Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  “And we are all going to Swiftsure!” Grumps shouted after his watch alarm sounded yet again.

  “Let me see that.” Ruby slid the watch off his wrist and passed it to me. Then she kissed the back of his hand, which got him misty and Bernard laughing. I clicked to the alarm settings, turned them all off and gave Grumps his watch back.

  Then, all of a sudden, the familiarity evaporated, and we seemed more like strangers, our changes and differences rising like welts in the fading light, though perhaps I was sensing what was coming, not what was right in front of me. My eyes scoured Bernard for more scars, tattoos or any other hints as to what he’d been up to, while I worried that too much air had left Ruby’s balloon.

  Desperate for normalcy, I flipped on the hi-fi and put on The Best of Dizzy Gillespie for the two Bobos while we youngsters lay on the floor with the dogs, well out of earshot. Ruby told us that her hospice work had got a little depressing and she now was balancing that with holding preemies at the hospital once a week. “Some of them are the size of potatoes,” she said. “When they stop crying it feels like a compliment. You both really need to experience it.”

  Eager to change the subject, I said, “There’s a Star racer who’s been sailing in Olympia for three years in hopes you’ll show up. He’s had a crush since you raced Lasers against him in your teens.”

  “Clark Thompson?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Lenny Hurst? Brock Jensen? Tom O’Brien?”

  “Mario Seville,” I said.

  She scrunched her nose. “The name’s familiar.”

  In an hour, we’d all scatter again, but for now, we were on the floor, the three of us, with the familiar sounds and odors, scratching the dogs while the Bobos discussed Swiftsure logistics and Mother drifted back toward her office as if tugged by some unseen force.

  Following instructions, Bernard and I checked our mirrors compulsively for any suspicious headlights tailing us before parking Noah’s car behind a desolate bar along Aurora. Then we strode down two alleys until we located a staircase that spiraled up to a one-bedroom condo above a renovated garage where we found some muted reality show playing on the massive screen behind the head of a fiftyish Asian man with a bleached smile.

  The two of them spoke for several incomprehensible and disconcerting minutes before Bernard pulled Tupperware from his backpack and set it on the granite counter of the kitchen island. “Your brother Japanese very impressive,” Yoshito told me, between glances at huge dead butterflies. “Most people know sentence or two—how to say thank you, how to get sake.”

  He waved aside Bernard’s offer to open more containers and then handed him stacks of bills, which my brother, in turn, didn’t bother to count before dropping them in his pack. After another flamboyant exchange of Japanese and a final round of smiling handshakes, we exited.

  The encounter was so much less stressful than I’d expected, I almost fainted from relief. I was carelessly switching lanes and thinking about Ruby on her long drive home, when I noticed the reds and blues spinning directly behind me.

  “Oh, shit!” Braking gently, I began to pull over.

  “You’re not speeding,” Bernard said calmly. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Before I whimpered to a full stop on the shoulder, the squad car screamed past in pursuit of somebody else.

  My brother laughed. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

  Merging timidly into the slow lane, I listened to him deconstruct the Yoshito encounter. “We made fifty percent more than we would have if we’d dealt with his underlings because I’ve been courting his ass ever since I heard that he respects white men who speak fluent Japanese. So we have Rosetta Stone to thank for this.”

  He dumped the money into his lap. “You good with ten percent?”

  “Fifteen,” I rasped.

  “Standing up for yourself, I love it. But ten is generous.”

  “Why didn’t he examine your butterflies?” I asked, still overheating but my voice returning.

  “He’s betting I won’t screw him if he doesn’t screw me—a potential miscalculation on his part because I won’t ever sell butterflies again. See, I’ve landed myself a real job, Josh—well, kind of real.”

  “Oh yeah? Drug running? Espionage?”

  “Can’t talk about it other than to say it’s down in the Southern Ocean and begins on June twenty-fourth.”

  “That’s the day the world ends,” I told him. “My friend’s preacher father says that’s when all the believers will ascend.”

  “Well,” my brother said, “how’s that for perfect timing.”

  OUR WOBBLING PLANET

  There’s no Las Vegas line on the exact doomsday date yet, but Noah’s father is far from the only person to speculate on it—just more willing and eager to get specific.

  Shakers predicted the world would be over in 1792. The American farmer William Miller settled on dates in 1843 and 1844. Jehovah’s Witnesses picked several years between 1914 and 1994. Various kooks and zealots have used numerology and algorithms and other methods to select actual days. Most recently, millions of pessimists rallied around a misinterpretation of a Mayan calendar that indicated we were running out of time.

  Just about every religion and mythology has a story about this. All yarns need endings, preferably action-filled Hollywood crescendos that tie everything off with one last battle between the righteous and the wicked. Christians still insist that Jesus’s return to earth will be the Armageddon finale, and 41 percent of Americans think this will happen before 2040. Hindus see the beginning of the end similarly, with Vishnu descending atop a white horse. One Buddhist prophecy foresees stages of deterioration until seven suns suddenly appear in the sky and the earth is consumed in flame.

  Icelandic mythology has a single ominous word for the end days: Ragnarok. Just about every Norse myth references it. Yet there wasn’t the convenience of an actual date. So Vikings prepared daily, never knowing when the battle was about to come and set the seas ablaze. Their only hint was that Ragnarok would be preceded by a specific series of events, starting with three straight winters without summers in between, when men would go mad, start mauling one another and have incest with their siblings. Then, at the very end, the moon and sun would exit stage left, and all the land would sink into the ocean. (Floods are wildly popular in end stories, as are earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, which helps explain why people get so pious during natural disasters.)

  Scientists have their own theories. Fans of the Big Rip argue that an expanding universe will eventually pull everything apart—stars and planets and even atoms. Believers of the Big Freeze imagine the expanding universe will grow too cold to support life anywhere. The Big Crunch reverses these equations and claims that a massive collision will produce Big Bang II, the Sequel. But all these scenarios are millions of years off, and no astronomer would dare predict a doomsmillennium much less a doomsday.

  Less-scientific apocalyptics warn about Nibiru, the rogue Planet X, that’s supposedly on a collision course with earth. That this calamity was predicted by a woman who claimed she received e-mails from aliens hasn’t discouraged her believers; but let me assure you that if Nibiru was flying toward us, my mother would’ve already seen it as easily as you’d spot a moose in a bowling alley. Along these lines, Einstein allegedly muttered something like “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man will have no more than four years to live.” Sorry, Albert, but that doesn’t sound very scientific to me.

  So here’s my take on the end: seeing as how this planet’s rotation is slowing, perhaps we’ll eventually become a fixed sphere, like our moon, with one side in the light and the other forever dark and cold.

  There’s also the possibility that the 23.5-degree tilt of our axis could increase over time. And this alarms me because I know exactly what a 23.5-degree tilt feels like. Too damn much! It’s time to put more people on the top rail or fly smaller sails. Mars twirls along at a
25-degree tilt, Saturn at 27 and Neptune at an even 30. Perhaps they were all more hospitable in their younger, less-tilted heydays.

  Given that the only reason there’s life on earth is because of the attractive pull of a star 93 million miles away, and seeing as how our nearly unsustainable tilt combined with our planet’s chubby midsection makes us like a spinning top that’s starting to stagger, how could we possibly believe all this will never end?

  It’s a wonder we’re still here at all.

  THE PILGRIMAGE

  Given dreary predictions of light winds, it was invigorating to see snapping burgees and choppy water as we powered out to our corner of the world.

  As we exited Victoria Harbour alongside a hundred and fifty other sailboats, Father blathered about weather and current and crew roles, a variation of his prerace stump speech we’d heard and mocked so many times. Mother and Bobo Sr. would handle spinnaker-pole adjustments and monitor instruments. Bernard would run the bow with my help. Father and I would muscle the winches. Ruby or whoever was closest would manage the main. We’d take shifts steering—except Mother and Grumps. If it blew hard, we’d wish we had more crew, but this was going to be a Johannssen affair.

  Granted, I hadn’t seen the entire family in the morning glare for years, but they sure looked like impostors. Eagle-eyed Ruby wore glasses? Mother’s jowls had drooped overnight? Father’s belly had doubled in size? Yet Bernard, behind his Zeus beard and Ray Charles sunglasses, wore the most beguiling disguise of all. I couldn’t find my brother in that face no matter how long I stared. (He’d slid through customs with a New Zealand passport declaring he was Charles E. Chapman from Wellington.) Only Grumps, slouching beneath his British driving cap like an old jockey, looked anything like himself.

  Everywhere I looked people were taking photos and movies of the exiting procession, with countless cameras and phones seemingly pointed at us. This wasn’t, in fact, my imagination. We were on the front of Victoria’s Times Colonist the next morning with Father at the helm and Ruby at the center of the picture, looking worried. Seattle skipper Robert Johannssen Jr., his daughter Ruby and crew read the caption.

  Before we raised a sail, Father went through his normal neurotic rituals, steering the bow directly into the wind, then slowing down, stopping and running it hard in reverse, hoping to knock off any kelp or detritus still clinging to the keel. If anything was truly hanging off the boat, he’d know it immediately, but he was equally good at imagining drag. “Feel anything?” he asked. “No,” we comforted him. “All clear.” Yet he did it all over again, hard into the wind, and then full speed in reverse. “Feel anything?”

  Temporarily satisfied, he let us raise the sails and traverse the starting line in the escalating boil of wind, waves, boat wake and current slop, periodically pointing Freya III straight into the breeze and letting the sails flog in order to triple check exactly where the wind was coming from in relation to the starting line.

  “Heading?” he asked.

  “Two-seventy,” I told him.

  “Two-sixty-five,” Mother said seconds later.

  “So which is it?” he demanded. It scarcely mattered. We’d gauge the wind direction at least twice again, but our captain found solace in repetition.

  There were just eight knots of wind, the instruments told us, though it felt like twice that in the prestart mosh pit with so many near collisions and so much adrenaline-slinging between jittery skippers. Months of logistics, maintenance and daydreaming were all fused into this start, which likely meant very little in a 122-mile race, yet in this crucible felt like the most critical juncture of our lives.

  More than three hundred boats and two thousand sailors used to gather for Swiftsure back before iPhones and Xbox distracted humanity. Twenty years ago, the race felt like a mythical rite of passage, a religious pilgrimage or a migratory phenomenon for which people of all ages geeked up to sail out into the abyss.

  By the time we reunited, it was still the region’s premier race even if the number of boats had been cut in half. And little Victoria was overrun yet again.

  Though just sixty miles from both Seattle and Vancouver, Victoria dresses itself up like a quaint British city. Maybe the manicured gardens and afternoon tea came with being named after the United Kingdom’s chubby monarch. Buzzkill Vicky—she wore black more often than Johnny Cash—never even set foot in Canada, much less her namesake city. But that didn’t discourage Canucks from celebrating Victoria Day every May, which Ruby suggested was almost as ridiculous as Columbus Day in the States. Their national holiday usually fell on the Monday of the Swiftsure weekend near the end of May, so the dueling festivities invariably clashed, with the international marina boozefest spilling across the street toward the ivy-ensconced Empress Hotel, which strived to preserve its dignity by overpricing its serving of tea and crumpets at fifty-nine bucks.

  Still, plenty of welcoming venues were bursting with wind-burned patrons boasting they’d sailed this race twenty-three straight times and had seen all anybody could possibly see. (When it came to measuring your Northwest sailing penis, your number of Swiftsures was right up there with how many ocean miles you’d sailed.) Engineers, doctors and lawyers had always been well represented, but nowadays the crowd was starting to look like a VFW happy hour. There was a limp and groan to this gang, though cocktails temporarily rewound the clock, and the lies piled up with the empties. Went from blowing thirty to fifty all of a sudden and masts started dropping like palm trees in a hurricane. So we had two choices, turn and run or douse. Instead we took a third option, and did nothing. The forestay snapped first, and it sounded like a thirty-aught-six.

  Every story got topped, if not by veiny retreads, then by boyish software designers and other hotshot upstarts in pricey Gill jackets and polarized sunglasses (even indoors), strutting the same clubby jocularity that had always made me feel like my family had pledged the wrong frat. She looks like a blonde, sure, but does the carpet match the drapes? Everybody swapping stories of heroic nonchalance, using that rapid gunslinging sailor lingo that had never moved me. The only Johannssen who’d ever felt at home here was my father, who drew swarms and murmurs. People wanted a handshake or a word, even if they thought he was nuts.

  Hobbling back to the marina on the eve of the race, Grumps had yammered about whether Ruby would actually show up, the possibility still too dreamy to get any traction in his mind. The beers exaggerated his unstable gait to the point Bernard and I spotted him on either side. Meanwhile, Father was bantering with Canadian and American racers who’d tailed us to the marina to see our boat, some of them covering their mouths to muzzle their amusement at the sight of our faded and bedraggled old Joho surrounded by gleaming new rigs half its weight and ten times its price.

  “I hear voices below!” Grumps gushed. “She here already?”

  “You actually racing this old girl tomorrow, Bobo?” an older man asked. “Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but have you seen the sleds you’re up against?”

  “Oh, we’ll see,” Father toyed. “At the rate things are going, we might not even make it to the start.”

  “Huh. So you and the family are just up here for the sightseeing.”

  “That’s right. Might go to that wax museum or check out the flowers.”

  Then the hatch slid open. “You win, Momma. They weren’t too drunk to find the boat.”

  “Ruby!” Grumps cried.

  Her name and secondhand lore reverberated through the drunks on the dock as she sprang from the cabin and hugged her grandfather, rocking him side to side.

  Once the rivals stumbled off we settled in below, with Ruby and Mother giggling like kids who couldn’t look at each other without busting up and Father—like old times—blaming “somebody” for forgetting his toiletries.

  After sleeping so lightly it felt more like waiting, I began my rounds at dawn, lashing a line to the boom to help prevent unintentional jibes. Then the smaller stuff, from cotter rings to shackle blocks and barber haulers. Hoisting
myself to the bottom spreaders, I switched out a dead lightbulb and continued up to the top of the mast to replace the broken cups on the anemometer. There I lingered, watching the yellow sunrise and the hopeful boats below until my harnessed legs began to numb and Father appeared on deck. I hung on a bit longer, knowing if the two of us were alone I’d confront him about the handicap rating I’d seen listed for us in the prerace blotter.

  —

  Swiftsure doesn’t begin with a horn or a gun but a cannon.

  There were three separate starts, with the largest and fastest boats engaged in the first one. Then, twenty minutes later, came ours, with a few dozen boats between thirty and fifty feet jockeying for position in the roiling water.

  If Father had to be stuck in a single place and time, he’d probably choose this one, marauding back and forth with thirty seconds to go, bullying everybody with his nimble boat handling and domineering voice, heads swiveling at his every bark.

  With twenty seconds left, the fleet condensed with skippers hunting for gaps to dart into in hopes of creating space and finding unobstructed wind. We surged forward precariously close to the massive Coast Guard ship, which was serving as the left end of the starting line, and once our bow overlapped the stern of a Beneteau 50 in front of us, Father bawled, “Gotta gimme room!” and its skipper yielded more space than he needed to, guaranteeing us clear air and the inside track, the cannon thundering overhead the instant we crossed the line.

  Temporarily deafened, we engaged in the necessary sail-sculpting adjustments, with Father calling the trims. “Give me a little vang…Yes…More!…Okay…No backstay yet! Keep the sails full, the draft aft, a little less jib halyard.”

  “Thank you, Odin, for that start!” Grumps shouted, throwing his gloved hands up near his head, followed by Bernard’s Tarzan howl. Father grinned, his eyes scanning sails and water, crouched next to the low rail so he could study the jib—stripped to a T-shirt in forty-five degrees, his belly ballooning the cotton, unshaven, hungover and thrilled, no hat, sunglasses or sunscreen, as usual, his hair, I noticed for the first time, thinning, his eyes bright and his hands light on the wheel, a hopeful blush in his cheeks. For now, we all shared it, quietly appreciating the remarkable pace with which the old Joho slashed through the turmoil toward smoother water.