A Brief but Glorious Sailing Career

Our sailboat came out of the water this week, and it may mark the end of our sailing career.

Bubbles - our First - a Halman 20

Sailing came in to our lives unexpectedly. (The sudden and surprising way is one of my favorite Ponczka stories, but it’ll have to wait for another post – or maybe an entire book; I have so many of them!) We started out with little expectation, except that it would be fun. It has absolutely been that, but it’s also offered a different way of seeing and being in the world.

For one, the laws of nature are different when on a small sailing boat. A scientist might not tell you that, but for anyone who has spent their life moving around on solid earth, the distortion and disorientation is undeniable.

Captain Ponczka in Action!

Early on, it was impossible to get myself or Bubbles – our boat – to move as I intended. To start with, how could a vessel that was powered by the wind move into the wind? And how could such a puny and stationary keel have such an effect on the movement of such a large boat? And how could a movable but even tinier rudder cause the boat to dance and spin so wildly? It took weeks and months to begin to figure out the basics of how to position the sails so as to go where we wanted to go, and that was when the water was calm and the wind fairly steady. Stormy weather made it all that much more complicated. Even moving two or three feet across the deck presented huge problems when that deck was continuously lurching and dropping out from under you.

Captain Ponczka says, "Go Forth!"

We counted ourselves as extremely lucky that Bubbles was designed to respond to heavy weather like a life boat, as so was near impossible to capsize. One of the early lessons we learned – which, thankfully, we never had to put into play – was that, when unmanageable weather struck, and when all else failed, it was advisable to surrender all control, go below deck, and let the boat do what she wanted to do. There are countless anecdotes of boats washing ashore intact after a storm, after their erstwhile masters have been lost at sea.

We had some scary moments before we learned this and other lessons. The worst was probably the first. We went out one sunny afternoon, shortly after learning some of the basics, and wondered why all the other boats we saw were coming in. A storm struck, seemingly out of nowhere. We were bounced around like a kernel in a popcorn popper while our sails were yanked loose and whipped about above us. I, like a fool, crawled to the foredeck, determined to rein them in. And if I had perished then, I’d have no one but myself to blame. No life vest, no secure line to hold onto, and crocs on my feet. And there’s no way Ponczka would’ve been able to steer around to get me if I’d been tossed overboard. Only half jokingly, when we made it back to shore I kissed the ground. Needless to say, since that experience we’ve always checked the forecast before leaving the dock, however glorious the weather seemed from shore.

Trickster - Our Second - a Catalina 27

That difference in perspectives from land to lake was one of the best parts of sailing. From just a few yards out, the land we live on – city and suburb – looks and feels so different. But actually, just going to the marina and sitting on the boat, and experiencing the slight rolling buoyancy of the tethered boat, could convey a sense of getting away, of being insulated from the heaviness of daily life. We soon came to understand why so many boaters hardly moved their boats at all, yet loved the boater’s life.

But there are other reasons for actually going out on the water that we’ll miss. It’s quiet. It’s serene. Sailing is a slow way to get from points A to B, but it’s also effortless and unhurried. And it can feel pretty fast, from a perspective of simply moving through space and over moving water. And there’s something uplifting about knowing that whatever power and speed one manages to harness is courtesy of natural forces in play.

On Lake Ontario

The most surprising and rewarding part of the sailing experience however, has been the community. Every marina is a kind of social club, or more accurately, several overlapping social clubs. Since moving to Hamilton, for various reasons we’ve made our home in three different marinas in just four seasons. But before that, while in Seattle, we belonged to the small Navy League Marina in Ashbridge’s Bay for 9 years, and there we had a wonderful community that we’ll remember for the rest or our lives. It contained only about 30 boats so, unlike the larger versions, was pretty intimate. There was no paid staff and all the work, including Spring Launch and Fall Haul Out, were handled by the boaters. Those two days alone – 8 to twelve hours long – led to a lot of bonding and mutual support among us. There were also meetings and work days when we actively supported our shared interests.

Fair Weather Sailor

During the season, there were lots of visits on one another’s boats, and shared meals at the picnic tables. And best of all, our marina happened to include quite a few musicians, including a pianist who made his living giving lessons, and a well-known professional rock and blues drummer. That bounty led to a number of jam sessions and ‘shows’ over the years. These were wide open affairs, where anyone was free to take the mic to share a song. I, with my also sax, wasn’t nearly the musician that most of my fellows were, but I was always made to feel welcome.

These were such good times! But another of the characteristics of marina communities is that they change every year, as boaters come and go. We had about a three year peak of our musical, communal boater community in Ashbridges Bay. We lost some key members after that, and the character of the community changed, as it inevitably had to. Ponczka and I moved to Hamilton then, and our mobility and distraction with other parts of life has kept us from becoming true members of the communities we’ve encountered here. But they exist, and in all of them, there is some sense of ‘alternate lifestyle’ and the ‘call to adventure’ to be found: always one or two whose entire being is centered around boats and life on the watery part of the world, always a few who live aboard their vessels, during the season or even year-round; always someone contemplating a big sail, down the coast or across the ocean.

Serenity

In 13 years of sailing, I’ve come to know for sure that my place is on solid land. I love the opening, the shift, the freshness that sailing offers. And I’m so grateful that it’s been part of my life. But I’ll never feel ‘at home’ or so totally at ease as I know the true sailors do. We don’t want to sell our current boat, Trickster, which we got about halfway through our career, when we wanted a vessel that was roomier below deck and more maneuverable on the water. Trickster is a 27’ Catalina. you might call it the Honda Civic of the seas, as it’s so user friendly that there are more of them than any other sailboat in North America. We’d love to keep her. 

But the other thing about sailing is that it’s expensive. It costs over $4k per year just to keep her docked in summer and stored in winter. So the year when we managed to get out only half a dozen times, sailing set us back almost a thousand bucks per outing. Which is absurd for folks with our income.

So our years of sailing may be done. And it makes us very sad. It was a wonderful, brief career.

B-I-D-E-N Doesn’t Spell OBAMA

I’m frustrated by the notion that the way to show loyalty to Barack Obama in 2020 is to back his 2008 running mate.

I was an Obama supporter, which doesn’t mean that I back everything he did while in office. While he pushed for and accomplished some positive, progressive measures: health care, LGBT rights, some checks on corporate greed, not only didn’t he go as far as I’d have liked, he didn’t go nearly so far as he himself would have liked.

I was very frustrated at his inability to bring in gun controls, I abhor the huge increase in drone warfare, and I sure wish he’d found another way to turn around the economy after its disastrous implosion in 2008 than to give or loan billions of dollars to the very corporations that caused it. But I recognize that he was even more frustrated than I was, by the organized resistance to change that he encountered in Washington.

Which is why I find it so ridiculous that supporting Joe Biden – a “middle-of-the-road” candidate, if there ever was one – is so often equated with ‘loyalty’ to Obama.

Biden speaks of Obamacare almost as a legacy that needs to be protected. But we mustn’t forget that Obamacare isn’t what Obama wanted at all; it is merely the best compromise he could find – a barely minimal beginning of an overhaul of a corrupted and ineffective health care system. Obama very much wanted a single-payer system, much closer to what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are calling for, than the system that exists now.

Loyalty in politics shouldn’t mean dusting off policies and platforms from more than a decade ago, and holding them as sacred because of what they represented when they were new. That’s the same kind of reactionary ignorance that has conservatives insisting that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of its framers in the 18^th Century, rather than by reasonable, philosophical extrapolations. (NO – the 2^nd Amendment does NOT suggest that gun ownership should be completely unchecked by concerns for public safety).

I will surely support Joe Biden if he emerges as the Democratic Party Presidential candidate to oppose Trump. But I hope that the party is bolder and more forward thinking than that.  I believe that the US badly needs leaders who will address global warming, foreign policy and economic inequality in bold ways that challenge the status quo. For now, I’m hoping that Sanders or Warren will succeed.

The notion that Black Americans are mostly falling in line behind Joe, as a standard-bearer of all that Barack represents really irks me. I don’t see it that way at all. And I hope that ALL voters will look and think more deeply than that. Of course, when I look at the idiocy that prevails at the right end of the political spectrum, where so many seemingly intelligent voters abandon truth and integrity in their continued defense of the nightmare that is Trump, I despair.

The old maxim seems to be true: that people get the leaders they deserve.

Coming into the Country

(with acknowledgment and apologies to John McPhee, a great writer)

A friend who lives up the road from here put it this way:
“I like to just go along, to let everything be the way it is. If a tree falls, I figure it was supposed to fall there, so I leave it. Sometimes it gets so quiet, and nothing is really going on. It’s almost like I’m not here.”

How does that strike you. Is it a little chilling. A little scary, this notion of almost…disappearing?

But no. It isn’t that at all. It’s actually very beautiful.

First of all, Dan is always doing something. One day, when he said he hadn’t done anything, he’d chopped down a tree, then spent four hours cutting up and stacking the wood.
Not exactly the same as letting a tree fall and just lay there.

What he means, really, is being in flow with these woods and this wildlife he lives within, so that all sense of being anxious or driven by anything falls away. Rules fall away. Society falls away. He forgets himself for awhile.
If I could say it any better, I’d have said it myself.

Willow on Fawn Lake in Addison, New York

My experience isn’t exactly that. I came here this week determined to make progress with my novel. And I spent lots of time struggling with it, trying to free myself of the eternal editor so that the writer could romp.

And even so, I fell into a rhythm that was as much the sun rising, and the fog gathering over the lake in the night, and the geese with their periodic summonses to one another
as it was my enduring battle with time, to have purpose, to matter, to achieve.

Time humbles me when I let myself be absorbed by it, let it insert space between my molecules and I suddenly breathe to a different rhythm.

Is it true, as Einstein said, that time and space are one?
I’m not so fixed in either from this place. Not so certain or definite at all. Yes, I understand that bit about almost not being here.