Sage Webb's Blog, page 3

Teenager-hood, a Book I Read Back Then, & Not Quite Everything About All That

At a large national archery tournament at the end of the ‘90s (a tournament for which I had been the favorite to win), my mom called and told me she wouldn’t be home when I returned from the event. She had her sights set on things other than my family, and that was that. (P.S. I didn’t win that tournament.) In the twenty-plus years since then, I haven’t seen her. Oh, I saw her once during my parents’ divorce proceedings, in a courthouse in San Diego County, when I tossed my eyeglasses on the tile of the courthouse floor out of anger, attracting the attention of a court security officer, who escorted the teenaged me to the parking lot as a threat to the sanctity of that hall of justice. And I had the unfortunate fortune of seeing her one night shortly after I turned eighteen and she was in a fit of pique, and bad things came of it all (though not terribly bad: they could have been far worse).

In some ways, this maternal departure shook me (Mom’s exit involved some other aspects that may best be saved for another day’s discussion—or never at all). In other ways, it set me on a path of adventure, like some socially awkward, terribly dressed (even for the ‘90s) Luke Skywalker leaving Tatooine.

No, never mind. None of it qualifies as being anything even close to the coolness of hitting Mos Eisley in search of a ride to the stars. But the debacle booted me into the world, to finish my bid—unsuccessfully—for an Olympic archery spot, to drop out of college and start coaching sailing to make a living, and to spend some time calling an old Ranger 29 sloop home. Not bad, really ... except a gawky, never-been-kissed, bespectacled little girl in too-big clothes, with a too-big store of trust, doesn’t make a good heroine for that kind of story.

That unpretty, too-skinny teen did have a talent though: she could read like a devil. She could read and synthesize everything she read. And she read a lot. So she could learn from the absolute greats. The stars of the big shows. She could sit at the knee of coaches like Phil Jackson (oh, those unstoppable Three-Peat Chicago Bulls of the mid-‘90s), with his book Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior, and learn about sports psychology and mindfulness (the mindfulness she would refine much later as a still-awkwardly-dressed public defender with a yen for yoga). She could learn from these greats and slather their wisdom all over her choke-prone efforts to shoot or sail her own way to golden whatevers.

I pulled out my old copy of Sacred Hoops today. Perhaps with a thought to read it again after all these years, given this whole archery-rebirth thing. Or maybe just to see this water-warped, torn relic that traveled with me to a coaching gig at a yacht club in Chicago, to finishing my undergrad work in Hawaii, to managing a sailing program and campaigning a Europe dinghy in the San Francisco Bay Area, to law school in the Midwest, to sitting in storage on the Gulf Coast. Maybe this book should snuggle into the bright-orange backpack that holds my archery gear, and maybe I should toss the whole kit in the RV and point us north (the Bosun and Boat Dog, too!) to find an old friend ... a fellow I once knew. Or I didn’t know him; that ungainly girl in navy-blue sweats, with an XL t-shirt on her 110-pound frame, knew him. An old friend who knows archery like few others. An old friend who, long, long ago, maybe didn’t think that that ungainly little girl was so very hopeless as she perhaps thought herself. Who says now on the phone (after watching a couple videos from my practices this week) that maybe the archery form he saw in those videos has some substance to it.

Anyway, I’ve had this copy of Sacred Hoops a long time. It still has a scrap of notes from college tucked in its pages. And maybe it needs a new adventure.

2021 Delivers a Slice of My Childhood ... and We Fix Up a Dinghy for the RV

The first week-plus of 2021 swept me into an archery range. I did not see this twist coming. As a teenager, I shot archery quite a bit, but it’s not something I’ve done much as an adult—sailing, ballroom dancing, writing, yoga, and the like have come and gone at their various times in my adult life and have given me some good memories. Maybe there just wasn’t “psychic space” for picking up a bow.

So I didn’t see archery coming, but the Bosun and I somehow found ourselves wandering into a local archery range ... and then running into a fellow who is friends with the man who once coached me. I also failed to foresee a FaceTime call with my old coach and an email to a fellow (a phenomenal shooter) I once shot with and who is now a coach. I need to work on my fortune telling, I guess. (I also need to work on my “past telling.” It’s terrible to be eighteen. It’s also terrible to remember being eighteen. Awkward, gawky, unpretty, unworldly eighteen. Crushes and hopes and happiness, and then getting crushed ... and all those things that come after eighteen. All those sticky memories that look nothing like anything anyone would want to remember.)

I wasn’t looking to create my own sort of—pardon the silly analogy, but it kinda works here—Cobra Kai, blast-from-the-past sports drama. And really, it’s not very dramatic at all, other than I now find myself constantly dreaming of shooting ... and found myself competing yesterday in my first Olympic-style-bow archery competition in twenty-one years. (My score wasn’t half bad either.) What drama there is revolves around the Bosun not feeling impressed by my ‘90s psych-up music.

(I’m still self-conscious about the lupus/alopecia hair-loss stuff, so the head will remain covered a while longer, though my hair has made quite the comeback and may present itself soon!)

In books, I’ve complemented this return to a youthful sport with a return to a fitting childhood read: Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. There’s comfort in bygone yarns like this one, and maybe I need a little comfort right now for some reason I don’t quite know.

Where all this shooting will lead is anyone’s guess. Why this wild hair came upon me now likewise remains a mystery. But for the next little while, I’ll just keep shooting. The weather is bad anyway (sleet in Houston?!), so tossing arrows around inside sounds way better than trying to sail or anything.

On the Bosun’s part, he worked late on Saturday to install a tow system on our little Chevy Spark, so we can now tow her behind the RV as a “dinghy” to use to explore when we venture out next time to camp.

Heck, maybe the next RV adventure will involve a trip to an archery tournament. It certainly feels that way.

I Suspect I Will Remember Last Night

I believe I will remember last night ... remember it when things start to draw to their inevitable end. I’m not worried about that end. Let it come. Tomorrow or in thirty years or in more years even than that. Let the stars decide.

But regardless, I suspect I shall remember something of last night. It doesn’t take much, I suppose, to make a memory like that one—the one of last night—will be. A few candles burning on the wooden table of a dockmate’s snug boat, with a terribly cold wind tearing through the marina, scaring everyone away from the piers, chilling them into their boats’ cabins, supposedly stalwart sailors or not. The Bosun with his guitar, and everyone singing a song of pirates and privateers. A plate of grilled asparagus, and then (much later, after a frantic little spell of trying to get a chore done on my laptop), on another dockmate’s boat, a plate of chocolate truffles and a kiss at midnight ... just a little kiss ... with the Bosun chuffed because his ridiculously overly efficient watch has, of its own accord, projected fireworks onto its face.

It’s the dock so very quiet and so very dark but not wholly dark because the almost- or pretty-full moon is watching, glimpsing our doings from between masts that poke up into that moon’s domain of stars and clouds and broad, broad sky.

It’s a dockmate wrapping an arm around my waist as we wait for midnight, an arm that feels kind and that shares some sort of sisterly understanding just by wrapping like that ... nothing more ... just wrapping and waiting for midnight. And it’s the cold, windy walk down the dock after midnight, down the dock, back to our boat, to say goodnight to 2020 and wonder not at all at what 2021 may bring, because who knows anyway and it will all come when it comes.

So at the end, when that end comes (and perhaps it will come quickly, instantly, unseen before it springs, or perhaps it will come after a long, painful wait, or perhaps something else), I fancy I will remember last night. Glorious, unremarkable and extraordinary and everything in between.

Post-Holiday Melancholy? Maybe a Free Book Will Help. . . .

I'm feeling---like a lot, a lot---a certain post-Christmas melancholia. Sigh. From what I've seen on social media, I know I'm not alone. We've all dealt with such gloom in 2020; seeing the lights fade out and hearing the carols go quiet now just feels like having the fog roll back in.

And the holidays aren't even over yet!

We still have New Year's! And Three Kings' Day (hey, I misspent my childhood in Tijuana in the '80s; I love me some Three Kings' Day, and my empty flip flops will be out on deck on January 6 to receive whatever the kings might give me!).

But still.

I offer two pickmeups for anyone else swimming in a slightly gloomy pond right now:

1) A bookish gift to tuck in your shoes even before Three Kings' Day on January 6:

The Venturi Effect is free on Amazon, as an ebook, today and tomorrow. For whatever that is worth. If you like courtroom drama, bad decision making, and a dash of sailing adventure, you might have some fun with it.

2) A poem I memorized a long time ago and carry with me for just such occasions as, well, 2020:

"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer (killed at the age of thirty-one by a German sniper in 1918 during WWI's Second Battle of the Marne).

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

*

Something about that one. Sad, happy, contemplative, anxious, at peace . . . it always seems to "fit" for me, to soothe, to speak. . . .

It's there if you need it. . . .

Magic Skies, Seasons, and Seas ... and Mermaids

To see the great Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, the Bosun and I joined our dockmates on a dockmate’s jaunty sailboat home (shhh! don’t tell our boat, but this boat is a little lighter afoot). While I had to juggle a last-minute work issue and found myself locked away in the cabin and wrestling with less entertaining topics for some of the ride, the evening was truly magical: a motley crew of shoulda-been pirates, a boardwalk aglow ashore, a sky hung with stars, and the sight of these two planets burning (I will be bold and say joyfully) together.

The whole night felt perfectly situated temporally, with the solstice and darkness wrapping around the astronomical pageant, with Christmas hovering near, arms full of its reminders of ancient journeys and longings.

So with Christmas Eve now here, with an old year washing out to sea, with 2021 coming on watch, well, I shall wish us all the rest of eight bells—the rest of a mariner released, by the chiming of the ship’s bell eight times (one chime for each half-hour of the standard four-hour watch), from their duties of keeping watch on deck. Let us retire to the crew’s quarters in the forecastle, have our rum and duff, sing songs of home, and rest well.

Merry Christmas.

May 2021 be a year of renewal and hope.

And may we too enjoy that small bit of what Emily Dickinson received when she walked along the shore:

“I walked early, took my dog,

And visited the sea;

The mermaids in the basement

Came out to look at me.”

To mermaids finding us all in 2021 ... and whispering a secret each to us.

Training for Boat Life: Go Spelunking!

I love spelunking. I love crawling through dark caverns, slathering myself in mud, squeezing myself into spaces barely wide enough to accommodate my clavicle.

As a kid, my dad (who belonged to the National Speleological Society, and who, as a young man from Chicago, spent weekends caving in the limestone along the Mississippi when he was a kid) would load us into the van and head to the Anza Borrego Desert in Southern California. We’d clamber through mud caves in dry heat, dirt caking on my little-girl clothes and working into my hard-hatted ponytail.

Texas Hill Country hosts a number of great deep holes in the ground: Natural Bridge Caverns, Cave Without a Name, Longhorn Cavern, Inner Space Cavern.... So now that I call the Lone Star State home, I’ve got plenty of opportunities to slither into rocky chasms. (Many of these caves offer “wild-cave tours,” excursions off the comfortable “show cave” path that give visitors an opportunity to sample spelunking and ruin their clothes in the mire.)

All this muddy scrambling has a practical application for a person who favors life on a boat. Boat repairs often involve tight spaces and contortions. And head lamps. Getting to the failing widget generally entails cramming one’s head into confined cabinetry, and as I found this weekend, it can involve spaces not at all hospitable to articulating elbows.

Caving thus provides great training for boat life. This past Sunday, a friend and dockmate asked if my narrower shoulder girdle would be willing to slither under a sink and fix up a new macerator pump. Head lamp installed on my brow, I shoe-horned myself into the cranny and somehow figured out how to use tools despite a lack of room to use my joints. Eventually, the sweet sound of a grinding macerator chimed victory, and my buddy rewarded me with a luscious hot chocolate.

Gotta admit: while a nook beneath a boat sink may not present quite the same adventure as a stalagmite-boasting cave, getting that pump fixed in place did pretty much rock. Especially with chocolate at the end.

Christmas Afloat

Christmas on a boat feels different. Obviously, boats don’t lend themselves to hosting real Christmas trees (though I know innovative liveaboards who welcome into their cabins tiny trees with diminutive ornaments). Getting into the Christmas spirit thus (at least for me) takes a lot more focus.

Our boat means:

❌ Christmas tree,

❌ holiday lights,

❌ space for baking seasonal goodies,

❌ room for presents to linger festively (we can’t have more stuff on the boat anyway, so it’s all about “experience gifts,” like museum memberships),

❌ lounging in pajamas and being completely lazy on the days off (because, no matter what, someone has to walk Boat Dog up and down the dock to get to the grass to do his doggie business).

And working for myself means I spend a lot of these quieter days getting ahead on projects. So “feeling” the holidays takes a bit of effort. Lucky for us, our dock- and marina-mates do decorate, and the marina puts up a ton of lights, and houses in the neighborhoods around the marina have Santa hanging out.

Perhaps I qualify as a Christmas mooch, sponging holiday spirit off others. Regardless—mooch or appreciative audience—I do enjoy the decorations around me since our boat in no way betrays any sign of the season except for a festive little snow globe a friend’s nine-year-old daughter gave me (a gift that pretty much made my holiday season).

Unlike our boat, though, the weather does betray an appropriate knowledge of the season, with rain and a chill and darkness lingering all day. Yesterday, for instance, the Bosun, Boat Dog, and I stuffed ourselves into the boat as storms blew over and soaked the bay. Work kept me busy, and the Bosun wrote songs. The close quarters felt cozy.

Looking at us from a mental distance, this snuggled-in tableau reminded me of all the books I’ve read in which voyagers have celebrated Christmas under sail. So many sailors have described loved ones stowing gifts away for the adventurer to find and open on Christmas: beverages, treats, books, letters.... While GPS, satellite communication, and all the technology that allows sailors to text and blog and chat with families far, far away lets people stay connected now (even when these sailors battle the Southern Ocean or cross a 64-million-square-mile Pacific), the idea of finding a tucked-away stocking stuffer still seems so completely charming. Should I find myself off Pitcairn Island or heading into Fatu Hiva some Yuletide, I hope I’ll find a little surprise squirreled away in some deep storage cubby.

Excitement Mounts on the Dock: The End of This Week Will Include Our First Book-Club Symposium

People end up living on boats for any number of reasons. When I brokered boats, I saw more than one man pull into the brokerage parking lot with a hangdog expression, a car full of junk, and a fresh divorce decree. I worked with multiple ladies who’d gotten a taste of the sea and knew they would call her home for the foreseeable future. Wealthy retirees turn to boats for mild adventure, and the down-and-out may see in a boat a preferable alternative to the ol’ “van down by the river.” You can shell out eight figures for one of our beloved headaches or pick one up for the equivalent of the local mechanic’s lien.

Everyone, though, seems to come to boats with a certain intention, a certain sense of choice or “agency” or purpose. In mindfulness practices, one might see boat dwellers as engaging in intentional living.

Which brings us to this fledgling book club. In an effort to examine our choices, consider concepts related to “the good life,” and grab some good conversation with good friends, a few dockmates, the Bosun, and I have formed a haphazard lyceum to read some “philosophy lite” and jaw about the why and wherefore of life (and the bad choices we love to make—because really, choosing a boat is a bad choice).

Our first book: Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus, an accessible, fun peek at one man’s adventures in Greece and ruminations on the ideas espoused by Epicurus. Is it all about “wine, women, and song”? Nope—not for Epicurus and not for our lyceum. Though a few of us like a little wine and we all love more than a little song .

Is it about virtue, judgment upon death, and preferring to suffer evil rather than perpetrate it (a la Socrates’ take in Plato’s Gorgias)? Maybe. At least for me. But there’s no “maybe” when it comes to contemplating these ideas with friends and a good meal—this sort of exchange is not “maybe” enjoyable; it’s the sort of meaningful human connection C.S. Lewis extolled in discussing philia-love/friendship in his The Four Loves. And it’s another reason why I love life on the dock.

Boat Dog, a Quest, and an Involuntary Winter Bath

Well, I can’t help but suppose ‘twas bound to happen. Our ever-so-nimble Boat Dog involuntarily took a saltwater bath today.

Last night rolled in cold and stormy, with the boat rocking like a hobby horse at the pier and the temperature dropping uncomfortably low. This morning dawned frosty, with the boat discombobulated in her slip because of the night’s antics: she was sitting quite far from the dock, having strained at her dock lines.

Poor Boat Dog.

Sometime not too long after noon, we hustled up the dock for a mid-day bathroom break. The sun sat hidden somewhere in the heavens, playing coy and leaving us, poor terrestrial creatures that we are, to shiver. Boat Dog did his thing, and we galloped back to the boat (actually galloped; or Boat Dog did—the little fellow shook a leg and made me break into a jog).

At the slip, our gallant hero stopped. His waterborne home was sitting farther away than usual, and I could see his doggy mind calculating the “leapability” of the gap between pier and vessel. He gathered his paws ... and sprang ... and missed. Aw, snap. Before I realized what had happened, Boat Dog had hit the water and begun dog paddling. I grabbed him up by his leash and harness, and received the fallout from one of those mighty wet-dog shakes.

I also received a really dirty look.

But not as dirty as the look I got when I heaped insult upon the injury by turning the hose on our dear hero. You see, marinas contain all sorts of unsavory muck: film on the water from drips of fuel, gray water, trash, “unspeakable” waste. So I had to scrub off our knight in furry armor before releasing him to once again try his paw at this quest to regain the boat.

Second time around, our hero made it. Handily. I had to race him to the companionway entrance to the cabin and stop him in all his glorious wetness before he clambered inside and onto the settee.

Toweling off first, buddy.

Toweling off first.

Having accomplished his quest, having made it to the grass and back by way of the seas in which there be monsters, our hero now rests. Satisfied.

Books + Boats + Boondoggles ... and a Few Burdens

An awesome dockmate started a Facebook group dubbed #BoatLife to expose the less romantic, not-sexy, sunset-less and drink-less side of living on a boat. I love it. Because yes: life aboard does not involve an endless cycle of postcard twilights and sundowners. I’ll go one further here, though, and say that RVs and writing likewise involve far less frolicking than popular perceptions may suggest.

For example, this week involved:

‍☠️Crawling under the RV to begin repairs post-piracy (theft of catalytic converter). The project means tools, measurements, parts + time + grubbing. (I work-worked while the Bosun worked on the RV.)

A stretch of 6.7 hours straight in front of my laptop to finish a legal-writing project. Yep, 6.7 hours without moving from the keyboard. Follow this span of time with a shift toward Read Local updates, book promos, and creative writing, and ... well ... that’s a lot of time in front of a screen and not out in the sunshine (yes, we’ve enjoyed some fine December days down here on the Gulf Coast).

An evening’s rain that brought a small drip—a drip from the sailboat’s deck, down along the mast (the mast’s bottom sits on the “floor” of the cabin we sleep in)—into our bed (or more precisely, onto the Bosun’s side of the bed). This gentle sprinkling led to a churlish Bosun waking up early and skulking into the main cabin. When I left my [warm, dry] side of the bed, I found him churlishly nibbling cold turkey. His answer to the problem? A plastic bag tucked against the mast to funnel the drips away from the covers. I remain skeptical.

The ultimate gamble! Knowing the water tanks had almost run dry, I hopped into the shower—real “washing roulette.” Would the water last⁉️ Maybe I like living dangerously. (The Fates spared me. The water did not run dry.)

Books, boats, and boondoggles rock. But they do come with certain price tags. In the form of elbow grease and inconvenience. At least sometimes....