Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  He knew all my buttons, how I felt about my grandfather, who’d fainted yet again, and how I knew my sister had a magical feel for steering our family’s fastest design in the grandest of Northwest sailboat races, or at least she had at one time. Steamrolled by his optimism, I felt bone weary, like I’d just swum across the bay.

  “Your sister’s definitely in,” he added, sinking the hook deeper. “Completely her idea.”

  I couldn’t hide my smile any longer. It’s not just simpletons like me who are suckers for sailing with their sisters. Einstein’s idea of an ideal summer was boating daily with his little sister Maja. In a 1929 letter, he wrote that he couldn’t wait to get her out sailing on his beloved Tümmler. You will go into raptures when you (hopefully) visit me next year.

  Raptures indeed.

  Einstein dared to imagine a new flexible grid of space and time, but he never learned how to swim or drive and unwittingly dated a Soviet spy. He also moseyed through summers in a rope belt and lady’s sandals and loved sailing with his little sister. Without knowing anything about her, though, I can promise you she wasn’t anywhere near the sailor mine was. But that’s not even slightly fair, because nobody has ever sailed quite like Ruby Johannssen.

  SUNDAY SCHOOL ON WATER

  The second of three Johannssen kids, pinned between a wild older brother and a soon-to-be-famous younger sister, I was the mild child, the hesitant shade of gray in a black-and-white household. Part of it was my comparable lack of gumption in a family that posted goals and inspirations on the walls. Ruby and Bernard had that dazzle of certitude, always seeming to know what they were going to be: Bernard, an astronaut or a boxer; Ruby, an acrobat or a singer. “What was I gonna be?” sounded like a trick question. How could I be anybody but me?

  My family rarely went to church, but we had our beliefs and rituals. For years, Sunday meant sailing, regardless of weather; sometimes in the big boat, more often in dinghies with our father shadowing us in a skiff. Where’s the wind? he’d shout, louder than any preacher. No! Those waves are old news! Where’s the wind now? His maxims were hammered into us. Ease, hike, trim! And his relentless mantra: Boat speed! Boat speed! Boat speed!

  Once I’d turned ten, Bernard twelve and Ruby eight, there was no getting out of Sunday sailing without a high fever. When there was too much breeze for the dinghies, we’d crew for the two Bobos, Senior and Junior, on our big boat against imaginary rivals. But usually they just anchored two buoys for a starting line and another two for upwind and downwind marks in the shallow bay east of Husky Stadium. Then they’d follow us around in the inflatable with Father shouting instructions and Grumps (the ironic nickname Bernard gave him) relentlessly encouraging us. We’d do thirty tacks, twenty jibes and ten mark roundings before we could even practice starting. Then they’d call off the race the instant it was clear who’d had the best start, and we’d do it again, with countdowns varying from one to three minutes.

  We practiced slam jibes and crash tacks, then we’d start, accelerate and stop on command. Like child gymnasts trained to throw flips before they’re old enough to fear them, we raced in storms, in fog and in the dark. It didn’t strike me how unusual our family was until we crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca in a gale, and I noticed, while surfing atop twelve-foot swells, that nobody else was out there, much less flying a purple spinnaker. When we slipped behind the tall breakwater into Port Townsend that chilly night, it was obvious no boats had even left the dock. I watched grown men eyeball our gregarious father—steam rising off his T-shirt—with the awe and distance reserved for champions and the mentally ill.

  Long after we’d learned the basics, he repeated them: how to read water and sails, how to see and anticipate the ever-changing geometry of the fastest zigzags around the racecourse. Most drawers of his life were messy, but he was a sailing perfectionist. If we slacked off on chores or homework, he rarely groused, but miss a ten-degree wind shift and he’d start barking. If the halyards were improperly coiled or—worst of all—if sails needlessly flapped or were improperly raised, adjusted, lowered or folded, there was a reckoning. Mostly, though, he implored us to just sail faster. Whether racing or not, he considered it an insult to the boat, the wind and our family name to go any slower than necessary. Something essential was gained—he called it honor—from sailing a boat as fast as possible that made up for most other transgressions. Through this prism of sailing right, we had a shot, so his parenting went, to experience inner perfection. Or, as Mother framed it, to understand an invisible force.

  Sailing began with a baffling lexicon, and there was no mercy for misidentification. Some things sounded like what they were: Mast, okay. Keel, sure. And, of course, boom, the most lethal and aptly named item on a sailboat, as in ka-boom if you didn’t duck at the right time. Fine. But left is port and right is starboard? Why, and says who? Even basic lingo seemed intentionally confounding. Ropes were lines? Yes, but they were halyards when they raised sails and sheets when they adjusted them. And knots were knots except when they were knots, as in nautical miles (1.15 normal miles) per hour, which was the confusing term for speed in the marine world, as if simply being afloat altered time and distance.

  Yet that was the lingo and nobody veered from it. When we steered the bow through the eye of the wind and the sails swung to the other side, we were tacking. Yet it was also called going about, which sounded more like a stroll than the right-angle turn it described. Hard alee! is what we were instructed to shout before tacking even if it was barely blowing and the only thing hard about it was finding enough wind to nudge the sails across.

  Over the sailing millennia, apparently nobody ever came up with an apt phrase to describe what it means to sail at angles toward, though not directly into, the wind. The options: going to weather (vague), sailing to windward (tongue twister), or beating (oddly violent or masturbatory). And if you steered too directly into the breeze and your sail fluttered, that was called pinching, which conjured a different image altogether. The potential bewilderment was endless. When your sails were on the port side, you were on a starboard tack and had the right-of-way. There were even two winds to keep track of, the true and the apparent.

  Grumps speculated that all the lingo was part of a conspiracy to make the simple act of sailing seem daunting. But I think the nautical glossary was invented by inarticulate men and perpetuated by mumbling successors who clung to it like any tribe clutches a dying language. Our assignment, though, was to master and not ponder the vocabulary. Yet the terms swirled in my head. One phrase that always made sense was sailing downwind. Anybody could visualize the oldest and simplest sailing mode, raising an animal hide above the raft and letting the wind push you through the water. This art has since been perfected with blousy spinnakers and surfy hulls, but sailing downwind has become running or, better yet, before the wind, which struck me as a phrase from the Creation Story or the first three words of an ominous fable. Admittedly, I tended to overthink these things. My father called me a thinker, which wasn’t a compliment. It put me in my mother’s camp, at odds with him and the other doers. Thinkers, he informed me, don’t win sailboat races.

  He’d critique us over lunch, playing Captain Second-Guess. Or he’d ask Mother to explain wind or sailing physics yet again. She rarely raced and never fawned over boats, but I never once heard her question the hub of our existence, as if she’d run some equation that proved her resistance was no match for the genetic gravitas of generations of Icelandic sailors distilled into the one and only Bobo Johannssen Jr. Or whatever defiance she’d mustered must’ve expired by the time Father’s medal hung on a nail in the garage. You win a silver in the ’76 Olympics, and your quirks, obsessions and chutzpah are all hailed as essential ingredients of your signature genius.

  As I said, my family rarely attended church or mentioned God—except Grumps. Thank God for this breeze, or that start, or that wind shift. His casual reverence was a tic he’d inherited from his Lutheran mother, but he’d also praise pagan lords whil
e heading back to the dock, thanking Odin, Thor and Poseidon among others. As Ruby told her Girl Scout troop leader, “Sailing is like praying in our family.” This was back when she used to spontaneously perform our family history for visitors with jumbles of fact and fiction.

  “Grumps’s father, Leif Johannssen, was related to the great Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson!” she’d begin, before Bernard inevitably pointed out that these two men were utterly unrelated.

  I don’t think Ruby set out to tell tall tales. She assumed most good stories were bolstered with interesting facts and numbers, not realizing they were also expected to be true. Yet these embellishments suited her. Things never did add up with her, so why should her stories? The only quibbler was Bernard, whose clarifications, footnotes and corrections turned her performances into duets.

  “Our great-grandfather,” Ruby proclaimed, “braved icebergs and pirates from Iceland to Seattle with his wife, Dora, in a small steel ketch in 1903.”

  “Actually they emigrated in 1914,” Bernard countered, “on a large passenger ship to eastern Canada before traveling overland to here.”

  “Grumps’s father,” Ruby continued merrily, “was a boatbuilder, which is why he started Johannssen Boatbuilders in a rotting warehouse he bought for eleven hundred dollars on the Ship Canal. Grumps was named Robert and called Bobby for short, which was finally shortened—nobody knows why—to Bobo.

  “When Grumps took over the boathouse in the early fifties,” she went on, “his specialty was designing fast and beautiful sailboats called Johos. Whoop-whoop! He and his wife had just one kid, our now world-famous father, Robert Jr., or Little Bobo, as he was originally called, then Bobo Jr., who took to boatbuilding like a dog takes to water [she routinely botched clichés] and, for some inexplicable reason, grew nearly a foot taller than his dad!”

  Actually, Bernard argued, it was eight inches and easily explained, considering some of our Icelandic relatives were giants. We’d marveled over an overexposed photo of a bare-chested Great-Uncle Petur with normal men coming up to his nipples.

  “By the time Daddy graduated from high school [depending on mood and courage, Bernard might point out that Father dropped out of the eleventh grade] he was building wooden sailboats with Grumps full-time. And in 1967 the business was renamed Johannssen and Sons Boat Company, even though there was only one son who’d soon be heading off to become a war hero. And they went on to design and build the prettiest and fastest fiberglass sailboats in the world!”

  “In Puget Sound, perhaps,” Bernard mumbled traitorously.

  “First came the Joho 32 and then the cheetah-fast Joho 39—whoop! whoop!—which wasn’t only a popular cruiser but also won its share of races—though usually with a Johannssen at the helm. Hey, what can I say? We’re good!

  “Grumps sold boats but also an experience unlike anything you can ever have on land. His love of boats made other sailors feel like they were getting a steal and weren’t going bonkers, though many of them were doing both. And there’s a reason we’re so good with boats: we have a higher salt content in our blood!”

  “That claim,” Bernard would patiently explain, “is based on one misleading blood test that showed Grumps had high sodium levels.”

  “And some people have suggested,” Ruby concluded (she loved dramatic endings), “that the reason the Johos have been so popular and Johannssen racers so unbeatable is that sailing runs in our blood all the way back to Leif ‘the Greatest Explorer of All Time’ Eriksson!”

  “Still not true!” Bernard countershouted. “No relation whatsoever!”

  While Ruby entertained and Bernard cross-examined, my role was far more subtle. I’d peer over the Bobos’ shoulders after they’d unfurl drawings on the dinner table and secure the corners with beer bottles and wineglasses. Then the three of us would silently ponder the lines until my father asked what I thought. A lot of beauty I’d miss, but not this kind.

  “I like how this one sits in the water,” I’d say, tracing my pinkie along the arc of the toe rail. “I like the sheer and low freeboard. She’s got a tall stick and a deep keel. Looks fast and balanced to me.”

  If I said it just right, his thick bottom lip would stretch into a grin, and he’d swing his eyes at Grumps. In those days, they saw me as their understudy.

  There are so many ways to disappoint your family.

  Mother was immune to the sport even though she contributed to the obsession, filling us with science as it pertained to sailing and life. A physics teacher at Ballard High, she shared her love of the periodic table when she wasn’t reminding us that everything, including seawater, rocks and apples, was mostly empty space. People, too, she’d say, tipping her head toward our father dozing and whimpering in the recliner. Or she’d hit us with such unusual facts as: the earth is an imperfect sphere, 42.6 kilometers fatter than it is tall. Or she’d point out that almost everything in the room—the radio, stereo, refrigerator and TV—had been made possible by math. None of our friends heard so much about Newton’s second law of motion or anything about Bernoulli’s principle, which explained how sails and keels worked like wings creating two different lifting forces that squirted a boat forward like a watermelon seed squeezed between your fingertips. We understood Bernoulli long before we knew where babies came from. Mother drilled us on Einstein, too. (Ruby’s the only toddler I ever heard shout, “E equiz emzee swear!”) That Einstein was a lifelong sailing fanatic helped bridge the gap between our parents, between science and sailing. Plus, Mother insisted, just trying to understand him made you smarter. I alone took on that challenge, realizing only years later that I was studying Einstein to better understand my mother.

  Early on, I was good enough at math to fool her that I grasped more than I had. She tucked me in one night and whispered, “Sometimes mathematics builds up inside us, and it’s like we’re climbing some mountain and we get this beautiful view of things that can only be seen by other mathematicians like us.”

  The most I could muster was a nod, but my scalp tingled.

  That same summer she scribbled down two Isaac Newton formulas on the back of a receipt, folded it and handed it to me in private. It was far more than just the mathematical explanations of why planets moved in elliptical orbits. It was as if I now carried in my pocket the two deepest secrets of the universe.

  Her information and insights were delivered with a shrill French accent that further confused people trying to sort out our roots. She’d been an innocent Swiss exchange student named Marcelle Gillette when she’d fallen under our father’s spell—according to Ruby’s rendition of their first date—while sailing in an old wooden Joho 26 with Father snickering at her silent Hs, how she called us uman beings and commented on the umid weather or complained about that Playboy magazine perv Ugh Effner.

  As much as Mother taught us, there was no mistaking who our headmaster was. Father shoved sailing down our throats, and early on Bernard and I swallowed every drop. We practiced boat-handling maneuvers till our hands bled while Ruby barely paid attention, not from lack of interest, but as though she’d entered the world already grasping what we’d never know.

  RUBY MOMENTS

  Two early memories of Ruby sailing:

  Sunday after Thanksgiving 1995: My father shoved us out into a diagonal rain in our three Lasers. It took 160 pounds to keep these sleek racing dinghies upright in a blow. Bernard might’ve weighed 150. I was maybe 120, and Ruby had recently cleared 95. So we were all doomed to capsizing, particularly her. Wearing partial wet suits didn’t make it more comfortable or less daunting.

  After the two Bobos anchored the inflatable buoys and gave us the three-minute horn, we traversed an invisible starting line littered with beer cans, straining to level our boats by either steering directly into the squall and letting the sails flap or pinching so close to the wind that they never completely filled while we dug our shins beneath hiking straps and suspended our bodies horizontally across the decks and out over the water. I capsized at the two-minut
e horn and was upright by the one-minute blast, already shivering and flustered and irritated that Ruby hadn’t flipped yet. We all had the same equipment and differed only in age, weight and skills. As I tacked toward the starting line, Ruby saw my cringing misery, and her mouth flew open with laughter.

  While she and I carefully pinched across the line through the froth, Bernard risked filling his sail and surged ahead, tipping wildly before inverting his body backwards over the rail until his boom clipped a wave and he capsized hard. If there was a violent way to do something, my brother usually found it.

  More cautious than ever, I continued pinching, but my concentration slipped and I veered off course, a gust straining my sail before I could ease the pressure. By the time my mast hit the water, I was already scrambling over the high side to stand on the centerboard, trying not to panic but feeling numb and helpless, barely aware of my father’s shouted commands. Once I got my boat upright, Bernard had tacked and passed Ruby, skimming along at twice her speed and rapidly approaching the upwind mark at an awkward angle, hoping a favorable shift might let him round it without having to tack twice. Stalling, and desperately trying not to capsize again, I slid sideways and noticed Ruby gaining on me, inching along at a better angle toward the mark, her boat tipping less, making steadier progress, as if she’d found a safe passage. Grumps was so proud he began shouting “God loves ya, Ruby!” just as Bernard missed the upwind mark, tacked back and got knocked down like he’d been swatted by some massive unseen hand. Amazingly, I rounded the mark first and began veering toward the downwind buoy bobbing in the waves half a mile away with Ruby still a few boat lengths behind me. As soon as I loosened my sail and swung the boom wide, I started surfing so wildly that I was reluctant to lift the entire centerboard and risk losing more control. I didn’t want to get soaked again. Plus, it felt like something might snap, though that—the breaking and the mending—was increasingly thrilling to me.