The Seventies in Santa Cruz, California. Idyllic scenery. Ancient redwoods top rolling greenery down to Pacific Ocean cliffs and beaches. Humpback whales and dolphins, seals and tide pools. The Boardwalk and Wharf. Surfing and sailing in the Monterey Bay. The Yacht Harbor and Wednesday Night Races to Moss Landing and back. Nirvana really.
In blue canvas deck chairs high on the stern, Feather and I light up our Benson & Hedges. We raise our coffee mugs to Lance, above us on the Captain’s bridge. Gulls screech and glide through openings in the morning fog. We are not on a sailboat. It’s a yacht.
This dinosaur of a yacht is Lance's pleasure toy. It is held in mixed esteem by the Yacht harbor regulars, where orderly rows of sailboats line up for weekend sailors and a few seasoned live-aboards. This was a government surplus PT boat, now converted to a sixty-foot party palace and berthed at the end of our dock.
Compare it to my ride over to Pebble Beach yesterday with a couple of the guys who would race back across this morning in a 22-foot fiberglass Santana, a sleek white torpedo. Picture the humble wooden dinghy that fetched us to the beach for the Welcome Bonfire last night. Both authentic seaworthy crafts.
We are not on a sailboat. It’s a yacht.
Marcos lets the engine idle while he lashes the Hobie Cat to the wheel house on the top deck. Ginger goes below to harvest alfalfa sprouts and bring us some trail mix. Marcos pulls up anchor and we bobble around clockwise, putting the deserted cove at Pebble Beach behind us, aiming straight across the Bay to Santa Cruz.
I agree to the ride back across the bay on Lance’s bogus yacht because I won’t get into any of the groupie cars that will drive around on land to wait at the finish line. I plan to relax for a few hours while we motor across the bay, enjoy some girl talk with Feather and Ginger, till we land at the dock in Santa Cruz.
Ahead of us, more than a dozen sailboats disappear through the gray curtain. They are racing upwind to Moss Landing first. Each three-man crew is nimble and quick. They slacken lines, duck under booms, and crank ratchets to tighten rigging. They shift weight and read whitecaps.
Each helmsman calls the shots and his crew responds with precision. Like a quarterback who knows all the tricks to get to the goal line, he is acutely aware of the competition’s whereabouts, as it changes. Like a choreographer, he chooses the dancers and directs their performance. Muscles remember, so minds are free to enjoy the ecstatic rodeo in The Sea.
The racers travel northeast as a body of fluttering white flags. They will tack and maneuver around the marker buoy. Then one by one they’ll pop their spinnakers and a riot of colors will run west, back to Santa Cruz. This will settle the question of fastest boat and coolest crew for the season.
Muscles remember, so minds are free to enjoy the ecstatic rodeo in The Sea.
Meanwhile, the groupies form a long parade around the bay to meet the sailors. From the ocean to Highway One. Then east and north as the famous road takes them past hints of Steinbeck and Joan Baez.
Fort Ord is a blur of sharp fences and rows of pale green buildings. The ladies rush past low fields of Brussels sprouts and artichokes. They don’t notice the power plant pumping smoke into the fog. They keep speeding along the narrow highway to set up the party camp on the beach.
They bring exotic intoxicants, drums, rattles and flutes. They spread Balinese blankets in agricultural patterns and anchor them with ice chests. Paisley umbrellas top off the oasis. They smoke and wait. I wonder if they know which sailor is mine.
Aboard the motorized amusement park, Feather and I settle into the slow sounds of the waves slapping against the heavy metal hull far below us. I squint north toward home, into the gray bay.
Before Ginger returns with snacks, the swells suddenly rise to nearly ten feet.
"We're gonna have to head into 'em," Lance announces. He steers with elbows lodged between the shapely spokes of the wheel. He cups his hands around his mouth, like an ape with a megaphone.
"Ee-ee-ee-ee! It's your lucky day!"
Feather and I know enough to stow the deck chairs and brace ourselves between the uprights of the framed opening that leads to the plush stateroom below.
We watch her Romeo pantomime crawling up the wind and back-pedaling to keep his balance.
The mass of the ship meets a swell the size of a mountain. The wooden frame of the wheel house creaks and cracks as we catch air. We pound onto the top of a wall of water, then tip and plunge into a deep dark valley.
"Don't worry, ladies, piece’a cake!"
Lance gives a Bronx cheer, like a man entering a lion's den armed with his farts.
Feather and I tighten our grip, lower our heads, and roll our eyes. Marcos crabs past us along the narrow side deck. Captain Lance still clowns and barks orders.
Lance gives a Bronx cheer, like a man entering a lion's den armed with his farts.
I remember seeing this yacht glide by in the harbor for the first time, high in the water, bedecked with ripe, young women.
Smoking dark clove cigarettes, they cradle their tanned breasts in tropical slings. Their sailor pants are blinding white. Airborne testosterone stirs in the harbor. The scent of frangipani mingles with the bait and salty tubs of fish and strands of kelp. The harbor inhales and expands. Halyards clank against hundreds of masts, drumming the news, What Ho!
Feather knows these women sometimes come aboard while she sweats through tedious classes at the hospital. She and Lance have shouted about it and come to terms. There are no signs of foreign women here today. They are on the highway, heading for the finish line.
I want to be somewhere else entirely, held close and safe. Under a blanket. Maybe holding a blanket and sucking my thumb.
I think of the opulent furnishings below us. Heavy braided ropes restrain burgundy velvet tapestries that frame Lance's boudoir in the forepeak. It is a massive Valentine of down and satin bedding. A huge heart, lined with pillows that follow the curve of the bow. At the head of the bed is the porthole where Lance and Feather look out together at night. They watch a train of moonlight veer off from the harbor toward the open sea. Later they fall into deep oblivion as this giant cradle gently rocks and rolls till dawn.
But this gray morning, on the other side of the bay, untethered, the party boat begins a series of bucking donkey kicks, smacking walls of water head on, then dipping down into deeper and deeper troughs and climbing the next wall. The swells keep coming, bigger, steeper, pounding us. The engine whines and coughs.
Feather and I abandon conversation and switch to mind reading, like nurses behind our masks in the operating theater. One loud bash brings a chorus of shattering glass and roaring water. We stretch back and down in tandem to see the thick round window in the forepeak explode. A surge of open sea dowses the king size love nest, and curls out onto the Persian carpet, making tides that slosh against the carved legs of the chart table.
Up go our eyebrows, "Buckets. Bilge Pump."
Down goes Feather to see what she can do.
"Pump's out. No power," she reports with a shake of her head.
She hands me a life jacket and climbs back up the steps to her perch beside me.
The engine cuts out; our heads turn to Lance on the bridge. His eyes widen.
"Take the wheel, man!" he shouts to Marcos.
He scampers down to the stern deck, pulls open the heavy wooden cover to the engine compartment, and disappears down the steps. We hit another swell, and with no forward momentum, we turn sideways.
There isn't much Marcos can do to steer her. And when the hatch door slams shut, there isn't much Feather or I can do about Lance down there in the dark with the engine. If we let go, we'll be tossed into the sea.
One of the few things we can do is look down at Ginger, whose thighs are wrapped around a post in the galley. Ginger has become a quivering cowgirl on a hobby horse. No longer the self-assured ‘race to Oahu and back’ veteran sailor. This craft has neither mast nor sails.
(Except for the lightweight Hobie Cat, a two-man wind toy. No more than a small trampoline stretched across a pair of hollow pontoons sporting a miniature sail. No Hobie Cat ever kept anyone dry.)
And when the hatch door slams shut, there isn't much Feather or I can do about Lance down there in the dark with the engine. If we let go, we'll be tossed into the sea.
Ginger straps on a life jacket and clips her blonde braids together on top of her head. She mumbles nonsense instructions. She stares at her thumbnail. She is ankle deep, then calf deep in cold, salty sea water.
We repeat the carnival ride along the arc to the top of a swell, then scream down and follow the curve up the other side. Over and over, physics have mercy.
Feather and I focus on bracing ourselves and holding on between the lulls, the way our ancient grandmothers learned to wait out seasons of fear, decades of birthing. Clutching, letting go, breathing in, breathing out.
We watch Ginger slosh over to wooden drawers that, once opened, won't close again until the boat tips all the way to the other side. Then they drop back into their slots like guillotines. Hats. That's what she’s going for. Feather and I notice she's wetter than we are and has gone tharn, like the rabbits caught in headlights in Watership Down.1 She covers her head and wades across the room to bring us hats. She hugs the ancient table on each steep climb, then inches toward us during the lulls.
We can't convince her to join us on the ladder. She recedes into the dark and salty parlor. She loses her grip and falls back against a cabinet. She is hurled forward like a rag doll, and we watch till she embraces solid oak again. Feather and I take stock of our position. We have fresh air and sky. We have our balance. We use our arms and legs to brace ourselves in the doorway. Fingers cramp all the way to the apex of each arc. The lulls are defined by the few seconds when our feet are under us. Feather and I learn to use the lulls for wiggling our fingers and assessing Ginger. We can't stop what we're doing to discuss fear. If we stop, we die. We all know that.
"Remember to hold your hat when you hit the water. Bare heads exposed to the sun. That's why people die when they go overboard," Ginger calls up to us.
She is in a trance. She is lecturing junior lifeguards, sitting in rows of red undershirts in the sand.
"Twenty minutes, max. The cold or the sharks."
Ginger continues to use the lulls to rummage through clothes and equipment, books and blueprints, till she finds the gun. Lance bragged about it when he told her and Marcos not to worry about sharks in the bay. I am the only one who didn't know we were armed.
“Time to radio the coast guard?” I suggest.
“Radio’s on the fix-it list,” Feather answers.
Ginger continues to use the lulls to rummage through clothes and equipment, books and blueprints, till she finds the gun.
I look at Feather. She looks down at her shoes to let me know she is ashamed of Lance for risking our lives like this. Then she uses the lulls for the next twenty minutes to inch over to Ginger to get the gun away and give her a pep talk.
Ginger responds in a monotone, "I read about some people who fell overboard and they peed into their hands to keep them warm. You die because of hypothermia and dehydration."
"We're not going to die! Snap out of it!" I pray.
I'm aware that we are in great danger. It doesn't sound like she's going to snap out of it, though, so Feather and I stop using precious energy trying to reason with her.
I think of a song everyone learned in kindergarten:
"I'm a little teapot, short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout, Tip me over and pour me out!"
A jagged sob rips from my heart and I start belting "Amazing Grace."
Feather lays her forehead briefly against my shoulder at the next lull and then we return to clutching door sills. Still down in the bowels of the vessel, Lance keeps hammering and wrenching to revive the stalled engine, while Marcos fights the wheel. Gravitational confusion hampers troubleshooting. Clogged fuel line, fat mixture of gasoline and air in the carburetor, worn out belts, tired gaskets, what?
Now a spark catches and the cylinders blast and thunder. The vibration offers hope of traction in the turbulence. Again the burping and the flatulence of a crippled engine, then silence. The constant tipping of this tank from one side to the other never stops. We come to the brink of overturning, first starboard, then port, like an executive pacifier on Poseidon’s eternal desk.
We maintain the repeated pattern of contraction/near panic/slow-motion-isometric, while suspended in a a giant cork gradually losing buoyancy, hour after hour. A hundred times the engine catches and inches us north. A hundred times the engine drowns and the sea hurls us south.
“What about turning back?” I keep wondering.
But if we surrender the tension against them, with so little control, the swells will eventually dash us into the pilings of concrete and rocks that protect the fisheries of Monterey behind us. We must keep struggling forward.
A hundred times the engine catches and inches us north. A hundred times the engine drowns and the sea hurls us south.
The fog and swells stay with us all day. Then darkness joins the party. Marcos uses a penlight to see the compass needle, always fighting the wheel for North.
At about ten o’clock the fog suddenly and completely disperses. The swells flatten out. The violent tipping stops. We are floating right side up.
We recognize the clanging of a rusty bell at the buoy stationed one mile from the Santa Cruz Harbor. Stars and twinkling land lights sparkle on the water. The engine hacks and clears its throat, then putters steadily the last mile. We glide past the jetty on the left, the Crow’s Nest on the right, and into position at the end of the dock.
We are very low in the water and there is an ugly gap between the hull and the cabin. We step directly onto the dock, the ladder submerged and unnecessary.
A small crowd has gathered to cheer our arrival and shout humorous insults. My sailor is tipsy, slurring his words of concern. Two giggling revelers bolster him between them. They make a handsome sailor sandwich. I have no words.
I push past everyone and stagger up to the public showers, shaking off help with my life jacket. It stays on while I stand in the shower till long after the hot turns to cold.
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology.Wikipedia
Damn Sherry, I am still spitting up salt water! Love your "Red Sail".
Love your art and story very much.