Twice to the Sea (Part Two of Two)

I'm sick. A low grade fever, around 100 or a little over, since Monday night, and body aches. And while this is probably some 'normal' virus, it's taking a different course from the usual cold. I played it safe, called my doctor, and I'm going in this afternoon. Good for me. Again, probably nothing, but I'm one of those armchair doctors who evaluates my symptoms according to what I can find online; and I don't go in unless I know I need a med (an inhaler, say for the wicked chest colds I get after nearly every illness) when I know something is almost certainly viral. Still, why not play it safe?

I remember two springs ago I bucked up, cut up (excuse the mountain lingo) an oak that fell on our property. Later I had a bump inside my left arm; I scratched at it and something seemed to come off, but I thought nothing of it. Then, a little later, I noticed a faint red ring around the spot. I was the only person I knew up here whose (obsessive) reading over the years led him to understand that this could be the first symptom of lyme's disease. I looked it up, saw the pictures online, saw my doctor (who also lives up here, a true mountain doctor and regular cross-country skiier) and he nailed it right away: tick bite, lyme's circle, take this antibiotic and you will not get lyme's disease. I did, and I didn't.

So anyway, I rarely go in. Why not now?

And I'm going to SF this weekend to see Long Beach Shortbus, a band my wife has a friend in, a band we have met all the members in a few times (including Eric, from Sublime). Can I live anywhere near the lifestyle of those guys? No. Not even close, though I know Steph's friend is trying hard to stay sober from some very serious drugs (she knew him in high school, indeed, Sublime used to play backyard parties when she went to Jordan). But the music is good, the shows are fun, and we're staying in the oldest continually operating hotel in San Francisco, the Hotel Majestic. Apparently it's haunted, but then you know how they play that up for business. I do know it's decorated in gorgeous Edwardian style and they throw in a light breakfast.

After the tragic events of today in London, I may actually drive into the city for the first time in years.

But in response to my illness, and to today's horrific acts in London (which, disgusting as they are, form just one more piece of the murder which occurs every day on this planet) I've decided to write something upbeat. And now, after my overlong teacher-intro, the story of my first sail.

***

A year or so after my dip into lover's cove at night, Clint took me sailing on his boat in Long Beach inside the breakwater. This was where Clint slept when he was 'over town,' or on the mainland. Someone had just given it to him, and I'll get the specs wrong, but I believe it was a 16 footer. It did have a 'lid,' or cover to the boat and a small cabin below with the head, a little portable pottie looking thing that sat right in the middle of that tiny cabin. I don't think he even knew how to sail, or only very little. J and he were now a couple, and her father had sailed for years out of San Diego so she may have had some idea, but I think between the two they only had the very basics down. Mostly, Clint used his outboard and just left the boat in the slip as I understood things.

I knew even less. In fact, with the little I've picked up from sailing three times in the SF Bay and reading about sailing, dangerously less. No one wore lifejackets. I wanted to make sure we had them, and Clint showed me some old vests under one of the storage areas in the boat's tiny cockpit. This is marvelously stupid, even in the flat, and relatively warm, water of Long Beach. In fact, I actually peed off the back (with reasonable privacy, J at the mast staring upwind) while we were sailing; I'm sure I was holding on to a backstay, but it was and is very stupid to do that, especially without a pfd. I remember how nervous J was that I was doing it and I thought, why worry, I can swim, you guys could whip right around and pick me up. In fact, it takes consistent training to do that. There was no radio to call the Coasties. The two of them probably would have managed something, certainly would have if the engine started, but if I had fallen in I could have drowned waiting around for them to get the boat to me.

(Didactic interlude: I don't care how unmacho it looks, always, always wear a pfd; my own cousin Johnny went over at night and washed up days later just three years before my first sail; he was in the No. Cal. Delta near the Antioch Bridge and had spent a lifetime on boats; he wasn't wearing a pfd either, though in the fog alone at night on the water, even that might not have saved him; now, if I'm on water, I wear the lifejacket, and so does everybody else; a radio must always be at hand...if I were ever alone, a radio on my person and waterproof. Here's a story from just last week here about how eight people nearly drowned just before they were very nearly run over by a 600 foot tanker in the SF Bay).

Now that that is out of the way....I sound like a fearful parent, like my mother, but I mean well. My mother would tell me not to go out on the boat at all.

My first sail was an amazing experience for me in every way, stunning. I had a fair amount of obsessive content burning through my head at the time, and I remember that while sailing did not push it out completely, it opened another vista inside my mind. I had what I considered an epiphany; I've read the same idea since but I don't recall where. I understood that consciousness is multi-faceted yet simultaneous. Meaning that even though I was caught up in my own mental junk, the sea crept into me, fed me, and I felt that serenity, even ecstasy, in one part of my mind. It was a normal day; I was nervous, being out on the water for the first time with people I didn't know all that well, but amidst whatever my concerns, I felt my obsessions diminish, though they shared the mental screen still, as I left the land. And that goregous, sunny, calm sea. I didn't realize how gentle a place that is to sail until I began learning on the Bay, which is a much more vigorous spot.

I had felt nature touch me, even sustain me, at times listen to me sob, before this sail on many day hikes, on short backpacks, and probably more than a hundred times in the Nature Center in Long Beach, a place I used to visit often, usually alone, during my darkest years. But the sea was, is, something else. It's flat and without individual feature; it's one great Thing. As such, its impact on the soul is singular and enormous. Below the surface, it is somewhat like natural beauty above ground, though it's also deeply alien, truly extraterrestrial, and I float through it as I can float through no mountain forest. But on the surface, even though it lacks variety, it overwhelms...its breath, its color, its constant lights and movement. We spent a beautiful day tacking up and then back (we were under sail for this, so at least one of them knew how to set the little mainsail enough to push the boat). The feeling of being driven by the wind, of the keel-weight shifting: it was exhiliration. I came home and wrote a poem I felt it was so powerful. As this is an older poem I'm embarrassed to share it, but I think I can dig it up and put it here as an offering, really, to the beauty of the Sea, and, hope beyond hope, to the Creator who made both my mind and the ocean from which (some say) all life sprang in a miracle greater than any single human birth.

But the mysticism of the day was followed by one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me, and it's worth telling.

We came back, under motor with the sail furled, into the docks. Clint had the tiller, J had the bow line, and I was given the aft line (if I remember right). The way it's supposed to work is that the person at the helm steers the boat into the slip and lets it drift close to the dock. The person with the bowline steps (sometimes jumps) off onto the dock and then helps guide the boat in. This is followed by the person with the aft line stepping off; then these two lines are secured to cleats on the dock and the boat is at rest.

I don't know why I leaned so far out. There was a boat right near theirs in the slip and all I remember is losing my balance, trying to grap on to an antenna on this other boat (which I snapped off as I went) and then I was in the sea, unlaced doc martens and all (my poor docs, they never recovered; they held a faint but noticeable stink for years afterward and I finally had to stop wearing them). I swam the few feet to the wooden planking (J looked as if she was about to jump in after me) and I climbed out. I was apologetic, felt terrible, of course. It was just getting dark by now and a little breezy. I offered to pay for the antenna, but they said they'd take care of it, which they did, students that they both were (I was an adjunct, and didn't make much but more than the two of them together I imagine).

There was something else though that I became painfully aware of standing, utterly soaked in my jeans and shirt, there on that dock.

I had to pee, again (did we have a couple beers; I don't think so but I don't remember; another thing I would never do on the SF Bay). In fact, J's warning about peeing off the back of the boat must have sunk in, because I had been holding it now for a while. And with being utterly soaked, in cotton, with the wind blowing, I really, really, really had to pee. It felt like urination would complete my life at that moment; it was now the only piece in my hierarchy of need. And the wind blew. I stood there flooding the dock and beginning to shiver.

I told them I had to use the restroom; I couldn't stick around to tie off the boat, I'd be right back but I had to use the restroom. J gave me a plastic card, said it's right over there, nice restrooms for the boaters in the marina, go ahead and go.

I think I ran to the building; at best I did the pee-walk, that thing all men must learn sometime during or right after potty training. My entire being was taken up with the lust to let go.

I found the right building, the right door, men's, and was faced with something I'd never seen before. It looked like the outside of a deadbolt only with no keyhole, just a smooth round cylinder about that size sticking out of the door. The door would not open, not even budge no matter how hard I pushed on it. I couldn't see any place to insert the card. I probably waved it near the cylinder, pushed it against it, nothing. It was beginning to feel like a sick joke. And now my urge became desperate, truly.

Clint and J were too far off to hear me understandably even if I yelled. I kept trying to open the door and I just couldn't. The evening breeze was coming stronger now, and my soaked clothes were like one vast message screaming: pee!

Why I didn't try to go in the grass or someplace else I don't know; there must have been people around. It's a pretty manicured area and there are always a few boaters, though no one close enough to ask for help.

And so, dear friends, I peed, deliciously as a toddler in a diaper after his nap, and thoroughly, standing there in my soaked jeans.

I know I was not drunk at all. Now, I don't know what I would do, but this is what I did then.

After that I had to go back and tell Clint and J, my unlaced docs squashing with more than just sea water now. I knew there were showers in the bathrooms, and clearly I had to rinse off. Physically I felt incredible, though I was getting cold again, but emotionally...I can't remember what they said exactly, but J was the one who went back with me and she was very cool when we got there. There was a huge puddle on the sidewalk in front of the door and she said, 'well, we can tell where you went,' genuinely laughing, but kindly. Then she showed me how to rub the key card around the outside of the cylinder; I had never imagined that. It was like a puzzle in a computer game.

But open it did. I let her keep the card and I headed, still squishing, for the large shower at the end of the room.

I went in in all my clothes, boots and all, and the hot water felt so good. I figured I had to stay in there for a while, running water down my jeans as much as I could to get rid of the pee. Just as I was getting to a place where I thought I had done the best I could in the field, I heard someone else come in; his breathing, the noises he made...I knew it wasn't Clint. It was some strange boater who then began to grunt and poop. I figured well, he's in the stall now and it's time for me to go, and so I walked out of the shower, right past the closed stall door, water gushing out of my boots as I stepped and pouring off of me, all echoing in that enclosed tiled room, clearly a man who had just finished his shower in all his clothing, including shoes.

What he thought I'll never know. Perhaps I became a bar story.

I headed back to the boat, quickly again getting cold and embarrased, but they were waiting for me not far off. Then as we walked to J's parent's car, parents I hadn't even met, it occurred to me that I had to sit on the seat. In her parent's car. Clint said he had been thinking of that too. We found a towel; I sat on it and on the faux sheepskin beneath, immediately rolling down my window in case of any residual urine. They drove me home to my apt. in the shore and it was there that I finally got into dry clothes and knew the warmth and luxury, the space and dryness, of life ashore again.

***

That is an odd story, I know, or at least an odd second half to another story, but that is exactly how it went. I began calling my fall into the sea a kind of baptism even that night, and I suppose it was. I only sailed in Long Beach one other time with Clint (and that, actually, is a pretty funny story in itself, but I don't know if I'll go there; not now at least) and moored in his little boat at Two Harbors during one Bucanneer's Day, a weekend when we motored up to snorkel in Emerald Bay, then back to that very odd annual party which opens lobster season, and a day or two later we motored all the way from Two Harbors to Avalon, staying near the coast and just talking.

Later, Clint continued his tradition of the free boat (not uncommon, actually) by giving it to another friend in Avalon, a guy named Abe who used to run the fire trails in the interior almost obsessively; he had a remarkable knowledge of the topography of the island. Clint told me, seriously and with purpose, that he was giving the boat to Abe 'for housing.' Alas, somehow, Abe managed to sink it, or let it sink, somewhere near the shore (perhaps even when it was moored or at anchor without Abe; I never got the whole story). It is perhaps fitting that the first boat I sailed on, slept in, and fell off has been several years at the bottom of the sea, already become another thing entirely, as my own body will one day become another thing entirely.

In the Apocalypse, those who lie in the sea will be raised first.

Perhaps. But again, hope beyond hope (and I see sparse reason in all my reading or experience to believe in an afterlife apart from the witness of the gospels, which are explicit) I will be raised into something greater. Or if not greater, I will at least be with Christ, alive, forever, with the author of both love and the sea. May it be so.

***

Hymn

what is it when the white sail fills with wind

and the great keel shifts, while the gray sea slings
below like a vision, like a meadow seen in sleep?

how the pastures of the dolphin feed my soul.

as the waters' country breath, soft and citrus,
turns in currents through my skin and hair.

how the grasses of Poseidon flood the air.