Change of Course Read online

  Never mind that neither of us had ever really been to sea before. Forget that open-water navigation was something we’d only studied in books, or that we’d soon be completely at the mercy of whatever weather the sea chose to test us with. That morning, I felt superhuman, absolutely invincible. Quite literally, for as far as the eye could see, there was nothing ahead of us but dazzling sunshine, crystal-clear sky, and blue ocean.

  But if dazzling sunshine produces exhilaration, it can also lead to blindness. I let myself take for granted that the broad smile on Jack’s face signified that his thoughts perfectly mirrored my own. And I’m sure I was right, up to a point. But I now know that much more must have been going on in Jack’s mind that morning, and that to him, the glorious spectacle laid out before us must have taken on a different meaning altogether.

  I knew none of that then, of course: While I felt the exhilaration, I never sensed the blindness. All I knew was that we were off on the adventure of our lives, my brother and I, and at that moment, it seemed that nothing could possibly stand in our way.

  One of the differences between island-hopping and open-water sailing is the need for charting a course. When you’re in sight of land, it’s sufficient to sail by “eyeball navigation,” simply progressing from visible point to visible point - connecting the dots, so to speak. This method will often do even when the distance between points is such that you find yourself out of sight of both points on occasion: If the land masses are close enough, or large enough, the next one will invariably pop into view ahead of you, so long as you pay a minimum of attention to the compass or even the position of the sun.

  Ocean navigation is a different matter altogether. Gone are the landmarks: There are no buoys at sea, no markers for the uncertain traveler. Blue-water sailing is as different from coastal sailing as crossing a desert is from traveling city streets.

  Just as I became the keeper of the log aboard Sea Legs by default, I also became her navigator. It fell to me to plot our course on chart after chart that showed nothing but open water. Under Jack’s watchful eye, I’d aim the sextant and take shots of the sun several times each day and of the stars each night, measuring the distance in degrees from the horizon. Then I’d get out the conversion tables and try to figure out our position, marking it on the chart.

  By keeping a constant eye on our speed indicator, and compensating for tides and sideways drifting, I’d do my best to approximate our position between bearing checks - the business of dead reckoning. At first, I was wildly erratic. I’d figure either too much progress or too little; I’d fail to sufficiently compensate for drifting or I’d overcompensate. But after a while, I became quite good at it, and eventually I got to the point where I had few or no corrections to make after checking with the sextant. Then I’d boast to Jack of my newly acquired skill, and he’d nod approvingly, as though he were the older brother and I the youngster.

  I was content to think that’s all there was to this reversal of our lifelong roles: Jack was finally captain, and I mate. I thrilled to the new order of things, imagining how very satisfying it had to be for Jack finally to find himself in the role of teacher - to the very one in whose shadow he’d suffered for so long.

  Foolishly, I was seeing only the obvious; once again, I was completely missing what must have been going on beneath the surface.

  Yet the biggest difference that first day out wasn’t the vast expanse of ocean spread out before us, or my first clumsy attempts at open-water navigation, or the perceptibly bigger waves and swells we felt beneath us, or even the fact that we now seldom saw another boat on the horizon. The biggest difference was this: As afternoon turned to evening, and evening to night, instead of being able to duck into some protected cove in search of a comfortable anchorage, we flicked on our running lights, zipped up our jackets, and plunged on into the darkness.

  For me, this was a new experience, and I admit that it took some getting used to. By running lights, I mean the small red and green sidelights our boat was required to carry in order to enable another vessel to see us. As for what we could see, that was a different matter altogether. Unlike a car, a boat has no headlights; the resulting sensation is one of hurtling forward into a solid wall of blackness. Try to imagine sitting in an open roadster, speeding down a deserted country lane on a moonless night, and suddenly turning off the headlights.

  To be sure, the analogy is not altogether a fair one: There are no oncoming cars at sea, and no need to stay within the lanes of a narrow strip of pavement. But there can be other vessels out there, huge ships, on whose radar screens a tiny sailboat like ours might not even create a visible blip. And there is all manner of floating or barely submerged debris lying in wait, much of it big enough to rip a small boat’s hull apart and send it to the bottom in minutes.

  We’d outfitted Sea Legs with a self-steering device, a contraption designed to correct the angle of the rudder automatically whenever we strayed off a preset heading. And though we’d tested the device and trusted it up to a point, we weren’t about to turn our lives over to it that first night at sea. We stayed together in the cockpit for hours, taking turns at the wheel, steering by the tiny light of the compass. But if Jack was as frightened as I was, he never showed it. While I nervously scanned the horizon for lights and listened for distant engines, my brother wore the wry grin of a seasoned mariner, ready to do battle with whatever dragons might be out there.

  “Relax, Joe,” he told me more than once, amused at my fretting.

  “I can’t help it,” I confessed. “I like living.”

  “Me, too,” he said, smiling. “But this is living. This is something I’ve always imagined doing. It used to frighten me in my dreams - heading into the unknown. But then I got to the point where I learned to trust that it would be okay. A nightmare turns into an amusement-park ride as soon as you know it’s going to have a happy ending.”

  I tried my best to see it Jack’s way. I concentrated on everything that was positive about our situation. The wind had fallen off a bit with the coming of night. Whereas during the day, we’d been heading almost due east, now we turned a bit to the south, so as to have the breeze over one shoulder, lessening the likelihood of an accidental boom-swinging jibe. The result was a comfortable ride over gentle swells, with a minimum of heeling. The night air was cold, but, with the collars of our heavy jackets turned up, we stayed warm and dry. With only a crescent of a moon showing, the sky filled with a riot of stars. It truly didn’t get any prettier than this anyplace on earth.

  I told myself that the blackness in front of us wasn’t really a solid wall that we were about to crash into, after all. I recalled sailing in fog so thick that the visibility had actually been far less. Here at least, in the clear air ahead, we’d see the lights of another ship in time to react.

  Jack did his part by trying to distract me with conversation. We talked of our earliest memories, of school and summer camp. We recalled the names of teachers and counselors, of fellow students and campers I hadn’t thought of for thirty years or more. We conjured up distant relatives, long dead and buried. We retold stories of incidents so old that we remembered the stories but not the incidents themselves, such as the time we’d been sitting in my father’s car and one of us had pushed in the cigarette lighter and removed it when it had popped out. We’d then proceeded to take turns burning our hands, passing the glowing lighter back and forth like a hot potato, all the while wailing in pain, afraid that if we dropped it, we’d set the car on fire. Or the time we’d come upon a deserted cabin deep in the woods, climbed up a ladder to the attic, and accidentally knocked over a nest of yellow jackets.

  What a history we shared. It formed the basis of an intimacy that my own wife learned to grow jealous of in time. Lying beside me in bed, she’d suddenly turn to me. “Talk to me about when you were a child,” she’d say, “like you always do with Jack.” And I’d try. But it was no use; my roots were so deeply entangled with Jack’s that when it came to competing with him in revi
siting my past, she never had a chance.

  Eventually, we grew weary of remembering and reliving our youth, and we listened to the sounds of the sea and the slapping of wind against canvas. Even in silence, Jack and I were able to communicate. Growing up so close for so many years had created a bond between us, a bond unlike any other I’ve ever known. Our relationship required no words. It seemed I always knew Jack’s thoughts, and he mine, though I know how foolish that must sound.

  And bit by bit that night, I felt the fear begin to slip away, and the blackness in front of me eventually take on a depth it hadn’t seemed to possess at first.

  After a while, Jack went below and put together some dinner We ate at the wheel. I can no longer remember just what it was we had, but the meal made me recall a memory of cooking over a campfire with my father and Jack long ago, grilling landlocked salmon we’d just pulled out of a mountain lake, and swearing that no meal had ever tasted so good.

  It was well after midnight before I became accustomed enough to night-sailing to allow Jack to go below and get some sleep. What it took, finally, was Jack’s explanation of how he dealt with the possibility that we might hit something. “Sure there’s a chance,” he agreed. “But it’s just too slim to worry about. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s kind of like getting struck by lightning - I’m not going to bother worrying about that, either.”

  Lightning?

  Jack relieved me at the wheel after an hour or two, and I went below. Sleeping aboard a small sailboat at sea is tricky business. At anchor, you bob up and down regularly, and the boat traces gentle arcs, back and forth, rocking you to sleep. Under sail, you can find yourself heeling steeply to one side or the other, rising and falling erratically on waves and swells, yawing suddenly in either direction, and experiencing sudden changes in both speed and direction of travel. But this, too, I got used to after a bit, and the sleep that finally came seemed doubly refreshing because it felt as though I’d earned it.

  It was still dark when I rejoined Jack in the cockpit. We sat together without speaking. Not long after, we watched the blackness in front of us turn first to midnight blue, then navy, proceeding through an infinite progression of lighter and lighter blues. Then the blue turned to violet, to pink, then to glowing red. Dead ahead, a sun of molten orange broke from the horizon and proclaimed that we’d made it through our first night at sea.

  “God, it’s good to be alive,” Jack said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “God, it’s good to be alive,” he repeated.

  I could have told you he’d do that.

  For me, those first weeks at sea with Jack were perhaps the very happiest time of my life, before or since. In my short lifetime, I’ve fallen in love and married, I’ve seen my three children come into the world healthy, I’ve won courtroom victories that seemed all but unwinnable, and I’ve had novels published against lottery odds. But none of those experiences, as wonderful as they all were, provided me with quite the same sense of sustained euphoria as did those weeks of getting to know my brother all over again.

  There were occasions when I’d catch myself watching Jack for long stretches of time - as he manned the wheel, or trimmed the sails, or attended to some little chore that needed looking after. Jack had a certain grace about him, an economy of motion I more often associate with an animal in the wild. There was no fat on him: He was lean to the point of being wiry, but he was strong and athletically fit. Deeply tanned by now, he took on a healthy glow that made it hard for me to remember that, somewhere inside, he was ill. At work, he possessed an adult’s steady hand and confident smile; yet there was always a child’s sense of awe and mirth lurking just beneath the surface, ready to erupt without a moment’s notice.

  I think I loved life as a young man as much as most. I saw now how Jack reveled in life, how he drank in every moment of it. Each sunrise, each sunset, each appearance of the moon and stars moved him close to tears. A flying fish soaring across our bow brought an ovation from him. The sight of a whale breaching to starboard stamped a daylong grin on his face.

  One afternoon, a pod of dolphins decided to escort us through the waves.

  “Stop her! Stop her!” Jack shouted, and, stripping off his shirt and sneakers, he promptly dove headfirst over the rail and out of sight. Frantically, I strove to rein in Sea Legs. But having no brakes, a sailboat slows only by losing momentum once the canvas is let loose, and so it must have taken me a full quarter of a mile to bring us dead in the water. When finally I regained sight of Jack, he was bobbing well back in our wake, waving his arms and crying out in what I first took to be distress. I threw him the horseshoe buoy and was searching about in desperation for a line to fling his way, when I realized he was laughing hysterically.

  “They carried me!” he shouted over and over as I dragged him back aboard. “They took turns carrying me on their noses!” He laughed for hours. For days, he laughed.

  Another day, as we were changing sails to compensate for increasing winds, one of us let go of a halyard - the line used to raise and lower a sail - and before we knew it the shackle was swinging up by the top of the mast, some thirty feet above our heads.

  “I’ll get my harness,” I said. I’d brought along some of my rock-climbing gear for just such a moment. I’d tried to teach Jack climbing a couple of times, and he could’ve been good at it. His wiry frame, agility, and determination made him well equipped. But he’d never really taken to it - “Not all that crazy about heights” is how he put it if I remember correctly. So when I emerged from below with a harness and a couple of carabiners, I was surprised to see Jack reaching for them.

  “I got it,” I told him.

  “No way!” Jack laughed, taking the harness from me and stepping into it. “This could be the scariest thing of all time!” So we clipped him onto a spare halyard and leaving the piloting to the self-steering device, I winched him up the mast.

  Understand that all the while we were making close to ten knots in seas rough enough to have caused us to want to reduce sails in the first place. Things were plenty tricky on deck, down where I was. Thirty feet above, the tip of the mast pendulumed wildly with each wave so that Jack, clinging to it, swung back and forth in a giant arc. One moment he’d be straight overhead, the next well out over the water, but never was he in one spot for more than an instant.

  So I can’t say I was too surprised when I heard his first scream. But I knew I had a good belay on him and that there was no way he could fall.

  “Hang on!” I shouted. “I’ve got you good!”

  But I needn’t have worried; it took me only a moment to realize that, once again, my brother wasn’t in the grip of terror so much as in the throes of ecstasy. His screams (which he kept up the whole time he was aloft) were mixed with laughter. They were the screams of a kid who’s just discovered what life is like in the front seat of a roller coaster.

  At some point, I managed to remind Jack he was up there to do a job, and finally he gathered in the shackle and let me lower him, still laughing, back to the relative calm of the deck.

  Yet all afternoon I caught him eyeing the top of the mast, and at any moment I fully expected him to demand a re-ride.

  Why do I go to such great lengths here to recount these foolish antics of my brother? Why do I dwell so now - some fifteen years later - to paint this portrait of Jack those first few weeks at sea aboard Sea Legs? The answer is this: In all of our years together, I’d simply never seen Jack so happy, so animated, so absolutely full of life. The pure joy I took in watching him defies all description; at times, it seemed to me so absolutely intense as to border on pain.

  Oh, to be frozen in time! To be able to go back to some singular moment and place in the past and dwell there forever - immune to the rest of the world, safe from the future. I not only know now, with hindsight, what my choice would be; so help me, I knew it then.

  There comes an entry in The Log of the Sea Legs that is shorter than any other. It
is a single sentence on a page that contains nothing else but a date and our position on the ocean. There are no entries of any sort for the three days that followed.

  For fifteen years, I’ve seen that page, that sentence, in my mind’s eye. More than any other - more than all the others combined - it was that one entry that had kept me from the attic all those fifteen years. Even when I finally climbed the stairs and opened the trunk and found what I was looking for, it was that entry which lowered me to the floor and kept me from opening the book until my hands would stop trembling.

  When at last I forced my fingers to begin the process of turning the pages, I drew inexorably closer to the source of my dread, until I began to feel that the paper itself was taking on a heat, and I actually came to imagine that when I turned to that page, that entry, the paper might literally ignite in my hands.

  It didn’t, of course. I reached the page and saw the entry. There was no combustion, no spontaneous conflagration. After a while, I was even able to read the words themselves without the blood pounding deafeningly in my ears.

  Seven words. Seven benign little words. Thirty-two letters, set apart by six spaces, ending with a period. Nothing more, nothing less: Today Jack told me about Walker Island.

  “So why Walker Island?” I asked one evening as we sat below, leaving the piloting to the self-steering device for a bit “Whatever made you decide on that for a destination?”

  “Because it’s there,” Jack answered, the way a mountain climber brushes off his need to tackle a particular peak.

  “So’s Bermuda,” I said.

  “Too built-up. They make you wear leather shoes and black socks there. They’ve got paved streets and traffic lights, and all the other things that ruin islands.”