Something About Sailing
It was at The Page last Wednesday night when I sat next to my neighbor’s friend who in the span of a two drink minimum conversation told me that he and his girlfriend are getting a cat and he teaches sailing lessons. The latter fact fascinated me because he revealed that he used to be afraid of water, but now not so much as he gives sailing lessons to children under the age of 13 in the San Francisco bay. He told me a story, that occurred a few weeks earlier, where one boat of children sailing capsized fairly close to the Golden Gate Bridge. This area of the bay is particularly dangerous due to the mouth of the bay opening to the sea. The water is almost always choppy and unpredictable. Cargo ships are constantly passing through. My neighbor’s friend was in a motor boat and the engine went out. He himself called some maydays over a radio and hoped that the kids who capsized remembered the protocol. I asked him if he had to jump in and he told me that it would not have been smart because he was in the motor boat. I wondered to myself if it would have mattered if he jumped in or not because the engine went out in the motor boat. I wondered if in the scene of the crisis his fear of the water rose up again. The cool choppy pacific looking dark and deep and a sail boat floating prone. The story ended in the vein that everyone was safe and my neighbor's friend still likes to sail. Crisis averted.
Lately, I have been encountering the word sinuous as it is applied to the word freeway. Sinuous meaning many curves or bends. I have been craving a drive, the long kind towards some kind of imagined place. Recently, when I sit behind a steering wheel it has made me think about being fifteen years old and happy to postpone my license attainment. My drive to high school was long and involved what felt like too many lane changes and speed limits upwards of fifty miles per hour. I got my learner’s permit and did my behind the wheel hours in a driversed.com issued Mini Cooper. My driving teacher was a divorced man and talked often about his daughter’s aversion to driving and why he and his wife are no longer together, always managing to make himself the hero in every non story. He told me that because I played sports I had good hand eye coordination and that is why I was a satisfactory driver. His daughter did not play sports. After I fulfilled my behind the wheel hours and waited six months I took the license test. I drove the car that I now drive and have to parallel park on my street. My appointed DMV employee was an emotionless man with a clipboard. I finished the exam and just as I was pulling into the parking spot, I accidentally tapped the accelerator and slammed on the brakes. The observer with the clip board berated me with information that when people panic they slam on the brakes. I passed and got my license.
Somewhat often I think about the sentiment of the knee jerk reaction. The immediate response to a sudden swell of emotion varies in degrees. Sometimes there is no kneejerk and others it is larger than it should be. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to be somewhere else in a year from now. It felt sudden and random, but maybe this decision was a matter of time and a victim of its own circumstance. However, telling myself this thing makes the inbetween time feel a bit disjointed. It feels incubatory and also a weird lost time. A waiting room and purgatory with proper entertainment. Since the knee jerk decision decision in March, I have a new job and a new living situation. I did not want to learn how to drive and for a time I believed I did not want to move out of San Francisco. But now, I love to drive and although I am so fond of the place I am in, it feels delicate and of a certain occasion. I guess it is so easy to see the chasm that forms when a sudden decision is made and then seeing what happens when you make it over the fissure, but what does it look like when you need to get from one side to the other? How do you get over the fear of the water and start sailing?
