But then Jeff realized he’d left Heron’s hatches open a crack.
Big mistake.
Cold saltwater was still pouring like a stream through the cabin hatches, raining down, and sloshing back and forth on the wooden desk, puddling atop the front stateroom comforter, soaking the banquette, and dripping off the teak dining table onto the cabin’s honey-colored teak floor.
“What the—!” bellowed the skipper.
“Uh-oh,” breathed the chief mate.
* * *
We spent the next fifteen minutes on our hands and knees, cursing, using up every fresh-laundered towel we had to mop up the mess. By two o’clock, striped towels were hanging off Heron’s every rail, drying in the sun; the boat looked like it had been commandeered by pirates.
“I should have immediately throttled down, what a dumb shit,” Jeff said when we finally returned to the open cockpit.
“I’m just glad you’re the one who left the hatches open,” I said.
CROSSING OVER
When I told a friend that my husband and I were thinking of sailing around for a while when our sons left for college, he raised his eyebrows, then said: “Ah, boating! Where good marriages go to die.”
“Have you ever sailed before?” my best friends inquired. Or more to the point: “But you’ve never really sailed before!”
“Of course I’ve sailed before!” I said indignantly.
But I hadn’t. Not even in sailing camp. I’d grown up windsurfing on the bays near my family’s home in Southern California, that was it. Standing on a surfboard while hauling a sail out of the water, pointing it into the wind and muscling a teak wishbone boom around to harness a gust, then hanging on with all my might whenever a steady breeze kicked in.
Everything I knew about sailing I’d learned from a weekend or two spent with East Coast friends on their C&C 36, and a seven-pound doorstop of a book called Chapman Piloting & Seamanship, by Elbert S. Maloney.
The Chapman had been a Valentine’s Day present the year before. Valentine’s had fallen on a Saturday that year. Since it was a Saturday during the height of the recession, we’d stayed in and cooked: grilled steaks, new potatoes roasted with rosemary and olive oil, spinach sautéed with lemon and garlic. It was a rainy night. Thousands of tiny drops beat upon the roof while I lit the candles in the dining room. As a splurge, Jeff opened a special bottle of wine, a coveted Washington cabernet sauvignon. In the past we might have gone out for dinner and traded Valentine’s Day cards. But this year, the year after the prostate cancer surgery, the stress of everyone trying to keep their businesses above water, of downsizing, of Jeff’s having to let good people go, realizing how that would affect them, their families; of watching magazines I loved writing for—National Geographic Adventure and Parenting and, inconceivably, Gourmet lay off talented staff and shut down after years, or in some cases, decades of publishing, or shrink their editions until the once fat-and-glossy magazines were as thin as brochures…Having endured all that, something different and almost defiant seemed in order. Something that said, We are still here and deliberately, intentionally, trying to take charge of our destiny during these uncertain times, if just for a while; something that demonstrated each of us believed in the other, in the world we could create together, even when the world outside was shitty. I gave Jeff a pair of tickets to hear what was then an up-and-coming local indie band, the Fleet Foxes, a favorite of his. Jeff loved new music, was up on all the emerging artists and bands. The Fleet Foxes had just appeared on the Seattle music scene then, and they were gaining national attention with their soaring melodies and retro harmonies. Their music was fresh and wide-eyed. Hopeful. Jeff presented me with a red-foil-wrapped brick, heavy as a concrete block.
“What is this?” I’d laughed, incredulous, paper and tape tumbling to the floor.
“It’s the most unromantic present of all time—it’s Chapman!” he’d said with a grin, reaching over to refill my wineglass. “The classic seaman’s bible, encyclopedia, and übermanual all rolled into one.”
“Wow,” I’d murmured. Chapman Piloting & Seamanship weighed in at a bicep-busting 927 pages, with 1,500 illustrations and diagrams. Then in its sixty-sixth edition, it was still considered the leading reference book for power and sailboats, and has been since it was first published in 1917. “It’s pretty heavy—does this go on the boat?
“Sure, why not,” Jeff said with a shrug. “You’re the least likely person on the planet to open a book like Chapman.”
Oh yeah? I sipped my wine, listening to rain lash the windows. It was true: you couldn’t find a less-likely candidate to sign up for this sailing thing. I am petite; hate to be wet; don’t do well in cold; have arms as thin as toothpicks and the mechanical aptitude of a houseplant. I turned the book’s pages tentatively. They laid out a whole new world, a physical world—navigation, sail trim, tides, currents, electronics, radio communication, knots, weather. I studied a diagram of a sailboat, its graceful outline illustrating the physics of standing rigging, each line labeled like the borders of a triangular country. If it was a world that could be learned partly through books, there might be hope, I thought, brightening.
* * *
In March of James’s senior year of high school, I’d signed up for a weekend sailing course taught by the American Sailing Association. It offered four classes: Basic Keelboat Sailing, Basic Coastal Cruising, Bareboat Chartering, and one on Coastal Navigation. Those of us who had signed up for Basic Keelboat Sailing met around a conference table in the basement of a small marina in Kirkland, Washington, east of Seattle. The instructor, Ed, turned out to be a wiry retiree with the infinite patience of an Eagle Scout.
“Squirrel comes up out of the hole, looks around, goes behind the tree, and back down the hole,” Ed recited, demonstrating a bowline with a yard of practice rope.
My classmates, Mark and Tyler, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, nailed the bowline after a couple of tries.
“Squirrel comes out of the hole…looks around…” I recited dutifully, then got stuck holding my squirrel end of the rope frozen in midair. Which way was the hole again?
Ed stood next to me demonstrating how to tie the knot in slow motion. “Squirrel comes out of the hole…,” we recited together. After ten or so tries, I finally got it, grateful there were only two classmates to witness what was probably the worst case of rope-tying dyslexia Ed had ever encountered.
Next we memorized Rules of Right-Away. There was a riddle to remember these by. Ed wrote it out on the whiteboard: Only New Reels Catch Fish So Purchase Some Often.
“O equals an Overtaken boat,” he explained. “An Overtaken boat has right of way over N, which stands for Not Under Command.
Sailboats have right of way over Powerboats, I scribbled in my notebook. But boats with Restricted Maneuverability (Cargo ships! Tankers!) have right of way over Sail!
We covered additional useful safety tips, including the proper way to use an air horn: five short blasts means danger.
And the 50/50/50 rule, which pretty much speaks for itself: if you’re in 50-degree water (Puget Sound) for 50 minutes, you have a 50 percent chance of surviving.
Out on the water, we practiced tacking the school’s J/22 under a grim spring sky. Ed taught us to call out when captaining:
“Ready about!”
“Ready!” the well-trained crew chirped.
And, “Prepare to jibe!”
“Ready!” we’d confirm.
“Jibe ho!” we’d shout, executing the jibe.
It was cold on Lake Washington that weekend. Gunmetal-gray clouds closed in over the lake, like a lid on a pot. The four of us huddled in the J-boat’s fiberglass cockpit taking turns at the tiller, and I tried to imagine myself captaining Heron, calling out to my wisecracking crew: “Jibe ho!”
I knew the word “ho” would set off Jeff and the boys immediately, like a pack of wiseass jackals.
No, sailing a boat the size of Mighty Heron, which made tacking more of
a major team commitment than a flick of the tiller, would not involve saucy sea commands. But I’d skimmed my Basic Keelboat Sailing book and somehow managed to ace the multiple-choice test Ed handed out at the end of the day…Yes!
The sense of accomplishment was familiar: like earning a Girl Scout badge for something you’ve barely tried. An A for showing up and getting your toes wet. I telephoned to sign up for the next class in the series, Coastal Cruising. The guy who picked up the phone was more helpful than he knew.
“Not to discourage you from paying to take this class, but we don’t have one scheduled right now,” he admitted. “But honestly? If you have a boat you can cruise on, just get out there and do it. You’ll learn, believe me—trial by fire.”
* * *
And so here Jeff and I were a few months later, just the two of us, trial by fire.
I glanced up from Heron’s cockpit, where we sat dressed for summer in the Northwest—jeans, nubby sweaters, fleece vests, jackets, ski caps, wool socks, suede sneakers. We were motoring past the west side of Whidbey Island, thirty-five miles north of Seattle. The island stretched long and thin as a string bean, rising at its westernmost flank to chalky cliffs. A trail I knew traced the wind-scoured cliff edge there, bookended by a beautiful forest of Douglas fir, alder, spruce, and red-barked madrone. I reached for the binoculars, scanned the cliff face, and spotted a group of hikers, tiny as ants, marching single-file against the sky.
Were we ready for this trip? I had no idea, but how can you tell until you try? From land we must have appeared even smaller than the hiker-ants, I thought. I am petite, compact. My face is narrow and feral-looking, with myopic blue eyes framed by an untamable wedge of wavy brown hair. Jeff is taller, a darkly handsome, scowling misanthrope who had met his match: a complicated man captaining a complicated boat.
Given our differences, the connection between us has always been surprising. I spent the first twenty years of my life in sunny California. There were four of us, my parents, younger sister, and me. We lived in a suburban ranch house on a street named Wavecrest and then a cedar house perched on a cliff with a distant view of the Pacific. My parents both come from pioneer families, and sometimes I think it’s destiny that generations later the descendants of those who had journeyed on pilgrim ships and wagon trains would end up as far west as they could get, clinging to a cliff, staring out to sea.
My energy derives from movement. When I was a girl we’d drive our Volkswagen camper van through the West each summer. In Southern California the dry flats of the Owens Valley rose to meet the rugged foothills of the Sierras, and here the pioneers—and even some of our ancestors—had settled, hauling water by mule-drawn wagon between California towns with names like Big Pine and Lone Pine. Once my parents, ten-year-old sister, Kristen, and I, then thirteen, drove to Bodie, a ghost town east of the Sierra Nevada, and went exploring. We walked through silver-gray sagebrush, looking for the place where our great-great-grandfather had lived. I pretended we were archaeologists. The coarse desert scrub crunched beneath our feet, and the air smelled like juniper. It was so dry my frizzy 1970s hair hung straight.
We never did find my great-great-grandfather’s house, although we found imprints in the dust where foundations of houses dating from the 1800s had stood. The few buildings remaining had unpainted porches and wood bleached to a silvery white. The wood was the same color as the dust. Above, the sky shone so clean and blue it made my scalp tingle.
Typically, we would drive up the California coast from our home south of Los Angeles, or brave the hairpin turns of the Sierras’ steep flanks, park the van, load up our packs, and hike for days. After miles of switchbacking up a peak, we’d camp near a clear, cold alpine lake or a stream. My sister and I would pull off our boots, tape moleskin over our blisters, and head off to explore. Sometimes we would read, or write in our journals. Each new campsite felt like our own private realm.
In the late afternoons my father would rig up fishing poles, and we’d hurl salmon eggs into mountain lakes, bent on hooking rainbow trout. As night fell my mother would panfry the fish we’d caught. We learned how to fork the tender flesh from the bones and to ignore the fish heads with their gaping mouths and eyes cooked to pearls. Among the many qualities we absorbed in the California wilderness, one of the most useful, it seemed to me, was to be unflinching but feminine: a pioneerwoman’s trait, as disarming in the Mojave as it is in Manhattan.
After dinner we’d build a fire and sit around it, toasting the soles of our boots. We slept side by side on the ground, sleeping bags unfurled right under the stars. My sister and I were never afraid—except for the time we awoke with our mother whispering, “How big is it?” We sat up and stared straight into three pairs of eyes glowing like yellow embers in the dark. My father crawled out of his bag, swearing and banging a pair of Sierra cups together, and he finally drove off a mother black bear and her two cubs. Then he built a fire and kept watch while the three of us played dead, trying to will ourselves to disappear into the earth itself. Lying there, my heart cartwheeling against my ribs, I’d never felt more terrified or alive.
My family wasn’t religious, but I had a hunch about God. The mountains seemed created for our worship. There were high granite peaks, an expansive sky, and cottony white clouds. Each day was long and hard and grand. Stitched together, the hiking days made a sort of pilgrimage. Even during the drive to a distant trailhead, I felt like I was exactly where I wanted to be: perched between my young parents and gazing out the window to take everything in, my strong-willed little sister splayed on the bench in the back. The road stretched endlessly ahead of us and behind us, so we were suspended in time and place as well. I liked moving through that expansive landscape. I liked the feeling of being between one place and another. As the towns spread farther apart, the sense of time diminished, and we each became lost in a mythical landscape that was as much internal as it was external. We were a family.
When you are a child learning the world, your parents help shape your perceptions. When you are a parent introducing your own children to the world, you discover those perceptions—things you had almost forgotten—resurfacing, as if hardwired to your DNA. These memories in me of our family’s wandering through the West were so deep that as soon as my own boys were old enough, all I wanted to do was take them exploring.
Luckily, my husband was willing to come along.
By contrast, Jeff is an East Coast boy. He and his two sisters grew up in a modest ranch house like I did, but on a cul-de-sac in southern New Jersey. He spent summers fishing and surfing and learning to sail on the Jersey Shore, where his parents rented a series of small beach houses, then finally bought one in Beach Haven township two blocks from the Atlantic. Rather than ramble around mountain ranges, living out of camper vans and backpacks like we did, his family established summer traditions, returning to the same shore like migrating birds, putting down roots.
Looking back on the early years of our marriage, I think of all the influences shaping not just us but any two people committed to making a new life together. In our case there were cultural differences: East versus West; tradition versus freedom. Jeff had been raised Catholic; my family questioned organized religion. He was a Republican when we first met; I was a Democrat. Out here, the waters of the Pacific Northwest Coast were terra incognita for both of us, and even though we were sun and moon, East Coast and West Coast, they beckoned like Oz.
* * *
We hoped to make some distance the first night and checked the Current Atlas, although the water lay still as glass. We’d be riding across the strait as water rushed back out of Puget Sound toward the sea; calculating the distance, and the speed of the current, we figured this should take us about six hours at Heron’s cruising (motoring) speed, just over seven knots. After drying out from our run-in with the container ship, we’d had all three sails—the mainsail, staysail, and jib—up briefly, but no sooner had we raised them than the wind disappeared and Heron slowed from cruising to crawling
, barely making two knots.
“Shit—if we go any slower, we’ll be moving backward!” Jeff had said.
So we’d furled the big jib, brought in the staysail, wrapped the mainsail, and turned the key: Heron’s engine chugged to life, and now we were motoring north, making good time.
The Garmin VHF radio crackled. Jeff picked it up, wielding the black handheld with its spiraling black cord like a cop on some nautical sitcom. What is it with guys and radios?
“This is Victoria Coast Guard Radio,” the dispatcher said. “A heart attack has been reported on a forty-six-foot blue-hulled motor vessel off Cypress Island with two passengers aboard. Over. Any boats in the immediate vicinity of Cypress Island available to help are requested to radio Victoria Coast Guard. I repeat, any vessels in the immediate vicinity available to help are requested to radio Victoria Coast Guard.”
Just as suddenly as it sprang to life, channel 16 went silent.
“Jesus, that would be scary,” Jeff said.
“I know, scary as hell,” I said, imagining a couple, maybe twenty-five years older than us, floating off Cypress Island thirty miles to the north—one of them struggling to keep the other alive. Or maybe it was two friends, fishing buddies. Or a father and son. We didn’t know, never would because we weren’t in the immediate vicinity and couldn’t speed to their assistance. All we knew was that life changes in an instant.
That’s the thing, I thought. You never know when your moment will be, when that instant will come—but it will, as sure as the wind now raking the water into small, hysterical waves.
“Life is short,” Jeff said, reading my mind.
“Aye, that it is,” I said, stepping up from the cockpit to the wide, flat stern deck directly behind for a 360-degree view of Puget Sound and its fir-trimmed islands. I stretched my arms wide, reaching into what felt like a dizzying amount of space, and gulped in clean crisp air. “So what if it’s a cliché. We’ve got to grab it while we can, Chet, don’t you think?”
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