RHYTHMS Writing Challenge: Motif the Sea

The best winds return to Southern California in the early winter. The day-sailors, oblivious to rhythms more complex than a weekend sunset, end their sailing season when August, summer’s last breath, expires. Those of us who love the sea, tend to know the rhythms of the winds and it is, therefore, the winter we love most.

Remember that day? I think it was in November. We were sailing Drum Major. Our rubber bottomed cups were piping hot with French Roast and Baileys. We were hunkered down in the cockpit. The morning was gray, the sea was gray and there was no horizon; only bled together gun metal hues.

We were there before the wind. Remember? The mainsail was up but the jib was still furled. The iron sail bubbled and mumbled us out into the bay where we killed it and waited for the soon to arrive wind. We used to do this often. Power out into the bay and wait.

There were no words between us. I don’t remember who put the chowder on the stove but its aroma traveled up the companionway and rested between us like a promise being kept.

I played the mainsail out when I saw the sea crinkle in splotches as the wind rubbed against her face, stirring her to wakefulness. In no time, the mainsail began to fill and Drum Major began to strut, just a bit, not too prideful – her jib was still furled, toward the island, crowned and gowned in fog.

When we reached five knots, you unfurled the jib and Drum Major, running on a broad reach, lurched ahead to 7 knots.

Bottoms up, we thanked the auto-helm and our spirited coffee for the beginning of a good day.  

I turned off the auto-helm and took the wheel. Mechanized systems are good but a sailor’s hand is better because he sees the wave set, the rogues, the patterns; he sees what’s coming while the machine only experiences what has already happened. The difference may seem infinitesimal but experiencing the difference will prove otherwise.

I think you saw it first. Or maybe you heard it then saw it.

The sea roiled with the huge school teeming near the surface under the voracious appetites of the council of birds. Literally hundreds of birds were screaming in tens of dialects, diving, hovering, heads thrown back, swollen gullets; they were gobbling fish that, as we approached this place of natural harmonies, could be seen leaping into the air as if desirous of sacrifice.

We stood on our plastic platform, warming our hands with fresh cups of magic coffee. Awe filled our throats with silence. It was here we understood the profundity of love. It was here we understood that love is not always gloriously surprising. It can be so fundamental that it appears ordinary or harsh. It was here we reconciled to beauty that is plain, to truth that is unutterable.

We sailed close to the madding feast, our hands warm, our minds attentive to the nature of things as they are more than we could romance them to be.

These are the things of the winter at sea. The necessary intimacy of birds and fishes, the undulating plane where they decide to love across the divide of water and air; where we saw the rhythms of life and death there, on the surface.

These natural rhythms comfort us as we reach across our own divides to embrace the necessary intimacy revealed starkly in the life of the mirrored sea.