A Sloop’s Tale

Fairwinds

“I wish I could say where it’s at,” he said, sounding earnest.  I could feel him searching for the right thing to say.  “I would give you anything I had.”  Those were his exact words: I would give you anything I had.   I believed him.  He didn’t want to be a dead end, but he simply had nothing else to offer.  We said our goodbyes and it was done.  There was no where else to look.

I wrote Dominic soon after, letting him know the boat had been sold years ago to an unnamed person for cash, and that I was conceding reluctant defeat.  He wrote me back with sympathetic words and a oddly cheerful pep talk. “I admire your qualities of persistance. Once you give your best shot, there is no failure!”  He ended with, “Thanks for keeping me in the loop, and if you’re ever in my neck of the woods, the first round’s on me!”

 About two weeks later, I read a news story that two state police troopers had walked into Dominic’s sailing school pretending to be customers, and when he came to the front to assist them, he was handcuffed and brought to jail, having been charged in the British Virgin Islands of one count of murder.  The last I heard, he was in jail the Caribbean, awaiting trial there.  Seems the police there had decided to re-open the investigation into the death they once dismissed as an accident.  Not much news comes out of Caribbean jails, and I wonder his fate.  I only hope that if he is innocent, he won’t have to suffer too much longer.  Without his cooperation I never would have gotten the closure, however unsatisfying, that eventually came.   It would be more unsettling to me to know the possibility existed but I just didn’t have the right information.  At least now I feel that I did what I could, and I can make peace with that.

If anyone has any questions for me, I’d be happy to answer them.  It took a long time for this story to unfold, and be written, and shared.  For those who read, thanks, and fairwinds.

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Saying hi to old geezers

After many months, Dominic came through for me.  “Spoke to a mutual buddy about Ed the welder.  His last name is Novell (sp?) If you have any luck, I’d like to say hi to the old geezer!” 

This was after I had just read that his lawyer had sickened and died of cancer in the middle of the trial, and he’d had to represent himself because he was allowed no time to find another lawyer.  I hate that detail.

I looked up Ed’s address on the web and wrote him a letter.  Seven days later he called me at home.  It was the easiest and most significant part of this whole search.   It was a moving, surreal conversation, and I learned a lot that evening.  I even took notes furiously throughout our time on the phone; having done a little bit of reporting I can recognize good quotes when I hear them.  And in a gruff voice heavy with Boston accent, they were spilling from him. 

“This was gonna be the ultimate. Your dad had the right idea.  It was a big boat, a beautiful boat.  He took on a hell of a job, starting from scratch like that. That takes gumption.  I know your father worked pretty hard.  I used to think about him, ask him what I should do now when I was welding.  This wasn’t just a whim, this was serious.  I had big dreams for that boat.  Anyone who has a sailboat is a dreamer.”

That particular dream died for him after his divorce.  “I almost cried when they pulled it out of my driveway.  It was just about done.  But I just couldn’t keep it.  I never even got to name it.  I figured I was going to save that for the christening.  But I never had her under power.”  The man who bought the boat from him was “a colored guy with an afro and a strong British accent.” He bought her with cash.  “He probably ran drugs, I dunno.  He was throwing around money like it was nothing.  He introduced himself, but me and names just don’t make it.”

The notes I took that day on the phone with Ed are barely legible, I was writing so fast and vibrating with new information.  But on one page there is a very clear and painful sentence.  “I think you reached a dead end, to tell you the truth.”

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Grasping at memories

After all that, and Dominic didn’t remember his name.  Damn.  Yet another stumbling block I had not anticipated.  Several months passed after that initial email.  I placed a classified ad in Soundings, the publication my mother had originally placed the “unfinished boat for sale” ad in.  It was a long shot, and nothing came of it.  I sent out emails to family asking if they remembered anything at all about that time.  I got some nice feedback about my dad’s ambition, but nothing to go on.  My older cousin, who today looks so much like my father my mother mentions it every time she sees him, emailed this memory: 

I helped your dad from time to time.  He was trying to teach me how to weld. One cool day  - I was like 12 - I spent the day there with him and the boat.  He gave me a beer (and a “Don’t tell your mother”) and brought me home on his motorcycle.  Doesn’t get much cooler than that - but that was what your dad was.  Cool.

That boat was to be completed and then put in the water for a big trip.  I wanted that to happen and was very sad that it did not.  I have a strong feeling that it was sold for scrap as it was only a shell of steel at the time and would have cost big bucks to put it together.

Ouch.  That one hurt.  But at that point I was pretty sure that wasn’t true.  Dominic had indicated that Ed had started to work on it and had made progress, the last time he knew.  I had been checking in with Dominic once in a while over the months, hoping to jog his memory and fearing that his personal issues  would soon dwarf any desire to help me.  But he kept writing me back.  “Should a couple more neurons come back to life, you’ll be the first gal I call,” he wrote. “I very much admire your tenacity and maybe someday you’ll share more on the drive to this knowledge.”  He signed all his emails, “Fairwinds, Dominic”

During this time I spend lots of time wracking my brain, trying to remember little details about the 0-10 years of my life in relation to that steel behemoth in the yard.  I nursed some frustrations about the fact that no one else had thought about this, had thought that we might one day want to know what happened to the boat.  Would my father have been angry that we let it all slide?   There’s a fruitless question for you.  So I gathered up my small, fragmented memories of playing underneath the boat - the steel fragments were cookies hot from my imaginary oven; the overturned metal box in the yard that I think was going to be an actual oven on board (?) served as a carriage that I would sit upon, after placing a sawhorse in front of it to flesh out the fantasy.  My favorite memory is of one Spring when my dad took me into the echoey belly of the boat to show me a Robin’s nest that was built on one of the inner beams- three sky blue eggs on a rusty shelf.  In those days of slightly more relaxed child safety rules, I remember climbing the ladder to the deck of the boat, which had to be at least 20 feet off the ground, and surveying the neighborhood amongst the pine boughs.  Maybe my mom didn’t know I was up there, pretending to be at sea. 

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Picking through the skeletons

I reached tentatively into the blankness of cyberspace with a quick, to-the-point email - polite but beseeching. You better believe I didn’t mention his …situation.  “I can’t think of anyone else who could help me with this but you,” I wrote, trying to get across a sense of my desperation. ”I’m just looking for a name.“  I didn’t wait long -  only a week passed before he wrote back.  My heart gave a flutter when I saw his name in my inbox, not just because of the person who wrote the note (I mean, I have known a few people who have killed people.  Well, one that I’ve known for sure.  Two, if you count Dominic.  Which I don’t.), but because of the potential breakthrough I was facing.  It was rather thrilling, just sitting there at the computer, staring at that unopened email with the subject line “RE: Hope you can help.”  A nervous twinge.  Click. 

At this point, I’d read extensively of Dominic’s alleged crime.  With all his skeletons dredged up for public display and more still being added to the pile, I felt strangely guilty asking him to engage.  And like any 30-something American raised on pop-culture schadenfreude and the curiosity of human train-wrecks, I spent a good amount of time picking through those bones with morbid fascination.

They were sailing the waters off Virgin Gorda with another couple from Rhode Island.  It was Christmas vacation (Sharon, Dominic’s wife, was a school teacher).  All four were all experienced sailors and divers.  But something went wrong. Sharon’s body was recovered from the bottom of the ocean two days before their flight home.  Her face mask was torn and she was missing a flipper.  Authorities in Virgin Gorda called it an accident.  Although Sharon and Dominic had begun the dive together, they had drifted apart to explore independently, as they often did.  No one, it was determined, was with her at the time of death.   Dominic flew home from his Christmas vacation a widower. 

Six years later a wrongful death suit was brought against him by his in-laws.  Millions of dollars in “compensatory and punitive damages” were awarded to them.  He was forced into bankruptcy.  He owned a for-profit sailing school in Rhode Island, and that would soon be taken as well, liquidated.  He didn’t have to go to jail, but he had to pay.  Big.   

All of this, hovering like so many bats above his head, and yet his email reply to me seemed upbeat, almost sunny.  He expressed surprise hearing from me, of course, and said he’d often thought fondly of my mother when he drove through Mass. He couldn’t believe I was 30, he saw me last as an 11 year old girl (an angry one, I thought, but he didn’t mention any of that).  He’d love to help me on what he saw as an “interesting quest.”  But with all this excitement of reaching Dominic and having him reach back, I never even considered that he might not remember his friend’s name, the name I needed to get closer to the boat.  “I’m sorry,” he wrote.  “I’ve wracked my brain for the last few days, but the only name that comes to this feeble brain is Ed.”

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Don’t assume

His name isn’t really Dominic Snow.  Let’s get that out of the way first.  I just Googled that name a moment ago and up popped a nice nature photography site, and I don’t want anyone getting any ideas about the real Dominic Snow.  I guess I feel a sort of defense mechanism kick in when I speak of the fake Dominic Snow.  I don’t want people looking up his name, gathering cursory information and reading knee-jerk comments on forums and judging him.  And I’m not convinced he killed his wife, either, if you want to know the truth.  If you did know his real name, however, and did read some of those forum comments you might be quick to jump to other conclusions, as people seem to.  But I’ll get to that a little later.

After getting psyched up to begin the search for the boat, finally coming to the realization that Dominic was the only person who knew the name of the man who bought it, then discovering the fact that he was on trial for murder, my forward movement on the search faltered, and I had barely gotten started.  So much for there being little story to tell.  Did I really want to contact this guy?  He might be in a truly desperate state… and wouldn’t my request for information sit at the very bottom of his list of priorities, even if I could reach him?  The man was mired in an imbroglio that affected every aspect of his life - that currently was his life.  All I needed was a last name from him, and yet I hesitated.  For a year, in fact.  What was one more year after 20, after all?  I followed his trial, read his quotes, considered his argument - it was an accident, an awful underwater accident - and tried to remember as much as I could about this man who was in so much trouble.  I pushed away my aggravation at my mom for not knowing this basic information.  When I was finally ready to contact him, every phone number I could find was disconnected.  He had, understandably, retreated.  Ah, but email!  Good old safe, impersonal email.  He had owned a business, according to all the news stories, and I wrote to the business, assuming he wouldn’t be the one who wrote back.  I also wondered if anyone would take my request to reach him seriously, since he was obviously hounded regularly and probably only wanted to speak to close friends and family.  Luckily for me, both of those assumptions were wrong.

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The Perils of a Google Search

When at last it was clear to me that I was finally and truly going to get started with the search, I indulged in a lot of fantasy. I imagined finding out that the boat was docked in some glassy Bahamian lagoon; I imagined buying a plane ticket. I even had an amusing little notion that my long-held habits of procrastination would melt away as I focused in on this goaI, harnessing the dedication and ambition that my father surely passed on to me. Then there was the poignant, wrenching book I’d write that would chronicle my search - a book that would, of course, culminate in my not only finding the boat, but also a new and lasting peace within myself. Maybe a whole new life lay ahead. For a while I became worried that the boat would be too easy to find, that it would be drydocked in Rhode Island and there would be little story to tell.

There wasn’t much to go on at first. My mother couldn’t remember the last name of the man who bought the boat and hauled it away - only that his name was Ed. After 20 years there were no papers, no records. I knew that the one person who would know Ed’s last name was Dominic.  Dominic the 20-years-ago-boyfriend whom I was never nice to.  It would be weird, but I had few other options, and soon realized he was my only option. 

I had to ask my mom for his last name.  Her tone when I asked seemed skeptical.  This was not a quest she would have embarked on herself.  So on my own, in the high-windowed bedroom of my Cambridge apartment, I set to work on my computer, typing “Dominic Snow” into Google and clicking SEARCH.  That I did it that way revealed an inexperience on my part - unless a person is well known, you usually can’t just type in a person’s name and expect information about them to just pop up - there could be thousands of people with that name.  And that’s what happened - the top several results were stories of a fellow named Dominic Snow who was embroiled in a murder trial for allegedly killing his wife.  I tried to narrow my search, kept clicking, searching, reading.  Then I found a photo of this fellow on trial, in a suit and walking toward a courthouse.  And there he was - a little grayer but essentially recognizable - my mother’s old boyfriend, Dominic.   

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Let’s call him… Dominic

The Boat, July 1986, shortly before it was sold.

Some events morph into myth in the history of families.  Truths are sometimes cast off, a little bit at a time.  I say this because as I wrestle these stale memories into a (quasi) coherent narrative, I keep coming across all of these gaping holes.  Let this be a lesson to those who wait to tell their stories.  Don’t wait too long to tell them or the juicier and more authentic stuff will fall away and you’ll have to make it up and it will never be as good. 

…

I don’t remember the first time I was aware of Dominic’s presence.  At first he was just a guy with the beard who answered my mom’s ad for a boat for sale.  He didn’t buy it, but one of his friends did. I don’t remember that guy at all.

Dominic and my mother hit it off.  He started coming around more often, after the boat was already gone, making my mother laugh.  He was always nice to me.  He had a sailboat and took us sailing and fishing.  He helped my mother when she desperately needed it.  And I loathed him with a smoldering hatred I had never experienced before.  What kind of man starts a relationship with freshly widowed woman and her two young, wounded children?  A kind and patient one?  Or was he manipulative and masochistic?  Looking back, I really don’t believe it was the latter.  Though I regarded him through rage-colored lenses pretty much the whole time I knew him, in hindsight he wasn’t such a monster. Dominic stayed around a while, at least a year as I recall.  And then - poof- he was gone.  I think I was happy about it.  But maybe I’d gotten used to him.  You’d think I’d remember.

Life went on.  Over the years the big boat in our side yard became a distant memory, slipping ever further into the past.  We didn’t talk about it much - what was there to say?  My mother started dating another man, not a sailor, and life shifted in a new direction.   I entertained the occasional thought of tracking down the boat but for some reason never did much about it.  I suppose the advent of the internet may have been what finally propelled me to take actual steps to try and find the boat…Google makes most excuses moot when it comes to research.  Two decades had passed before I took my first real steps in a search for answers.

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Strange Comfort

Brain tumors are a bitch.  They take dreams, and dignity, and fathers.  In my more selfish moments, the losses I mourn most fervently are the experiences I would have had if the boat were completed, if our little family had climbed into that boat and lived lives of sailors and scuba divers, experiencing things most people have to read about in books to even know they’re possible.  My father wasn’t a weekend kind of sailor.  Talking to my aunts and uncles and older cousins who knew my father longer and better than I ever would, they speak of a singular dedication, an obsession, really.  Joshua Slocum was his hero - if I were born a boy, I would have taken his name.  I certainly would have known how to sail, something that I never have learned to do - a fact that has become a source of anxiety and frustration for me.  Even as I write this, I worry that I’m not using the correct terms, that I sound like the kind of sheltered rube that we were going to leave behind in the suburbs while we cruised the Indian Ocean.  It’s easy to romanticize it all.  The point is none of it happened. I made peace with that long ago.  The lessons thrust upon me at a young age may have roughened some of the edges of my personality, but have made me stronger and more aware.  I think it helped me to learn what can be taken away.  It gives me a strange comfort.  Like I’ll be ready.  Bring it on, life. 

So the boat was there for the first ten years of my life.  And then there was no one to finish it.  My mother placed a classified ad for an unfinished 40 foot boat in the sailing magazine Soundings, and one surreal day not long after, men were chainsawing down the large pine tree - my rope-swing tree, in fact - in the front yard.  Couldn’t get the boat out otherwise.   In an absurd twist of my memory,  I can’t remember watching any heavy lifting - how the hell did they get that huge, odd-shaped steel object onto the trailer? - but I do remember painstakingly applying green eye shadow for the occasion.  I recall wondering vaguely if I appeared more grown up.  Later, my mother, sister and I watched wordlessly as the boat rolled slowly, impossibly, down our little street, tree limbs snapping in its wake.  It swung left onto Randolph Street, and we never saw it again. 

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22 years later…

The Boat, December 1980.

It is surprising, even to me, that the following story is true. Or at least it’s going to start that way. I’m still hoping for a miracle ending, but even if D- gets out of jail soon, I doubt he could do anything else to help me. And thus I could be forced to concoct an elaborate, romantic conclusion to go along with the first part of the narrative. But let’s see if we get that far. After all, I’ve only been thinking about telling this story for about 22 years. But in the past two years it started getting particularly interesting. So here goes.

For the first ten years of my life there was a forty-foot steel sailboat taking slow shape within the white picket fenced yard of my suburban family home. My father had a dream and was making it happen. It was kind of a spectacle, actually. The neighbors had swing sets and plastic lawn chairs. We had a hulking boat skeleton that towered over the kitchen window and grass littered with fragments of steel and My Little Ponies. Strangers would stop their cars in front of our house, get out to ask questions, visit again and again to observe the progress. I remember that the mailman seemed fascinated.

In his makeshift suburban boatyard, miles from the water, my dad labored behind his welding mask during most of his free daylight hours. At night he crafted handsome wooden pulleys for block and tackle and pored over his books and plans. He’d sometimes lay the blueprints out on the kitchen table and point out where my bed would be (it turned into bunk beds when - whoops!- my sister came along).

When the boat was finished, he said, he and my mom would pull me out of school (I always remembered that thrilling detail specifically) and magnificent adventure was to be ours. And he meant it; the proof was growing, piece by heavy metal piece, right in the yard. I may have been young, but the talk made me breathless.

When he got sick, I knew nothing bad could happen, because our adventure was all planned out. But that’s one of the things you learn growing up. Things just don’t always unfold like you planned.

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