The New Essex Yacht Club stands four miles east of the city of New Essex, a self-contained world of leisure built around an ample yacht basin, generous dock space, and its own breakwater. The long club building houses terraces, bars, and a ballroom, facilities designed to accommodate the large yachts that stop at New Essex because the amenities are good. In summer, visitors arrive from Miami and Fort Lauderdale; in winter, several of the local owners of the big cruisers head south, marking the club as a seasonal hub for the wealthy. The social dynamics of the membership are captured in the nicknames the two factions give each other: the motor-cruiser owners call the devout sailors the Magellan Set, while the sailors retort by calling the cruiser owners the Stinkpot Group. This playful but pointed division reveals a club where status is measured not just by wealth but by the style of one's relationship to the water.

The Bowdens' Arrival and the Sweet Sioux III

The Bowdens came to the club after a significant upgrade in their boating life. Having graduated from the Sweet Sioux II, a converted lifeboat from an obsolete lake ferry, to the Sweet Sioux III, a cranky twenty-six feet of day cruiser about sixteen years old with a convertible navy top, Sam and Carol joined the New Essex Yacht Club. The dues were high, and the social schedule was intensive, a cost they were willing to bear for the prestige. Yet the Sweet Sioux III, no matter how fresh her current paint and varnish job, never looked at ease tied up in the middle of all that teak, brass, chrome, and mahogany. She had a beamy and disreputable look, like a dressed-up washer-woman at the opera. The boat seemed actively to resent her new environment, and on each departure she tried to swing and bash one of the grand craft tied up near her, a mechanical rebellion that mirrored the family's own discomfort.

The boat's mechanical quirks compounded their sense of being out of place. She had a single screw and a sixty-five horsepower marine engine of a make few people had ever heard of. The engine was stolid, reliable, and unaccountably quiet, and it could push the Sweet Sioux along at a waddling ten knots. But at the New Essex Yacht Club, the engine also revolted. Twice it quit in the middle of the basin as they were headed in, and twice they had to accept a tow, a humiliating spectacle among the gleaming cruisers. After that, Sam kept a five-horse outboard motor wrapped in a tarp stowed forward, a practical but telling concession to the club's demanding standards.

The Decision to Leave

The club's drawbacks were not merely financial. It was expensive, and too many of the members were excessively stuffy. It was also a long way from Harper, adding a practical inconvenience to the social discomfort. When it came time to pay dues for the second year, Sam and Carol talked it over and were each pleased and surprised to find how willingly the other person would give up the club. This mutual relief revealed that their initial enthusiasm had been a shared experiment in social climbing, one they were both glad to abandon. The decision was not a defeat but a quiet acknowledgment that the club's world was not theirs.

The Move to Harper Boat Club

Their departure led them to the Harper Boat Club, ten miles closer, on the lake shore between New Essex and Harper, at the end of a road that turned off Route 18. The contrast was stark. The club building could more accurately be called a shack, and the boat basin was small and crowded. Jake Barnes's boat yard was next door, a cluttered, informal enterprise where he sold boats, gas, oil, gear, fishing tackle, and cold beer. Barnes was a fat, sleepy man who had inherited the business when his father died, a good but indolent craftsman with rickety ways on which he could haul anything up to forty feet out of the water. His yard was an incredible clutter of timbers, corroding hardware, empty oil cans, hulls too far gone for repair, rotting lines, and sagging roofs over his covered storage area. In this shabby, functional setting, the Sweet Sioux III found a home that the polished New Essex Yacht Club could never offer, and the Bowdens' brief flirtation with high society gave way to a more authentic, if less glamorous, relationship with the lake.