Letters

Pas ici, said Joe. His opinion was that the fellow supervised a sort of underground railway for U.S. draft resisters and had gone south to lubricate the wheels. But Joe knew little about him, and was not being particularly forthcoming anyhow, and I was too moved with self-revulsion and concern for Jeannine to draw him out further. I ate lightly, without appetite, there in the restaurant; then to escape the traffic noise from the nearby highway bridge I bid a vexed good-bye to Chestertown and motored back to anchor for the night in Devil’s Reach, using both anchors against the swift current. Three mallards — two drakes and a hen — paddled over for handouts. Sheepflies bit, oblivious to chemical repellent. There would be no meteors that evening, and who cared? I screened the companion way and forward hatches and went to bed early, out of sorts.

Day 5 blew up gray and disagreeable. Above the Chester there was nothing I felt like saying adieu to; I decided to recross to Annapolis and begin working south along both sides of the Bay. But halfway down the river, beating into a rising southwesterly which, should I continue, I’d have to bang through all the way to the Severn, I changed my mind. Foul-weather sailing has its pleasures, but not in foul spirits. I ran north up Langford Creek instead, anchored for lunch off Cacaway Island, another favorite; fidgeted with odd-job maintenance for a while, then out of boredom sailed the five miles up to the head of the creek’s east fork and motor-sailed back, parking early for the night in the same spot. The warm wind had veered west and risen above fifteen knots. I swam in the nettle-free waves (the sky was clearing; there was no thunder) and circumambulated the empty little island. Its name I understand to be corrupted from the Algonquin cacawaasough, or chief, but it spoke to me of Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces, their disposition.

A long, finally calming late afternoon and evening: smoked oysters and lumpy pina colada in the cockpit, followed by cold sliced ham and a 1962 Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon that cheered me right up. It was, damn it, Jeannine who had propositioned me.

No doubt I ought to have declined, but the woman is 35, not 25 or 15, and I am 69. Not keeping her with me was the “error,” if anything; but I had my needs, too. Away with such caca! Mrs. Golden needed residential psychotherapy, not a cruise on

Osborn Jones. Despite the fact that that day was the anniversary of my first seduction by Jeannine’s mother, in the Todds Point cabin in 1932—an anniversary whereof I was exquisitely mindful — I slept dreamlessly and well.

And woke refreshed and rededicated to 13 R! A fine breezy morning — wind still SW 18+—but I was in the mood for a brisk day’s work. Bye-bye, Cacaway! Bye-bye, mild Chester: may you flow as handsome, and less polluted, for generations after me! Given the wind, I was obliged to motor down the first nine miles from Langford Creek, straight into it with the dodger up to break the spray, before I could turn west enough to make sail and shut down the engine. A good fast reach then up out of the Chester’s mouth and around Love Point, the top of Kent Island, and we were in the open, whitecapped, serious Chesapeake. Our destination lay almost in the eye of the freshening wind, but no matter; so many tidewater August days are swelteringly still that it was a pleasure, and cathartic, to reef down, close haul, and bash through it all that bright brisk Thursday—O.J.

for the most part steering himself with a little sheet-to-wheel tackle while I took bearings, checked charts, and trimmed sail. A five-mile port tack due west, back toward discomfiting Gibson Island; then a six-mile starboard tack therapeutically south, under the Bay Bridge, past tankers and container ships plowing up to Baltimore; west again then another five miles into the mouth of the Severn, up to the Naval Academy and Annapolis Harbor. The only entries in my log for that day, apart from sailing data, are two questions: If Jane’s Lord Baltimore is André Castine, who is Joe Morgan’s “Monsieur Casteene”? For that matter, who is André Castine?