Jed Wolf

“Sit down aunty Iris,” Rory Halifax insisted, rowing their overloaded dinghy after his aging British aunt tried to stand with her martini. “Do sit,” Mr. Halifax said, beseeching his batty sister who rarely could be reached. “Mind the captain darling,” Mrs. Halifax added, recapping protocol, while yanking Iris down on Rory’s younger brother Finn, without spilling her own cocktail.

Rory was my age. We both lived on the water next door to each other, but the twelve-year-old blueblood was everything I wasn’t. Blond, buff, gorgeous and a bit daft, Rory was just like his family, I thought, watching from the seawall as he attempted standing to grab their new boat.

Neither of my parents would dare befriend a relative, and though our mid-sixties follies differed, the view from our houses was identical. Both our fathers moored boats off our sections of seawall. Our elegant, new Ketch hovering at anchor in the dazzling sunrise like an elegy to windjammers of yore, degraded the Halifaxes used speedboat. “A lazy choice,” my father said of their Chris Craft, after they hadn’t purchased the beamy diesel with the elegant striped canopy suitable for the Thames, that he’d suggested.

Lea Deutschman’s older brother blasted us in their parent’s Boston Whaler with its eighty-horse engine to and from Long Island. She and I clung to the bow for dear life scanning for partially submerged logs, we’d be blamed for hitting. Aquaplaning toward huge tugboats towing two-hundred-foot barges, we closed our eyes, braced to fly off their wakes.

“Coming about, hard-alee,” my father yelled from the tiller of his ketch, flaunting his double-masted sailing prowess, while I acted brain-damaged below in the cabin.

My older sister won sailing races. Lea’s equestrian talent earned her show-jumping ribbons and aunty I, clapped as Rory showed off his isometric exercises by their pool. With nothing to show off besides piano talent which wouldn’t “amount to anything without lessons,” my father reminded me, I sat on my hands whenever he entered the room.

I could stay on a horse, swim like a seal, right capsized Sunfishes with ease and had more barnacle scars than anyone, but found what others did boring, especially tennis. Leaping over horse jumps taught me to sail with ease over tennis nets, but for obvious reasons I kept my interest in Nureyev under wraps. I could return an occasional serve with deadly accuracy when in the mood which resulted in my one and only tennis lesson.

When my father noticed my exquisite form, he bought me tennis whites and a Rod Laver racket and insisted I take one lesson with a prodigy of Laver’s, who taught at the Yacht club across the harbor.

I agreed to go if I could sail to the lesson. I aimlessly zig-zagged over on my sunfish, capsizing as often as possible while dragging my racket behind me. Tucking strands of seaweed in my pockets, I arrived intentionally late, dripped to the club’s courts, transparent and muddy and made sure the Legend could see me. But he was with the next kid, so I headed back across the harbor victorious. I missed my lesson.

While other boys my age were learning to mow lawns, grease cars, and build boats, I flung open three sets of my parent’s pulsing French doors during a nor’easter, only so my returning mother would find me valiantly sweeping out the salt water.

Rescuing sick wildlife had worn thin. I’d identified with sensitive Jodie from the “Yearling” and his weak friend Fodder-Wing, but after recently rescuing a baby crow from a mob of adults trying to kill it, feeding it ‘til it could fly only to find it pecked to death, I was done.

Lea’s older brother Barry, returned from boarding school with a healthy young Sparrow Hawk he’d supposedly “found” in a barn. Practicing falconry, he tied leather jesses on its legs and taught it to return to his gloved hand using a long line. When one of its straps got caught in branches too high to climb, his desperate calls gave me nightmares. He also had a Coati Mundi, a Central American raccoon which wouldn’t have turned vicious if it was mine, I thought.

Unable to help a blind Canada goose, bumping into a seawall and deliberately ignoring a night heron floppy with rickets, I built a large cage on stilts and got four white homing pigeons. The plan was to release them at weddings, and have them return to me, but within days, I’d tied long lines to jesses on their feet which allowed them exercise without escape. I paraded them on my arms around the neighborhood until after being teased by Barry, I released them along with my childish need to mess with with warm blooded creatures, and turned my attention to fishing.

Nobody cared about fishing in our neighborhood, so I threw a tiny outboard on my father’s seven-foot Dyer dingy called the “Midget,” grabbed a rod and set off to make Southfield Point history. The tiny boat could only hold a two-and- a-half horse, so it took a while to make it to the breakwaters, where seabirds often located the Bluefish. All I had to do was cast beneath the frenzy of gulls and terns to catch them.

Sets of enormous waves from cruising yachts threatened to swamp me more than once before life vests were mandatory. Imagining being missed less than my sister, from capsizing my father’s remarkably stable Midget, I hated how right he always was, when a Ring Billed Gull took off with my lure. Dreading it being swallowed, I was relieved to see it hooked only to the end of its beak. It fought harder than a Blue, and was far more fun to reel in, but glad to have fish gloves and pliers, I unhooked the gull with a jerk, and watched it careen away smarter.

Three feet long with a wingspan of nearly six, Great Black Backed Gulls are the largest seagulls in the world. They stood around Connecticut beaches nibling on whatever washed up, reluctant to lift off, but once airborne their power and agility could steal fish from larger Ospreys.

One of those could tow a dinghy, I thought imagining aunty Iris clapping as floated by, towed by a huge white angel. My father might even be impressed, but even if he thought I was crazy, it was fine by me, so I headed toward a distant feeding frenzy with a dark silhouette circling above it. I cast my lure beneath it and a Black Back as if waiting for me, dropped from the sky like an Albatross.

The reel whizzed as I cut the engine and yanked on my gloves with my teeth. As the gull wheeled in the air like an evil kite, I swore with excitement as my dinghy began to leave a slight wake. I imagined the power it would have with a line attached to its feet instead of its beak. I felt it’s increasing rage in the tension of the twenty-pound test as I reeled it closer and closer. Ten feet away, it came at me.

I nearly fell off the seat, as i knocked the monster to the floor carefully avoiding the treble hooks dangling from its beak. The slack monofilament entangled its neck and wings, as it repeatedly lunged for my bare arms. When the lure imbedded in one of my gloves, I tried to slip out of it so I could have two free hands, but its thrashing head caught my thumb with a barb. It squawked when I kneeled hard on its back with anger and pressed my knee on my hooked glove to stabilize the gull’s flailing head. With my thumb hooked to the glove, and the glove to its beak, I saw no way to detach or even kill it.

Suffocating it was unimaginable. I’d yanked it from sky and it was enough a nightmare. It might wind up washed up on a beach somewhere, but so might I if I didn’t try to save it. These bastards are tough, I thought, twisting around, feeling for my pliers as it pummeled me with one free wing.

My blood gushed as I unhooked my thumb, wiggled out the other embeded barbs and shoved the exhausted demon over the side. It swam away with a vengeful glare before lifting into the air. It landed in my dreams, where it stands on a beach within a mob of crows, indifferent.

The Halifaxes laughed as the narrow dinghy, my father urged them not to buy, flipped. Rory’s father stepped aboard their Chris Craft too fast causing aunty Iris to drop merrily into the tide with her arm in the air, less concerned about drowning than her martini. Though panicked by fireworks, Blitzkrieg sure hadn’t destroyed her sense of humor, I thought, before I knew why she got bombed every afternoon, expecting the Luftwaffe. Rory and his father hauled her up the swim ladder in her soaked tea party hat barely pinned to her head, with what was left of her marbles. “Off we go then, dear.” Mr. Halifax declared, wearing the mariners cap my father’d given him.

As the happy family attempted to head out to sea, still attached to their mooring with Rory oblivious at the helm, the boat jerked spilling all of their drinks. I decided to give up my need to be noticed that day, and began being cheerful in earnest.