My dad had his own business and worked long hours most of the year, sometimes six days a week and 60 hours. He would leave us before 7 in the morning and rarely come home before 7 in the evening. Then he would be too tired to do much else than watch a couple of sitcoms with us, and on Saturdays he would spend time on his hobbies: building a catamaran, and making cabinets for my mother. The only day we really had to share time was Sunday and after church we would play a couple of games of chess and listen to some classical music; my dad would play records of Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Beethoven and Strauss, and he gave me through that my love of music.

There were many summer vacations when my mother would drive out to our summer house out on Long Island without my father. When you have your own business, you take time off when the business is slow, and many times he would take the train out to Coram on Friday evening, spend a couple of days with us, and then we would take him back to the train on Sunday evening so he could go back to work Monday. On these weekends my dad would try to relax by sailing his boat, the catamaran he built, out of Mount Sinai Harbor. My dad seemed to possess all these magical skills of woodworking and sailing, and I longed to learn them from his hand.

One year as summer was coming to an end and my chance to go sailing with him would end with it, I talked him into making a day trip with me from Mount Sinai to Port Jefferson. We would leave early in the morning, sail out to Mount Misery at the mouth of Port Jefferson, have lunch there, and then sail back in the afternoon. We would have to navigate the sand bars and rocks, and the tides and islands. We would have to take my father's little twelve foot boat out of the calm waters in Mount Sinai inlet and into the rolling swells of the wide open Long Island Sound. It was some distance across the open water and to me, it seemed like a real adventure, a chance to learn tacking and steering from my father; a real accomplishment. We would have to sail past the eerie wreck of a ferry that had run aground under Mount Misery in a storm in the early 1900's. I longed to explore that wreck, to stand amid its remains and feel the ghosts of those who had experienced that harrowing night so long before I was born.

We got a good forecast and the day of our trip broke into one of those beautiful, August days on Long Island; a clear, blue sky and air from Canada that brought a tinge of approaching September. My mother packed sandwiches for us: salami on pumpernickel for my dad and peanut butter and jelly on wonder bread for me, carefully wrapped in wax paper. Also in our plastic, zippered bag she put tupperware containers of homemade potato salad and cottage cheese, crackers, and a ziplock bag of chocolate chip cookies. There was also a thermos of her delicious, lemon and mint ice tea, all kept cold with an ice pak. These were the comforts of home we would bring on our journey.

We loaded up our lunch, our map, a couple of towels and our brimmed hats into my father's station wagon, hitched up the boat on its trailer and were waved off by my mother and my sisters. Our adventure had begun. We were on our way, together.

As we drove in the car up Mt. Sinai - Coram road, my dad's sharply chiseled profile was turned to look out the windshield as I road beside him. He seemed to be contemplating the weather and the wind in some mysterious calculation and I wished I could know what he was thinking.

"It's a beautiful day," I said, hopefully. "We should have a good sail."

"It's pretty calm," he answered soberly. "I hope we have enough wind out there. We'll need some good wind to get all the way out to Port Jefferson by the afternoon."

The though of not making the trip all the way out shook me. "You think we might not be able to sail out to the Port?" I asked him anxiously.

"We'll have to see when we get to Mt. Sinai. Usually there's some kind of breeze on the water."

"Can I sail for a little bit today?" I asked my dad.

He turned to look at me. "I don't see why not. You have to start some time."

"I'd like to see the old wreck," I stated. "Do you think we could land at the wreck?"

"I don't know. There might be rocks. It might be tricky." my dad answered dubiously.

"I'd really like to see it, close up."

"We'll have to see." my dad said flatly.

His ability to think of all these dangers I could hardly guess at was something I longed to possess.

At the water my dad backed the trailer down the boat ramp and then we lifted the catamaran together off of the trailer and into the water, where it could float freely. The water shimmered like glass in the harbor but the flag at the marina dock was blowing straight out in a light breeze. My dad watched it for a moment and seemed satisfied. My spirits rose until I was jingling with excitement. The grassy islands that littered the harbor out to the cliffs of Mt. Sinai at the mouth of the harbor seemed to beckon us. My dad entrusted me with holding the boat by its line while he parked the car; the responsibility swelled me. That boat he had designed and built himself in our basement was his pride and joy.

I helped him lift the eight foot aluminum mast into its fitting on the deck, and together, pulling hand over fist, we hoisted the white canvas sail out of the boom until it caught the wind and pulled the line tight. My father let out the boom and held its line with one hand, while with the other he gripped the rudder. Somehow, he seemed to know just the right angle to steer the boat to catch the wind and drive us across the water, magically on the wind alone. We zigzagged in short tacks against the wind to make for the harbor mouth, and he always seemed to know at just the right moment to turn the rudder and swing the boom over our heads to turn into each tack. Each tack got longer and longer as the harbor widened and on one of the last, long reaches before we left the safety of the harbor for the open Sound, my father finally asked me: "Here, do you want to take the line?"

My turn had come. With a beating heart I took the line from him, and then the rudder, connecting me to the wild powers of wind and water. The boat lurched in the waves and the sail began to ripple.

"Keep the boat steady," my father advised, "Don't steer too close to the wind or it won't fill the sail. Keep the rudder straight. Try to steer on a straight line. Steer for that rock on the other side."

Sure enough, the sail smoothed out and billowed, the boat skimmed forward, towards that rock. My heart leapt. The boat was making for our target, at my command, in the middle of this water, this wind, this light. I was exultant. I was sailing, just like my father.

"Yes, that's it," he approved.

We were leaving the other sailfishes and sunfishes sailing with us behind. I wondered with immense pride at what we must look like, slicing through the water at speed, across the harbor mouth, together, side by side, my dad and me.

When we got closer to the other side I handed him the line and rudder to work the tack and we were on our way again. At last we were in the open Sound and we would have to ride and crest each rolling swell, but I quickly found it was not too much for us and we soon left Mt. Sinai behind. We were traversing this great space one could measure on maps by wind and mind alone. Behind us the towering cliff of Mt. Sinai with the houses on top of its bluff shrank while the low, rounded bulk of Mt. Misery rose steadily ahead of us. The sky was one great, blue expanse; the light, like one endless photo flash.

As we drew closer to Mt. Misery and its rounded top grew more distinct, I made out the broken black ribs of the wrecked ferry at the base of it. There it was; the old wreck I had always only just heard of, in all its eerie glory. I wanted to land there and explore it, to say I was there.

"That must be the wreck," I said to my dad, pointing.

"Yes," my dad said, solemnly. He seemed to be watching it respectfully, as if looking at a graveyard. The serious look on his face silenced me and I watched the wreck go by as we sailed past without saying another word. Somehow I was beginning to feel what he felt; that it was no longer a part of our world.

Just ahead of us an empty beach of undisturbed sand and pebbles stretched under a row of cedar trees. It looked like nobody had ever even seen it before. The waves were breaking on it in gentle, murmuring curls, sparkling in that August sunshine. My dad made for it and it seemed to me that we were discovering some unknown place, we were sailing into some unopened moment. The hull of the catamaran scraped into the sand and my father let the wind out of the sail. "Now," he said to me, "Jump off."

I jumped off of the deck of our boat and into knee deep water, grabbed the boat and held it as my father brought down the sail. Together then, we pulled the boat up half way out of the water. We brought down our picnic bag and thermos and spread our towels out on the sand under the cedar trees to eat our lunch. It was like being on a deserted island. Together we looked back at what we had done; the great expanse from the distant cliff of Mt. Sinai, some miles away.

"We did it," I said triumphantly, do my dad.

"Yes," he said. "It was a good sail. We had some good wind and an easy swell."

"Is this the furthest you have ever sailed?" I asked him.

He looked out across the Sound, so wide there you could not see across it. Somewhere out there lay the neighboring state of Connecticut. "No," he said, "I've sailed over to Connecticut."

It seemed like an impossible, dangerous trip to me, out of sight of land. "How long did it take you?" I asked him.

"There and back? A whole day."

"Was it rough out there in the middle, where you couldn't see land?"

"No, not too bad. It's not like an open ocean, you know."

I looked out at that distant shore I could only imagine, dreaming of crossing the Sound to Bridgeport with my dad someday. Someday we would do it, I told myself.

Then we unwrapped the sandwiches my mother had made for us, sipping her tea and enjoying her potato salad, thinking of her back there in Coram, the place we had left so far behind. I wondered if she was thinking of us too, out on that distant beach.

The waves rolled down that beach gently, one after the other, sparkling in the crisp sunshine of that hour on that August afternoon there with my dad. White clouds began to gather out of nothing out to the west, over the Sound, in that wide sky. The tide was beginning to creep in, rocking our boat and lifting it from the sand. The day, and the summer, were coming to an end but no matter where we went from there, in the future, we would always have that afternoon to ourselves.

My dad stood up and shaded his eyes, looking back over the expanse of water we would have to cross in order to get home, back to my mother and my sisters in our little cottage in Coram.

"Well, we'd better be getting back," my father said.