Coasting Read Free Page A

pedaling, and to slide down a slope on a sled. The coaster—as my school report pointed out in no uncertain terms—is someone who uses the minimum of effort to go down a slippery slope on the margin of things.
    The coaster never stays in one berth longer than he can help. He’ll take on any cargo for a short distance—coal, scrap iron, timber, day-old chicks. He doesn’t quite belong either to the land or to the ocean. He is a betwixt-and-between man, neither exactly a citizen nor exactly a foreigner. Choosing to live on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land, he has to make himself the master of a specialized kind of knowledge not taught in English public schools. Admiral Smyth’s
The Sailor’s Word Book
of 1867 puts it nicely:
    C OASTING , or To Coast Along. The act of making a progress along the sea-coast of any country, for which purpose it is necessary to observe the time and direction of the tide, to know the reigning winds, the roads and havens, the different depths of water, and the qualities of the ground.
    It makes a happy metaphor for a life on the fringe. For years I coasted, from job to job, place to place, person to person. At the first hint of adverse weather I hauled up my anchor and moved on with the tide, letting the reigning winds take care of the direction of the voyage. In writing I found a good coaster’s occupation, unloading my mixed cargoes at one port after another. The writer, sitting alone in a room, watching society go past his window and trying to re-create it by playing with words on a page, has his own kind of sea distance … a sense of pushing up-Channel on a lumpy swell while the men and women on the shore go comfortably about their business, caring nothing about the pitch and roll and flap of the solitary small vessel on the horizon.
    It was only a matter of time before the metaphor insisted on making itself actual. I was nearly forty, a little older than my father, when I bought a real boat, fitted it up as a floating house and set out to sail alone around the British Isles. It was rather late in the day to run away to sea (thirteen is supposed to be the standard age for that chronically English escapade) but I wasn’t going to let ordinary caution or common sense get in the way of this imperious compulsion.I was besotted by the idea. Britain still seemed to be somehow more my father’s land than my own—and home is always the hardest place to get into sharp focus. If only it could be
encompassed
 … by a slow, stopping, circular voyage … if only one could go back to all the stages and places of one’s own life, as a stranger, out of the blue … couldn’t one emerge at the end as a domestic Columbus, the true discoverer of a doorstep empire? With all the ardent solemnity of a thirteen-year-old, at thirty-nine I saw my trip as a test, a reckoning, a voyage of territorial conquest, a homecoming.
    I was not alone. I was bringing up the rear of a long queue of certifiable obsessives. This notion of taking to a boat and grandly coming to terms with one’s native land is one that regularly presents itself to a certain dubious brand of Englishman, and I should have felt more disturbed than I was by the company I found myself keeping.
    John MacGregor stood at the head of the line; and MacGregor’s book,
The Voyage Alone in the Yawl “Rob Roy,”
started a national craze for solitary coastal voyaging when it came out in 1867. MacGregor had a lot to live up to and a lot to prove: his father was a famous general, and when the infant John was plucked safely from a shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay at the age of five weeks, the incident was held by the MacGregor family to be a clear case of Divine Intervention, in the same category, if not quite of the same rank, as the Virgin Birth.
    MacGregor grew up to be a crashingly hearty Victorian bachelor. In an age untainted by suspicions fed on Freud and Krafft-Ebbing, he was able, as an