As the statue drew nearer Phædrus could see the old Blake School torch still held on high; a Victorian statue but still impressive, particularly from the water like this. It’s the size that does it, mainly. And the location. If she were just an ordinary park-statue most of that inspiration would be gone.
There was more water traffic now. Over by Governors Island some tugs were moving a big ship toward the East River. He could see what was probably a Staten Island ferry boat in the distance. Nearer, a river tour was coming in his direction.
He wondered why it was so heeled-over, then realized it was because all the passengers were on the Manhattan side of the boat, watching the skyline that loomed up above everything.
What a skyline! The clouds were reflected in the glass of some of the tallest buildings. Rhapsody in Blue. For the moment the towers of the World Trade Center seemed to have won the race upward but those other skyscrapers seemed not to know it. All of them together were no longer just buildings or part of a city, but something else people didn’t know they could be. Some kind of energy and power that wasn’t anything planned seemed to constantly surprise everyone at how great it all was. No one had done this. It had just done itself. The Giant was its own creation.
The Verrazano bridge was drawing closer and closer. Underneath it he could see a line that might be the far side of the lower bay. This was the last bridge. The last one!
As Phædrus approached the bridge he felt the beginning of a deep, periodic swell. It was a kind of a trapeze-like feeling. But slow. Very slow. It lifted and lowered the boat. Then it lifted it and lowered it again. Then again. It was the ocean.
Suddenly he realized he didn’t know where he was going. He tied off the rudder again and went down below and got a pile of charts from the chart drawer — still no sign of Lila — and went back up on deck. He paged through the charts until he found one that said New York Harbor. On the back side of the chart was the Lower Bay, speckled with buoys that marked channels for ships. At the bottom of the Lower Bay was Sandy Hook, and in the middle of Sandy Hook was Horseshoe Cove. That had to be the cove Rigel had told him about.
The chart showed about ten nautical miles from the bridge to the cove. There were so many buoys in the bay it was hard to tell which was which, but the chart said it didn’t matter, there was no way he could go aground.
In fact he was safer outside the channel where the big ships couldn’t go.
As the bridge moved farther and farther behind he noticed the engine sounded a little odd, and he saw the temperature gauge was up near the red range. He throttled down to just above an idle.
It was probably some debris in the water that had gotten into the engine’s cooling water intake. That had happened before. The trouble was the intake was so far below the water line and the curve of the hull was so great he couldn’t see the debris or get it with a boat hook. He had to get out into the dinghy and try to pull it off. Now he couldn’t do that because the ocean surge coming into the bay would clunk the dinghy all over the place. He’d have to wait until he got into the cove.
A fresh breeze seemed to be building from the southwest New Jersey shore. He might just as well sail the rest of the way.
He shut off the engine and for a moment enjoyed the silence. There was just the faint sound of the breeze and the sound of the waves against the hull, getting quieter as the boat slowed. With what momentum was left he headed the boat into the wind and went forward to the mast to put up the main sail.
The roll of the boat from the surge made it tricky to keep his balance, but once the sail was up and the boat came off the wind, it steadied on a slight heel, picked up speed, and he suddenly felt very good. From the cockpit he put her on course, rolled out the jib and the boat speeded up some more. He was feeling some of the old sea fever again. This was the first real open water since Lake Ontario and the surge was bringing it back.
To the east, there it was out there, the landless horizon. Some sort of ship way off in the distance, apparently heading this way. No problem. He would just keep the sailboat outside the channel.
Old Pancho would be smiling now.
This sea fever was like malaria. It disappeared for long periods, sometimes years, and then suddenly was back again, like now, in a wave that was like the surge itself.
He remembered long ago being taken by a song called The Sloop John B., that had an unusual speed-up and slow-down rhythm. He didn’t know why he liked it so much until one day it dawned on him that the speed-up and slow-down was the same as the surge of the sea. It was a running surge where the wind and sea are behind you and the boat rushes forward and rises as each wave passes underneath and then descends and hesitates as the wave rolls on ahead.
That motion never made him uncomfortable, probably because he loved it so much. It was all mixed up with the sea fever.
He remembered the day the fever started, Christmas Day, after his sixth birthday, when his parents had bought him the most expensive globe they could afford, heavy and on a hardwood stand, and he had turned it on its axis around and around. From it he’d learned the shapes and names of all the continents and most of the countries and seas of the world: Arabia, Africa, South America, India, Australia, Spain and the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea. He was overwhelmed with the idea that the whole city he lived in was just one tiny dot on this globe, and that most of this globe was blue. If you wanted to really see the world you couldn’t go there except over all that blue.
For years after that his favorite book had been a book about old ships, which he’d paged through slowly, again and again, wondering what it would be like to live in one of those little ornamented aft cabins with the tiny windows, staring out like Sir Francis Drake at the surging waves rolling under you. It seemed as though all his life after that, whenever he took long trips, he ended up on a dock in a harbor somewhere, staring at the boats.
Sandy Hook, as the boat approached it, looked like it hadn’t changed much since the wooden ships of Verrazano and Hudson sailed by. There were some radio towers and old-looking buildings on the northern tip which seemed to be part of some abandoned fortification. The rest seemed almost deserted.
As the boat moved inside the hook’s protection from the sea the surge died and only a ripple from the southwest wind was left. The bay became like an inland lake, calm and surrounded by land wherever Phædrus could see. He furled the jib to slow the boat a little and stepped below for a moment to turn on the depth sounder. Still no sign of Lila in the forecabin up there.
Back on deck he saw that the cove looked quite good. It was exposed to wind from the west, but the chart showed shallow water and a long jetty off to the west that would probably keep big waves out. There certainly weren’t any now. Just a quiet shore, and a couple of sailboats at anchor with no one on deck. Beautiful.
When the depth sounder showed about ten feet of water he rounded up into the breeze, dropped the sail and anchor, started and reversed the engine to set the anchor, then shut it off, furled the main and went below.
He put away the chart, then turned on the Coast Guard weather station to see what was predicted. The announcer said a few more days of light southwest winds and good weather before turning colder. Good. That gave him a little while to figure out what to do with Lila before heading out on the ocean.
29
He heard Lila move.