by Jim Lynch
There’s a shrink in town with a business called sailingtherapy.com. He takes out bickering couples, mother-daughter squabblers and the chronically depressed. He readily admits he offers little beyond the natural high of sailing. It doesn’t hurt that they’re mostly women and he has dreamy eyes and an FM voice, but the ride alone usually solves or at least eases their problems.
Yet as therapeutic as sailing is, it’s awkward for romance. Cramped, mildewed boats don’t conjure foreplay. My initial online pitch—Sailor looking for love—attracted women seeking novelties. Many were freshly divorced and disrobing before I knew them at all. Afterwards, some dates looked so remorseful, like they’d just cheated on somebody far worthier, which in turn left me bluesy, wandering the docks. Even Kirsten, who’d been with me long enough for everything to bloom and wither and bloom and wither yet again, felt so wholesome compared with these escapades. But they continued, though few truly enjoyed the sailing. Many were nervous, some uninterested, their faces sagging with boredom.
Number 27, however, was thrilled. On our third sail, she suddenly insisted we do it on board, seeing as how there was no wind. She was older, never married, seemingly stable, often funny. I hoped she’d last. We admired many of the same books. This wasn’t common, and in fact it had evolved into my lone date disqualifier. Your favorite authors can’t be romance novelists. This woman was a Tom Robbins fanatic, and she admitted after a third mojito that she occasionally thought of him while getting off.
I laughed. “He’s gotta be pushing eighty.”
She puckered a grin. “Have you read Jitterbug Perfume?”
During my family’s early cruising days, we’d passed a seemingly unmanned vessel flying a tiny jib and a JUST MARRIED banner. “God bless them,” Grumps said. The next time we saw the same setup, I overheard my father call it “the international sign of fornication.” I didn’t have a banner, though I did fly my smallest jib on this eerily calm Sunday afternoon.
We were below, in the bow, fully engaged, when I heard water suddenly gurgling beneath the hull. I’d strapped the tiller to the middle but sensed a puff pushing us to port. Eyes clenched, she seemed so close I didn’t want to interrupt things and ask her to look out the hatch to see if we were headed toward shore. Who knew what writers she was fantasizing about now? A young Vonnegut talking filthy? Melville in waders? Faulkner in nothing but a cowboy hat?
I was pondering all that while also trying to calculate speed and location, tidal height and likely depths, without getting too distracted, when my cell started blaring behind us—my father, I knew without looking, demanding a progress report or exhorting me to pounce or informing me the new goddamn rudder should’ve already arrived.
As anybody who’s ever tried to please a woman or get a small sailboat up on a plane knows, it can take a whole lot of tweaking and tightening and gentle adjustments. Then either yeowwww! or you slam, precrescendo, into a sandbar like we did, thudding to a halt as gently as I could’ve hoped, though firmly enough to eject Number 27.
She couldn’t have been more alarmed or embarrassed if we’d been abruptly boarded by the Coast Guard. Even after I’d backed us off the bar into deeper water, she couldn’t look at me, much less laugh.
I called Grumps during his happy hour the following day to recount the fiasco. His opening chuckles deepened into full-throated cackling as I described the mounting complications, then turned asthmatic once I told him about Father’s untimely call. His ensuing coughing spasms had me contemplating hanging up and dialing 911. None of his health threats sounded too dire, but add them all together—ministrokes and tiny blood clots, rising prostate numbers and elevated liver enzymes—and the little man seemed to be under siege. “She wouldn’t have lasted anyway,” he finally rasped. “No sense of humor. Although maybe you’re no Captain Casanova.”
From what I’ve gathered, Einstein wasn’t either. If photos tell us anything, his sailing dates were overdressed and constipated. Mostly, he went out by himself.
Perhaps sailing is a vehicle for thought, not seduction. Maybe Einstein’s boldest notions and thought experiments came to him while riding or awaiting wind with no risk of phone calls or visits from students, friends or family. Where better to ponder light and gravity, time and relativity?
During our homeschooling Sundays, Grumps once made the case—after a few Rainiers—that the history of the world was written by whoever sailed best. Early on, the Egyptians topped the heap because they figured out how to sail goods up the Nile, he told us. Then business boomed for the Arabs once their new triangular sails enabled them to travel upwind. And China’s early dominance, he assured us, coincided with the advent of its sturdy sails that folded up like venetian blinds.
In my early days in the boatyard, Jack used to tell us we were performing a community service. Without us, he said, the motorized boating world would fade away and all waves would come from wind, with no sounds other than the occasional flap of oars or sails. That scenario always appealed to me. Maybe we’d all think more clearly. Sailing and big ideas go together. That’s why boats attract some people the way churches lure others. Knowingly or not, we sail in hopes of answering larger questions.
In the summer of 1939, in between solo afternoon sails on Cutchogue Harbor along Long Island Sound, Einstein sent FDR a letter urging him to build an atomic bomb before Germany did. Other than that fateful letter, it was a serene summer of sailing and playing music with a fellow violinist who owned the local department store.
In the end, all Einstein wanted to know was how God created this world. “I want to know His thoughts,” he used to say. “The rest are details.” He spent his final years working on unifying theories that could explain and connect everything. Light and gravity. Atoms and solar systems. Violins and sailboats.
A CRUSH ON EINSTEIN’S BRAIN
My mother encouraged us to revel in historical flash points when conventional wisdom got kicked in the nads. Like when Copernicus suggested the sun didn’t revolve around the earth. Even better, the moment Galileo used his homemade telescope to prove that Copernicus was right and our humble planet wasn’t the center of anything other than the orbit of one puny moon. Her favorite Einstein moment came fourteen years after he first jolted the scientific community with daring theories he’d generated during his midtwenties in his spare time. Those ideas made him famous among his peers, but his fanfare was about to flash to the masses.
In Newton’s universe, time and space were constants, but Einstein came along and said, Hold on, Isaac! I don’t think so. The speed of light—671 million miles per hour—is the only constant we can truly count on. And I’m also pretty sure energy and mass are connected by the square root of the speed of light.
While scientists debated his brain-twisting abstractions, a solar eclipse finally offered a world stage to prove or disprove his bewitching premises, that gravity bends light and distorts the night sky far more than anybody realized and that Newton’s long-accepted grid of the cosmos was an oversimplification.
On May 29, 1919, the moon obscured the sun for slightly more than seven minutes, providing a dark-enough sky to measure the difference between the real and apparent location of a star positioned slightly behind the sun. The star should not have been visible from earth. Yet because the sun’s gravitational suction bent the starlight around it by the precise amount Einstein’s general theory of relativity had predicted, the star appeared beside, not behind, the obscured sun. His far more precise understanding of gravity suddenly changed the way Man looked at the cosmos.
“Think about it,” Mother marveled. “The world had to go dark in order to be illuminated.” And for one grand moment—this was her favorite part—a scientist was the world’s biggest celebrity. As Charlie Chaplin told Einstein, “They’re cheering us both: you because nobody understands you, and me because everybody understands me.”
Mother might have understood Einstein better than she did us and never passed up an opportunity to explain and extol him.
/> When the first pocket GPS came out, she took one aboard with us so we could use the latitude and longitude readings to plot our location on the chart. “How can it be so accurate?” she asked, then explained how the device calculates its whereabouts by triangulating signals from satellites. To be precise, though, it needs to know exactly how long it takes to receive those signals to within a billionth of a second, which is tricky because satellites are moving and their signals are passing through the earth’s gravity. Getting an accurate reading wouldn’t have been possible, she told us, had Einstein not accurately predicted that the earth’s gravity sped up time ever so slightly, leaving time on a satellite thirty-eight-billionths of a second behind time on earth. Without his math, she explained, errors would grow by the hour and a GPS would be useless. “We know where we are thanks to Einstein.”
What I knew was that our mother had a crush on Albert’s mind.
By mid-2000 her astronomical research made diminishing sense to me, though I suspected she was ransacking the sky in search of anything that might help her get hired as a professor. Along with her résumé, she sent the UDub a summary of her findings, including a short paper on supernovas she’d published in Astronomy Now. A faculty friend assured her she was the front-runner. Yet the form letter response thanked her for applying, but unfortunately, due to such stiff competition for this position, we are unable to grant an interview.
It was the first setback I saw her unable to process. Ruby snubbing the Olympics or Bernard clogging on a police car were mere shudders compared with this derailment. She had the experience, the volunteer hours, the awards. She phoned the dean to make sure it wasn’t a mistake. They hired a young man from Amherst who would quit three years later for a post at Berkeley. They could’ve had our mother forever.
Suddenly her high cheekbones made her look gaunt. Her lips flattened, and her eyes narrowed. Her default expression became a thin frown. She forgot to wear bras. Chin whiskers went untweezed. She took to wearing thicker glasses and speaking in incomplete sentences. On clear nights, she’d stay on the roof till four o’clock, regardless of the temperature, then take a nap and rise for school only a few hours later.
I wanted to believe she was responding like a champion, by working harder, like Einstein after he got turned down for a high school teaching job.
Ruby’s response was to turn her senior project into an oral essay on sexism in science. “Given that less than five percent of research physicists are women,” she began, rehearsing her performance for me, “isn’t it remarkable there are three women on the top-ten list of scientists robbed of Nobel Prizes?”
She went on to cite, very convincingly, and at great length, the brilliance and brainstorms of Lise Meitner, who’d discovered that some of the missing mass involved with nuclear fission is converted into energy; Chien-Shiung Wu, who proved the daring theory that the widely accepted parity law didn’t apply to all nuclei; and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who detected a radio pulse that led to the recognition of pulsars as a previously unknown phenomenon coming from stars. In each case, of course, male colleagues or bosses or rivals got all the Nobel credit and love.
“My mother, as great a scientist as any of us will likely meet, could write you an equation to illustrate how women have to be twenty-five percent better and work thirty-five percent harder to get seventy-seven percent as much money for the exact same job,” Ruby told the panel of teachers and parents. “All of which might explain why the overrated physics department at our local university—an institution I will never attend or root for—has turned down my mother’s efforts to teach there. Twice!”
Wrapping up, Ruby offered a couple quotes: “As Gloria Steinem said a long time ago: ‘The truth will set you free, but first it might piss you off.’ For our purposes today, please keep that in mind.”
By this point, Ruby was blossoming into a persuasive public speaker, especially when it came to charming strangers into writing checks, first for the Red Cross and later for Mercy Ships, a floating hospital offering free medical care to impoverished Africans.
On this drizzly Wednesday morning in late May, she concluded with: “I will give the last word to my brilliant and patient mother, who says: ‘The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.’ ”
She waited a couple beats, then bowed.
One of the panelists broke into tears. None of them, including Ruby, realized this stirring closing line belonged to Einstein, not our mother.
The week after Ruby graduated, Mother pulled me into her office, her eyes blinking excessively. I thought Bernard must’ve phoned or that he’d been arrested or found dead in the Pacific.
Instead, she showed me a web page about some institute offering million-dollar rewards to anybody who could solve any of seven unsolved mathematical problems.
She tried explaining further, but her words started jumbling so she just scrolled and pointed.
For the past 150 years, the Navier-Stokes equations have been used on a daily basis throughout the world for all sorts of applications of fluid dynamics. Yet the equations remain mysterious. They aren’t as well understood as mathematicians would like, which is why we are offering a $1 million prize to whoever makes substantial headway into understanding these important equations.
“This one’s mine!” she hissed, clenching both fists. “You remember me talking about them, right? Waves and fluids and making sense of chaos?”
I nodded too vaguely.
“Navier and Stokes! C’mon, Josh! The French bridge builder and the Irish mathematician. Remember?”
“Yeah, sure, right.”
She was hard to listen to because I couldn’t get past her pained expression.
“It’s all about turbulence,” she said, “about what happens to these equations when complications mount. Throw in a little chaos, and everybody runs for the hills. But just because it gets complicated doesn’t mean the equations don’t continue to work! It’s still just an extrapolation of Newton’s laws of motion with an additional term for energy lost, okay? And I’m good with differential equations. I’m gonna take a run at this, Josh, but your father can’t hear about it or all he’ll see is money. No, this is for me.” She tapped her temples with her fingertips as her voice dropped to a whisper. “For me!”
FRANKENSTEINING HER
After a neurotic early spring of rain, sunshine and hail, summer seemingly arrived prematurely in late April with vegetable gardens exploding—FREE LETTUCE!—and massive mudflats exposing themselves to the warmth during one of the largest tidal swings of 2012.
The heat wave sent frantic boat owners scrambling to get their forgotten and neglected vessels into the water. Now! Before the rains returned or they ran out of cash. Now! Because their well-being, their biological clocks and the narratives of their lives suddenly hinged on getting their boats fixed and ready to launch. Whatever the cost! Erase months of inattention in a weekend. Preferably an hour. Now!
The yard bustled with boat brokers and surveyors and another wave of seasonal bottom painters like Austin, a tattooed dropout who got around on a skateboard towed by a pit bull named Fiona. As soon as Tommy launched one boat, he lifted another to take its place. Dozens more anchored in the deep end of the shallow harbor, waiting for an opening.
On our first break of the day, the boys huddled along the launch railing, seagulls wheeling overhead in search of leftover fries. Launch day had finally arrived for Rex and Marcy, the manifest-destiny couple from St. Louis. Everybody liked Marcy so much we’d all helped them for free. Even the port gave them a discount on lay time. Just two days earlier, I’d found them a storm jib and some used charts. I almost started liking Rex after he begrudgingly took my advice on tethers and strobes. But we were all about Marcy.
Tommy carefully lowered their Catalina toward the floating dock below, offering Marcy his first smile in weeks. We crowded the railing to watch the big-eyed couple. Rex kept scowling and readjusting his
hat while she pointed at us and rocked with laughter.
“Why do the biggest blowholes always get the best girls?” Mick asked. “Makes me think I need to become more of a prick.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Noah said. “You’re getting there.”
“Marcy’s just so real,” Mick continued. “I mean, all that food on her face and paint on her hands? Any of your computer dates that adorable, Josh?”
“Not even close.”
“Most of ’em are one-offs, right?” Leo asked. “Not many repeats, no?”
“True, but lately it’s been my call. Weird things start bugging me. I bailed on Number Twenty-Eight because she couldn’t spell. Hey, my sister can’t spell and I adore that about her. But this woman’s e-mails had at least one misspelled word in every sentence. When she spelled asshole w-h-o-l-e, I asked if she was referring to the entire butt and never heard from her again. Number Twenty-Nine was a divorced Realtor who put all her incoming calls on speakerphone no matter where we were or what we were up to or who was calling. How appealing is that? The next one must’ve read all those Cosmo articles you see in the checkout line about the fifty sizzling moves guaranteed to seduce a man. She had so many moves I didn’t know what to do.”
“Fifty moves?” Mick said. “I think I’ve got one.”