Stay of Execution: Deputy

As you may know I have a sailboat, that I co-own with a female friend of mine who is a few years older than me. She was my sailing instructor when I was a kid, when the six-year difference in our ages actually meant a whole lot. As you may know, we keep this boat on a mooring at the Portland Yacht Club. As you may know, this is my second summer as a boat owner. There's a ton of things I don't know about owning a boat. You may not know, but you might as well know, that my boat is far from fancy. I took ten seconds to think about the things I need to repair right now and counted ten things without even pausing, and got too dejected by the exercise to want to continue it. It's a lovely boat, but it's also a shambles, and a work in progress.

When I bought the boat with Meg it was late fall, and we had to haul the boat out of the water, find a place to store it, and stow the thing for the winter. Then we had to decide what kind of prep work it needed in the spring and do it. We didn't know much about how to do any of that. I mean, I've hauled boats before plenty of times but not as OWNER, you know. I never paid complete and total attention to everything, was never the ultimate responsible party. Neither Meg nor I have a truck, and neither of us were all that confident towing a big trailer and a 30 foot boat. We didn't own a lot of tools (although the collection in my garage is growing). We're both very capable sailors but didn't know technical things or much about bottom paint or rigging or fiberglass repair. I was overwhelmed and paralyzed by the whole project. I never, ever would have dared to buy a boat without a partner, but even with a partner I felt stuck and helpless and frozen by all the stuff we didn't know how to do. And I suppose if I had lots of money I would have just paid other people to do all these things but I was using a 401(k) loan to make the down payment and the very generous financing terms given to me by the seller of the boat to pay my half of a pretty darn modest purchase price, and didn't have any money to throw at taking care of the thing. I concluded that we'd just have to fumble along as best we could on our own, learning about the areas of boat ownership we didn't know by making best guesses and living with a ton of mistakes.

What was the best thing for me about the partnership with Meg is how she got me unstuck. She just asked people to help us. She asked a friend if she could borrow his truck. She asked people who had other boats to show us how to do the fiberglass work. She asked a bunch of people to be there on the day we wanted to haul the boat out of the water. She asked our third crewmember to join us in sanding and painting the boat. She asked the launch drivers at the yacht club to tow us into the dock and give us a hand dropping the mast. She asked Dave if we could borrow his electrician's snake, Jeff if we could borrow his jackstands. With her encouragement, I asked Brent if I could borrow his grinder. Etc, etc, etc. And of course people were happy to help. We had a frustrating and embarrassing series of rigging problems over the course of the first summer, due partly to bad luck and largely to stupidity, so we kept having to take the mast down or send people up it to repair things. And every time we did this we had someone agreeably helping us out.

For me it was a quiet revelation. I never asked anyone except family or the very closest of friends for help with things like this. I'd always been uncomfortable and extremely apologetic borrowing things from neighbors, finding rides to or from the airport, or asking a friend to help me move a sofa. The casual way Meg solved our problems by recruiting advice or spare hands or tools from our circle of sailing buddies astonished me. And what amazed me even more was how much people enjoyed helping us out. They would drop by, get involved, and stay for a long time. They liked giving us advice and showing us how to handle things. They OFFERED help and I began to realize they meant it. We became closer to the whole sailing community. They were rooting for us. Somehow asking people to go out of their way for us made us more part of the group, not less.

Last night I deputized one of the launch drivers. I went to the dollar store and bought a package of shiny silver- and gold-tone badges, and one of the other Hooked On Tonics girls and I had a little solemn ceremony on the dock in which we made this smiley 19 year old kid an official Hooked On Tonics deputy. We'll be deputizing the other launch drivers over the course of the summer. It's meant to be a little funny gesture to thank them for all the help they've given us this summer. They like us, and put up with our silliness, and tow us in on race nights when the wind has died or let us borrow lifejackets or scrub brushes or other things if we discover we're missing them. We told our first Deputy that there were very important responsibilities with the job of deputy, and that we would be requiring even more hard work, perseverance, and involvement in our various pranks. (We are, for example, going to paper our fancy-pants doctor friend's fancy-pants boat with labels peeled from Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles, which will probably require the assistance of some deputies.) He seemed willing to take the job. He was really excited about it, actually. When I went by today he showed me how he had taped the badge to his nametag.

This is a long post and maybe the point is elusive. But I guess when I deputized the launch driver I realized how much I had learned in the past couple of years from being a boat owner. I don't mean to suggest I'm a freeloader now but I am so very much more comfortable asking for help from all quarters, in all aspects of my life. I get it now. People WANT to be deputized. When you let people help you they feel included in your life. They have a stake in you. It's not embarrassing or shameful or burdensome to let people see that you can't do everything alone. The launch drivers like us, not IN SPITE of the favors we ask of them, but because we ask them to do a little more than other people do. (And because we know their names and laugh with them and tease them, and maybe it doesn't hurt that we're three reasonably cute chicks and we're often a little bit tipsy when we get off our boat....) The realization that asking people for help, showing my weak spots and my areas of ineptness and inviting folks to help me attain a goal actually creates stronger ties and better relationships than aspiring to self-sufficiency and trying to hide all the ways I fall short, well, that might be the most important lesson I've learned in a long time.