Sailing as tangible metaphor

Sailing is one of my powerful occupations.  I got into sailing when I was taken out on a sailboat on the last day of summer camp.  I was probably 12 or 13.  It was a perfectly exciting sailing day, leaned (hiked) over and wet and exciting.   I fell in love.   So I saved up money from giving piano lessons to younger kids and bought a styrofoam sailboat.   I didn't know how to sail, so went to the Newark library and read some musty old sailing books.   We strapped the thing on top of a car and my father drove me to Lake Hopatcong.   I said are you coming?   He said, no.   So we dropped the thing in the water and off I went.   It was great.   I learned sailing from a book.   (My grandfather arrived from Lithuania in the early part of the 20th centurty and was said to have "learned about America" by reading an encyclopedia from A to Z.)

I had a lot of fun with that boat, but also some bad moments.   One time it flew off the top of the car on the Garden State parkeway and broke about 10" off the bow.  I just drilled new holes for the bow stay and went on.

Well, I got more ambitious and paid $200 for the forty year old wooden Barnegat Bay Sneakbox.   This design developed from rowing boats used in the shallows of Barnegat Bay for duck hunting.   It was a very shallow draft cat boat.  It was totally opened up and leaky.   Per my day's instructions I filled the seams with a mixture of sawdust and varnish, covered it over with that new material (fibereglass.) made a rudder and tiller (see earlier blog.)  and sailed it from a very blue collar boat club in Perth Amboy.  I remember my mother driving me down to Barnegat Bay to find a very elderly Barnegat Bay Sneakbox builder who allowed us to make a trace of the rudder, so I could make one out of plywood.   Catboats sail what is called a barn door rudder, which also provides a good bit of the lateral resistance for the boat.

As a teenager I had two loyal crew:  my cousin Ted Green, and my friend Bob Brewin.   Raritan Bay was not your idyllic sailing country.....the boat was moored in the shadow (literally) of a coal fired power plant, and the rest of the bay was similarly industrial.  You had to clean off the black stain every time you sailed.  You had to watch out for the big freighters.   I had a very very old Johnson outboard for those times there was no wind.   Sometimes the outboard and wind failed at the same time, and we would get towed back to shore by some friendly motorboaters.   The guys at the boat club were very kind to me.   I was the only sailboat (and probably the only teenager) in the place.

We learned a lot, adventured a lot, and got very sunburned.  The catboat was gaff rigged, which meant it had an upper as well as lower boom on the single sail.   This had the unfortunate trait of occasionally manifesting a goose neck jibe.   In this case, with a following wind, one boom would tear one way across the boat, the other would go the other.   When they reached the end of their slack, the upper boom would yank the lower (very big and heavy piece of oak as long as the boat) straight up to vertical and then it would come slamming down.   I only had this happen twice.   Very frightening and impressive!  Luckily no head or boat parts were broken.   Some of my strongest memories are not on the boat, but driving home in our 1951 green Chrysler, totally sunburned, totally wet and sandy, totally tired, and totally happy.   By the way, I didn't have a dinghy to get out to the boat's mooring, so I used the remains of boat number one like a surf board to paddle out to the mooring.

Next boat never hit the water.   It was a town class sloop.   Turned out it was too dried out for me to fix.   The seams just wouldn't hold anything and swell up.   I tried all kinds of soaking and wetting the get it together, but nothing worked.   It was junked in the end.   (I now know of a repair method that would have worked: called splining.   You cut thin splines of wood and glue them into the open seems.   The boat becomes sort of a monococoque.)  I didn't own another sailboat again for 30 years.

So the point was really to be about the experience.  When I'm sailing, I am totally unable to think of anything else.   It's totally gripping.   The thing I like best about sailing is that it's one area of life we can't control.   If there is no wind you don't go.   If there's a lot of wind, you have to adapt.   If the wind is from the wrong direction you have to zig zag to get where you're going....the antithesis of getting in a car or even a motorboat and driving where you want to go.   There's plenty of metaphor there (which btw is beautifully written in a book called "To Row a Little Boat." )   The added piece is that sailing is sometimes so out of control that it can be dangerous.   I don't know the appeal there, but I find that seductive as well.  One of my few anxieties about aging is the anticipation that there may come some day I won't be able to handle a sailboat.