Peeling memories

 

Skin peels like fish scales from my dry palms. Once water-soaked pruney, blistered and bloody they are disrobing their armor, pushing pink newness to the surface: a circus of circles where toughness once lay. 

Bits of torn skin catch on my clothing. 

There is the rub.

With time and without oars muscles once taut soften, recede, ebb. I am flooded with panic and want to re-seed my memory, want to hold onto to all the little motions and thoughts that have been left in the wake behind. I want to wrestle that feeling of Fuck Yeah back into my gut where it happily nested, made my heart chirp in appreciation and spring forward out of my (count the ribs) cage. 

The bird has fluttered and flown and I squint at the horizon searching for signs of feathers and sound.

My legs no longer wonder at the ground before them in weak anticipation of movement. It is I who am moving now, not the sole of the boat. There are no waves pushing plastic and vibrating through every fiber of my body, my soul. When I lie down there is no need to compensate to stay on the bunk. When I place a jar on the counter it stays exactly where I put it. 

This predictability makes me both relieved and unquestionably sad.

A few weeks ago I stood on a dock in Ketchikan in the middle of the night and I knew anything was possible. Not thought it. Knew it. As the days turn to weeks and now a month from leaving Victoria in a rush of horns and paddles, I am struggling not to grasp at memories and feelings of a three-week stretch of the unpredictable, of despair and magic. I find myself pulling at threads of images and trying to tuck them in around me like a Binkie. 

You know Binkie, that vomit-stained blanket you drooled on as a kid and wouldn’t leave home without. It was torn and faded and chewed. It smelled like pee and moldy broccoli with a hint of baby powder. It had seen you through the tough times of crawling and walking and sleeping on your very own for the first time in a dark room in a dark house with space space space all around. But with Binkie you knew all would be OK, that you were safe and courageous. So you held on and cried a lot (and died a little) when it was taken away. 

What now would remind you of your bravery?

My memories of adventures are like that: I don’t see the stains or smell the putridness as I wrap myself in the security of knowing I DID something. I survived. I can do anything. I want to hold on to all that made me come alive out there even if half the time I was out there I was distractedly thinking of back here. 

No matter, when I looked up from the spinning in my head I saw whales and porpoises and sunrises over glassy water. I saw mountains resting their heads on pillows of cloud. I saw double rainbows through whitecaps and stars through darkened shrouds. I felt salt and wind and somehow felt the sky, too. I heard the salmon jumping at sunset and humpbacks crashing ahead of us in the night. I was scared and electrified by joy. I was a spectrum of all I could be when I settled into the moment and enjoyed where I was.

The ocean was my blanket.

Now I see the sunflowers against a backdrop of pine and cedar. I hear the sparrows in the field and the chimes on my porch where I sit and type and breathe in evergreen. I feel the eternal wind that still blows around this earth, that took us from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and that I flew through home. 

As the muscles and memories from adventure fade, as the skin and images flake away, I remind myself that THIS is the adventure. Every minute of every day there is adventure if I can just stay present to it. Burn the Binkie! OK, maybe not burn but don’t be afraid to fold it neatly, place it on a shelf to occasionally pick up, shake out, breathe deeply into the weave but remind myself that I don’t necessarily need a trinket or image to remind me of who I am and what I can do. 

I am a composite of everything I have ever done and may not remember.

I wrap myself in the present moment, whale songs submerged (yet echoing) under the rustling of dry grass and fall asleep on solid shifting ground, safe and brave and sound.

Hit It

If the roughly hewn timber and rock breakwaters of Port Townsend and Ketchikan were parenthesis, our adventure would not be contained in an aside. This was an exclamatory excursion and it would burst through any sort of manmade containment without apology. Hence our slamming and swirling encounters on our exit from and entrance into “safe” harbors, the start and finish lines. 

Save whirlpools and overfalls, hitting stationary objects (breakwaters, islands, docks) or being hit by other moving objects (containerships, massive logs, tugboats) was my greatest fear on boats. Losing an engine was high up on that list, too, as it would only contribute to such jarring opportunities for puncturing the hull. I suppose it wasn’t so much the hitting as the sinking that worried me. And not so much the sinking but the drowning part, gulps of salty sea and plankton through baleen-less jaws, a diving deep without a spyhop to follow.

I am in love with the sea, I am a mermaid, a shapeshifting flying fish, but the imagination of my heart can only go so far, breathe so deep under the edge of water.

Entering a race where the rules forbid even having an engine on board, where sailing and rowing and paddling (or peddling on some boats) are the only means of propulsion, where turbulent tidal rips and currents and whirlpools let you know that you are definitely not the one in control, well, it seemed a little nuts. Because hitting shit was inevitable. And hit shit we would. I pretended like I was OK with that reality but in fact I was terrified and I knew this was the very best reason for me to enter the race.

Even with tens of thousands of miles of sailing experience I felt pretty vulnerable and anxious as I boarded the ferry to Port Townsend where the Race to Alaska would begin. Walking down the street with a dry-bag heavy with emergency equipment over my shoulder, I watched the truck trailers sporting modified plastic kayaks and mini mono-hulls crawl towards the waterfront. When I leaned out over the rail overlooking the docks full of trimarans and hobie cats and tiny coffin-like boats, I cried.

Not out of fear but excitement and relief. These were my people! Nuts, every single one, some even more so than me! We were all coming together to push our limits, to challenge what was considered safe, to use our skills and stamina in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. I was soothed by the camaraderie, like a snug school of sardines finning past the gaping jaws of a shark.

Last minute preparations, repairs, modifications dialed up the frenetic energy on the docks. In less than 36 hours (and two beer-soaked parties later), we would all be squeezing through the narrow harbor entrance and pointing our bows towards Alaska. Well, those who could actually point more than 45 degrees into the wind would be doing so. As part of Team Onism on a 24-foot homebuilt trimaran with 25-year-old sails (and trampoline and hull), we would be pointing a lot of places along the way but rarely in the exact direction we wanted to go. Of course we didn’t know this when we started. We were very aware we didn’t know a lot of things about the boat. We went anyway.

We hit the breakwater in Port Townsend battling 20-knot winds on the nose with oars and paddles. (The oars and paddles were in the water, not in the turbulent air smacking that laughing wind on the snout, but sometimes our propulsion implements felt like they might as well have been skyward the progress was so painfully slow.) It was 5am, we hadn’t eaten breakfast or slept a wink as the halyards clanged and docklines creaked all night. To make the 6am start the 60+ boats started clawing their way out of the harbor before sunrise. Or perhaps the sun had already risen but was obscured by the angry black clouds overhead.

Before we had a chance to think about it (or have coffee. Damn!) the trimaran in front of us pushed off into the fairway. That meant it was our turn and god I wasn’t ready lets just take our time but now we’re being pulled forward by boyfriend and husband and father and now fuck we are in the fairway and now I am paddling and now my lungs are burning and I realize that paddling in a drysuit sucks and my muscles are now burning and suddenly I am yelling “Let’s do this ladies” like a gym coach on steroids because I am afraid if I don’t yell I am going to stop and cry but I keep paddling and Emily keeps rowing and Katy keeps steering and yells “Don’t stop!” and we don’t. There is a crowd cheering us on from the railing above but I can’t hear them with the blood rushing in my ears and we round the corner

we can see open water

we can see the other boats

we are almost there

but the wind still takes our bow a second before we can get the jammed staysail to unfurl and we drift more like slide more like plow towards the timber wall to port. Contact! That sounds so gentle but it is more of a crunch and we are sliding against the splintering wood and we think we will spin and end up on the beach where there is another fucking happy group of people cheering us on (DON’T YOU SEE WE ARE GOING TO CRASH?)

But the fluttering of a white wing saves us and pulls us into the wind. We are flying towards the rest of the (floating, sailing, safe) boats and we can breathe again. Yell with joy. We have not even officially started the race but we have started the journey.

We have hit shit. We are OK. We are more than OK. We are laughing.

We are on our way to Victoria and then Alaska. Alaska!

I am on my way to discovering who I am when the boat hits the breakwall, when exhaustion and steep waves and adverse currents will mix with bubbling shame, when the sight of fins and flippers will connect me to my briny blood.

When in the last moments of the race we are spun in circles inches away from hungry sharp rocks and we are able to laugh again and accept our pirouette of a finish as we guzzle beers and ring the brass bell and hug fellow racers when we finally make it to the dock in Ketchikan. 

I will finish with a smile on my face, arms strong, hands blistered, heart full.

We hit shit and we made it. 

Spun, rain-soaked, sun-drenched spirits
bursting out of whale bone cages to meet the yellow dawn

and the next

 )not-to-be-contained(

ADVENTURE.

Ready or Not

I barely remember the early morning over 13 years ago when J and I untied our little boat and set off into the darkness. We had shoved all the extra gear into whatever cubbies and lockers we could at midnight. We’d stashed the last few cans of tuna under bunks and topped off the 40-gallon water tank at one a.m. Our single side band radio was nestled in blankets under the settee next to a lifeless bubble-wrapped solar panel. The rigging wasn’t quite tuned, the outboard rarely started on the 1^st or 20^th try, we didn’t have charts for our entire trip and we sure didn’t know the waters. We’d only sailed on our boat Gitane a few times before embarking on a six-thousand-mile journey from Ensenada, Mexico to New York City.

We weren’t ready to untie those lines, we had dozens of more projects to complete, San Diego was on fire, family told us not to go. We could have used a plethora of excuses to sensibly wait one more day, but somewhere around 3am we slipped off those lines anyway and sailed off that dock.

As I get ready for a little ole race to Alaska on a boat I’ve only sailed a few times, Being Ready is on my mind. As is knowing deep down that Being Ready is not a Real Thing. It doesn’t matter how many energy bars we have stowed or how many rowing workouts I’ve done or how comfortable I am pulling up the jib on the tiny bow of this trimaran, I won’t be ready. 

And yet I am.

Ready is less a list of to-dos than it is allowance of forward motion. Instead of saying ready, maybe I should say willing. I am open to challenge. I am confident that we can handle what comes our way. And by handle I do not mean fight or defeat or stay alive, I mean that if I am willing (ready) to stay present in the moment (which the sea is extraordinarily wonderful at cultivating, that presence), I can trust that I can be in the flow of whatever happens.

Hoping that flow is not a whirlpool.
Yet that too. 

Not going, as has been suggested by dear caring souls with more arguably more sense than I, will not teach me these lessons of trust. Doing something that is wholly unknown (other than that sailing ocean birds sunset bioluminescence whales un-fucking-believeable beauty part- I know that) is a way to remind myself that every day we throw off the docklines and get out of bed. Or at least most days. We sail into the unknown with every conversation on the street or at the breakfast table and during every acceleration in the car catapulting us into the next moment, the next interaction. Nothing is fully planned and executed exactly. Planning is inherently ephemeral. Our dreams and expectations never quite line up with our reality.

We are penciled self-portraits blurred by the hands that draw them.

The bigger the decisions or the more outlandish the adventure, I’d venture to say that the chasm between expectation and reality widens more significantly, obviously, acutely.

Is that what I fear? Falling into that chasm of the unknown, swooping swallows and flying fish circling and slashing?

I realize that this is commitment. Commitment to getting out of bed in the morning and being in relationship with others and going on a crazy fucking boat trip for no point other than to do it. This is trust and love and life. Living. Untying what holds us back and sailing out of the harbor each and every day into the unknown and feeling every wave and wash of terror and gratitude. It can look like this trip or like marriage and kids and staying in one place for more than a year.

Adventure is relative.
It is trust.

Ready? Sure.
For blurred lines and whales breath and swooping swallows and presence.  
Willing to welcome commitment and contentment.
Open to the challenge of the unknown (so everything). Ready.