A Gunkholer at Heart

It’s a shorthand we use, these preferences that define our lives. We’re morning people, or night people. We drink coffee or tea.  Some favor the sweet things in life; others seek out the tang of salt or the sharpness of spice. Entire advertising campaigns play to people’s passion for the PC or Mac, and in the sailing world there’s no avoiding the question: are you a cruiser, or a racer? How a sailor answers that question will determine a good bit, from choice of boat to the weekend schedule.

Racers generally commit themselves to light and fast, preferring Kevlar sails and carbon masts to canvas and wood – if the budget allows. Spending hard-earned dollars on new technologies, they push technology to its limits. Others, coping with older and heavier boats, ponder their PHRF ratings and do what they can to maximize performance.

Still, whether their vessel is a Sunfish, a J-Boat or a fully-fitted cruiser, racers share a few characteristics.  They’re tweakers at heart, constantly adjusting sail trim, seeking the currents and anticipating the wind.  Demanding of themselves and one another, they’re often focused to point of obsession. In the end, their goal is simple – to get from point A to Point B first, and in the shortest possible time.

Camping Out In the Cosmos

 

School has ended, summer has arrived and the sudden spill of Sunfish, Optis and Lasers onto the water means it’s sailing camp time on Clear Lake. 

Watching from my work dock, I have to smile. The older kids arriving for the first week of instruction look – and act – like any other group of teens.  They remind me of the skateboarders who congregate in our grocery store parking lots – studies in calculated cool.  To adult eyes their swagger might seem a little too self-aware, a bit overdone, but there’s no mistaking the meaning of the jostling, fist-bumping and sideways glances  that mark their passage through the week. They’re as interested in the social seas that surround them as they are in the water, and they’re learning to navigate both.

Stepping Off the 8:15

 

Musically speaking, the 1960s were a ”mixed bag”.  Tucked between the sweet securities of the ’50s and the tumultuous creativity of the 70′s, the decade  included everything from the Beatles to Bobby Vinton, Strawberry Alarm Clock to Nancy Sinatra.  Depending on your perspective, the decade’s nadir or zenith was that bit of fun and frolic held out at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York.  And even while Woodstock was taking place, a Canadian named Richard Bachman was writing lyrics for a song.  

Originally entitled White Collar Worker, his song sounded remarkably like the Beatles’ Paperback Writer.  Even the guitar riffs mimicked the more famous song.  The similarities were so obvious publication was out of the question and the song was put on the back burner for several years.  In 1973, it was pulled from the files, revised and recorded.   By then Bachman’s band had a new name – Bachman Turner Overdrive – and their re-worked song became the classic Takin’ Care of Business . BTO’s counter-cultural anthem still pops up from time to time – for years it provided an innocuous musical lead-in for Office Depot’s commercials - but in the 1960’s, no matter which side of the cultural divide you lived on, you knew the lyrics.

The Beauty of Substitute Stars

 

I’d been sailing aboard Isla for weeks. She was my first boat, her captain my first sailing instructor. They were a good pair who fit together as naturally as port and starboard.  Both were sturdy, dependable, unpretentious and made for cruising.

We didn’t just sit around,Tom, Isla and I. We cruised from the beginning, undocking and docking at Tom’s equally unpretentious home on Galveston’s Teichman Road. He was an old-fashioned sort who believed boats were meant to go places, and that anyone setting foot on a boat needed to know everything there was to know about getting a vessel from Point A to Point B without running aground, sinking, losing crew or disrespecting the sea and other sailors.   Being able to communicate with Cajun Captains in the ICW and knowing how to tear down an engine were as important to him as being able to program a GPS although, in those days, there were no GPS sets to program. In fact, there were far fewer electronic gadgets of any sort on most pleasure craft and none at all on Isla, unless you counted the VHF radio.

The “I”s Have It…

 

Like many new bloggers, I was consumed with anxiety when I posted my first, tentative essays on WordPress.   “Will people like them?”, I wondered.   “Will anyone take time to read them?”   “How will I ever know?”

As time passed and I grew more assured, I began to think less about others’ response to my words and  more about the writing itself.  Georgia O’Keefe once reflected on a book of photographs and text published to mark her 90th birthday by saying,  “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.  It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest”.  Reading her words, I felt an immediate kinship.  Over the months, I’d begun to make similar comments when discussing my own work. “This is how I understand things.” ” This is the way I experience the world.”  ” This is what I would like you to see.”

To be frank, that’s a lot of “I”. At one time, it would have made me uncomfortable to say such things.  During my formative years, ”I” was a bad word.  No one ever said so explicitly, but if any of us began to use it just a little too often, we knew we needed to stop.  ”I” was a  selfish word.  “I” was self-centered,  vain and egotistical, prideful, frivolous and perhaps even a little smart-alecky, like the inevitable kid in the back of the classroom who loved to wave his arms and yell, “Teacher! Teacher!  I know! I know!”  It was impossible to stop using “I”, of course, but we weren’t supposed to celebrate its necesssity.

Life being what it is, someone was bound to challenge that view of things.  My challenge appeared in the form of a rumpled and utterly distracted professor who bore a vague resemblance to Quentin Compson.  Tie pulled loosely to one side, occasionally missing a button, shedding files and paper like autumn trees, he was a natural actor whose classes could be pure theatre.  He didn’t precisely teach but rolled through our lives like a force of nature, tacking signs above his desk that proclaimed  Creato, Ergo Sum  and asking questions like,  “If you had to wear a scarlet letter, which one would it be?”   His lectures were filled with a mix of literary classics, myth and religious texts.   We got Genesis, Gilgamesh and the Gospels filtered through Melville, Eliot, Faulkner and Greene.