Time & Tide by Frank Conroy Page B

had to have it. No more standing on the culling board, but I already knew where the channels were, so it didn’t matter. I called it
Elvis,
and it was fast enough so I could take my boys water skiing, which they loved for a couple of years and then mysteriously lost interest. I had gotten a mushroom this time, but stupidly overlooked the proper clasps, knots, and other paraphernalia with which the rope from the boat is attached to the mooring. Simple ignorance. One afternoon, during a hurricane, I stood at the rain-streaked window thinking I should have beached the boat, only to see a granny knot fail and the boat sail away up harbor with the wind.
    I ran down to the water, and then along the shore as the boat lurched along in the angry water to come to rest in the shallows of the long spit of land separating the north end of Polpis Harbor from Nantucket Harbor proper. The wind was fearsome—seventy to eighty miles an hour, I would later learn—but as I saw waves breaking over the stern of the boat I jumped into the waist-high water and got behind it, hoping to save the engine. As I struggled (ineffectively) to lift the stern, a sudden gust took the glasses off my head. In a surreal moment I watched them fly up into the air, way up, and disappear over the spit, higher and higher, smaller and smaller, until I couldn’t see them anymore. The boat swamped and the engine was lost. Eventually the wind actually blew the boat over and upside-down, bending the windshield beyond repair.
Elvis
was trashed out, and, brokenhearted, I would eventually give the hull away.
    Boats are more heartbreak and worry than they are a joy. Something always seems to go wrong. An engine briefly catches on fire on the way to Coatue. The battery dies for no apparent reason. The draining hole stopper dries out and springs a leak. I don’t know how many mornings I would come down to the window half expecting the boat to have disappeared, then relieved that it had not, but still nervous enough to worry if the stern might not be riding a bit heavy in the water. I knew I wasn’t the only one to feel anxiety. My good friend David Halberstam had a Boston Whaler for a while, from which we fished out in the ocean, but he finally gave it up. “Marine engines,” he said. “The tolerances are like airplane engines, so they’re expensive, but they keep conking out anyway.” For many years now he has glided through the harbor in his racing scull, keeping fit while enjoying the water.

    Gracie and Maggie.
    The fact is, once you’ve tooled around in Nantucket waters, once you see the island from that vantage point, you can’t easily give it up entirely. It becomes essential that you have a way to go over to Coatue for private skinny-dipping, or into town via the harbor to see the hundreds of yachts moored there or tied up at the docks. In recent years there seem to be more and more really big yachts, sometimes with helicopters tied down on deck. Frank Sinatra sailed in one day, a young woman dressed in white playing a flute in the bow as they docked. The boat was enormous, of course.
    And there are more intimate pleasures—bird watching from a kayak small enough to let you navigate up a stream, and then back down to, for instance, Polpis Harbor, where Maggie likes to paddle along with our dog Gracie shadowing her.
    THE YEARS PASSED, during which I began teaching at the University of Iowa and M.I.T. My financial situation improved markedly, and I started haunting Madaket Marine again. And so I came by the boat we have today, a seventeen-foot Chincoteegue brought up from the Chesapeake (it’s a duck boat) by a member of the Dupont family who fell too ill to use it. We named it
Buzz Cut,
and we’re now on the second engine.
    During the season a lot of people live on their boats, and the harbor fills up. The launch is in continuous operation taking people to and from the wharf. I should mention the Nantucket