I met Loomis for the first time off Point Hudson. The tide was at the top of the flood, the wind light, twilight fading, and I was entering the basin under power. Ahead was a lovely cutter, not an old fashioned type, but a racing boat, slender, low freeboard, tall of rig, and gracefully proportioned for speed. She was finished bright, and in the fading sunlight her varnished mahogany sides lent a creamy glow to the whiteness of her sails. At the eastern edge of the narrow channel she tacked, and slowly gathered way. There I overtook her and was passing with a silent wave when her helmsman called across the almost breathless water.
"Are you a stranger here, WILDFLOWER? You'd better leave the red buoy well to starboard. It's fifty yards out of position.."
I had idled my engine, and with so little headway, the two yachts drew together. "Thanks," I said. "I'd probably have gone aground. Can I return the favor and tow you in?"
Loomis looked aloft at his towering spread of canvas, cast a calculating glance at the ripples of a building ebb, and gently shook his head. "I think I can make it," he said, The element of uncertainty doubles the enjoyment."
"Well," I said dubiously, as the wind was very light and dead ahead......."See you inside." And I motored in.
I had been moored at Point Hudson for at least 20 minutes when I stepped to the breakwater to see how the element of uncertainty was getting on. HOTSPUR, I had read her name in passing, was on starboard tack, inside the jetties, but seemingly making no headway as the current had begun its ebb. and the tide was beginning to fall fast. As Loomis neared the west side of the narrow harbor he came about, his bow only feet from the tarred piles. For each foot he forged ahead, the ebb current carried him a yard sideways, and I admired Loomis for the closeness of his calculations. A sudden puff in his sails and he might have come to grief. But he discounted that contingency.
The moment came when I could have leaned out and placed my hand on HOTSPUR's bow. But Loomis stopped me. "Give her another minute by herself," he said. "That will put her inside. I might get a little puff."
The puff came. The cutter, heeling slightly, gathered herself like a bay mare and slipped inside. I ran across and came up alongside the cutter on the west side of the basin.
Loomis was putting the boom crutch into place as several friends made fast the mooring lines. I stepped aboard to help lower sail, and the main came smartly down. I observed that Loomis worked with extreme deliberation. Not the deliberation of a lazy man, or one mentally slow. Rather, it was the cautious movement of one who has schooled himself to avoid violence of gesture. Later, when he invited me below for a drink and asked for me to excuse him from participating, I jumped to a conclusion. "A yachtsman who doesn't drink? It hardly seems proper."
"My heart," he said apologetically. "Got some shrapnel near it during the War, and I have to take things easy." He laughed. "I'm not easily frightened, if that's a concern. If it comes on to blow, HOTSPUR steers like a witch, and I chock myself in the cockpit. Fortunately, sailing is the only sport for a man with my diaphanous attachment to life."
With the picture of his calm, leisurely entrance vivid in my mind, I was ready for a moment to believe Loomis could always take things easy aboard HOTSPUR. We joined for supper that evening aboard WILDFLOWER and revealed our different cruising philosophies. My preference is to go on and on to new waters. His, he told me, was to explore each harbor thoroughly, to know the coast under all conditions of wind and tide. I need not add that he was wedded to the sail and tiller, and entertained complete disdain for anything rotary in movement.
It was the next year, I think, that I saw Loomis again. Once more I was entering under power, this time at Friday Harbor, and I felt a twinge of shame when he saw me with my sails furled. He sat in the stern sheets of a pretty mahogany skiff, a crew rowing him from place to place as he sounded with a three pound lead. Later, after I had tied up, Loomis came in after me and accepted my invitation to come aboard.
As if to set my mind at rest, he began by telling me Friday Harbor was one haven, with the ferries coming and going, at which he always took a tow. And he hoped, somewhat to my surprise, that we might depart together. I told him I would suit my timing to his.
With that settled, I asked, "will you kindly tell me what treasure you expected to pick up with your lead from the floor of Friday Harbor?" He seated himself carefully in the chair I had brought on deck, and humorously shrugged his shoulders. "I was doing that to get away from my paying guests. I'm happy to sail with them. But damned if I have to join them ashore. He sat facing his lovely HOTSPUR, moored nearby, and I noticed his eyes continually caressed her lovely hull and lofty mast.
"Isn't this something new?" I inquired. "Guests onboard HOTSPUR? I thought you liked to singlehand?.."
"I do. More now than I did a year ago. These are paying guests. He paused a moment and continued in the best counterfeit of offhand manner. "The fact is I've had some financial reverses. I can't afford the cutter. I can't give her up. I would die ashore. So to make ends meet I have to take these guests. They're good people, but don't love the sea as I do. And I have to get away from them time to time."
Our third meeting, a year later, occurred near Port Hadlock. I had noticed a sailing dinghy scooting along, her helmsman immoveable at the tiller, head back, and eyes unwavering on the luff of the sail. Calm over took us, and I rowed over for a talk with the intrepid stranger.
"Loomis!" I exclaimed, grasping his gunwale and fending off. "Where's HOTSPUR?"
"This is she," he replied gravely." You hadn't heard the yard burned just after I had her hauled out last fall?"
"I heard about the fire," I replied. but HOTSPUR- that dream of beauty."
"Perhaps it was for the best," Loomis said stoically. "I couldn't make ends meet with those paying guests. Now I live in a room by the sea at Port Townsend and sail this little dream of a beauty. I make no comparisons with my old love, but feel a more intimate companionship with the sea in this 14 footer than I ever did before."
Scanning his face, I could see Loomis had aged. But asked no questions other than the routine one of, "Have you been caught in anything nasty?"
"Yes. But I've been able to run for it. And you ought to see her off the wind." His grave face brightened noticeably. He held out a hand, palm down, and oscillated it slightly from the wrist. "Like that," he said. "A marble on the thwart would hardly roll six inches from side to side."
"Your heart?" I asked. "Does it give you any trouble?"
"No more than usual. I'm no weakling you know. I can reef, haul, and steer with the best, so long as I take things easy."
A first darkening of the water to the north now became apparent. Expressing a final wish that I could do something to assist, I rowed back to WILDFLOWER as the wind filled. The chance meeting had been pleasant, and Loomis, rising above his personal misfortunes, had suffused me afresh with his love of sailing. I found myself thinking fatalistically that if he did overtax his heart, as in this approaching northerly, he would die happy.
As we gathered way, HOTSPUR glided past and I noticed how much this sailor was with his boat, stretched at ease, one arm thrown carelessly along the tiller, head just showing above the gunwale, and face uplifted so his eyes commanded the luff of the sail. After nodding to me, he looked to the north and nodding his head more emphatically, called back "Better get your dinghy aboard fast, this will be quick."
Later, after reefing, I had time to look around and see how Loomis had managed in the now half gale. He too was shortened down, and although his boat seemed to skip from crest to crest, he told me afterword that she made remarkably easy weather of it.
WILDFLOWER reached port first, and I was in readiness to receive him as he came careening up the narrow harbor. Though he made an eggshell landing alongside my sloop, he depended on me to secure him and lower his wildly luffing sail. I had to lift him bodily aboard and below to the bunk. "I did it that time," was all he would say. I inferred he spoke of his heart rather than of his feat of seamanship.
The next day we got him ashore and to his own room, where a doctor stethoscoped him and made other tests. His verdict: bed and no more sailing, brought a look of profoundest gloom to Loomis' face. I stayed in port several days, visiting the sick man frequently. When I finally left, it was with his assurance that he was well cared for and that he would obey doctor's orders and do nothing rash.
I returned after two weeks, blithely expecting to find Loomis recovered. But there was a wasted look to his face that took my breath away. Out of bed, but confined to his room, his first words expressed repugnance to life ashore.
"I feel like a sick bear in a cage," he said. "If I could have a little sail on a calm day, it would give me a new life. Sailing always does me good. But I haven't quite had the nerve to slip out against doctor's orders. If only this wind would let up!"
It had blown half a gale down Admiralty Inlet for the last five days. The sea pounded on the shore until it rattled the sick man's windows. The wind howled down his chimney and puffed wisps of dead ashes out of the black grate. "As for me, " I said, "I am quite content to be in port."
That night the wind died. I awoke to a morning full of sunshine. In the leftover swell, moored boats rolled lazily. The surface of the water was flecked by the gentlest of winds from the east. I looked out the main hatch to see who had come and gone. Early though it was, HOTSPUR's mooring was empty.
I jumped into my dinghy, and ashore, ran full tilt to the lighthouse on the east pier, still damp from the bath of spray. Far to sea, across the Sound near Partridge Point, I could see a leg-of-mutton sail slowly dwindling. Full of misgivings I returned aboard for breakfast. All that lovely summer day I loitered about at the harbor mouth, watching shipping and ever turning an anxious eye to sea. At last I saw him coming from the east, sailing on an easy reach. As he drew near I could distinguish him in his familiar pose, arm thrown carelessly along the tiller, head showing above the gunwale, eyes on the luff of the sail. When he came nearer, I saw the luff shook slightly and HOTSPUR's course was not arrow-straight.
Before I had time to digest the significance of this, a deep throated whistle blistered my ear drums and I looked around to see the Port Townsend ferry charging out from her wharf. At full speed, she was giving lesser craft the signal to keep clear. I looked again at HOTSPUR. What was she going to do, skim across the ferry's bow, or luff up and pass astern? A careful seaman would have passed astern. But I remembered Loomis' delight in calculation of clearances several years earlier at Pt. Hudson. HOTSPUR held her course, clearing the ferry's knife-like bow by a distance measurable in feet rather than yards. I saw her stern rise to the bow wave, and just before the black hull of the ferry intervened, I thought I saw Loomis put her about for the entrance.
It was my next thought that he had cut the distance so close the ferry had run him down. But in a few seconds HOTSPUR reappeared, almost shaving the ferry's stern and bobbing in her wake. She straightened up and on starboard tack entered the harbor, the tide under her. A thrill of admiration tingled in me when I saw that Loomis' non-chalance remained superb. He did not once look astern at the black death that had so narrowly escaped him.
By now the wind was almost gone and it was more the indulgence of the tide than air that HOTSPUR drifted to her mooring. But Loomis, sailor he was, still kept his glance riveted to the luff of his sail. Running ahead to my dinghy I jumped in and shoved off. HOTSPUR sailed serenely by until her bow actually kissed the mooring buoy. Then, though she seemed to hesitate for an instant, she kept on.
Speechless, I rowed alongside and touched Loomis' arm where it lay carelessly along the tiller. Its coldness was communicated through the jacket sleeve to my fingers. I looked at the lifeless face and saw that though the eyes were open the mouth was closed, the corners of the lips just lifting to a smile.
"God!" I whispered. "If we could all go out as happily as that."
In Memory of Alfred F Loomis, aka "Spun Yarn."
