This summer, I’m going to learn how to sail. I’ve only taken one lesson in the past, on the water at Hueston Woods in Oxford, Ohio, in a little Sunfish, on a clear day with sporadic and light winds, though strong enough that we almost capsized a couple times. Since then, I’ve been wanting to get back out on the water and try it again, work with the sails and the wind in a way that is akin to listening, use all those arcane and confusing terms that sailors use. A shroud, for instance, is not a white stretch of cloth, but a metal wire attaching the mast to the side. Telltale, tack, jib, keel, stern—eventually I’ll know these terms with my body and won’t have to think too much about how to turn, how to slow down or speed up, and to do it all without getting smacked in the head by a swinging boom.
As a kid, the closest I came to sailing was rowing a boat while fishing on Lake Logan with my uncle Mike. In college I went canoeing a few times, but boats weren’t much a part of our lives in Groveport, submerged as we were in corn fields and soy fields and fields that didn’t grow anything and subdivisions and, eventually, big box parking lots. There were a few times we went out in a speedboat and waterskied on Buckeye Lake, but that was the extent of my career in watersports. But now that I think about it, the world of sailing—or at least the idea of the world of sailing—intersected with my world in other ways. At the top of the escalator in Lazarus at Eastland Mall, a slice of an imaginary New England greeted you through the Nautica and Polo sections of the store, all rugbies and raincoats, Nantucket red khakis and crisp white oxfords. Nautica, Polo, and Tommy Hilfiger sold the world of sailboats and horses and luxury cars and parties at old money mansions to people who had never come close to any of it. The advertising posters of prep-schooled white men (and Tyson Beckford) on boats under blue skies made you feel that people who sailed always seemed to have wealth, or fame, or both, those magical things that people who have neither wealth nor fame refer to as “good luck.”
By the time I reached high school, I was really only interested in the clothes associated with sailing, as the Wu-Tang Clan had become informal ambassadors for brands like Norwegian sailing and climbing gear company Helly Hansen. At fifteen, on a trip to New York City, I stopped in a spot called The Beez Kneez, where a corkboard wall was filled with snapshots of the owner with a multitude of hip hop legends who shopped there. I would have loved to buy the whole store and take it back to Ohio, but, as I had no money, I had to settle for talking my mom into buying me a red, white, and blue Helly Hansen sailing jacket. It was my most prized possession for years; something about those gleaming white waterproof sleeves, the overly tall collar, the quality of the construction, felt different from anything else I wore. It also resembled the coat worn by Ghostface in the “Glaciers of Ice” video, and that was pretty cool, too.
But by far my most emotionally resonant experiences with sailing came through movies. In Quiz Show, Charles Van Doren takes investigator Dick Goodwin out on a dinghy in an attempt to shift the scales, to get the snoop out of his element, but Dick sees through Van Doren’s ruse anyway. The sailing scene was a rather short one, but it tied into the world fabricated in the rest of the movie, that Van Doren world of wood-paneled classrooms at Columbia, impossibly green lawns at a country estate in Connecticut, the book launch receptions all Lilly Pulitzer dresses and pearls, the New England where everyone has good luck, the New England imitated by Nautica’s fantastic ads, the New England of the movies.
This summer, I will learn how to sail, but I think my relationship to it is simpler now, less fantasy-filled than it used to be. I just want to get out on that lake I walk past every day on my way to the office. I want to be seated under one of those sails I see floating lazily by. I want to drift a bit, be blown about, get sunburnt, enjoy the simple, ancient, screenless technology that is the sailboat, maybe fall in the water once or twice, remember some things I’ve forgotten.