so early that the days would still be short when we sailed the islands of local waters, but early enough to reach our destination, turn around, and be safely back before late summer and the beginning of hurricane season. Now we told our loved ones that our window of opportunity was but a few short weeks away.

  Jack spent those weeks with his daughters, seeing as much of them as their school schedules permitted. The divorce had driven some distance between them, as the girls had rallied to their mother’s side over what they’d perceived at the time as their father’s abandonment of her. The closeness that Jack had shared with them would never be entirely restored, but his trip to New England was Jack’s way of both making amends and asking forgiveness.

  I took leave of the law, spending those last weeks ashore with my wife and our three children, torn between how terribly I’d miss them over the coming months and the irresistible pull of the adventure I was about to undertake. To their credit, my family understood this pull, and if they thought of the trip as some foolish midlife crisis, they never said so to my face.