Setting out in the off-season for the Great Lakes, the narrator initially tries on various forms of idealized self-sufficiency and heroism typical of masculinist sea stories. Such projects soon flounder; however, in the Chesapeake, as she begins to learn what it means to navigate history and to care and take care in the face of life and death. These lessons are not enough, though, it will take the help of an entire rural coastal community in Nova Scotia to bring an old wooden schooner to life again, and along with it, another model for making, being and sailing.
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