How a girl gets a boat

Like many east coast kids, I was shipped off to camp for a few weeks every summer. I tried all the things – archery, swimming, arts and crafts, soccer, etc. but when that little bathtub was pushed off the dock and I found myself completely self contained and out of any harasser’s reach, my mind was blown. It was like tasting a new flavor. I was on my own. My god, my own space. 

I don’t have a lot of memories from that time, but it made enough of an impression that I signed up for a sailing clinic that fall. I  was the only girl and so housed separately from all the rest of the students. The lone female instructor and I were housed together, as there weren’t really accommodations for either of us. I wasn’t particularly good, in the technical sense, or maybe any sense  and received an awkward trophy for “good sportsmanship” when they weren’t quite sure what to do with me casually bobbing about, coming in terribly last in all the practice races. I didn’t have the words then to tell them that it seemed entirely impossible, vulgar and wretched that I would get this small reprieve, this delicious moment of solitude and freedom and all I was supposed to do with it was hurry it along to get it over with as fast as possible. The boys were buoyant and jovial, full of enthusiasm and delight. I was quiet, separate, and in search of something else. There wasn’t nearly enough shame they could put on me to rush past this. Feel the water, find the wind, float. Alone. Quiet. Let them do the rushing and yelling. The further they went along, the quieter it all became. The leaves are changing color on shore and the sunlight is just right. 

Now I know that the Buddhists have a thousand different words for presence, and what I was experiencing was something unconditioned and timeless. Being on the boat, I had gotten where I was trying to get to. There wasn’t anything that was going to improve the situation. The reverence for the moment of it made me quite still, like the kind of motionlessness that can take hold when you stand there and watch a lover walk out the door for the last time, knowing you are going to let them go. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want the moment to end, it was more like  I couldn’t imagine a future on the other side. This was it. 

I left the east coast as teen and I promise you, sailing in Portland, Oregon is no prize and you can’t tell me different, my 20 winters there have earned me my opinion on weather in the PNW, so my love sailing lay quiet and sat inside my mind, next to all the other adventures I promised to return to someday.  

When I returned to sailing as an adult in San Francisco Bay, my reward for finishing grad school and in a semi-desperate attempt in regaining something like a normal life,  I took lessons at a top notch school, at first. This consisted of meeting people, immediately crawling onto a small confined space with them, finding a man hovering over me who, without much introduction, would start  screaming commands faster than I could think. Hoist the main! Hoist the jib! Plus the lines! Let out the sheet! Pull the fenders! Trim to upwind! Helpless when the commands were not directed at me and sometimes confused when they were, I didn’t find this enjoyable at all. This was nothing like bobbing about in the sunshine, listening the the water secretly slide across the the hull. The days always ended the same, with a recap of all every little way I had failed and a wave goodbye. I wasn’t worse than any of the other novices, and often better, but I am certainly more sensitive and less tolerant of being treated like an object than a person. 

I tried to keep at it. I know this is how men learn sports. I know this is just “how it is done” but I just couldn’t hang. It took a number of months and many afternoons spent crying in my car (sometimes the crying started before I even got to the car) to realize that I knew too much pedagogy, had too many abused clients rattling around in my psyche, and had gained far too much independence to spend my weekends being screamed at by a stranger in a small space with people I didn’t know or trust (and pay very handsomely for it!).  To pack in all the information needed to keep their accreditation, there wasn’t any time for watching the currents, feeling the boat or seeing what happened if we just let the sails out a little more or brought them over just a hair. The instructor was sailing with his mouth. We were his hands.

I wanted to hear stories. I wanted to watch the sunlight on the water. I wanted to take my time. Check the lines, look up the mast, find the wind, see what the tide was doing. This all takes time. I wanted to take in the views and bask in the open space while feeling how the boat moved. I wanted to watch how the water moved and find moments of silence. Twenty years later and I still wasn’t in any hurry to go anywhere. It was either give up or get my own boat.

I lucked out that someone who was to become my best friend was also an excellent sailor and an excellent teacher- the two are not the same. Between the unending patience of the boat, who let me dawdle and check and recheck endlessly before we would slowly bob off the dock, and his laughter and confidence, I was able put the pieces together.  Learning to sail and learning a boat are also two different skills and learning the boat helped me immensely with learning to sail. Sailing is not nearly so much about technical proficiency as it is a holistic understanding of how it all works together. The sails come down in the fairway so you don’t have too much speed when you get to the dock. The fenders come out past the breakwater so when you get to the dock you don’t lose half your paint. You look up before you go out so that you aren’t untangling lines down the fairway with two school boats in front, a charter to the side and a singlehanded behind you.  You check the weather and change your jib at the dock so you aren’t saying prayers and holding a tiny pin while balanced on the bowsprit in four foot wave chop. A thousand things like this. 

As long as we weren’t headed towards a lee shore and there was beer in the cooler, we were doing just fine. I needed to hear that before I could learn anything else. This is similar in therapy, we need to be accepted for where we are at before we can move ahead. I can’t come crashing in to the room shouting commands about how someone needs to change their life and for me, the boat was a way I was changing my life. I was literally taking my life into my hands and changing its course by being out there. This was going to take a little time. 

Long after the official sailing lessons ended, I struggled more with my confidence, my place in the family of things, more than my skills. I was nervous to go out on my own, lest I make some egregious mistake and so would invite people along. Men would come on my boat and couldn’t help themselves — they would see me slowly hoisting the sail and at the slightest snag they just couldn’t help but push me aside so they could give her a good yank until the halyard was really jammed. They’d rush to shove off the dock and leave our lunch on shore. They’d pull the sails in until her rails were in the water and everything was banging down below and we were steadily moving sideways. They’d shove the tiller across so fast we’d end up doing a turn and half instead of a tack or come to a complete stop halfway through deep chop. They’d jump on board and just past the breakwater announce they were hungry. These were the next set of lessons, the interpersonal and intrapsychic ones that I couldn’t learn on someone else’s boat. As Charle’s Bukowski put it, “there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to learn this.” I had see someone come on to my boat to really understand the audacity of it and I am grateful for each experience because I needed them to give me the gall to get up and go out on my own.

There, by ourselves, she has taught me, rather in secret, that there is another way, without all the screaming and yanking, that we can sit upright and still get to where we are going, with love and joy and patience, as long as I hold fast to the helm and my own sense of authority.