TRIFFID II- Part Two
By Genevieve Jacobs
“We need A BIGGER BOAT” truer words never spoken more emphatically than by my mother, long before Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” had ever yet been written.
“Triffid II” folds her wings and hunkers down under murky plastic tarps for the winter in a farmer’s yard on her trailer somewhere on the coast of Gaspe in 1968, and we pack ourselves up to traipse home in the GMC pop-top van. It’s been a mix of camping and sailing with a revolving crew of family and friends but now school is starting and both of my parents have begun new careers teaching.
Dad is teaching history at the High School. Transition to civilian life is harder than he thought. Maybe harder on everybody else, though. He is quickly dubbed “The Colonel” by students and administration alike. He grows a beard over the summer sailing, which escalates to a showdown with the entire School Board, as he is refusing to shave it off before the semester starts.
Evidently, it is easier to promote a bearded Colonel to Faculty Representative than it is to fire one, as a bunch of other teachers (both male and female) rally to his ranks in protest of liberty, justice, and choice of facial hair. And probably invoked academic freedom for good measure.
He is frequently called to the Principal’s office to discuss classroom management as properly performed in a public school: Why he may not pick an obstreperous farm boy up by the collar and hold him to the chalkboard and swear at him for talking back. That there is, in fact, a limit on how many students he can exile to the hallway in any given class period for lack of respect.
He cops to all these charges, and gradually modifies his behavior, taking up a remedial course of Dr. Dreikurs over the public broadcasting channel of the TV, a dude who talks with an accent about “natural consequences” and which my father misconstrues to mean “let them perish at their own hands, not yours” . Still, there are slipups.
One day, his reprimand of a talkative girl “You’ve got a bad case of Verbal Diarrhoea!” sends her fleeing the classroom in tears screaming in humiliation and rage “the Kernel told everybody I’ve got VD!!!”--he more or less got that straightened out, because pretty soon he’s got his own private office as Head of the History, Geography and Social Studies, where he reigns supreme. His little file cabinet lair is filled with cigar smoke, bourbon, and stacks of newspapers. He hammers hard on his italic style typewriter, churning out ambitious lesson plans regarding lectures on Ancient Roman Military and American Revolutionary themes, various diatribes, and opinion letters to the editor. NOAA charts of the seacoasts of the Maritime Provinces grace his walls with pins and pencil lines…where we’ve been, where we’ll sail next summer. Boat dreams keep his restless heart at bay through the long winters in school.
Still, he’s not a happy camper as he heads the public High School History Department.
Mum is teaching Middle School Language Arts. She herself is surprised that she too has to learn a few things from Dr Dreikurs, as she’s a deadly accurate hurler of chalk and erasers, a feat she can accomplish without even turning her head. Like most mothers, she is equipped with eyes in the back of her head. Unlike most mothers, her childhood nicknames were “Babe Ruth” (her deft left hander takes a few artful dodgers by surprise) and “Mother Superior” (she knows how to rap a ruler on your desk, if not on your knuckles).
She is soon elected to the School Board, perhaps as an ablative measure to keep Colonel raging bull in line.
TRIFFID II spends a winter in the barn again, and we add a larger section on the cabin: it’s Dad’s design and mother says it looks like a hulking monster. But, the good news is: Now it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside! Thus accommodated, we cruise the Coast of Maine. I’ve become the sole deckhand, my older sibs having despatched themselves to “anywhere but here”.
Out of sheer boredom and a bit of loneliness, not to mention survival value, I start to learn everything I can about the arts and sciences of boats and sailing. I can keep a solid 1 hour watch, steering by the compass but I’m not allowed to adjust our trim without waking Daddy up first. Mother says it’s really too much to expect a child to steer more than an hour at a time.
Dad installs a self-steering gadget. It’s an experiment. The varnished plywood vane with it’s metal weights screwed to the lower edge, flaps back and forth in the wind, attached to a servo-pendulum with a little sort of fake second rudder vane underwater and a couple of lines led forward through blocks to the tiller, but it doesn’t work very well. We keep tinkering. We move the weights around and we move the lines and the blocks around and we also keep playing with the rig itself. Nothing does much good, ultimately.
By the time I’m 10 years old, I can keep a 2 hour watch, trim sail as needed, track our knotmeter (a glass tube I dangle over the stern on my belly, watching the little red ball bubble up–until I can just stay right side up and guess it pretty accurately based on a number of things i can’t even enumerate) and my printing is disciplined enough to keep decent log entries if anything changes. By now the self-steering is maybe slightly a little better than before.
Sometimes I wriggle down into the cockpit lee of the cabin to amuse myself playing by ear: Irish tunes, Newfie tunes, Sea Shanties, Civil War songs, and scraps of opera and classical. I get to know each and every library in the ports up and down the coastline, because although I can’t take books out, I can read to my heart’s content while I’m there. My parents go do grownup things and fetch me when they’re ready.
One calm day sailing up Eggamoggin reach, I’m on “Lobster Pot Lookout” stationed on the bow when I fling my arm out and screech “Daddy, Hard to Starboard! COCONUTS!!???” The coconuts vanish, duck under, disappear! A whole bevy of sleeping whiskered seals! It’s okay that we woke them up from their nap, they start playing all around the boat and swimming in between the hulls. They are so sleek and clever. One, closest to me, as I’ve now gone belly down on the foredeck to lay with my arm in the water, rolls and gives me a wink from a bright little eye and it seems to be laughing. I call her Sophie, after the friend of Doctor Doolittle. I feel her side as she slides by. I feel she’s a she, but she might be a he. She comes back again and again. Yes, it could be another seal, but I feel it’s her, the same one.
Another day, I’m on the main bow, just for fun, as we plunge to windward off the coast in a good steep chop with lots of whitecaps and I suddenly spy directly below our bows, a massive slab of gray stone, covered with barnacles–I scream into the wind, but my voice doesn’t work!
We will smash when we descend. I brace for the impact. The end of life. This will be bad. HOW BAD? NO TELLING, NO KNOWING! Whatever is happening: This is not gonna be good.
But nothing happens, the rock slides from view, slowly, majestically, and a spout of rainbow water gasps with a sound like the most ghostly hello you ever heard! I have just seen a whale, flirting with us.
My favorite port, by far, is Isle le Haut, which we nicknamed “Eely Holy”, where our Vermont friends the Hotchkisses have an A-Frame summer house they’d built long ago. We 7 or 8 or 9 assorted kids play card games in the rainstorms, cook on bonfires, traipse barefoot like little fauns all over woodsy trails, eat a lot of berries and generally run wild. We fall asleep on the floors with quilts and blankets for pillows and tell ghost stories as long as we want until we drift away. My father often shanghais Jeff, the teenage son of the family, to crew for him, giving me and my mother a chance to enjoy some shore leave. She and Jean, the mother of the family, are very dear friends. Jean also worked in the local VT schools as a librarian, and she had given me countless gifts of good books to read over the years.
Sometime in the summer of 1973, after we’ve enjoyed visits with relatives and friends all up and down the coast, my mother announces she has “Had Enough Of This”. She persuades my father that it’s time to try just day sailing on freshwater Lake Champlain, closer to home, sleep in our own beds at night, tend the animals and the gardens and the ramshackle farmhouse. I overhear that she feels this at least in part because of me: that I’m growing up “too wild”. It’s an odd sensation, being blamed for freedom and my father’s enslavement.
So, we get Triffid 2 oriented at a public launch, consulting the tide tables. It’s either Rockland, or Portland, or Rockport. Or maybe even Portsmouth. I think Rockland! I can’t remember! It’s a nice little town, and we snag onto pilings alongside a long pier with a restaurant on the end of it. Fenders are out and we wait on the tides.
Mother backs the GMC pop-top camper van down the ramp to get the trailer in place. Then take the van back up to park top of the ramp, above the tide line. Dad says it will be an all-nighter so everyone should rest up and take watches. It’ll be all hands on deck for action by 2 am, and we will hit the road to be well on our way home to Vermont before sunup.
In retrospect I’m pretty sure an added element of suspense is that he had not paid for our dockage.
As the tide comes up, it’s fully dark. We ease Triffid into the slip, the trailer sitting expectantly under the waters, like a spooky silver cradle. The waters begin to recede. Perfect! All in the quiet night, we’ve got Triffid situated over the trailer. I have to go down into the hulls without a flashlight, just doing it by feel, to crawl up and wield the wrench to undo the bolts that hold her wings out aloft for sailing–they are called “I Beams” –so that as the waters lower down, she can slowly fold them. I feel like one of the spies in an international thriller doing a thing. James Bond! For some reason it is important to stay quiet through these operations. (Again, in retrospect, I think there might have been some fee avoidance in play.)
Finally she is happily folded and lashed to the trailer, road ready, secured for take off, and all is going just ducky. Mother backs the van down the slimy ramp so that Daddy can lift the trailer hitch onto the ball and shackle the chains in place and make sure electrics are all working for the lights. Good. The moon comes out a little on this calm night and so far operations are all go. Triffid 2 points her bows to skyward, no longer dancing, just stuck on the trailer for her next leg of voyaging.
The van starts up the ramp, tires spinning on the greenery, and then there’s a kachunk sound. It’s an ominous sound. It’s worse than the sounds that follow as mother keeps turning the key in the ignition. Which sound is like a really spoiled kid whining and bellyaching about something nobody can do a damn thing about. The sounds emitted by both my mother and my father are not like that: they are much more strident and filled with words we must not normally say out loud without the sign of the cross being performed immediately afterwards.
The tide is coming up. We have barely budged. The Van won’t move. The muffler tailpipe is, under the load of the trailer and Triffid, just about already underwater.
My father, decisively, orders me to go find a police station. Report back as soon as I succeed in my mission. I know this game, it’s called Scavenger Hunt! You get little clues and you follow them from one place to the next until you succeed! I run off and indeed i DO find a police station not too far away, one lonely light is on in there, but no people. I run back and discover that my mother has been more successful on her mission, she found a payphone on the pier dock, and she called for a tow truck.
By now, the water is under the van’s bottom and Triffid 2 and the trailer, lashed together as they are, are having rather a dance of it. The wind has picked up a bit, and with it, the wave action.
Mother, on the pier, with her handbag (where she keeps her coins for the telephone) suddenly calls out “Michael! MICHAEL? There are some rascals over here…”
He is busy trying to disengage all the lashings with hands underwater and doing it blind by moonlight to float Triffid free of the damn trailer again since it doesn’t appear we will get a towtruck for the Van at this hour…but how do we get the wings hitched back properly–the van may end up a total loss but at least we can save the boat…what the hell is she on about!
She yells back “GODDAMN BUNCH OF GUTTERSNIPES STEALING LOBSTERS!!!”
I had succeeded in getting a neighbor of the police station to respond to my knocking on the doors and windows of the cop shop sufficient to alert them to call whoever was on duty that some little child was banging on their doors about needing help at the boat ramp and so this valiant officer pulled up at this moment in an actual patrol car at the top of the ramp with a floodlight which revealed:
A stalled green pop top van whose undercarriage is now almost underwater on the steep slippery ramp–
–Hitched to a rather monstrous trimaran, with flapping hinged wings partially deployed–
–A man standing hip deep in the water with a wrench yet maintaining a distinctly military posture–
–A woman who looks like Ingrid Bergman waving her polka dot scarf like a bullfighter blocking the pier as–
–A bunch of teenage boys with a duffel bag full of frozen lobsters stand busted by this woman who looks like a movie star and talks like a teacher raised in Brooklyn–
–a Freezer stands open, locks broken, on the restaurant end of the pier: A burglary in progress! BUSTED!!!
…and a little girl with brown ponytail is somewhere in all this as the moon comes up and the tide comes up and the life
The life, plays out, as life will, as life does, as life lifes and lives life.
There was an article in the local newspaper. They made us sound like heroes I think, Serendipity. Ignoring that the whole thing probably happened because Daddy didn’t want to pay for daytime dockage fees, still, we somehow got Triffid 2 and the trailer and the van home to Vermont eventually.
We did sail the rest of that summer on the Lake, which should have been tame, but it wasn’t because my father has a way of challenging the powers of Poseidon and had taken a group of high school students out on an action adventure weekend with the boat and ducked in behind Valcour Island giving them a lesson in Benedict Arnold and Real Vermont Revolutionary War History except we had 50 knots blowing (but they made it okay and one of those students, Leah Terhune, was sufficiently inspired–by terror and victory– to become one of the first female Ferry Captains on the lake!)
The Maine waters can be perishing cold, as my father only really appreciates after he goes to an Outward Bound Wilderness school on Hurricane Island, plunging into 40 degree waters of Penobscot Bay. He announces that for my 12th birthday, he’s going to send me to Sterling School for Outdoor Survival in Vermont, even though I’m still a little younger than you “should” be, he’s twisted their arm to allow me the privilege. He says it’s character building.
He says I’ll need that, because he’s going to buy a bigger boat. We are going to sail the Caribbean, maybe the world. We’ll see.
The author is a longtime professor of Psychology and Communications. She landed in Vermont in 1987 after a decade of cruising under sail. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.” Her Substack site is HERE