Into Irons

Abstract

Into Irons Mike Broida (bio) When I was a boy, my entire family would take the two-day-long drive from the cracked sidewalks and crowded city pools of Cleveland, Ohio, up to the adventurous, bucolic wilderness of southern Maine. John and Cookie, my mother's parents, only lived a few miles from the Maine coast, a short ways inland on the Arundel river, but despite this they still "summered" properly on the ocean, in the well-shingled summer town of Biddeford Pool, a strange, sleepy spit of land jutting out into one end of Saco Bay. Even as a boy, I felt a sense of peregrination that was unavoidable in the journey, that the seven-hour ride across upstate New York was a holy penance to cleanse myself of Midwestern honkytonk values: no more pop, no more tree lawns, no more putt-putt, no more big-drop coasters along the lakefront. Each mile was a prayer towards the promised land of white shorts and clay courts, evening gin and tonics and walks along the stony strands, the cyclopean flash of the lighthouse and, of course, the trimmed sails cutting across the waves. Beyond tennis or golf or the long afternoon games of bridge (or hearts, for the young ones), sailing was everything along the coast: My grandparents' thirty-foot sloop, Cygnet, sat moored just off the shore, visible from the north-facing beach, a boat simple enough for an afternoon out on the water but capable of, on rare occasion, a two-day overnight journey. Before the family even decamped from the long drive, my grandmother had signed my siblings and me up for the next round of sailing lessons, which would start early the next morning. Like my grandfather and his father before him and his father before him, we were all to become sailors. [End Page 259] Biddeford Pool sits eight miles to the south of the old mill town of Biddeford, and the actual "pool" is a vast tidal pool hemmed in by the sandy tombolo known as Mile Stretch that, at low tide, empties out into a broad mudflat favored by amateur clammers. It made for an ideal spot to learn how to sail, sheltered by the broad rim of the pool, slowly tacking back and forth in two-person Turnabout boats, trying not to get caught up on the rocks during high tide. Early lessons covered the parts of the boat: bow and stern, mast and boom, port and starboard, tiller and rudder, mainsheet and jib, halyard and clew. Sailing is its own sort of language that sits parallel to English—the hal-yard is a portmanteau of "haul the yard" because it's the line used to haul up the yards of fabric that make up the sail. "Starboard," the right side of ship, comes from "steer board," since Germans steered their early boats with paddles over the right side of the hull. While it was possible for me to step onto a boat and call a line a "rope" in minor sacrilege, to instead sit in the stern and tap into the language of the water, to call out "ready about" and wait for the response—"hard alee"—was to carry roughly on my lips the magic words that my family had been using for over a hundred years. When I turned twelve, it became time to sail out onto the open ocean of Saco Bay, rigging our little boats and heading towards the infamous "Gut," the narrow channel that separated the pool from the Atlantic, the water lapping up the sides of the fiberglass hull, foaming and sucking as it pulled the little boats to and fro, drenching us with waves caught broadside. The reward for harrowing the Gut was the wide-open ocean, filled with sandbars and lobster buoys and hidden jagged boulders looking to rip our Turnabouts in two. It didn't take long for me to not like sailing anymore, and each time we went out for class, I thought this was surely the inevitable day that I would be swept out into the Atlantic, wreck my boat, and drown as it sank. I started begging my grandparents...