Typhoon - NYTimes.com There is a boat in my barn. I put it there last October, yet it surprises me every time I go down to get a bale of hay. A previous owner called it the Judy of Gloucester - still painted on the stern - but its manufacturer called it a Typhoon, a name I like to think was taken from the novel by Joseph Conrad. You can pack a lot of plans and illusions into a dirt-cheap, 40-year-old sailboat only 19 feet long in a barn 140 miles from the sea. When the weather warms up, I'll begin restoring the Judy of Gloucester. It will be yet another of the things I'd never done until I came to this farm, like raising pigs. I imagine that one day I'll be far out at sea remembering those pigs. Or perhaps I'll be in the pigpen imagining all of us far out at sea together, like the pigs and the children on the pirate ship in Richard Hughes's novel "A High Wind in Jamaica." The mast is lying on sawhorses, and I like walking the length before I feed the animals. It's not exactly climbing into the crow's nest, but it will do for now. When I was young, my father bought me the cheapest old car he could find, in hopes that restoring it would take my mind off other things. We parked it in the garden and put the front end up on blocks. I never did restore that car, but I used to sit in it, angled toward the sky, when the moon was high. I haven't yet taken to sitting in the cockpit of the Judy, pretending to be at sail when everything around me says I'm not. But I'm sure that day will come.