“Sea Fever” by John Masefield is a poem our granddaughter read in her English language arts class at the East Hampton Middle School. To me, it evokes my father’s spirit, sailing on the picturesque bay at Grandpa’s Beach.
Grandpa’s Beach, a name we use in memory of my dad, Lawrence Jamieson Koncelik. Located at the foot of Mile Hill Road, it’s nestled between Camp St. Regis and Ernie’s Jetty in Northwest Woods. It’s a place where my father harvested bushel baskets of little necks and chowders. It’s a place where my father enjoyed haul-seining blowfish by the dozens.
The old Koncelik homestead, where I was born and raised, is just up the road from Grandpa’s Beach. Our old Sears and Roebuck family home still stands, overlooking the once-upon-a-time farm. The house arrived in the 1950s, on the back of a flatbed truck. An uncle shot a short film of its heavy load nearly toppling over as the vehicle navigated an uphill turn along our sandy driveway.
My granddaughter asked about the sailing program offered by the East Hampton Town Recreation Department permitting 20 beginners and 12 advanced students in biweekly sessions. I told her two instructors taught with my father, including myself, for a time. I recalled Masefield’s puffy “white clouds flying” over Grandpa’s Beach, Sunfish pulled up onshore, waiting like sentinels to go out once more into the fray. The fleet was adorned in red, white, and blue striped sails with matching hulls, owned by the town and maintained by my father. In the wind, their metal goosenecks clanged together against the metal masts as if to share “a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover.”
Scanning the horizon, my father and I waited for students to arrive, as sunlit waves overtook sands of time. My husband, Phil, mentioned the Lightning, my father’s 19-foot sailboat, and I replied, “A tall ship and a star to steer her by.” I reminisced about her sailing narrow-beamed, upwind from Grandpa’s Beach to Mashomack Point. She’d heel over on a broad reach toward the Cedar Point Lighthouse. She was yar, with “a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking,” especially when running home with mainsail, jib, and spinnaker aloft.
I was asked if my father ever served in the military, and I explained that he was a first lieutenant bombardier in World War II on an Army Air Forces B-17. Just after the war, in Munich, Germany, he met his beloved future wife, Doris Marie Whelan. At the time a volunteer for the Red Cross, Doris was demure, intelligent, and beautiful. With porcelain skin, copper red hair, and pale sea-green eyes, my mother captivated many, including my father. A marriage made in heaven, I said.
Phil mused about cans of cold soup my father popped open to eat. I laughed, saying how they reminded him of military rations in England. I recalled him savoring a cold can of vichyssoise, standing up and gathering students together. He was charismatic, handsome, tall, with a ruddy complexion and captivating smile.
At times, he reminded me of an instructor who taught the Red Cross certification course I took on a lovely bay beach in Hampton Bays. A retired Carmelite friar, he was like my father: eagle-eyed, effectively instilling confidence. I recalled the weeklong course and the windy, white-capped bay where Brother Lewis stood, asking who’d like to go out first.
I stood up, saying I’d like to try. My sailing partner was apprehensive. The love of sailing is “a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied,” I said, assuring her there was nothing to fear. Then, asked about the classes, I mentioned ground school, knot tying, boat rigging, and a swimming test. Knowing how to swim, wearing a life jacket, and understanding boat terminology were essential.
On a boat in the shallows, Daddy demonstrated how to capsize and then right the skiff. A wide-eyed boy mastered the skill on the first try. Freeing up the main, securing the daggerboard, he uprighted the waterlogged vessel, buckets of saltwater raining down on him.
Turning into the wind near Grandpa’s Beach, he asked me why life jackets were needed. I explained the danger of rescuing someone who has impulsively jumped from the boat without one, in over his head and fully clothed. I mentioned the drama of the boat engine not starting and the frustration of a flotation pillow tossed to no avail. I mentioned the difficulty of securing an anchor against “the call of the running tide” and the wind “like a whetted knife.”
I mentioned keeping an eye on this victim as a rigged boat came to his rescue, skippered by none other than my father. A true hero. Lifting the drowning boy onto the skillfully rounded-up vessel, by the grace of God my father rescued him. He then sailed to me on the chase boat, starting the engine. “Flooded,” he said, securing the Sunfish astern. The skiff danced behind as we motored back to Grandpa’s Beach. Amid dark seaweed onshore a gift from the sea appeared. A message from above, a new slalom water ski. The rescued boy lifted it. I scolded, saying a life jacket is lifesaving and must be worn when boating. He wholeheartedly agreed.
From then on, the wide-eyed boy and all the students heeded the moral of the story, life jackets must be worn.
Our granddaughter asked how long her great-grandfather taught sailing. I said for many summers, until one warm day in late August when a hurricane came in fast. Daddy carried the Sunfish up off the beach, two by two, and onto his trailer. Towing them to the barn in his Farmall tractor, he turned them upside down. The sails and gaffs he stowed in the haymow. Down at Grandpa’s Beach, the Lightning remained tethered to an anchor in the bay. Making landfall by midday, the storm tore the boat free, slamming her against the rocky jetty. Brokenhearted, Daddy retired from teaching sailing, and the town soon canceled the program. Asked why he couldn’t save the Lightning, he whispered, “Time and tide waits for no man.”
“He sounds like a wonderful man,” our granddaughter said, and I lamented how down at Grandpa’s Beach, in a certain slant of light, he is standing arm in arm with his beloved bride, my mother. Or, they’re riding together on his electric golf cart, heading down to the bay, and he wonders aloud if the water’s still there, “and the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.”
And at that golden hour, the Lightning and Sunfish boats remain forever crisscrossing over the glistening bay, “and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking . . . and quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”
Mary Cecilia Koncelik Miller is a wife, mother, and grandmother who, for posterity, works on her memoirs, including historical fiction about her native Northwest Woods, East Hampton.