A Family of Windjammers

摘要

In June, before the arrival of picnic boats, before the appearance of acres of party-colored lobster pot markers, mid-coast Maine is a bare stage. From the deck of the ISAAC H. EVANS, the other schooners, nearly a dozen strung across Penobscot Bay, call to mind a passage in Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod. Writing just before the Civil War, he described 200 mackerel schooners tacking into Provincetown Harbor like "fowls coming home to roost." When we reach Castine's Smith Cove, the metaphor seems especially apt. Vessels wheel in slow arcs. Sails are backed and dropped. Chain clatters from the larger vessels and the remainder maneuver between them. It could be 1790 or 1970. A nearby voice tugs me into the present. "I don't know where we are," a woman reports into her cell phone. "We're tying up to a bunch of other boats, and it's like, raining."