The Points of Sail

The Points of Sail Sven Birkerts NONFICTION 343 The nerve of fathering is woven through the moment—and here and now is the place to start. Late July of 2008, Cape Cod. We have come down almost every summer for the last twenty years. This time we are staying in Truro, my wife Lynn, our son Liam and his friend Caleb, and I. Our daughter Mara will take a few days off from her job next week to join us, arriving when Caleb leaves. There will be three days when we are all four together, the basic unit, taken for granted for so many years, but now become as rare as one of those planetary alignments that I no longer put stock in. This, though, I do put stock in. The thought of us all reassembled reaches me, wakes me with the strike of every blue ocean day. It’s mid-afternoon and I’m in Provincetown, sitting on a deck on the bayside, at one of those rental spots. Liam and Caleb have persuaded me to rent two Sunfish sailboats so they can sail the harbor together. Caleb has been taking sailing lessons all summer at home, and Liam had some a few years back, though as was clear as soon as they launched out ten minutes ago, he has forgotten whatever he learned. As Caleb’s boat arrowed toward the horizon, Liam’s sat turned around with sails luffing, and I watched his silhouette jerking the boom and tiller this way and that until at last he got himself re-pointed and under way. I was smiling, not much worrying about the wisdom of letting him out in his own boat—he’s fourteen and as big as I am—though I did take note of a smudge of dark clouds moving in behind me. Once Liam joined up with Caleb, the two little Sunfish zigged and zagged for the longest time in the open area between the long pier and the dozens of boats anchored in the harbor and I fell into a kind of afternoon fugue watching them. The book I’d brought lay face-down on the little table where I sat. I tracked the movement of the boats and half-listened to two men behind me talking about the perils of gin and various hangover remedies, and every so often I stood up to stretch and to glance up at the sky. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I panned left along the shoreline, past the clutter of waterfront buildings and pilings toward Truro and Wellfleet. I don’t remember what year we first started coming to the Cape regularly. We had been down once or twice for shorter visits before we had kids. Massachusetts was still new to us—Lynn and I are both Midwesterners—and going to the ocean felt like adventure, a splurge. Fresh seafood, bare feet in the brine. What a sweet jolt to the senses it 344 Ecotone: reimagining place all was. And isn’t this one of the unexpected things about getting older: suddenly remembering not just the specifics of an event, but the original intensity, the fact of the original intensity? Those first times have mostly slipped away, replaced—overruled— by the years and years, the layers and layers, of family visits. The place, which is to say the places—the many rental spots in Wellfleet and Truro, including some fairly grim habitats early on—has become an archive of familylife.DrivingalongRoute6ineitherdirection,Ihaveonlytoglance at a particular turnoff to think—or say out loud, if Lynn is beside me— “that was the place with the marshy smell,” or whatever tag best fits. All of which is to say that this whole area, everything north of the Wellfleet line—which for me is marked by the Wellfleet Drive-In—is dense with anecdote. I have this storage box with its twenty-plus years of excerpts, all of them from summer, all from vacations away from our daily living and therefore of a kind, a timeline separate from everything else. “That first summer we . . .” Except that memory does not obey timelines, but associations. Shake the photos in the box until...