Paul Theroux - To the Ends of the Earth - The Selected Travels

So I struggled all day. I hated the banging waves, and the way they leaped over the sides when the wind pushed me sideways into the troughs of the swell. There was a few inches of water sloshing in the bottom, and my chart was soaked. At noon a motorboat came near me and asked me if I was in trouble. I said no and told him where I was going. The man said, “Rock Harbor’s real far!” and pointed east. Some of the seawater dried on the boat, leaving the lace of crystallized salt shimmering on the mahogany. I pulled on, passing a sailboat in the middle of the afternoon.

“Where’s Rock Harbor?” I asked.

“Look for the trees!”

But I looked in the wrong place. The trees weren’t on shore, they were in the water, about twelve of them planted in two rows — tall dead limbless pines — like lampposts. They marked the harbor entrance; they also marked the Brewster Flats, for at low tide there was no water here at all, and Rock Harbor was just a creek draining into a desert of sand. You could drive a car across the harbor mouth at low tide.

I had arranged to meet my father here. My brother Joseph was with him. He had just arrived from the Pacific islands of Samoa. I showed him the boat.

He touched the oarlocks. He said, “They’re all tarnished.” Then he frowned at the salt-smeared wood and his gaze made the boat seem small and rather puny.

I said, “I just rowed from Sesuit with the wind against me. It took me the whole goddamned day!”

He said, “Don’t get excited.”

“What do you know about boats?” I said.

He went silent. We got into the car — two boys and their father. I had not seen Joe for several years. Perhaps he was sulking because I hadn’t asked about Samoa. But had he asked about my rowing? It didn’t seem like much, because it was travel at home. Yet I felt the day had been full of risks.

“How the hell,” I said, “can you live in Samoa for eight years and not know anything about boats?”

“Sah-moa,” he said, correcting my pronunciation. It was a family joke.

My brother Alex was waiting with my mother, and he smiled as I entered the house.

“Here he comes,” Alex said.

My face was burned, the blisters had broken on my hands and left them raw, my back ached, and so did the muscle strings in my forearm; there was sea salt in my eyes.

“Ishmael,” Alex said. He was sitting compactly on a chair glancing narrowly at me and smoking. “ ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ ”

My mother said, “We’re almost ready to eat — you must be starving! God, look at you!”

Alex was behind her. He made a face at me, then silently mimicked a laugh at the absurdity of a forty-two-year-old man taking consolation from his mother.

“Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” Alex said and imitated my voice, “Pass the spaghetti, Mom!”

Joe had started to relax. Now he had an ally, and I was being mocked. We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents. Home is so often the simple past.

“What’s he been telling you, Joe?” Alex asked.

I went to wash my face.

“He said I don’t know anything about boats.”

Just before we sat down to eat, I said, “It’s pretty rough out there.”

Alex seized on this, looking delighted. He made the sound of a strong wind, by whistling and clearing his throat. He squinted and in a harsh whisper said, “Aye, it’s rough out there, and you can hardly”—he stood up, banging the dining table with his thigh—“you can hardly see the bowsprit. Aye, and the wind’s shifting, too. But never mind, Mr. Christian! Give him twenty lashes — that’ll take the strut out of him! And hoist the mainsail — we’re miles from anywhere. None of you swabbies knows anything about boats. But I know, because I’ve sailed from Pitcairn Island to Rock Harbor by dead reckoning — in the roughest water known to man. Just me against the elements, with the waves threatening to pitch-pole my frail craft …”

“Your supper’s getting cold,” Father said.

“How long did it take you?” Mother said to me.

“All day,” I said.

“Aye, captain,” Alex said. “Aw, it’s pretty rough out there, what with the wind and the rising sea.”

“What will you write about?” my father asked.

“He’ll write about ocean’s roar and how he just went around the Horn. You’re looking at Francis Chichester! The foam beating against the wheelhouse, the mainsheet screaming, the wind and the rising waves. Hark! Thunder and lightning over The Gypsy Moth!”

Declaiming made Alex imaginative, and stirred his memory. He had an actor’s gift for sudden shouts and whispers and for giving himself wholly to the speech. It was as if he was on an instant touched with lucid insanity, the exalted chaos of creation. He was triumphant.

“But look at him now — Peter Freuchen of the seven seas, the old tar in his clinker-built boat. He’s home asking his mother to pass the spaghetti! ‘Thanks, Mom, I’d love another helping, Mom.’ After a day in the deep sea, he’s with his mother and father, reaching for the meatballs!”

Joseph was laughing hard, his whole body swelling as he tried to suppress it.

“He’s not going to write about that. No, nothing about the spaghetti. It’ll just be Captain Bligh, all alone, bending at his oars, and picking oakum through the long tumultuous nights at sea. And the wind and the murderous waves …”

“Dry up,” Father said, still eating.

Then they all turned their big sympathetic faces at me across the cluttered dining table. Alex looked slightly sheepish, and the others apprehensive, fearing that I might be offended, that Alex had gone too far.

“What will you write about?” Mother asked.

I shook my head and tried not to smile — because I was thinking: That.