Caught by the Sea
Table of Contents
For Rick Schrock,
who knows the wind
Foreword
The sea was
there, deep cobalt, immense, rising like a great saucer to the blue horizon, where it was impossible to see a defining line between water and sky.
It staggered me, stopped my breath, stopped all of me dead on the deck when I first saw it.
I was seven years old on a troopship heading to the Philippine Islands. We had left San Francisco some ten days earlier but I had not seen the ocean yet. I had chicken pox when we left, and my mother and the captain had smuggled me into the ship in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, and kept me in a small cabin without a porthole, down inside the boat so that I could not infect the rest of the crew or the soldiers on board. I stayed there until I was past the infectious stage.
But I had smelled it, the sea, and heard it against the side of the ship at night over the sound of the engine, the
swish-roar
of it down the steel sides and through the propellers at the stern and I knew it was there.
But I had not seen it until just now, when my mother had come down inside the boat to get me, breathlessly telling me that a plane full of people was going to crash near the ship and that I should come to watch.
I did not know how to get out, but I scrambled after her up ladders and through the hatches and down an alleyway until she opened a heavy metal hatch door and we stepped out on the deck, and I stopped dead.
For a second or two the sun off the water and the striking color were so brilliant that they seemed to burn through my eyes into my brain and I didn’t truly see anything.
Then my eyes adjusted and it was there before me, blue, grandly blue and huge, filling me with a thrilling joy that completely took me over.
The plane crashed and broke in half near the ship, and the sharks that had been following the troopship moved to the women and children in the water, many of whom were bleeding into the water from injuries. The attack was fast, ripping, savage. Some of the people were killed and many others left with terrible wounds that I would see later when they came aboard the ship from the lifeboats. I was horrified and have written of the horror in another book, but it affected me in a way that I did not fully comprehend then, and did not know until later.
Terrible as it was, I found the attack not frightening but somehow natural, a part of what I was seeing for the first time.
I had heard the sailors talking about sharks. I knew that they attacked things, killed and ate, and were an eternal part of the sea. I marveled at their sleek beauty as they left the ship and moved into the crash area; gray and streamlined, they fit the blue of the water and the bright sun.
Screams and the sounds of people dying filled the air. But even so, I found myself looking out across the expanse of water on the other side of the ship, away from the sinking plane and struggling people.
The water moved up to the sky, beckoning. It pulled me in a way that I knew was important, even at the age of seven, a way that was profoundly vital and would never leave me.
We were on the slow ship for several weeks as we took the survivors back to Hawaii and then sailed on to Okinawa and the Philippines. I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching the patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.
1
The First Sail
I was discharged
from the army after nearly four years, most of it spent at Fort Bliss, Texas, in May of 1962. I hated every second of my time in the army and although I was still very young, I did not think I could salvage the time I had just wasted, or that I could save my ruined life. I know how ridiculous that sounds now, but the feeling was real then. I remember sitting in my old truck in El Paso, Texas, thinking that I was done, had no future, and the thought popped in out of nowhere that if I didn’t see water soon I would die.
Now I’m amazed to remember how much I missed the sea, because it hadn’t been a real part of my life between the ages of ten and seventeen, when I enlisted. Maybe I longed for it now because of all the time spent eating sand in the winds of the desert.
I drove to California that very day, straight to the coast, then north, away from people, to a small town named Guadalupe, near Santa Maria. There I bought some cans of beans and bread and Spam and fruit cocktail and a cheap sleeping bag and then walked out through the sand dunes, where I could hear the surf crashing. I walked until I could see the water coming in, rolling in from the vastness, and I sat down and let the sea heal me.
I was there six days and nights. Before dark each night I gathered driftwood for a fire. The salt in the wood makes it slow to burn and it was difficult to light. But I worked at it until there was a good blaze going. I would heat a can of beans and sit there not thinking, really not thinking of anything at all, listening to the waves roll in and licking the salt from the spray off my lips until the heat from the fire made me sleepy. Then I would crawl into my bag near a huge log that must have ridden the Pacific currents down from the British Columbian forests, and I would sleep as if drugged, as if dead.
Today you would see people there. Today there are developments and beach houses and condos and malls and noise and garbage and oil. But then I saw nobody, heard nothing but the gulls and the crashing sea and now and then the bark of a seal as it hunted the kelp beds just offshore.
It would be easy to say it was peaceful and just drop it there. And it
was
peaceful. Years later I would come to run sled dogs in the North woods, and to run the Iditarod race in Alaska, and there would be moments of incredible serenity then, quiet and cold and peaceful, but nothing quite like that time after the army when the sea saved me.
I went away from there a new person, and I also began to understand things about myself, that I must see and know the oceans. I must go to the sea, as the writers Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Ernest K. Gann and Sterling Hayden had done. Like them, I must seek myself there, as the novelist James Jones did as he was writing
Go to the Widow-Maker.
To do that, I would need a boat.
When first I thought about boats, the intensity and obsessiveness that people brought to them seemed overbearing, silly. Most boat owners I met seemed ridiculously anal and boring—as indeed some of them are.
Except for trapping in the North woods with a canoe, I knew absolutely nothing about boats. I had crossed the Pacific that one time at the age of seven in a navy ship, and my knowledge of that was limited to old, dented steel, the hum of huge engines, and a bunch of kind sailors who wanted me to introduce them to my mother, who was young and lovely and almost terminally seasick.
When I was about fourteen, I made one wild attempt at sailing. In a book on woodcraft I found a drawing of a “sailing canoe” and built a sixteen-foot canvas canoe from a kit that I sent for. It came complete—wood, glue, canvas, nails and paint— for just thirty-one dollars. The book made it seem simple to turn my canoe into a sailboat by rigging a dried pine pole for a mast with a small boom and using an old bedsheet for a sail.
I set it up with the canoe tied to a dock on a lake in northern Minnesota. I tied it fore and aft (though I would not have used those nautical terms yet) so that it was stable. There was a slight breeze blowing from the left rear; later I learned that this is called the stern-port quarter. Following the instructions, I lashed a paddle on the side to act as a leeboard to keep the canoe from sliding sideways, and used the other paddle across the stern to steer the canoe.
Then I untied the lashings (cast off the dock lines), pulled in the rope tied to the end of the boom (which tightened the main sheet), and to my complete surprise the canoe shot away from the dock and started across the lake so fast it made a little bow wave. I slammed the steering paddle across the stern and pushed sideways a bit. The canoe turned, caught even more speed and seemed to leap for the far shore, which lay three or four miles away.
I had time for one gleeful thought of triumph as we zipped to a point almost exactly in the middle of the lake. Then the canoe flipped upside down with a vicious sideways roll that came out of nowhere so fast that I was caught beneath it—my head in the dark—and wondering what had happened. I swam out from under the canoe—it remained afloat because it was made of wood—and struggled to get it back upright. It teetered for an instant and then flopped over the other way, upside down again.
Back and forth we went, like a wounded gull, the sail flopping first left and then right until, finally, I gave up and pulled the mast out, turned the canoe back upright, bailed it out and paddled it back to shore, swearing that I would never, absolutely never, sail again.
So when I first realized I must be on the sea, near the sea, in the sea, I thought of power boats and not sailboats.
Then I began to read about the sea and found that the Pacific Ocean was so enormous it dominated the entire planet; all the land mass in the world could fit inside the Pacific and there would still be sea around it. If I wanted to know this ocean—and I did, desperately—then I needed a kind of vessel that could cover great distances. The only power vessels with adequate fuel capacity were large ships and there was no way I could ever afford to own a ship.
I would have to use a vessel that used free power, the wind. I would have to use a sailboat.
At the time, 1965, I was working in Hollywood, learning to write, and the second thing happened that would change my life forever.
I was part of a low-level party circuit of writers who worked on the fringe of films and were not yet successful. We were always trying to meet the Right People, to be at the Right Place at the Right Time. (Yes, I believed then that was the way it was done, until I found that it was the opposite of the truth and taught nothing.) A very rich and famous star invited a dozen or so of us up to Lake Arrowhead to his waterfront home for a weekend party. I don’t know why he invited us—God knows he didn’t know any of us and never spoke to us—but it was exactly the kind of party we thought it was important to attend and we all drove up on Friday night for “a glorious weekend at the lake.”
Lake Arrowhead is a semiritzy area, a very small lake in the mountains near Los Angeles, a reservoir lake. Coming from northern Minnesota, where I lived among some fourteen thousand lakes, visiting this one was not particularly exciting for me.
Early Saturday morning, having concluded that the whole thing was a bust, I went for a walk along the shore, killing time until my host woke up and I could tell him I had some urgent reason to go back to the city. I rounded a bend in the shoreline and came upon a wooden dock that stuck out fifty feet into the lake. Tied to the dock was a small sailboat. It had one sail, a main, and no foresail and was about twelve feet long. The sail was up and flopping gently in the soft morning breeze.
Now, except for the slapstick attempt with the canoe, I had no concept of sailing.
There was an older man standing on the dock by the boat and he saw me looking at it and smiled.
“You like to sail?”
I shrugged and shook my head. “I might. I don’t know. I’ve never really done it. . . .”
“You want to try it?”
I nodded. “I sure would.”
“Hop in and we’ll go out.”
I never found out his name, and in view of the effect he had on my life it is a shame, because I owe him a great deal.
The boat (a little cat scow plywood racer) seemed to be a welter of lines running through pulleys and eyes. He motioned me to sit in the front of the small cockpit. “Crouch down so your head won’t get hit by the boom when we come about.”
“Boom?” I asked. “Come about?”
He pointed to the flopping wooden pole on the bottom edge of the sail. I looked up at it just in time to get hit solidly in the forehead three or four times.
“That’s the boom,” he said. “It’s aptly named.”
He motioned for me to let loose the bowline tied to the cleat, and then he pushed the boat away from the dock and pulled a flat, blade-shaped board down in the middle.
The boat wallowed with the two of us squatting there, the sail flopping back and forth, and I didn’t see how it could be translated into any kind of movement.
Then he pulled in on the main sheet and the sail filled and he slammed the rudder to the side and the boat suddenly became alive.
I have had similar thrills: I took flying lessons in an Aeronca Champ and when I soloed and the plane left the ground and did that greasy little slide that planes do when they first catch the air, it felt something like this boat did; or when I first ran a large team of sled dogs and they took me out of myself.
But this, this beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath, as it had stopped when I first saw the Pacific.
The man was a master sailor and controlled the sail with the main sheet, letting it in and out to compensate for the fluky lake winds, keeping the boat at a ten- or fifteen-degree heel as it cut across the lake. Then he jibed effortlessly, brought the stern across the wind and out the other side, ran half a mile down the length of the lake before he tacked in three quick cuts back up, then reached across and back to the dock, then back and forth across the lake in easy reaches, moving from one puff of wind to the next, working the sheet and the tiller in perfect unison to move from one wind ruffle on the lake to another, all while I marveled at his skill.
We never really spoke. I wanted to know a million things but felt so ignorant I was afraid to ask for fear of sounding too dumb. I didn’t even know enough to ask. But I would think often of him when I was sailing my own boat and how he seemed as easy as a gull, working the sail this way a bit and that way a tiny amount to move with the wind and catch every little bit of energy there was, like a bird flying on a light sea breeze without moving its wings.
Maybe an hour or an hour and a half we sailed. He came back and dropped me at the dock and moved off to another part of the lake and I never saw him again. I walked back to the house and made my excuses and drove back to Hollywood almost in a dream.
I would have to find a boat. Nothing else would matter until I did.