As I clambered up the church steps, it occurred to me that time is a most ethereal instrument: It can both fly and stand still. Funerals are confusing because each concept comes into play. You think back and consider the fleeting, productive years of the freshly departed. You can’t comprehend how quickly they rushed past, while arriving at the realization that they’ve come to a crashing halt.
But, for me, this interment was particularly confounding. At 87, my old sailing mate and colleague Nim Marsh had lived a good, long life. Yet it somehow still seemed cut short. I’d always believed the salty old dog would easily crest 100.
The service at Saints Sahag and Mesrob Armenian Church in downtown Providence, Rhode Island—the longtime parish of Nim’s wife, Naomi—was also a gathering of Cruising World alumni. That was fitting, as Nim had been a staff member on three separate occasions. He was the rare bird among us with an actual degree in journalism, from Boston University. During his remembrance, the pastor said Nim’s final few months, after his cancer diagnosis last fall, had been brutal. But when he summoned the priest to make his peace with the Almighty, when asked if there was anything else he wanted, Nim’s reply was classic: “Well, I’d like to go fishing.”
When I was editor-in-chief of this magazine in the early 2000s, Nim was an associate editor and my go-to man when a troublesome article required some major massaging. He was a gifted editor and a wonderful, poetic writer. My favorite Nim piece took its title from the vivid hallucination of the skipper and protagonist in a story about a nightmarish offshore passage: “A Star in the Eye of the Angel Pony.”
But what I really remember about Nim was the twinkle in his eyes, almost always masking the mischief on his mind. He kind of reminded me of Eddie Haskell from Leave it to Beaver: Outwardly, unfailingly polite and well-mannered, yet always with a trick up his sleeve. It proved to be a potent combo for fine stories and pure adventure.
As a nautical journalist, he had few peers, with stints at Blue Water Sailing, National Fisherman, Salt Water Sportsman and, for more than a decade, as the chief editor of the delightful and literate Maine-based journal Points East. Ditto for his sailing prowess, including many an offshore mile across the Atlantic and down to the Caribbean, and plenty of coastal cruising aboard his Bristol 29, Breakaway.
His favorite boat, however, was probably Frith, the 13-foot dinghy he’d inherited from Cruising World founder Murray Davis. Inspired by small-boat cruising in Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, France, each summer, he organized a little fleet of like-minded sailors—basically, our staff and a few pals—for a rally up Narragansett Bay from downtown Newport to Portsmouth’s Island Park that he called the Great Gansett Raid. We all set sail on whatever we could: Lasers, Sunfish, sailing dinghies and so forth. It was a ragtag fleet. Off we went.
“The magic of Nim,” said Tim Murphy, another Cruising World colleague and disciple, “was his conviction that the adventure you could have sailing a 13-foot open boat up Narragansett Bay could be as great and as nourishing and memorable as a transoceanic passage.”
The Raid had a fantastic motto: Infesta Navigatio Videlicet. It was, Tim recalled, our copy editor John Wilson’s best guess at a Latin translation of “manifestly unsafe voyage.” The party at the conclusion of each edition was appropriately epic.
A laminated card was handed out at the conclusion of Nim’s service with a verse called “Prayer of the Seafarer,” which included this stanza: “When the journey ends and harbor’s near/Let me return to those I hold dear/Till then, on every wave I roam/Be my compass, my anchor, my home.” Going forward, I will carry that card, and that message, whenever I go to sea.
With that, it was all over. It was still hard to believe my old friend’s time had run out. Leaving the church, I had one last thought: If Nim Marsh is gone, none of us stands a chance.
