DEPARTURE

(From MAGIC HARBOR by Don Berry)

 

 

It is the common wisdom that one's self image should derive from an inner center, a core of clear conviction of individual worth. Philosophically I like to agree with this idea, but it is not, in my observation, the way it works. Most of us deriv e our actual self-image from two outside factors: how others look at us, and how things are going. Those who don't are often rather dangerous psychotics.

The Bhagavad Gita holds that the truly wise man is equal in victory and defeat. Much as I wish it were so, I am not up to that standard. Defeat gets me down.

Beginning about the time Ronald Reagan took office, all my battles began to end in defeats. (I don't blame Reagan for this, but presidents, whatever else they may be, are a convenient way of dating events.)

These defeats were great and small, and included a number of battles I did not even know I was engaging in. They included, as high points:

(1) The failure of my business.

(2) Going blind from cataracts in both eyes.

(3) The breakup of a thirty year marriage.

I did not react well to these events. Had I been writing a novel, my protagonist would have met these obstacles with fierce determination, chin up and brave. I did not. I became subject to a kind of creeping paralysis of will, and spent most of my time either looking at a computer or a TV screen.

It occurred to me then that I may not even be the protagonist of my own life saga, since I seem to lack the necessary virtues of the true protagonist. Perhaps I am local color, or a sub-plot that could well disappear in any disciplined editing of the story. Who, then, would remain? Whose story is it really? Damned if I know.

The final straw broke on September 11th of my 56th year, when the ceiling of my apartment collapsed, depositing half a ton of rubble on the bed where I had been sitting a moment before.

I had been installed in this comfortable little apartment for three years, unaware whether the wind was blowing or not. I liked not knowing. I liked going to bed at 70 degrees and waking up at 70 degrees. I liked being within ten minutes of anythin g I wanted to do in Seattle. I liked the comfort of it. But things were gradually slipping away. It lacked all sense of the Real.

The collapse of my ceiling shocked me briefly out of the numbness into which I had been steadily sinking. In spite of my deep reluctance to move at all, it was time for a drastic change. It was time to go someplace where I could sort out what was Re al from what was un-Real.

I decided to go back on the water. It was the only place I knew for certain I would have to deal with things as they arose, without evasion or quibbling or self-hypnosis. Life on the water is not easy, but it is rarely ambiguous.

Over a three month period after the ceiling collapse I searched for, and found, a small powerboat I could live on. It was in the port of Bellingham, a hundred miles away near the Canadian border. On a clear day in mid-December I caught a Greyhound g oing north and set out on a venture that is always underpinned with apprehension: Picking up the New Boat.

Boats do not like to change hands. Mariners fall into two catgories, those who know and dread it, and those who know it and obstinately refuse to admit it. Anyone who is not apprehensive about that first voyage, particularly a solo voyage, is paying insufficient attention.

The bus trip, however, was pleasant, and I was basking in a few small victories. I had conceived and executed a plan of numerous steps, and was feeling satisfied with my patience and persistence. It would have been trivial to anyone comfortable in the mainstream world, but for me it was like clearing the foothills of Everest. The mental refrain that repeated itself in my mind was "This is the first day of my new life."

I find it easier to deal with problems both bureaucratic and physical if I pretend I'm in a foreign country, where I seem to have more patience with the way things turn. So, on the bus trip I pretended I was in the lesser Antilles, remembering ten mi le treks to find a boatyard in countries whose language I spoke feebly and whose bureaucracy was actively hostile.

This mild fiction didn't actually work very well. There were neither chickens, pigs, nor large hands of bananas on the Greyhound and all the people were a pale, greyish pink instead of rich, lustrous blacks and browns. And nobody talked to each othe r. It was still America. However, the fantasy did succeed in creating a certain patient resignation toward the coming events.

After a day of trivial paperwork, satisfying the bureaucracies in their various configurations, there was an abrupt change of world. Suddenly the project shifted gears from the abstract, number-filled domain of bankers and brokers and promissory note s and contracts and licenses, and was plunged into the physical world of wind, water and mechanical systems. I finally got on board ADRIANA in the late afternoon.

The engine wouldn't start, the head didn't work, the radio was inoperative, the shorepower system had the wrong fittings and I couldn't get the missing letter of her name (which I had decided to keep) to stick in place. Of the first five things I tri ed to do, five failed. And the temperature began to drop alarmingly.

The previous owner had to come over from Lummi Island by ferry to try and sort things out. He was clearly puzzled that his little darling was behaving so badly, but he cheerfully set in to make things right. Over the next three hours he got most thi ngs corrected. The broker departed to buy fittings for the shorepower (which had been buggered by his boss) and I settled down with my little sleeping bag to a miserably cold and discouraged night aboard. The temperature that night was 20 degrees, with a 30 knot wind from the north.

In the morning, we set out to clear ADRIANA from her cramped slip in the marina and get her over to the fuel dock. I had never been at her helm. My original intention had been to get her into clear water and practice maneuvering to docks and so fort h, but it didn't work out that way.

The departure is best characterized by the broker's wry summation: "Well, we didn't hit anything but pilings." Right.

Time had gotten short, and by the time I departed into Bellingham Bay, I had only about five hours of light, all of which I would need to reach Oak Harbor.

By the time I had cleared the lee of the northern point, the seas were whitecapping at every wave. The wind remained northerly at 30 knots, and as I turned south I turned into the worst possible steering conditions, following winds and following sea s in a vessel with enormous windage.

The chop was extremely erratic and short. I looked at the charts and saw, somewhat to my surprise, that the northerly wind had an unobstructed fetch from the Straits of Georgia of hundreds of miles. Having always thought of Puget Sound as sheltered waters, this was not an agreeable surprise.

The seas were so short there was no real chance to establish a rhythm of steering through them. The farther out I got, the worse the steering became, until it was a serious wrestling match between an indolent and sedentary TV watcher and northern Pug et Sound. This is not a match any decent official would allow to continue. It was hard work, too hard for me.

I was heading toward Guemes Island and a series of narrowing channels between islands. Since I didn't know these waters, I had no idea whether the narrowing channels would pile the waves up wildly, as they do in some places, or whether they would act as shelter.

There then occurred a theme that would recur on scales both great and small through the whole period to come. The theme is this: I am right at the edge of my capabilities, and I don't know if things are going to get better or worse.

My mental monitor observed irritably, "What the hell are you doing out here in bad conditions, all alone on a boat you don't know in waters you don't know?" I had no answer, and the monitor only said it once.

After several hours of this unequal battle I swung into the channel between Guemes Island and Samish Island, and the seas began to ease off. By the time I was well into shallow Padilla Bay, it was calm. Immensely relieved, I began to try to find the channel markers leading into Swinomish Channel, the inland passage everyone had advised me was extremely difficult to find. Padilla Bay is basically a huge mudflat, only a couple of feet deep, and if you miss the channel the chances are good you'll spen d the tide aground. However, it turned out to be easy to find the channel, and I sailed in just as though I knew what I was doing.

Swinomish Channel was a delight. It is more like a river than a saltwater channel, perhaps fifty yards wide, reminiscent of European canals. I eased past grazing cattle and little farms, and on the left the Cascades loomed up brilliantly white and sn owcapped. Contrary to expectations, the dog-leg exit from the channel was also well marked. There wasn't really anyplace else to go.

The exit from the Swinomish channel, past Goat Island, squirts you out into Skagit Bay, the passage between the mainland and the northern end of Whidbey Island. It was middling late afternoon. Now things were the way they 'sposed to be on Puget Soun d. The north wind had left skies brilliantly clear. The spaces were vast. I could see fifty miles across the calm waters to the Cascades. In my apartment in Capitol hill I never knew if the wind were blowing or not. Here I knew, and my eyes were eased by distance.

I had arranged to spend the night with a friend on Whidbey Island. This had been set for three months, and even when the various delays had shown that I was going to be in transit on that day, I had decided to keep the appointment.

I was not, I think, very good company. After only one day on the water I was both tired and incredibly spacy, spacy from the careening struggle against following seas. But it was glorious to have a warm bed and good food and company after the chilly , hard-edged night before.

I left early the next morning, and the forty miles down Saratoga Passage were archetypal Puget Sound cruising. The skies were crystal clear, and I could see the snow-peaked mountains on both sides, the Cascades to port and the Olympics to starboard. I steered straight south between them on the flat water. I was happy with my engine now, and no longer waiting apprehensively for coughs and falters. She purred.

A sailor I'd talked to when I was looking for the boat had constantly used a cheerful phrase that stuck in my mind: "Cruisin' down the bay."

Well, that's just what I was doing, by god. Cruisin' down the bay. I still had my apartment and gear in Capitol Hill, I still had to deal with my lifelong Nightmare of Moving. I still didn't know if the life-gamble would work, and wouldn't know the answer to that one for a long, long time. But I could tick off point after point that had been visualized, and then realized. And this was the biggest. I was on board at last, and cruisin' down the bay.

I was back on the water.

 

 

end

Departure ©1994 Don Berry