I once fell in with a most dubious character of sorts... one Charlie Boland (almost same name of former ambassador to Russia - but he wasn't).  What this Charlie was, was sort of con man and genius all wrapped into one.  He was a TV  Show Director and writer (the old Herb Shriner Show was his creation - I know I date myself with that one! - Herb was the celebrated Hoosier - remember? - sort of cracker barrel wit and Lake Woebegone sort of guy long before Garrison Keilor, etc.). I had a front row seat as Charlie's guest at Herb's Opening Show (big honor!) and he was very funny and big hit for awhile... I think he died suddenly or was in accident or something... Show got pulled, whatever.  Maybe I am thinking of guy (name gone completely here) with big moustache who also around same time was big hit - he got killed I know - his wife (Eadie Something?) hawked cigars in TV commercials - willowy blonde type.. "Pick Me Up and Smoke Me Sometime"... but I wander...  

'Twas Charlie's livelihood - and he was very good at it. (He was also - in an era when McCarthy and others were prowling the grounds - an actual card-carrying member of the Communist Party - which was (is) neither here nor there in our onetime relationship - but just trying to present his whole cachet here for window dressing in my tale, etc.... Sigh) .  Matter-of-fact, another pal of the times (a sometimes recipient of these same mailings, too) -  was a bona fide CIA spook.  I just include this so you may judge of my even-handedness and eclectic approach to friends and associates in this Life.).   

As I was in PR in NYC - Charlie and I thus moved distantly through same world (I was industrial accounts and mainly print media  - he was commercial and TV... but same general live-by-your-wits thing...).  

Sigh...  

Then Charlie got religion!  He went bonkers over hypothetical "PreColumbian voyages and voyagers to America."  So our paths and friendship entwined yet further.  (He also lived in suburban CT same as I did - not far away).  We saw a lot of each other.  Then Charlie hit a lick: he authored a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection no less (Boland, Charles M. They All Discovered America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. 384 pages.).

Sigh, once more..  

"Them as has, gits" - as the old saying has it.  (What he "got" was some purloined pictures of mine of exposed (during drought) supposed "early European sailing vessels" pictographs on rocks not normally seen in an obscure MA reservoir once...  He talked my wife into "loaning" them to him from my file cabinet when I was absent once...they appear in said work, I believe).  

After publication, Charlie was now an "expert" and doing the lecture circuit thing (with his super-duper touch for promotion generally, well - you can imagine the subject - always latent with New England antiquarian types - it flamed into newspaper accounts and whatnot for a few heady seasons).  

Charlie is the Charlie mentioned in my discovery  of the Bresson Stone in an earlier chapter here of what is fast becoming a sort of revitalized or re-issued Viking Series of mine (again).  He also fell in with Fred Pohl (also noted in earlier postings here): it was a rather loose group - but most of us knew each other (or knew about each other...).  

Charlie got "into" the irresistible store of sailing directions and logs purportedly handed down by the Viking discoverers of enigmatic Vinland. (Translations of the Icelandic Sagas by monks long ago, etc.)  A celebrated chapter of those affairs concerns the minute word-by-word recounting of the "...last day's voyage in from the Northeast (open Atlantic) as they raised the shores of Vinland (thought by many back then to be Provincetown on the extreme end of Cape Cod).  "They came ashore at a summer's dawn... and the dew was sweet upon the grass..." and they went on to lick up this dew profusely, as they had been many days at sea and no freshwater.  Stuff like that.  

They had then set sail to the westward again (into a large bay) and had found a tidal creek at the upper end up which they went, etc. etc.  

Boland was aflame.  He came to me and said, "You used to sail a lot, right?"  

"Right," I said (I had owned a couple small centerboard sloops on Long Island Sound).  

"Could you help sail the last day's sail of the Vikings into the Cape - a re-creation as it were?"  

"I don't have a horned helmet," I replied.  Something like that.  

"Listen, I 'm serious!  I have a friend who has a 40-foot ocean-going ketch and he says we can use his boat if I can find someone to help who also knows how to sail."  

Charlie was great dissembler: he used nautical terms and phrases and all so I had always just thought he knew his way around boats...  Things were to prove otherwise...  

Well, we set this thing up one fine summer day back - when?  I don't know - back in the '60's anyhow.  His friend was a guy named Streeter - John Streeter I think, and he was a Professor of Astronomy no less at I think some posh girl's school up in the Bay State somewhere.  (It was rumored that John's nighttime astronomy classes were very popular with his select group of pupils- but of these details and affairs we need not be concerned here). I think the "Streeters" are very large clan (or were once) in the MA social hierarchy up there... maybe even third in line down from the Cabots and the Lodges... You know the old New England doggrell don't you?..."Here's to dear old Boston - Home of the Bean and the Cod, Where the Cabot's speak only to the Lodges - and the Lodges speak only to God!"  Well maybe you don't know it.  No matter.  

Streeter kept his boat at Marblehead on the Massachusetts coast.  So one fine summer day we three set forth therefrom on our historic trip to "...re-create the last day's sail as the Vikings recorded it  around the Year 1000 A.D., as they ran in from the open sea..."..  Success was to be deemed a virtual proof that it all actually happened.... Etc.  

I think we slipped out on a nice Smokey Sou'wester as we used to call certain summer winds along those New England shores.  Soon we were bowling along, outbound to the open Atlantic - occasional spray flying over the bows - and Boland in Seventh Heaven as he ambled around the boat - tripping, slipping and generally disporting himself.  The sun sank lower and lower.  As it sat on the horizon preparatory to dropping from sight for another night, Streeter served out sandwiches all around - and a beer or two.  Soon dusk fell.  Then the stars came out...  

Streeter suddenly announced that he was totally exhausted (guess his usual night job was taking a toll! LOL) and he actually put on a pair of sleep shades over his eyes and went below and tucked in.  He was not arousable even till the following dawn...  

Boland and I - the great Viking Sleuths - sat in the cockpit - our mutual dream of voyaging in the open sea in pursuit of these mythic heroes at last become a reality.  Boland was coughing a lot.  A whole lot.  And wheezing.  (He was sort of what we used to call a "lunger" - asthmatic and all that sort of thing).  He hung gamely on.  We were crossing in some of the incoming steamer lanes and these were moderately trafficed waters - fishing boats out of Gloucester and pleasure craft, etc.  I bid him keep sharp lookout.  Suddenly, the comforting glow of the binnacle light in front of me (I had been at the wheel now since nearly mid-afternoon - while my shipmates alternately gabbled, drank and snacked away...) flicked out!.  

Damn! I thought . fuse or something.  But no - it was Charlie!  He had switched off the binnacle light! 

"What the hell, Charlie?," I said...  

"Listen," he replied -"You got to steer by the stars, Bernie.  Like Leif Ericsson did: by the stars only!  The Vikings did not have lighted compasses in their dragon boats!"  

(Damn! How could I forget that?  Yet... I don't know.  I wasn't too keen on a guesstimated (by the rolling stars overhead) course through this night and these waters...)  

Before I could launch a formal protest, Boland rose and allowed as how he had to get below as the damp was getting to him (the sails already wet and slick with cold dew forming on them as they do at night under such conditions...).  He went "downstairs" and tucked away "into bed."  And that was that!  (His whole "familiarity" with boats was a farce anyhow: he knew the words but none of the reality!).  

Lucky Bernie (like Lucky Leif?) steered on and on into that ever darker night.  Far off our starboard beam, however, I could make out the familiar Provincetown Light - sort of a reassuring reference as we bowled along.  My worries included things like (with no watch mounted here now) dark, heavy timbers barely awash in the chop - strays from boatyards and docks - that could hull a light vessel such as this like an arrow in a fraction of a second and send all to the bottom forthwith.  Stuff like that.  

The breeze freshened.  I eased the sheets some.  She was a fine craft and responsive to her helm - but still...  

The breeze freshened more.  Now Provincetown Light was only visible now and then when one of the bigger, open ocean Atlantic rollers slid beneath us.  Then soon it was gone altogether.  We were very far out, sailing roughly Northeast.  On and on and on.  Around 3 or 4  in the morning, my hand cramped and frozen to the wheel and stiff all over besides from such a long trick here... I decided to put us about and start the long tack back to the Sou'west - with the ultimate hope (our plan) of "...raising Provincetown with the morning light..." I figured we might have made 75, 80 - maybe even a hundred miles out. Enough!   Boland was an exquisite wordsmith if nothing else - and always supplied mouth-filling and ringing phrases for every event. So it was "hard alee" alone there in the dark and we came about and fell off smoothly on the new tack.  

Hoping my bearing "on the stars" was valid, and that my memory of the last azimuth toward Provincetown Light was somewhere near the mark, I steered on.  At last I rose and pounded on the hatch cover.  Enough was enough!  One of my shipmates (but not Boland! LOL) had to spell me off!  A sleepy and very silent (sullen?) John Streeter poked his head out of the hatch, raising his sleep shades like an oldtime aerial pilot pushing up his goggles...  

In words of nearly one syllable I gave him the course and a "quarterdeck report" of what had happened on my (several!) watches - and slid below myself and into a bunk where I immediately fell into a deep slumber.

The next thing I knew was several things happening all at once: a loud shout from somewhere, a blowing, hissing noise, a strong oily fishy smell everywhere it seemed, and sunlight flooding into the cabin... I sat bolt upright - and scrambled out the open hatchway on the double. Had we fetched up somewhere? Had we been run down? What?

As I rose erect on deck, my gaze traveled portside - and there looking back at me was a great big eye! A great BIG eye I mean - and it had an eyelid and eyelashes and everything (And why not, they are mammals we know...). A whale! An honest-to-god whale was swimming right abeam us not - honest - 15 feet out from where I stood! Transfixed, you betcha! As I watched, he (she?) shot a hissing squirt of vapor into the air from a hole on top of its head (whence the fishy smell - like 1001 dead herrings in your lap at once already yet!) - and sank once more beneath the waves. "Only a pilotfish," I heard John shout from the wheel. Laughing. "We get them out here all the time...!"

Sometimes - at night - I remember that eye still - and am one with Ahab and Moby Dick (that 'great damn'ed whale') and Ahab's deep philosophical ruminations on what wonders the Eye of Leviathan has beheld in God's Deep and all that... It's one strange world, Mates..

And back on deck, about to grow stranger still...

You see, Charlie (who was also now making a reappearance on deck - stretching, yawning and hacking...) before we had sailed, had called a bunch of news reporter friends - at the New York Times, no less. He told them what was afoot, and whipped up their collective news instincts, so these worthies had gotten together and gathered en masse earlier at the Provincetown Dock to greet we three adventurers as we sailed in out of the morning sun "proving" that Leif Ericsson had so arrived this way, too - way back when.

Only Charlie now put a new spin on affairs: with Provincetown now plainly in sight off our port beam, he decided we "had proven our point" ...and it was not absolutely necessary that we actually go and put foot on shore to demonstrate same. (Goodbye to licking the dew off the grass and all that... Sigh). So we veered away offshore again and trimmed anew for a run down across Cape Cod Bay to little known Duck River (?) or Duck Creek - something like that at the far upper end off over towards Plymouth Rock area I think it was. (My memory here is rather dim for much of this - and I have no detailed chart of those waters at hand right now. Most of my sailing was much further on down in Long Island Sound those days anyhow so these waters are not that familiar to me - then or now). I do recall that a large point of land with a monument on it lay off our starboard quarter - Miles Standish Head (?) - something like that maybe: it had a stone monument on high, way up on top of it...)

Now if that were all there was to it - it would be not so bad. But what Charlie unwittingly set in motion with our pals of the Fifth Estate was this: when we "failed" at dawn to put in our promised appearance at the Provincetown Dock, the word flashed out to the rewrite men or whatever - likely an alternate story had already been set in type - but I swear to God what happened next is the truth:

The New York Times, which had already carried an earlier story ("Trio To Duplicate Viking Route" or somesuch) kicked the presses into high gear and was on the streets (and in the suburbs) within hours with a prominent news story (Second Section? I can't remember - I have these clips in storage yet - and if I could get to them -and when I do! - you shall have a repro of same to go with this!)... anyhow their follow-on ran (get this!) "Viking Trio Unreported At Sea" - and best of all and true to the NYT's famous maps which accompany all such stories, was a map of the Provincetown area with the Time's famous black Maltese Cross plopped right down in the ocean offshore and the notation: "Last Known Position of Trio."

(You know, like - "Sperlos versunkt!" or 'sunk without trace' - the famous entry line in the German U-boat skippers' logs when they sank Allied ships - even in these same waters not all that many years before! LOL)

But wait - that's not all! We used to get the Times delivered to our doorstep mornings back in CT, so my wife, Jean - who had not been too keen about my going off on this junket in first place - had sat down to her breakfast toast and jam, poured her coffee - and opened her Times to see staring her in face ..."Trio Overdue" and that Maltese Cross and "Last Known Position of Trio".

Sigh.

Meanwhile the good ship Windowblind flew along over the choppy waters of Cape Cod Bay. Streeter had the helm now of his own boat so I was free to roam around a bit. So I stood in the bow and was idly watching the bow wave cream by when I became aware of flashing white streaks down in the clear green waters below... The streaks were white oyster shells on the bottom as we zipped by overhead! "Shoals!," I cried... "Shoals! We are in shoal water...!"

"Oh, that's okay," sang back our Captain... "I think we are okay anyhow... Charlie here has turned off my fathometer - something about Leif Ericsson had no fathometer. Usually I have my fathometer on all the time when I am sailing here..."..

Jeezul! Now this purist, Charlie, had denied us a fathometer to determine soundings - and midnight sailing with no binnacle! Enough already! Astern I could see the muddy roil in our wake. Well, we never grounded but we sure came close to it! More due to Good Luck than Good Management said I to myself - deciding at first opportunity I would jump ship, whatever...

Well, we made Duck Creek or whatever it is called. Nothing would do but what Charlie "...was taken ashore in the ship's longboat..." just as had been those Viking chieftains. (The significance of Duck Creek is that I believe this is the Creek where the early antiquarian Howland found or got wind of the stone foundation that once stood here and in which was discovered a Norse axe way back a long time ago. For Boland, it was kind of a windup "thing" of our pilgrimage here that we call in at this creek inlet.)

Our "ship's longboat" being nothing but the crankiest of tiny dinghys, I tumbled Charlie in and then rowed him ashore - and back. Mission fulfilled. I now set about figuring how I could get ashore and start back for CT, as I had other affairs to attend to. A council of war was held and it was determined that I would be put ashore on a "..long pier..." that John knew and which jutted out into the water down the coast a bit - from whence I could walk inland and to the Greyhound bus-stop and thus secure passage home. Charlie and John however, were now opting to continue this peregrination (having no further part to do with re-living the Viking efforts) by going on down across the Bay and through the Cape Cod Canal to Buzzards Bay below - where Streeter had some pressing business or another and Charlie on the morrow could start back for CT from there.

Which they did - and which I must tell you they got into one hellish fog in the Canal and liked to have wiped out on obstructions a dozen different times, but did make it into Buzzards by the following afternoon and so all ended well there.

As for me, why we found the wharf alright, and John lay her alongside nice as pie and I jumped clear with my seabag over my shoulder and landed good and clean on the planks below. A last wave to my departing mates and they were soon gone again. I shouldered my bag and began the long walk into the shore. Fate had yet one more trick in store for me: halfway in - the planks disappeared! LOL! Someone or somebody had taken up a long stretch of the wharf decking and I was marooned now on an outer jetty to nowhere - unable to reach the remaining stretch which connected to the shore. I was fit to be tied!

But there are always the tides you see - and this one was at the ebb and running strongly round the pilings below. After a few hours (the sun was sinking low again) the water ran mostly out and I jumped down onto the hardpacked sand itself and was able to sprint across the gap and thus on to dry land again and to the elusive bus-stop.

Eventually I lost track of Charlie. I think he took it amiss that I was often "negative" to some of his wild ideas about archaeological "possibilities." But his book is a good read if you have never read it, and can get a copy. I think our Last Day's Sail is in there. You will also meet Saint Brendan I think it was (Charlie was Irish you might know) and how there is a legend of how Brendan and some Irishmen came to North America in a "curraugh" or hide boat long ago - stopping along the way to build a fire and cook a meal on a whale's back, or so' tis said. (Maybe the Great Grandaddy to the one that eyeballed me...!) Charlie and others held that maybe Brendan and his boys were the folk who built strange Pattie's Caves up New Hampshire way... This stuff was all "au courant" back in the '50's and '60's, you see. Everyone save maybe a few culties has moved rather further along now..

I believe Charlie must have died years ago. He had a son - I forget his name - but for some reason, I figured out once he may be the guy who runs (or ran?) some kind of Hot Air Balloon Service (for real here!) further upstate in later years. Dunno - ran across his name and it was same I think - years ago. Was gonna write him once or twice - but never did. Hot air balloon rides all behind me now... Grin!