Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  Few places turn more motley than a hobo marina that welcomes liveaboards. There were some professionals, a few state workers, an occasional world traveler and plenty of dreamers, eccentrics, addicts and ex-cons like Trent. Nobody knew if that was his first, last or real name, and the fine print on his business card boasted that he offered paid instruction on tree climbing, marathon swimming, windsurfing and Frisbee golf. Toss in two lesbians, several stoners, an elderly nudist couple, a narcoleptic we called Rem and a former nun named Georgia who lived in a large black catamaran and call it my neighborhood.

  There was a sweet vincibility to Sunrise, the grass and ferns sprouting from rotting piers reminding us that our time here was limited. Yet people kept coming and going, their abandoned boats auctioned and demolished. My problem was that I wanted to rescue them all. Sloops, ketches, schooners, powerboats, I couldn’t resist. Similarly indiscriminate with women, I liked them short and tall, skinny and stubby, quiet and brash, brainy and simple, sane and nutso. I wasn’t an ass man, a boob or an elbow man. If anything I was a laugh man, or maybe a voice man because I knew that might become the soundtrack to my life. The smart ones sensed my lack of discernment and focus almost immediately.

  See, Sunrise had wireless, so my dating two-step usually began with dinner at the marina tavern with its brassy waitresses and addictive clam chowder. Plus they all wanted to see my home. Yet no matter how truthfully I described it, they’d envision a swanky yacht instead of a dank hovel of tools and books with a drop-down table, a triangular bed and a closet toilet. What it definitely didn’t look like was the home of their future husband. And that’s what many of them were hunting for—whether they realized it or not.

  Getting dates wasn’t the hard part. As Ruby once put it, my angular face, messy hair and spaniel eyes made me appealing to all those girls who fell for stray dogs. If there were second dates, I’d take them sailing and study their reactions as the boat tipped and the plates, pots and life preservers fell to the floor, as if the inanimates below were enjoying raucous sex while we got acquainted above. They didn’t have to instantly love sailing, but they couldn’t act like they’d rather be at some mall.

  As new prospects popped into my in-box every day, I’d lean back and study their pictures for beauty only I could see, then scroll down to the books they’d most recently read. Number 23 mentioned Sophie’s Choice. So I couldn’t resist meeting her, though her pictures were poorly lit and she’d described herself as “Hillbilly cute.”

  Tacking out of the marina now, I smelled Grady Rollins’s eighty-two-foot yacht. If you squinted you could see its former grandeur, the knife bow, fantail stern and curved pilot-house windows. But now? You could kick a hole in her side without straining a hamstring. And if you stepped inside, the mildew reek snapped your head back.

  “Got some nasty deck leaks,” Grady had admitted after coaxing me aboard the first time. “Especially above the bedrooms, but I just push the mattresses aside.”

  I reluctantly toured his dilapidated yacht with one eye calculating the enormous restoration costs, the other filling out my insane-boater checklist.

  Minimal boating experience. Check.

  Blindly in love with a hopeless boat. Check.

  Vastly underestimates maintenance expenses. Check.

  The gleaming eyes of a zealot. Double check.

  Yet it was hard to dislike Grady. His cheerful twang matched his crisp Wranglers and Western shirts with their yokes and snaps. He was a salesman, though nobody knew what he peddled beyond optimism. While his fence-post posture and courtly manners suggested he’d served, nobody knew where or when. Perhaps it was just his Oklahoman sensibilities. See, Grady was yet another adventure migrant who’d washed up here.

  From inside the wheelhouse, his boat didn’t even appear to be compromised. And after we dropped into the refurbished dining room, I sensed some of the effortless elegance she’d obviously once generated and began to sympathize with him.

  On the coffee table next to a brown couch was a hardbound version of Yachting from 1975. “Go ahead,” he urged, “take a look.” Without my leafing, the magazine fell open to a two-page spread on his boat, temporarily restored to its 1915 splendor. He shared the yacht’s history, its foreclosures, title fights and lawsuits escalating until he’d snatched it at what sounded like a steal if you didn’t think very hard. All of which meant, of course, that I was getting played. Like the others, Grady was fishing for free help, having heard, no doubt, about my unusual philanthropy.

  “People say all the time I should just put this old girl out of her misery,” he said. “They tell me I should sink or demolish her and move on. ‘Get over it!’ Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Most people don’t understand love,” I heard myself respond.

  “Thank you! That’s exactly right! It’s like they’re all sayin’, ‘Why’re you still bangin’ this old hag when you could be boppin’ some young thing?’ ”

  “Love,” I said again.

  Down below, he showed me the huge twin diesels, which looked strangely clean, almost new. He offered to turn them over, and, believe me, I wanted to hear them knock, but again I felt that tug of free labor and passed. Then I trailed him to the stern cabin—twelve hundred square feet in all, he told me, like a Realtor pitching a condo—and down a comically narrow spiral to three disheveled bedrooms, where the mold stench tripled. Still, the sporty tiled and teak-laid head was a jewel of a tiny bathroom that would’ve looked regal anywhere.

  “My girlfriend loves this boat,” he assured me. “If she didn’t, I’d have to cut her loose because I’m gonna die on this thing.” He told me that a second time. I nodded so he wouldn’t say it again.

  Stepping back onto the dock, we walked around gazing quietly at his rot-softened hull. “I’m renamin’ her Shangri-la,” he said, beaming like an expectant father. “Gonna get a real artist to paint the name freehand on her stern. Shangri-la!”

  He’s a loon, I reminded myself, once he told me his master plan called for not only removing the rot but also raising the bow. Yet his optimism seemed so genuine it felt contagious. I’d seen this trait before, of course, but Grady had taken it to another level of batshit craziness. I nodded along, not wanting to offer any buzzkilling estimates of what his fantasy might cost. By now I was rooting for him, but then I innocently asked why he wanted to raise the bow, and he doubled down on the madness.

  “Oh, Josh,” he said, as if it were obvious, “I’m gonna put a piano in her. Gotta lift the bow so it’ll fit!”

  This felt like the moment when he’d enlist me in his quixotic absurdity, but he didn’t. At least not yet. He was just sharing his dreams with a stranger on a dock. “A baby grand,” he said, smiling and shaking his head like even he couldn’t believe how fantastic this was all gonna be. “Not a grand. A baby’ll work just fine.”

  “You play?” I asked.

  “Hell no!” He dragged his hand back through his hair, leaving the impression that his retreating hairline wasn’t the result of natural balding so much as the consequence of being continually astounded.

  I tried to look at him like he wasn’t deranged. “Your girlfriend?”

  “What about her?”

  “She play?”

  “Not a lick.” He laughed. “I just love pianos, Josh.”

  In the bright daylight he actually didn’t look nuts at all, even after explaining with an Okie mumble that he was running dreadfully low on cash. His expression was serene, not cuckoo.

  “You won’t need to raise the bow,” I told him as pigeons swooped and banked in formation over our heads toward the B Dock. “The piano should fit as is.”

  It’d been weeks since that exchange, but I recalled Grady’s delight at my observation as I tacked my Star twenty feet from his rotting bow and glided out of the marina toward the crowded racecourse.

  EVERY CELL IN YOUR BODY

  My racing sidekick this evening was eager Johnny, a 120-pound Japanese student at the college. His rea
l name was Hideaki, but to make it easy for Americans he told everybody to call him Johnny. My response was to insist that he call me by my Japanese name of choice, Kazuhiro. So when we sailed he called me Kaz, or Captain Kazuhiro if he was feeling particularly respectful.

  His legs were too short for him to get his butt out over the rail, but his enthusiasm nearly made up for his size. What was endearing, though, was how much he loved everything about racing: the rigging, the waiting, the jockeying, the near collisions, the shouting matches, the absence or excess of wind, seemingly even the losing. Whatever he knew I’d taught him, but since language often fouled us up I kept his assignments simple, along the lines of “Where’s Mario?”

  If you’d just met our fleet of Star sailors, thirty-three men and nine women, you’d never guess Mario was our Buddha. No, you’d fall for the enchanting accents and assume the eloquent Brit or the loud Lithuanian or perhaps the handsome Aussie was the chosen one. You might even pick any of several blustery Americans before you’d point to sheepish Mario. The first hint, though, was that at six three and twice Johnny’s weight he possessed the ideal length and mass to keep these boats level and fast when it blew. But at the southern end of Puget Sound we’d often get a whole lot of nothing, which is why some skippers preferred light crews, though Mario usually won those drifters, too. On water, he oozed command, rarely speaking or protesting. You never heard him shout Starboard! because everybody knew where he was and that he either had the right-of-way or wouldn’t hit you. You also noticed his swiveling head, his fast strong hands and his unruly shrub of hair that looked like he’d never been indoors. To top off his dominance, he beat everybody with a geriatric crew.

  Technically over seventy, Yvonne moved like fifty, with silky white hair and a Mona Lisa grin beneath her wide-brimmed hat that made you want to paint her. Still, what it all said, without Mario having to, was: I can beat you hacks with a dated hull, shit sails and a spinster on the bow. It was her boat, you see. Mario was a racing bum who’d never owned a single floating object. Beyond his size and unknowable age, he didn’t offer many clues about himself other than that he worked in transportation logistics. What else we’d clawed out of him was that he was single and kidless, living alone in some random apartment equidistant to three sailing clubs where dozens of race-boat owners begged him to steer theirs and make their pricey obsessions, at least for a day, seem sane. But what Mario apparently liked the most was racing cheap old Stars down here with the rest of us.

  Crouched low in the water beneath an enormous mainsail, these boats resemble birds with wings too large for their bodies. Conceived in 1911, a Star is twenty-two feet, nine inches long and just five foot eight wide. Its tall, flexible mast is easy to bend, shape and, unfortunately, snap. Attached to it and swinging perilously low over the cockpit is an endless boom, making the Star perhaps the most uncomfortable, head-banging two-man boat out there. You don’t just duck when you tack, you go facedown like you’re in a foxhole under fire. Throw it all together and you have a sleek boat that’s fended off a century of design revolutions, even if racing it feels like playing tennis with an old wooden racket.

  That Yvonne’s boat was the only red one in the fleet made it easy to spot, though all you really needed to do was look toward the front. Comforting ourselves, we collected excuses and theories. Maybe her boat was slightly lighter, her mast better tuned, her sails cut in New Zealand. After a few beers, we’d indulge the notion that Yvonne herself was the secret weapon, a mermaid or sea witch masquerading as an elderly hippie.

  By the third and final race, Johnny and I were parched and discouraged after finishing in the middle yet again, the wind too frisky for us to keep stable and fast. But it now had lightened enough that we had a chance. I followed Mario, timed it right and flew out beside him. For the first time in weeks, we were close enough to watch him in action.

  Unlike me, he wasn’t squeezing the tiller, holding his breath and studying telltales, nor desperately trying to go in a straight, fast line. He was in perpetual motion, tightening and easing lines, reshaping the mast and the mainsail like a man playing a stand-up harp, bowing the sails and accelerating, then steering more directly into the wind without losing speed. When he and Yvonne tacked, their footwork and body movements looked choreographed. Trying to copy them, I whacked my skull on the boom, and Johnny missed the hiking strap with his foot and nearly backflipped overboard. Then we pinched, stalled and fell farther behind.

  One of Mario’s advantages might have been that he didn’t have a mother who’d pointed out to him that sailing was more complicated than flying. Mine wrote an article for Sail magazine that confused thousands by mixing laws of motion and fluid dynamics with forces of gravity, torque, kinetic energy, wind, lift and drag to explain the science behind the sport. Even as technical as she got—“water is 800 times denser than air”—she warned that her tangled equations were oversimplifications because once a boat tips or the wind gusts the calculations change again. In other words, as soon as you think you’ve grasped sailing physics, there’s something else to factor in and you’re back to bafflement.

  At some point, almost everyone had ribbed me about being a mediocre racer. A Johannssen who can’t sail? That’s like being Aretha’s tone-deaf daughter or Einstein’s dimwitted son. But Mario never brought it up. The only thing he’d ever said about my family was how much he hoped my sister would race with us down here someday.

  “I still don’t see the upwind mark,” Johnny admitted after a long silence.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Mario will show us.” He rounded the buoy a moment later and surfed toward us, his main fully eased, his jib poled out wide, with Yvonne lounging belly-down on the bow in her straw hat, as if poolside in Monte Carlo. Like I said, she got into our heads, too.

  After the last race, we all glided home in the buttery twilight. Just an hour’s drive or a day’s sail from noisy Seattle, Olympia used to be the end of the wagon road heading north from Oregon. From the water, the southern end of this inland sea still has that dead-end feel. The tides get more extreme, but just about everything else mellows, with enough greenery crowding the modest city to imagine nature reclaiming downtown, its shabby buildings floating out on the next big ebb.

  With just enough wind to return, nobody spoke, not wanting to spoil the moment, all of us happy mutes with bright faces and no chance of explaining this sensation, even to ourselves. Perhaps that’s part of why I keep taking people sailing, hoping somebody will eventually put the feeling into words. My mother’s the only one I’ve ever heard try.

  “So why do we feel so good out here?” Ruby had asked one night after a week of cruising that ended with us all lying on the deck, spinning around the anchor.

  Mother loved these sorts of questions. Why do we laugh when something is funny? Why do we dream of flying?

  “Well, it’s the same feeling we get when we walk along the ocean, isn’t it?” she began indirectly, as usual. “It’s that ionic lift from salty water, sure. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  We were all yeahing and nodding and listening hard in case she put her finger on something revelatory.

  “And it’s even more powerful when you’re out on the water all day because the rise and fall of the ocean connects you to the sun and moon, right?”

  With her eyes squeezed shut, we knew not to rush her.

  “That alone might make us feel good, but let’s not forget we live on a planet that’s mostly water—and so are we, right?”

  We were too tired to respond. Sure, whatever, yes!

  “And we know all of life began in salty water. So maybe the reason we feel like we’re glowing or buzzing at times like these is that when we’re out here every cell in our body is saying, Momma!”

  After a thoughtful lull, Ruby broke the silence by shouting, “Momma!”

  —

  Our night of Star racing ended with Johnny and me rolling the sails and offering each other farewell bows.

  “Th
ank you, Kazuhiro,” he said, “for another night of sailing.”

  “No, thank you, Hideaki,” I replied. “Good job out there.”

  He bowed. I bowed back. He dropped his head again, wanting the last word, but I was not about to be outgratituded tonight.

  Afterwards, I shuffled up the A Dock through the early evening cacophony of metal, hip-hop and classical—the mix, as always, reflecting the drugs du jour on the docks. You could tell the age and sobriety of the new liveaboards by their music. Whenever a meth head moved in, we heard from howling bands with names like Bone Cancer followed by fights and evictions. Then the tunes would improve for a spell until the next addict turned up.

  Glancing up at the noisy tavern above the marina, I noticed a bag lady waiting outside the gate for the A Dock.

  “Hey,” Mario said, surprising me as I strode past his boat. “How’d you do out there?”

  “Another beautiful night of discouraging sailing,” I said.

  He gave me a wincing smile. Mario had usually finished his cheeseburger by now and was slipping out the back door. Uncomfortable with placing second in one race, though, he’d been tweaking something probably only he’d notice, tightening an upper shroud a half turn or reinspecting the battens.

  “Hey,” he said, “I was wondering…”

  “Yeah?”