The Wanderer Read online

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Cody said.

  “Well, then, what were they talking about? What’s the big secret?”

  “How should I know?” Cody said.

  “Sometimes people need their own secrets,” I said.

  “You oughta know,” Brian said.

  Brian is like a woodpecker, peck-peck-pecking away. I was glad to get back to the boat and take my sleeping bag up on deck and sit down with my log.

  Uncle Stew has been taking his sleeping bag out on the dock.

  “What’s the matter?” Cody asked him. “You feeling seasick?”

  “I never get seasick,” Uncle Stew barked. “I just like to sleep on the dock.”

  “Yeah, right,” Cody said.

  I’m going to stop writing soon and then I’ll fall asleep with the stars overhead and the clinking of lines against masts in the harbor. I love the way the boat rocks you to sleep like a baby.

  CHAPTER 10

  AHOY

  Ahoy! I could get into this sailing stuff. We’re whipping along! Man! And I don’t have to be on watch with my dad, so that’s cool. Nobody to bug me except Brian, but he’s easier to ignore than my dad.

  Sophie is a riot catching fish. I’ve never seen anyone so happy about something so simple. I thought she was going to puke, though, when she had to kill the first one. She kept saying, “It’s still alive! It’s in pain! It’s hurting!” Then when my dad got the fish cooked, Sophie said she wasn’t hungry.

  My dad is on my case big-time. He’s trying to talk me out of doing the juggling thing.

  He said, “Don’t you know anything else you could teach?”

  I said, “Nope.”

  CHAPTER 11

  JUGGLING

  More work on The Wanderer today. I finished off Buddy the Bilge Box, the fiberglass wonder, coating it with resin to plug any minor leaks.

  Uncle Dock said, “You did a fine job on Buddy the Bilge, yep.” I was hoping he’d point that out to the others, but instead he said, “I guess we’d better get moving. Too much boat attitude here anyway.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You know: my boat is better than your boat, and my boat is bigger than your boat, and all that. Boat attitude.”

  I think he’s a little sensitive about the state of The Wanderer. I hadn’t really noticed how strange our boat might look until I saw all the sleek boats in the harbor here. They’re gleaming! People dressed in spiffy matching clothes are on deck polishing everything in sight. You don’t see a thing out of place.

  The Wanderer, though, is splotched with caulk, including white footprints across the deck from where someone had stepped in it; our clothes are hanging off the lines in hopes of drying; pots and pans are piled on the deck because Cody and I brought them up top to scrub; and we’re wearing our normal grubby shorts and T-shirts and bandannas.

  “Time to move on,” Dock grumbled.

  “Ahoy then!” Cody said. “Boom the anchor!”

  Uncle Mo was lounging on the deck. “Cody,” he said, “knock it off.”

  “Knock off the anchor!” Cody said.

  “Go help Brian with the charts,” Uncle Mo said. “Make yourself useful.”

  Cody leaped off the side into the water. “Man overboard! Glug, glug, glug.”

  It’s hard not to laugh at Cody, but I do sometimes wonder if he has any brains in his head or if he ever thinks any serious things, and I’m beginning to see how it might get kind of annoying to be holed up with him for three whole weeks on this little island of a boat.

  Today Brian tried to teach us points of sail. Most of us already knew all that, but if we hadn’t already known it, we sure wouldn’t have learned it from Brian. He launched into a complicated explanation of how the wind relates to the sail and the boat’s direction.

  “So when the wind is from ahead,” Brian lectured, “that’s called beating—”

  “Beating? Like this you mean?” Cody beat his chest.

  Brian ignored him. “And when the wind is from the side, that’s called reaching—”

  “Reaching? Like this?” Cody reached out way over the rail as if he were stretching for something.

  “Knock it off, Cody. And when the wind is from astern—”

  “What’s astern?” Cody asked.

  “Don’t you even know that?” Brian shouted. “Astern is back there—the back of the boat. If you’re not going to take this seriously—” Brian warned.

  “I don’t see why we have to know all those terms. I mean, so what if we don’t know a beat from a reach? You only have to know how to do it, right? Not what to call it.”

  Brian said, “Do you really know how to do any of this? Do you know where the wind is coming from and what to do with the sails if it’s coming from, say, behind us?”

  “What do I have to know that for?” Cody said. “Everybody else seems to know, and everybody’s always barking orders, so I just do what people tell me to do. I can haul in a line as good as anyone.”

  “Huh,” Brian said.

  Later, we got our first juggling lesson from Cody. I thought he was a really good teacher, because he started out very simply, with just one thing to toss in the air. We were practicing with packets of pretzels.

  “This is stupid,” Brian said.

  Uncle Mo was on watch, but he turned around to mutter, “Juggling. Geez.”

  Then Cody had us toss two pretzel packets in the air, one from each hand. That was easy, too. But when we added the third pretzel packet, we were all fumbling and clumsy. Pretzels went zinging over the side of the boat.

  “It’s all in the motion of your hands,” Cody said. “Just get in a rhythm.”

  “This is really stupid,” Brian said.

  “It might help your coordination,” Cody said.

  “What’s wrong with my coordination?”

  It got ugly after that, so we stopped the juggling lesson.

  Brian and Uncle Dock are going over the charts and trying to catch the weather forecast on the radio. Tomorrow we leave for Nova Scotia, a straight ocean sail that should take three or four days, with no sight of land. No land! I can’t imagine it; I can’t think what it will be like to see nothing but ocean, ocean all around.

  “This will be our first big shakedown, yep,” Uncle Dock said.

  Uncle Stew tapped his fingers on the table. “Weather forecast doesn’t sound too good.”

  “Aw, what’s a little weather?” Uncle Mo said.

  CHAPTER 12

  BLAH-BLAH-BLAH

  Stupid day.

  Stupid Brian was blah-blah-blahing about points of sail, as if he knows everything there is to know about everything.

  He doesn’t know how to juggle, that’s for sure.

  This morning, Brian said to me, “You like Sophie better than me, don’t you?”

  I said, “Yep.”

  Well. It’s the truth.

  Tomorrow Sophie is going to tell the first of Bompie’s stories. Now, that ought to be interesting.

  CHAPTER 13

  SHAKEDOWN

  I’m not really sure what day it is anymore. These duty watches are warping my sense of time.

  For the first couple days, there were two of us on a watch (I was paired with Uncle Dock), and we were on for four hours at a time, off for eight, then on for four more. Four hours is a lot, especially when it’s dark, and every muscle in your body is tensed, listening, watching. Everyone else is asleep then and you know it’s only the two of you keeping them safe.

  Out here, there isn’t day and night and then a new day. Instead, there are degrees of light and dark, merging and changing. It’s like one long stream of time unfolding in front of you, all around you. There isn’t really a yesterday or a day before, which is weird, because then what is tomorrow? And what is last week or last year? And if there is no yesterday or last year—or ten years ago—then it must be all now, one huge big present thing.

  This makes me feel very strange, as if I could say, “Now I am four,�
�� and by saying so, I could be four again. But that can’t be. Not really. Can it?

  We’ve been sailing up through the Gulf of Maine, toward Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, just west of Nova Scotia. Uncle Dock calls the wind “a capricious lady” because it comes in fits and starts. Yesterday (I still have to use words like yesterday, because I don’t know how else to talk about things that happened before), when we had a spell of fog, Uncle Dock recited a poem about fog creeping along on little cat feet, and as soon as he said that, that’s what I saw when I looked out into the gray mist: hundreds of little cat feet tiptoeing along. Later, when the fog rolled along in deeper, darker clumps, I imagined great big tiger feet loping toward us—soft, furry, graceful tiger feet.

  I had a mournful lonely spell when I was on watch, peering through all that gray, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave the shores of North America, to set off across the ocean, to be so far from land. But I didn’t have long to be mournful, because the wind came up strong from the north, which meant we had to do a lot of tacking and heeling. The waves were huge—six to eight feet—or at least I thought they were huge, but Uncle Stew called them baby waves.

  “You getting scared, Sophie?” Uncle Stew said, and it seemed as if he hoped I was scared, so I said, “No, I’m not a bit scared. Not the least bit.” I was scared, but I didn’t want him to know it.

  Below deck, it was chaos. It was Cody’s and my turn to cook lunch, and we had food sloshed all over the place.

  “Mind the mizzen pot! Hoist the flibber-gibbet!” Cody shouted, as the pot’s hot contents went sloshing over the side.

  “Cody, are you ever serious?” I said.

  He tossed a clamshell right in the soup. “Oh brother,” he said, “sooner or later, everybody asks me that.”

  I guess it’s a touchy subject.

  The Wanderer has had a few problems on her first shakedown: leaks in the aft cabin and water in the sump. We spend a lot of time crawling around looking for trouble and then trying to fix whatever’s wrong. So far we’ve been able to plug all the leaks. You don’t feel too worried when you know you can get to land within an hour or two if you have to, or where there is enough boat traffic so that you can hail help easily, but once we set off from Nova Scotia, what will we do if we spring a major leak?

  I don’t want to think about that. I’d rather think about the good omens: dolphins have visited us three times! They come in groups of four or five and swim alongside the boat. They usually come when we’re sailing fast, whipping along. It’s as if they’re racing us. They play up in front of the bow, darting back and forth right below the water, only inches from the hull.

  They’re the most graceful creatures I’ve ever seen, gliding through the water without any apparent effort, and then arching at the surface and raising their fins and backs out of the water.

  Cody calls them darlings. “Here, dolphin darlings! Over here!”

  I always feel a little sad when they finally swim away and Cody calls, “Bye-bye, dolphin darlings! Bye-bye!”

  We’ve changed the shifts around in order to have three people on watch through the fog (Cody’s on with us now). Right now I’m bundled up in my foul-weather gear, watching the sun rise in front of us and the moon set at our stern. I’m tired and damp and desperately need a shower, but I am in heaven.

  I’m learning so much every day, and the more I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to know about sailing and water and navigation and weather. Today Uncle Stew gave us a lesson in sextant readings. It’s harder than I expected, and Uncle Stew and Brian keep scolding me and Cody, telling us we’re not pulling our weight unless we learn how to do all this, because their lives might depend on the two of us.

  “You’d better hope your lives don’t depend on me and Sophie,” Cody joked.

  Uncle Stew got mad. “Not everything is funny, Cody, and when you’re in the middle of that ocean, you’ll be praying that if anything happens, everybody on board this boat will be capable of saving your hide. You could at least do the same for us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear ya,” Cody said, as he went below deck.

  Even Uncle Dock seemed annoyed at Cody this time. “I sure hope that boy gets serious about something,” he said.

  I had a dream last night (or was it in the afternoon? or the morning? or the day before?) about being adrift in the ocean with no food, and we were all languishing on deck with no energy to do anything, and the boat was tossing and heaving around, and then a seagull flew overhead and landed on the boom and Brian said, “Kill it! Kill it!”

  It’s now about two in the afternoon, and the sun has broken through the clouds, and we’re about thirty-six miles from Grand Manan. We’re hoping to get there before dark. It’s my watch now, so I’d better get busy.

  CHAPTER 14

  BOMPIE AND THE CAR

  Today I heard Brian ask Uncle Stew what happened to Sophie’s real parents.

  Uncle Stew said, “No idea.”

  “How come you don’t know?” Brian asked.

  Uncle Stew shrugged. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  So I asked my father what happened to Sophie’s real parents, and he said, “I’ll tell you someday.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “No, don’t think so.”

  Got yelled at for not understanding all the navigation gobbledygook. Got yelled at for joking around too much. Got yelled at for breathing. Well, almost.

  Sophie told her first Bompie story today. It went something like this:

  When Bompie was a young man, he lived on a farm, and his family was very poor. They didn’t even have a car or a truck. But one day they traded two mules for a car. The only thing was, no one knew how to drive it. Bompie had ridden in cars, though, and he didn’t think it could be all that hard to drive one. So Bompie volunteered to go to town to pick up the car and drive it home.

  It was raining, raining, raining. You should hear Sophie tell a story. She really gets into it. You can almost feel the rain on your head when she tells it. You can feel it, you can smell it. It’s really something.

  Anyway, Bompie goes to pick up the car and it’s raining, raining, raining. He’s driving home and he gets to the place where he has to cross the creek. There’s no bridge or anything. When they’d walked that way, or ridden the mules, they’d always just waded across it.

  So Bompie drives the car into the creek, but the water is rushing, rushing so fast, it’s like a big wall of water coming down at him, and Bompie is yelling, “Hey! Giddy-up!” but the car won’t giddy-up, and that wall of water turns the car over, and Bompie scrambles out and watches the new car float down the stream.

  When Bompie finally got home, he got a whipping from his father and an apple pie from his mother.

  “Why’d she give him an apple pie?” Brian asked Sophie.

  “Because she was grateful that he was alive, that’s why,” Sophie said.

  “So how do you know this story anyway?” Brian said.

  “Hush up, Brian,” Uncle Dock said.

  But Sophie said, “Because Bompie told it to me, that’s how I know it.”

  You could tell Brian wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. No one did.

  I was sitting there thinking about Bompie getting out of that car and his mother giving him an apple pie.

  Today Sophie and Uncle Dock each juggled three pretzel packets for a couple minutes! They were so excited. I felt pretty good myself. I’m a teacher!

  THE ISLAND

  CHAPTER 15

  GRAND MANAN

  We arrived in Seal Cove on Grand Manan at sunset—was that yesterday?—with the sky awash with streaks of rose and lavender. What a paradise!

  I think Uncle Dock knows people everywhere. On our way into Seal Cove, Dock called shore by radio, and the person on shore called a friend of Dock’s—Frank is his name—and when we arrived outside the harbor, Frank was there waiting to help guide us in. The harbor is inside a huge breakwall, like a fortres
s, and The Wanderer was the only sailboat scuttling into the harbor where fishing boats were crammed—triple and quadruple parked—as if it were a big city parking lot. Frank packed us all in his van and took us to his house a few blocks away, and we met his family and swayed around like dizzy clowns on our wobbly sea legs.

  I’m really getting into fish and fishing here. You can’t help it; everyone who lives here has something to do with fish. They’re fishing for lobsters or pollock or herring, or they’re working in the factories that can sardines and herring. Fish, fish, everywhere!

  Today we all went lobstering with Frank on his fishing boat, Frank’s Fort. He’d bought the shell of the boat and built everything else himself. I love it when people do things like that—take something decrepit and create something grand out of it!

  Brian doesn’t like this sort of thing. He said, “Sophie, you don’t have to go overboard. It’s just a boat.”

  Just a boat! You could spend months poking around these boats. You’d see buckets of bait, containers full of lobsters, lobster bands to put around the lobsters’ claws, hoses, nets, and other stuff that gets covered in fish slime and seaweed. Maybe someday I’ll be a lobster fisherman; who knows?

  Cody said, “How come you like all this stuff, Sophie?”

  “Well, don’t you?” I said. “Don’t you like imagining what your life would be like if you were, say, a fisherman? You could smell the sea all day—”

  “And smell the fish,” he said. “You might get sick of fish smell.”

  “Or you might think it’s the best smell you ever smelled. You might love feeling the air all day and handling the fish and—”

  “It’s okay, Sophie,” he said. “You can like this stuff if you want.”