In the spring of 1992, Nat Philbrick was in his late thirties, living with his family on Nantucket, feeling stranded and longing for that thrill of victory he once felt after winning a national sailing championship in his youth. Was it a midlife crisis? It was certainly a watershed for the journalist-turned-stay-at-home dad, who impulsively decided to throw his hat into the ring, or water, again.
With the bemused approval of his wife and children, Philbrick used the off-season on the island as his solitary training ground, sailing his tiny Sunfish to its remotest corners, experiencing the haunting beauty of its tidal creeks, inlets, and wave-battered sandbars. On ponds, bays, rivers, and finally at the championship on a lake in the heartland of America, he sailed through storms and memories, racing for the prize, but finding something unexpected about himself instead.
Reviews
“[Philbrick] describes with infectious joy the experience of catching a stray bit of wind or surging over the waves in a harbor…readers will feel lucky to share the experiences vicariously…. An amiably witty book about sailing that will appeal as strongly to the uninitiated as to the addicted.”
—Kirkus
“Describing his races tack-by-tack and gust-by-gust, Philbrick crosses the finish line with sure-to-be satisfied readers interested in sailing and the personal life of this highly popular author.”
—Booklist
Interview
Most know you for your award-winning books of history, including In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award. SECOND WIND, however, is a memoir, originally published almost 20 years ago by a small New England press, which chronicles your attempt to win a sailing championship you had won some 15 years before. Can you tell us a little bit about the backstory behind SECOND WIND?
My wife Melissa and I moved to Nantucket Island with our two young children Jennie and Ethan in 1986. Melissa was a lawyer; I was a struggling writer and stay-at-home dad. I loved being with my kids all day, but my career had stalled and I had lost all touch with competitive sailing, the sport that had once meant everything to me. And then, in the fall of 1992, when I was 36 years old, everything changed. Ethan started first grade, which meant I now had until 2:30 in the afternoon (an unheard of span of time) to write and I began work on my first work of history, Away Off Shore. As if all that wasn’t enough, I decided I should also launch a comeback as a sailboat racer by using the ponds of Nantucket as my training ground for the 1993 Sunfish North Americans. It proved to be a pivotal year, and SECOND WIND tells the story of how I not only rediscovered sailing but launched my career as a writer of history.
You grew up mostly in Pittsburgh, PA, a landlocked city. How’d you get into sailing?
My grandparents had a summer place on Cape Cod, where I first learned to sail in a wooden Beetle Cat. We were on the Cape for only about a week each summer, but there was something about sailing—the interplay of the wind and the water and the sense of independence—that completely captivated me. Even though we lived for most of the year in Pittsburgh, I begged my parents to buy me and my younger brother a Sunfish, and we started sailing just about every weekend on a man-made lake about an hour outside the city. For a shy misfit of a teenager in a big city high school, sailing became the oasis that got me through the tortures of adolescence.
For those who might be unfamiliar, can you describe what a Sunfish boat is, and why sailing is a unique sport? Do you still sail?
A Sunfish is the simplest of sailboats: basically an ironing board with a sail on it. It may not look like much, but a Sunfish is fast and makes for a great racing boat. Since you can throw a Sunfish on the roof of your car, you can take it just about anywhere. What I particularly like about the class is that besides being relatively inexpensive, it accommodates a wide range of body types, meaning that people of just about any size and age can race the boat. Although I’ve since donated my Sunfish to our community sailing group on Nantucket, I still sail every chance I can get. We now have a fifteen-foot sloop that is a tad more comfortable than a Sunfish and has the added benefit of being able to accommodate our three-year-old granddaughter and her parents. The intergenerational aspect of sailing is what makes it really special.
You’re hesitant to label SECOND WIND a “midlife crisis” story, but you seemed to be stuck in a rut before deciding to train for the Sunfish North American Championship. How did the period described in SECOND WIND change your life?
I think anyone who has raised children has struggled with the challenges of balancing your own needs with those of your kids. I had reached the point—after close to ten years of being a primary caregiver—that I had lost touch with some of the things in life that had once meant a great deal to me. I’d also put my professional career as a writer on a kind of hold. When in the fall of 1992 I suddenly had the opportunity not only to begin writing my first work of history but start sailing again, I went a little crazy—launching into both the book and my training program with a ferocity that was more than a little disconcerting—especially for Melissa and the kids. But it was also extraordinarily liberating. Now, twenty-five years later, I’ve calmed down a bit, but there is a part of me that’s still trying to catch up for lost time.
Many of your works of history explore America’s relationship with the sea, and, as explained in the book’s “Author’s Note,” in SECOND WIND you explore your own relationship to both salt and fresh water. How have bodies of water influenced you, both in your personal life and in your work?
Water is the dominant theme of my life. Melissa and I met teaching sailing on Cape Cod. It’s no accident we ended up on an island thirty miles out to sea that’s riddled with freshwater ponds. Every book I’ve written is, in one way or another, about water. Even The Last Stand, about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, begins with a riverboat on the Missouri River. When Melissa and I go on vacation we almost always end up on an island or beside a river or lake. We have a new dog, Dora, a Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever who is even more addicted to water than we are. I love the smell of mildew in the morning.
It’s been almost 20 years since the original publication of SECOND WIND, what’s it been like revisiting and reflecting upon this part of your life? Would you write the memoir differently now?
It’s been kind of amazing to return to this book after so many years. It was a truly different time. No cell phones or internet. Nantucket was without the high-speed ferries that have made it so much more accessible than it was back then. The person I was in 1992-93 is in many ways almost unrecognizable to me now (for one thing, I still had hair), and yet, in other, probably more fundamental ways, I haven’t changed that much. In fact, now that I’m over sixty, I’m beginning to feel some of the old restlessness. Who knows, maybe another quest of some sort is in my future; we’ll see!
Excerpt
Preface
I still refer to 1992–93 as the “Second Wind Year,” the year I launched a comeback as a sailboat racer and taught myself how to write history. I was 36. I’d spent most of the previous decade at home with our two children Jennie and Ethan (then 9 and 6, respectively) while their mother Melissa supported us as a lawyer. Six years earlier we’d moved to Nantucket, and I’d become fascinated with the island’s past. A freelance sailing journalist and former English major, I’d managed to write a handful of articles about Nantucket’s literary legacy but had hopes of some day delving much deeper into the history of my new island home.
Then, in the fall of 1992, I got my first big break when I signed a contract with a small local publisher to write a history of Nantucket. I had only a year to complete the manuscript, but since Ethan had just entered the first grade, I now had until 2:30 in the afternoon before the kids came home from school. It was an unheard of expanse of uninterrupted time compared to what I had known over the course of the last ten years. In fact, I was so giddy with the prospect of all the new-found freedom that I decided I must tackle one more, not-inconsiderable task. I must start to sail again. In college I’d been an All-American sailboat racer, and that fall I vowed to recapture some of my former glory by training for the Sunfish North Americans, the same championship I’d won 15 years earlier.
It proved to be a landmark year, during which I established many of the patterns that still govern my life. I still attack the writing of each book with a manic focus that has become all too familiar to Melissa. Twenty years ago, however, I was possessed by a level of energy and pent-up frustration that was, in retrospect, beyond even manic. Sane people do not sail a Sunfish around and around the perimeter of a tiny pond in over 30 knots of wind when the temperature is below freezing—and that was one of the tamer stunts I pulled that year of training for the North Americans.
Now in the fall of 2012, I am happy to report that Melissa and I still live on Nantucket. We also still sail a Beetlecat, one of the boats that appears in the following pages, although I’ve long since donated my Sunfish to Nantucket Community Sailing, an organization I helped found soon after the Second Wind Year. Jennie grew up to be a highly competitive Laser sailor and was a member of a nationally ranked sailing team in college. Ethan, never a serious racer, still loves to sail; in fact, a few years ago he and his husband Will sailed our 34-foot sloop Marie J around Cape Cod for their honeymoon. Soon after, Jennie’s husband-to-be Bryan was introduced to sailing aboard Marie J during an interminable six-hour race in a howling sou’wester. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Bryan and Jennie decided that a honeymoon spent climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was preferable to the questionable thrills of a wave-drenched sailboat. Marie J has since been replaced by the more comfortable centerboard yawl Phebe, named for an eighteenth-century Nantucket whaler. One of these years Melissa and I hope to sail her down the inland waterway to Florida.
I’ve written eight books since the publication of Second Wind in 1999, several of them about America’s relationship to the sea. This is the book with which I explored my own relationship to both salt and fresh water, and I hope you enjoy the voyage.
Author’s Note
I never thought I would have a midlife crisis. As far as I was concerned, all of life was a crisis. To point to a single event as the defining moment of one’s middle age was either a babyboomer’s self-dramatization or, at the very least, wishful thinking. Doesn’t the word “midlife” imply that you’ve got more than a few good years left?
I’ve now come to realize that the events described in this book, all of which occurred between the spring of 1992 and the fall of 1993, constituted, if not a crisis, a kind of watershed. Before that year, I was a stay-at-home dad who only got out of the house to take my two kids to the playground. While I considered myself lucky to be with my children every day, I had lost almost all touch with sailing, the sport that had once meant everything to me.
Then everything changed. For reasons I am still trying to understand, I decided to take another shot—maybe one last shot—at the Sunfish championship I’d won fifteen years before. I began an odyssey that led me from the lonely ponds of Nantucket Island to a humbling return to competition in Florida, then down the Connecticut River with my family before I headed out to a steamy lake in Illinois for the North American championship. In the end it brought me home, to Nantucket. That all this happened while I was working on a history of the island—a book that tells of a place experiencing its own midlife crisis—makes me scratch my ever-lengthening forehead and admit that, well, maybe its author was having one, too.
Since that weird and wonderful year, my children, who were not sure what they thought about the sport back in ‘93, are now better sailors than I ever was at their ages, competing in regattas on Nantucket and beyond. While I haven’t raced my Sunfish much in the last five years, I recently purchased my own Beetlecat. Now my wife and I can continue the rivalry referred to in Chapter One.
Any author incurs a great many debts when working on a book, and thanks for this project are long overdue. First, I’d like to express my appreciation to everyone who has ever raced a Sunfish. You created an atmosphere of competition and camaraderie second to none. Sunfish class historians Rapid and Donna Buttner were a huge help. Thanks also to the friends, especially Marc Wortman, Mark Poor, Wes Tiffney, and Bruce Perry, who provided essential encouragement during my year of pond sailing.
Without the interest and insight of John Burnham, Doug Logan, and Peter Gow, this book would have never been written; without the enthusiastic support of Mimi Beman, it might never have been published. Thanks also to Mimi Harrington, Nancy Thayer, Tom Congdon, Paul Odegaard, and Stuart Krichevsky for their input regarding the ever-evolving manuscript. Island artists Illya Kagan and David Lazarus generously lent their support to the project. Wally Exman, Walter Curley, Justine Klein, and Susan Klein at Parnassus Imprints were most helpful, as was Margaret Moore, curator at the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies. Special appreciation to Albert F. Egan, Jr. and Dorothy H. Egan, whose support through the Egan Foundation and the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies kept me afloat during the writing of this book. Finally, in addition to my wife, Melissa D. Philbrick, and our children, Jennie and Ethan, I’d like to thank the family that first put the wind in my sails—my parents, Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, and my brother Sam. Here’s to future voyages together.