It's the end of my sailing-in-the-mountains adventure. On the day my father died in 2017, his bank account hit zero, which is how he approached everything. He did have a modest life insurance policy. Because he taught me to sail when I was 1 (above, blonde), I used the money to buy sailboats. My first overnight sailing trip was to Regatta Bay on Franklin Island on Georgian Bay near Snug Harbor. I was six weeks old. We sailed the Fancy Free, which he and my mom built. Ever since, every year of my life except maybe two, I sailed.
By "sailed," I mean I learned the wind. I learned awareness of small shifts. I learned to read the water and how to hold my body in relation to these elements in such a way as to render myself nearly invisible between them, an instrument of something far greater. I learned the horizon and the sun. I learned to tip and right without getting more than a splash. Whereas I was a failed ballerina by age 10, sailing was my music.
When my mom and stepdad bought a cottage on Georgian Bay in the very early 90's, I drove up with my dog, Zoe. The cottage was close to Regatta Bay. With the first sniff of that primordial air, I dove in, and then my mom and I rigged the Invitation, the boat I had sailed since childhood. Up there, you never have to go about once you're out of the bay. You can sail forever so just remember to take a paddle for when the wind dies at around 9 p.m. sunset. Out there on the water, I had conversations with my deeply estranged dad. These conversations could last hours.
Sailing transcended everything. Sailing kept my heart from turning hard. Estrangement isn't a way out of anything. It's a skill with parameters. If you stay angry, it's not for you. Estrangement isn’t revenge but survival. You do it to live. There was a lot I would never understand, and for that the wind explained enough. Sailing on Georgian Bay was second nature or possibly even first. I only felt challenged on land. Wind, sun, and water--I understood. Slipping down into the same shallow cockpit that held me through decades, my toes dipping through waves, my long hair trailing cool water, the tiller under my knee, the main sheet loose between my fingers--the only reason to stop was to keep people on land from worrying.
I bought three sailboats with the insurance money. One on Lake James, one fix-up project that lived in my driveway until I sold it a few months after. Having a 23-footer in my driveway was a good way to mourn. It took up as much space as grief does, but it is contained. It has hatches you can shut, lines you can coil. It intimidates as grief does. It taunts and invites a dream at the same time it causes stress along the lines of "what on earth have I done?" The risk of estrangement is the risk of regret: will you feel bad about it after? I had taken that risk. Its outcome stared at me every time I looked outside.
All I knew was that water, wind, and sunlight collaborate if you let them, and that land feels hospitable only insofar as knowing there's a sailboat near enough by to leave it.
The second boat was a 1977 27-foot Hunter with the name "Island Princess" painted over in white. It was the dream. It was also a tank. It's diesel Yanmar engine alone was worth much more than I paid the guy I bought it from when we met at the pawn shop on Patton Avenue and transferred the title. If the boat in my driveway was the mourning of my father's death, the Hunter was the battleground whereon Ii would work through the pain of his life. It had a little table that dropped when I unhooked it from the eye screw. I could drop anchor and sit there to write with the water lapping against the side of the hull. If the way I said that sounds cliche or hackneyed, it's only because that's the only way to say it. Water laps like an animal drinking. To be inside the thing it is lapping is like inhabiting your own dark thirst. The water lapped. It's the sound of my childhood going all the way back to Regatta Bay. When I took my mom out on the Hunter, she was positively delighted. After I roller-furled the genoa and dropped the latch on the cabin door, I asked her, "Why do I get the feeling you're more proud of me for buying a Hunter than when I graduated from college." She answered as the docks rocked with the wake of a motorboat, "Oh, I always knew you would graduate from college."
One winter morning (my father died in autumn) I got a text from the marina, "Your boat needs attention." That's how marina people say anything from your sailboat has sunk to the bottom of the lake to a flock of baby merganzer geese have hatched in the cockpit. You don't ask details. You drive to your boat. Bitter wind under the gray billows assured me of nothing good as I drove down the mountain to my boat. From a curve a half mile from the marina I could see the nature of attention I was called to pay. The gigantic hull was nearly on its side, and the mast was cantilevered over the water, the white tatters of the sail flapping like flightless birds. This was bad. And in the same breath, this was dad.
This happens with roller furling jibs and genoas. If you’re bored, Google that for some entertainment at the expense of others. Sailors don’t mind. Sailing is problem-solving. We run aground. We tip. We slice a hand open as lines tear through our palm. We hoist the sail with our blood streaked across it like a flag of our own failing nation. That’s the joy of sailing—so seldom do we actually get to go because of things like this. The only person who could help me lived an hour away. He made the drive anyway. By the time he arrived with two of his boat-nutty friends, I had positioned myself windsurfer-style leaning my full weight back over the dock as though this could offset the 40-foot mast’s near-horizontal threat to pull the boat entirely over. The 1977 Hunter is a legend for its reliable heft. I was a few geometry-and-protractor degrees from unwriting that legend. This, too, was dad. Three men and me were all it took to reverse the wind of the night before. A tub of epoxy and a new genoa customer made from insanely acquired measurements of the torn sail from Hong Kong later, I bought the boat a new navy blue “Sunbrella,” the sailing word for the cover. My dream of owning a Hunter now entered its second phase commensurate with the five stages of grief. Delight became respect.
“I wouldn’t take her out on the ocean,” said my friend after he inspected my repair work.
I nodded, “Sure thing,” skipping the whole “It’s a boat, not a she,” thing. Women were not allowed on boats unless they were carved wood with bare boobs sticking out at the prow. The spirit of that lives on in marinas. Sailing men treat sailing women like we should be carved of wood and bare-breasted. This does not die. This brings me to the third boat, The Galilee 15, my final boat purchase from a former police officer in the Virgin Islands or something. While I always expect a handful of caveats when buying anything second hand, I did not foresee the boat’s coming with a police officer from the Virgin Islands. He regretted the sail immediately even though he had purchased the boat-of-choice of the Asheville Sailing Club racing sailors. I never race sailboats for the same reasons I never slammed poems. This is also related in ways to the thing about women at the prow. There’s a place for utility in all arts. To use some things for purposes outside of the sacred experience of binding oneself to the powers of earth and imagination is, in my manual, sin. I heard from a then-friend at the club that he was talking about how angry he was that I’d bought the boat but didn’t race.
I sailed the Galilee on weekdays. A gentle boat, the Galilee could soar at close haul and just as easily breeze along in a beam reach. I could lean back and let my hair trail in the water, but none of the lakes are actual lakes. They’re connected to power sources, and on Lake Julian, you could get electrocuted if you touch the water. That’s they way the signs made it feel. You sail dry, or you don’t sail. I hated that. I also hated the coal factory that loomed on a starboard tack. Brutal and ugly and dangerous, the factory could disappear behind the sail with good posture and pull of the tiller.
“Your sail’s missing a batten.”
“Your tell-tails need replacing. I’ve got yarn in my locker.” (I don’t need tell-tails.)
“You nearly jibed down by Wild Wings. Gotta watch that boom.”
“You were spilling wind at the third buoy. Keep the sheet tighter in.”
These insights offered by men also lap around the hull of your sailboat. You can be completely blissed out after accomplishing a great sail with a perfectly timed drop of the jibe and hard-over bringing your craft without a bump into its slip. Your blood pressure low as the geese on the water. Your head full of wind and nothing else. That’s the sweet spot of sailing. That’s what makes all the other stuff worth it. But then, along come the men. They probably want to talk about something else, something about themselves most likely, but they’ve a read so have an idea they shouldn’t make it all about them, not at first chat-up at least. Hold the good stuff for later. They mean well, but they do poorly. Their best bet, it must seem, is to tell you how to fucking sail when you’ve been sailing your entire fucking life.
“You’ve got your halyards twisted.”
“Had a rough time getting out of irons, didn’t you?” (Everyone has a hard time getting out of irons. It’s why they’re called irons.)
“Lemme know the next time you’re going out. I can help you out a little.”
There’s a reason some boats are only fifteen feet long.
I successfully un-owned the latter of the two big boats this past winter, six years after that first wonder and rush of owning my first big boat. I gave the Hunter away, literally, to a family with a son with a brain injury because I know sailing and brain injuries are sibling circumstances. I could have sold its engine and the custom-made-in-Hong-Kong genoa, but there comes a time when you know you can let something go. In Buddhism, it’s the feeling of having a klesha resolve. That thing you felt drawn to and could not for all the deep breaths you had in you keep yourself from getting drawn into. And you surrender and engage the ride the creative forces of the universe have chosen for you. You rest your fingers on the tiller gently and, keep your hold of the mainsheet loose. And the rest is up to the wind.
I let it go. I even called Fish and Wildlife and made sure no one could ever give it back. Gone. It is gone. Years of stress and repair and feelings of “What the fuck have I got myself into?” Years of approaching that curve a half mile before the marina and the sigh of relief that the boat’s still there, mast upright, mainsail secure inside its canvas coat. Years of weaving the postscript of my life with a father who, when I am truly honest about our story of sailing, once caught a cat’s paw on Lake Rosseau so suddenly that seven-year-old-me flew off the stern. He shouted from the close-haul heel of the CL-16 we sailed those years,
“I’ll come back and get you after this reach!”
With my life preserver pressing tight around my neck, I bobbed and treaded water, happy for him for catching the perfect wind. Even though people in motorboats slowed down and circled me, the little stream of rainbow gasoline pooling in the space between my waves shouted “Here, grab my hand. I’ll pull you in.”
And I’d say, “No, it’s okay. My dad’s in that sailboat. He’s coming back for me.”
A time would come, years on, when he wouldn’t, but he did that day.
My mom came over yesterday with my daughter for Easter. I showed her the Galilee where it now rests on its trailer tucked back behind a magnolia tree.
“I’ll buy it from you to keep at the cottage,” she said.
“I owe you ten times the price of this boat,” I said because it’s true. I told her the story of the time when my daughter was in a very dark place at age 12, the age when everything falls apart if you’re doing it right. 12 is the age when the universe chooses you to be its interpreter. If you’re not chosen, you get by easy. Mom nodded and remembered, like me, with a facial expression that describes that time perfectly.
At the lowest point, I took my daughter out in the Galilee. It was calm with a very quiet breeze. In the middle of the lake I let go of the tiller and the mainsail. As sailboats do with no one shaping the wind for them, the Galilee turned in circles. I moved toward the bow and rested.
“What are we doing?” they asked.
“We’re going around in circles.” We spun slowly, gently. Thankfully, no one shouted advice or sped over to rescue. I watched my daughter calm and relax in the safety. After an adequate number of circles, they asked me how long we’re doing this for.
“Circles? We can spin in circles forever. That’s the nature of circles.”
“What if we want to stop going in circles?”
“When you’re ready to stop going in circles, just place your hand on the tiller and pull that rope.”
My daughter did this, and we sailed. And we made it through.
“It’s a good boat,” mom said. I agreed.
We both know the meaning of sailboat. We have our legends of the north where wind, water, and sunlight work as one thing on a soul on a sailboat brave enough to take them in. We talk in terms of “That was a great sail!” We talk in terms of “a blue day on Georgian Bay,” and can feel the wind inside those words calling us out to open water.
We know the meaning of the Galilee’s return into the hands of our kind of sailing, the rough and ready kind, the closest thing there is to disappearing. I’m driving it up to the cottage this July. No more merganzer geese. No more marina men teaching me how to sail and tip-hurling on how to care for a boat, people who don’t know that any time a woman owns a boat, it’s not about the boat.
Up north, my mom, my daughter, and I will fill a wet bag with ginger ale, sunscreen, cheese sandwiches, and highway-fruit-stand-cherries. We will bag wind until sunset then paddle, wordless, heads full of wind, the rest of the way.