The Moth Podcast: Learning to Sail

In this episode, Jamie Trowbridge learns a couple of lessons from his father - about sailing and about life. This episode is hosted by Angelica Lindsey-Ali. Podcast # 720

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• 2:02Speaker 01

  Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Angelica Lindsey-Ali. This episode, we have a story from The Moth main stage. 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.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  When I was 12, my father bought a 36-foot sailboat called the Perigee. It was really exciting when I learned we were gonna all go sailing. But I was a little surprised because, as far as I know, my father's never sailed, not even a small boat. It all started right here in Portsmouth. We got on board. We started the motor away from the dock, and the motor died, and we had to be towed back. An inauspicious beginning. But I knew that sailing with my dad was gonna be great because he was so good at everything he did. Even at 12-years-old, I knew he was an accomplished man.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  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. 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 sense his disappointment in me, his oldest son. So if this sailing thing is something that we can do together, I am all for it.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  So now, it's our first time actually sailing, and we're up in Penobscot Bay, Maine's rocky coast. The whole family's on board, and I'm feeling a little tense because we narrowly missed hitting a few boats getting out of the harbor. And now, we're sailing down the coast. We're gonna sail between these two islands. The boat's heeling, that feels a little weird. And 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.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  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 us. 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.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  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. And when we're all safe and sound, my mom looks my dad straight in the eye, and he says, "I am never getting back on that boat with you." And I think, "Whoa, I have to decide if I'm getting back on that boat." 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.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  We were constantly losing things overboard. So much so that we had to clip my little brother onto a lifeline, 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. My father, he'd get so mad when things went wrong. A 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. Those early sails, my heart was just in my throat. You know, what was gonna go wrong next? But I never considered quitting the crew of the Perigee.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  It was a chance to be with my father 24/7, sometimes for as long as a week. And 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 schlumpy clothes, and he didn't care if we had Pop-Tarts for dinner.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  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. The other reason I didn't quit being 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.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  But we were racing them. And he bought these special sails to help the boat perform better and under certain conditions. We didn't just have one jib, we had four jibs. And 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. You know, at first, all you can do is just hang on. But after a while, I started to get my hang of it, and in the end, how fast I could change a sail became a point of pride.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Now, as we got better at sailing, my father just kept upping the ante. Didn't matter that he didn't know what he was doing, he was just gonna go for it.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  The diceiest 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.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  So I'd go up on the bow of the boat in the fog, and I'd look for anything we might hit, and some kind of mark in the water that's gonna 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." And 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."

• 9:22Speaker 02

  There goes the can. There's the grass in the water. Right into the ledge.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  As good as we got, we never stopped running aground.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  When, um, after college, I, uh, I moved away. I wanted to see what it was like to live farther away from my family and away from New Hampshire. Moved to Seattle. And when I came back, everything was different.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Um, when I moved away, I was a carefree 21-year-old. And when I came back, I was married and my wife is pregnant with our first child. My mom was ill, she was very ill, and she needed care. And my dad was strangely absent. And he was drinking too much.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  I, uh, 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. And 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. And, um,

• 11:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  We buried his ashes in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he'd lived and worked and been so successful. But we reserved some for one more sail on Penobscot Bay. I knew I had to go back to this place. It was so special to him and special to me. So my brother and my sister and I went back for a three-day sail. And 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.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And when the motor wouldn't start, for old times' sake, I blamed my brother. It was amazing. I had actually learned how to sail. So on the first night of that cruise, my brother, we're down below, and 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. You know, there it all was, a complete record of all the things that 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,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  the first course of the day, blah, blah, blah. And then there it was, ran aground, blah, blah, blah. And you get to, it's just like, ran aground. No big deal, no need to elaborate. 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. And we anchor in the cove. We're all alone there. There's no other boats. The island's uninhabited. My brother and my sister and I, we row ashore and we pull the dinghy up high on the beach to keep the tide from taking it.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  And we climb the bluff. And as we're looking down on 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. And I feel prepared for whatever lay before me. You know, 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.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  And when I think of my father today, those four words from the logbook sum it up: ran aground, good times. Thank you.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  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 main 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." And 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.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  I can't wait to indulge in mulberry-soaked fingers with my daughter, the same way that my father did with me.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  That's all for this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  Angelica Lindsey Ali is a native of Detroit and a diehard Afrofuturist. She lives with her husband and four children in Phoenix, where she's also the host of The Moth Story Slam. 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, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cluchet, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Kazza. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on

• 17:20Speaker 04

  pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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