Returning to Charles Kuralt's America for August in Boothbay Harbor, Maine:
This is one of the loveliest moments in life: the moment after you have shut down the engine of a sailboat. The sudden silence always comes as a sweet surprise. You let the bow fall off the wind, feel the sails fill, feel the boat heel gently for the instant it takes the craft to recognize its new and mysterious power, and then feel it surge forward, lines taut, bow rising, sails pulling, gathering momentum now, doing its business, in control, of course.
. . .
Doris said, "We built Appledore II at Gamage's Shipyard in South Bristol. That was our first round-the-world boat. We sold it when we came home.
"We built Appledore III in our backyard in New Hampshire. We started a dairy farm but found we couldn't make a living, so we built another boat. This was the other side of Dixville Notch. That boat made quite a sensation. When we said we were going to build a boat, the farmers thought we meant a rowboat to put in the lake up there. Appledore III was really a great cruising boat. We made our second round-the-world trip in her."
I suffered a pang of envy. I learned to sail when I was still young enough to cross an ocean and promised myself I'd do that someday at the helm of my own boat. But promises postponed have a way of getting broken. Now I was too old, and my ability too rusty, and that particular dream, like so many others, was on the shelf for good. So it stung a little to be aboard a sixty-four-foot topsail schooner with a still-young couple who had sailed across all the oceans and around the great capes, and not once but twice, and had taken their children along for good measure!
Off in the distance, I could see Damariscove Island, a place of history and legend. English cod fishermen of the 1600s found a perfect harbor there, and a four-acre freshwater pond for filling their water casks, and so made the island an outpost of theirs a long way from home. Truth to tell, whatever you have heard about Jamestown, Damariscove was the first permament English settlement in the New World. The Plymouth Puritans used to sail up here to trade with the fishermen and swap news between the Old World and the New. The Nature Conservancy has returned the island to the uninhabited state in which those cod fishermen found it, a place of wild beauty. Damariscove was familiar to Rachel Carson, too. I once landed there and found a little stone cairn somebody put there in her memory.
Tags: Charles Kuralt, America, Maine
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