POWER OF THE SEA #2 (Notes from an Island Series), 1991

Will Thurber was one of the last schooner captains alive. To abbreviate – it is said that he sired many a kid. In his eighties, so arthritic that he often needed help to fit his hands over the oars, he rowed his dory each day across Grand Passage to the Freeport side. He said there was a woman there who made great bread. On the way back he would pause out of the rip in the lee of Peter’s Island to jig for cod, and nap in good weather. He told the children of the village that one day he would drown himself in that very spot. The kids took him at his word. Often was the time he would lie down in the floor of the dory, his profile out of sight, and one kid would spy the absence and sound the alarm: “Will’s drowned himself!” I image there were times when a boat would reply – go out to spy on the man, snoring out the afternoon, and then return. But one day he did it. Wrapped the anchor line around his neck to set his mooring, and the dory, stalled out of the current and wind, masked his trick. Sometime later his body washed well up into Freeport’s Harbor. Front of his granddaughter Trudie’s house.