- Sailing
- Skiing
- Writing
Take a few minutes to write a common misconception about one of these three things:
People often assume that sailing is a luxury sport, an activity partaken of only by the rich. They imagine an older, pompous gentleman in a captain's hat standing behind an over-sized wheel grinning as the sun shines down on a bored looking bikini babe wearing sunglasses. Maybe this happens for some people. I wouldn't know. If I tried to wear a captain's hat on any boat I sail, it wouldn't go two minutes without getting knocked off. If someone tried to suntan on my deck, they couldn't lie there thirty seconds without me yelling at them to get out of the way, and that's acting under the assumption that I was careless enough to let a barefoot person on deck in the first place.
I didn't grow up learning to sail. I grew up learning to race. My dad, over 50 now, has probably not actually managed to go 'cruising' on a boat since he was six. He continued this tradition with me brining me on board at the age of six months, securely tying a line to my life-vest, and racing the boat with his motley crew on Tuesday nights. I grew up with the mentality that if you were the captain of the boat, then your absolute job was to make the boat go faster. Get those sneakers out over the rail, get your butt off the side, get that line in, it's causing drag. You can always go faster.
Write a list of 'Not's about one of your three things:
I am not going to define what sailing, skiing, or writing is not. I do not have the ferocity of belief or passion, the arrogance or pride to define those things myself. But, if I am to be honest and a bit deprecating, I have always been something of a priest of the sea.
The sea is not safe.
The sea is not dangerous.
The sea is not out to get you.
The sea is not out to get anyone.
The sea does not care.
The sea does not acknowledge.
The sea does not do anything but what it wants.
The sea does not begrudge you.
The sea does not bless you.
The sea does not care who you are.
The sea will not define you.
The sea will not hold you.
The sea will not comfort you.
The sea will not give a single damn about any part of your convoluted human drama.
The sea does not reflect your feelings.
The sea does not reflect you.
The sea is not so shallow.
The sea does not know any of this.
The sea does not know anything at all.
The sea is not anything but the sea.
And the sea will still be here when we are all gone.
Expain: What is _____ like?
What is skiing in the wilderness like?
What is it like, to ski off the man-made trails? What is it like, to throw these flimsy fiberglass foils on to what is otherwise untouched by humanity? Um. Well. Good question. That sort of feeling... is hard to comprehend for someone that's done it, let alone put into words. It's like hiking along a path, and then just turning off the path randomly into a thick wood. Except that you aren't just hiking, but you're running, as fast as you can. And it's not just a wood, but a steep hill covered in trees that you are running down. You have no idea how great the descent is, but it's so steep that you have no choice but to keep running until it levels out a bit. Problem is, the trees are really thick, and the ground is covered in roots, and the roots are covered in a thick layer of leaves so you can't see the roots, and the leaves are slippery in some places and sticky in others.
Write about one of the tools involved with one of the things you do well, about it's care and it's feeling:
A boat is far more than a tool. It is no mistake that boats are referred to as 'her' or 'she', because in many ways a boat is a person. Sailboats emulate this. A sailboat, even one as small as six feet, is made up of numerous other tools. The main sheet feeds into two different pulleys, one on the hull and the other on the boom, which is attached to the mast at the same place that the cunningham, vang, and plenty else all converge in their multicolored tangles, while the inside tip of the sail feeds into the mast, running the length up the stern-side of the mast, following the main halyard, which will generally run down the bow-side of the same metal pole. And that's assuming your boat has only one sail. A jib brings at least another three ropes into play, while it's bottom flops around without a boom, relying on dueling jib sheets to wrangle it like a bull. And that's just a fraction of the rigging. The hull itself must be kept clean of kelp and seaweed and other sea hitchhikers, and the same with the centerboard, or keel. And if you have a keel, woe be to you to keep that clean. You either have to lug your entire boat out of the water, (a process, I assure you, for any boat over 20 feet), or don a diving suit and plumb the depths with mop and scrub brush in hand to get that extra half a knot of speed out of your baby.
While doing one of these things, what could someone do wrong?
In sailing, if you have no idea what you're doing, things are likely to go wrong from the moment you get on the boat. The amount of skill, knowledge, experience, and sheer intuition it takes just to navigate out of a harbor can be to such a level that I suspect the reason you don't require a license is because no one could ever devise effective testing requirements. Fortunately, most boaters are self-policing, and you are highly unlikely to get a complete newbie trying to sail his boat with no skill or assistance. So, let us instead focus on what can go wrong even with some degree of competence. As mentioned above, m-word is key. Much of it is admittedly superficial. You don't *need* that extra half a not gotten from scrubbing down your keel every day. But plenty of it is also extremely serious. See that main halyard up there? If you haven't checked it for fraying or other signs of weakness, that thing could snap on you without warning, and then you've lost your main sail, and possibly your only source of movement. See those pulleys that you're running your main sheet through? Those can jam up, leaving your sail stuck in the same position, unable to move with the wind, and thus subject to being chucked around by the wind. Possibly one of the most terrible things that happened to me was when my tiller simply came off my rudder, without warning!
How did you first come to _____?
As I hinted at earlier and above, I was brought to sailboats at a very young age. My dad tells stories of me crawling around on the deck, trying to untie the knot that kept me attached to the safety line. There are pictures of year-old me sitting on my dad's lap and holding the tiller with him, my little hands not even making it halfway around the thin metal pole that was probably twice my height in length. I can actually remember being old enough to move around on the deck myself, and going through a phase where I was six and wanted to read instead of sail. So, during a race, my dad would just send me to the snug cabin below and I'd read on one of the side cushions, the bouncing and rolling not bothering me a bit. Each time we tacked, I dutifully moved to the new high side of the boat, in order to do my part in trying to flatten it out. A flat boat is a fast boat, you see, and even if I wanted to read instead of race, I understood without prejudice that everyone does their part to make the boat go fast. Later on, I would get back up on deck, where I would make a game out of scrambling from one side of the deck to the other faster than the other crew mates, my small size making it much easier for me to duck the swinging, several hundred pound boom above me. Schoolwork and friendships gave me less and less time to race as I got older, but that was fine as my father was no longer quite the roaring buck he'd been when I was still very young.
What's so amazing about _____?
What's so amazing about sailing is the fact that it allows human beings to move and be in a way that we never intended by nature, and yet feels so natural at the same time. We're land animals. Adaptable land animals, yes, but we have to struggle and strive and endure long bouts of practice before we begin to feel comfort in even shallow water. And even good swimmers would blanch at the idea of riding the tops of ocean swells twenty miles off-shore. But by sailing, we can do it. We can exist in a world never made for humans, and move through it powered only by our intelligence and the wind itself. It's as if we all had a way to fly. Not just fly on an airplane, because then someone is flying for you, but a way to fly for ourselves. It's as if someone could reach down to you from the sky and say, "Here, let me show you how." And amazingly enough, in this day and age, some of us will be lucky enough to fly for ourselves. Little airplanes, hang-gliders, airfoils, there are bountiful ways to personally fly, even if there aren't bountiful opportunities. And like sailing, most of these methods of personal flight provide little tangible benefit. In fact, they almost always cost more than they return. But, for many of us, they are worth the while. They are our vehicles to the human spirit. They're the wings for our dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment