“Well, the weather report is good today. We’ll have a good stiff wind at our backs, so I thought we’d raise the sails and go like a striped ape.” Father always said stripe-ed like it was two syllables instead of one. Girl sighed. She really didn’t like to sail. It was too much work. Girl preferred motoring along lazily, but Dad had to get to Cordova to do a clinic, and they had only a few days to get there.
Cordova was a small fishing village that could only be reached by boat or small plane. No roads connected it to anything else. The town was so small that they didn’t have a pediatrician, only emergency medical technicians and nurses in their small clinic. Once a month Dad would sail down and see all the kids in town. If Juli wasn’t around, Girl acted as his assistant, calling to confirm appointments and writing down everyone’s height and weight in their charts. Dad, as the visiting doctor, was treated as royalty, and the hospital staff and parents of his patients treated her with respect. No one questioned a ten-year-old medical assistant—Girl was Dr. Lillibridge’s daughter, so therefore cut from a different cloth than the village children.
Brother and Girl went forward to haul up the anchor. They inserted the metal rod into its slot and took turns pushing the lever back and forth to run the manual winch. It was hard work and the weight of the metal, spade-like anchor tired out their arms quickly, so it forced Brother and Girl to cooperate. They were both skinny kids, neither of them close to one hundred pounds, so they didn’t have enough mass to be able to throw their weight into it, but summers on the boat were making the children wiry. Living onboard forced a transient truce between them, their constant competition held mostly at bay until they reached land, though they could never eradicate it entirely. After they weighed anchor and entered the open water, Dad cut the engine. Brother and Girl stood on the roof of the cabin by the mast. They unzipped the blue sail bag and freed the mainsail.
“Okay, hoist the mainsail!” Dad called, and Brother loosed the halyard from the cleat on the blond varnished mast. He and Girl alternated pulling on the line hand over hand to raise the sail, then Girl tied it off in a locking figure eight on the cleat. Dad adjusted tension on the lines with the cockpit winch, and they were underway. The boat was silent now, cutting through the water at ten knots. It heeled to the right, so the starboard gunwale was only a foot from the water, the port side rising like a wall. It was fun to climb around on the tilted deck, and especially to go below where navigating the cabin was like a crazy carnival house. Outside you always had to be ready for Father to yell Ready about! Hard a lee! Which meant the boom was coming across the deck at head level as they tacked back and forth on alternating diagonal paths across the water. The old joke—Why do they call it a boom? Because that’s the sound it makes when it hits your head!—was true.
They were never entirely out of sight of land, but the horizon showed mountains and glaciers, not cities or even fishing villages. They skittered around islands too small to merit human habitation, but large enough to contain hundreds of untold adventures. Every evening they would choose a different harbor to anchor in overnight. The beaches were composed of small, gravelly rocks that hurt your feet, and the islands themselves seemed soilless, built on large stones that were less boulder than mountaintops poking up from the ocean floor. The island foundation was visible around the beaches with rock walls rising twenty feet high or more like exposed bones of a mammoth creature big enough for the whole world to reside on its back. The boulders begged to be climbed and always had gentle paths covered in soft moss that were easy to traverse with sneakers or bare feet. The woods covering the solid rock were lush green—pine and spruce evergreens, but smaller and stunted from living so close to the Arctic Circle. Tiny fairy pools formed in depressions on the rock high above sea level, fed with rainwater and rimmed with tiny saplings as big as Girl’s hand. Girl was sure there was magic there just beyond the periphery, and if she could stay long enough she could join it and learn its secrets. The beauty of this place was that there were no other people there, and the islands were rarely marked with names on the nautical map, so they could claim these islands as their own and call them whatever they wished. The naming made them theirs more authentically than legal titles and without the need of lenders or mortgages. The small harbors were always good for a dog-faced seal or a few otters, and black-and-white puffins bobbed on the waves everywhere they went.
Girl played her wooden recorder on the foredeck for the orcas and blue whales to hear. She didn’t think they minded her lack of musical training, but they never answered back, either. Every day or two they would spot a bald eagle flying overhead, but they never meant as much to Girl as the furry sea creatures she longed to pet. Eagles were
