Host: Angelica Lindsey-Ali
Angelica: [00:00:06] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Angelica Lindsey-Ali. This episode, we have a story from The Moth Mainstage. Jamie Trowbridge told this in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the theme of the night was The Ties That Bind. Here's Jamie, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Jamie: [00:00:40] When I was 12, my father bought a 36-foot sailboat called The Perigee. It was really exciting when I learned we were all going sailing. But I was a little surprised, because, as far as I knew, my father had never sailed, not even a small boat. It all started right here in Portsmouth. We got on board. We started to motor away from the dock and the motor died. We had to be towed back. [audience laughter] An inauspicious beginning. But I knew that sailing with my dad was going to be great, because he was so good at everything he did.
Even at 12 years old, I knew he was an accomplished man. He was a graduate of Princeton, he was the president of our family business and he'd recently been elected to the New Hampshire State Senate. I was the only kid in my school with a Trowbridge for State Senate bumper sticker on his lunchbox. [audience laughter] Naturally, I wanted to be just like him. But so far, it wasn't working out so great. He was a three-sport varsity athlete and I can't catch a ball. He's a beautiful tenor and I appear to be tone-deaf. I sensed his disappointment in me, his oldest son. So, if this sailing thing was something that we could do together, I was all for it.
So, now, it's our first time actually sailing. We're up in Penobscot Bay, Maine's rocky coast. The whole family is on board. I'm feeling a little tense, because we narrowly missed hitting a few boats getting out of the harbor. [audience laughter] And now, we're sailing down the coast. We're going to sail between these two islands. The boat's heeling. That feels a little weird. I look down in the water, and there's grass in the water. Now, I know now that grass in the water is not a good thing. [audience laughter] Grass in the water means shallow water. And Maine's Penobscot Bay is full of ledges hiding right beneath the water.
So, we sail right into a ledge. There's a huge crash. The wave picks us back up off the ledge, crashing back down. The whole boat shakes. We're going up and down on the ledge, and my mom is running around, putting life jackets on as she's preparing to abandon ship. My dad's yelling, "Everything's okay. Everything's okay," over and over, in a way that isn't remotely reassuring. [audience laughter] I'm frightened and I'm thinking we might all have to swim to that island over there. But we don't. The boat does not sink.
We bounce all the way off the ledge and we sail back to the harbor, get off at the dock. When we're all safe and sound, my mom looks my dad straight in the eye and says, "I am never getting back on that boat with you." [audience laughter] And I think, whoa, I have to decide if I'm getting back on that boat. [audience laughter] But I do go back. I go back with my brother and my two sisters. We go out for sails for two days, and three days and sometimes even a week. And every time, there's some minor calamity. [audience laughter] We were constantly losing things overboard, so much so that we had to clip my little brother onto a lifeline, [audience laughter] in case he went overboard.
One time, we woke up in the middle of the night and we were drifting out to sea with the anchor just dragging across the ocean floor. [audience laughter] My father, he'd get so mad when things went wrong. The motor would die, and he'd go, "God damn it, I just had that thing fixed!" And then, he'd blame one of us for breaking it. [audience laughter] Those early sails, my heart was just in my throat. I didn't know what was going to go wrong next. But I never considered quitting the crew of The Perigee. It was a chance to be with my father 24/7, sometimes for as long as a week. It was so different from at home. You know, at home, he was this superhuman and he was busy and never around. On the boat, I got to see a different side of him.
He wore these slumpy clothes. He didn't care if we had Pop-Tarts for dinner. [audience laughter] It was just amazing to be there with him. And in the evenings, we would all sit in the cockpit and laugh and tell stories, and he would sing as we sat there under the stars. Now, the other reason I didn't quit being on The Perigee was I started to prove myself as a sailor. We used to race other boats. They didn't know we were racing them, [audience laughter] but we were racing them. He bought these special sails to help the boat perform better under certain conditions. We didn't just have one jib. We had four jibs. We had the drifter and the flasher. And so, I would go up to change those sails while we were underway.
You had to take down one jib, put up another, the boat's going up and down. At first, all you can do is just hang on. But after a while, I started getting the hang of it. And in the end, how fast I could change a sail became a point of pride. Now, as we got better at sailing, my father just kept upping the ante. It didn't matter that he didn't know what he was doing, he was just going to go for it. [audience laughter] The diciest thing we did was sail in the fog. We used to go out in the fog with just a chart and a compass to navigate. No GPS, no radar.
Now, here's what you need to know about doing that. [audience laughter] You don't know where you really are in the fog with just a chart and a compass. You just know where you think you're supposed to be. [audience laughter] So, I go up on the bow of the boat in the fog, and I look for anything we might hit and some kind of mark in the water that's going to tell us where we actually are. One time, I'm up there and I see this green channel marker coming out of the fog. It's a green can. I call back to my dad, "I see green can number six." I look back at him, you know, barely see him back there, the fog's so thick. And he's consulting the chart and he calls up, "Can't be green can number six. That's miles from here." [audience laughter] There goes the can, there's the grass in the water, [audience laughter] right into the ledge. As good as we got, we never stopped running aground. [audience laughter]
After college, I moved away. I wanted to see what it was like to live farther away from my family and away from New Hampshire, and I moved to Seattle. When I came back, everything was different. When I moved away, I was a carefree 21-year-old. When I came back, I was married, and my wife was pregnant with our first child. My mom was ill. She was very ill and she needed care. My dad was strangely absent, and he was drinking too much.
I didn't understand how bad it was until the day I unscrewed the cap of the disposable water bottle he carried with him all the time now, and I smelled the cheap vodka inside.
When my father left my mother after 35 years of marriage, my image of him was just shattered. I kept my distance from him after that. I couldn't overcome the feelings of anger and disappointment I had. He invited me to sail with him, but I wouldn't go. It was a place he went now to escape. You could say that our relationship just ran aground and the tide wasn't high enough to pick us off the ledge. At least not yet. You know, I knew I had to reconcile with him, this man I loved so deeply. But I kept putting it off and putting it off. And then he died. He died quite suddenly. And now, there was no way for us to come back together.
When I went to the funeral home and I was alone with his body, I just broke down and wailed. I couldn't believe I'd never see him again. We buried his ashes in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he lived and worked and had been so successful. But we reserved some for one more sail on Penobscot Bay. I knew I had to go back to this place that was so special to him and special to me. So, my brother and my sister and I went back for a three-day sail. It was weird to be on the boat without my father. I'd never sailed without him. But it was also so familiar. And everything came right back.
I remembered how to fly the drifter. I remembered how to set the anchor, so it wouldn't drag. I remembered how to dock the boat, always a moment of peril. [audience giggle] When the motor wouldn't start, for old times’ sake, I blamed my brother. [audience laughter] It was amazing. I had actually learned how to sail. So, on the first night of that cruise, we were down below. My brother pulls out of one of the drawers, all the old logbooks. I couldn't believe it. I didn’t know they were on board. When he spread them out on that table, it felt like we were dividing up this secret treasure. There at the wall was a complete record of all the things I had done on the boat with my father, all the misadventures that had happened to me.
One entry in particular cracked me up. It began with the usual stuff, you know, the wind speed, the weather, the first course of the day, blah, blah, blah, and then, there it was ran aground, blah, blah, blah. This is like ran aground. No big deal, no need to elaborate. [audience laughter] Less important in the entry than what we had for lunch. And at the end of the entry, my father had scrawled, "Good times!!" with two exclamation points.
So, on the last day of that sail, we sailed to Butter Island, which was one of my father’s favorite destinations. We anchor in the cove. We’re all alone there. There are no other boats. The island is uninhabited. My brother, my sister and I, we row ashore and we pulled the dinghy up high on the beach to keep the tide from taking it, and we climb the bluff. As we’re looking down on The Perigee, with the sun setting behind us, we cast my father’s ashes into the air, and the wind carries them far out over the water. In that moment, I don’t feel my father’s loss so much as I feel his presence.
There’s no place he’d rather be right then than there with me. I feel prepared for whatever lay before me. What I learned from sailing with my father, is your greatest strength is not your competence, it’s your confidence. I decided to let go of those bad years at the end. When I think of my father today, those four words from the logbook sum it up, "Ran aground. Good times." [audience laughter] Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Angelica: [00:12:57] That was Jamie Trowbridge. Jamie is a magazine publisher who lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Although Jamie says he has not cast off from the Maine coast in a decade, he does set sail on a nearby lake every summer, and on New Hampshire's frozen lakes in an ice boat during the winter. Jamie says, “When you go out in a boat, you almost always come back with a story.”
If you're wondering what exactly an ice boat looks like, head to the Extras for this episode. While you're there, you can also check out some photos of Jamie and his family on their boat, The Perigee, and a page from his father’s logbook at themoth.org/extras.
This story reminds me of summer and the perfectly imperfect memories that I shared with my father. He was a complicated man, and we often had a difficult relationship, but he managed to make summer the most magical time of the year. Our favorite activities were foraging in our northwest Detroit neighborhood for mulberries and taking the pruned branches from the peach tree in our backyard and using them to fashion fantasy vehicles like Starship Cruisers. It was an amazing time, and I cherish those memories with my dad.
I’ll be going back to Detroit for the first time in four years. This time, I’m taking my youngest daughter. At the top of our itinerary is visiting our old neighborhood to see if those mulberry trees are still standing. I can’t wait to indulge in mulberry-soaked fingers with my daughter, the same way that my father did with me.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Julia: [00:14:43] Angelica Lindsey-Ali is a native of Detroit and a die-hard Afro futurist. She lives with her husband and four children in Phoenix, where she's also the host of The Moth StorySLAM.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by me, Julia Purcell, with Sarah Austin Jenness and Sarah Jane Johnson.
The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.