by Jim Lynch
“Is there any chance your sister…”
“Yeah?” I wasn’t about to help him.
“If, you know, she might come out with us some night this season.”
I knew he’d sailed against her in Lasers back when she was a teen phenom and had seen her beat everybody, himself included, years before all the hullabaloo.
“Like I’ve told you, Mario, she hasn’t sailed or lived around here since high school. Okay?”
“But maybe she’ll visit this summer and go out for a night?”
People like Mario were the most unsettled by Ruby’s saga, as if her mythology mocked their passions.
I looked past him to make it appear I wasn’t reading his mind and saw the posse of liveaboards waiting to ask me about their balky bilge pumps or their weeping hull-deck joints or their jammed halyards or haywire autopilots…
The rumpled woman still waiting behind the gate suddenly looked familiar. But who the hell was she?
“Maybe,” I told Mario. “I’ll tell her, the next time I talk to her, that we’d both love to see her out here if she could pull it off.”
He nodded doubtfully, and that’s when I placed the bag lady. She looked better in her dimly lit headshots.
Hillbilly cute.
I bought her chowder and a beer, and we discussed that devastating moment in Sophie’s Choice when we discovered the meaning of the title.
She was missing an eyetooth, but I liked her attitude and didn’t want to appear entirely uninterested. So when she thanked me for dinner, I gave her that neutral line about how we should stay in touch.
She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re so nice, but, to be honest, not my type. Too skinny.”
Back aboard my boat, I stared gloomily at my new batch of potential dates before obsessing yet again over Bernard’s latest postcard. Creating an anonymous e-mail address took no time at all, but I lost an hour of my life choosing the words for this simple message: Minke coming to Seattle soon with product. Will deal only with you.
Pressing SEND, I felt a fever wash over me, soaking even my socks.
LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE
“The great Leif Eriksson sailed to North America in the year 1001, centuries before the overrated Christopher Columbus ran aground and told the world he’d discovered this place, which is why we should be celebrating Leif Eriksson Day instead of toasting some second-place wannabe who finished almost five hundred years behind the winner!”
Not even Bernard challenged this portion of Ruby’s childhood rendition of our Icelandic lore, but his interjections and clarifications were coming.
“Leif Eriksson was a strong and handsome [embellishment] young man when he discovered America [Canada, actually, Newfoundland to be more specific]. But he just called it Vinland—the land of wine, wink-wink—and threw wild parties [embellishment]. Soon enough, though, the Indians got jealous of all the fun [speculation] and killed a few drunken sailors. So Leif and his crew packed up and sailed home. Not being a braggart, he didn’t make a big deal out of finding a continent. And the rest of the world apparently was clueless about the Vikings and didn’t know Jack Squat. [Ruby assumed Mr. Squat was a noble Icelander because Grumps kept griping about people not knowing him.] So that’s how the overrated Christopher Columbus was able to gobsmack [another word she routinely misused] the world into believing he discovered America, which is silly, since oodles of Indians had already found it.
“But the people of Ballard knew better!” Ruby shouted. “That’s why there’s a ginormous statue of Leif at Shilshole Marina. Still, when they put up all those fancy words beneath him, they almost made the silly mistake of calling him the son of Norway. Bah! They stopped that foolishness after Grumps said he’d bust some heads unless it said Leif was the great son of Iceland! [Iceland’s consul general, not Grumps, had threatened to sue.]
“What people don’t realize,” Ruby maintained, “is there are only four thousand [actually, forty thousand] Icelanders in the States, and that makes Icelanders rarer than two-headed sharks [no such thing] and people like Grumps really exotic, considering he’s even a blood relative of the Great Leif Eriksson! [Not even close to true.]”
Fortunately, our Sunday instruction went beyond lectures on sailing, physics and Icelandic reverie. We had texts, the heaviest of which was Chapman’s Piloting: Seamanship and Small Boat Handling. You could spend several lifetimes mulling his advice in those 624 mercilessly dense pages and still miss thousands of tips on knots, navigation, boat handling, anchoring, line splicing and so much more. Bernard was outraged to learn that the long-dead Charles F. Chapman—Chap, to his pals—was a powerboater. No wonder his section on sailing ran only twenty-six pages! Chap owned a stinkpot!
But there’ve been fifty-seven editions of that book for a reason, the Bobos told us. And Chapman, while hardly Mr. Excitement, nor even alive, was one of our professors. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been repeatedly asked, What would Chap do?
Yet our required reading wasn’t all tedious. We also were assigned our namesakes’ books: Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way and Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World.
Slocum set out to sea from Massachusetts in a stubby oyster sloop just shy of thirty-seven feet on April 24, 1895, back when it wasn’t considered possible, much less advisable, to circumnavigate the planet by yourself in a small sailboat. Many people—probably not the Mensas of their time—insisted it was impossible to go around the world seeing how it was so clearly flat. Mr. Slocum, don’t you mean you intend to sail across the world? But Slocum didn’t care what anybody thought. He just did it and told his story in the breezy fashion of a fearless captain who’d already witnessed everything the oceans could hurl at him. When he waxed about his boat, as sailors must, he lauded and defended it like a loyal spouse and occasionally veered into anthropomorphic zeal, but never once went batshit.
“I heard water rushing by, with only a thin plank between me and the depths…But it was all right; it was my ship on her course, sailing as no other ship had ever sailed before in the world.”
People write memoirs about drug binges, suburban angst or raising llamas and try to make them sound unique and harrowing. Slocum did the opposite. He understated exotic adventure, at one point offhandedly describing how he fended off cannibals by changing clothes and hats whenever he emerged from the cabin to make it appear that several men were on board. I recall some of his sentences like they were my own, but the line our father made us memorize was: “To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.”
I read Slocum with an awe dwarfed only by the mounting burden of being as horrifically misnamed as all the clumsy Graces, gloomy Hopes, stingy Charitys, and disingenuous Franks. Even photos of big waves made me queasy despite a birth certificate swearing that I was, indeed, Joshua Slocum Johannssen.
However, Bernard’s namesake would become his North Star. A so-called mystic, Moitessier was in position to win the very first solo, nonstop, round-the-world race in 1969 when the Frenchman said, Fuck it (Le baiser, actually), and instead of heading north to the finish line, he’d continued sailing his ketch eastward through the Indian Ocean. “My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands,” he wrote in a note to the London Sunday Times, which he’d slingshotted onto a passing ship. (How cool is that?) “I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.”
Yet the Moitessier quote that Bernard stapled to the wall above his bunk was: I FEEL HAPPY, LIGHT, AT ONCE DETACHED FROM EVERYTHING AND IN CONTROL OF EVERYTHING, AS WHEN ALL DEBTS ARE WIPED AWAY AND YOU CAN LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE.
There it was: Live your own life!
Moitessier’s decision to swap victory for peace of mind played a role in the evolution of every Johannssen kid, but who could have predicted all that would unfold? And determining whether the Fr
enchman deserves credit or blame is like assigning intent to a meteorite. Regardless, our readings coincided with Bernard’s burgeoning disdain for rules and authority. He shunned seat belts and helmets and drove without a license. If he saw signs warning SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, he looked for something to steal.
I doubt Father ever slowed down enough to read The Long Way or grasp how much Moitessier’s philosophies contradicted his own. Peace, he’d assured us, came with winning. The unspoken goal of all his schooling, of course, was to create a dynasty of Olympic-caliber racers, though it was increasingly obvious that only one of his children inherited that chromosome. Even on big boats. Ruby never glanced at instruments to see if we’d sped up or the wind had mellowed. She knew.
Most people don’t give wind much thought. Ask where it comes from and why it goes where, and they’ll shrug. Except Mother. Wind, she told us, usually begins with the heat of the sun changing the density and moisture of our atmosphere. I had this memorized by age nine: Wind is the consequence of variation.
And without wind, how would the planet express itself? If dead calm was the norm, trees would never sway or dance. Lakes would be as flat and dull as a Thorazine buzz. The windiest city on earth is Wellington, New Zealand, where it blows an annual average of sixteen knots. Half the days of the year it averages over thirty. So people stay the hell away, right? Nope. Wellington’s among the world’s most-beloved destinations. The least-windy place on earth? Oak Ridge, Tennessee, averages a three-knot draft, barely a mouse fart. So it must be a getaway for honeymooners and yoga retreats? Nope, they built atomic bombs there in part because nobody wanted to live there.
We want and need wind. Sure, it’s a complicated psychological relationship, starting with the first lullaby we hear. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. How comforting. Yet for some reason we treat even the most villainous windstorms like endearing alcoholic relatives. Why else would we christen violent hurricanes with names like Andrew and Katrina? Earthquakes and tornadoes generate similar mayhem, yet we don’t name those brutes.
Ruby’s understanding of wind was wildly out of proportion with her grasp of everything else. She always took everybody literally and never saw the point of apostrophes or nonphonetic spelling. Nobody bit her tongue more often or broke more nails or swallowed more gum. By her teens she began attracting a succession of dubious boyfriends—as Bernard put it, the Who’s Who of Ballard Fuckups. She’d fall for lame pranks onshore. Yet at the helm she was steady eyed, unfoolable. Something about reading the wind focused her. I should know. Nobody watched her sail more than me.
Once I got my license, I’d drop her off at the lake after school and return early enough to see the final race. She competed mostly against older high school boys. The general rule: the less wind, the bigger her lead. In little or no breeze she’d be so far ahead it looked like she was in a different race. Nobody maximized their time in gusts better or read the conditions as well, not just the shifts but the lulls disguised as shifts, as if she’d downloaded a bird’s-eye view of the course with its invisible overlay of ever-changing tacking lanes.
But like a musician who plays by ear, she couldn’t teach it. And she wasn’t always right, occasionally finishing near the back when she’d gamble on shifts that never came. Usually, though, she won easily.
Most of us learn the basics, how to pull the strings that shape the sails to make the boats move reasonably well at different angles to the wind. The more skilled puppeteers, like my father or Mario, could make sailboats fly like birds. And then there was Ruby. She was the bird.
Between races, I’d watch her do the mortal things, stretching her arms and neck with no more tension than if she were moseying around the yard. At fifteen, she was growing into herself and sliding from cutie to beauty. Mario Seville and the rest of these older boys getting trounced by her every Tuesday afternoon were no doubt already helplessly in love.
BOAT PORN
Sailboats and women. The wiring of men gets messed up here. There is something so irresistibly feminine about sailboats that men forget they are things. Why else would even the surliest of mariners name their boats Roxanne or Juliette? It’s not just love but lust. Trust me, there’s something oddly carnal going on. Sailboats arouse.
Why else would a marketing juggernaut like Pfizer shoot a Viagra commercial that shows a middle-aged man sailing a J/29 by himself and suddenly having to replace a failed boom shackle. Why it fails at all is a mystery. There are maybe three knots of wind and barely any pressure on the sails. But that’s missing the point because: “You’ve reached the age where you’ve learned a thing or two,” says Voice-Over Man, who sounds like he gets laid twice a day. “This is the age of knowing what needs to be done. So why would you let something like erectile dysfunction get in your way?”
Of a little boat maintenance?
Apparently. Because this MacGyver wannabe pulls a strap off a life preserver and ties a makeshift tether to secure the boom and sail long enough to find a substitute shackle in the cabin below. After he screws that on, he removes the tether in a swift sensuous tug, as if discarding his own belt.
“Isn’t it time you talked to your doctor about Viagra? Twenty million men already have.”
So what’s the takeaway here?
Fixing small problems on your boat with an erection equals good times? That’s more than a little confusing. Cialis ads are all about being ready when the moment is right. There’s always a fetching middle-aged woman somewhere in the commercial. But Viagra strands you solo on a sailboat in no wind, with your jib oddly back winded because your boat’s getting towed and you’re an actor who doesn’t know how to sail. Why Viagra advocates woodies in solitude is another mystery. Yet near the end of the ad, as the fake sailor glides toward the dock amid the disclaimer that these pills might leave you blind, deaf and permanently hard, he looks so sated you half expect him to light a Marlboro. Confusing? Yes, but the point is these marketing geniuses in the boner business understand how to exploit the peculiar wiring of men when it comes to sailboats.
Or consider Boat Porn. That’s the subject line of thousands of e-mails sent daily when men share photos of their fantasy boats, with juicy high-resolution gigapixel images of curvaceous hulls, swanky interiors and mouthwatering sterns. Listen closely to men talk about their dream boats, and you can hear the infidelity in their voices.
It was Grumps who first suggested the libido link. He’d driven us to Shilshole Marina to stroll the docks, as usual, but there was one particular beauty he wanted to show us—an old panther-sleek schooner named Rainbird. It didn’t take a trained eye to see she had all the salty charm that forty feet of wood, glass and bronze can conjure. Still, he clearly saw something more.
“Just looking at her almost brings me to orgasm,” he volunteered, not realizing how weird that sounded to his three teenaged grandchildren. From his vantage, though, he was earnestly sharing an unvarnished truth.
As a part-time surveyor, I see infatuation in the eyes of potential buyers like the man I met last April at a Bremerton yard to examine a forty-year-old Alberg 30.
Upright on stands, dripping like a bikini model, her cruising curves and varnished teak glistened in the early sun. She looked young for her age, with a spoon bow and a heart-shaped stern slightly narrower than the one belonging to the buyer’s wife, who stood at a disgruntled distance to size up her latest rival.
Assessing a boat this old is a bit like giving your middle-aged date a physical. You tap her decking to check for rot (bone loss) and listen for structural weaknesses (bum hip or shoulder). You hunt for deep blisters in the hull (skin cancer) and see how worn-out her sails (lungs) are and make sure her engine (heart) sounds reliable and that she hasn’t been sailed so hard (lived so recklessly) that her rigging or mast step (adrenals) are fried.
Sliding a bare hand along the base of her keel, I could feel where she’d grounded but found no voids or delamination. I wiped bottom slime
on my jeans and looked up, knowing the couple’s eyes would be all over me.
When he started firing questions, I offered discouraging grunts and climbed a ladder to the deck without glancing at either one of them, then went to work with what Noah called my little hammer of doom, hunched over and tapping the deck, listening for ominous thuds.
Afterwards, I spent a couple hours exploring the cabin, with a flashlight and mirror, checking and touching, testing and even tasting everything like a kid left alone for too long in a doctor’s office.
Fire extinguisher loaded with current tag? Check.
Operable shutoff valve to galley stove? Check.
All thru-hulls double clamped? No. Corroded clamp on the raw-water-intake seacock.
Operable running lights, cabin lights and VHF? Check, check, check.
Crawling beneath the cockpit, I pulled out the noise insulation and wedged myself beside the twenty-horse Yanmar to look for abrasion, corrosion or oil leaks. Then my hip started vibrating so I gingerly fished my cell phone from my pocket without checking the incoming number.
“This is Josh.”
“Tell me you’ve got that damn keel off already,” my father began, his voice breathy and halting as if he’d been lunging up stairs.
Exhaling through my nose, I wiggled my thumb over the OFF button. He’d gone from calling but never leaving messages to bludgeoning me with daily demands and updates.
“They’re casting the new one right now,” he declared. “Should’ve already been done, but you gotta be ready to roll when it arrives. New rudder will be trucked to your yard on Thursday. Friday at the latest. Well?”
“What?”
“Sounds like you’re in a tin can. You’ve had that boat for nine days now, but I bet you haven’t even taken a look at the keel bolts yet. Surprise me! What’ve you got to report?”
“I’ve been busy.” Dizzy from diesel fumes and sweating profusely now from the waist up, I wiggled my torso to give my chest more space to expand between the engine block and the curved hull. “Getting to your project in my spare time hasn’t been my top priority.”