I lack very little in this life. I have things and I have family, and I have a roof over my head and some hardwood under my feet. I don’t need very much, even if, at all times, I struggle with wanting more than I know I need. And this is why I watch television shows, or movies, and I think that I need to be tested. I am soft. Soft in form and soft in purpose, and I know this. Worse is the person who is soft but unaware. I am soft, aware, and I feel the need to buck that warm, velvety cloak. I want to be tested.
When adventure types on television purposefully strand themselves on some island, I don’t think this is a big deal. When they make fire, it seems somewhat easy. Two dry sicks, some rubbing, and voila: fire. I could eat things that I forage and kill, I’m sure of it. Only I’d also take some salt water and leave it to dry inside a large banana leaf, so that by dinner time I’d have some salt to sprinkle on my recently killed dinner. I’m amazed that they never do this. They take the time to boil leaves and then drink the water as if it is some fine tea, some treat. But they never take the time to passively make salt. I would, I know it.
Last week, I found myself wandering up a small, cold stream in some location not horribly far from here. I was geared up, as my son calls it, with waders and boots and gear packs, and a fly rod in hand. I worked this small stream that I had never fished before, as it twisted through fields of Goldenrod and dark forests of overhanging, juvenile willow trees that reached across the stream to mingle with each other, and to tease my fly line into their grip. I fished up this stream, past these things, for three hours. I caught one brown trout. It was colorful, strong, and posed long enough for me to snap one picture and release it back to the undercut bank where it spent the high part of the day. I scrambled over rocks, and up steep banks, and when I came to a beaver dam that had stretched across the 15′ width of this stream and turned the upstream water into a swampy pond, I knew it was time to turn back. I had adventured enough.
But I hadn’t been tested, even if hiking back through chin high goldenrod is something that sounds romantic but is, in practice, difficult work. Bear Grylls would have purposefully fallen a few times and faked near death in that field, but not me. I just soldiered on, back to the road and then back to the car. I was still soft, but the sun had hardened me if only some.
Yesterday, the wind blew. It blew in the morning and it blew in the afternoon and though I didn’t see it in person, I assume it blew in the evening, too. I woke in the morning, and took the dog for a trip to the hardware store. I didn’t necessarily need anything, but I wanted something, and so I went. This, as I mentioned earlier, is one of my problems. I bought some weed killer, and stopped for gas before returning home. I tilled some of my lawn, because my wife wants a flower garden that is approximately the size of all of Holland, and then by noon I was ready to find the lake. It was blowing, hard.
It is no secret that I am unwaveringly proud of my son and his sailing abilities. We sailed last week from Conference Point to Black Point and back, and he beat me without breaking a sweat. He is capable and even though a Laser is a bit large for him, he can sail it with surprising proficiency. So we did what anyone would do on a billowing Sunday, and we rigged up the dueling Lasers and set out into the great wind. My son in his blue Laser, my daughter and me in the yellow Laser. Boaters boated past, sailors sailed, and a sunny Sunday was unavoidable and ideal. For a while.
When we headed out, towards the Black Point, the wind, for some while, was shielded ever so slightly by the lee side of Conference Point. We sailed along, zigging and zagging, which may not be the technical terms for what we were doing, but it was, in fact, what was happening. The wind was stiff, but manageable. At once, it was not. A mighty gust pushed against our twin white sails, and my son’s boat flipped just a moment before mine did. I was watching his boat give way to the wind just as mine did. I was propelled into the water, my daughter too. This wasn’t the biggest problem. As I was in the process of tipping, and pulling the tiller against the momentum, the old wooden tiller snapped in two. I was perhaps 200 feet away from my son and his turtled boat.
Things rush through one’s mind at a moment like this. There is immediate procedure to be followed. First, I gathered my daughter, who was upset but not yet frantic. I could hear my son yelling for me, and I could see that his centerboard was not sticking skyward from his hull. Waves pounded us, slamming against our hull. My primary concern now was that either my son or my daughter would lose their grip on the boats, so I yelled at them to hold on tightly. I was as Bear Grylls now, except that my danger was real and his is always fabricated.
Luckily, my boat, though crippled with a broken tiller, had not fully turtled and I was able to right it without much difficulty. I threw my daughter into the tiny boat, the sail flapping wildly in the wind, and the rigging lines a mess of twist and violence. The line had managed to get wrapped under the rudder, so I clung tightly to the back of the boat, balancing as best I could so as to avoid another upsetting flip, and I freed the line. I pulled in the sail, shoved the broken bit of the tiller into the rudder, and limped in this high wind over to my son, where his tears were noticeable to me even from a distance, and even with the water splashing all about and over him.
I released the sail when I was close, grabbed the small length of braided line that dangles from the bow cleat, and I jumped in. I yelled to my daughter to stay low in the cockpit, and handed the rope that was my daughter’s only connection to either of us to my son, and instructed him to hang on tightly. My daughter was crying now too. A few boats came by to help, but as is my way, I waved them all off. I could handle this, I assured them and tried to convince myself. I was being tested, and I needed badly to pass.
My son’s centerboard had drifted a short ways away from the boat, but not so far as that I couldn’t quickly swim it down and bring it back. The boats were drifting quickly, but in my old, fat softness I am still more than proficient in the water. I crawled onto the upside down hull, riding it as a wrangler would a wild bull, except that they get to hold onto some rope and I had none. I plunged the centerboard into the hull and leaned my significant weight towards one side, pushing on one lip of the hull with my toes and pulling the opposite side with my hands. The boat righted itself, and I pulled the centerboard out on its way upright and threw it into the cockpit. I yelled at my son to get aboard, and in a flash he was back in control of his boat. The centerboard was rammed into place, the line hiked in, life, perhaps, once again intact.
My daughter was a wreck now. She had every right to be. And when the boom swung around in the heavy wind and hit her in the head, she was even more entitled to those tears. She was telling me that this wasn’t fun anymore. That, “we are never going to make it back”. This was resignation, and this was usually the moment in the movie where the father, exhausted from the fight to save his children, sinks below the surface never to return. But I am not that father, so I rigged the boat back up, fighting the waves and the wind, and pushed the broken bit of the tiller back in place and aimed to sail towards shore, or home, whichever came first. That was the plan, until a minute later Thomas’s boat was once again upside down. This was far from good.
The work that came next was like the work that came first. Pulling the boat back, hanging to the other boat, and to my daughter, pushing my son aboard his boat, and instructing him with no light words to sail home, slowly, steadily, without tipping. DO NOT TIP OVER AGAIN! I yelled as he sailed back to the West, back to the pier, back to safety. Once he was again sailing, I surveyed my situation. I had a broken tiller, a sobbing 7 year old, and a main sail line that had completely worked out of all the various pulley’s and loops that it should have been run through. In such a high wind it would be nearly impossible to re-rig the boat, so I grabbed hold of one line, without the use of any weight-easing pulleys, and aimed towards Cedar Point. I assured concerned passersby that I had this under control.
I was mostly concerned about Thomas at this point. If he were to have turtled his boat again, with my boat now incapacitated and incapable of catching up to him to render aid, I’m not sure what would have happened. I had drifted to a pier in Cedar Point, and to all of those who think that Black Point, or the Narrows are the roughest points of the lake, I assure you that the very southern tip of Cedar Point is worse than both combined. I tied up to a pier and walked on wobbly legs to ask for a cell phone so that I might call my dad. I had re-rigged the sail, but had grown faint at the prospect of trying to sail against these waves and that wind with a broken scrap of a tiller.
Help came, and with a new tiller I sailed home. My daughter will likely never sail again. My son will likely become some thrill seeking daredevil, who will quietly cite this experience as the reason for some post-college cross-Atlantic solo journey. I have bruises this morning, and the yellow Laser is missing a bow cleat after it was ripped directly from the bow deck as a result of the forceful waves that pushed it from the pier that I had tied it to. I suppose I had passed the test, but I am left today with two thoughts. First, I could survive in the wild just fine, so long as I had the ability to borrow someone’s cell phone to call my dad once things really hit the fan. Also, that Pi guy had a rough gig, on that boat in that ocean. But he was with a tiger, and I was with a shrieking 7 year old, so he had an easier cross to bear.