A 20-year odyssey approaches a perfect ending
Issue 56 : Sept/Oct 2007
On a gray winter day in the middle of the continent, I open a copy of a sailing magazine I’ve just bought at a bookstore in a city where there are no sailboats. I’ve had no choice about being in that city since the day I was born in it. I’m in the backseat of my parents’ car, shortly to return to the nearby college where I’m committed to spending the next four years. My life’s as gray as the sky, and I have no idea when, where, or how it will clear. My childhood is being dismantled and what’s to replace it hasn’t come over the horizon yet. I’m lost and vaguely aware of it.
I don’t read a word of the magazine. I just look at the pictures — especially the glossy full-page ads for boats. I stop flipping at a two-page photo of a sailboat at anchor just off the manicured lawn of a subtropical waterfront hacienda complete with palm trees. A beautiful couple stands on deck looking adoringly at each other while they sip champagne. I can’t tell exactly what color the boat is because the sunset imbues the shiny hull with its rosy glow.
That was almost 20 years ago. At that moment, my life took a turn that, more than anything else that happened in the 20 years that followed — except when I met my wife — has determined where and who I am now. I’m 38, so 20 years is a long time. For most of those 20 years, I’ve struggled to get here. The fact that for much of that time I didn’t know what I was doing helps explain why it took so long.
For the past six of those years, I’ve been preoccupied with restoring, equipping, and learning about my own cruising sailboat. That part of my life is now ending. I’ll be “finished,” as much as one can ever be “finished” with a boat that’s still afloat. There haven’t been more than 15 consecutive minutes in those six years that I haven’t been at least mentally immersed in every detail of the intricate machine that is a sailboat. Blood, sweat, and tears — absolutely. It’s been the final, and most removed, step in the process that led from the pure desire of that glossy magazine ad, to heavily supplementing my liberal arts college curriculum with sailing magazines and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship, to hours — that turned into years — sitting at the dining room table studying navigation while landlocked in the third city I didn’t really want to live in.
By “removed,” I mean that the obsession with Type 316 machine screws, rebedding chainplates, curing times for two-part polyurethane paints, and the hundreds of other mundane details that make a boat a boat necessarily took me further and further away from that old, vague, purely aesthetic-emotional longing, even as it brought me ever closer to its realization. If I wanted what was in that magazine ad, I had to put that ad out of my head and learn about dissimilar metals and make my fingers sore splicing double-braid.
Just as when I looked at the happy couple drinking champagne on deck in the sunset and wanted that, I was in for a schooling no college could begin to offer before I’d have it. When we say “I want,” life has a way of immediately responding, “How bad?” The greater the potential reward, the greater the price, so in the case of something really worth wanting, the answer had better be, “Real bad.” I wanted this real bad.
I’ve long been off the life track I was rolling steadily down 20 years ago as a college freshman with my new National Merit Scholarship. I live at the beach. I don’t have a real job. I wear T-shirts, shorts, and sandals just about every day. I don’t have kids to care for. I don’t have a big expensive house. There’s a lot I don’t have in common with my classmates who are now neurologists or professors or economists at the Fed.
I sat down tonight and opened the latest issue of the same sailing magazine I’d first picked up in another world, in another life, a long time ago, and there was a two-page glossy ad for a sailboat. I’ve seen and ignored a thousand of them over the past six years, a period during which “sailboat” has meant something to me completely removed from what those ad agencies are trying to sell. But tonight I stopped and looked, and it came back. What they’re selling now is what they sold me 20 years ago: the simple fact that a sailboat is the second most beautiful thing on earth. Tonight, finally, I popped up on the other side and once again a sailboat became the sleek hull in the cool blue water, the perfect white sails drawing, and the setting sun in the faces of the happy couple in the cockpit.
But this isn’t a circle completed, rather, a spiral ascended. I know every little part of a cruising sailboat: what it does, how to put it there, how much it costs, how it breaks, and how to fix it. My cruising sailboat, that is. Tonight, when I look at that beautiful picture, I don’t say, “I want that.” I am able to say, “I have that,” because I’ve poured everything I have into getting it. So now it’s me — with a little gray hair — standing on the deck of my own beautiful boat with my own beautiful wife, watching the sunset.
Phillip Reid, his wife Andie, and certain other miscreants sail their 1977 Pearson 28, Miss Bohicket, out of Wilmington, North Carolina. They finished a five-year refit in the fall of 2005. When not sailing, writing, or boat-grubbing, Phillip teaches a college history course.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
