Out of the Fog | Page 4

stood
out in strong contrast against the unreality of many timid and
non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing, but their
reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed to me as a
boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to produce such
men.
Then, too, the ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods,
the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost
irresistibly attractive to me.
On graduating from high school I declined my father's offer to send me
to college, thinking that the life I had in view did not require a college
education. Then he made me a very attractive business proposition, but
it looked to me like slavery, and what I wanted most was freedom. My
father and mother were both Christians, but I had become skeptical,
profane and reckless of public opinion. I had left home for a boarding
house in the same town at eighteen, and at nineteen I had slipped the

moorings and was heading out to sea.

ADRIFT
My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of
impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the
springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding
grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a
period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was
at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch
little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee
rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the
shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week
we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business.
Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of
fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each
boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six
thousand feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length,
with hook attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the
trawl was set each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel
like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer
anchor of each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory
this year, passing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the
year before. My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young
Irishman about my own age, red-headed, but green at the fishing
business. John's mother kept a little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city
adjacent to my home town, and his father was a man of unsteady habits.
But John was a good fellow, active and willing, and, though he had not
inherited a rugged constitution, he could pull a good steady stroke.
Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly
carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own,
were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we
had no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went
over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a
bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved
down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us
in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the
fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working

overtime for the two weeks before and had sent their whole output in
one consignment. We had just passed our inner buoy when the fog
struck us, but we kept on for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy
weather, since it was safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel,
rather than take the inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a
boatload of fish and ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had
our bearings, I had often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we
could do it again. We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far
enough, though we had not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.
"Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little.
That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick.
What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time
and then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel