Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  I nodded. “What would your father think about you doing all this for Grady?”

  “He wouldn’t get it.”

  “Neither would mine.”

  We waited as Mick carefully maneuvered the crane, delicately lowering the 1943 eighty-eight-key Baldwin baby grand into this tired old yacht as if returning its long-lost heart.

  THE STUPID BITCH

  Mother liked to remind us that Einstein was a nobody, a peculiar twenty-six-year-old patent-office clerk with a pregnant girlfriend, when he changed the world. And the pantheon of scientists didn’t immediately embrace his daring ideas about gravity, energy and light, either, with years passing while they made the rounds and he climbed the rungs.

  The reaction to Mother’s brainstorm was, by contrast, almost instantaneous.

  Three weeks after we returned from Swiftsure, she posted her solution to the Navier-Stokes problem on a Cornell University website where scientists shared theories and findings.

  Her paper sat unnoticed for all of thirty-six hours before Nature magazine bannered her assertions in its online edition.

  Perhaps one of the greatest mathematical mysteries of all time has been solved by a high school physics teacher in Washington State named Marcelle Johannssen. If deemed accurate, this former state teacher of the year could be in line for a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. The problem involves the 19th century Navier-Stokes equations, which are at the heart of many fluid-mechanics calculations. Her solution is currently being examined by Dartmouth physics professor Wilson George, who has scrutinized three prior papers claiming to have also solved the old riddle. In those earlier cases, Mr. George found flaws within a few hours. He has looked at Ms. Johannssen’s paper considerably longer, he said, and at press time had yet to find any problems with her mini-wavelet approach to expanding our understanding of the equations. However, Mr. George cautioned that to be deemed worthy of the prize, Ms. Johannssen’s solution would have to withstand up to two years of scrutiny.

  That one paragraph drove the science bloggers into hysteria mode, with the nerd buzz rising loud enough to send the hyperventilating local media to the Teardown.

  Her voice shaking, Mother called me for advice when the first TV truck wheeled up. I told her to be her humble self and to say something like “Time will tell if I’m right, but I’ve given it years of thought and at the moment this is my best shot.” I should’ve encouraged her to tell them to go the hell away until it was confirmed.

  The interviews were predictably light on the science before badgering her about what she’d do with the cash. She was interested in the solution, she said, not the prize, though admitted she’d accept the million if it was offered. But what would she buy? “I’ve got a relative with some potentially large medical bills, and I’d sure enjoy a larger telescope.” Despite her stress and insomnia, she looked and sounded astonishingly good on TV. Grumps and Father were guardedly ecstatic, like lotto winners waiting to see the door-sized check.

  The Dartmouth prof with interchangeable names called the following morning for a brief conversation. Mother thanked him and removed her paper from the Cornell website, stating only that a serious flaw had been discovered and she needed to determine whether it could be overcome.

  Then the shitstorm kicked in. Who knew an angry, anonymous online mob couldn’t wait to sink their boots into her ribs?

  Just another charlatan—the stupid bitch thought she’d solved N-S!

  And there were more cordial, condescending commentaries that cited her lack of formal education:

  I don’t mean to be elitist, but more than ever, the most daring advances in mathematics come from people already at the pinnacle of their profession. The era of Swiss patent clerks or curious Seattle housewives making major contributions to our understanding of the universe is clearly over.

  She and I read every comment. So did the Bobos.

  Their reaction was to take five days off to build and wire an enclosed and heated cedar-paneled observatory on the Teardown roof. Then Father handed her a doodled gift certificate with a blank check and encouraged her to buy whatever telescope she desired.

  RUNAWAY MARINA

  My ideal marina would run like a co-op, where everybody makes their boats available to everybody else. Imagine it. We’ve got Hobies and Lasers, Stars and Vipers, J/Boats and Beneteaus, C&Cs and Hinckleys; yawls and ketches, sloops and trimarans. All of them used all the time by all of us. Handy people help maintain them for free moorage, beer and tips. It runs like a time-share, but you don’t have to fly to Hawaii or Mexico to enjoy them. They’re right here. Depending on your mood, you could sail a Santa Cruz on Monday, a sailboard on Tuesday and pop out on some old Thunderbird or Joho on Wednesday. There would be simple tests to qualify for different boats and rotating captains to teach the nuances, but skim past the insurance paranoia and you’d have my dream marina instead of the predictable and prevailing model with one underused and underloved sailboat per person.

  The first hint that Sunrise Marina was in for an altogether-unusual Saturday came when the corrugated-tin roof sheltering two C Dock slips blew off. Wind that wasn’t supposed to show until after four arrived shortly before noon, with wire and rope halyards pounding the hollow aluminum masts so hard they sounded like huge cowbells. Conversations turned into shoutfests, as the entire marina, humans and inanimates alike, groaned and rattled in the hinge-squeaking, rope-straining, temper-fraying onslaught of gusts and waves until that twenty-foot-by-forty-foot sheet of rusty roofing rattled loose over C-14 and C-16, crashing down onto an old Bayliner and an even-older Tollycraft, which unfortunately belonged to Noah.

  For the past three weeks he’d been slogging through his days in the boatyard like a sedated patient, a haunted look settling over him while he listened to his father preach nonstop, as he was doing right before the roof flew off. Mercifully and finally, tomorrow was doomsday. Survive the weekend, and theoretically he and we could resume our lives as sedentary humans.

  Yet Noah was riveted to the countdown. There were no impersonations, no mention of penguins, no razzing of the boys. He’d drunk himself out of his tics and twitches. Hungover and zombie faced, he performed his boatyard work with his father’s station always playing on his headphones. “You know,” he’d muttered the day before, “I’d completely forgotten how much I love the sound of his voice.”

  Saturday’s unexpected windstorm—they called for twenty-five knots, not forty-five—didn’t help keep things in perspective. Noah stepped out on deck after the roof slid off his boat and vanished into the murk. He glanced up at the turbulent sky, then retreated back inside to hear his father.

  “We are coming to the end of this spectacular drama,” the old preacher told his listeners. “Next will come an earthquake that the Bible says will be bigger than anything we’ve seen. And this quake will then open the graves of every believer who’s died during the past thirteen thousand years.”

  Despite the storm, it was warm enough for Rem to walk around in his boxers and T-shirt, griping about the marina owners being such cheapskates that the goddamn roofs were blowing off, as if this validated every slanderous charge anybody had ever made against them.

  The second hint that the day had hopped its rails was when a skinny platinum blond resembling my sister swaggered down the A Dock with her hand atop her head in the gale. It’d been just four weeks since I’d seen her at Swiftsure, yet she looked absolutely foreign all over again.

  “Aren’t you a pathetic sight!” she said, patting down her wig and exhaling theatrically. “This thing’s driving me crazy. Don’t look so concerned! I’ll be my fashionable self again in no time.”

  When I hugged her, she felt as thin and light as a bony ten-year-old. “Ouch!” she said, and asked to be put back down.

  “What’re you doing here?” I asked. “Why are you…why didn’t you…What I mean is I’m just surprised—and thrilled—to see you.”

  “Today’s that Star regatta, yes? Races star
t at three, I seem to recall. You apparently didn’t think I’d come or you wouldn’t be treating me like some ghost. Why didn’t I call? When do I ever call?”

  “Look around, Rube,” I said, palms up and pivoting. “The races were canceled. It’s blowing forty, gusting fifty. We just had a roof torn off.”

  “Since when do races get scratched because it’s windy?” she demanded, mimicking Father’s bravado.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is different.”

  “Hey,” she said, glancing past me, “is that the famous Mario?”

  Looking up, I saw him strapping thicker mooring lines to Yvonne’s Star.

  “Hey, Mario!” she shouted.

  He looked over to scowl at whoever was breaking his concentration. But then his eyes and mouth opened wide, and I swear his entire body wobbled, as he strode awkwardly toward us into the wind. I could tell he wanted to run.

  “Ruby?” he said when he got close, his face a mix of delight and concern. Then he bowed like Johnny and I did after losing races together—a deep one, as if greeting the queen. “Is that really you?”

  She pulled off her wig and rubbed her buzz cut. “I’m afraid so. Recently sold all my locks, though, so I’m kind of between hairdos. But wow, don’t you look fantastic? Larger and more adultish, but great. I came down to sail with my chickenshit brother, who now claims the races were canceled due to wind.”

  She tilted her head to the side as a gust whistled through the dock, rattling halyards and shaking roofs. “Any chance you’d take me out for a sail, Mario?”

  “All I’ve, why all I’ve got,” he stammered, “is the Star, and it’s not really mine. But if you want—”

  “Hey, I’m kidding. I don’t need to sail,” she said flatly, suddenly looking too tired to stand, then turned toward me and admitted, “I also came down to make sure Momma was okay with not solving that problem.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “She’s not all right.”

  Hatches and latches kept clanging. Tarps flew off some boats and wrapped around others. Loosely furled jibs swung out wide and drove boats against the docks. Another roof section flew off near Noah, widening his path to the heavens.

  I fried quesadillas in my galley and sorted embellishments from truths as Mario and I listened to my sister rave about how fantastic she felt. She was eating quinoa and raw vegetables and doing this yoga and that Tai Chi. Huge flocks of snow geese had changed their migratory paths to spend a weekend on her farm, she told us. “Woke up and looked out the window, and it was like a foot of snow had fallen. Guess the navigator goose got drunk or lost, or they decided our farm needed some fertilizer. It stinks, sure, but you still have to call that a gift from above, don’t you?”

  “But is everything in remission,” I pressed, “or are you just being positive?”

  She squinted. “Didn’t I cover that already? Everything looks great—except me. I’m recuperating.”

  “You’re too thin, Rube.”

  “Chemo doesn’t make you hungry, Josh, but I feel like a champ.” She punched the air in front of Mario’s nose. Then she wound down, ate very little and dozed on the bunk through the ensuing pandemonium. Mario sat there watching her sleep. I didn’t know how to ask him to leave.

  —

  Rem was the first to notice and ran to my boat. “Josh! Josh! We’re moving, Josh!” Then to everybody: “The marina’s moving!”

  I knew instantly what he meant because I’d been registering motion on some new level, something different than the wind and the current lapping against the hull. A look to shore confirmed it. We were heading out.

  Sunrise Marina was theoretically bolted and strapped to the dry land, and further secured by steel hoops looped over pilings as thick as telephone poles. But if the shore ties snapped and the pilings were short or rotting and the tide and waves washed high enough, how secure was it? Strangely, the storm actually seemed to be weakening at the moment the marina let go and started floating away.

  Most of the liveaboards couldn’t hear our warning cries until we were actually at their boats. The A, B and C Docks were now severed, along with water and power lines, from the rest of the marina. Some seventy-two boats, we’d later count, as well as eleven shacks and a partially roofed dock, were drifting out of the shallows, the floating docks and smaller piers bending at tortured angles yet moving as one, like a city block or a crowded trailer park suddenly sliding north. For many of these boats and owners, it marked their first outing in years.

  We continued alerting liveaboards hunkered obliviously below. Some, like Noah, had been drinking through the storm. I had Georgia, the former nun, and Cara—who’d moved aboard the Coronado 27 I’d rescued from demolition—make sure everybody put on life jackets, and before long we looked like some outward-bound expedition for wayward adults.

  I shouted repeatedly for everybody to prepare their anchors. “But do not drop them yet!” That didn’t keep Trent from misunderstanding and letting his fly and dragging it behind us until it pulled the cleat off his pier. I’d planned on dropping them en masse before we hit the log booms, but when we blew east into deeper water I realized there was a chance we could make it into the next cove and out of the storm’s path.

  That’s when I heard Ruby awaken and ask Mario, “What kind of crazy marina is this?”

  After we cleared the logs and rounded the treed peninsula, I had Rem double check that everybody had life jackets on and flashlights handy. “Everybody on C Dock,” I shouted, “get ready to drop your anchors!”

  Some tossed them over immediately.

  “Not yet!” I yelled.

  More anchors flew. Little ones, big ones, Danforths, Bruces, Deltas, plows.

  I gave up. “Okay! Now!”

  People threw anything they figured might stop us. Lunch anchors, grappling hooks, crab pots, fishing lures.

  “About sixty feet of scope!” I yelled. “And tie off to sturdy cleats.”

  The waves calmed. The docks somehow remained intact. Anchors seemed to hold. Grady checked his GPS and checked it again. “We are stationary!” he declared.

  We’d come to a stop almost a mile north of our address yet looked like we belonged, as if this were some sort of newfangled mobile marina you could get to only by boat.

  I had Rem do a head count. None of the eighteen liveaboards on the three docks was missing except a stoner named Wendell, who’d been washing his laundry and had come back to discover that his boat and dock had vanished.

  Calling the Coast Guard, I gave our coordinates and assured them that all residents and visitors were safe and accounted for—including Noah, who still hadn’t taken a break from his father’s broadcast to step outside and see what was happening.

  Checking on Ruby, I was startled to see Mario’s arm around her. “Mario works in transportation logistics!” she said, like this was the cutest thing she’d ever heard.

  With our runaway marina seemingly secure, the shortest night of the year rolled in as we congregated in front of Grady’s Shangri-la, seeing as how it was the largest boat and he had the most beer. Cramming aboard, we filled the air with our babbling astonishment while taking turns plinking childish songs on the baby grand.

  Ruby, in her dazzling wig, listened vacantly to Rem rattle on about how he deserved more acclaim for noticing our near catastrophe before anyone else. “I mean Paul Revere probably couldn’t buy his own drinks after alerting everybody, don’t you think?”

  I felt guilty for not doting on her, though Mario was giving her constant attention, shadowing her like a bodyguard. And I remembered how even a younger, healthy Ruby wilted at parties when she wasn’t the main draw. “You don’t want to play a little something?” I finally asked, pointing at the piano.

  Her left eyebrow gunned that idea down. “I’m exhausted,” she said as Georgia’s flawless “Yankee Doodle” elicited polite applause.

  At Mother’s insistence, Ruby had taken lessons but infuriated her teacher by refusing to l
earn how to read music. The only time I ever heard her play was in a bank. Why they had a piano, I have no idea, but she sat down and banged out something jazzy and fun before stopping in the middle, insisting that it wasn’t a real song and she’d messed it up anyway.

  When Georgia broke into “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” I made eye contact with Ruby, who shook her head but edged closer to the piano. And after a very slow rendition of “Skip to My Lou,” she asked if she could play.

  Georgia yielded reluctantly, but soon Ruby’s freakishly long fingers were poised over Grady’s baby grand as she got acquainted with the keys and pedals.

  “What’re you gonna play for us?” Georgia asked.

  “I don’t know songs,” Ruby said, finally looking up. “I just plunk around for something that sounds good to me.”

  Then she banged out several quick, clever rhythms, first with one hand, then both. People stopped chatting. Grady moved closer. With those quick riffs as her foundation, she shifted into a loud, fast and jazzy asymmetrical jag that she later called a variation on the one song she’d taught herself on the Mercy Ship’s piano, then she swung back to her initial rhythms. People started wiggling and moving—Mario whooped like we were at a rodeo—and as the sound rose up in this confined space, she returned to what felt like a catchy hook we all recognized but couldn’t quite place. By now she was milking the attention, closing her eyes, smiling and rocking from side to side. When she resumed that hook, Cara began to scat. That’s right—the dock lush who’d inherited enough money from her recently deceased aunt Ruth to cover her moorage bills was scatting. If you’d heard it on the radio it might’ve sounded all right, a decent voice with a little training, a sense of timing and a nice repertoire of bumgiddydeedees and shoobydobobbies. But given that she was ripping it in Grady’s mildewed fantasy lounge on a wonderfully peculiar night, it was Ella good. The best part, though, was watching my sister smiling and rocking so hard that her wig fell off. She kept swinging us back around to that same jazzy hook with Cara’s improv piling up on top of it. Nobody else was doing anything but listening and gasping and dancing in place. Resisting the encore calls, Ruby plunked around in hopes of finding another rhythm, misfired several times and then grabbed her wig and rose slowly, her fatigue a lead sweater by now, to acknowledge the applause.