Payback for insufficient name expungement
Issue 59 : Mar/Apr 2008
From experimental fiction to humble haiku, be it survey, installation tip, insurance claim, jingle, grocery list, living will, love note, or subpoena — words matter. Just ask any writer, reader, or one of the I-can’t-believe-they-found-out-about-that elected officials.
Names matter too. Just ask any parent, philanthropist, or one of the I-can’t-believe-they-named-her-that boat-owners. After inking the deal for our 1990 Catalina Capri 26, my husband, Jeff, and I stood looking at each other in a happy glow.
Sure, she had a few flaws — a scattering of chipped spots on her forward deck, some cracks around her chainplates, and a leak in the head — stuff hardly worth mentioning. More important was her solid build, the 3.5-foot wing keel good for cruising the coasts of the big lakes, the 9-foot 11-inch beam, and the fact I could stand up straight in her galley. She also sported four self-tailing winches and a roller-furling jib. Furthermore, her mainsail had been replaced in 1998.
She was ready to sail and we were ready to sail her. Too bad we’d need to wait seven months, as it was October and she’d just been hauled out for the winter.
There was something else. Isn’t there always?
It wasn’t that her name was stupid. In fact, it was rather nice. But its two words, Ebb Tide, were wedded to the salty sea and, according to her survey, she’d only sailed fresh water and, with us, would continue to sail the Great Lakes. Jeff and I are can-do Americans who don’t spook easily, but we couldn’t help but wonder whether our sailing fortunes would be better in an ill- named boat or a renamed boat.
After about five seconds online we found an answer: “Renaming a boat? How bad could that be?” Originally published in the July 1999 edition of Good Old Boat, author John Vigor’s Interdenominational Denaming Ceremony appealed to us because it rang true. (Jeff, a Methodist, and I, a Lutheran, were married by a Unitarian minister, and the ceremony was short.)
Removed old name
As per John’s instructions, we began the work of psychic transformation by quietly expunging the old name. We cut it out of paperwork, ground it off steel, and rubbed its ghostly image off fiberglass. We kept finding and expunging, finding and expunging. The previous captain had put her name all over and in the unlikeliest of places. Open a drawer, turn over a cushion, and it’s a Jack-in-the-box.
Once satisfied the old name was no more, we buttoned our boat up for winter and began focusing on candidates. Route 66 gained favor for a while, given that 66 is our hull number. It surprised me how long Cock-A-Doodle-Do hung around, daring us to go there. White Noise, a classic DeLillo novel, buzzed in the background, while Jaozi — a boiled dumpling we developed an addiction to during the year we spent in China — bobbed afresh in our memory. Leap Year, in honor of our February 29 marriage, seemed cool. Great Leap was too Maoish. But wouldn’t Hummingbird, the favorite bird of my mother — who last summer went to her great reward — be lovely? Yes it would. I’d found it. Jeff liked it. My sister liked it. Everybody loved it and what an understated but attitude-laden graphic that emerald firebrand would make!
Nah. Hummingbird could fly on something sleek like that Block Island 40 briefl y docked in our marina but
not on our beamy Capri, which is more dumpling than wing. And hummers aren’t exactly water birds. Then Jeff, a newspaper editor cum college English worker, found the word that put a fine point on our lives at the half century with all those red marks on student papers, the novel I’ve been working on for a while, our parents aging and dying, our girls nightclubbing in another time zone, and now, a sailboat listed improbably in our assets column.
Revision it was!
Final expungement check
March rolled around and, with the boat in the shop for some work, we made the two-hour drive from home to the marina to polish her up, do a final expungement check, and perform the Denaming Ceremony.
Falling on the ritual scale somewhere between the lemming-like flow of the stadium wave and the compressed singularity of the post-sail cigarette, it’s a ceremony perfect for two people who can agree on what role they want to play. In our case, Jeff recited John Vigor’s text while I poured a bottle of California Wild Bunch White over the bow. Then we gave the spirits one night to take their salty leave.
We slept fitfully in the motel, but the next morning the boat appeared to have settled into some kind of jittery limbo as we approached her with flexible ruler, painter’s tape, vinyl lettering, and burnisher. Maybe she was hung over from the previous day’s ceremony. Maybe it was the shop’s fluorescent lights. Whatever it was, it was obvious we needed to get on with it.
The hull curves, of course, but the boat was also listing to port in the cradle and her bow was dropping a tad. Finding the right line proved a challenge, but the vantage from the top of the stepladder was a breakthrough and three hours later we were able to stand back to admire our work. We’d gone big and it looked great.
Jeff dumped a bottle of Wild Bunch Red on the anchor locker and around the bowsprit, while I gave thanks, made a polite request for fair winds, and we named her Revision. Toward the end of our giddy huddle, John, the marina owner appeared, searching for a forklift, and we heard him ask one of the technicians why the shop “smells like booze.” But sometimes you just have to do what’s right and we headed to the lift with our heads held high. And now, after a summer on the bay, what a sweet story Revision’s written. Of course, what else would one expect on a boat with a typewriter font and editor’s mark on her side?
Head problems
Well, there was one thing . . .
We don’t need to go into details. Just know that our holding tank had overflowed into the locker off the head . . . the one in which we stored our foul-weather gear. We split the duties and Jeff left with the bagged micro-fibers for the coin-operated laundry while I tackled my job in a cloud of acrid hopelessness. But a week later, after a deluge of bleach and an avalanche of rags, port lights open, and the tiny fans whirring 24/7, we had reclaimed our neutral, faintly basil-tinged, air . . . and life aboard was once again just dandy.
Turns out we needed a pumpout. We hadn’t gotten one because the holding-tank experience was new to us, but more so because the tank’s vent fitting was loose. The vent’s seal is now tight and a Head Scorecard is posted above the sink.
And here’s my point: a couple weeks after the overflow incident we discovered a messenger from the past deep in the three-ring binder of boat info kept by the previous captain. In all our searching and expunging, we’d just plain missed it. But there it was, plain as the nose on Neptune’s face, printed in all caps in blue ballpoint ink on the inside cover of the Jabsco pamphlet — those two little, and oh so salty, words of her name.
Mary Kinnunen is founder of Marquette Monthly, a features tabloid for Michigan’s central Upper Peninsula. She has had poems and essays published in the literary and popular press. She served on the Rhinelander, Wisconsin, city council and then, as mayor, her greatest achievement was getting the council, on a tie-breaking vote, to adopt volume-based garbage pickup.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
