May 20, 2025 | The Boat, the Bay, the First Sail

Lyle drifted into Mallets Bay on a Saturday in late October, after finishing his stroll around the park up the hill. It had been a rainy morning in Colchester that finally cleared as he was sitting under a tall tree, with wet leaves falling down on him, and it smelled good, which he liked, and he could see the bay from up there, which he liked even more. He slumped down the road until he came across the water running up the shore, low and glassy, a silence wrapped around his ears as he stood at the top of the dock ramp, listening to the boats quietly shuffle and rock in the water while the low tide tumbled inland. He stood there awhile beneath the rustling maples, then wandered down to where the boats slept, tethered soft and slow along the docks at the Moorings place.

He began looking around, scanning the dock for a man named Bob he’d planned to meet around nine — someone looking to get rid of an old sailboat before heading off on a long trip of his own, sailing down the waters of Lake Champlain all the way to the Florida Keys with his wife. At the far east end of the dock, old man Bob emerged from the cabin of a boat Lyle didn’t recognize right away. Lyle stood there for a moment, watching Bob, who kept his particular gaze fixed on him while stepping carefully around the lifelines on the starboard side of his vessel. Bob then offered a slight wave before hurrying off his boat — a vast red sailboat with a long-pointed bow, two towering sails, a wide cockpit, and a neatly painted ribbon lining the edges. Bob stepped hard onto the dock and moved toward Lyle with deliberate intensity, each step heavy and firm, like that of a strong man—though he wasn’t a big man. Lyle began walking toward him, raising a hand in a small wave of his own, and had been thinking all morning about how, around this time in his life, he was on an irreparable descent toward a great turning point—one he couldn’t associate with anything good.

He spent the year working at an apple orchard, hoping to find a sense of purpose similar to what he had felt before during his past travels, while sitting alone in a field of trees whispering, “Don’t lose your fruit, keep them forever. Don’t leave me alone all winter with just the branches empty of them.” He woke one morning before the sun had risen, struggling to see out of one eye and engulfed in a deep confusion that lasted until February. All he had asked went unanswered, and things only worsened from there. He would later learn that there was no turning back from the long, long winter of his being, for he had become part of the orchard, the hills, the valleys, the lake, and the dying fruit trees in the yard, and everything he believed in was dead. It was then that he believed being close to water might cure his ailment. And Bob, eager to sell the boat quickly, thought of no better person to buy it than an aging young man searching for something to fill an empty promise.

“Ah, you made it! Just in time. It’s nice to see someone who can follow a schedule. It's hard to find reliable people nowadays. Come on, let’s go look at the boat.” He led Lyle up a different dock, stepping over a puddle of crud from one of the seagulls that had been flying around squawking loudly, and Bob said to Lyle, "Watch your step and watch your head." Lyle jokingly covered his head briefly and laughed, then there where Lyle caught his first glimpse of the Spirit 28 — an old boat that looked particularly clean and bright, the sun striking it just right. It was like a ghost of the bay, and a light in Lyle’s eye showed itself for the first time in a long while. “My wife wanted a bigger boat,” Bob said, “and I need to get rid of this one quickly because we’re going on a long sail down the waters here in two weeks. I can’t take both boats, obviously — unless the wife wants to learn to sail, but I figure it could go to someone who would take care of it, and you look like a caring type of person,” he said to Lyle. Across the docks, Bob pointed out his new rig and his wife, whom Lyle could see lying flat on the bow of the boat, looking up at the sky, listening to the wind carry its tunes, and watching the waves crash and topple over each other, stirred by a north wind. This brought Lyle great joy and deepened his love for the musings of the water’s workings and its poetic charms for life. Lyle began asking Bob questions and learned that Bob had served in the military for thirty years—army, air force, or maybe navy, which made sense to Lyle, though he couldn’t remember exactly what Bob had said. Since Bob had spent so much time on the water, it made sense that he was in the navy. He also learned that Bob’s father had taught him how to sail these very same waters. Everything Lyle was discovering—the stories, the history, and the richness of this place—had happened in Mallets Bay.

Lyle paid a sum of money, the last of the money he could shell out before he would go into a sort of hibernation, so that he could sit alone in the high room of the orchard home and watch the apples fall off the trees, only to venture out in the cold and pick them off the ground and do it all over again until the trees ran dry. “It’s so simple, so, so simple,” Bob kept saying to Lyle, “all you really need to know how or what to do is…” and he proceeded to point here and there and everywhere so that Lyle’s understanding of the vessel would eventually be more complicated than it would if he were to sit and observe the different parts of the boats while lost in the deep void of his headspace.

Lyle thanked him and set up the vessel after spending a couple of weeks alone and learning to be at peace with the fact that the boat would not depart the dock until the next spring, when he would eventually need to sail the boat out of there and across the waters of Mallets Bay and south down the waters of Lake Champlain, where he would be in the great middle of Vermont and New York, making grand plans for his complicated journey to be in even bigger bodies of water.

So, the boat went away, and that winter, all winter long, his snowy winter at the orchard, when the little snowflakes fell, dissipated, and melted away like the memories of his old trips, Lyle sat at his desk thinking of spring, where he believed he would be, while whistling away and deeply, so deeply depressed, under thick ice, locked inside because the icy snow blocked the door, and he was locked in the cockpit of his next dream.

Lyle returned from a great trip across the United States once again and found that he had arrived just in time. He had been seeing spring arrive everywhere except in Vermont, where he wanted to be back to watch the trees turn green—bright with fresh light in the mornings, evenings, and even during overcast days when a shy sun peeked through, nourished by April rains and May showers. When he came back, it was still the season of sticks, mud, and great changeovers, which he also considered a season of change for himself.

The boat had been cleared of snow. Lyle removed the shrink-wrap and cleaned it up, which wasn’t very messy at all. However, there was an odor he couldn’t quite describe—an old boat smell—and the newness had long since faded. Yet the memory of last fall came to him when he noticed dead leaves still clinging on from another beautiful autumn, which had always been his favorite season of life.

They launched the boat two weeks later, but it sat at the dock for another week before Lyle reached out to Emmett to sail with him—a task they both knew would be a great challenge. Lyle picked him up at 7 and they drove to Chipman Point, where they dropped a car for their return. Lyle had mistakenly thought the trip would take no more than an hour, believing in the “engine that could”—an engine they would later learn could only push them to seven knots, no more than eight miles per hour, and they had seventy miles to sail.

“You’ve got to be out of your mind thinking it’ll only take an hour,” Emmett said. “It’s a straight shot, no traffic on open water, it’ll go by quickly—just watch. You’re the delusional one,” Lyle replied.

He thought about it for a while, then came back to Emmett and said maybe two hours, but no more. Emmett laughed softly, full of doubt about Lyle’s initial plan.

It was a rainy morning, with showers all around them, but Lyle believed it would clear up—that they could sail, stay dry, and talk about everything, and maybe be friends again. The boat started right up, plumes of gray smoke fuming out the back of the exhaust—something Bob had shown Lyle last October was normal. However, it had been almost half a year since then, and Lyle worried the old fuel might have been sitting too long. But the oil looked good, and he had almost a full tank of gas, so he wasn’t too worried. He scratched his head, trying to muster the confidence that he needed to know everything about boats before setting sail. But everything makes sense when you’re looking back on it.

Lyle untied the ropes from the cleats and pushed the boat out into the great bay. The wind began to push the boat toward the shore. The waters moved rapidly because of the storm that was upon them. He couldn’t see any vessels out in the far waters—it was deemed not a good day to be there, to begin with. But it was a good day in their minds, and there they were, hopping on the vessel quickly while gathering the last of their things and tossing them on the boat.

This was all met with the realization that they were now officially sailors. Although they had no clue about the inner workings of the boat, they were on the water with it, and that was good enough for them.

The sailboat needed a name, as it currently had none; all boats need a name. Lyle knew the vessel had been given a name by the old owners. It was once called The Squeeze Queen, which he later learned after seeing the faded and missing letters of the old paint on the stern of the boat. It was a fine reminder of what once was—and an even better reminder of what would be.

Then it started to rain, and Lyle told Emmett to lay a towel across the steps leading down into the cabin of the vessel. Emmett closed the hatch, and they were all smiling with great joy as soon as Lyle pushed the throttle forward and they headed out into open waters.

“Owoooooooo!” Lyle started howling at the sky, and then Emmett was howling too. They began chanting old sailor talk to really set the tone of their voyage, saying things like, “Captain, keep the land adjacent to port side, watch for the high bluffs and keep away from the cliffs, and when we get close to the bridge, stay away from the starboard, and ahoy and matey and land ahead.”

They envisioned every approaching vessel as a pirate ship poised to board the Spirit 28, and though there weren’t many boats streaming along nearby, they could hear them, and they saw one speeding fast to the north toward one of the islands. If any of them had been approaching, it would have required them to repel the intruders until both their ship and the waters were free of danger. That marked the start of their life as sailors, and Lyle compared it to the nautical nuance of an empty rocking chair rocking away like that in the windy country home—one he remembered from his childhood—and that the trip itself could only go one of two ways.

10:32am - A Note in My Journal from May 8.

"Only days ago, the good friend and I sailed the boat to Chipman Point. We came in like bandits, like true sailors lost at sea, looking for the nearest and closest dock to dock as we were both very tired at the end of the day as I imagined how all true sailors would be after a long day treading on vast waters. The friend was steering us home; the lights of the dock were distant, but they were ours, hard to see in the night when there is no spotlight on the vessel. Instead, I took the wheel, and the friend climbed in between the mast and the bow to get a good look at the water in front—some buoys unmarked and not flashing, which made it even more difficult to navigate, relying fairly heavily on the depth finder and the shadows of the land on both sides of the river—Vermont and New York. Docking was easy after thirteen hours, and we arrived at the marina so that I could begin to work on this story and write them for anyone who will listen to me. Vermont may be my home forever, and this journal has heard it first."