'A Private Greatness' Chapter 1

-Chapter 1-

The keel of the sailboat sliced evenly through the chop, brooding and elongate, a wooden eye into the murky warm depths of the sea. It was all I could do to keep the groaning mast firmly attached to the deck as the kind of gale the old timers like to talk about whipped the channel into a pudding cake frenzy. It wasn't supposed to have happened like this; I thought, as if aware for the first time of the glaring inequality, the way my grandmother used to call the myriad woes of life "private matters", as if that would somehow make it all better. But, in a roundabout way such that fate met retribution, waiting for the right circumstances hadn't lined up quite right. My ducks no longer in a row, I did the only thing I knew how to do: escape.

The facts were quite simple, really: It was May, 1978, and I was one week away from graduating magna cum laude in geology and geography from Brown. In an LSD-induced euphoria, I’d driven the old station wagon down to the boatyards in Newport at 3 in the morning, and, well, I fucking stole a boat, that's what I did. None seemed overly appealing to me at the time; noble teak and mahogany yachts of the blueblood legions, dirty 2-stroke Boston Whalers and fishing skiffs of the white trash; the gaudy dories and catboats of vacationing nuclear families, freshly painted by Jimmy and his pops. I chose…well, I chose the biggest damn one, wouldn't you? For an act whose premeditated fantasy had cost me so many hours of concentration in class the past few years, it was surprisingly easy.

The massive Honda inboard burbled pleasantly to life with a gentle twist of a key already in the ignition. ‘God bless the trust the old money has in the world’, I thought. The 85' sloop slid slowly out of Newport harbor under power as the last bits of exploding neon stars faded over the inky black water with the remnants of the LSD. Suddenly I sobered up so intensely and vividly that I cried out in fear over the ebbing dark tide. ‘Holy shit!’ This was real; there was no going back, no telling, no regretting, everything from now on was forward and immediate. The rush of possibility was soon smothered by the sharp salt spray whipping over the whitecaps, however, and I gathered I was now somewhere off Nantucket. The brass compass read North 30 East, which would put me somewhere between Lisbon and Gibraltar, I thought without particular consequence.

There is something immediate and terrifying about losing sight of all points of land for the first time in the Atlantic. You don't feel small, you feel singular, enigmatic, an oddity in a 2-dimensional landscape of air and water. You long for a lawn, a football game, an ice-cream sandwich; an identity. Until, that is, you realize life is now absolved of trivial meddling and preoccupations and heeds only to sun and wind, night and day. For me this was also forgiveness, absolution from the self-inflicted sins of LSD and meaningless sex, cheat sheets and stale Christmas's. Life in the gentle womb of blueblood privilege was such a cruel blessing; comfortable yet somehow intellectually bankrupt, full of opportunities for other people, people with options and abandon.

I wanted only to be wrapped in the wraithlike form of the sea; naked and vulnerable to everything, for once free of the bullshit safety net from responsibility my parents clad me in. I used to go sit down at the boatyard docks nearly every day, reading or smoking cheap cig's or just watching the sailboats stutter haphazardly around the bay. Sometimes I'd see schoolmates there. Friends, lovers, rivals, they never asked me what I was doing, intimidated or perhaps just disinterested. I was well liked, tolerated affably, not one of the cashmere sweater 'good-to-meetcha' fraternity sociopaths, but not exactly a math nerd either. I wasn't sure whether he liked boys or girls, cats or dogs, responsibility or escape, so I tried everything just because I could. Took in a spot-eared mutt from the pound, blew the star of the rugby team on the locker room bench; took the prettiest girl in his class to senior formal. I was so tired of everything though, tired of caring, tired of winning without trying, that sailing, which for once I could thank my blueblood lineage for, felt like an extension of my skin and bones right now, as the boat shot out into the night.

In the distance, a horn wailed in eerie harmony into the darkness. Soon I could make out heaving white breakers, cresting upwards over the earth. Nog Ledge, I thought with sudden certainty. 398 miles North by Northeast of Nantucket, and the last bit of land from here to France. I could thank my preparatory school geography teacher for this bit of arcane nautical lore. As the horn faded and the churning green wake burned with the rising sun, the only thing that crystallized in my mind was tomorrow, because in this place, today was only real if you couldn’t see beyond it.

Sometimes tomorrow appears like a shooting star- mysterious and ethereal at first, then suddenly quite forceful and charismatic and before you know it, the reality of what is happening has to be faced in full. The entirety of the experience could cease to be real if you let it bend back into yesterday. Such was this particular morning over the western Atlantic, May 17th 1978. While Jimmy Carter promised peace in Israel and Anita Bryant took rights away from people somewhere to the east, in this place there was only deep blue Ocean. Not the tannin-infused mottling of the estuaries or the filthy oil-slicked yellow of the Tri-State coastline, but such intense blue that it almost burned the eyes if you stared at it too long. I stretched like a cat on his back across the shiny maple boards of the bowsprit as it whipped forward over the water, riding high over the uneven staccato of the swells. A sudden shrill cry rang out in the still air and I jumped with instinctive fright as a small group of gulls, no terns, Arctic terns on their way south for the summer flew near overhead, the first living thing I’d seen since leaving Newport 2 days ago.

I pondered the idea of rigging up some sort of improvised fishing pole and reeling in a great heaving, monstrous swordfish, battling it for days like The Old Man and the Sea. I thought better of it though as the cabin was already prodigiously stocked with cans and staples. ‘Thank god…’ as the miasma of LSD had prevented any foresight in bringing such necessities on the night of the escape. I lowered a bucket over the starboard gunnels and filled it with cold briny water. Searching for a brush to clean the remnants of last night's vomit from the sleeping berth downstairs, I felt for the first time as if the seasickness had finally passed. This was good. The regret, the self-loathing, the fear, this had all begun to pass as well. At times I suppose felt stoic and resolute, a man created from nothing and with infinite potential, or something along those lines.

With a loud glancing blow and a deep shudder, my smug contemplation shattered. I ducked and covered my head as sharp wooden splinters sailed over the deck and the boat stuttered and slammed to a stop. 'Well, this is it’, I thought without particular immediacy or attachment, ‘I'm going to drown alone in the Atlantic'. Just then the yacht lurched forward and a large rectangular metallic object bobbed up in the wake and drifted slowly backwards… a shipping container? I’d heard of these things. I followed the racing magazines loosely and occasionally on those 'around the world' adventure races, one of these giant floating shipping containers would be encountered, fallen off some massive ship in a storm. Just waterlogged enough to float inches below the surface, they were silent deathtraps ready to slice a fiberglass hull in two. Thank god for this ancient wooden ramming rod of a keel…besides a torn off bowsprit and some mangled anchor lines, the craft seemed essentially unharmed. A quick trip below deck confirmed this, as the triple reinforced hull hadn't even been punctured, rather, the thick, cured wood had absorbed and softened the blow, saving the boat. Three days had now elapsed and daily uncertainties seemed slight in comparison to the shipping container incident; I rode on an ambivalent high of having escaped imminent disaster somehow. The weather was slowly making a turn for the better. The churning gray swells were increasingly replaced by calmer, more certain winds and fairer skies. The escape from the storm-bound and mortal coast last week seemed distant. I relished this newfound freedom of nothing but Ocean- Ocean-with-a-capital-O, goddamnit, and more Ocean beyond it.

I remember as a small child returning to New York from one of the frequent trips to Stockholm and glimpsing out the window of the plane what looked like tiny rectangular dots afloat in an endless blue canvas, a young king surveying my kingdom from the window seat of a transatlantic flight. I thought now of this memory warmly and abstractly, a vestige of a distant, carefree childhood. Though I would not have even registered as a dot from above now, the surreal magnetism of the open ocean drew me so intensely and uncharacteristically inward that what lay immediately ahead took a minute to register. Perhaps 2000 yards off the starboard bow a looming, shining wall of metallic gray split the flat blue horizon. It was a massive oceangoing container ship bound for Athens or Dubai- perhaps the very source of my earlier brush with disaster. What was but a whimsical rectangle from 35,000 feet was now perhaps no more a threat to me but undeniably huge and intimidating nonetheless, an anomaly in this seemingly lifeless landscape.

It didn't appear to be going particularly fast. I passed perhaps 500 yards to the north, and a few men on the upper observation deck waved and smiled, tan and trim in white uniforms as I peered at them through his spotting scope. A silver light on the deck flashed and I recalled enough of nautical rules to know this was a friendly 'hello' signal. I sent a return across the channel between them. I recognized the blocky white letter on the hull as Arabic and imagined the sailors returning home sometime next week, their white adobe houses in some nondescript suburb of Medina or Riyadh. I saw them kissing their wives, picking up their children; sitting down to a dinner of deliciously foreign, aromatic things. Suddenly, I longed for a meaning, the regularity of purpose these sailors had, to be employed and accountable, attached to someone else's schedule. I envied their easy contentment, their trust in Allah and the shipping company.

Somehow I knew others could never provide fully for me- I had to sustain myself singularly, absolutely. Food, clothing, shelter, these were all things to be had in times of success. I thought of the cozy investment baking job my uncle had lined up for me in New York this July, the transparency of money when all it meant was a phone call to mom, the dull shame of hundred dollar bar tabs and designer sports coats. The wind kicked up from the east and I paid out the mainsheet dangerously far, the boat shuddering as it took up speed with the sail. The most dangerous point of sail, 'running with the wind', I thought detachedly. The risk of course being an accidental jibe, sending the boom across the deck with the sort of force that cracks skulls and tear’s halyards from their stays. This afternoon's breeze was behaving most agreeably however, and I trimmed the sails to my liking before retiring to the cabin to read a few haphazard pages of my latest obsession, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 'Nog'.

Nog was this sort of disillusioned space cowboy who drifted around a wild, romanticized west, gleaming bits of brilliance between pseudo-psychedelic trips and hazy existential crises. I wanted so badly to meet Nog out here, afloat on some sort of derelict ocean raft, drinking gin out of the bottle and waxing deliriously on the meaning of it all. Nog wasn't created for this world, of course, but neither was Clark Nilsson for that matter- suburban space alien from planet disenfranchised. The sailing was helping though; it was so pure, so spiritual. I missed the days of teaching sailing up in Wiscasset, the "prettiest little village in Maine.' Fairytale clouds would float over dark green islands and gaudy pastel lobster pots, the little wooden Mackinaw’s overcrowded with laughing kids and duffle bags. The comfort of association- a place neither home nor foreign territory, was lost out here on the open ocean. Goddamn!, what a great equalizer of human strife and worrying.

The fog. That was the best, I knew. That damp, cold Maine fog that would move in for days, leaving everything dark and piney and bathed in ambiguous shadows. There was none of that out here, just the most blinding blue I could have ever imagined- bigger than that sky over the Montana prairies, harsher and more acrid than the cloudless ceiling over the Nevada playa in July. In a sudden inclination I stripped naked and, one foot planted high on the great wooden wheel and the other on a bench cushion, cried out in a silly, childish assertion, diving head first into the rolling green waves. It was colder than I’d expected, clear and salty. In a sudden panic, seeing down into the endlessness, I thrashed towards the life ring I’d tied to the stern line, as thoughts of sharks and bumping things crowded my imagination.

As a child I’d been quite terrified of the open ocean. My legs never seemed to settle into a rhythm when swimming- rather they kicked erratically as if deflecting the lurking creatures below, the ones who watched with menacing disinterest. I thought of this spot, this moment- I might be the first human ever to swim here, dangling in an alternate reality 10,000 feet above the floor. That's what really got me, what scared and fascinated me- the fantastic 3-dimensionality of it, the vertical immensity of the unknown. Suddenly I shivered and then, letting go of the life ring, dove down as deep as I could go, perhaps only 5 or 6 meters. I opened his eyes, seeing maybe another 20 meters down into the great green nothing. When I came back up he gulped delicious air and hooted and hollered like I'd won the game single-handed. I’d glimpsed the edge of the void, something we all wish to peer over. I thought I’d seen it before, nature almost tastelessly uninterrupted- like looking through two mirrors till the reflection’s edge fades around an imperceptible bend. I'd seen it in pieces from the tops of desert peaks, dawn light on some distant island, New England forest’s damp and infinite.

This time though, the immediacy of the experience caught me off guard and suddenly I was crying, toweling off and slipping on yesterday’s jeans and cardigan while blubbering helplessly into a dirty handkerchief. They were tears of gratitude though, not sadness, for having left behind the dull functionality of Brown and New York and modern social networking for something trying and beautiful. The sharp sting of salt in the half moon crack in my left palm shook me out this emotion. I wished I hadn't climbed so damn hard on the last trip upstate. My fingers were strong and calloused from caressing sharp quartzite and granite edges. I always looked at people's hands when he first met them, my grandfather taught me that; said you could learn an awful lot about someone just by studying their hands.

I suppose my hands were rough and kind, clean angular lines with neatly trimmed fingernails. I’d always been wary of grownups with soft hands. Everyone should experience fatigue of the body, I thought selfishly. Perhaps not in the fields or the factories but in something purposeful and regular, whether the even creases of a paintbrush trapped for hours beneath thumb and forefinger or the deep calloused grooves worn by fishing line and marlin twine. Gripping the dark oiled wood of the wheel felt timeless and unconstrained. I could have been a captain 400 years ago, I fancied, returning to the old world from an expedition of learning and adventure.

Feeling wonderfully adrift, I shouted commands to imaginary crewmembers and sang out to the terns and the fish. In a place like this, memories had to be paper-thin because they are constantly being rewritten. I thought nostalgically of the hours spent as a child peering into the curving glass expanse of a bedroom fishtank, the contents always shifting and ethereal. I saw quite suddenly that now the glass was the sky and he was just a fish in the ocean, studied by god and no one. I wondered what the French authorities would think.