by Jim Lynch
“I’m here.”
“Hello? Josh?”
“I’m here!”
“You heard anything from Bernard?”
“Yes!”
“Josh? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Ruby! Yes!”
“You there?”
“Yes!”
“Well, if you can still hear me,” she said quietly, as if talking to herself, “plan on dinner at the Teardown the Saturday before the race to plot our brilliant strategy.” Then she giggled and hung up.
After the line died, I frantically redialed and a robotic voice informed me that the message box was full.
Only then did I look up and notice Trent and the nudists staring at me as if I’d just lunged so far out of character they no longer recognized me.
Instead of retreating to my bunk, I found myself pedaling blindly into the soggy night, my sister’s voice reverberating inside me as I glided past mumbling street guitarists and the buzz and rustle of downtown back out to the soaked boatyard.
The Joho 39 had been sitting there for eleven days, but I hadn’t given it more than nervous glances or, for that matter, looked closely at any of these models since my father sold Freya II—against everybody’s wishes—during another slump at Johannssen & Sons. Spotting one crouched at a dock, much less under sail, unhinged me. But this boat came with so much baggage, had such an offensive name—Hell Bitch—and looked so neglected, as if she’d been banging against a dock for the past decade, I hadn’t felt any affection until now. With her to myself finally, her graceful bulky silhouette felt like family.
The design had lost its prestige long ago. Too spare to be a posh cruiser, too heavy to race competitively, she’d still managed to hang around for twenty-eight years and circumnavigate the planet at least three times and had, no doubt, been in and out of almost every celebrated harbor on every continent, not to mention every cove and cranny of our inland sea.
I was a toddler when the Bobos invented her, but long after we’re all dust, there’ll likely be a few restored Joho 39s hurtling downwind, buckling the knees of boaters who can’t resist old curvy low-slung sloops that meshed Father’s desire for speed with Grumps’s insistence on beauty and comfort. The compromises were obvious. An overhanging bow for elegance and anchoring ease combined with flat hull sections aft and forward to boost downwind surfing, velocity and control.
This design was the yardstick by which I assessed all others. Length 39 feet 1 inch, waterline 33 feet 3 inches, beam 11 feet 4 inches, displacement 13,700 pounds, sail area/displacement ratio 18.8. Sailboat stats relax me. Show me the numbers, and I’ll tell you how she sails in different conditions. Given the age and general condition, I can tell you what she’s worth, how pretty she is, then dial up her racing handicap within ten seconds a mile.
Walking around her several times, I wondered how the eight of us—counting Grumps and the two Labs—got along at all inside this plastic shell less than half the size of a mobile home. Yet stuffed with ropes, chains, fenders, sails, cereal, books, beer, wine and sleeping bags, this had been room enough. We did so much more together when we were aboard it—more reading, laughing, conversing and singing, with Grumps leading us in ridiculous sea chanteys before invariably leading us aground.
We hit bottom twice on the same day in Active Pass, first on the east side, then on the west. Three days later, we were marooned on a sandbar in the Georgia Strait. So we raised sails and gathered on the lower rail, except for little Ruby, whom we left at the wheel in case we broke free of the mercifully soft Fraser River delta. This went on for almost two chilly hours until Grumps and Bernard winched Father halfway up the mast, the harness squeezing his crotch enough to make his voice climb as he ranted about everything that was annoying him, including the snickering below.
Finally a puff of wind in tandem with the rising tide sprung us free, under sail and accelerating at an extreme tilt with all of us bracing to hit bottom yet again while Father dangled more precariously by the minute and shouted to get him the hell down, sending Ruby into hysterics. Yet nobody risked lowering him or relieving her for fear of jinxing our escape into deeper water.
The last time I saw Grumps, I asked why we ran aground so often. “Were charts that poorly marked back then?”
He stared into his beer, contemplating the bubbles. “I have no idea,” he said. “Your mother claims Einstein ran aground all the damn time.”
It’s true that a peculiarly high percentage of Einstein’s sailing stories ended with him hitting bottom or getting rescued or towed home in the dark. And when the famous scientist messed up in a boat, the world heard about it. In the summer of 1944, the New York Times considered it newsworthy when the sixty-five-year-old sailed into a rock and capsized in a lake high in the Adirondacks, where the genius was temporarily trapped beneath his sail, his leg entangled in rope before he clawed to the surface.
During our longest family odyssey, we lived together on the 39 for twenty-four straight days. We ate s’mores every night. Grumps taught us Nordic myths and how to yodel. We played countless games of Yahtzee. In one quiet Canadian marina, Bernard put on his Zorro mask, fake sword and cape and had me winch him off the deck so he could swing over the crowded boat of strangers next to us and shout, in a bad Spanish accent, “How much for your leetle girls?”
Freya II was so much more than a boat. She was our portal to the rest of the world. Aboard her, we saw orcas and humpbacks, porpoises, dolphins and menageries of seabirds and tidal crawlers. Near the end of one trip, we lay on the deck and stared at the blazing constellations while Mother informed us that we were all an inch longer lying down than standing up because gravity wasn’t compressing the tissues in our spine. She also told us how the moon would’ve spun off into space long ago without the earth’s suction holding it close, and that all objects asserted pulls. Neptune, she explained, wasn’t discovered until an alert astronomer detected a wobble in Uranus’s orbit around the sun that hinted at some unseen sphere tugging it slightly off course.
Staring tonight at the pleasing shape of this downtrodden Joho 39, I hoped that if properly mended she might possess enough gravity to tug the family back together again, at least for a weekend.
Next thing I knew, I was removing the warped teak floorboards to examine the keel bolts and the integrity of the reinforced keel trunk with its familiar final layer of twenty-four-ounce roving and its trademark I-beams supporting the thick mast step. I spent the remaining hours before sunrise sanding and silently vowing to make the hull as smooth and true and flawless as it was when this 1984 Joho 39, Hull Number 13, emerged from the mold at Johannssen & Sons.
HEARTLESS HUNKS OF PLASTIC
Families split over money, betrayal and abuse, over resentments, infidelities and misunderstandings, over people being jackasses. Most anything can rattle the fault lines. Yet I know of only one family torn asunder by a sailboat race. Actually, by a single moment and a spontaneous push of a tiller. Other smaller quakes preceded the big one, but during most of those, my father, not my sister, was the skipper.
When racing, he dictated not only boat maneuvers but mood and emotion, too. If he joked, we all loosened, but you wouldn’t intentionally distract him any more than you’d heckle a man listening to the tumblers of a bank vault. Shoot the breeze at the wrong time, and he’d turn his bulging blues on you. He expected everybody to talk, think and daydream about how to make us go faster, as if a tad more teeth-grinding, spoon-bending concentration might will our boat ahead of the fleet. You didn’t pack beer or an ounce of unessential weight. You ate lunch discreetly, if at all.
David Binstein violated all these tenets.
Built like a three-hundred-pound boar, Binny was popular with shorthanded skippers struggling to keep their overpriced, underballasted boats level and fast. And he’d raced enough to understand his role as prime railmeat, nimbly switching sides with each upwind tack, cantilevering his heft out over the lifelines at just the right spot and moment. His weight, though, was
simply hurting us on the final downwind leg of this disappointing day of summer racing in 1999 when he launched his third frat story of the afternoon while mauling an egg-salad sub and chasing it with a Busch Light.
This one began with some pledge attending his first football game and Binny waving him toward the middle of the student section, shouting that he’d saved him a seat.
“So this pimpled dweeb heads out to me, excusing himself past maybe forty or fifty students with his huge smile and a foot-long hot dog.” As usual, Binny’s giggling slowed his own storytelling. Veins pulsed in my father’s forehead as two more boats gained on us.
“This kid had no idea we were such great friends,” Binny continued. “I mean, I saved him a seat, right? He’s flattered! So when he finally gets to me, I lift him up and yell, ‘Body pass!’ ”
Pop’s jaw muscles twitched as a Synergy 1000 passed us. I knew he saw this final run as the last chance to salvage the day. We were on Freya II, which felt sluggish downwind compared with pricey new lighter designs like that goddamn Synergy. The economic inequalities of the sport infuriated Father, especially this recent wave of dot-com newbies who’d drop a couple hundred on a boat and sails. Buying trophies, he called it. Stubbornly, we continued racing our aging boat against these young peacocks like the one skippering yet another featherlight blowing past us with its sexy see-through sails.
“So this kid gets passed all the way down to the front row. And everybody’s been leaning in and taking bites of his hot dog.” Binny’s neck jiggled with suppressed laughter. “So by the time he reaches the cheerleaders, there’s about this much left.” He held his thumb and forefinger a half inch apart and loudly inhaled, dizzy with mirth. “And that’s the part that gets me,” he squeaked, wiping his eyes, “the expression on this kid’s face at what’s left of his—”
“Off!” Father thundered. “You’re a waste of space, Binstein! Get the hell off! Now!”
Binny dropped his can, and what beer was left sloshed along the toerail.
“Off!” Father yelled again.
Binny looked around in disbelief.
“Dad,” I said gently, being the closest to him, “take it easy now.” See, I’d watched his rutted forehead do the math, estimating our total crew weight at fourteen hundred pounds and realizing the difference three hundred might make in the final mile. He’d probably also factored in that it was late July and the water was warmish, that we were out of sight on the edge of the course.
“Now!” he demanded. “We’ll pick you up after we finish!”
Then we finally all started objecting at once, but to our amazement Binny lifted one of his meaty legs over the lifelines. I don’t know what Bobo Jr. thought would happen. Regardless, he didn’t object when Bernard followed Binny’s kerplunk by shouting, “Man overboard! Douse the chute and prepare to jibe and rescue!” And he did start the engine and execute the U-turn while we tackled the spinnaker, dropped the main and powered back to our bobbing frat boy, his undersized life preserver barely keeping his chin above the small waves.
“C’mon!” Father said, trying to laugh it off. “Who seriously thought he’d jump?”
“Dad,” Bernard said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “you’re an asshole.”
Our father forced a smile and glanced around, counting on his cartoonish ability to reinflate himself. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “we all are.”
“Nice try,” Bernard said, “but you can’t spread this blame. Too many witnesses to warp reality this time.”
He was right. Our crew that day included three youngsters who sailed and drank with just about everybody, which meant this story would be passed from bar to bar, race to race, year to year, along with more exaggerated lore about our father illegally pumping or sculling or hitting marks or ramming boats on purpose or shattering a Coke bottle on the mast when he was upset with how the spinnaker was handled.
By the time Ruby began her senior year later that fall, the wheels of normalcy were coming off. She’d glance at the phone before it rang. Or she’d turn to me and say “It’s about to rain” seconds before it did. Or she’d suddenly whisper “Visitors” right before the dogs yelped. Maybe her hearing was bizarrely acute, but that didn’t explain the early September evening when she blurted, with obvious alarm, “Where’s Momma?”
“Safeway?” Grumps said, looking up from a letter he was writing to the latest critic who’d denounced Steinbeck as too political or too sentimental. “She shops on Thursdays, right?”
My father folded and creased the sports section and glanced at the clock. “What’s the problem? It’s not even seven yet.”
“Something happened,” Ruby mumbled. Her new haircut made her distress even more palpable. She’d started cutting it extra short to avoid the double takes it generated when long and curly. Still, mothers asked ours which dye Ruby used to get that burnt-orange hue. They’d always look disappointed, then suspicious, to hear it was natural.
It was another hour before we got the call that our mother had been rear-ended on 45th at what had to be nearly the exact instant Ruby had inquired about her whereabouts.
Before skidding to the hospital in the flatbed, we all stared at her until she shouted that she had no idea how she felt the jostling of our mother’s remarkable brain.
Just the week before, Mother had sat me down to tell me the saga of Fermat’s famous last theorem.
Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician whose final brainstorm came in 1637, when he declared that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. Not a holy-shit revelation to most of us, this theorem became a pillar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mathematics despite the fact that Fermat never provided the proof to back it up. Not surprisingly, re-creating this missing evidence became the holy grail of mathematicians for well over three hundred years, until a skinny Brit named Andrew Wiles pulled that rabbit out of his cap in 1995. Mother showed me a video in which Wiles described his quest and how he spent years working secretly in his attic before presenting his findings at Cambridge in 1993—only to discover a critical error. Devastated, he quietly returned to the task until he realized that an idea he’d abandoned long ago provided the missing link. “It was the most thrilling moment of my life,” he said, choking up and turning away from the lens.
That’s when I noticed my mother was weeping, too. “His name,” she whispered, “will always be attached to this grand achievement. There is nothing anybody can do to improve his proof. It stands on its own like Mozart’s Requiem. Hundreds of years from now, people will still know his name.”
It was the first time I’d sensed her ego, her need to leave her mark. Call it my mother’s version of the midlife crisis. But that was just part of it. She also was at war with the Bobos about the ongoing education of her children, the most recent flash point coming when they persuaded me to continue working in the boathouse—for just one more year—instead of heading off to college. Though she’d objected when Bernard went straight from high school to the boathouse, she’d thrown a mini-tantrum when I did the same. “I refuse to be the only educated member of my own family,” she’d declared. “I did not bear and raise children to work in your damn boat factory!”
As the Olympic trials neared, Father implored Ruby to train harder, pointing out that other racers wouldn’t have an extra pound on them. Ruby persisted in ignoring him and sticking to her own habits, gorging on Cheetos and giving her possessions away to friends and acquaintances, her bicycle, snow skis and sailing gloves, her watch and necklaces, my skateboard. “They’re busting their butts five hours a day, every day, even Sundays,” he’d chide her over dinner.
“It’s just sailing!” she finally erupted, then doubled the blasphemy. “And sailboats are just heartless hunks of plastic!”
The Bobos stared at their plates. Grumps cracked his toes. Father ground his teeth, outrage misting off his skin and hair. Mother and Bernard twitched in and out of grins.
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Ruby’s stack of unread racing books continued to grow, and I couldn’t blame her. Why study something that came as naturally as breathing?
Though it wasn’t like she always won. She’d lost races steering big boats. Yet on her lonesome, in a Laser, when it mattered, she’d won every major local and regional competition she’d entered since she was twelve. At fifteen, she won the Youth Nationals, easily. Now she was about to face the best women sailors in the country for a spot on the 2000 U.S. Olympic team bound for Sydney next summer.
Even to me, this sounded like more than just sailing. More like legacy, as if generations of genetics and ambition and lore had been bubbling toward this climax.
THE FAMILY PIG PILE
No girl Ruby’s age had ever won the trials. Still five five and a teen-soft one hundred twenty pounds, she was up against thirty-two adults, gym-sculpted women in their twenties with sponsors, husbands and abs like boxers. Once again, the math and physics and odds were against her. But she’d qualified, and our father had immediately entered her in the regatta, serendipitously held this year half an hour from the Teardown, which made her the local darling underdog complete with an Olympic bloodline.
I was more nervous than she was. Her rivals were grown-up wizards who’d traveled from the lakes, bays and rivers they’d dominated all across America. Sailing was their life, and Ruby was barely seventeen and seemed even younger.
A humbling opening day that left her with two thirds, a fifth and a seventh was softened by the fact nobody had really dominated yet, except for a former collegiate champion from Lake Superior who was twenty-five, six one and a mother of twin boys. Mother Superior—as we called her—had a first, two seconds and one disqualification.
Ruby was in the top three for the next seven—including four firsts!—and in second place overall with three races remaining on the final day. So there we all were, stacked along log-strewn Golden Gardens Park to witness the potential coronation of our family obsession on a record hot day.