Hard driving and smooth sailing
Mystic Seaport in southern Connecticut offers impressive sites, history and boat rides
Because there are no city-sized theme parks in southern Connecticut, you must find your thrills there in real life. I had just come from helping to herd a crew of Grade 2 students through the Visitor Center at the PEZ factory in the town of Orange, a fragrant, colourful diversion for the nation’s devoted army of “PEZ Heads” and for civilians like us, who just like popping dispenser heads and downing 12-packs of PEZ bricks. I was now rolling in an easterly direction along Interstate 95, toward Mystic Seaport.
To get there and live to tell about it, I had to steer past locals speeding in fits of driving mania that were one part homicidal and the other part suicidal. No matter how confiscatory the speeding ticket I risked summoning, I could barely keep a succession of young women in vehicles with Connecticut plates from plowing their front bumpers up my tailpipe. One drew so near, I could see the driver’s scowling visage clearly enough to critique her eyeliner. Another got so frustrated, she motioned, in a sweeping gesture with her right hand, to get out of the way. Now frustrated by the repetitious peril, I responded with a single-digit gesture perhaps more common to my home in New York City but recognized everywhere as an emphatic rebuke.
I was trying to have a relaxing road trip, but I felt a sparkle of accomplishment when I reached Mystic. I took a room at a simple but hospitable hotel near the seaport.
As a German national, I have been accused of punctuality: I was the first to arrive at the seaport the next morning, but soon the place filled with other weekending families. The seaport is a museum but an interactive one in a traditional (nondigital) sense: real things happen, put into effect by humans. For starters, the harbour, once used by New England wailers and fishermen, is authentic, as are the ships, boats and repurposed antique shoreside infrastructure. To enter the museum, which covers an impressive19 waterfront acres, is to participate abstractly in the economic life of the region during that brief but essential period in which American ports supported themselves with manually operated machines and instruments.
Back when you lit your home with whale-oil lamps, the ships that did the brutish but then-necessary work were powered by sail. My first job this morning, therefore, was to join other visitors in helping museum staffers set a mainsail on the Charles W. Morgan. The stout, tall ship is the last surviving wooden whaler — a type of maritime commercial hunter represented by the Pequod in the novel Moby Dick.
As two women climbed aloft to release the sail (back in the day, the crew was all-male), we able-bodied not-quite-seamen pulled in unison on the rope that hoisted the sail, the heaves coming on our refrain, offered in response to the stanzas sung by our young guide. The song concerned the plight of a Boston tailor who went to sea — and although we never heard the end, we understood, with each yank in unison, what that landlubber found himself up against.
At the print shop, I was shown how a crank-action printing press works: with muscle power. The shop had two open cases, one above the other, fixed with type for ready use. The upper case held capital letters and the lower case held the others — and that, I learned, was the origin of the terms “uppercase” and “lowercase.”
Throughout most of history, almost anyone, regardless of the level of their culture’s technological sophistication, could get into a boat and go somewhere. What separated the developing seafaring nations from the rest of humanity was in knowing actually where they were going and, even more important, how to get back.
There were important political implications — those who could do that colonized those who could not.
To understand a bit of the knowhow involved, I took the Navigation Quest, which is free and fun to do as a family activity. There are two courses, and you are given one; it consists of four white boxes positioned around the museum grounds. Each box contains a card explaining an exhibit and clues to the location of the next box, which you find with the aid of the navigation tools given at the start: a map, telescope, compass and GPS. I did well enough until the third box, which I had trouble locating; fortunately, I was safely directed to my destination by an 8-year-old boy following the same route, compass in hand.
Given that this is a maritime museum, it seemed only sensible that I end our visit with a boat ride. From the available options, I chose a short harbour tour aboard a former Navy launch, and I can recommend the experience.
Only when you see a commercial harbour from its business end can you really understand, if only by feel, its present or former power, grace and consequentiality.