A Rowboat Pilgrimage

We were glad that the plan of the rowboat cruise dawned upon us almost a year before it came to pass. We were the gainers by just that rich length of expectancy.

For the joy that one gets from any cherished plan is always threefold: there is the joy of looking forward, the joy of the very doing, and the joy of remembering. They are all good, but only the last is eternal. The doing is hedged between limits, and its pleasures are often confused, overlaid with alien or accidental impressions. The joy of the forward look is pure and keen, but its bounds, too, are set. It begins at the moment when the first ray of the plan-idea dawns on one’s mind, and it ends with the day of fulfillment. If the dawn begins long before the day, so much the better.

It was early fall, and we had come in from a day by the river, where we had tramped miles up, to one of its infrequent bridges, and miles down on the other bank. Now we sat before the fire, talking it over.

“If we only had a boat!” I said.

“Boat! What do you want a boat for? You wouldn’t want to sit in a boat all day.”

“Who said I would? But I want to get into it, and float off, and get out again somewhere else. That’s my idea of a boat.”

“Oh, of course, a boat would be handy

“Handy! You talk as if it was a buttonhook!”

“Well?”

“Well of course it is handy as you call it but a boat means such a lot of things adventure, romance. When you’re in a boat a little boat anything might happen.”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, drawing the logs together, “that’s just the way your family feels about it when you’re young.”

Then we both laughed, and there was a reminiscent pause.

“What became of your boat?” I asked finally.

“Sold. You kept yours.”

“Yes. It’s in the cellar, there at Nantucket. I could have it sent on.”

“Cost as much as to buy a new one.”

“A new one wouldn’t be as good.” I bristled a little. Any one who has owned a boat is very sensitive about its virtues.

“How big?”

“How should I know? A little boat maybe twelve feet.”

“Two oars?”

“Four.”

“Round bottom?”

“Yes. She’d ride anything.”

“Well” Jonathan suddenly expanded “here’s an idea now! How would you like to have it sent on to the mainland, and then row it the rest of the way along the Rhode Island and Connecticut shores?”

I sat straight up. “Jonathan! Let’s do it now!”

Jonathan chuckled. “My! What a hurry she’s in!”

“Well, let’s!”

“We couldn’t. The boat will have to be overhauled first.”

“Oh, dear! I suppose so.”

“We could do it next spring, and go up the trout streams.”

“Think of that!” I murmured.

“Or in September and get the shore hunting the salt marshes.”

“Oh, which? which?” Already I was following our course along curving beaches and amongst the yellow marshlands. But Jonathan’s mind was working on more practical details.

“Twelve feet, you said?”

“About that.”

“Pretty close stowing for our dunnage still let’s see two guns

“Or the rods, if we went in the spring.”

“And rubber coats, and blankets

“Jonathan! Should we camp?”

“Might have to.”

“Let’s, anyway.”

“How does that coast-line run? Where’s a map?”

All we had were some railroad maps and an old school geography just enough to tantalize us but we fell upon them eagerly. It is curious what a change comes over these dumb bits of colored paper at such times. Every curve of the shore, every bay and headland came to life and spoke to us called to us.

We decided on the September plan, and for the next eleven months our casual talk was starred with inapropos remarks like these:

“Jonathan, I know we shall forget a can-opener.”

“Better write it down while you think of it. And have you put down a hatchet?”

“The camera! It isn’t on the list!”

“Hang it! Those charts haven’t come yet!”

“What can we take to look respectable in when we go ashore?”

Meanwhile the little boat was stirred out of its long sleep in the cellar, overhauled, and painted, and shipped to a port up in Narragansett Bay. And on the last day of August we found ourselves walking down through the little town. Following the instructions of wondering small boys, we came to a gate in a board fence, opened it and let ourselves into a typical New England seaport scene a tiny garden, ablaze with sunshine and gorgeous with the yellows and lavenders of fall flowers, and a narrow brick path, under a grape-vine arch, leading down to the sand and the wharf and the sparkling blue waters of the bay. As we passed down through the garden, we saw a little boat, bottom up, dazzling white in the sun.

“There it is!” I said, with a surge of reminiscent affection.

“That little thing!” said Jonathan. “I thought you said twelve feet.”

“Well, isn’t it? Anyway, I said about. And it’s big enough.”

He was spanning its length with his hands.

“Eleven foot six. Oh, I suppose she’ll do. My boat was fourteen.”

“Now, don’t be so patronizing about your boat. Wait till you see how mine behaves.”

He dropped the discussion and got her launched. Is there anything prettier than a pretty boat floating beside a dock!

The next morning when we came down we found her half full of water. “She’ll be all right now she’s soaked up,” said Jonathan, and we baled her dry and went off to get our stuff.

I delayed to buy provisions, and when I came back I found Jonathan standing on the float surrounded by plunder of all sorts. He answered my hail rather solemnly.

“See here! When this stuff’s all stowed, where are we going to sit? That’s what’s worrying me.”

“Why, won’t it go in?”

“Go! It wouldn’t go in two boats.”

I came down the plank. “Well, let’s eliminate.”

We eliminated. We took out extra shoes and coats and “town clothes,” we cut down as far as we dared, and expressed a big bundle home. The rest we got into two sailor’s dunnage bags, one waterproof, the other nearly so, and one big water-tight metal box. Then there were the guns, and the provisions, and the charts in a long tin tube, and there was a lantern a clumsy thing, which we lashed to a seat. It was always in the way and proved of very little use, but we thought we ought to take it.

While we worked, some loungers gathered on the wharf above and watched us with that tolerant curiosity that loungers know so well how to assume. As we got in and took up our oars, one of them called out, “Now, if you only had a little motor there in the stern, you’d be all right.”

“Don’t want one,” said Jonathan.

“What? Why not?”

“Go too fast.”

“Eh? What say?”

“Go too fast.”

“He heard you,” I said, “but he can’t believe you really said it.”

The oars fell into unison, there was the dip of their blades, the grating chunk of the rowlocks dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk. As we fell into our stroke the little boat began to respond, the water swished at her bows and gurgled under her stern. The wharf fell away behind us, the houses back of it came into sight, then the wooded hills behind. The whole town began to draw together, with its church steeples as its centers.

“She does go!” remarked Jonathan.

“I told you! Look at us now! Look at that buoy!”

Dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk the red buoy swept by us and dropped into the blue background of dancing waves.

“Are we really off? Is it really happening?” I said joyously.

“Do you like it?” said Jonathan over his shoulder.

“No. Do you?” To such unwisdom of speech do people come when they are happy.

But there were circumstances to steady us.

“What I’m wondering,” said Jonathan, “is, what’s going to happen next when we get out there.” He tilted his head toward the open bay, broad and windy, ahead of us. “There’s some pretty interesting water out there beyond this lee.”

“Oh, she’ll take it all right. It’s no worse than Nantucket water. It couldn’t be. You’ll see.”

We did see. In half an hour we were in the middle of upper Narragansett Bay, trying to make a diagonal across it to the southwest, while the long rollers came in steadily from the south, broken by a nasty chop of peaked, whitecapped waves. We rowed carefully, our heads over our right shoulders, watching each wave as it came on, with broken comments:

“That’s a good one coming bring her up now there all right, now let her off again hold her so there’s another coming see? that big one, the fifth, the fourth, away row, now we beat it there it goes off astern see it break! Here’s another look out for your oar we can’t afford to miss a stroke oh, me! Did that wet you too? My right shoulder is soaked my left isn’t now it is!”

But half an hour of this sort of thing brought about two results confidence in the little boat, which rode well in spite of her load, and confidence in each other’s rowing. We found that the four oars worked together, our early training told, and we instinctively did the same things in each of the varied emergencies created by wind and wave. There was no need for orders, and our talk died down to an exclamation now and then at some especially big wave, or a laugh as one of us got a drenching from the white top of a foaming crest.

It was not an easy day, that first one.... It seems, sometimes, as if there were little imps of malignity that hovered over one at the beginning of an undertaking little brownies, using all their charms to try to turn one back, discouraged. If there be such, they had a good time with us that long afternoon. First they had said that we shouldn’t load our boat. Then they sent us rough water. Then they set the boat a-leak.

For leak it did. The soaking over night had done no good. It had, indeed, been “thoroughly overhauled” and pronounced seaworthy, but there was the water, too much to be accounted for as spray, swashing over the bottom boards, growing undeniably and most uncomfortably deeper. The imps made no offer to bale for us, so we had to do it ourselves, losing the much-needed power at the oars, while one of us set to work at the dip-and-toss, dip-and-toss motion so familiar to any one who has kept company with a small boat.

“I wish my mother could see me now ” hummed Jonathan.

“I wouldn’t wish that.”

“Why not?”

“What would they all think of us if they could see us this minute?”

“Just what they have thought for a long time.”

I laughed. “How true that is, teacher!” I said.

Finding us still cheerful, the imps tried again.

“Jonathan do you know I do believe my rowlock socket is working loose.”

He cast a quick look over his shoulder without breaking stroke. Then he said a few words, explicit and powerful, about the man who had “overhauled” the boat. “He ought to be put out in it, in a sea like this, and left to row himself home.”

“Yes, of course, but instead, here we are. It won’t last half an hour longer.”

It did not last ten minutes. There it hung, one screw pulled loose, the other barely holding.

“Take my knife you can get it out of my hip pocket and try to set up that screw with the big blade.”

I did so, and pulled a few strokes. Then “It’s come out again. It’s no use.”

“We make blamed poor headway with one pair of oars,” said Jonathan.

He meditated.

“Where are the screw-eyes?” he said after a moment.

“Oh, good for you! They’re in the metal box. I’ll get them.”

I drew in my useless oars, turned about and cautiously wriggled up into the bow seat.

“Look out for yourself! Don’t bullfrog out over the bow. I can’t hold her any steadier than this.”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

With one hand I gripped the gunwale, with the other I felt down into the box and finally fished out the required treasures. I worked my way back into my own seat and tried a screw-eye in the empty, rusted-out hole.

“Does it bite?”

“I don’t know about biting, but it’s going in beautifully now it goes hard.”

“Perhaps I can give it a turn.”

“Perhaps you can’t! Don’t you stop rowing. If this boat wasn’t held steady, she’d I don’t know what she wouldn’t do.”

“If you stick something through the eye you can turn it.”

“Yes. I’ll find something. Here’s the can-opener. Grand! There! It’s solid. Now I’ll do the other one the same way. Hurrah for the screw-eyes!”

“You thought of bringing them,” said Jonathan magnanimously.

“You thought of using them,” said I, not to be outdone.

And so again the imps were foiled. But they hung over us, they slapped us with spray, they tossed the whitecaps, jeering, at our heads, over our shoulders, into our laps. They put up the tides to tricks of eddies and back-currents, so that they hindered instead of helping, as by calculation they should have done. They laid invisible hands on our oars and dragged them down, or held them up as the wave raced by, so that we missed a stroke. Once, in the lee of an island, we paused to rest and unroll our chart and get our bearings, while the smooth rise and fall of the ground swell was all there was to remind us of the riot of water just outside. Then we were off again, and the imps had us. They were busy, those imps, all that long, windy, wave-tossed, wonderful day.

For it was wonderful, and the imps were indeed frustrate, wholly frustrate. We pulled toward the quiet harbor that evening with aching muscles, hair and clothes matted with salt water, but spirits undaunted. Hungry, too, for we had not been able to do more than munch a few ship’s biscuit while we rowed. Wind, tide, waves, all against us, boat leaking, oars disabled and still “Isn’t it great!” we said, “great great!”

Dusk was closing in and lights began to blink along the western shore. We beached on a sandy point and asked our way, where could we put up for the night? Children, barelegged, waded out around the boat, looking at us and our funny, laden craft, with curious eyes. Yes, they said, there was an inn, farther up the harbor, where we saw those lights ten minutes’ row, perhaps. We pulled off again, stiffly.

“Tired?” said Jonathan. “I’ll take her in.”

“Indeed you won’t! Of course I’m tired, but I’ve got to do something to keep warm. And I want to get in. I want supper. They’ll all be in bed if we don’t hurry.”

Our tired muscles lent themselves mechanically to their work and the boat slid across the quiet waters of the moonlit harbor. The town lights grew bigger, wharves loomed above us, and soon we were gliding along under their shadow. The eddies from our oars went lap-lap-lapping off among the great dark spiles and stirred up the keen smell of salt-soaked timbers and seaweed. Blindly groping, we found a rickety ladder, tied our boat and climbed stiffly up, and there we were on our feet again, feeling rather queer and stretchy after seven hours in our cramped quarters.

Half an hour later we were sitting in the warm, clean kitchen of the old inn, and a kindly but mystified hostess was mothering us with eggs and ham and tea and pie and doughnuts and other things that a New England kitchen always contains. While we ate she sat and rocked energetically, questioning us with friendly curiosity and watching us with keen though benevolent eyes.

“Rowed, did you? Jim!” calling back over her shoulder through a half-open door, “did you hear that? These folks have rowed all the way across the bay this afternoon yes rowed. What say? Yes, she rowed, too. They say they’re goin’ on to-morrow, round Judith.”

“Say, now,” she finally appealed to us in frank perplexity, “what’re you doin’ it for?”

“We like it,” said Jonathan peacefully.

“Like it, do you? Well, now, if that don’t beat all! Say you know? I wouldn’t do that, what you’re doin’, not if you paid me. Have another cup o’ tea, do.”

The next morning she bade us good-bye with the air of entrusting us to that Providence which is known to have a special care for children and fools.

In fact, through all the varying experiences of our cruise, one thing never varied. That was, the expression on the faces of the people we met. Wind and water and coast and birds all greeted us differently with each new day, but no matter how many new faces we met, we found in them always the same look a look at once friendly and quizzical, the look one casts upon nice children for whose antics one is not responsible, the look one casts upon very small dogs. Why? Is it so odd a thing to like to row a little boat? If it had been a yacht, now, or even a motor-boat, the expression would have been different. Apparently the oars were what did it.

On that particular morning, word of our doings must have got abroad, for as we stepped out on the brick sidewalk of the shady main street a little crowd was waiting for us. It was a funny procession: Jonathan first, with the guns and the water-jug, then a boy with a wheelbarrow, on which were piled the two dunnage bags, the metal box, the lantern, the axe, the chart tube, and a few other things. An old man and some boys followed curiously, then I came, with two big baking-powder cans, very gorgeous because the red paper was not yet off them, full of provisions pressed on us by our friendly hostess. Tagging behind me, came an old woman, a big girl, and a half-dozen children. It was the kind of escort that usually attends the hand-organ and monkey on their infrequent visits.

We loaded up the boat and pulled off, a little stiff but fairly fit after all. The group waved us off and then stood obviously talking us over. One of the men called after us, with a sudden inspiration, “Pity ye’ hevn’t got a motor in there!”

Though we didn’t want to be a motor-boat, we were not above receiving courtesies from one, and when the Providence tacitly invoked by our hostess sent one chugging along up to us, with the proposal to take us in tow, we accepted with great contentment. The morning was not half over when we made our next landing, and looked up the captain who was to tow us “around Judith.”

For in the matter of Point Judith our friends and advisers had been unanimously firm. There should be a limit, they said, even to the foolishness of a holiday plan. With a light boat, we might have braved their disapproval, but loaded as we were, we decided to be prudent.

“I’d hate to lose the guns,” said Jonathan.

“Yes, and the camera,” I added.

So we accepted the offer of a good friend’s knockabout, and sailed around the dreaded Point with our little boat tailing behind at the end of her rope. We saw no water that we could not have met in her, but, as our friends did not fail to point out, that proved nothing whatever.

At Stonington we were left once more to our little boat and our four oars, and there we pulled her up and caulked her.

Strange, how we are always trying to avoid mishaps, and yet when they come we are so often glad of them! A leaky boat had not been in our plans, but if we could change that first wild row across the big bay, if we could cut out that leakiness, that puddling bottom, the difficult shifts of baling and rowing, would we? We would not. Again, as we look back over the days of our cruise, we could ill spare those hours of labor on the hot stretch of sunny beach between the wharves, where we bent half-blinded over the dazzling white boat, our spirits irritated, our fingers aching as they worked at the push-push-push of the cotton waste between the strakes. We said hard words of the man who thought he had put our boat in order for us, and yet if we could cut out those hours of grumbling toil, would we? We would not. For one thing, we should perhaps have missed the precious word of advice given us by a man who sat and watched us. He recommended us to put a little motor in the stern. He pointed out to us that rowing was pretty hard work. We said we liked it. His face wore the expression I have already described.

We launched her again at dusk. Next morning Jonathan was a moment ahead of me on the wharf.

“Any water in her?” I called, following hard.

“Dry as a bone,” he shouted back, exultant; but as I came up he added, with his usual conservatism, “of course we can’t tell what she may do when she’s loaded.”

But our work held. For the rest of the trip we had a dry boat, except for what came in over the sides.

Now that we were in the home State, we got out our guns and hugged the shore closely, on the lookout for plover. We drifted sometimes, while we studied our maps for the location of the salt marshes. If we were lucky, we had broiled birds for luncheon or supper; if we were not, we had tinned stuff, which is distinctly inferior. When we spent the night at an inn, we breakfasted there, but most of our meals were eaten along the shore, or, best of all, on some island.

“Can we find an island for lunch to-day, do you suppose?” I usually asked, as we dipped our oars in the morning.

“Do you have to have an island for lunch?”

“I love an island!” choosing to ignore the jest. “That’s one of the best things about a boat that it takes you to islands.”

“Now, why an island?”

“You know as well as I do. An island means oh, it means remoteness, it means quiet possession; while you’re on it, it’s yours you don’t have every passer-by looking over your shoulder you have a little world all to yourself.”

I could feel Jonathan’s indulgent smile through the back of his head as he rowed.

“Well, you know yourself,” I argued. “Even a tiny bit of stone and earth, with moss on it, and a flower, out in the middle of a brook, looks different, somehow, from the same things on the bank. It is different it’s an island.”

And so we sought islands sometimes little ones, all rocks, too little even to have collected driftwood for a fire, too little to have grown anything but wisps of beach-grass, low enough to be covered, perhaps, by the highest tides. Sometimes it was a larger island, big enough to have bushes on it, and beaches round its edges. One of these we remember as best of all. It lay a mile off shore, a long island, rocky at its ocean end and at its land end running out to a long slim line of curving beach. In the middle it rose to a plateau, thick-set with grass and goldenrod and bay bushes, from which floated the gay, sweet voices of song sparrows. Ah! There was an island for you! And we made a fire of driftwood, and cooked our luncheon, and lay back on the sand and drowsed, while the sea-gulls, millions of them, circled curiously over our heads, mewing and screaming as they dived and swooped, and behind us the notes of the song sparrows rose sweet.

If we had had water enough in our jug, we should have camped there. We rowed away at last, slowly, loving it, and in our thoughts we still possess it. As it dropped astern I pulled in my oars and stood up to take its picture no easy task, with the boat mounting and plunging among the swells. But I have my picture, its horizon line at a noticeable slant, reminiscent of my unsteady balance. It means little to other people, but to us it means the sweetness of sunshine and wind and water, the sweetness of grass and bird-notes, all breathed over by the spirit of solitude.

Then it melted away our island into the waste of waters, and we turned to look toward the misty headlands beyond our bow. Where the marshlands were, we followed them closely, but where the shore was rocky, or, worse still, built up with summer cottages, we often made a straight course from headland to headland, keeping well out, often a mile or two, to avoid tide eddies. We liked the feeling of being far out, the shore a dark blue, the cottages little dots. But we liked it, too, when the headland before us grew large, its rocks and bushes stood out, and we could see the white rip off its point a rip to be taken with some caution if we hoped to keep our cargo dry. And then, the rip passed, if the bay beyond curved in quiet and uninhabited, how we loved to turn and pull along close to shore, watching its beaches and sand-cliffs draw smoothly away beside our stern, or, best of all, pulling about and running in till our bow grated and we jumped to the wet beach and ran up the cliff to look about. Such moments bring in a peculiar way the thrill of discovery. It is one thing to go along a coast by land, and learn its ways so. It is a good thing. But it is quite another to fare over its waters and turn in upon it from without, surprising its secrets as from another world.

But to do this, your boat must be a little one. As soon as you have a real keel, the case is altered. For a keel demands a special landing-place a wharf and a wharf means human habitation, and then where is your thrill of discovery? Ah, no! a little boat! And you can land anywhere, among rocks or in sandy shallows; you can explore the tide creeks and marshes and the little rivers; you can beach wherever you like, wherever the rippling waves themselves can go. A little boat for romance!

A little boat, but a long cruise, as long as may be. To be sure, a boat and a bit of water anywhere is good. Even an errand across the pond and back may be a joy. But if you can, now and then, free yourself from the there-and-back habit, the reward is great. The joy of pilgrimage of going, not there and back, but on, and on, and yet on is a joy by itself. The thought that each night brings sleep in a new and unforeseen spot, with a new journey on the morrow, gives special flavor to the journeying.

Not the least among the pleasures of the cruise were the night-camps. When the shore looked inviting, and harborage at an inn seemed doubtful, we pulled our boat above tide-water, turned her over and tilted her up on her side for a wind-break, and there we spent the night. The half-emptied dunnage bags were our pillows, the sand was our bed. Sand, to sleep on, is harder than one might suppose, but it is better than earth in being easily scooped out to suit one’s needs. Indeed, even on a pneumatic mattress, I should hardly have slept much that first night. It was a new experience. The great world of waters was so close that it seemed, all night long, like a wonderful but ever importunate presence. The wind blew that night, too, and there was a low-scudding rack, and a half-smothered moon. As we rolled ourselves up in our blankets and rubber sheets and settled down, I looked out over the restless water.

“The bay seems very full to-night brimming,” I said.

“Not brimming over, though,” said Jonathan.

“I should hope not! But it does seem to me there are very few inches between it and our feet.”

“And the tide is still rising, of course,” said Jonathan, by way of comfort.

“Jonathan, I know just where high-tide mark is, and we’re fully twelve inches above it.”

Silence.

“Aren’t we?”

“Oh, was that a question?” murmured Jonathan. “Why, yes, I think we are at least that.”

“Of course, there are extra high tides sometimes.”

Silence.

“Jonathan, do you know when they come?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I don’t care. I love it, anyway. Only it seems so much bigger and colder at night, the water does.”

At last I drowsed, waking now and then to raise my head and just glance down at those waves they certainly sounded as if they were lapping the sand close by my ear. No, there they were, quite within bounds, fully twenty feet away from my toes. Of course it was all right. I slept again, and dreamed that the tide rose and rose; the waves ran merrily up the beach, ran up on both sides of us, closed in behind us. We were lying on a little sand island, and the waves nibbled at its edges nibbled and nibbled and nibbled the island was being nibbled up. This would never do! We must move! And I woke. Ripple, ripple, swash! ripple, ripple, swash! went the unconscious waves. As I raised my head I saw the pale beach stretching off under the moon-washed mists of middle night. Reassured, I sank back, and when I waked again the big sun was well above the rim of the waters and all the little waves were dancing and the wet curves of the beach were gleaming in the new day.

The water was not always restless at night. The next time we camped we found a little harbor within a harbor, a crescent curve of fine white sand ending in a point of rock. In one of its clefts we made our fire and broiled our plover, ranging them on spits of bay so that they hung over the two edges of rock like people looking down into a miniature Grand CaA+-on. There were nine of them, fat and sputtering, and while they cooked, we made toast and arranged the camp. Then we had supper, and watched the red coals smouldering and the white moonlight filling the world with a radiance that put out the stars and brought the blue back to the sky. The little basin of the bay was quiet as a pool, the air was full of stillness, with now and then the hushed flip-flip of a tiny wave that had somehow strayed in from the tumbling crowd outside.

We slept well, but once Jonathan waked me. “Look!” he whispered, “White heron.”

I raised my head. There, quite near us in the shallow water, stood a great pale bird, motionless, on one long, slim leg, his oval body, long neck, head and bill clearly outlined against the bright water beyond. The mirror of the water reflected perfectly the soft outline, making a double creature, one above and one below, with that slim stem of leg between.

I watched him until my neck grew tired. He never moved. Out beyond him, more dim, stood his mate, motionless too. Now and then they called to each other, with queer, harsh talk that made the stillness all the stiller when it closed in again.

When we awoke, they were gone, but we found the heronry that morning on one of the oak-covered knolls that rise like islands out of the heart of the great salt marshes.

All through the cruise, the big winds were with us more than we had expected. They gave us, for the most part, a right good time. For even in the partly protected Sound it is possible to stir up a sea rough enough to keep one busy. Each wave, as it came galloping up, was an antagonist to be dealt with. If we met it successfully, it galloped on, and left us none the worse for it. If we did not, it meant, perhaps, that its foaming white mane brushed our shoulders, or swept across our laps, or, worse still, drowned our guns. Once, indeed, we were threatened with something a little more serious. We were running down out of the Connecticut River, gliding smoothly over sleek water. It was delicious rowing, and the boat shot along swiftly. As we turned westward, it grew rougher, but we were paying no special heed to this when suddenly I became conscious of something dark over my right shoulder. I turned my head, and found myself looking up into the evil heart of a dull green breaker. I gasped, “Look out!” and dug my oar. Jonathan glanced, pulled, there was a moment of doubt, then the huge dark bulk was shouldering heavily away, off our starboard quarter. It was only the first of its ugly company. Through sheer carelessness, we had run, as it were, into an ambush one of the worst bits of water on the Sound, where tide and river currents meet and wrangle. All around us were rearing, white-maned breakers, though the impression we got was less of their white manes than of their dark sides as they rose over us. Our problem was to meet each one fairly, and yet snatch every moment of respite to slant off toward the harborage inside the breakwaters. It took all our strength and all our skill, and all the resources of the good little boat. But we made it, after perhaps half an hour of stiff work. Then we rested, breathed, and went on. We did not talk much about it until we made camp that night. Then, as we sat looking out over the quiet water, I told Jonathan about the shadow over my shoulder.

“It was like seeing a ghost,” I said, “no more like feeling the hand of an enemy on your shoulder.”

“The Black Douglas,” suggested Jonathan.

“Yes. Talk about the scientific attitude you’ve just got to personify things when they come at you like that. That wave had an expression an ugly one. I don’t wonder the Northmen felt as they did about the sea and the waves. They took it all personally they had to!”

“Were you frightened?” asked Jonathan.

“No, of course not,” I said, almost too promptly. Then I meditated “I don’t know what you’d call it but I believe I understand now what people mean when they talk about their hearts going down into their boots.”

“Did yours?”

“Why, not exactly but well it certainly did feel suddenly very thick and heavy as if it had dropped perhaps an inch or two.”

“I believe,” said Jonathan gently, “you might almost call that being frightened.”

“Yes, perhaps you might. Tell me were you?”

“I didn’t like it yes, I was anxious and it made me tired to have been such a fool the whole thing was absolutely unnecessary, if we’d looked up the charts carefully.”

“Or asked a few questions. But you know you hate to ask questions.”

“You could have asked them.”

“Well, anyway, aren’t you glad it happened?”

“Oh, of course; it was an experience.”

“Do you want to do it again?”

“No” he was emphatic “not with that load.”

“Neither do I.”

If the winds sometimes wearied us a little, they helped us, too. We can never forget the evening we turned into the Thames River, making for the shelter of a friend’s hospitable roof. We had battled most of that day with the diagonal onslaughts of a southeast gale, bringing with it the full swing of the ocean swell. It was easier than a southwester would have been, but that was the best that could be said for it.

We passed the last buoy and turned our bow north. And suddenly, the great waves that had all day kept us on the defensive became our strong helpers. They took us up and swung us forward on our course with great sweeping rushes of motion. The tide was setting in, too, and with that and our oars we were going almost as fast as the waves themselves, so that when one picked us up, it swung us a long way before it left us. We learned to watch for each roller, wait till one came up astern, then pull with all our might so that we went swooping down its long slope, its crest at first just behind our stern, but drawing more and more under us, until it passed beyond our bow and dropped us in the trough to wait for the next giant. It was like going in a swing, but with the downward rush very long and swift, and the upward rise short and slow. How long it took us to make the two miles to our friend’s dock we shall never know. Probably only a few minutes. But it was not an experience in time. We had a sense of being at one with the great primal forces of wind and water, and at one with them, not in their moments of poise, but in their moments of resistless power.

After all, the only drawback to the cruise was that it was over too soon. When, in the quiet afternoon light of the last day, a familiar headland floated into view, my first feeling was one of joy; for beyond that headland, what friendly faces waited for us faces turned even now, perhaps, toward the east for a first glimpse of our little boat. But hard after this, came a pang of regret it was over, our water-pilgrimage, and I wanted it to go on.

It was over. And yet, not really over after all. I sometimes think that pleasures ought to be valued according to whether they are over when they are over, or not. “You cannot eat your cake and have it too.” True, but that is because it is cake. There are other things which you can eat, and still have. And our rowboat cruise is one of these. It is over, and yet it is not over. It never will be. I can shut my eyes indeed, I do not need even to shut them and again I am under the open sky, I am afloat in the sun and the wind, with the waters all around me. I see again the surf-edged curves of the beaches, the lines of the sand-cliffs, the ragged horizon edge, cut and jagged by the waves. I feel the boat, I feel the oars, I am aware of the damp, pure night air, and the sounds of the waves ceaselessly breaking on the sand.

It is not over. Its best things are still ours, and those things which were hardly pleasures then have become such now. As we remember our aching muscles and blistered hands, we smile. As we recall times of intense weariness, of irritation, of anxiety, we find ourselves lingering over them with enjoyment. For memory does something wonderful with experience. It is a poet, and life is its raw material. I know that our cruise was made up of minutes, of oar-strokes, so many that to count them would be weariness unending. But in my memory, these things are re-created. I see a boundless stretch of windy or peaceful waters. I see the endless line of misty coast. I see lovely islands, sleeping alone, waiting to be possessed by those who come. And I see a little, little boat, faring along the coast-lands, out to the islands, over the waters going on, and on, and on.