Sailing Beyond the Sunset

And the Baths of All the Western Stars

I am once again in California, once again aboard the tall ship Exy Johnson, and sorted among muscular, agile, lustrous, nimble--and all the words that can describe fleet young persons--for a few days. I am here volunteering as a deckhand, and opposing their contemptible youth with my own halting walk and my own decrepit and arthritis-plagued line coiling and hawser throwing. So far they haven’t voted me off.

And it’s a good thing this is a friendly group. Yesterday one of these young people helped me down off a deck house after I’d climbed up there to furl a sail and couldn’t get down. Which shows you the consideration of the crew. If she hadn’t offered to help I would still be up there, weeping.

Afterward, after a hard day’s work sailing with middle school students, we all went out to a restaurant located on a barge in a marina to enjoy clam chowder and refreshing beverages, more or less in that order,

Now I get to sit and write all by myself in the aft cabin, with the sun streaming in the open ports and the morning foghorns sounding. Big tankers and container ships ply the waters we float in, one channel of the largest seaport in the country.

The crew have all gone off to other adventures on their free day and one member returned to her regular gig in Mystic Connecticut. She came to California to sail boats on vacation from sailing boats in Connecticut. This is a frequent sort of story around here.

I have been lucky while working on this boat, to come to know an inordinate share of very decent and intelligent people. There is something about the life, something about all pulling together. I don’t even want to call it teamwork, but try a musical reference instead. Call it an ensemble performance.

I have come to love staying mostly outdoors on a boat beneath pleasant sunshine, and I often wish this life could go on forever.

However, as James Thurber pointed out somewhere, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end. Muscles weaken. Overall horsepower diminishes. A lumpy cushion begins to seem the worse choice among sleeping options.

The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the sea moans round with many voices.

It’s made me wish, wish really hard, that more of life could be cast as an ensemble performance, that we could all add our own little melody to the great music unfolding. That it would add up to glory and the glorification to the supreme being of your choice.

All this will once again to explain why I don’t write a full column this week.