The Moth - Learning to Sail: Jamie Trowbridge

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

In this episode, Jamie learns some lessons from his dad - about sailing and about life. This episode is hosted by Angelica Lindsey-Ali. Storyteller: Jamie Trowbridge

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's the moth.org forward slash Houston. Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week Angelica Lindsay Ali. This episode we have a story from the Moth Main Stage. Jamie

Trollbridge told this in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the theme of the night was the Paragy. It was really exciting when I learned we were going to 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 to motor away from the dock. And the motor died and we had to be towed back.

And inauspicious beginning. But I knew that sailing with my dad was going to be great because he was so good at everything he did. Even at 12 years old, I knew he was an accomplished man. 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 trobridge 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 catch of all. 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. So now it's our first time actually sailing. And we're up in Penobsopska Bay means rocky coast. The whole family's on board and I'm feeling a little tense because we narrowly miss hitting a

few boats getting out of the harbor. And now we're sailing down the coast. We're going to sail between these two islands, the boat's healing, 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. Grass in the water means shallow water. And mains, panopscape, 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.

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 sales for two days and three days and sometimes even a week and every time there's some minor calamity. We were constantly losing things overboard. So much so that we had to clip my little brother onto a lifeline. Case, he went overboard. One time we woke up in the middle of the night and we were drifting out to sea where the anchor just dragging across the ocean floor. My father, he gets so mad when things went wrong. The 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 sales, my heart was just in my throat. What was gonna go wrong next? But I never considered quitting the crew of the paragy. 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 slumpy clothes and he didn't care if we had pot-tarts for dinner. It was just amazing to be there with them.

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 paragy was I started to prove myself as a sailor. We used to race other boats. They didn't know we were racing them, but we were racing them. And he bought these special sails to help the boat perform better in 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 sales while we were going to underway. And 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 to 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 sale became a point of pride. 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. The diciest 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. You don't know where you really are in the fog

with just a chart in a compass. You just know where you think you're supposed to be. So I 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 going to 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 seeing back there of the fog so thick. He's consulting the chart and he calls up, can't be green-can number six. That's miles from here. LAUGHTER There goes the can.

There's the grass in the water. Right into the ledge. LAUGHTER As good as we got, we never stopped running around. When after college, 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 it came back, everything was different.

When I moved away, I was a carefree 21-year-old, and when it came back, I was married, and my wife was 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. I didn't understand how bad it was until the day I unscrewed the cap or the disposable water bottle carried with them 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. 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 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. We buried his ashes in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he lived and worked and been so successful. But we reserved some for one more sale 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 sale. And I was weird to be on the boat without my father. I went back for a three-day sale and I 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. And when the motor wouldn't start, for old time's sake, I blame 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 the mount on that table,

it felt like we were dividing up this secret treasure. You know, their wall 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 usual stuff, you know, the wind speed, the weather, the first course of the day, blah, blah, blah,

and then there it was, ran aground, blah, blah, blah, and you get to, this is 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 scrolled good times with two exclamation points. So on the last day of that sale 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, and we climb the bluff. And as we're looking down on Paragy 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. And when I think of my father today, those four words from the logbook sum it up.

Rannagrown, good times. Thank you. Thank you. That was Jamie Trollbridge. Jamie is a magazine publisher who lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Although Jamie says he is 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 to Paragee and to page from his father's log book, at themoth.org slash extras. 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 Mowl

berries and taking the prune branches from the peach tree in our backyard and using them to fashion fantasy vehicles like Starship Cruises. 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, his visiting our old neighborhood, to see if those mulberry trees are still standing. I can't wait to indulge in mulberry soaked fingers with my daughter, the same way that my father did with me. That's all for this week. Until next time, from all of us here at

the Moth, have a story-worthy week. Angelica Lindsay Ali is a native of Detroit and a die-hard Afro-futurist. 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 Janess and Sarah Jane Johnson. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Katherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bulls, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klucce, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Gladowski,

and Aldi Kaza. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.