Retrospective Two
Going way back
My first memory of sailing was with my dad on his 13’ wooden Blue Jay sailing dinghy. I was probably 4 or 5. My parents would rent a cottage each summer in and around Muskoka, and mom and dad would pack us all up into their 1960s vintage wood panelled station wagon, three seatbelt-less children, legs sticky on the hot vinyl bench seat.
Sam, the family dog, was relegated to the very back, in a small space saved for him between the boxes bowed out with our summer necessities - shorts and t-shirts, bathing suits, mom’s rubber air mattress, metal popsicle molds, masks and snorkels and swim fins, beach towels, tinned goods, sheets, plaid flannel sleeping bags, pillows.
Like any self respecting retriever, Sam loved the water and on one trip he famously leapt out of a side window, while the car was still moving, absolutely crazed by his first whiff of intoxicating lake. I completely understood Sam’s fanaticism as I would practically levitate as we got closer to the cottage, so deliriously excited at the first glimpse of pale blue water down those long dirt roads… and the sweet smell of crankcase oil used to keep the dust down.
We were in the water every day, skinny dipping, water balleting, leaping from docks or swim rafts, gunnel bobbing, Sam pulling us around by his tail, mom on her air mattress her hands sculling languidly at her sides, dad scudding about in his wee boat.
As summer jobs took over our teenage lives, the cottage rentals stopped, but dad always had a sailboat that, on weekends, he would trailer down to the boat launch in Humber Bay and head to Toronto island. As the youngest child and last left in the house, I was often recruited as crew, though I think his preferred company was his peeps, Ferg our dentist, and Holm, dad’s best friend, both of whom could contribute to dad’s epic sailing picnics, that which I could not, a thermos or two of martinis.
The event that truly sealed my destiny in sailing was when my dad inexplicably signed himself and my mom up for a weekend keel boat cruising course, knowing full well that mom would rather stick needles in her eyes than go sailing. With absolute conviction she manifested an injury to her elbow, rendering her unfit for the weekend. I give her props for her performance as she wandered about the house, wincing, with a bulky ice pack wrapped around her arm. As I was again the last standing child in the house, and despite teenage outrage at a lost weekend, (and many an incredulous look to my mother whose wanly sympathetic smile bordered on smirk), I was pressed into reluctant, pouty, service.
Things however went in a different direction that weekend, and I was hired as a sailing instructor for the last couple of summers of high school. I loved that job. Who wouldn’t?
For one of those summers, my brother Tim was hired as a garbage collector for the city of Toronto. He made good money, but he smelled like rotten cabbage and each day when he returned home from work, mom would make him strip his putrid coveralls off in the backyard and hose off before he came in the house, whilst I strolled past, coming home from my “job”, clad in white adidas shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, tanned limbs, sun bleached hair….
Sailing for me had become what a rock is to a limpet. I was completely seized.
At first the lure of sailing was in the sheer and utter joy of the mechanics. Feeling the power of a dinghy defying inertia and lifting onto a crazy-ass plane, or the bliss of a perfectly balanced gaff rigged schooner under full sail. Over time, the joy shifted from the workings of the boat to the unique and humbling view of our planet from the water. The jumble of awe and disquiet when you find yourself so completely alone, and insignificant, at sea. The joy of a landfall. The food. The culture. The most amazing people along the way.
Lou and I have struggled with the thought of selling Meteor, and if she does sell, we both agree that the next leg of our lives will still have us out on the ocean, neither of us capable of imagining a world without that first brush of warmth as the sun climbs above an unbroken watery horizon, and hearing the dolphins before seeing them.
Or standing watch in the deep indigo of night with stars so impossibly crowded in a moonless sky, that you wonder if they had all somehow been swept there, like a gardener raking leaves into the corner of the backyard.
Or the sheer giddy delight and wonder of whales breaching, fish with wings, and fleets of Portuguese Man O’ wars tacking upwind.
We are held in her spell… and in the immortal words of Van Morrison…
“hark now, hear the sailors cry
smell the sea and feel the sky
let your soul and spirit fly
into the mystic.”