Sunday, April 18, 2010

Elsewhere


Take me somewhere else, big guy


Deb and I had received a call from friends we hadn’t seen in a while. They live on what I like to refer to as “the mainland.” Technically Deb and I are island dwellers since we live on Long Island, a hyper-populated slab of glacial debris more congested than the Tokyo subway system. It’s separated from continental America by the East River, which isn’t a river but a tidal estuary, which is an interesting bit of trivia that is perhaps neither here nor there. The point is it’s enough water to legitimize an emotional detachment from a homeland to which I feel little fealty. See, I happen to value my family’s health over the federally funded destruction of fruit bat habitat in Ubetyurassistan. Steep on that, Teabaggers.

To join our friends for dinner in their neck of the woods, we’d have to take a circuitous drive away from our destination in order to exit the peninsula we live on, then circle back and creep over the heavily taxed, ergo socialist, thoroughfare known as the Throgs Neck Bridge. From thence we’d batter our way through a portion of The Bronx. Let me tell you, any place called “The” anything is an awful place to have to pass through. The Hamptons? I’d rather gargle with Sno Bol.

A transit of The Bronx is a caustic slog through commuter hell. Then it dawned on us there was another option, involving a considerably more direct route, less fossil fuel expenditure, fewer traffic altercations, and a more enticing view. So we sailed to New Rochelle, which burned roughly eight times as much off our life clocks, and cost eighty times more in parking fees than what a round trip auto excursion would’ve.

Here’s the way I look at it. Life is a series of trade-offs that ends with the Big Trade-In: that of one’s questionably led life for eternal peace and quiet. I consider this a fair exchange, and boating helped teach me this lesson.

What the harbor at New Rochelle taught us, once again, is that Deb and I live in a really nice harbor. No anchorage is perfect, but Manhasset Bay, let me tell you, well just come visit and see. And that’s the point. Sometimes you just feel the urge to get out of Dodge, pretty as the local saloon gals might be. You know the feeling. Richard Gere knows the feeling. Brad Pitt knows the feeling. I think you know wherefrom I gather my inspiration, but I’m sure there are feminine equivalents. Kate left Jon to go dancing, right? Even after he blessed her with all those glorious offspring.

So Deb and I pulled into a sort of new harbor for us, though her dad had docked and dined us there years ago when teaching us how to sail shamefully irresponsibly.

As I’ve often said, sailing into a new harbor is exhilarating and dangerous because you’re on fresh turf, and because of that one obstruction just below the surface near Green Can #9, or some other such submerged solid thingy someplace. All the locals are fine with it because they pass it every day, but for newcomers it’s a little scary, which again is kind of the point. Shake things up a bit. Get nervous. Consult the chart overly frequently.

Getting past the mystery rock is a lot like rolling on a rubber for the first time. Then bang zoom, you’re snug inside the harbor, and you’re calling the dock master at the local marina on your cell phone because nobody uses VHF anymore, which seems a shame even though guys who bemoan the demise of Loran are, let’s face it, pathetic dweebs. You’re calling this guy because he undercuts the municipal marina’s rate by a buck a foot, and you have a hankerin’ to find out how he pulls it off.

Then you find out how, because he and his brother (both escaped bit actors from the movie “Deliverance”) snub you into a slip with the reek of fuel pumps to starboard and the panorama of a three story shrink-wrapped behemoth named “Andiamo” (the largest of three vessels so named in the harbor) to port. To finish out the scene, the view out the stern is a worm-laced field of pre-war pilings held in place by dinosaur ooze. There’s nothing to see forward because we’re on a sailboat (mast, boom, dodger, raised hatch, and if you’re lucky the requisite dockside “don’t do” sign (No Displays of Mirth, unless you bring us something from Carvel).

Welcome to Elsewhere. Which is just what the doctor ordered: something N.E.W., as our pal Mary liked to say. So Deb and I sat for a while in the cockpit because we had time to kill, and we slaughtered it by laughing at human folly. The kind that makes people pack their Studebakers to the gills with suitcases and kids who until recently were content fooling around in the back yard, so that everyone can experience The Badlands as a family unit. Laughing is good for the soul, which if you’re wondering, doesn’t actually exist. But Carvel does, so it all evens out in the end.

Our hosts were sour-faced dock rats (we have those guys in our harbor too, so there) put off by our ill-timed visit. They had better things to do than make easy money on transient schmucks willing to snort petrochemical vapors in the floating equivalent of a Motel 6. They had real business to tend to, which was the preparation of very large vessels for a season of slip decay while the boat owners billed land-based clients for work done in their sleep.

Cuz that’s how you pay for a bottom job. It’s all ebb and flow, Cap. Ebb and flow.


Let's see, that's a dollar a gallon, for water