Chasing Leila
by
Terence Loose
My wife Gayl wanted a baby. I wanted a boat.
She wanted swing sets and Saturdays at the
park. I wanted trade winds and beach days in foreign lands.
It would take a long time before I would
realize we were both right.
But that wasn’t the question on my mind as I
hunched in
We were driving
I peeked below, into the main salon that
served as living room, bed room and kitchen on this leaky time capsule from the
seventies. Gayl slept on the floor, wedged in between the port and starboard
settees with cushions to avoid being tossed back and forth by the large swells.
It was officially her watch, but there was no way I was waking her.
Okay,
honey, time to get up and relieve your moronic husband in this quixotic hell
ride so he can get his rest and dream up with more fantastic adventures for the
two of us.
No, at least one of us will survive this way. So I pulled my
wool cap down over my ears, did my best Clint Eastwood squint into the wind,
and worked on those pressing questions.
1
It all started with an adventure – make that misadventure
– of the most domestic kind: the buying of our first house.
It was 1995 and Gayl and I were young, not
even married yet, but devoted to one another with a stronger bond than most
couples. The words were never spoken but
I knew she wanted a family and it was easier for me to stay silent on the issue
than to bring up the reasons I thought it was too early. Besides, if I was pressed, I wouldn’t be able
to give a reason. It was in my gut, in
my bones; there was something left undone, something small but wild screaming
for release from the belt and tie I wore to my job as an editor for a regional
magazine.
But with the tie came the assumption that we
should by a house and settle down. At
that time the country was in a recession and the home market was at its lowest
in years, seemingly a good time to invest.
But
The effect on me was terror, compelling me to
insist that Gayl and I buy a home within the upscale
So Gayl and I began looking at fixer-uppers,
houses which needed new roofs, new kitchens, new windows, a little paint, a lot
of vision. We lowered our standards and
brainstormed on what relative could lend us money.
There were none.
We lowered our standards some more.
Finally, we moved from fixer-uppers to
no-hope-fors. In this collection we
found a half dozen places orbiting our price range. A few had yellow condemned notices on the
front door — at least that saved us the humiliation of entering and seeing the
inside. Another was filled with a decade
worth of newspapers and porn magazines that formed a maze through dark rooms
and hallways. It should have been
condemned. The remainder had views of bus stops and blinking donut shop signs.
Then, on a gray Sunday morning our real
estate agent, Darlene Tombs, showed us what she called a find. By now, Gayl and I had grown wary of
Darlene’s “finds.” Upon opening the door
to the last one we were greeted by two guys with dreadlocks and a two-foot tall
bong. I almost took a hit.
Still, during the twenty-minute ride over to
the new prospect, Gayl and I couldn’t help but grow excited as we asked what by
then we assumed were the usual first-time buyer questions.
“It’s not condemned, right?”
“No more of those, I promise,” said Darlene
as she lit a menthol cigarrette.
“Does it have a roof?”
“Of course.
Don’t talk crazy.” Darlene forced
out a dismissive laugh.
“Did
someone die inside recently?”
Darlene looked nervous, took a long pull on
her menthol and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. “Think location, people, location,” she said.
The little blue cottage did have location —
but not much more. The structure itself
was less than a thousand square feet, occupying a corner lot of over 7,000 square
feet, which was covered with a mixture of crabgrass and dirt. There was a porch, but no back patio. A pea gravel driveway led up to a circa-1930s
one-car carriage garage with a small glorified shed attached to its rear.
We parked on the street in front. It was a beautiful lane that stretched three
blocks to a cliff top that held a view of the ocean. A cool sea breeze funneled down this
corridor, passing green lawns and large homes of every architectural
style. The scent of the ocean
intoxicated me immediately and cast a brighter aspect on the sad little home.
“I could get used to that breeze,” I said to
Gayl as we stepped out of the car.
“I like the trees,” she said, eyeing the
towering eucalyptus trees that stood sentry to the cottage. Their marbled trunks were ten feet around.
We shouldered open the swollen front door and
stepped inside. Apparently, the magic of
the sea breeze could not penetrate sixty-year-old plaster walls. The cottage blue that was so quaint on the
outside became hospital-like inside. It
felt as though I was in the waiting room of a 1930’s sick ward.
Darlene sensed the death of her fat
commission, I think, because she rushed to open a front window. But it was no good; the old frames were stuck
fast. She finally managed to get a small
side window up but when she let it go at the top it crashed down so hard its
window pain shattered and fell out into the dirt of the front yard.
“This is a great bargaining point,” she said
triumphantly. “The place needs all new
windows!”
“It needs more than that,” I said, reeling
with which bargaining point to bring up first:
gaping cracks that plagued the fireplace and the ceiling or the loose
boards in the wood floors.
But before I could decide Gayl spoke up from
the kitchen. “Terry, look at these floor
tiles, they’re the same ones we had in our first apartment together.”
“Kitchens are very important,” Darlene said,
hurrying toward the promise in Gayl’s voice.
“If you like the kitchen you save yourselves boucoup in
remodeling. Kitchens and bathrooms,
those are what cost kids.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on our side?” I
said, annoyed at getting the hard sell from my own agent.
“Terry, baby, of course I’m going to fight
like a pit bull to get you the deal of the mellin’. I’m just pointing out what to emphasize in
your search.”
“Right, well how does the 6,000-square-feet
of dirt we have to landscape fit into your equation?”
“Oh believe me, we’ll absolutely hammer them
on that. But don’t expect a
miracle. After all, planting a garden is
one of the best parts of being a homeowner.
I do a bit of it myself and it’s absolutely invigorating.” She pulled another menthol out of her bag and
stuck it between her lips. It bounced as
she finished. “The fresh air, mother
nature, you know. Tres magnifique.”
“Please
ignore Terry,” Gayl said. “He’s the
great pessimist.”
“We’ll just have to use him as a bargaining
tool,” Darlene said and blew another cloud of smoke out the corner of her
mouth.
We moved through the house quickly — there
was not much to see. I found all the
blemishes, Gayl ferreted out the few rustic niceties. Darlene smoked and tried to stay neutral,
only occasionally chiming in with a quick “Stupendous bargaining point!”
Exiting the back door, we walked across the
patch of dirt where most homes would have a patio and inspected the
garage. The double barn doors creaked
open to reveal a dark, dusty interior filled with firewood, two axes, a broken
bicycle and a manual lawn mower.
The
smell of cat piss stopped us from entering.
There was a crash. It was one of the doors, which had fallen to
the ground and exploded in a cloud of dust.
“I think we could claim this as a very big
bargaining chip,” I said. “Don’t you
Darlene?”
She gave me a nervous laugh and sucked on her
menthol. Even Gayl couldn’t find
something to love here. We walked around
back. The fright of something worse hung
in the air as we approached the dilapidated shed attached to the rear of the garage.
“Apparently someone currently inhabits that,”
Darlene said.
I peered in through a tiny window. The walls were bare clapboard and two-by-four
studs. The floor was covered with a half
dozen mismatched pieces of old carpet — some brown, some blue, all faded and
stained. There was a narrow cot, a sink
that seemed to be supported solely by the pipes leading up to its faucets, a
toilet and a small electric hotplate.
All this was in
2
Two months later, on a cold and gray Saturday
in mid-November, 1995, Gayl and I pulled up to the cottage in a large,
over-stuffed U-Haul van. We parked the truck
in the gravel driveway so we could unload most of our furnishings and clothes
into the small carriage garage — the first thing we wanted to do was paint over
the hospital interior of our new home and we decided it would be easiest while
it was still empty. So, with the
exception of a few necessities such as our bed, refrigerator, television and
microwave, everything was going into the garage for the weekend while we
painted.
I pulled up the rolling door to the van while
Gayl wrestled the garage doors open and we began offloading the contents that
represented our life so far. By this
time we should have been expert movers:
we had changed locations four times in the past five years. Further, being fairly consistent travelers,
the van should have been lighter.
Neither was true.
We had jammed the huge U-Haul with a thousand
items and in no observable order. Cans
of paint were in the same box as kitchen tile cleanser; all our hanging clothes
were draped across the two mountain bikes; and while our bed mattress was
stuffed against the very rear, the box spring portion stood upright at the open
end blocking access to everything else.
Somehow we had managed to get the dolly pinned against the wall with the
refrigerator, which was pinned in by two dressers and the free-weight set.
I stared at the jumble of stuff and an
all-too-familiar thought overcame me:
When wedged into a rusted U-Haul, the contents of my life resembled a
seedy second-hand shop. I half expected
a hunch-backed gray-haired man in a moth-eaten sweater to climb out from the
dark interior of the truck and try to sell me a broken lamp shade.
Instead, a short, pudgy Mexican in a dirty
T-shirt and jeans tapped me on the shoulder.
It was Fernando, the day laborer who occupied the shed. We had met a few times when I came to
supervise inspections. Then and now
Fernando struck me as more Mexican than any other Mexican I had ever met: his skin was the exact color of refried beans
and he had the soft, dark brown eyes which when peering up into mine fully
relayed the struggle of his people.
Seeing him now instantly killed any hope for
a good mood: he represented guilt and
resentment. The guilt I felt when I
signed his eviction notice with the home sale agreement and the resentment I
held for having to do the selling agent’s dirty work.
“Hello Fernando. What brings you back?” I said, trying to hide my fear that he was
not back, but rather still here, meaning I now had the tortuous chore of
kicking him out onto the street in person.
“I speak to you, please. Muy important,” he said. As he spoke he choked a fading baseball cap
with his hands. Hands that were plump
with knuckles scarred from a life of manual labor.
Gayl began sweeping the floor to the garage;
great plumes of dust puffed toward the entrance.
“What’s up?” I said
to Fernando.
“Please, senior Terry. Understand I not want to be here. I know, I am meant to be gone.” He looked down and shuffled. “But it is my brother, senior
Terry. He no have place for me. He no have place no more. I try Mr. Terry, but no one wants to give me
place. They all want much money.”
“Are you saying all your stuff is still in
the . . . the back unit?”
“I sorry, senior Terry.” He looked at his feet.
“But you’ve had over a month to move.”
“I very sorry. Maybe I work for you, senior
Terry.” His head rose and an expectant
smile overcame his small mouth. “I am
garden man, good with the grass. And
plants,” he said.
“Do you see any grass or plants?” I said, and
pointed to the wall-to-wall dirt of my new home.
“I plant for you, senior Terry.” He was as hard to defeat as to evict.
“That’s phase three of this project,” I
said. “Unfortunately, we are currently
in phase one.” A day and a half of
packing a U-Haul was getting the better of my patience. I couldn’t help but think, Wow, a real
Mexican stand-off.
Fernando’s
smile faded to confusion and he wrung his cap hard.
Gayl walked over to us. “But phase one
includes a lot of heavy lifting,” she said to Fernando while staring at
me. I recognized the tone in her voice
because I had lost a fortune in pocket change to it: It was the one she used when giving dollar
bills to beggars. She turned toward
Fernando, who was no taller than she was.
“How are you with heavy inanimate objects, senior Fernando?”
I
was sure he was thoroughly confused; he didn’t know the meaning of the word
object, let alone inanimate.
Heavy,
he probably knew intimately.
Fernando gave the answer his survival
instincts rehearsed daily: “Oh, I am
very good adinant ojects man, seniorita Terry.”
“Then let’s all get on with phase one, shall
we?” Gayl said.
After
Gayl had moved inside the house, I turned toward Fernando and, trying to sound
firm, said: “Listen, you must find a new
place to live by December. This is not negotiable.”
“Si,
yes. Decembre. Not notionable. Thank you senior Terry.”
“Okay. Now help me with this junk,” I said.
We had emptied half the U-Haul — Fernando
working at three times my pace and commenting on the excellent taste we had for
furnishings — when I heard a low growling on the far side of the yard. I put the desk chair I was holding down and
went to investigate. Walking across the
pea gravel and dirt mixture that was, for now, our patio, I listened as the
growling intensified. It was a dog,
hunched in attack mode, I suspected. An
image of a drooling Doberman pincer, crouched and ready to pounce caused me to
slow my pace, each new step falling gently upon the ground. But after only two steps I felt silly: this was my home, my castle. I was king here. And besides, where would a fierce animal hide
on this empty dirt lot? I stopped, stood
up straight, and took a confident step.
Suddenly the air exploded in sound: a vicious growl, the clatter of clawed paws
racing along cement.
“Shit!” My instincts told me to scream. The fact that there was no cement anywhere on
my side of the fence did not register; I only knew something was attacking.
There was a violent crash against the fence,
on the neighbor’s side. It was as if
someone had slammed a wheelbarrow full of cement into the thing. A dog barked wildly now, tearing at the
fence, which swayed under the assault.
“What
the hell . . .” I said.
“Ohhh, perro de Diablo.” Fernando stood by my side, shaking his
head. His face was twisted up as if he
was preparing to spit.
The dog raged at the fence, barking with the
fury of a hurricane. Fernando and I
stared at the shaking boards.
Gayl came out of the house and joined us.
“What did you do?” she shouted over the pandemonium.
“Well, let’s see,” I said. “Right, I walked across my fucking yard!”
“The dog, it is evil seniorita
Terry,” Fernando said. “It has the Diablo inside.”
“Please call me Gayl,” my wife said, and
somehow, over the bone-cracking howls of this devil dog, she actually managed a
soft smile.
“I think it’s time to meet the neighbors,” I
said. “Fernando, come with me.” I had no idea why I wanted a short, plump
illegal alien who spoke broken English as company for my introduction to my new
neighbors — neighbors who lived in a four-thousand-square-foot mansion that
towered over my ramshackle cottage.
But I did.
Fernando, on the other hand, did not want any
part of the party. He looked at me with
the countenance I’m sure graces the furry face of a squirrel a second before
being flattened by a speeding car.
“Please, Senior
Terry, I stay here.” He turned to my
wife and begged. “I am adinant ojects
man.”
“Yes, of course, Fernando. You stay here and finish up. Terry and I will go next door and say hello.”
Fernando hurried off to the garage and the
U-Haul again, happy to lift the heaviest appliances alone.
While our fence withstood a major canine
offensive, Gayl pulled a china plate from a box labeled kitchen and filled it
with an assortment of cookies. A moment
later we stood at the ornately carved wood front door of the castle next
door. I looked at our new home; it
seemed to droop, as if its heavy black roof was crushing the sad blue walls
into the burnt brown soil.
Gayl rang the doorbell. In her face I saw everything that I wanted
to feel, but didn’t. She glowed with
that provincial pride that embraces small things like meeting the
neighbors. Behind her was our small new
home and it made me sad — she deserved more.
I wished I could buy her the manse that stood before us, with it’s
towering and multi-peaked roof, beautiful front yard garden and walk that
smelled like cut grass and jasmine and the professionally fitted-out kitchen,
flawless wood floors and luxurious master bedroom I was sure graced its
interior. But I couldn’t; and since I
had chosen writing as a career, I probably never would be able to. This made me feel worse and made the huge
house even more imposing.
Through the beveled glass inlay of the door I
saw a figure come toward the door. He
stuck his face in the glass to study us; his own face was stretched and
distorted by the thick pane as if it were the reflection in a circus house of
mirrors.
He said nothing.
After a moment of being studied, I called
out. “Hello. We’re Mr. and Mrs. Loose, your new
neighbors.” Gayl held up the plate of
cookies.
The man looked at the treats, then turned and
walked away from the door. He moved in a
slow shuffle, with a slight limp to the right side, as if a string pulled him
that way.
“What kind of freak doesn’t like cookies?” I said.
Defeated — the dog was still barking wildly
in the back yard — we turned to leave.
But as my foot hit the first step off the porch, the large door opened
and I heard the man’s voice. “I’m Herb
Plotter,” it said.
It occurred to me then how the most complete
picture of a person can sometimes be formed from hearing them speak without
seeing their face. The mind is free to
assign attributes to every inflection or tone that leaves the other’s
mouth. True, often the physical
attributes are far from accurate, but I’ve found the more important traits —
generosity, anxiety, perspective — to be more easily diagnosed without the
complex deceptions of the physical.
By simply saying his name, Herb also told me,
I’m tired, a little bitter and don’t
trust people.
Gayl and I turned around.
Herb stood on the edge of the porch, a step
higher than us, and closed the door behind him.
We shook hands and Gayl handed him the plate of cookies.
Herb was in his mid-sixties, I guessed. He had that unfortunate amount of hair on his
head that insists you notice the balding, not the hair. His face and hands were big, hard and
sun-baked, the features of a retired construction worker (months later he would
tell me he had spent 30 years in insurance but his face would never let me
believe it). He stooped as if he was
carrying twice as much gravity as the rest of the world. In spite of the fact that he wore faded blue
jeans and a multicolored plaid shirt — the kind that’s usually found on a
department store’s $9.99 sale table — Herb made me think of the color gray; his
was the atmosphere of an overcast day.
I told Herb we hoped that within the year he
would not have such an eyesore next door, that we planned to completely
renovate our home. I mentioned my fear
of disturbing him with the work.
“I’m afraid power tools are inevitable,” I said.
Then, when I was summoning the courage to
bring up Herb’s dog — which, in an amazing feat of energetic rage, had actually
stepped up its attack on the innocent fence — Herb broached the subject. “I’m sorry about Matthew, he’s got to get to
know you, I guess.”
There was a silent moment — well, almost
silent; Matthew refused to recognize it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “did you say the dog’s
name is Matthew?”
“That’s right,” Herb said. “That was the name we were going to give our
son, but we never had children.”
I wasn’t sure whether to say “How nice,” “I’m
sorry,” or what I really felt: “That’s really weird, Herb.”
Thankfully, Gayl spoke up before I
could. “Maybe we could have him over to
meet us,” she said.
“Sure,” said Herb. “Until then, I’ll bring him inside, so you
two can move in in peace.”
When Gayl and I got back to our yard, the
U-Haul was empty. Fernando was dragging
the refrigerator toward the kitchen door — the wheels of the dolly it rested on
were getting stuck in the dirt. I
grabbed the bottom and pushed to help while Gayl directed traffic and opened
the door. We had to cross close by the
fence on the way and Matthew reached a new height in his crazy assault.
“Don’t worry,” I said to no one in
particular. “Herb’s going to put him
away.”
“El Diablo,” Fernando grunted
as he pulled the refrigerator up the first step to the kitchen door. I wondered whether he was talking about Herb
or Herb’s dog.
Three hours later, as the last orange of the
sun faded out of sight, Gayl, Fernando and I sat in our empty living room, in
beach chairs, watching a television which rested on a box cryptically labeled
“House.” We ate pizza and drank
beer. The volume was cranked up to eight
bars out of ten — Matthew was still giving his all-out blitz on our defenseless
fence.
3
That first winter in our new home was a long
and cold one. We did not have central
heating and the raised foundation, along with the wood floors, drafty windows
and tall attic with no insulation, created a 62-year-old freezer. There was a large pile of eucalyptus wood
logs in a corner of the lot and my common evening workout became chopping wood. I used the worn axe that had come with the
house and set up my camping lantern for light.
We had no fence on the street side of our yard yet, so neighbors, warm
in their half-million dollar homes of complexity, and passing motorists snug in
their BMWs and Mercedes, got a full view.
Sometimes I would be out there in a rain,
other times howling
Matthew — I still had trouble calling a
vicious but fluffy white dog Matthew — was relentless as well, and I began to
regard him as a sort of competition. If
anything, he was worse than ever, as if winter’s onslaught was a challenge to
his determined ferocity; his very canine-ness seemed at stake. He strained and ripped to get through the
fence. He was like a deranged postal
worker; pouring rain, raging wind, nothing turned him away from delivering his
attack. When the wind came in blasts and
pushed the fence in on his snarling, curled up snout, he dug his haunches in
and slammed back with all the might of a St. Bernard three times his size. I hated and cursed him, but I also marveled
at the energy he was able to summon, day in and day out, for months on end.
The harder he fought, the faster I
chopped. By the time I was done, I was
so overheated a fire was the last thing I wanted.
Herb had proven himself to be an extremely
suspicious character in his own right.
As an animal owner he was the worst kind. Gayl and I had asked him through notes and in
person to do something about Matthew’s barking, and each time he had responded
with false sincerity.
First, he promised to tame Matthew by
Thanksgiving.
Then by Christmas.
The New Year was proposed.
I was living out the
To make matters worse, Herb was as elusive as
Matthew was ferocious. He and his wife
Ida, whom we never did meet, ran a handmade doll shop in the old part of
“Many people want dolls of themselves,” Herb
told me. “We use their hair, match skin
tones and eye color exactly, and accommodate any special requests.” I couldn’t help but ask what kinds of
requests he ran into.
“Just last week we made a doll of a lady’s
mother, who had recently died. She
insisted we use pieces of her dead mother’s finger and toe nails for the doll’s
nails,” he said.
I wondered how there could be enough doll
people to keep a business running.
And run it did, because the Plotters would
leave their house early in the morning, usually around
Seven days a week.
Matthew was free to attack the entire day, every day.
By the time the New Year’s resolution came
and went unheeded, I was picturing Herb working away at small cupie dolls of
Gayl and me. In the corner of his small
shop, door closed and with a dozen candles for light, I pictured him sicking a
tiny furry white dog doll on two haggard people dolls.
4
The holidays, it turns out, is a very hard
time for an illegal alien to find a place to live. Fernando was also still a part of the Loose
household. I suspected that if we were
to charge him rent, he may be more motivated, but Gayl wouldn’t hear of
it. And, to be fair, Fernando was the
perfect tenant. He was very quiet — he
didn’t have a TV or radio — left very early every weekday morning to find work
and hardly ever returned before eight at night.
On weekends he helped me with the house and refused payment, pointing to
the shed and saying, “You give me too much already, senior Terry.”
Probably because the neighbors knew what Gayl
and I were up against in trying to restore the rickety old shack — this being
Still, most projects also were not too kind
on the neighbors’ eyes. When I retiled
the bathroom floor for instance, I had to remove our toilet daily, reinstalling
it when the work day was done. Since it
always dripped a bit of water and the front door, leading to the front porch,
was the closest exit point, that’s where it went. For the eight days leading to Christmas Eve,
the neighbors got a view of our toilet, resting next to our “Welcome” mat like
a potted plant.
But I suppose by this time they had watched
me chop enough wood in the rain to expect anything.
It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that
work on the house was going very slowly.
For every minor problem Gayl and I had identified, a dozen major ones lay
in hiding. We both had full-time
careers, so weekends were spent getting to know new tools and wearing our worst
clothes.
The first hint that we were in way over our
heads slammed home with our first project:
the painting of the interior.
It turned out that the paint the old man had
used to coat the plaster walls was the most ornery of oil-based
concoctions. We bought a primer that
claimed to cover anything in one coat.
It was called Kills, and the minute we saw the name we knew it was for
us. But after spending our fist Saturday
morning coating the living room twice with the stuff, the sickbay atmosphere
still surrounded us.
“I still see hospital,” Gayl said and we
pushed our faces close to one wall and squinted.
But the blue only grew stronger; it seeped
through the Kills like an insidious infection.
“Let’s move on,” I said, turning a fan to
high to try to blast the fumes out the open front door.
We pried open a five gallon drum of Bher
premium paint. Gayl had chosen tundra as
a color — Hal, a pock-marked Home Depot employee had called it “a sort of
parchment yellow with life.” I looked
into the can as I stirred.
“This stuff doesn’t stand a chance,” I said.
We threw ourselves at the walls with dripping
paint rollers, fighting the blue with a good American fury and eight hours
later, after laying on three coats of tundra, we felt we had the sanatorium
motif beaten. We toasted our victory
with a bottle of wine and fell exhausted into bed, the strong smell of paint
spinning us into unconsciousness.
The next morning, coffees in hand, we studied
our handiwork. We watched as the blue
oozed through. The more we studied it,
the bluer it became.
“It’s like a cancer,” I said, my nose six
inches from the wall.
We declared all-out war on the hospital
blue. Two more coats of Kills, three
more of tundra. The walls were now caked
with half an inch of paint, but we had done it.
The blue was eradicated; the walls were in remission.
“I declare this a hospital-free zone,” I
said. And I was right; the tundra held.
But as with all great victories ours had come
at a cost. The massive amount of energy
it had taken to claim our living room dissuaded us from attacking the rest of
the house. The fight was just too
tough. Instead, we rationalized — and
perhaps it was not rationalization but realization — that the paint was mere
cosmetics, low on our modest home’s priority list. There were still structural battles to be
waged: we wanted a patio and lawn by
summer, which also meant erecting 200-feet of fence; we still had no shower —
we took baths surrounded by open walls of two-by-four studs; our washing
machine had no plumbing; there were still four windows with top-to-bottom
cracks; pieces of our roof flew off with every strong puff of wind.
Worst of all, our furniture was still piled
in the small carriage garage, which had been strategically placed in the lowest
part of the lot so that with each rain it filled with an inch of mud. (Fernando and I had spent a long day stacking
our belongings on two-by-fours, like stacks of lumber at a construction site.)
We decided living like this was more
depressing than living in a sick ward.
So, a month after we took possession of our home, the barrels of paint
replaced our furniture in the garage and we moved in.
Our dream had become a nightmare. I looked at Gayl, tired and dusty from moving
dirty boxes from the garage. She just
smiled back, her eyes sparkling as if we had just settled into a model home. She was everything I was not, but wanted to
be. I vowed to think more optimistically,
to see the good in the situation, no matter how overshadowing the depressing
and devastating reality might be.
Then Matthew slammed into the fence with a
blast of fury.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran at the fence
myself. I landed a huge blow with my
Nike right at the level I imagined Matthew’s snout to be. A foot from the ground the board snapped and
a piece of blue fence flew into Herb’s yard.
Matthew yelped in pain; I cheered in victory.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” I yelled.
Fernando, who was carrying in our living room
lamp, held it high. “Ole’, Ole’!”
But Matthew had a reply. A loud one.
He slammed back at the fence; I backed up. His snarling snout now dug at the hole.
But I was not to be outdone. I reared back my foot again, encouraged by
the diminutive Mexican.
“No!”
It was Gayl. She stood at the
kitchen door. “You’ll hurt him.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Si, si!” Fernando said.
But I saw that if I took the kick, I was only
kicking another hole in Gayl’s respect for me.
“Then, what?”
I said.
Gayl disappeared for a moment, then came out
with a pile of sliced honey roasted turkey.
“We make friends,” she said.
She peeled off a slice and fed it to the
snarling Matthew.
“Good dog,” she said. “We’re your friends, see.”
Matthew gobbled up the turkey and Gayl gave
him more. It seemed to work. Matthew retreated and we heard him savoring
the turkey.
Then, all at once he adapted. He had to be the first dog in history to
learn to bark full force while eating seven-dollar-a-pound organic turkey. And he did it well; the fight was back on.
Gayl and I looked at each other. Fernando looked at us.
“Fine, kick him,” Gayl said.
But my opportunity was gone, for Matthew was
not coming near the fence again. Like
5
After four more months under siege, including
calling the local animal control more than once, investing in pepper spray (guaranteed
to lay an attacker helpless for two full minutes, it stopped Matthew for ten
seconds), and pouring five-gallon buckets of water on the mutt from the top of
a six-foot ladder, we took the last option open to us: county mediation.
Herb was ordered to meet us in the animal
control office downtown for peace talks.
We brought Fernando as a witness.
Herb showed up with a square of broken fence.
From there it only got worse. The problem with our justice system is that
it relies heavily on honesty and integrity.
Two qualities Herb was obviously totally void of, which meant that the
law was powerless against him.
First, he put forward the idea that the dog
was a life-savor and months earlier had alerted him to the fact that his
elderly mother, living in the granny cottage above his garage, had fallen and
broken her hip. Matthew did this by a
rare instance of barking, he said.
Gayl, Fernando and I sat dumbfounded.
Next, Herb placed the piece of fence on the
table in front of Nancy, the librarian-like mediator.
“All I ask is my neighbor stop provoking my
dog,” he said.
“What!”
I screamed.
“Mr. Loose,” said
“But he’s lying through his goddam teeth!”
Herb took this as a cue to cough and pull out
an assortment of medications.
“I’m sorry,” Herb said in a weak voice. “Could I trouble you for a glass of
water. My heart, you know.”
“Of course,”
“El
Diablo,” whispered Fernando when she was gone.
A very long minute later she came back. Herb downed a few pills and thanked her.
“If there’s anything else, please let me
know,” she said.
When it was my turn to speak, things did not
go right. My mouth turned against me in
a horrible way and I came across like someone who had watched too many horror
movies. I stuttered out half-finished
thoughts while fumbling to pull out the tape recording I had made, one hour of
Matthew at his angriest.
“The dog doesn’t sleep. He’s named goddam Matthew. Matthew!
The fence doesn’t stop him.
Pepper spray has no affect. He’s
pure evil. My gardener calls him Perro Diablo. Just listen to this!”
I pushed the recorder’s play button. A dog’s bark was heard, but it quickly melted
to nothing, like the witch in Wizard of
OZ. I stared at the machine,
betrayed. “Batteries! I need batteries!” I yelled and gave the recorder a smack. It fell to the floor and smashed open.
“Okay, okay,”
Gayl put her arm around my shoulders and
tried to calm me with a gentle neck rub.
I took a few deep breaths.
She turned to me. Her smile faded.
“Mr. Loose.
Legally I can’t enforce anything.
I am here to bring you two to an agreement—“
“What do you mean legally you can’t do
anything?” I started. “You don’t say that right in front of the
defendant; it takes all the meat out of—“
She cut me off with her stop sign hand again.
“Mr. Loose, please. Now, as I said, I can’t bring any legally
binding action against you, but—“
“What?!
Me?! I…” My mouth-to-brain connection turned on me
again. Gayl pressed harder on my neck to
try to minimize the damage.
On the way to the car, I was still in
shock. Gayl took the keys and helped me
into the passenger seat. “Don’t worry,
baby. We’ll get through this.”
Fernando just kept mumbling, “El Diablo.”
6
Summer approached and we concentrated on the
outdoors. First, we had to establish a
perimeter, so I spent a few weekends researching how-to books on building
cinderblock walls, then decided writing a check to a contractor required much
less heavy lifting.
Next, we turned our attention to sod. Surely we could lay that ourselves. Turns out we could – in one excruciatingly
painful 14-hour work day. After Fernando
installed a web-like sprinkler system, we took delivery of four towering
pallets of sod. From dawn until dusk
Gayl, Fernando and I pushed and pulled 252 30-pound paddies of
“I want a condo with a roof deck,” I said
that night while straining to lift a slice of pizza to my lips.
But the next day, as the new sprinkler system
misted the green expanse, making every blade glisten with pride, we felt we had
reached a milestone: Growth, progress, suburbia.
Two weeks later, when I had to rent a trench
digger and tear a hole the length of the backyard because of a faulty gas line,
the feelings were just as poignant: Death, recession, forced labor.
July Fourth came and went and I truly believe
that if we had had a patio on which to place the barbeque, we would have had a
party. But come Labor Day, the very
impressive 15-by-30-foot patio, complete with fire pit, accent lighting and
stone walkway, still existed only on paper.
So after spending yet another four weekends immersed in do-it-yourself
patio books and laying down a highly suspect grid of concrete forms, I called
the contractor back in. In three days,
we had what I had been craving for almost a year: A way to walk from my back
door to my car without sloshing through mud. And all it took was 20 seconds of
filling out a small piece of paper with some bank information on it. This novel idea of promissory notes to escape
back-twisting jobs quickly became the new rage in the Loose household. When those failed, we pulled out the plastic.
Over the next nine months we used this tactic
for a new roof (during the worst El Nińo year in a decade, ensuring a 30%
increase in price); new exterior paint (but not before painting the entire
house ourselves, ensuring a 30% increase in price); and central heating. We
still worked hard on weekends, and equally hard during the week in offices to
placate our cavalry of creditors.
Fernando turned out to indeed be a very good
garden man and created a beautifully wild front yard. Neighbors started to comment on the
improvement and soon Fernando had a half dozen accounts, then a dozen. He only went to the day labor center three
days a week, then two. By the following
summer he had his own truck and he was back at the day labor center three to
four days a week – to pick up laborers for landscaping jobs he had contracted.
For reasons I couldn’t fathom, Fernando did
not move out of our shed. The topic had
long since been taken off the discussion roster and, in truth, I sort of liked
having him around. We shared a common
bond in wanting to tear Matthew’s head off, something I couldn’t express to
Gayl. Fernando also kept our place lush
with healthy plants. Every weekend he
would install new plants, unused specimens from his accounts, he said. Our back yard soon rivaled any in Home &
Garden – except for the barking.
So it was a heavy shock when, one night in
late fall, an INS van pulled up at the curb.
I spotted it from the living room and went to investigate. Two armed INS officers climbed out, flipped
on flashlights and approached the shed.
“Can I help you?” I called, and moved toward them.
A flashlight blasted in my direction, blinding
me.
From behind it, a stern voice demanded to
speak with our renter Fernando Gomez.
“We don’t have any renters.” It was Gayl, standing behind me. And she was right, Fernando never paid us a
dime of rent. But it did little to stop
the INS. They shined their lights
through the small shed’s windows and a frightened Mexican head popped up.
A few minutes later we were all standing at
their van, Fernando wearing handcuffs.
“Since when does the INS come and yank people
from their homes?” I demanded.
“Listen, I don’t like doing it any more than
you,” said the bigger agent with the boyish face, “but when we get a complaint
from a citizen, we can’t just ignore it.”
The agent helped Fernando into the van.
As he did, Fernando looked at me with those
same pleading eyes that had melted me on our first meeting. Only this time I did not see a small Mexican
laborer squatting on my land. I saw an
honest man who had worked hard and established a respected business in a
foreign land against all odds. I saw a
good father who sacrificed every comfort so his daughter and wife could have a
few more in their
Fernando’s last words were whispered and sad
more than angry. He said, “El Diablo.”
Then the big man slammed the van door. The noise was a shock. Then the fact that the noise was a shock
became shocking. My house, for the first
time in forever, was quiet. Matthew had
remained silent through this entire incident.
Strange men, flashlights, arguing – and not a whimper.
Gayl and I turned toward Herb’s house. And there he was. Backlit by his balcony light, he was a dark
silhouette looking down on the proceedings, a stream of silvery smoke snaking
above his head and into the night. He
was watching, quietly, smoking a cigar. El Diablo.
The next day Matthew was back in all his
fury. And maybe it was this incident
with the INS that started my almost subconscious study of Herb’s habits. I don’t know, but as the months went on I
found myself constructing a theory that Herb was not the mild-mannered doll
maker he purported to be.
7
Herb drove a black Ferrari. It always seemed odd, but now the car stood
out. But that alone probably would not
have set any alarms off. It was the
combination of other things, like latticework and lights.
Their home was massive, a huge two story
block that covered every buildable square foot of their lot, so it towered over
our home like a castle next to a hut.
Between the main structure and the granny quarters was a small patio
with a series of deck leading up to a patio.
This whole thing was directly opposite our patio area off the back of
the house. The entire two-story maze was
hidden behind a wall of double lattice – painted hospital blue, by the
way. Then, on top of the six-foot fence
that divided our properties stood another three feet of double lattice. I had always assumed that the lattice was
there to blind Herb and any house guests to the hovel next door. But now I saw that this complex structure was
not to keep sights out – Herb was only there at night and as far as I knew they
had never even spoken to another neighbor, let alone entertain visitors – it
was in place to keep prying eyes out.
With the exception of one three-foot wide opening up on the top balcony,
the sentry box from which Herb observed Fernando’s incarceration, the place was
a massive suburban fortress.
There were other suspicious features as
well: Every window, even the second
floor ones, featured a 100-watt security light, albeit a homey one, that
automatically went on with the sunset; the gates on either end of the property,
which also closed off Matthew’s dog run, were locked from the inside with two
locks (I discovered this after a thwarted plan to dognap Matthew and drive him
to Mexico); lastly, I had never seen Mrs. Plotter outside of the house. Herb had always said “we” when referring to
the doll shop or the house, but I was starting to wonder if there was a Mrs.
Plotter at all.
“Herb is hiding something,” I announced one
day after a particularly messy hour of routing out a pipe.
Gayl just stared at me. It was
“I’m serious, they’ve trained the dog to
freak out at the sound of a leaf dropping and look at that fortress they’ve
barricaded themselves into. Correction,
he, because I don’t think there is a Mrs. Plotter. What if he killed her? He’s evil enough. And whoever heard of the name Plotter anyway? It’s clearly made-up.” From the twisted expression on Gayl’s face
and her crossed arms, I got the impression I wasn’t helping my case.
For the next few weeks I kept my views to
myself as I fought the war against Matthew on one front and my house on the
other. Then, one night as I was painting
some new steps to the shed and Gayl was out with a girlfriend. Suddenly, a woman screamed. It was the first proof that Herb was not
alone in his castle.
It started as an angry tirade, but soon
developed into what sounded like an all-out brawl. I heard heavy objects thud against walls; I
heard breaking glass. All this was so loud
it distracted me from Matthew’s usual barking soundtrack, which was of course
playing below. What I never heard was
Herb’s voice.
But then, just as suddenly as it had all
started, it stopped again. For a few
seconds.
Finally, a blood-curdling scream rang out,
like in a horror movie.
I dropped my paint brush and ran for the
phone.
The police arrived ten minutes after I called
them, three squad cars with six officers – I guess they take it pretty
seriously when someone uses the words “horrible violent murder” during a 911
call.
They pulled up fast and parked crooked,
leaving their lights spinning the neighborhood into a red, white and blue
disco. Neighbors filtered out onto their
porches as the police approached Herb’s front door.
They knocked.
Nothing.
They knocked again, and this time the door
opened. It was Herb. He and the officers spoke for a minute and
the officers went inside.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped.
“Shit!”
I turned to see Gayl; she had come in through
the back.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I was wrong,” I said. “Herb does have a wife, or he did. He killed her tonight. I heard the whole thing. The cops are arresting him right now.”
Ten minutes later the police were at my door.
“Are you Terence Loose?” one of them asked, staring
at his notebook.
“Yes,” I said. “And I’m willing to testify if needed. I just want that maniac to finally see
justice.”
“Right.
Mr. Loose,” he sounded stern, not thankful. “I’m here to inform you that it’s a crime to
make a malicious and false emergency response call. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I didn’t.
I felt Gayl’s hands reach for my shoulders again, like that day at the
county mediation.
“Mr. Plotter informs me that you have some
sort of personal vendetta against him.
That he’s tried everything, including county mediation, to resolve it,
but his efforts have only met with…” He
checked his notepad again. “with abuse
to his personal property and his pet. Is
that true?”
“What?!
Are you kidding? Listen to his
goddam pet!” Then it hit me. Matthew had been silent since the police had
arrived, stuffed away in one of Herb’s garages again.
“Okay, he’s not barking right now, but you
should hear it when he does. He’s
insane, an insane canine! He yaps like
this…” I started barking. “And growls, too…” I growled. “Grrr…grrr…”
Gayl’s hands squeezed my shoulders hard. I could almost feel her worry. “Fine, fine, forget the devil dog for
now. What about those screams? How did he explain them?”
“He didn’t have to,” said the officer. “He introduced us to his wife instead. She’s been ill and can hardly speak. In fact, Mr. Plotter suggested that your
harassing them may be slowing her recovery.”
“And you fell for it?” I yelled, shaking Gayl off my shoulders.
The officer tore a ticket off his pad and
handed it to me. It was a warning that
false 911 call was a crime. “Yes, I
guess we did,” he said.
8
I went back to my slave labor on the
house. There was no denying that progress
was being made on our home, but it came with hidden costs: Gayl and I now
regarded Home Depot trips as opportunities for quality time together. On weekends she’d be in the yard trimming
plants or placing pavers and I’d be inside trying to electrocute myself with
ancient wiring. During the week, I’d go
to my job writing for a local magazine and she’d go to hers as an office
manager for surfwear giant Quiksilver.
At night, we’d just crash, perpetually exhausted by our eight-day weeks.
So it was not surprising that Gayl did not
notice that I was spending more time plotting revenge against the Plotters than
performing my duties as Mr. Home Improvement.
One day I stayed home from work to build some
new steps up to the porch. The porch was
concrete, raised two and a half feet from the ground to match our raised
foundation, and the concrete steps part had been chipped badly. I probably should have just hired a
professional, but something about first destroying the old steps attracted me
to the project. I kissed Gayl goodbye,
pulled out a few of the pickaxes that came with the house and was at it by
eight-thirty.
Matthew kicked into gear at the same time,
raging as I worked up a sweat. I had
believed that sixty-year-old concrete would be brittle and weak and fold easily
under my attack. But this was the Loose
residence, and nothing here ever went quietly.
The steps seemed petrified and every fourth blow or so the pickaxe would
bang to a stop and give my forearms a brutal rattle, as if my bones had been
shattered.
Soon, I was openly cursing the steps with
each blow, and between blows I was swearing at Matthew. About nine-thirty our seventy-one-year-old
neighbor Edna Parks walked by on her morning stroll and saw a 33-year-old man,
unshaven and wild-eyed with a pickaxe raised above his head swearing at an
unseen but very heard dog. She doubled
her pace and did not say hello.
I ran to the fence, then down the sideyard to
the privacy of our backyard. I stood and
watched Matthew raging at the hole I had kicked in the bottom of the
fence. I kicked at his snout but he was
too quick. Each blow just wedged my foot
into the six-inch high hole and allowed Matthew a bite or two at me before I
could pull it out. Then it happened; it
just happened, that’s all I can say. I
brought the pick down hard.
It landed on the soft concrete of our new
patio. It left a bullet-sized hole with
spidering cracks all around. I slammed
down another blow, and another, and another.
Soon I was in a fury that rivaled Matthew’s and had chipped off a
plate-sized chunk of our patio right at the fence. I moved the rubble aside and kept going. Soon I had three-foot-square area cleared.
I went to the garage and got a shovel and
started in on the dirt, digging a trench under the fence. There was about a five-inch gap between
Herb’s patio and the fence, so I figured with the fence’s hole and a deep
enough trench on my side I could get at Matthew.
After twenty minutes, I was there. I dropped the shovel, ran to my Bronco and
rolled down the window to the back. Then
I pulled on my thickest pair of leather work gloves, ran back to the fence and
dropped to the ground.
“You’re mine!” I growled as I pushed my face into the
opening, showing Matthew the bait.
He lunged, but I was not to be outdone on
this day. I grabbed him by the collar
with both hands and started yanking. He
lost a little fur to the fence but I got him onto my territory – kicking and
snapping like a pinned down alligator.
Smothering him with the weight of my body I
wrapped my arms around him in a bear hug and got to my feet. Though Matthew was on the smaller side of
medium, he was an amazing opponent. It
was all I could do to hold on for the thirty feet to my Bronco. At one point he got hold of my neck and drew
blood, but after a short struggle I threw him into the back of my Bronco and
closed the glass on him.
Matthew slammed against the glass with
everything he had, scratching and biting to no avail. I pressed my face close to the window.
“You’re going down, mutt! You’re going down to Taco-town!”
This is about where Gayl walked up, home for
lunch.
“Terry?”
I turned.
“Why is our new patio destroyed?” she asked,
her voice quaking.
“It’s okay,” I said, wiping blood from my
neck. “I got him, honey. I got him!”
“What are you doing?” she started, but I cut
her off.
“
Matthew slammed against the glass and I
turned back to give him a shadow punch.
In the glass, I saw Gayl’s reflection turn and walk away and something
in me felt like it died a little. I saw
my own reflection next and all Matthew’s rioting faded to a distance. I hardly recognized myself; I resembled a
person you might see on a corner shouting about Jesus or socialism. My face was a mixture of dirt, blood and
rage.
9
By five, when Gayl returned from work, I had
Matthew and the dirt back in place.
Finally having something to bark about, Matthew was taking full
advantage. I had also taken a shower, shaved
and put on my best clothes. But the
massive chunk missing from our new patio overwhelmed all my efforts.
“I think you need some professional help,”
Gayl said as I handed her a glass of wine.
“You’re right,” I said. “There is no way I’ll be able to do a proper
patch job on the patio alone. I—“
“Not for the patio, for you.”
I checked the door for men in white
coats. The coast seemed clear. But when I turned back to Gayl, she held out
a brochure.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You’ve always talked about learning to sail,
here’s your chance. I’ve signed us up
for sailing lessons.”
“Sail?
I don’t have time to sail,” I said.
“We’re building a house here.”
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s a house, not a home. A home is something two people share. All we share around here is work. And, frankly, I’m starting to worry about
you.” She glanced toward the patio.
We needed an escape she said, something
totally new we could discover together.
We both loved the ocean, so sailing seemed the perfect fit. Besides, she said, if we were going to start
a family soon, I needed to calm down.
The ocean seemed like a good start.
10
The following Saturday, after a two-hour
classroom lesson on wind direction, sail position and rules of the road, we
stood on the docks of the OCC Sailing Center in Newport Harbor being lectured
on how to rig a Lido 14 sailing dinghy by Sandi, an instructor who had just
completed a circumnavigation aboard her own boat. She was three months pregnant.
We were a class of ten, and we would take five
boats out. “Class rule number one,”
Sandi told us, “was husband and wife never sail in the same boat.”
She said all it did was lead to fights, and
someone being thrown overboard. I asked
her if she could make an exception, since the entire reason for the class was
Gayl and me spending time together.
“There will be no spousal abuse in my class,” Sandi demanded.
So we were assigned partners for the day and
let loose on the unsuspecting dinghies.
I was teamed with a lady in her early forties named Marla Winchell. She had short, neat black hair, a petite
build and an eager smile. Everything she
wore was new and expensive: polarized
sunglasses made specifically for sailing, soft leather sailing gloves and
high-tech racing deck shoes. She wanted
to learn to sail so she could do something on Sunday with her ten-year-old
daughter while her husband took their older son golfing. She hated golf, she said; it had no thrills,
and chasing a small white ball around on a beautiful day was just silly.
“We spend so much money to live by the water,
we should enjoy it,” she said as we strapped on our Day-Glo yellow life vests —
a safety requirement of the sailing center.
I liked her immediately. She reminded me of a slightly younger, if
more daring, version of my own mother.
Before we could begin our careers as seaman,
we had to rig the boats. This included
everything from attaching the rudder and tiller to leading all the running
rigging. It would be Sandi’s first
glimpse at the “cuts of our jibs,” as the salty expression goes.
I piled the various parts of the rig on the
dock by the bow of our
“I’ll get in and drop the centerboard, then
you can hand me the rudder and tiller,” I said to Marla.
“Sounds good.” Her
smile was huge.
I grabbed the mast with my right hand and,
with extreme care, placed my left foot at its base, in the center of the small
boat’s foredeck. When my weight hit the
boat it jerked quickly but my years on a surfboard told me everything was fine
and after a few light steps I was standing comfortably in the stern. I lowered the centerboard and returned to the
bow for the rudder and tiller, which Marla was already holding out.
When I took those aboard, I said, “How about
handing me that mainsail and grabbing the bitter end of the main halyard,” and
I felt more proud of that one sentence than anything I had said for a month.
Marla handed me the sail and after I shackled
on the halyard we worked as a team to hoist it — her hauling, me feeding the
boltrope into the mast track. When it
was raised it cracked and whipped in the wind and threatened to snap my eyes
out if I wasn’t careful. I finally
managed to grab the clew and attach the outhaul. The moment I did the sail filled and swung
the boom right into my forehead.
Luckily, it was a glancing blow, but the
pressure on the sail spun the boat into the dock. Fortunately for the boat’s rail and the
dock’s new wood trim my fingers were between them when the two met, acting like
four tiny fenders.
“Oh, shit,” I screamed as my fingers were
mashed like potatoes on Thanksgiving.
I ripped my now bleeding knuckles out of the
squeeze with a groan that prompted all head’s to turn my way. The boat listed and was being wedged against
the dock; the pressure on the sail was building like steam in a pressure
cooker. Just as I was picturing some
kind of climax — its form ambiguous but final — I heard Sandi’s voice.
“Mainsheet, mainsheet!” she yelled.
In all the excitement I had forgotten to
release the mainsheet and sailed my first few feet — straight into the
dock. I yanked on the mainsheet and the
sail instantly deflated. The little boat
eased off the dock and flattened out.
The sail flapped and protested a little but it was obvious everything
was under control.
“Thank you, Mr. Loose,” Sandi said. “I was hoping someone would demonstrate the
consequences of forgetting lesson three.”
Everyone laughed again.
Including Marla.
A half hour later we had the boats rigged and
everyone was eager to get underway.
First, however we had to get our final flight instructions from
Sandi. She pointed out several orange
buoys that had been placed in a square pattern in the waters fronting the
sailing center. They staked-out an area
the size of three football fields, the wind blowing parallel to its
length. Sandi said we must stay inside
this area; she would be giving instruction via megaphone from her Boston Whaler
skiff.
Which is why, when I looked out at the tight
boundaries that represented our sailing world, the corners of my mouth lost
their spirit.
Sandi saw the defeat in the students,
probably was expecting it. “Don’t
worry,” she said, “you’ll get to sail the big water next time. But first you need to get comfortable with
the boats and the rules of the road. And
sailing a boat in a restricted area is the best way I know to go about it.”
We all clambered into our boats and prepared
for our first sailing test: getting off
the dock. Not wanting to start my
sailing career as a Captain Bligh, I proffered that Marla take the helm and
control the mainsail for the first half of the class.
“Wait till I tell my husband I was the
captain!” she beamed.
I got the impression her husband was the kind
who never let her see their financial statements and I was happy to play a part
in her liberation. I climbed into the
forward part of the
It was a comfortable beam reach out of the
docks and, taking off one at a time like baby ducks in a row, every boat was
soon in the channel. Marla and I were
third off the dock and to avoid ramming the first two boats, we steered
slightly down wind. I eased off the jib
and Marla let out the mainsheet.
It was that simple; we were sailing. Only surfing had felt this free to me. The boat slid across the water as if it were
skating on ice, flat and efficient on a broad reach.
It was intoxicating. It was a promise and an answer all in one.
I liked the way the clean white sails filled
and the hull heeled in deference to the wind.
I liked the gurgle and splash of the water as
it pushed off the bow.
I liked the creak of the mast as a puff hit her.
What I liked most of all, however, was the
freedom that came in the wind. The
horizon was not limited to a tank of fuel, as it was in my dad’s powerboat. The wind whispered forever, and I heard her.
Sailing also demanded more skill and respect
than pushing a throttle forward and turning a wheel. There were a thousand nuances in every
maneuver, but when accomplished in the right order, they added up to pure
grace. You can say a lot of things about
powerboats, but grace is not one of them.
“Isn’t this marvelous, Terry!” Marla
said. Her smile was back, broader than
ever.
I smiled and looked ahead. We were quickly approaching one of the buoys
that marked the boundary of our sailing space.
“We had better come up into the wind a bit,”
I said, pointing to the orange ball.
Marla agreed and we both tensioned our grip
on the sheets, ready for action. Marla
moved the tiller to leeward and pulled in on the mainsheet. I sheeted in the jib and leaned out as the
little boat found the wind and began to heel over. It was a rush and I let out a little hoot of
joy as the weather rail rose under me. The water flew by.
But the moment didn’t last long.
“Oh shit!” Marla screamed and the boat
lurched back flat. The mainsail was
flogging. When I looked up I saw Marla
sitting in the stern, her hands in the air and a frozen gasp on her face.
“What happened?” I asked.
She shook her head and blurted out, “We
almost capsized. Didn’t you feel it?”
“I thought we were doing great,” I said.
Marla said something about the wind picking
up — if anything it was a little lighter — and took hold of the tiller and
mainsheet.
Three “Oh shits” and a hundred feet farther
down the bay I suggested I take a stab at skipperhood.
“If you think you can handle it out here,” Marla said.
We switched positions; Marla crawled along
the center of the tiny craft with bug eyes glued on the water.
“Ready?” I said, knowing she was anything but.
Not counting on any help from the jib, I
sheeted in the mainsheet and turned the
“We’re
going over. Oh God!” She lunged toward the center of the boat,
which took needed balancing weight off the windward rail. By the time I reacted it was too late; the
wind had overcome us and we went over.
When I hit the water it felt like I was
dropped in an ice chest. I looked for
Marla. She was clinging to the
“Marla, let go of the boat.
Get clear,” I called.
But she was in her own world — a sinking
one. The boat was filling with water and
it was only a matter of seconds before it would turtle, so I grabbed Marla’s
life jacket collar and yanked. Between
my pulling and the masts sinking she came free, at which time she chose my neck
as her next victim. She wrapped her arms
around it; under the surface I felt her feet kicking against me as if she were
an islander clambering up a coconut palm.
As I was sputtering “Calm downs” and “You’re
“Get her to the
I struggled to bring Marla to the white hump
that was our overturned sailboat — I now fully understood why it was called
turtling. When she saw the boats big
surface, the highest point above water for hundreds of yards, she let go of me,
scrambled up its side and grabbed the centerboard, which stuck straight up in
the air. Her feet curled up under her
and she looked like a wet hunted rabbit.
“If you get into this boat, Marla, we can go
to shore,” Sandi said, steering the Whaler right up alongside the
It took some coaxing but Marla finally
loosened her grip and edged over to Sandi’s craft. Once she was in, Sandi ran over the
instructions for righting the
I stood on the bottom of the hull and pulled
against the centerboard, hiking out as if I were windsurfing in a fresh
breeze. The boat finally relented and
for the next ten minutes I bailed the thing out. Sandi tied a line from the Whaler’s stern to
the
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just put the boat away.” I needed time to exhale all that had just
happened, even if it meant doing it through chattering teeth. How did this first magical sail go so
miserably wrong? I couldn’t completely
blame it on Marla, but I had to believe that had I been on the water alone
things would have turned out differently — at least dryer.
As I de-rigged the boat and secured the
running rigging I glanced out at the water to check the other four Lidos
skating along in the breeze. They were
sailing; I was standing in soggy shoes watching.
Nothing had changed.
I found my wife’s boat. She was steering toward me on a perfect beam
reach, her sandy blonde hair whipping around in the breeze. Her male crew was hiking out a little and
they were both laughing. She waved with
her free hand and in spite of my own failure, perhaps partly because of it, I
never felt so proud of her.
An hour later, after all the boats were
safely in their cradles and all the sails were properly folded and stored, the
entire class gathered around Sandi for some final words about our first day on
the water. She said she was happy with
us all, but I noticed her eyes did not make it around to me.
“Next week, we’ll go for the big water,” she
said and everyone cheered.
Everyone but Marla.
She sidled up to me. I introduced her to Gayl
and after the usual pleasantries Marla turned to me and wished me better luck
next Saturday.
“Maybe you two will get to sail with each
other,” she said, motioning toward Gayl.
“Aren’t you coming back?” I said.
She shook her head no.
“I’m going shopping,” she said. “For golf clubs.”
A skinny young graphic artist named Adam
offered to help me fold my dinghy sails, since I had dunked my partner. As we wrestled to fold the main, him on one
end, me on the other, I asked him why he was learning to sail.
“So I can go cruising,” he said.
“Cruising?”
“Yeah, man, I’m gonna buy a boat and head for
Adam told me he had formulated the idea after
reading a newspaper article on the increasing numbers of baby boomers checking
out and sailing for all parts of the world.
The piece claimed that fleet was now 10,000 strong. Adam wanted to be number 10,001.
He planned to take every class
It sounded nuts.
It sounded dangerous.
It sounded like a great idea.
11
It was not easy convincing Gayl that we
should scratch our plans for a land-based home and look towards the sea. After all, we were just starting to see the
light at the end of the Home Depot tunnel and the sailing lessons were meant to
rebuild our relationship and provide escape.
So turning it into yet another hard-earned obsession didn’t sit well.
But I was relentless with dreamy tales of the
two of us discovering exotic ports together, drifting free on the open ocean
together, finding a new, more exciting life where we would spend 24 hours a day
together.
“And there are no dogs on the ocean,” I said
one night as I cleaned the dinner dishes, Matthew storming the fence ten feet
away.
My manic eyes probably didn’t help the sales
pitch. But Matthew’s barking did. Gayl said she’d think about it.
I wiped my hands and put my arms around
her. “God I love you,” I said. She probably thought it was part of my pitch,
but it wasn’t. I was seeing the woman
who seven years earlier had quit her job, spent four days moving our
possessions into a ten-by-ten storage unit, and jumped on a plane to
We spent the next two years working three
jobs: our day jobs; night and weekend
classes at the
Many of our friends called us nuts, but that
was understandable, I thought we were nuts too.
Besides, their accusations were made more out of jealousy than concern. The women saw their true materialistic sides
and the men saw that I had the wife they could only dream of: a beautiful woman who would literally follow
me to the ends of the earth.
Other friends were encouraging and
complimentary. They wished they could be
so courageous, they said. They wished
they could do the same thing, then they would make a dozen excuses that, with a
little courage, could be more of an advantage than anchor. When they complained of mortgage payments, I
saw equity that could be cashed in.
Furniture, appliances and garden tools were garage sale cash. Kids were merely another crew member to help
take that dog watch. And jobs, well they
were the root of the problem – on your deathbed, I flatly guarantee that you
will not say, “My one regret is that I didn’t work more.”
So while we were in seminars on how to take a
star sight from a pitching deck at sea or repair an outboard on a remote island
with no Yamaha dealer, they spent their time in shopping malls and
restaurants. They collected catalogs and
when that was no fun anymore, took their credit cards to the internet. They wore J. Crew and L.L. Bean as they
reclined on soft couches and watched Sony big screens. They drove shiny cars and talked on sleek
cell phones. They were busy buying the
American dream on lay-away and we made them nervous, because our dream had
nature at its core, not consumerism.
I did envy them one thing, however. Their dream was right down the street, easily
purchased on time. Ours was still far,
far away, obtainable only with time, life’s most precious commodity. It was ambiguous and unsure. It was risky and different. So keeping the dream alive was a struggle,
especially through the sawdust of working on the house, and over Matthew’s
continual belligerent attacks. But
somehow we did and after spending almost a year in a sailing club – for $80 a
month we got to make all our expensive mistakes on someone else’s boat – we
began looking for boats.
We consumed every book on the topic, from the
gypsy-like rantings of the Pardeys preaching simplicity to the point of a
bucket for a toilet to the eye-glazing technical thoroughness of Rousmaniere’s Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of
Offshore Yachts – we erred on the side of simplicity. After all, isn’t that what this whole thing
was about? Less stuff to buy, maintain,
and inevitably, to fix? We drew the line
at the bucket toilet however.
Anyone who’s ever shopped for used cruising
boats will tell you that they make real estate ads read like the most humble of
understatements. There must be a
rose-tinted dementia that sets in when a sailor decides to sell his sailboat,
because nothing short of a total loss of all senses can explain the
exaggeration, the elaborate fictions, the bald-faced lying found in the back of
cruising magazines. We had learned from
our house that for every easily seen problem, at least a dozen more lurked in
cover of plaster and paint. We assumed
the same for boats, only with wood and varnish.
Boy, was our ratio off.
The very first boat we looked at sounded
great in the ad: One owner, many
upgrades, GPS, radar, wind generator, new rigging and sails, no blisters found
at haul-out. I called the number and
made an appointment. The next day we
walked down the docks, got to the slip number we had written down and looked at
each other.
“I must have gotten the slip number wrong,” I
said.
The listing wreck in front of us, covered in
bird droppings and smelling of guano, could not be the boat described in the
ad. Then all hope was dashed as Bill,
the owner walked up behind us.
“A spray with the hose and she’s ready to go,
eh?” he said, obviously in some sort of alternate reality.
“The ad said new rigging and sails,” I said.
“That’s right,” Bill said with his atomic
smile. “Brand spanking new in ‘88.”
He had me there.
We climbed aboard and the appropriately named
Last Chance gave a mighty groan. When Bill opened the hatch to the main cabin,
the pungent odor of a neglected holding tank and un-pumped bilge blew us back a
little. Nostalgia for the guano smell
set in. Reluctantly, we descended into
this dark hold.
Bill flipped the cabin lights on and I
instantly yearned for them to go out.
Darkness was much kinder to my cruising dream. The GPS looked as old and worthless as the
rusting stove and the radar resembled something off the Sea Hunt set.
“Yeah, she’s a beauty,” Bill said, eyeing the
stained salon settee with affection.
“Hate to give her up.”
“Why are you?” I asked, hoping he’d change
his mind immediately and we could escape.
“The upkeep is killing me,” he said without
the slightest hint of irony.
On the drive home, Gayl looked pale and
sweaty. I wasn’t sure if it was a
reaction to the assault on her olfactory senses or if it was the fear of what
she had gotten herself into when she said yes to the cruising idea. My own queasiness was a reaction to the
latter, I’m sure.
She was the first to speak, and I braced
myself; how could I argue for our dream after seeing that nightmare? But instead she put a hand on my shoulder and
said, “Don’t worry, honey. Remember the
first houses we looked at? And look how
that turned out.”
“Don’t scare me,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
I did, and I loved her for it. We had just visited a floating Honduran
prison and she was still optimistic. She
was a rock. A beautiful, unsinkable one.
It turned out that the Last Chance was the bottom of the barrel. And this time, we had the luxury of upping
our price range, which we did immediately, checking out anything in the $40,000
to $60,000 range. In time, we also
learned how to decode ads. We noticed
they actually did range, from obviously deceptive to brutally honest.
Sleeps
eight meant only if five of
them enjoyed sleeping in the fetal position out in the rain. Ready
to go cruising tomorrow meant only if your first landfall was a
full-service shipyard. Then there were
the misguided souls who seemed reluctant to join the deceptions; they killed
themselves by way of parenthetical admissions:
Loaded with equipment, they’d
start hopefully, then list: ham radio (needs wiring); wind generator
(not mounted); professional sextant (needs all mirrors); radar, autopilot,
electric windlass (none working). It
seemed a form of public confessional and I felt bad that these lonely good men
would get rewarded only with bargain hunters hammering them with their own
printed admissions to bring down what was probably an already reduced
price. But I was in no position to buy
one of these fixer-uppers; I had proved that on terra firma.
My favorite, though, was when the advertiser
listed additional equipment for sale
outside the purchase of the yacht. This was inevitably complete junk,
telling me that the boatowner had overpriced his “yacht” by thirty percent and
wasn’t about to negotiate. They usually
read something like this: sold
separately: numerous hats; dock plant; complete set Hardy Boys Mysteries;
coffee maker; eight-inch black and white TV (not working).
We were not always right in our assessments,
however, and if there was a silver lining to the dark ominous squall of boat
hunting, it was that it was its own form of adventure. Most of the time, we had no idea what to
expect with each outing. So on a crisp
October day, when we drove a few hours north to
And we did just that, until late in the day,
when we had one boat to check off the list.
It was a 1976 Westsail 32, which thanks to its fat beam and heavy
displacement was commonly referred to as the Wetsnail, followed by a snide
snicker. It couldn’t sail upwind; the
cockpit was horribly wet and uncomfortable; and worst, it was a ‘70s “kit
boat,” so who knew how each was built?
But those criticisms faded away as Gayl and I
went below on
Gayl and I spent over 30 minutes aboard
On the ride home we rationalized away the
Westsail critics’ accusations:
Upwind? Who’s going upwind, we
said, we’re following the famous Milk Run, running with the trades through the
South Pacific right to
Three weeks later we took the train north
and, as
The week over, we sailed her to
12
If our life seemed busy and frantic pre-Tamarac, it was nothing compared to
post-Tamarac. Though she was “ready to go,”
At home, we were still struggling to put our
house together, now with the idea of selling it to pay off
But this is where the maniacs and there devil
dog next door actually saved us.
Matthew’s tirades at the fence and the suspicious movements of Herb and
his ghost-like wife only served as motivation to sail to the opposite
hemisphere, no matter what the cost.
If Herb was the tragedy’s heavy, the people
of the doc were its comic relief. Dock
people are a special breed. I say dock
people instead of boat owners because in actuality most characters you meet
while slaving away on your boat don’t own one themselves. They are a purer form of boatowner, in spirit
only, where there is but one way to do each project – and it’s never the way
you are proceeding – and one ultimate boat – which they owned once and have
vague, suspect reasons for why they had to sell her. They visit the docks out of pure altruism,
descending from their ultimate boater’s place only to offer their expertise, in
detail, on every nuance of whatever they happen upon you doing. If they owned boats they would have zero time
for this.
At first, I greeted these supposed
benefactors with a welcome handshake and a cold beer. But after handing out a lot of beer and
finishing few projects, I became the dock grump. But this still didn’t stop the truly die
hard.
Oscar was such a person. One sunny afternoon, as I wrestled with the
mystifying innards of a halyard winch, a hard, accusing voice said, “So, what
are you using for an alternator?”
I looked up, puzzled since even I knew that
the alternator was far below, in the bowels of the engine room, and had
absolutely nothing to do with hoisting sails.
The man staring back was long-haired and bare-chested, wearing greasy
jeans and smoking a cigarette. He held
an open phonebook in one hand.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Power?
What the hell you using for power?”
He stepped closer. I felt hunted.
“Uh, a Balmar 120,” I said.
“Total shit.” he informed me.
“It came with the boat. Maybe I’ll replace it someday,” I said,
hoping to appease him.
He popped the cig into his mouth, stepped
forward and tapped the phonebook with his index finger. “I’d do it today. This company right here is selling Proline
230s for five hundred dollars. Five
hundred dollars!”
“Right.
Wouldn’t I have to double belt that, though?”
“Shit!
You’d have triple belt that son-of-a-bitch! Then you could charge a thousand amps of
batteries in no time. Shit.” He seemed proud of that fact, in a psychotic
sort of way. He sucked on his cigarette.
“Yeah, well, we’re not planning to use much
energy on this old boat. Keeping it
simple, you know?”
“Simple!
You think it’s simple out there?
Friend, you got another thing comin’.”
He yanked the cigarette from his lips and threw it into the bay at
“Let me tell you something. Simple is turning a key and motoring through
a raging tempest. Simple is heating your
beans in a microwave. That’s what simple
is. Shit.” He drifted off for a moment and I thought I
was free. But no. “Where you headed?” he demanded.
I told him the Marquesas, in the South
Pacific. It was a three-thousand mile
trip, so there was no way to motor there anyway. “Besides, we are a sailboat,” I said in my
most cheerful tone. It didn’t work.
“I’m headin’ to the Marquesas, too,” said
Oscar, and I immediately considered changing our plans. “And I’m motoring there.”
“You have a powerboat then?”
“Hell no, I ain’t no stink-potter!” He seemed offended. I held my wrench up, ready for an attack. But Oscar calmed himself with a slick back of
his hair and quick facial tick. “I’m
currently in the market for a Downeast 36.
Huge foredecks on them. Bolt a
custom-made two-hundred gallon fuel tank up there, strap a few fifty gallon
barrels to the rails, and, hell, I’ll be able to motor to goddam
An hour later, after stomping around
After that I wore a Walkman every day. For my amateur radio license I had to learn
Morse code, so as I worked on winches and sanded wood, I listened to beeps and
dashes all day long, repeating the letters – D…N…T…L…K. Wanderers by thought I must be mentally
challenged. I didn’t care; I had my
privacy.
13
Over three years after we had bought our sad
little home, we were nearing the end of its renovation. We could have built six new homes from the
dirt up at that rate. No matter, the
feeling of closure – and escape – was growing strong by the spring of 1999 and
we prepared our house for the market.
I sent a note to Herb, telling him that if
Matthew screwed up the sale of our house in any way, I would sue him for
damages. I pointed out that he should
heed this warning seriously, as I was a desperate man, and desperate men do
desperate things (like selling everything and sailing to the other side of the
world, I wanted to point out, but refused to give him the satisfaction of
thinking he had won). For the first time
in years, the other side of the fence went silent. Far from calming, however, all it proved to
me was Herb’s maliciousness: he had the
power to stop Matthew all along and simply refused. But I was past that now; soon Gayl and I
would be snuggled up in
Our house went on the market on a Thursday,
complete with a disclosure about “noise issues related to a neighbor’s
dog.” We felt it only fair to mention
that; besides, the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with a lawsuit while
sailing in
The two that stood out were a builder who
wanted to tear the house down and build a 6,000-square-foot spec home. His was the second highest bid. Outbidding him by $10,000 was a husband and
wife with a two-year-old toddler. Gayl
voted we go with the family, not because of the money, but because “They’re so
nice, and the little girl is so cute.”
“Exactly!”
I screamed, unable to control myself.
“You really want her to be subjected to Matthew and those people? She’ll grow up more neurotic than Woody
Allen. I don’t want that on my
conscious. No way!”
I realized I was stomping around the room
like one of the paranoid dock people I loathed and feared. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. All I could do was ride my emotions like a
man trying to steer a runaway Mac truck down an icy slope.
“But the builder!” I said, fire in my eyes. “Yes, the builder. Just think of it, honey. Six months, maybe eight, of dust and
jackhammers and hammering and Mexican radios.
Herb and Matthew won’t know what hit them. And Matthew will piss off some day worker
just trying to put food on his family’s table and he’ll kill the little
mutt. Slam him with his hammer or shoot
him with a nail gun. God, if I could
only be here when that happens…”
Somehow Gayl’s face shone through my rage and
stopped me. It was the face not of
excitement for a new life, but one of sadness and doubt. Doubts about the future, and, I suspected,
about me. She didn’t want our house to
be home to another family’s dreams, she wanted it to be home to ours. She wanted the toddler to be our little hope
for the future.
Suddenly, I wondered why I didn’t want the
same thing; just when and how her and my futures parted ways. Gayl was my world, why didn’t I want to do
the thing that would most make her happy?
That question was the most frightening question of all, because search
as I might, I did not have an answer.
As usual, Gayl gave into my wishes and we
sold the house to the builder. During
escrow we had a huge yard sale, selling almost anything that wasn’t useful on a
32-foot sailboat. Which was
everything. The few remaining items we
stored in one closet of my mother’s house.
Finally, the day came to move onto
At the end of a long day of piling a tanker’s
worth of stuff into a 32-footer’s worth of cabin, we sat on the one remaining
square foot of settee and looked around at our new home. It was small, cold, loaded with odds and ends
that had no place, and unfinished. It
was very much like the sad little cottage we had moved into over three years
ago. Only it leaked more.
Gayl and I looked at each other; I waited for
her to stand up, declare divorce and leave the battlefield. Instead, a small smile grew across her
lips. It was warm and infectious and I
felt one come on too. The sheer
absurdity of what we had done, coupled with a sort of delusional pride,
overwhelmed us and we broke out in laughter.
We hugged each other tight, forcing out the cold and uncertainty, and I
knew, no matter what came – storm, doubt, bankruptcy – it could be weathered if
we faced it together.
But we could not sleep here tonight.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re going out to eat then getting a nice
cozy hotel room.”
14
The next day we returned and tried to sort
things out. It was a Sunday and we
worked all day in the confined space as the wind and rain stormed the
cabintop. It pounded at the hatches and
found its way through unseen openings to soak our paperbacks and pillows. Sunday night came and it seemed we had
accomplished nothing more than shifting things about. Our life was a Rubik’s Cube game, and we were
failing to solve it.
We booked the hotel for the week.
But all we did was crash there. Most of our time, outside of the office, was
spent working the stowage problem.
Thankfully, the storm passed by Tuesday and we were able to lay things
out to dry. And by the following
Saturday, we had “solved” the space dilemma by donating to charity half our
clothes and shoes, over a hundred books, pots, pans, towels, framed photos, and
two dozen other household items. We were
learning first-hand the painful, but golden rule of cruising: less is more.
In our case more room.
Unfortunately, in storing all this stuff, we
discovered that
The only saving grace was there was no
Matthew chomping at the dock lines. Just
the sound of water caressing the hull.
And wasn’t working on a boat more romantic, more satisfying than working
on a home? We weren’t laboring for mere
creature comfort or something as intangible and illusory as equity; you were
preparing for a grand journey, perfecting something that would carry you to far
off lands. You were working for freedom.
15
“How much are these?” I asked in disbelief.
The West Marine clerk just stared at me, as
if this were the perfectly normal reaction, which was probably true.
“A dollar ninety-eight each,” he said.
“It’s a bolt.
A bolt.” I held one up as proof.
“All of our hardware prices are clearly
listed,” he said with the emotion of an egg.
He had been here before.
“I thought that was for the whole bucket,” I
said, and handed over the cash.
This was the infamous hidden cost of
boats. The genesis of a boat’s second
definition: Hole in the water into which money is thrown. A lot of money.
Books had warned me about this. Prepare
to spend 30% of the price of the boat on outfitting her for cruising, they
instructed. I took it as wild
exaggeration. I was a writer and I knew
about that. But I soon discovered it was
a wild underestimate. When matched up
against the West Marine catalog, the list of projects and equipment I had
outlined would cost as much as
But these are typical cruiser dilemmas, I
would discover. Everything made for a boat
is obscenely expensive. Whether this is
justified or not, the manufacturers have the ultimate trump to any excuse. When
you’re alone on that ocean and there’s no spare parts store or repairman to
call, do you want sub-par equipment made with cheap parts? I didn’t think so.
Every cruiser falls for it. And probably rightly so. The sea is a much harsher environment than it
looks. To combat corrosion all hardware
must be stainless steel or bronze. All
mechanical equipment must be able to work when being thrashed about like a
ninety pound weakling in a mosh pit. And
all electrical wiring and equipment must be water tight.
Think bulletproof, then make it stronger.
My solution to the money problem was
easy: spend more. We had made plenty from the sale of our house
and Gayl had made the mistake of giving me full access to it. The answer to the second was more
complicated. It meant prioritizing, but
whenever I tried everything fell into the top category: Safety. Repaint the deck? They would have non-skid in the new
paint. Safety. Replace the batteries and wiring? Everything from the radio to the radar ran
off them. Safety. And so it went, until the only thing I had on
my If I Have Time List was install new stereo.
If work on the house went slowly, getting
things done on
16
I quit my job in late August. And I really went to work. The list to get through if we were going to
cross 2,800 miles of open ocean the following March now ran two pages long but
we had finished every course OCC Sailing Center had to offer, right down to
Cooking for Cruisers and How to Varnish Like a Pro. Now all we needed was a seaworthy boat. I still had my doubts if Gayl and I would
have the nerve to go, but I had to give us the choice.
So, each morning when Gayl walked up to the
boater’s showers – we had no shower on Tamarac
and planned to use a sun shower, which is a black bag you fill with water and
let heat in the sun, on our trip – I would dig out the tools and parts I would
need for the day. As soon as she left I
would dig in. It became a race of sorts;
my mission was to finish my project in time to put everything back together by
the time Gayl returned home.
I never won that race. After a hard day of office work, Gayl would
come home and trip over screwdrivers and wire and odd boat parts. Sometimes she’d have to wait in the cockpit
while I rearranged the destruction enough to replace the gangway ladder, behind
which were half the tools and the engine.
She never complained; usually, she helped.
Weekends we got more done, since there were
two of us working the wrenches, but crossed-off calendar days far outpaced
check marks on The List. It was obvious
certain things were just not going to get finished. If we didn’t leave by mid-April, we would
have to wait another entire year.
Because our route would cross the equator, and therefore travel through
two tropical zones, we had a relatively short weather window in which to launch. We had to take off before the start of the
north-eastern Pacific hurricane season, May, and after the end of the
south-eastern Pacific season, March.
The main problem was that Gayl and I were
trying to accomplish in one year what most hopeful cruisers take five or more
years to do. Gayl had made it very clear
that she wanted to start a family before we were over 35. For both birth defect risk reasons and, more
important, we wanted to be able active, youngish parents. I wanted that, too, at least, I didn’t want
to lose Gayl.
In truth, I felt a little too selfish to be a
father. Kids were a lot of work,
possibly more than the house or the boat.
That scared the hell out of me.
Didn’t they need a lot of feeding and holding? There was all that small furniture to buy,
not to mention the army of loud toys, each one designed to drive parents
absolutely loony. Changing diapers
sounded about as fun as getting sprayed by a skunk. And kids didn’t seem to give a lot back for
at least the first five years. No, our
friends had children, and that was as close as I wanted to come at the moment.
I argued we had to go cruising first, or we’d
never do it. It was a solid argument, of
course, but it was more a form of stalling off any decision. I figured cruising gave me another two years
to build arguments for continuing on, without new crewmembers, so I pulled out
every excuse to sail now, baby-up later:
We didn’t have a proper home; we didn’t have job stability; we didn’t
have enough money; I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t fulfill this dream,
I’d always be wondering “What if…?”
Finally, we came to a compromise. We would go cruising for two years, until we
were 36, then start a family. So the
coming March-April weather window represented the last shot at my dream, a more
ominous deadline than I ever had as a writer.
And as usual, I had no idea how I was going to meet it.
17
If there is a hell for sailors, it is surely
in the form of a boatyard. There is
nothing sadder than seeing a sailboat hauled out of the water and propped up on
braces, her imperfect underbelly displayed for all to see. It’s as if all grace and beauty drains away
as she is pulled from her ocean, and she is discarded to the dirt and noise of
the wasteland that is a boatyard.
Our home was now in such a place. We lived aboard
But if I felt like a killer, my intent was to
be a life-giver. I was working to bring
The odds were a bit against us.