Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley

Author:Christopher Buckley [BUCKLEY, CHRISTOPHER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446556644
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

IT WAS OUR LAST LONG SAIL TOGETHER. He was getting older now. So was I. I was a father of two. Then came the episode of October 1997.

We’d made a date the month previous to have an overnight sail to Treasure Island along with Danny, our old sailing partner. I took the train up from Washington, D.C., to Stamford. Along the way, I looked out the window and saw gray, stormy skies. I checked the weather in the paper, where I saw the word northeaster. To anyone who’s grown up along the Connecticut seashore, this is not a word congruent with “overnight sail.”

My father was standing there on the train platform to greet me. This had always been a welcoming sight. But I noticed, through the train window, that he seemed to be holding on to a sign, as if for support. Had he injured himself?

No, for when the train door opened and I went to disembark, a violent gust of northeast wind blew me back into the train. I crawled out, practically on all fours. Loose objects in the railroad parking lot were being blown about. It looked like the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.

“We’ll have a brisk sail,” my father said.

Danny was there with him. I looked at Danny. Danny looked at me.

“We’re going out in this?” I said incredulously.

“Sure,” my father said nonchalantly.

We arrived at the marina. The wind gauge indicated steady at forty-five knots, gusting fifty. To put that in context, hurricane-force winds start at sixty-four.

“Pup,” I said, shouting to make myself heard above the wind, “ought we to be doing this?”

“Take in the fenders,” he replied merrily.

He had brought with him a friend of his from San Francisco. Poor, innocent lamb. He had never been on a sailboat before.

“Should I take a Dramamine?” he asked me nervously.

“Nah,” I said. “You’ll be too scared to throw up.”

And so off we sailed into the storm. This was in my father’s last sailboat, a thirty-six-foot fiberglass sloop named Patito. (Roughly translated as “Ducky,” which my father and mother called each other.)

We somehow made it across Long Island Sound, through a screaming, dark night and fifteen-foot seas. I kept the radio tuned to the Coast Guard frequency. I thought of my two young children. I thought of my warm bed in Washington. I thought, What the f——am I doing out here?

The next morning, after a sleepless night at anchor listening to the halyards slap furiously against the mast, a greasy dawn arrived. The wind had increased; it was now gusting to fifty-five knots. The radio reported that over half a million homes in New England were without power. Various governors had declared a state of emergency. We had gone for an overnight sail in a state of emergency.

I proposed that we row ashore and flag down a passing car, or perhaps a FEMA vehicle.

“No, no,” said my father. “We’ll be fine.”

It was daylight now, so we could see the seas we were up against, and there was nothing pleasant about them.

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