MY MARBLEHEAD FIRST TIME: From dusty farm fields to the wild blue sea
It will not be news to the seafaring folk of Marblehead that in order to get out to a boat in Marblehead Harbor, you have to get into another boat. I have observed this from the safe shore of Crocker Park many times. Recently, a kind neighbor invited my partner and I out onto his boat over Labor Day. And so as we stood on the dock at the Boston Yacht Club waiting for a ride, what caught my attention was the youth of the taxi pilot: a young man, barely out of his teens if he’d made it there at all.
Back home, I was literally raised on a tractor seat. That photo is me on my dad’s lap at bean harvest, circa 1979. The open-cab combine had manual steering and whirring blades of death a few feet below my perch. A scene so commonplace on the farm back then that my mom thought nothing of snapp...