Sailing Lessons
December 2004
As a 10-year-old girl, I fell in love with sailing the first time I set foot aboard a sailboat. The thirty-foot yacht belonged to my mother's friend, David, whom she dated for a short time after my parents separated.
David had invited my mom and her 4 kids for a day of sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. I remember the harbor in Annapolis, with its tangle of masts jutting into the sky and the windblown halyards slapping a wild tune. We motored out of the harbor, and then David raised the sails like a glorious dove unfolding her white wings. The water riffled and gurgled against the hull as the boat took to its seaborne flight.
Soon after the sails filled with wind, my sister was hiding below deck, where she would stay for the entire voyage, woozy with nausea and Dramamine. I'm not sure what my brothers were doing; the only thing I cared about was learning to sail.
David encouraged me to take the tiller of the Islander 30. He told me how to choose a landmark and sail toward it, and how to watch the leading edge of the main sail, called the "luff," for indications that I needed to adjust my course. Spaced along the luff were small pieces of yarn, "telltales," which started to flutter before the luff. They provided small, early indications that the steering needed correction. Keeping my eye on the telltales, David said, would help me best stay on course.
I focused intently on the telltales as I held the long wooden tiller, learning by experience which way and how much to push or pull in order to keep on course, to keep the sail taut.
All else fell away; I was not aware of time, and the only thing that mattered was steering the craft as we passed beneath the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I marveled at being able to handle and maneuver this seemingly large vessel with ease.
My mother and David parted ways, and I didn't sail again for over a year. My luck changed right after my 11th birthday, when I began to volunteer aboard the Lightship Chesapeake, which the National Park Service used as a floating environmental education center. The Chesapeake had just acquired a small fleet of sparkling new Widgeon sailboats. One of the park's staff offered low-cost sailing lessons--which, to my delight, were made available to volunteers at no charge.
The Widgeons were easy to handle, reliable, and perfectly fitted. If I were extremely lucky, my assigned sailing partner--who was notoriously adept at capsizing--was absent, and I had the boat to myself. During those rare classes when the wind was rousing small whitecaps on the river, I discovered a new and exhilarating joy. Nothing stirred my soul more than hiking out over the side of a heeling sailboat, wind whipping my hair, brackish spray dampening my face. In the best of conditions, with the boat trimmed just right, I could lean backward over the gunwale and sweep the face of the Potomac with my hair. On land, and with people, I felt awkward and unsure. But here, dashing across the waves, I felt strong, capable, and free.
Although I had the bookwork down after the first sailing course, I took the class again that summer, and twice more the following summer. I would have chipped and painted, pumped the bilge, peeled potatoes in the galley, anything, to get out in a boat, to sail.
At thirteen, I completed the US Coast Guard's safe boating course, and throughout my teen years, I sailed whenever I could borrow- or tag along on anybody's boat. I had two harrowing experiences, many hours of contentment, and several joyful days of perfect sailing.
I even owned a nice little boat myself, for a short while. It was an MIT Tech II sailing dinghy, the kind sailed on the Charles River in Cambridge. Twelve feet of smooth white Fiberglas, with an aluminum mast and a single sail. I thought it was beautiful, and spent my entire savings--a summer's worth of pay for scraping and painting my orthodontist's yacht--to buy it. I loved the beamy little boat that sailed in the lightest of airs, so when my mother announced that she had sold it to pay rent on a storage unit, I was heartbroken.
Around my 20th birthday, I bought another boat: a Styrofoam Sea Snark with a triangular red and white striped sail of Dacron, and the hull a hideous shade of turquoise blue. The previous owner had applied the Fiberglas to the hull in a slipshod manner, leaving bumps and caverns galore. But it was affordable, and the lightness of the boat made it easy to haul by car top, and into the water single-handedly.
As I allowed the currents of young adulthood take me where they would, I let my sailing dreams blow away, although my yearning never stilled. Sometime in my early 20's, I took the Sea Snark to my father's waterside cottage. Lacking a better place to store and sail the Snark, I left it in the storage area beneath the building, coming back to sail it only once in the 15 years it was kept there.
During the summer of 1997, I took my kids to visit at my father's cottage. Fortunately, our plan was to visit only a day and a half. That was enough for my girls and me. My father was rude, aggressive, and angry for a significant part of our time with him. Perhaps I sensed that his behavior was a forewarning of the storm that would come when I had finally gathered the courage to talk about what had previously been unspeakable, and that sense of foreboding sparked me to bring my boat home.
The next afternoon, Dad helped me tie the Sea Snark atop my little blue 2-door Dodge Colt, and my children and I felt relief as we left the cottage--and my father--behind.
The Sea Snark has been in our basement during the 7 years since that final trip to my father's cottage. It waited while I worked through unresolved issues created by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse I endured in childhood. I spent 5 years in both group and private therapy, and worked very hard on my own--completing, I was told, 5 years worth of therapy in the first 2 1/2 years alone. After several of my father's venomous print and e-mail tirades failed to stop me from speaking up, Dad cut me out of his life so he wouldn't have to face the truth about himself: that he had become what he despised in his own father.
Early in my group therapy sessions, the facilitator asked us to use our non-dominant hand to draw a picture of who we would be if we had never been abused. I sketched a portrait of myself as fit, happy, singing, and holding a writer's pen in one hand, and the "painter," or bow line from a sailboat in the other. "That's who you will be when you have done your work," Bonnie said. For a few years, that picture hung over my desk as a reminder of who I would one day become; the person who would be revealed after washing away all that wasn't me.
Now the drawing is in an album, a keepsake of my journey from victim/survivor to thriver. I am well into the last phase of healing: reclaiming my physical self. In some ways, it is the hardest, because, for one who lived mostly from the neck up her whole life, it is frighteningly foreign to feel ownership of my body, to take back what was stolen so long ago that I can't remember ever feeling physically safe. But self-defense courses have helped me learn that it is OK to say "NO!" and prove that I mean it. These classes have helped me feel physically powerful, and capable of protecting myself.
Changes in lifestyle--improved diet and increased physical activity--have also been a major component of my reclamation project. Dancing has improved my stamina and coordination, and allows me to feel good and whole in my body, and safe when in contact with other bodies. My almost-daily battles with The Loathsome Machine, a gift from a dear friend, have helped me to trim down and firm up, giving me a sense of wellbeing, and the ability to feel pride in my physical self. Increasingly, I am living in my body, and feeling more complete ownership of it. There are setbacks, and times I feel like giving up, but I know that success trumps revenge every time, and I refuse to hate.
Unsailed for almost 19 years, the Sea Snark has rested against a basement wall, not far from where I now exercise almost every morning. I am determined to put it back in the water in the spring. Sometimes, during my morning encounter with The Loathsome Machine, when that awkward, prickly heat rises on my skin, I glance over at the boat, and the thought of sailing keeps me going. Thirty-four years later, the significance of David's gift is finally appreciated.
Winter has come with the solstice, and the darkest day has passed. From here the days grow longer, bringing more light. In no time, the roses will be blooming, and warm weather will return. Soon, it will be time to bring my sailboat up into the light, into the wind, into the spray, the clouds, to fly with the wheeling birds, to share the stirring of my heart.
[Post Script: In the summer of 2005 I did manage to put the boat--which my older daughter dubbed the "Dixie Cup"--in the water, and had a frustrating 4-hour sail that convinced me that the piece of Styrofoam was not a real boat. I decided that I deserve to sail in a real boat, so I sold the Dixie Cup, and now rent a Flying Scot when I have the opportunity to go "Sailing Again."]
© 2005 Shay Seaborne. All rights reserved.
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