Writings - Sailing Home
(I wrote this story for Traverse Magazine in the summer of 2001 for an issue on boating in the Grand Traverse region. When the issue was scuttled, my story was left stranded, until now. The pictures are from a later cruise that I took aboard the Manitou, another historic ship that sails the waters of Grand Traverse Bay. Select an image for a larger view.)
Mars rose over our starboard side. It hung there just over Old Mission Peninsula, long before any stars appeared, a bright red dot on the horizon. The captain said it looked so bright because it was closer to the Earth than it had ever been before. I took it as a good sign.
We were sailing in a light breeze aboard the Madeline, a replica of a two-masted schooner that had plied Lake Michigan’s waters more than 150 years ago. Under the command of Capt. Joe Niehardt, the crew of two mates and ten trainees was heading for Omena Bay, where we planned to set anchor and stay the night. We tacked back and forth up the west arm of Grand Traverse Bay, strangers the day before who were now working side-by-side to raise and lower the massive Dacron sails, plot our course on a map spread out in the captain’s cabin, and take a turn steering the ship’s cast iron wheel. With the sails luffing gently in the breeze, and the water lapping steadily against the hull, our lives on land seemed a million miles away.
My stint aboard the Madeline felt like a homecoming—and a long-overdue one. I’d grown up “out east” in a small seaside town south of Boston. At the end of our street was a boulder-strewn beach, and beyond that was Minot’s Light, a severe granite spire that rose almost straight out of the Atlantic about a mile offshore. As a kid I’d watched lobster boats and pleasure craft motor in and out of the harbor, fished off the wooden docks, taken the occasional sailing course, and stared out at the lighthouse wondering what it would be like to live and work among the waves that pounded its sides.
Since then, each move—to a New Hampshire town as a teenager, then away to college in upstate New York and west to Ann Arbor with my wife—had taken me farther from those ocean waves.
Sailing on the Madeline that day, using arcane nautical terms like fife rail, steaming cone and kevel, and trimming the sails on the captain’s shouted command, brought back memories of my childhood on the Atlantic coast. I looked out at the tip of the peninsula and spotted Old Mission Point Lighthouse between the trees as the stars appeared overhead, and glanced around at my new-found friends on the gently rolling deck. For the first time in years, I felt at home.