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  • The Thirteenth HourThe Wreck of the Sailboat Morning Dew and a Child’s Voice in the Dark
  • Philip Gerard (bio)

Act I

This is how things go very wrong, how a safe journey is not all one thing but an accumulation of right decisions made consciously and sometimes unconsciously, and how calamity begins with a failure of imagination or a simple wrong turn late in the day or stubbornness or inattention or too much confidence or fatigue with luck running out, or more likely a cascade of small bad choices whose hidden sum is great and irrevocable disaster—and four lives that end in cold water.

On the day after Christmas, 1997, at the Lightkeeper’s Marina in Little River, South Carolina, a forty-nine-year-old country music singer-song-writer named Michael Wayne Cornett stepped aboard his thirty-four-foot sailboat Morning Dew to begin their first and last voyage together. The boat was a popular model, a Cal 34, built for day-sailing and coastal cruising. You could identify the make and model by a glance at the dark blue sail cover, stitched with a big signature C logo, with the numerals 34 inside the curve of the C. Her white hull had fair lines, a sharp cutter bow, and a slight flaring bustle to the transom. A blue canvas dodger protected the front of the cockpit from seaspray and rain. Hung from lifelines on either side of the long cockpit, matching blue canvas spray panels announced the vessel’s name in big white capital letters: MORNING DEW.

Cornett had bought the boat locally a month earlier and planned to sell it for a profit in Florida—an inverted proposition in itself, since so many boats come onto the market in Florida from the charter trade that the usual practice is to deliver a boat north for sale at Charleston or Annapolis. He and his brother, Harold, had spent the night on the boat, plotting with a pencil the route that would take them down the Intracoastal Waterway [End Page 429] (ICW) to Georgetown, Charleston, and ultimately Jacksonville, where he planned to meet his wife, Libby.

The Lightkeeper’s Marina is large and luxurious, located in Coquina Harbor, a man-made basin scooped out of a natural slough with high land all around, just off the newly developed strip of Highway 17 between North Myrtle Beach and the no-longer-small town of Little River, on the North Carolina border. It is accessible from the ICW through a narrow, curving channel that has good water even at low tide, marked by a conical ornamental lighthouse rising only as high as a telephone pole, banded by five broad horizontal black and white stripes, that shows an actual light but is not an official aid to navigation. The tourists love it. Boaters love it more, for it provides an unambiguous landmark to the entrance to the channel—not so important in sunshine, but very handy in fog, rain, or darkness, or when fatigue interferes with attention. The marina is ringed by condos that provide a high windbreak, protecting the boats moored therein from all but the most easterly winds, making it a safe haven even in hurricanes.

For a year, I kept a sailboat about the size of the Morning Dew at the same harbor and raced it on weekends with the fleet off Myrtle Beach. I came in and out of that channel dozens of times, in clear light and in squalls, always glad to see that quaint toy lighthouse, to feel the blustery wind suddenly calm inside the protection of the harbor.

Harbor in its original meaning held no nautical connotation at all—it referred to a place of shelter or lodging for travelers, a haven from weather, storm, and highwaymen, or else a refuge for the infirm—or the insane. The distance between the dangerous world and a safe harbor is sometimes an infinite space that cannot be crossed. And sometimes the space of the crossing is the most truly dangerous ground.

Mike Cornett was the talented, likable grandnephew of the famous Carter family, legendary in country music for classic hits like “Wildwood Flower” and...

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