They Call the Wind

Clark and I went sailing yesterday. He bought an ’88 Sunfish from a guy a couple weeks ago and yesterday was the first day we’ve had enough wind for an audacious attempt. The trailer with the boat on it was pulled to our house by our friend, Flip, who has a trailer hitch on his truck. Sara and Clark haven’t gotten a hitch on their car yet, maybe because another one of our friends in the neighborhood who shall remain nameless drove his truck down the boat ramp a couple years ago and lost control. His truck drowned that day.
So Clark and I decided the thing to do would be to lift and pull the trailer with the boat on it to the sound park, an otherwise 5 minute walk, with Clark positioned in the front of the trailer and me in the back, pushing. “Erhhh,” Clark said with some effort as he lifted the tongue of the trailer. I would know later when I tried to lift it myself that it was 8x heavier than the force it took me to push the back, though at the time I heaved and panted so hard to try and make Clark hear me, as I was sure my end was harder than his to move. We moved that trailer slowly — I leaned in and pushed hunched over in a high-knee run and Clark looked like he was taking the dog for a walk — and we got to the sound park within 20 minutes. At the access point, Clark and I lifted the sailboat off the trailer and slid it down the ramp and into the water.
Twenty more minutes passed and we had the sail unfurled on top of the boat, trying to figure out where to put what rope. The wind was whipping into whitecaps on the water all around us and I began to lose my confidence. I hadn’t sailed in 15 years, longer so for Clark, but I knew enough to know that this speed of wind would be challenging on a Sunfish for even the most experienced sailors. “We shouldn’t go out today,” I said to Clark as I untied the halyard and clipped the sheet. I hadn’t any plans to stay behind, especially considering what we had endured to get there, but I had to say it nonetheless. “You shut your mouth,” Clark chipped out a mono-syllabic laugh. “You’re right,” I said, and I knew he was. We were too involved to turn back now.
We finished rigging the boat without too much trouble, and 46 minutes later, we were setting out on our maiden voyage. “Get it away from the pier, get it away from the pier!!!” I shouted as Clark led the boat out for take-off. I could see the worry creeping in on his turtle-shaped face. “It’s good, we’re good,” I assured him. “Just get in the boat.” Clark slid his life-jacketed torso onto the seat of the Sunfish and flopped his feet up so that his long body lined the side of the boat. “Get in,” I said again, my right hand grasping the sheet, left hand holding tight the tiller. Clark glided his legs around to the cockpit.
“Here, take this,” I said with the sheet in hand. Clark grabbed onto the end of the sheet and knotted it so it wouldn’t get away. “Watch out!!’’ I almost yodeled into the breeze, feeling the tiller’s pull and guiding the gusts of wind of the sail. “Let go of the sheet, LET GO OF THE SHEET (the rope used to pull in the sail)!!!” I shout-chanted and would chant for the duration of the sail, subbing out expletives. Clark’s feeling of trepidation and his determination to sail us out and tack us back were at odds with one another, so that when he pulled that sheet in he held on for dear life. I was a wreck, although I felt better when yelling at Clark. About 500 yards out, the sail caught a burst of wind and hiked the boat up slightly, causing Clark’s anguished eyes to open like saucers as he put himself in emergency mode and he threw his legs overboard. His body slid out of the boat while Clark’s hands were still holding the sheet. “Clark! Let go of the sheet!” I proclaimed once again, and Clark’s hands released the sheet, but having nothing other than the pole underneath the sail that swings back and forth (the boom) to hold onto, he grabbed it like an animal who had been tethered to the bottom of the sail and pulled the boat down with him. “Let go of the boom!” I could be heard saying as I plummeted side first into the water. “My Croc! Where did it go?” Clark asked frantically like his baby was going under on the other side of the boat. Luckily those things pop up pretty easily. We stood up to our waists looking over a rainbow sail submerged under water. Our boat had capsized.
We were in shallow enough water to right the boat without too much trouble. “Straight into the wind, we need to right the boat so that the sail is straight into the wind,” (I think?), I snapped at Clark. We climbed into the boat a second time ready to set sail, and we did, until Clark held on to the sheet a little too tight again so that the boat tilted, his buns slipped over the edge, he panicked, dropped his feet over the side and fell into the water, grabbed the boom and pulled the boat down with him. Again. Same offense, same reparation.
Unnerved by the power of the sheet in his hand, Clark did fall off the boat another time, dropping the rope when I yelled at him. Here’s the thing about Clark’s falls. They weren’t so much falls as they were Clark throwing himself overboard at the slightest sense of the boat tilting, which it does when it catches wind.
But after Clark’s last fall we flew. One, two, three, “Coming about!” I would say, and we’d duck down low, Clark throwing his entire torso down to miss the sail that swept over our heads, changing the direction of the boat. We were garnering our expertise, feeling the wind with our bodies and moving our instruments just so to catch the sky. We were alive, and when we were not cursing, we were laughing loudly or holding reverent the sensation. “We’re doing this! We’ve got this thing!” Clark said as the hull of the boat skated briskly along the water. “Let go of the sheet!” I said as I clung on. We were fast and we knew it, and we chomped the wind with our mouths. Or maybe that was just me.
“I guess we’re here, we should go in,” I said, but “No! Let’s go out for another!” was Clark’s response. Clark was wearing the voice he reserved for Christmas morning and for Sharky — the one that sounded kind of like a clown’s voice with an element of Aaron Neville in there. “Yes! Let’s do it!!!” I shouted loud enough to be heard. We turned the boat around and headed out for another, old mariners by this point, salty and sea-soaked, elated and intoxicated. “We’ve got this!” Aaron Neville said once more.
When we got back to the docks, our neighbor Flip was there with his dog. “I just came over to see if you might need anything,” he said to us from the pier. I knew he must have heard the yelling that likely echoed from our little boat over the water to each of the neighbors’ houses. “You sounded like you were having a little bit of troubled fun,” he went on. “Ha! You’re flipping right we were!” Clark told him as we folded the sail to tie it up. “Do you need any help, then?” Flip asked, the wind by this time blowing through his hair as if he were a mighty warrior in slo-mo. “We’re good, I think,” said Clark and he looked to me, tying up the sail with such deftness it was hard to deny my sea-worthiness. I can only imagine Clark thinking, “Hmm, what can I do now?” before what came out next. “Yo Jackson, look out for the SHEET!!!” he cried, laughing hysterically while I toiled with the sail in his presence. And without a word, Clark quietly stepped in to help by my side. “What’s this?” he asked, earnestly, as if to learn the parts of the boat, post-run. “That’s the sheet,” I said to him, matter-of-factly, not yelling the name of the rope for once.
