The Appledore Revisited: I Am Charles Ryder

“I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.”

Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited

Last night I dreamt I went to the Appledore again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the dockyard, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. I called in my dream to the captain, and had no answer.


Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me, and I was once again on the familiar douglass fir deck, underway with the enormous sails around me.

M.A.Peel via Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca



I crewed for two summers during college on a schooner out of Sag Harbor, New York. The Appledore was the last schooner custom built by the Harvey Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, Maine, in 1978, designed by Bud Macintosh. After Herbert Smith sailed it around the world, he sold it to Cornelius Donovan and Ed Orr, two wild dreamers who were making a business of day sails in Gardiner’s Bay, and overnights from Montauk to Block Island. That’s when I entered their story.

I had only just sailed for the first time in college, as a guest of a childhood friend and the Georgia Tech Sailing Club for their annual tradition of sailing from Miami to Bimini. We were under a pelting storm across the Gulf Stream throughout the long night, and it was thrilling. When I got back home I wanted to learn to sail. I saw an article in Newsday about big boat sailing on the East End. I wrote 3 letters asking to be apprentice crew, and got 2 job offers. And so I landed on the Appledore.

Ed Orr: A Sagaponack Hemingway

The man who offered me the Appledore job was her captain Ed Orr, a retired principal of Southampton High School who loved sailing and the life of skilled sailors. He had a soft spot for an Irish American English major, and he received my letter just as he was thinking that he needed a feminizing influence for his overnight sails from Montauk to Block Island (although those aren't the exact words he used). His real schooner sailors were colorful, if a little rough on the edges. (They turned out to be great shipmates.)


He had sunk his retirement money into the Appledore, and strove to run it without losing the joy of it. Cornelius Donovan was a true Mad Men ad man,  a silent business partner who didn't interfere with how Ed handled the sailing.


Ed had the timelessness of the sailor's soul. He could have been been a whaler during the 19th century or on the deck of a Roman trireme.  I didn't know him well,  but there was a commonality of place and time: like my father he was in the service, also a Marine, went to college on the postwar GI Bill, and raised a family in postwar suburbia. He was blustery, with the Irish gift of storytelling. It wasn't hard to see that he was frustrated by some of the life choices he had made and he was railing against his fate in ways large and small, unimportant and corrupt: a classic tortured soul.

The Funniest Day: Tough Time Docking on Block Island

This memorable day took its first turn when the real schooner sailors George and Bobby both didn’t show up, and we had a usual sail planned from Montauk to Block Island, with about 10 guests.

The captain that day was a very young, very talented guy named Robbie who had gotten his GRT 200 commercial captain’s license at a very young age.

“Captain—no guys today, just me.”

“No problem, we’ll be fine.”

Hmmmm. Maybe.

We had the guests to help raise the main and foresail, and the winds were low that day, so the run to Block was—yes—very smooth sailing. That wasn’t the problem.

The sun was just starting to set as we motored slowly through the forest of anchored boats in New Harbor on the way to Payne’s dock. I am standing in the bow, holding the bowline to throw, as Rob--

[I Interrupt This Story for Several Important Notes: Everything on a schooner is supersized. Even a fairly small amount of line on a schooner is very heavy. Lines are usually thrown overhand, to get the distance needed between ship and dock. I, alas, did not yet have much upper body strength, being fresh from two years of English majorness, compounded by sophmore mono. George and Bobby always do this part. Narrative resumes. . . ]

bie is piloting the 86-foot schooner toward the dock under a low engine. He brings the ship in at an angle, to get me as close to the dock as possible before he has to straighten it out. And in that flow of motion, I throw the dock line with as much might as I have. But---SPLAT!!!—--right into the water. Without the bowline to anchor us, Robbie has to swing away from the dock, and I have to haul the now wet, heavier, line back into the ship.

Robbie circles us around in as tight a radius as the size of the ship will allow, and we are headed again straight for Payne’s.

The Appledore coming into port is a majestic sight—it often attracts a crowd. Chug, chug, chug--we are close again---again I pick up the line, and throoooooow it with all my might.

OHHHHHHHHH the crowd roars, as the line once again falls into the water, and Robbie has to peel off, again.

I was horrified. I was exhausted. I was scared. What if I can’t get this line onto land? Isn’t this how the Ancient Mariner’s world went horribly wrong?

I can barely write this, but my throw fell short a third time. We were entering Monty Python territory now. (I built a castle, but it fell in. So I built another castle, and it fell…), but it wasn’t funny.

For insurance reasons, the guests are not allowed in the bow during docking, so even though there are some good sized guys with the guests, I am on my own. Once again, I coil the evil line. Robbie shouts that he is going to come in even more slowly, which means he can get even closer to the dock.

Chug-chug–chug. There is now a very large crowd gathered, many rows deep, waving, shouting, pointing to our ship. Mercifully, they are a blur to me. (I should have never left the safety of the library.)

Several resourceful, Frat-looking guys are forming a human chain to hang out as far as possible over the dock. Someone yells at me, “Throw it underhand.”

We are now close enough that I can lob 2 feet of this cursed line to the guy at the end of the human chain. He cleats us, Robbie goes into reverse, cuts the engine, and we are home.

I didn’t have time to be too mortified at that moment. I help the passengers off the boat, dress the deck as usual, and go into town.

After dinner I go to Captains Nick’s, a friendly place where the sailing crowd dances.

I am relaxing at the bar, when a very good-looking man starts the “what brings you here” conversation with me. Now, during this summer, I was not above aggrandizing my job a little--tall tales are the way of the world on the water--but that night, I say, “I’m an apprentice sailor, learning big-boat sailing.”

He looks straight at me and smiles and says, “I know.”

“Oh?”

“I tried to catch one of your dock lines today.”

At the public dock in Sag Harbor

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 Mapeel     8/01/2015     literature, Schooner Girl   

Christopher Hitchens: So Women Aren't Funny, but We Can Appreciate You & Kipling

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling

I was a fan of Christopher Hitchens's literary side, not his political or theological pursuits. I love that one his last articles was a reflection on Rudyard Kipling for Slate. I enjoyed many of his literary essays for The Atlantic through the years, and am so happy that they are online to read again.

But it was his hilarious, outrageous, insane 2007 article for Vanity Fair, "Why Women Aren't Funny" that I remember most, for its great writing, real-life observations, and strange vulnerability. The day I first read it in 2007 it completely related to something I had been thinking about, and so this post about my schooner days. What I didn't remember is that Hitchens works Kipling into that piece too, quoting his poem "The Female of the Species."

The world has lost a distinct voice, and one that genuinely spoke for the great British literary tradition. I admire how Hitchens wrote his way through his dying, verily proving Kipling's quip about the power of words.

My Post from 2007: Schooner Girl

I was rearranging my library to accommodate new titles that had stacked up, when a large leather-bound old compendium toppled from the high shelf and whacked me on the head. That got my attention, and I sat on the sofa, poured a scotch, and flipped through its stories by Maugham, Wallace, Huxley, and decided to stop at Joseph Conrad’s Youth.

The unnamed narrator introduces us to Marlow (who will later lead us into the heart of darkness), but here he tells the tale of his first command of a ship at age twenty in “Eastern waters,” a ship that sinks after an explosion, and puts him and his crew into lifeboats for 12 days.

I was enjoying the tension in Conrad’s world between the exuberance of the young, “There was a touch of romance in it, something that made me love the old thing-- something that appealed to my youth!” and the burdens of the seasoned, “youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts--all die . . . . No matter.” when I was startled by this sentence: “The deck being blown up, it had fall down into the lazarette of course.”

Lazarette. Oh my gosh. My own considerable sailing adventures came flooding back with that unique word in a way the tale hadn’t conjured. It’s often left out of my bio, but I crewed on a schooner for summers during college out of Sag Harbor, New York. The Appledore was the last schooner custom built by the Harvey Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, Maine. After Herbert Smith sailed it around the world, he sold it to Cornelius Donovan and Ed Orr, two dreamers who were making a business of day sails in Gardiner’s Bay, and overnights from Montauk to Block Island. That’s when I entered their story.

The lazarette is a storage area in the bowels of the stern. In a schooner it is large enough to crawl into. It is an exotic spot—you see the hull, you are in the skeleton of the ship. You can’t get closer to the mythos of sailing than this.

There are many schooner stories to tell—there were some rough days and some funny ones--but one thought is in the fore. I had two main mates—George and Bobby. Schoonermen: a type of alpha male. They need to be highly skilled and brutishly strong. I was the first woman brought into the franchise, to help the passengers feel more comfortable. George and Bobby were skeptical at first, but I pulled my own weight, never complained, and soon my presence on the ship was welcomed. We fell into a rhythm of drinking Mount Gay & OJ together in port at the end of a sail, sitting and watching the sun set and laughing at the day’s events, before they went off and did their real drinking.

George had popped into my head earlier today (before Conrad landed on it) when I read Hitchens’s provocation fancy in Vanity Fair. “For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical.” He’s all over the place with this, which I’m sure will result in much blogbabble. “Filth. That's what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities.” But George taught me that, sometimes, men want the civilizing influence of women, apart from as the price they pay for desire. No one swears like a sailor, and a schooner sailor is top dog. I didn’t impinge on George and Bobby’s natural order, but I offered an alternate to some of its excesses. At the end of the summer I was walking away from the Appledore when George caught up with me to say I was the truest lady he had ever met, and he was glad to sail with me.

Men, they will surprise you.

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 Mapeel     12/16/2011     Joseph Conrad, literature, Schooner Girl   

Sag Harbor: A Letter Forgotten

I love the whiteness of January. After all the holiday red and green and blue have been tucked away there is an appealing sleek brightness to the first 31 days, when the day light has a particular absence of color. Is it a coincidence that we have the tradition of the January White Sales, when sheets and linen go on sale at deep discounts, or are merchants simply tapping into the primal collective unconscious of whiteness? Hmm.

The frigid weather—-which is white itself in its starkness—-is my excuse for indulging in a little post-holiday burrowing before the year starts to pick up steam. I’m reading through more of the NY Times than I usually do. That included a little tidbit from Ben Yagoda, “The Perils of ‘Contact Me’,” an essay about how people contact writers to answer questions. In his case the questions are about Will Rogers, The New Yorker, and grammar, because of books he’s written. He’s not complaining about this, except maybe when it’s school kids who want him to write their papers.


This reminded me that I contacted an author last year, a letter I had completely forgotten about. Not to ask a question, just a fan letter. I wrote to Colson Whitehead after reading his novel Sag Harbor, about black teenage kids in the mid1980s summering in the black enclaves that their grandparents had staked out. I bought it because I spent two summers in Sag at that very same time crewing on the Schooner Appledore (which I’ve written about here). Sag was my town: The Tuck Shop, the Corner Bar, Canios, the American Hotel; these are serious flashbacks for me.

Janet Maslin called the book “sea-breeze buoyant” and it is. It’s narrated by Benji who recounts his summering rituals and working in a fictitious ice cream shop. I found it funny and charming, and just ate up Whitehead’s mastery of pop culture references. He captures the WTF moment of New Coke just right.

I was hoping that the Appledore might make an appearance in the book. It docked at the end of Main Street and might have been something the kids saw and commented on. But no.

But what finally drove me to take the time and write the letter and look for an address was his reference to the 1973 tv movie SSSSS. I saw it as a kid and the image of Dirk Benedict lying on the floor and morphing into a cobra SEARED into my brain. I have never met another human who saw this thing, and I was floored to see a reference to it in print.

Colson never responded to me. His website has no direct contact info, so I did snail mail to his publisher. I like to think he never got the letter. Now, Ben Yagoda, he’s got an email address, plain and easy to find. Maybe I’ll read his Will Rogers bio next.

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 Mapeel     1/09/2010     literature, Schooner Girl