I'm into the intense part of the purging project. The boxes with old letters and memorabilia. Good heavens. I used to be quite a correspondent. There's a lot to think about, seeing fragments of my old life.
In my senior year of college I had to tell my life story. I just found the box with my notes, as well as the box of responses from those who heard me tell it. Anyway, here's an excerpt I wrote back in 1994 about why I sail. I've written something similar here and here, but writing this bit was when I really figured out and put words to my love of sailing for the first time:
Why do I sail? There are simple answers and complex ones to that question. The simple ones are that my dad is a sailmaker. I've done it all my life. It's what one does. I'm good at it. Now it has become wrapped around my life so much that it occasionally feels like too much. I don't live on campus; I live upstairs at the yacht club. I am a senior on the sailing team and there are many reasons why I couldn't stop sailing. All the people I know sail whenever they can. What else would you do on a free afternoon?
But I also sail because I have never found anything that is better. The thing that is amazing about sailing is that when I am sailing (and when I say 'sailing' I actually mean 'racing' -- we'll get to that in a minute) I feel like I am using myself as much as I can. Mayn people think of sailing as riding around on a boat. It is sometimes that. But that's not what I am talking about.
To sail well, you have to be completely in tune with your environment, and to do that, you have to use every little bit of yourself. You have to be able to see the wind, and to know when it will get to you, and how strong it will be then, and what you need to do with your body when it hits to transmit the force of the wind into forward velocity. You need to be able to read the waves, to know what kind of waves they are and how they will eddy around your boat, when to ooch your body to push the boat over the crest of the wave and down its slope. You need to be able to read the current below the surface. So you are so alert -- you are noticing every ripple on the waves, every flag or tree branch around where you are sailing, what the clouds look like above you and what those might mean.
But you are using your body, too -- not just to balance the boat but to feel it. You're sitting on this boat and that means you're touching it in a number of places. Your feet are touching the boat. With my feet I feel the water flowing below the hull -- if it is very turbulent, that means our weight isn't on the smoothest part of the hull. My calves are touching the hull. My butt is on the hull, and I can feel changes in angle as the boat heels more or less. My right hand is on the tiller. With it I steer, but I also feel the tug on the rudder. If the boat is perfectly balanced, you don't need a rudder. We practice without one; by using our body weight we can adjust the forces of the water flowing past the centerboard. So with my hand and the rudder's tug I can gauge how out of balance those forces are -- I feel it and know what I have to do to change them. With my left hand I feel the tug of the mainsail. I have to fight the wind to keep the main trimmed in. I have to know whether it is trimmed enough, or too much, or whether we are stalled. There is so much to know about the shape of the foils -- the right decision about how to trim the sails depends on how much it is blowing, and how flat the water is, and a number of other things. That complexity is neat, but what I really like is that you need to know not just the theory, but the physical manifestations of these things -- how it feels when the main is stalling, what that certain pull in your arm means. Every sensation has a purpose and a meaning.
When my hair was longer I used to wear it in two braids, like Heidi or Pippi Longstocking or something. I told people it was superstition, but the truth is when you're sailing downwind the little hairs on the back of your neck can detect small variations in breeze better than anyplace else. In summer I wear just a bathing suit because the hairs on the back of my arms are similarly sensitive.
There's more to sailing than the sensations. All of those things I was talking about noticing are strategic. I can't shut them off even when I'm sailing to relax -- today on a casual sail I was counting down the seconds until the wind puffs arrived, and ooching the boat over waves. But in a boat race there are not only all of these forces. There are also other boats. So there are tactics to think about -- how to position your boat to beat the other boats. It's like a big chess game. When two boats converge, one is always right. One always has some advantage. You can beat somebody by being faster or by being smarter -- like maneuvering a car in heavy heavy traffic and gaining ground.
There's always more to know. It is both analytical and instinctive; physical and mental. I haven't found anything else like it for tuning me into the world, and for making me feel engaged and alive.
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