PW: You've written of your sailing experiences before. How did the idea for Around America arise?
WC: Over several years, a very fine artist named Ray Ellis and I did three coffee-table books on sailing the coasts of the United States (Oxmoor Press). But I discovered that people don't read coffee-table books. After the first book, people said, "Oh, what a wonderful book," but nobody mentioned any episodes out of it. So I trapped them deliberately in the second one, which dealt with my home sailing grounds—from the Chesapeake north to Maine. There were a lot of friends who I told little anecdotes about, and I waited for them to say something like, "That story you told about me wasn't quite right." They all praised the book highly, but not one of those individuals ever said, "But that incident…." I was complaining about this to various publisher friends, and the W.W. Norton people said, "Let's put the text together in a single book without the artwork." They suggested that we include the Gulf Coast as well. I agreed, naturally.
PW: Did you form a different opinion of any place after seeing it from the water?
WC: You know, nearly all of them. Viewing anything from the water is vastly different from viewing it on land. You get a whole different sense of a community, particularly of its background, because the waterfronts were always settled first. We moved by water in our colonial days, either on open waters such as Long Island Sound and the Great Lakes, or the rivers and streams up which the trappers went, and the hunters and finally the settlers. That is the origin of America, on our coasts. You don't get that from the present-day highways, or even just driving to the beach or the shore. Unless you can see it from the water, you don't get that sense of America.
PW: Where did you get all of the background and historical detail in the book?
WC: Some was obtained by my natural curiosity about the places that I visited in my boat, and my visits to museums and battlefields and that sort of thing. Then follow-up research in history and geography books and so on.
PW: What about America's coast sets it apart from others around the world?
WC: I don't believe there's much that is different in the sense of the coastline being the breeding place of history. The thing about Europe and the Orient, though, is that inland is so antique that the impression is there of their history, as opposed to our modernization and overgrowing of historical landmarks. They're buried underneath skyscraper architecture in our cities, beneath industrial, commercial development in smaller towns. In Europe, you live with history all the time. Here, the coastline preserves it.
PW: Your previous book outlined a reporter's life. What's a retired reporter's life?
WC: It's as busy as ever—a lot of public speaking and some writing, and I narrate quite a bit of documentary material.
PW: Is Wyntje, the name of your boat, from your family genealogy?
WC: Yes, Wyntje was the first one to marry a Cronkite in the New Amsterdam colony, in 1642, at the old Dutch Reform Church. It's there in the church log. Wyntje Theunis spawned all the Cronkites in the New World. So I thought I should name a boat after Wyntje in honor of all the women who have made Cronkite men happy in the New World ever since.
