Crosby Still And Nash "Southern Cross"

This week's posts are written by Scott Lajoie, editor of Cape Cod Magazine. In creating a publication that reflects the look and feel of the region, Scott is particularly attuned to the stories, sights and general nostalgia of summer. So I asked him to write about some of the songs that have touched him personally over the years, particularly the ones that connect to iconic memories or feelings of Cape Cod.

Being that we are on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, one can imagine how strong the sailing community is on Cape Cod. Whether you are a regatta racer, or just like to cruise around the bay, Cape Cod is a sailor’s playground. Nothing reminds me of this lifestyle more than Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Southern Cross.”

The premise is great: Man loses woman. Man hops on a sailboat for a long-distance journey in which he can gather his thoughts. Man finally realizes what went wrong in the relationship. Granted, every time I listen to it, I wonder about some other bit of symbolism in the song. The accompanying music is pretty simple; every novice guitarist learns the chords to impress some “woman/girl” at a campfire. But it nonetheless is one of the most classic riffs of all time.

I always liked the song. But it meant a lot more to me when I actually got to see the Southern Cross while sailing across the Pacific Ocean. Our course was further south, departing Buenos Aries and arriving 35 days later in Wellington, New Zealand (we never came close to the Marquesas). I was a journalist on board a racing yacht in the British Telecom Global Challenge of 2000. There were 18 of us on board, and we raced the boat day and night for over a month. No, we never stopped in Avalon to make calls back home to the family; we were racing. We won that leg in a very exciting finish that came down to less than an hour between us and the second-place boat.

Since I am not a life-long sailor (I had to train for this race), many of those lines made sense a bit more after the Challenge. I not only understood what “sailing a reach” was, we had done it. We did a few “downhill runs.” Sometimes, when you were on a “midnight watch,” you’d find yourself contemplating life, out in the middle of the darkness with thousands of miles of ocean all around you, where at one point, you are closer to space than you are to any continental land. Does such an odyssey provide some answers? It did to Stephen Stills. “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time/You understand now why you came this way/'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small/But it's as big as the promise—the promise of a comin' day.”

By the way, if you are wondering why “Wooden Ships,” another song by Crosby, Stills and Nash, doesn’t make me reminisce about sailing, it is because is not about sailing or boating at all. It is about a nuclear holocaust. And the survivors happen to have fled on “wooden ships.” Not a happy song in the least.


See the video on Youtube.