Lately I find myself overwhelmed with a lot of things. Life has just been … big … for a few weeks. It is what it is.
In amongst the big moments of life, I’ve noticed my thoughts always turn to the ocean. Sailing. The bigger my life, the smaller my thoughts… the more minute my attention.
You can’t adjust the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
I remember the left turn out of Neah Bay, headed south down the coast toward Oregon. You can actually feel the bottom drop out from beneath you. You can feel the very nature of the water change. You can feel the “roll”. Somehow you know, and you look at your depth sounder and it reads “–” because the depth doesn’t matter, it’s at least 1,000 feet of ocean beneath you. Which means you’re not anchoring here, and it doesn’t matter how much you draw. So the depth doesn’t matter. You won’t be hitting anything any time soon.
And the water gets bluer. In an almost ethereal way.
It’s indescribe-a-blue. Heh.
I would later learn that among my all-male co workers there were bets placed on whether I’d ever even make it out of Neah Bay. Those guys are all assholes.
Every day on the boat was a symphony of the most boring times I could imagine… then briefly wondering if I might die in the next 20 minutes… followed by the best fish tacos on earth… and a nightcap of what was probably too much rum.
Memories to enliven me for the next 80 years.
I never was able to fully get over the blue of the ocean. It is so, so incredibly blue. It is a color I had never seen. It is, simply put, impossible. And yet. I sailed in it, swam in it, and lost myself in it daily for months. It’s impossible, yes, but I assure you that it’s also not.
I used to hook my chin over the lifelines and drift for hours in it.
One morning I was doing just that, when a bright red tiny lobster-type being floated past. “Oh cute!”
Then another one.
Then, for a good several minutes, a giant school of bright red “lobsters” floated past the boat, actually surrounding the boat, punctuating the impossible blue with their impossible red. I remember running around the boat squealing like a girl: “Doug! Look! Look! WHAT ARE THEY? WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
I still have no idea what they were. I just googled them now and I can find no suitable result. There is nothing that looks like an already-cooked tiny lobster that swims in schools of a million in a thousand feet of ocean off the coast of Baja somewhere.
Leisurely floating, getting to wherever they’re going, never mind what you’re doing.
Just going about their business, being so incredibly perfect doing it that folks are still trying to figure them out 15 years later.
What’s on my mind? How to be the impossibly red lobster in the impossibly blue sea.
Now taking bets.
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