Revision of Godspeed is Between 2.9 and 8 Knots for my personal essay class at the Writer’s Center.
“Oy, mate, what’re you up to???? Mark asked in his slow, deep, voice over a broken, choppy line.
“Got a couple gigs, but actually just cashing unemployment checks and keeping my head down,??? I answered, “uh, hello????
“I’m here,??? Mark answered after a few seconds, “but the connection sucks from this Internet café.??? Hey,??? he added, “I want to fly you down to Acapulco. Can you get down here????
“Uh, yeah. I think so. Sarah will probably be willing to forge my unemployment checks and I think I can pull out of some stuff. When do you need me????
“Uh, right away.???
When my best friend Mark pays for me to fly to Acapulco to join the crew of his seagoing catamaran and his crew I take it as one of those veiled manly calls for help which never really show either fear or desperation. When you spend time with men, you have to read between the lines. Dude, I am drowning, here, throw me a line, was what he was actually saying, and so was I.
I was in Acapulco within five days.
On the sea, nothing needs to be forced, nothing needs to be rushed; in fact, there are very few things that can be rushed. I have had to turn on the hourly chime on my wristwatch because I have experienced a couple of these 96-hour days. Time shrinks and expands. Being on watch exacerbates this experience. Time is relative in a practical sense as it can stretch or compress, and some nights I have been on a watch for what feels like an hour starting at 0100 and then the sky lightens and turns pink and the morning comes. Other times, I fight for wakefulness and after making a go of trying, I wake the captain and ask him to take the watch instead so that I can catch some sleep for a little while. This is too much to risk, too much to lose, if I were to try any harder and fall deep into an exhausted sleep leaving no one at all to keep an eye out for cruise ships or super liners.
When I pulled my bag and a huge green canvas duffel out of the back of the white VW “burro??? at the entrance to the Club de Yates de Acapulco it was real. I hefted the bags and meandered through the club towards the water, where the boats would probably be. I found a table and dropped the bags. The canvas bag was stuffed with the parts needed to fix the remaining broken bits of the boat, things that couldn’t be secured in Mexico.
“Oy, mate!???
I looked around and saw a wiry Yule Brenner, brash and arrogant and – bald. What had once been my skinny little friend with the bushy head of red curls – those same curls that made women mad in their desire to touch them – were gone. I was looking at a man jaunting towards me like the King of Siam.
Mark grabbed a bag and we dropped into a little plastic outboard dinghy called the dink and groaned out to Kinship II. After settling into my own private stateroom, we moved up to the deck and into the net of the trampoline. Mark popped a couple Corona and . . . holy shit!
I had done the most irresponsible thing imaginable in dropping everything and flying three thousand miles to help a friend by replacing his crew and becoming a sailor for two months. I had clients and I had unemployment checks to sign and cash and I had a girlfriend. There were way too many things going on. It would never have happened had the request come in any other form than what I perceived as a mayday, an SOS. Guy rules and all that.
Sailing takes time, and it takes its own time which has nothing to do with either my desire or the requirements of society. The moment one becomes willful enough to disrespect the nature of the sea is the day something breaks. It’s as simple as that and is kind of spooky at first. Easy as she goes. Cliché sentiment seems to reverberate on the sea. The 96-hour passages blur one into the other into one long day, and when the limits of my tolerance were reached I was rewarded with a pod of a hundred dolphins dancing in and out of my wake. Or a field of basking green sea turtles in the middle of the sea. Or a dense morning fog clearing to a double rainbow. There are some people who have never experienced the explosions and trails of blue-green lights of bioluminescence to say nothing of believing that there is such magic as real world fairy dust.
The crew of six he started with in South Carolina had started abandoning the vessel beginning at the first stop after a grueling trek from the Keys all the way to Central America, through the Panama Canal, and back up the Pacific coast of Mexico. The faithful remnant left in Acapulco because their money had run out and the time schedule had slipped and slipped and slipped, as sailing schedules are wont to do.
Mark is an average man. Five-ten, slender, with a head full of red bristle where his long curly red locks used to be the last time I saw him.
Outside the streets were dusty but the sky was blue and clear. I was in fricking Mexico when I should have been cashing my own unemployment checks in Washington. We had done a quick run in on the dink to grab some groceries and diesel before heading up towards Baja. I had joined the final leg of a sail on March 1, 2003, spent my birthday on the boat, and found myself stuck in Cabo San Lucas over a month later.
I had never sailed with Mark, even though he lives and works from the cabin of a gorgeous yacht Kinship II. I have never been much of a sailor and so much of my sailing enjoyment had been vicarious. It just never interested me and Mark never really pressed the issue. Actually, the truth is that I was afraid that spending time in a world I couldn’t afford would make me feel poor. So I just avoided even the taste of success. So, as a result I had never actually sailed to say nothing of making a blue water passage with only one other crew member.
God can be very remedial in his lessons when you are sailing. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and Karma is direct, reciprocity is king on the sea. When I am tempted to be willful and push myself past either my abilities or my energy, I always either hurt myself or break something onboard. This is not a joke. It seems gentle – the sea always does – but it is life or death.
The lesson I have learned thus far is that there is a definite rhythm I have been blind to, within which everything works beautifully. As a striking example, we were on route from Manzanillo to Cabo San Lucas and it was to be a milk run. Easily enough diesel to motor from where we were anchored at the Las Hadas Resort to where we were to moor in Cabo San Lucas. First impossibility: we ran out of diesel prematurely because the engine was detuned and was drinking the fuel quickly. So we ran out with just enough to bring us in to port when we finally made it to port, which was still 150 miles away.
That’s okay, we have a sailing catamaran. We sail easily in 5 knot winds. During the second day, the main sail halyard snaps at the block, at the top of the mast. That’s okay, we have a redundant halyard – which snaps four hours later! We string up the Genoa line and limp the rest of the way. Impossible, but normal I guess.
Things like this happen a lot. When we arrived at Cabo San Lucas, we could not find anyone who would climb the mast, until we ran into Sebastian and his family, from Vancouver, BC. He shimmied up the mast for free and we were back on schedule. We ran into many people like Seb along the way and the Cruiser community around the world is amazing generous.
Sartre was wrong, hell is not other people: grace is other people.
Every day of this trip has humbled me; every day has given me confidence. Not once have I felt humiliation and every day has been a celebration. The confidence not to fear what will happen next, to remain present and observant, to remain vigilant but not aggressive. And I have been thriving and I am strong and worthy of supporting Captain Mark as his only crew and of protecting the delicate fiberglass exoskeleton Kinship II so that she is seaworthy and makes her voyage to Los Angeles on one pristine piece. It might have been the first time since reaching adulthood when I felt truly capable, truly a man.
On the boat, I had time to think. At first, way too much time! I felt guilt and boredom; I felt like I needed to do something, needed to get back to the office to make sure everything was all right. After two weeks – yes, I buzzed for a fortnight – I started to relax. I felt my heart, my face, by body, and then my mind become more tranquil. On the boat, I have been getting a good lesson in faith, in trust, and in moving with the flow as opposed to opposing it, striking against it. To force it makes it break; to avoid it doesn’t make it go away; to fear it doesn’t help. Whatever it is.
I am reminded every day that in a conscious, present, spiritual life, money is the easiest to secure for many of us as it is the most valued. Surely, it can feel that way. There are days when I lose sight of all the things in my life for which I am amazingly grateful and focus on only the things I lack, in this case money. And then it is often a downward spiral, where lack begets lack and before I knew it, I find myself feeling not only like a loser but like the worse kind: the fellow who failed to live up to his potential. In these times, I lose sight that I have had money before and that I will have money again. It’s easy when one lives in a small world – or a world, shrunk – to find oneself skewed: both in perspective and proportion.
But on the sea, it’s different. As a geek, I liken it to rebooting my desktop computer. Rebooting the PC is the secret we techies have for fixing most of the problems wrong with most desktop PCs. Most of the time, these slowdowns occur because there are too many things going on inside the PC that the user is no longer aware of: memory leaks, infinite loops, crashed software. These things cannot fix themselves and most users cannot truly sense this chaos in any way short of system slowdown. Not all problems result in the blue screen of death, some just send the computer into a morass. A skilled technician can fix some of the problems from the keyboard or by using a piece of software as an elixir, but the simplest thing one can do to set everything right is to turn the machine off, wait a minute and then turn it back on. Reboot. Yourself.
The best advice I ever got was from the colorful plastic car in the back of every seat on a commercial aircraft. Be sure to put on your own oxygen mask before putting a mast onto you child, which I take to mean as take care of yourself first, otherwise you’ll be no good to anyone else.
The next time I wish someone Godspeed, in my mind and heart that will forever be between 2.9 and 8 knots.
