Father Water, Mother Sea

First, I must say that I read a short story by Anthony Doerr called "The Hunter's Wife" yesterday. A student gave it to me. It is one of the finest pieces of short fiction I've read in a long time. It's highly recommended. It has nothing direct to do with the rest of this blog, but I had to throw it out there.

***

I spent two and a half days this weekend sailing on San Francisco Bay. It is hard to describe how good I feel after this. I don't know what it is about the sea and about sailing in particular.

A significant piece is that the steady sea-wind soothes me and has done so all my life. Once, when my high school girlfriend went to Wyoming with her family for two weeks in summer and I flung into a genuine grief state, unable even to eat, it was only when my mother, by then absent from the family for a year or two, bought me Arby's and took me, providentially, to the beach for the afternoon that I was able to get down the roast beef sandwich and the cherry turnover. To embrace living again. Even as a girl-dependent 15 year old boy, I knew it was the wind that held and calmed me.

Also, and this is much more apparent when I'm actually on the sea, there is the continual poetic variance of the water and sky: wild and black one dusk, still and sunny-warm the next morning. Pleasure and adventure, fear and gratitude, all come together sailing the sea, and on the Bay in particular, where at two or three one can be barely moving under all sail around Treasure Island and then in less than an hour be beating towards Alcatraz in a 30 knot headwind and hammering chop under double reef. I have great respect for those who sail the Bay because no matter how much one goes out it is never the same thing twice. Without my skipper (who will sail in almost any weather) I'd be over my head many times.

Which is a good place to begin the story of this weekend.

I was only supposed to go out Sunday, but then a call Friday morning let me know I could drive to Berkeley that afternoon, bring my skipper with, and stay on the boat all weekend. I suddenly forgot everything I was suppposed to do that day and Saturday and I agreed. We would sail, just the two of us, Friday night, then all day Saturday and Sunday with other crew. I would spend spend two nights on the boat in my sleeping bag, over a fresh sheet from home and boat cushions, the wind keening and chiming all night through the sticks and rigging. Berkeley marina is especially windy this time of year because as the blister hot valley air rises, air from the Pacific rushes in to fill the void, much of that air passing through the Golden Gate itself. That Gate, a true venturi, is directly to seaward of the Berkeley marina. This is a good place for a boy who needs wind.

I picked my skipper up at his house, where he came out to greet me, bald, glasses, a grey manchu mustache and naked except for a towel around his waist. His girlfriend and I ate very hot, and very good, chili he had made that morning. Then he dressed, we loaded our stuff into my car, and off we went.

He's an intriguing conversationalist, a Buddhist with deep convictions who makes a genuine effort to live peacefully and charitably. I have real respect for this, and frankly, find more spirituality and reflection in him than I find in some Christians.

My experience on the water Friday night was one of those life events that are lived in fear, looked back on with quiet pride. It was dark, cloudy, very windy, between 28 and 35 knots, and the Bay was throwing wind waves three feet high one right after the other. This is very different from a sea swell; that a boat glides over, up and down, like gray-green hills (unless they too get close together, the rule of squared seas: worry when the wave height equals the interval in seconds; there's a substantial difference between nine foot swell at 12 or 13 seconds and nine foot swell at nine seconds or less). We were in the famous Bay chop, and even in a 36 foot Catalina with a dodger (a viny/plastic windshield at the front of the cockpit) waves were breaking over the bow, coming down the entire length of the boat, blasting over the dodger and soaking me at the wheel. My lee foot was ankle deep in water. Naturally, for such a short sail, I had left my foulies below.

And, besides the skipper, I was the only person on board.

Skipper tells me there are two keys to being a good skipper (besides knowing how to sail well, I assume). One is preparation, and two is confidence, or better, its appearance. He says that no matter what is going on, act like you see it all the time. Otherwise, the crew, which looks to the skipper, scared children to father, will panic. Most of the time Friday night my skipper was at the helm and I was on the lines, alone, running all the rigging on the boat after having not sailed since last October! I only took the helm when he went on the foredeck to reef, or shorten, the mainsail. This is very important in high wind; less sail means less wind pressure and makes the boat easier and safer to handle. He had a tether on, though it was far too long to actually keep him on the boat; as he and I both knew, if he had slipped over the side he would have gone in and been towed and hammered by the chop. I might have had to cut him free. I knew we had two radios on board and I've seen the coastie zodiacs move very, very fast. Still, I began to wish he had a shorter tether, that I had a tether and harness, a strobe attached to my pfd, my own radio and gps on my body...stuff I still don't own but every sailor who sails in this kind of weather should have! To make the whole evening more interesting, I was feeling nauseous. I can get seasick to varying degree, and it was setting in a bit as I spent most of my time head down over cleats and lines. I was queasy, scared, wet to my skin and tired as hell; my fingertips, in summer gloves, were numb and one thumb was cracked and bleeding.

I started to wonder why I put so much summer school money into this sport last year to begin with.

We weren't out long, a couple long tacks into the wind is all I remember, then a longer reach back, sailing with the wind coming from the back corner of the boat. I would swear the whole thing lasted thirty or forty minutes. It was more than two hours, actually, before we got back behind the marina breakwall.

I've only sailed with skipper seven or eight times; I've had six actual instruction days besides in Santa Cruz, and he calls me swab with genial affection. That night, after we ate some of the hottest vegetarian Indian food white people can have and not die, and after I stepped on a fire extinguisher in the v-berth and set it off, white powder blowing into and onto everything, before he shut the door to his quarter berth he said, night, mate; you're the second mate now; you could be the first mate, but she sleeps with the captain.

He has a regular crew who all have more experience than me, and if they were aboard I don't know about the 'mate' status, but it was a moving statement, a friend and father's blessing to me, nonetheless.

Later, he told me he's only seen the Bay worse than that one other time, so I guess I earned something. At the time, I was simply holding on and staying low and doing what I was told. As we came in, I saw a group of smaller boats going out, around 26 feet, with full racing crews in professional gear. I think the racing teams wanted to go out and play! It was profound to watch them work in team, hoisting mainsail in seconds. As Dan Inosanto used to say, one man's ceiling is another man's floor.

The rest of the weekend, Sunday especially, was exquisite weather. Sunday night, with a boat full of people of varying experience, I was again at the helm on a close haul, with the wind coming over the front corner of the boat, heading into wind nearly as strong as what we had Friday night. But the sun was shining, there wasn't a cloud to see, and the chop was not nearly as strong. I didn't even get very wet (though this time I was dressed correctly).

My brain is almost constantly thinking, processing, worrying, repeating, whether it's the horror-weight of an obsession or something positive: thinking about weightlifting or some other thing I look forward to. By the third day of sailing, driving home last night, driving to work today...I am living in a different brain, for a little while at least. Sailing takes me to a recreational and life-embracing place few other things do. Along with my spiritual practice, I can think of nothing else, except perhaps those strategically won moments of intimacy with my wife or son, which makes me feel so well. Well as one feels well after long illness, like inhaling the breath of spring I described below. Sailing is expensive, at least until one becomes like my skipper and others pay for the boat (even then, there is some cost for him). It's a drive from my house, too. It's a funny fact that I keep getting into ocean sports when I live in the mountains, forty minutes from a ski resort. But somehow, some way, I want and need more of it. It was hard to come back. I understand, a little, those who don't. Those who put their families on boats and just go. The week long trips which become summer sails to Mexico which become four year circumnavigations.

May I find, with God's help, more ways and times. Sailing on the ocean has aesthetic and utility; I am moved by beauty and also changed within.

***

Last night, my first night back, after falling almost at once to sleep, I dreamt all night long; I'd wake up and go to sleep and dream even more, vivid, concrete narratives in color, powerful feelings surging. I wish I remembered any of them! I don't and don't have to, but for me my was mind healing, stretching and moving, tousling in the land of dreams, the water of dreams, a place, surely, where the sea wind blows at all hours.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

First Step and the Consiliari

Hey Gang

Wanting to Come Back....