Sail On

Occasionally I will be relating a tale from the nether reaches of the vault. This one has it all: a boat, a tightrope, and a frantic collect call to my mother.

The summer between my junior and senior year of college, I decided to forgo the traditional internship (photocopying, yuck), hometown visit (drama, yuck), and low-paying service job (retail in New York City, double yuck). Sometime during the preceding winter and spring, I got it into my head that I wanted to go to sea and learn how to sail. I had been on boats a couple of times in my life. During a high school trip to France, we went sailing in the English Channel on a restored corsair vessel. I was one of the few who didn't get seasick that day, so...yeah, it was a shaky connection at best. But for some reason, going to sea become something I had to do. I did some Internet research and came up with the Seamester program, a six-week voyage on an 80-foot schooner—a working sailboat—in the eastern Caribbean. Unlike Semester at Sea, which took place on a cruise ship, this was billed as "experiential education." Along with 12 other college students and a four-person staff, I would get sailing and scuba certified, take oceanography courses, broaden my horizons, see much of the eastern Caribbean, make lifelong friends, get a fantastic tan, etc. I convinced my parents that this would be a character-building and worthy use of my summer. I wrote the application essays, got the recommendation letters, and spoke to the program director on the phone, who asked me vague questions of the "what do you want to get out of this program?" variety. By May, I was in. I would be reporting to Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, on July 5.

Later I'll go into a more overarching description of the trip, but for now I will tell the story that never fails to elicit horrified and disgusted looks, and sympathetic clucks and "oh my Gods." See, one of the first things I learned on Seamester was, you know those silly little things like motor skills and coordination? Mine: not so good. I was constantly slipping on the deck, banging my head, failing to tie the correct knot. It didn't help that my fellow shipmates were triathletes, lifelong sailors, former Boy Scouts, or at the very least, outdoor enthusiasts. Where they welcomed and sought out new challenges for fun, like climbing up the tiny rope ladder to the crows nest or executing graceful boom swings into the sea, I struggled to hoist myself out of the water on the rope ladder during our saltwater showers (yes: we bathed in the sea with shampoo and soap, then got a 10-second rinse with the freshwater hose. My skin has never been better). I had never really pushed myself physically, unless you count high school swim team, but that was more of an individual-achievement thing. There was no consequence if I didn't swim a fast race; now, if I didn't improve my upper-body strength right away, I wouldn't be able to accomplish basic necessities, like bathing.

Somehow I managed, with a great deal of scrambling and soreness and bruises. After a few weeks, I felt like I was finally getting the hang of it; i.e. I could get through a day without wanting to burst into tears of frustration over some new and horrifying challenge. Then we got to Antigua. On most islands, we were able to pull up right next to the dock and hop off the boat directly onto dry land. On Antigua, for spatial reasons I don't remember, we had to anchor the boat 10 or 15 feet from the dock. In theory there was supposed to be a gangplank, but it had disappeared somehow on a previous voyage and no one bothered to build a new one. So the staff had jury-rigged two ropes connecting the boat to the dock, sort of like a tightrope. You skittered down one rope with your feet and held onto a parallel rope above you, tightrope-style. The lines were angled pretty steeply downward, so it helped to have someone holding them taut while you went up or down. I managed it a few times, after much encouragement from my infinitely patient shipmates.

Then, in a terrible twist of fate, I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the second night. We were not supposed to use the heads (sailor-speak for toilets) on the ship while we were in the harbor and, being the obnoxious rule-abider that I am, I figured "well, I'll just go ashore by myself, tightrope be damned." Even with the ropes slack, I managed to get off the boat with no problem. I used the bathroom on land—great. Now I just had to get back on the ship, and mission accomplished. Stupidly, I hadn't anticipated that getting back on would be much harder than getting off. Somehow I had to scurry 10 feet up a slack line that was slanted upward a good 15 degrees, in the middle of the night. I contemplated my situation for a few minutes, then decided to just go for it. I took a tentative first step onto the line, grabbed the top rope with my hands, and promptly swung over the rope until I found myself hanging upside down over the water. This was not good. I was a few inches from the dock, so I managed to right myself and jump onshore. Okay, no big deal, I would just try again. The next two attempts resulted in the same situation, my rope burns getting increasingly worse as I found myself upside down again and again. On the third try, I fell into the harbor. It was like one of those surreal nightmares where you have to accomplish something relatively mundane but each time you try it gets more and more impossible. The fact that I was now treading water in a dirty harbor was, I decided, the last straw. After weeks of failing to keep up with my shipmates on basic tasks, I couldn't handle it anymore. I pulled myself out of the water, sat down on the dock, and began to cry. When I calmed down, I started weighing my options. I could yell and wake someone up to help me. A logical solution, but one I was loathe to pursue given my daily need for extra help. I could keep trying by myself, risking some terrible harbor parasite that would surely end my Seamester voyage and possibly my life in a torrent of vomit and diarrhea.

So what did I do? I called my mother collect. I had never made a collect call before, and the whole thing set an ominous tone of Big Trouble. It was maybe 10:30 in Missoula when I got through to my mom, who was naturally worried to be accepting a collect call from Antigua. As soon as I heard her voice, I went into hysterics. There I was, dripping wet in shorts and a tank top, separated from my temporary boat home by 10 feet of rope, appealing to my mother thousands of miles away. She was very nice about the whole thing, once she determined through my sobs that I hadn't been arrested or critically injured. But she was also pragmatic and said, "Honey, just wake someone up." I was beside myself. "No! That's so humiliating! I'll just sleep on the dock tonight," I said. "There's nothing I can do from here, you know," she responded gently. I knew she was right. Eventually I calmed down, promised her I would wake someone up, hung up the phone feeling extremely silly, and resolved to just sleep on the dock. It was better that way, I told myself. I started envisioning myself as a sort of Seamester saint, enduring a night on the wooden dock and then slipping into a euphoric trance of insomnia and rapture until the angels flew down and carried me onto the boat. All of a sudden, some unknown, unused part of me kicked in, and it was like a Nike commercial started playing in my head, and I Just Did It. My brain detached from my body and I was able to get up the ropes like it was nothing. I almost whooped in triumph when I reached the deck but I bit my tongue. I treated myself to a rinse with the freshwater hose, sneaked back into my bunk, and promptly fell asleep.

Then I got a staph infection, but that wasn't until the next day.