Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  He pushed a few breaths into the phone. “Feeling sorry for yourself? You still never pounce on anything, do you? You walk around in circles like a dog figuring out where to piss. Always have. Sometimes you have to pounce!” He filibustered for several more minutes before closing with “And I sure hope you realize we need to keep this family project as quiet and affordable as possible.”

  Translation: Don’t let anybody know what we’re doing to this boat, and forget about getting paid.

  “Seeing how you’re so worried about time,” I said, hyperventilating slightly and closing my eyes to brace for impact, “shouldn’t you let the Swiftsure handicappers know about your little design changes? Shouldn’t you pounce on that?”

  There was a pause, like the delay and click before a detonation, yet he came back calmer. “You worry about your end. When we have something to tell them, I’ll handle it. Get that keel off. No more lollygagging.”

  Back in the brilliant daylight, I climbed down the ladder, still cooling from my father’s words, my resentment spreading to include my brother for adding another stressor to my days—incessantly wondering if and how some bogeyman named Yoshito would ever respond to my e-mail.

  After lighting a cigarette, another theatrical touch I’d stolen from Grumps, I circumnavigated the vessel again, triple checking that the rudder lined up with the keel, that the hull was true. The buyer was a desperate dog by now, silently begging me to throw him a ball of information, and his wife heaved herself out of the backseat of their old sedan to hear what I had to say, praying, no doubt, I’d deem the Alberg an overpriced lemon.

  Exhaling slowly, I penciled a shopping list in the margin—cereal, bananas, beer. Surveys bring out the sadist in me. When a boat’s overpriced junk, I rush to crush the dream with lines like Run away and don’t look back. But when she’s a peach, I often stall and withhold oxygen before sharing the verdict with the nearly ecstatic buyer.

  “So,” he finally asked, “is she solid?”

  “She’s got voids,” I said solemnly. “Four-to-six-inch gaps in the cockpit decking.” His face fell; hers lifted. “But so do most boats,” I added, “even new ones.” They swapped expressions. Then I exhaled another thin cloud and said, “But you’ve also got rot here.”

  “Rot!” The man looked like I’d informed him he had leukemia. “How bad?”

  I shook my head. “You might drill some holes and dry it out some. Beyond that it gets pricey.”

  The wife made a fist and gently pumped it.

  “But that’s true for most old boats in this climate,” I continued. “If they’ve got wooden cores, rot comes with rain. This isn’t so bad. For this vintage, her decks are decent. The sails and running rigging are toast, though that’s no big deal. Her mast is bent to port, but you should be able to straighten that out. And while the auxiliary looks clean—and isn’t leaking oil or coolant—she looks like she’s been run hot at least once.”

  He nodded like a bobblehead. “So, what would you say overall?”

  I blew a smoke ring and shot a smaller one through it, something I’m fairly skilled at unless you compare me with Grumps. When there’s no breeze, he can pop out five perfect rings so fast he can skywrite the Olympic insignia.

  “Her body—the hull—is flawless,” I said, staring at the wife who was pacing now like a caged rhino. “I’ll need to run market comparables, but I’m guessing she’s worth the asking price. Wouldn’t take her on the outside without an overhaul, but she can handle inland waters right now. You’re not gonna win races, but Albergs are still popular, which helps with resale when it comes time to move on.”

  Within a few days they’d receive a report filled with enough minutiae about things to fix and ponder—missing split-ring on clevis pin holding starboard lower lifeline to bow pulpit—to fill many weekends. I wished them luck and stepped back before I got slapped by the wife or hugged by the husband, who I predicted would immediately buy new heaters and refrigeration and solar panels that he didn’t need, hastening their inevitable divorce when the wife would insist on keeping the boat just to twist the knife.

  Glancing beyond the doomed couple, I took in the rest of the yard. Hunters and Catalinas getting their bottoms painted. A Nordic Tug with a new bow thruster. A weathered black schooner near the corner of the yard that, if I hadn’t been dodging their eyes, I never would have noticed. Even though it was sixty yards away, and sixteen years had passed since I’d seen it, I knew exactly what it was and could make out a handwritten FOR SALE sign on the lifelines as well as its name. Rainbird.

  The same forty-footer that had made Grumps groan with lust!

  Starting to pant, I simultaneously wondered what they were asking and if it might be the ideal new boat for my brother. Or fix it up and give it to Grumps on his eighty-eighth birthday! Or buy it for me! Yes! Check out those lines! The sultry Rainbird down on her luck and falling into my price range! That’s called fate, right? Then it hit me, how much time and money she’d guzzle, how fast she’d decay, how she was probably slow through the water and gloomy down below, how she’d bust my heart.

  I flicked my smoke into a puddle, spun on a boot heel and ordered my legs to carry me safely away as an unusual black-and-yellow butterfly flitted into view and dive-bombed my face before flapping away, as if Bernard had been enjoying my internal melodrama and couldn’t resist swooping low for a taunt.

  OUR LEVITATING SISTER

  As startling as our sister’s sailing mastery rapidly became, it still alarmed us the first time Father showed more faith in her than her brothers in the biggest race of the year.

  Beginning and ending near Victoria Harbour, the annual Swiftsure International Yacht Race called for sailing out into the Pacific and back on the last weekend in May, with most boats finishing the following morning or later, depending on size, wind speed, patience, bravado, skills and luck.

  We were running Freya II as a family that year, along with two of Father’s pals who’d been racing since woolly mammoths roamed, as Ruby liked to say. But Bernard and I still outranked her on the big boat. So why let our fifteen-year-old sis call out sail adjustments right after we crossed the starting line?

  Swiftsure is notoriously volatile, capable of dramatic shifts in wind and waves that send so many sailors, me and Grumps included, scrambling for Dramamine. Nothing pleased the Bobos more than placing well here in one of their own designs. They’d last won it in 1986 and had finished in the top five three times afterwards, but even that was increasingly unlikely, since new ultralights were turning the final downwind leg into a drag race that left the Johos behind.

  Like most races involving vessels of various designs, Swiftsure uses a handicapping system that enables any boat to compete against another regardless of size, speed or age. Unlike golf, the handicaps apply to the boats, not the sailors. The higher the handicap, the slower the boat.

  If boat A is a 0 (a dead giveaway it’s large and fast), and B is a 60 (still pretty fast and likely large), A would need to beat B by sixty seconds per nautical mile. In a ten-mile race, regardless of wind speed, A needs to finish at least ten minutes ahead of B to place higher.

  So it’s not about who hits the finish line first because you won’t know who really won for sure until everybody crosses and this calculation is run: c = e − (r × d). Or, corrected time (in seconds) equals elapsed time (in seconds) minus the rating (handicap) times the distance (nautical miles). Waiting for the math often makes for belated celebrations when—after the fifth postrace beer, or the next morning—the results are finally released.

  This is the norm for sailboat races yet remains as awkward as trying to handicap a road race between an old El Camino, a Hummer and a new Ferrari to ensure that the best driver wins. A derelict sloop sailed by drunken rookies gets the same handicap as the same design in mint condition commandeered by America’s Cup winners. So rich owners, who can keep blowing cash on new sails, get rewarded. As do rogue cheaters who lighten or refashion their boats without informing r
ace officials of speed-increasing, handicap-altering changes.

  By the spring of 1998, the Bobos were desperately hoping to goose sales by winning Swiftsure with their already dated Joho 39, which meant they were betting the family business that Ruby was already better than the rest of us at calling sail trims from the bow. Lying on her back, she eyed the curvature of the sails and the slot between them, shouting out subtle adjustments in her kid soprano.

  Too much twist in the main…Lower the traveler…Another inch!…Too much!…That’s better. A little more. There…Now slide the jib car forward an inch…Good. A bit more jib halyard…That’s it. Yes!

  The larger revelation, however, came during the moonlit downwind run back to Victoria. Fearing we were falling farther behind, Father kept glancing from Ruby to our stalling spinnaker and back at her. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I noticed Mother studying the clashing and overlapping waves behind us again. “There’s probably a secret proof behind all this movement,” she told me when I got closer. “We use equations, you know, to predict currents and blood flow or to know how long it’ll take for a stirred cup of coffee to become still.” Her smiling face turned into the light. “There’s only chaos until we come up with the right math to explain it.”

  Meanwhile, Father kept peeking at Ruby. “What?” he demanded again.

  She exhaled. “Why don’t we just head up forty-five degrees for a hundred yards, and then jibe and ride the next gust. The puffs seem to be coming every three or four minutes, and more directly from the south, so we’ll be able to head off at a faster pace on a more productive course, right? And then we’ll do it again and again until the pattern shifts or we gobsmack these posers with boat speed. Maybe it won’t work, but it beats sticking with this course and watching boats continue to pass us, doesn’t it?”

  We looked around for the gusts she was talking about. Yet outside the moonbeam, the water was a black mystery. Perhaps she’d been tracking boat lights, but how could we be sure the gusts would be there, much less at the same angle, when we arrived? To our astonishment, though, Father stepped back and relinquished the wheel. “You do it,” he said.

  Maybe he deferred out of exhaustion. He routinely drove longer than anybody could concentrate. Or perhaps it was resignation because we’d lost too much ground to have a shot at winning even our class of similarly rated boats. Still, it was surreal to see him break the rotation and surrender the helm to little Ruby, and not out of love or preferential treatment but a raw desire to finish higher.

  Traveling farther, but faster, we passed half a dozen boats. Even Mother tuned in, telling Ruby when the wind waves and swells were synched to encourage surfing, and she’d steer more perpendicularly to the swells, speeding up again by veering more upwind until the next surfing opportunity arose.

  Our newfound speed cheered us all, with Ruby now calling trims and jibes from behind the wheel and Bernard handling the challenging spinnaker-pole maneuvers in the rising blow as Grumps hurled out gratitude to the deities. “Thank you, Aeolus! Much obliged, Njord!” And just as we were weaving and surfing at our fastest, Ruby began humming, a flagrant violation of the Bobos’ racing superstitions. Yet nobody flinched even when she started singing, softly at first, “I’m bein’ followed by a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow,” and everybody except Grumps, who didn’t know the lyrics, joined in.

  Then our sixteen-foot spinnaker pole inexplicably buckled, and as the pole fell to starboard, the massive flimsy sail collapsed to port. Bernard lunged for the pole and unlatched its jaws from the sail and then the mast before holding up the bent aluminum tube for everyone to see while Ruby steered more downwind to refill the unbraced, free-flying spinnaker, and the boat pounded onward.

  I didn’t hear what anybody said next because I was already scrambling below. Without the pole, I knew we’d either have to keep sailing more carefully and directly downwind or, more likely, drop the spinnaker, either of which doomed our performance. Scanning the cabin for a solution, all I saw was the tapered teak leg on the collapsible table latched to the bulkhead, and I snapped it off at the hinge, then grabbed a roll of duct tape and popped up on deck, where everybody was shouting. Scrambling forward, I told Bernard and Clive to hold the damaged pole straight while I taped my makeshift splint, turn after turn after turn to the buckled section. Then they reattached the pole to the spinnaker and then to the mast and gave Ruby the thumbs-up to change course and fill the sail. After it survived two gusts in a row there was applause.

  If my father was ever more proud of me, I’ve forgotten the moment.

  The pole would fail again within the hour, but we amazingly finished first in our class that year, fifth overall. We probably wouldn’t have cracked the top ten without Ruby steering.

  Word of her prowess, both accurate and apocryphal, continued to spread, and Bernard fueled the rumors. “She smells wind shifts,” he’d tell other racers. “Watch her nostrils flare.” Her success on water obscured the fact she was flunking classes and, as Mother put it, picking the wrong friends and still giving away everything she owned. Yet her failings and travails went unnoticed by Father. Like I said, sailing well was the hall pass in our house.

  But looking back, I see her uncertainty in some of those old photos. She didn’t know what was going on either. There were several shots in which we three Johannssen kids stood side by side, yet inexplicably only her hair was blowing. Others showed her sailing with tiny rainbows encircling her boat and, in one picture, her head. Another one Bernard and I obsessed over was taken from behind with her hiked out on her Laser, her torso suspended horizontally over the water. Sheer physics required her butt or thighs to be pressed hard against the gunwale, but there was light beneath her rear, too, as if she were floating. Bernard studied another Hovering Ruby photo for days, trying to figure out what trick explained the illusion that she was standing an inch above Freya II’s deck.

  Mother toyed with us, speculating on the scientific possibility that a powerful magnetic field could levitate a human ever so slightly and that perhaps some people were more susceptible to such forces. But Bernard cried bullshit and found a magician’s handbook that described how he took advantage of an audience’s inability to see his grounded foot to give the impression that he was floating.

  “See!” Bernard exclaimed, balancing on one foot.

  I said yes, but it didn’t look anything like what Ruby had done.

  By then, Ruby also had turned into Grumps’s personal masseuse. She’d have him lie belly-down on the couch and tell him to breathe loudly enough for her to hear. Then, during his exhales, she’d press small circles into muscles along his back and behind his knees. After several of these moves he’d giggle and pass out, and his bulging disk would usually stop aching by morning. Asked what she’d done, she’d shrug and say she was just encouraging his body to heal itself. Which it seemingly would for a couple weeks until she’d do it again. Soon she was performing similar exorcisms for half the old-timers on our block, easing kinks and aches, tendinitis or arthritis.

  Bernard dismissed them as Ruby’s placebos. But what gave her the notion and confidence in the first place that she could ease somebody’s pain? And what about the bigger question? Were these phenomena the product of luck and coincidence, or was she occasionally bending reality? Bernard wouldn’t indulge such conundrums. He was out to debunk her. My brother wasn’t investigating our sister’s inexplicable or supernatural moments but rather looking into her unfair advantages. In other words, whether or not she was cheating.

  During the heat of his inquisition, I found her lying in the backyard, her eyes fixed on the azure sky.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked, plopping down next to her.

  “Making a cloud with my mind,” she whispered.

  Snickering, I said, “If you’re a cloud maker, you’re fired.”

  “Quiet,” she hissed. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

  Her eyes began watering, and mine wande
red plenty over the next several minutes, so I might’ve missed something, but when I next looked up there was a tiny oval cloud the size of a minivan a few hundred feet directly above us.

  She wasn’t impressed. “I’ve made better ones,” she told me, rising to her feet and then flicking grass off her jeans. “You could make them, too,” she said, “if you’d concentrate.”

  I won’t admit, even to myself, how many times I tried.

  FOUR PLANETS IN SCORPIO

  Upside down in the engine compartment of a Peterson 42, my head throbbing, my hands bloody, my boots in the air, I struggled to loosen four stubborn bolts. Finally dislodging one, I came up for air in the cockpit and heard the fidgeting owner tell me, as if I were his mildly retarded servant, that this wasn’t supposed to take so long.

  “Electrical problems are unpredictable,” I told him, a line I’d offered a hundred times. Usually it worked, and most people would give me the I-get-it grimace, the do-your-best shrug.

  “At ninety-three bucks an hour,” this one grunted, “I expect more than vague excuses.”

  I inhaled the toxic boatyard aroma of solvents, bottom paint and epoxy. “Wanna take over?” I asked. “I could coach you on what you need to do and what you’re up against.”

  He vibrated his lips. “You’re just removing the solenoid, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How hard could that be?”

  “Well, seeing as how it won’t detach from the starter, you’ll have to pull that, too.” I took a deeper breath. “There’s three more bolts down there to loosen, and good luck with them. It’s too cramped for a socket, so you gotta hang upside down and bust ’em loose with this customized Allen I sawed off for you this morning. And you might have to attach a pipe to the end of it to get enough leverage. Hopefully you won’t break the heads off or smash your hands, but the odds are good you’ll hurt yourself.”