around the hydrosphere. Sailboats, sloops, catamarans, re-creations of famous schooners, wealthy paranoids, retirees, people traveling with cats, people traveling w/ lizards, people sick of giving one quarter of their income to the government, free spirits, charlatans, and yes, children. There are thousands of children sailing this world as we speak, some who’ve never lived on land.
We say we want kids to be joyful/unmaterialistic/resilient. That’s what sailing kids are like. They climb masts & can correctly identify obscure plant life. They don’t care what somebody looks like when they meet them, they sometimes don’t even speak the same language, but they work it out. They don’t sit around ranking one kind of life against another. 71% of the earth is ocean. These kids literally cannot believe they are the center of the world. Because where would that be, exactly? They measure their days against a candid & endless horizon.
* * *
—
Let me begin by saying that buying a boat was the most absurd idea I’d ever heard. I’d never boarded anything but a ferry in my life, and Michael hadn’t sailed since he was in college.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I said to him. You want me, and our two little kids, to live on a boat with you in the middle of the sea?
Just for a year, he said.
I don’t even know how to sail, Michael!
You don’t need to know how to sail, he said. All you need to know is which way to point the boat. I can teach you the rest as we go.
You’re insane, I said.
But even Juliet was hard to convince. How do you sell your wife on the benefits of assuming risk? After all, if your wife is like mine, she probably married you for your stability.
In order to convince Juliet to buy the boat, I had to channel that great salesman—Artist of Spit and Staples, Prankster, Tightwad—my dad, Glenn Partlow. Nothing made Dad happier than sailing on Lake Erie in his old Westsail 32. He’d bought her on a lark from some guy at work who was trying to get rid of her quick. Those days, apparently even a supervising technician at the GM plant could afford a boat. He kept her at a marina on Lake Erie about a half hour’s drive from our house. My sister Therese joined us for the first several outings, but she got seasick. After that, it was just me & Dad on a boat neither of us deserved to sail.
The boat was named ‘Odille.’ Probably somebody’s old flame. My mom didn’t want anything to do w/ the boat. She was completely absorbed by raising us, which is not to say this was good for her or for us. It was just what moms like her in Ashtabula, Ohio, did at the time. She’d drive us around, handing us our trumpet case or our paper-bag lunch. When Dad & I went sailing on ‘Odille,’ she didn’t complain. At least not to me.
We couldn’t have taken more than 2 dozen voyages on that boat, but they clog my memory. I remember the sea-glass green surface of that windy lake, the short fetch of the waves. If I wanted to see my 13th year of life, I had to learn fast. Which sheet to pull, which one to tie off, how to ready the lines for Dad, when to ask questions, when to shut up. I didn’t want to bother him. He looked so important at the helm.
When I was in 10th grade, GM offered dad a transfer from Parma, Ohio, to Pittsburgh. For reasons I never inquired about, he took the deal & sold the Westsail.
He set us up in a modest brick house on a hillside in the City of Bridges, the steep streets of which had no traction in the ice.
This last detail, of course, rearranged my life.
* * *
—
Of course I said no. My first reaction was shock. I thought he’d lost his mind. Me and the kids living on a boat? Michael might as well have said, Let’s live upside down and walk on the ceiling.