A VERY SHORT VOYAGE
TO BARCELONA(From Magic Harbor by Don Berry)
Julia of LEGACY has set her sights on Barcelona. It is not the Olympic Games that draw her, but the mysterious and other-worldly architecture of Gaudi she wants to see. These extravagant monuments to creative power captured her imagination from the first moment she saw pictures of them.
To this end she has been accumulating what she calls her Barcelona wardrobe for the past six or eight months. Everything is in black -- long dresses, jackets, slacks, scarves -- dress that is elegant as well as functional. She wants to be able to wo rk when she is there, possibly as a waitress, and has outfitted herself accordingly. The basic plan has been to go to Florida and find a crew job on a yacht making the Atlantic crossing.
Yesterday afternoon she rowed up to my boat with her face alight, excited and exhilarated.
"I've got my ride!" she said. "First to Baja, then the Canal, then Barcelona."
"Hey, good news!" I said. "Somebody from around here?"
"Yeah," she said. "Can we talk about it?"
"Coffee?"
"Rather have a Scurvy Preventer," she said.
It was late in the afternoon, and a Scurvy Preventer suited me fine, so we got out the rum and lime juice and I settled down to hear the story.
It seems that a couple of days ago she ran into this guy at the marina near the mouth of the harbor... "a person of the male gender" was, I think, the way she put it. A man of about her age, with excellent manners and a fiberglass sloop in good cond ition, about 30' long and only a couple of years old. She'd been sailing with him for the last couple of days, around the south end of this island, at Blake Island and the port of Manchester on the Kitsap Peninsula.
O.K. So far so good. Or, at least, within the realm of possibility. In the right season good mariners have made the Atlantic crossing in craft no larger than that.
But as she unfolded the story -- about a minute and a half in, actually -- the realm of possibility suddenly receded into vast, almost infinite, distances. The gentleman, who "wanted to be called Gerhardt", had a remarkable past, which he had freely recounted.
It seems his parents had been German, and had been mysteriously killed at some indeterminate place and time. Gerhardt himself had then been raised by the United States government as a kind of general espionage agent. He had recently ceased to work a s an international spy, and was now a filmmaker. He was planning to do some film here in Eagle Harbor, but quite soon expected to be working for the National Geographic.
What, I ask myself, is wrong with this picture?
"Well -- " I said, "There are probably a few things you ought to check out." I was basically stalling for time, because I didn't quite know where to get hold of this bag of rubbish.
"That's what I came to talk about," she said.
"Resources," I said. "Where does the money come from? What happens when the engine breaks in Acapulco? How does it get fixed? How do you get home?"
I waffled on in this wishy-washy practical vein for a while, not wanting to puncture a pleasant bubble of excitement too callously, trying to treat the thing logically rather than truthfully; a social idiocy I'm unfortunately subject to. I love to se e Julia excited and happy about a project, and was reluctant to use the word "bullshit" too early in the conversation.
As it finally turned out, I got off this self-impalement rather easily. As Julia recounted her sailing experience with Gerhardt-the-international-spy we left the slippery mire of mere logic for the more substantial ground of seamanship. There was, it seemed, just a bit of a problem with Gerhardt's seamanship.
Understand, Julia is not nearly so naive as this account implies; but she had been on holiday, for christ's sake. She was along for a nice weekend sail, just taking things as they came, not in any critical frame of mind, thinking of Gaudi's magnifice nt spires twisting and towering in the sunlight of Barcelona, shining in her mind like a hypnotic charm.
As she told the story of their weekend sail it got funnier and funnier. You could see it in her eyes as one piece after another clicked into place. He'd showed her around the boat, telling her he had two reefs in the mainsail, which Julia questioned .
"There was only one set of reef points in the main," she said. "How can you put two reefs in if there's only one set of points?"
"You can't," I said.
"Oh," she said, and sighed a little. The glittering, fantastic colors of the Gaudi towers were fading rapidly.
The last nail in Gerhardt's coffin came when she described stopping for breakfast at Manchester. As they came into the dock, she was concerned about the depth of water, but Gerhardt said they had plenty. They tied up alongside the Manchester dock an d went ashore for breakfast.
"We weren't using my brain," she said, "We were using his. Hell, it was his boat."
Then she described coming back to the boat to find it aground and heeling badly away from the dock. It seems Gerhardt had somehow overlooked the fact that the tide was ebbing when they tied up. Perhaps international spies don't need to know. But wh en a boat goes aground at the dock, something other than a security clearance is probably involved, something that rhymes with "fool."
In any case, they had to wait another full hour even to get to full low tide, and then another few hours waiting for enough water to come back to float the boat. At this point I decided to break my cover, and share with her a deep secret from my own past.
"Julia," I said seriously, "when the KGB was training me to infiltrate the water rats, my cadre leader said 'Comrade Berryshki, first thing you got to know is, the tide comes in, the tide goes out. Don't forget'."
About this time another dinghy came alongside. It was Dale of OBLIO, headed for shore and the grocery store, wondering if anybody was interested in a barbecue aboard OBLIO and how big a piece of meat he ought to get.
"Permission!" he called.
"Come aboard," I said, pouring another Scurvy Preventer. "Julia just had a great adventure," I said. "See what you think."
Julia, with a straight face, began to tell the story as she had told it to me. Now, Dale is not handicapped by my unwillingness to be blunt, so Julia only got about fifteen seconds into the story before he interrupted.
"It's not my way to tell anybody what to do," Dale said. "But I absolutely forbid you under any circumstances to even think about this. No, no, no. Absolutely not!"
At that point everybody broke up, and we decided a barbecue was just what we needed. Oddly, the fiasco had put us all, including Julia, into a very cheery mood.
"It doesn't matter," she said. "I needed a shot of adrenalin, and this got me up. I'm going! I'm going to get there! Yeah!"
In Julia's characteristic way, she had taken what anyone else would have seen as a defeat, and turned it on its head. She was more exhilarated after the bubble burst than she had been before, more certain of her goal, more energized to make it happen . In Julia's studio in Port Townsend she has a motto on the wall that says "Success through greater failure."
It was sunset when I rowed up to OBLIO, and nobody was there yet. I shipped my oars and lay back in the dinghy, setting myself adrift on the calm water of the harbor, looking at the clouds over my head, drowsing off to the gentle rocking. It was ser ene and peaceful, as the change of day so often is in the harbor. After half an hour the tide had moved me only a hundred yards from OBLIO.
As I dozed in the drifting dinghy, my mind wandered in a half waking reverie. Julia's adventure had not only been the day's entertainment, but a kind of lens, a focus on what is different about life on the water.
In the end, the most ludicrous part had not been the clownish grounding itself, but simply the idea that "Gerhardt" would try to present himself as something he was not. We're not used to that.
The water life permits us the luxury of certain illusions, and denies others. There is no deceiving of the waves, there is no persuading the winds. Deviousness, on the water, is unthought of, because it is non-survival. On the water you either know, or you do not know, and the difference is plain to everyone.
I think this is why we tend to be rather simple in our outlook; with the water rats, what you see is pretty much what you get.
By and large, those who have chosen to live this life seem to have adopted as their banner the wisdom of America's greatest sailor, Popeye. It may even be specially appropriate that he, himself, is merely a cartoon, an imagination, a figment.
Popeye's wisdom is, "I yam what I yam."
That's the way it is with most of us. That's why we're here. And -- of course -- every day the tide comes in, the tide goes out. Don't forget.
end
A Very Short Voyage to Barcelona
©1995 Don Berry