wind reincarnated
learning to sail the hard way | seastray VI
So with these few exceptions, the sailing did not scare me, but sometimes the sailing made me cry. On an otherwise unexceptional Tuesday in late February, for example, crossing from one side of Lake Izabal to the other, the light cooled with the air, and the golden hue of a day winding down evaporated into something softer. Everything in sight tinted with a powerful purple–the rippling water, the dwindling sky, the skin that held the body that marked my membership in it all–omitting only the glitter remnants trailing a swallowed sun and the shimmer that fell from the moon into a silver pool of water waving from the direction of the wind. With my arms and hands and fingers extended, I played with the wind at the bow of the boat like a child meeting her for the first time. I closed my eyes and felt the mighty force of her as she propelled us over the length of the lake. With my fingertips and face, the sensation and sound in my ears, the movement of loose hairs on my head, I found her; I knew where she was coming from. I looked at the horizon then and all the lines and shapes that emerge and morph in the fabric of the water, so quickly as to never have really existed at all, and I knew that there would always be this. I cried until the sea desaturated, and I made my peace with the chill of a night in black and white.
When I cried, it was less often because of those things beautiful. It was more often because of rancid feelings that festered in my chest and made me fantasize about endings and escape. There were many moments when I cried and thought about leaving, like when we were out at sea and the wind died. Dead wind feels like forever, like stifling stillness is permanent, like the world is stuck on pause with the sun suspended indefinitely above–hotter and higher than ever before–like you will never live to taste another twilight, to delight in another dawn because there never will be one, because you and the rest of the living will succumb to circumstance and suffocate on this sick languor, because in the inescapable emptiness of sea, all is as good as dead as the wind.
The wind died on the last day of my last sail as we neared the channel to Cienfuegos. We departed an international dive site called Las Tetas de Maria la Gorda (the tits of Maria the fatty) on the southwest tip of the island a full two weeks earlier. For lack of leadership and insufficient forethought, we had sailed upwind across a distance of almost three hundred nautical miles, zigzagging the southern coast of Cuba. Besides one mission to refill water and kiss the precious earth of Cayo Largo and one night drinking rum with the lighthouse keeper on the last caye before the span of uninterrupted sea to the mainland, we had pressed straight on through the gulf. This final stretch saw my favorite sail–a solo night shift on Utopie with la luna half herself in the sky, lined up as my sole point of directional reference between the mast and the forestay–but overall the easterlies had humbled us. Worse, though, than the wind blowing from where you want to go is the wind not blowing at all.
On that last day, the wind did not exist, and the boat would not heave to (when you position the sails and steering to halt the headway of your boat), so having collectively forfeit the helm, we spun in cruel circles. This made sustainable shade impossible as the sun surrounded us, running laps around our Utopie. The Genoa flapped in voluminous, swaying motions, and the boom echoed the harsh sound of metal moving against itself with the endless lift, tilt, fall of the boat. The blue waves continued rushing beneath, while body odor polluted breathing on the boat that day, and the sun showed her strength like she wanted to hurt me. I cried and could not speak. Utopie, so small, forbid my solitude. I sat at the bow and squinted into the bright abyss and felt the bumps and blemishes that littered my wilted skin, open wounds from exposed metal and the spines of a vengeful sea urchin that refused to heal for months on end in the salty dampness of life at sea. We were only a few nautical miles out from destination, two weeks of effort behind us, the end taunting in proximity. I felt vile, I felt hate, and I felt hints of lunacy. Had the wind shown any mercy, we would have been but an hour's sail away. Instead we watched helpless as the coast moved about in circles, dizzy and with spirits shriveled up in the heat, a sad band of strays at sea.
When the wind returned we had great fun and forgot all about that. That last sail could have been a cumulative exam. We navigated Utopie through the curving channel at every point of sail possible, avoiding many obstacles like the green and red buoys that warn of where the river shoals and some fishermen in rowboats passing low by large commercial vessels. Friend Ship followed close behind, and we blew kisses at our crewmates, our team severed only by the small distance between two sailboats, as they gathered out on the deck amid colorful clothes dangling stiff from the railings and lines draped off the mast. We tacked, tightened, loosened, furled, unfurled our Genoa as the wind surged sporadic through the waterway. We had the main at once secured in the middle, in another instant open wide, restrained to the railing with a rope and a bowline. We attached the spinnaker pole, hoisting the Genoa opposite the main in a broad butterfly. From the helm, I thanked Utopie for giving me one last run downwind as we flew between tall jungle mountains and big buildings of incompatible architectural influences and private docks that revealed passing peeks into family restaurants and homes and some small city streets where vintage cars met horses and fuming motorcycles met men and women moving on foot. Approaching the marina, we battled a sudden current that sucked us dangerously close to a big steel buoy. Having avoided collision, at last I steered Utopie into the wind, furled the rest of the Genoa, and called to drop anchor. I realized then that my hands were shaking and that the space between my shoulder blades was sore, and I stood stunned for a moment in the sobering conclusion of my final sail. Soon the four of us on Utopie paddled the dinghy to Friend Ship where we reconvened and decided how to spend our day. It was by then once again only early afternoon.
Thanks for reading! This piece was originally published under the title “About a Sea Stray” in Volume II of Duvu Magazine, a women’s arts and culture publication based in Philadelphia, PA. Find them on instagram and purchase a copy to see this essay in its physical spread.
This is the fourth installment of a five part essay. Read part one, part two, part three, and part five on my Substack!