“Oh, great,” you say. “Here he goes again about risk and checklists and aviation or something. BOOORRRIIING!”
Well, fear not, my friends. I’m not going to talk about that tedious old crap. I’m going to talk about another kind of crap altogether, fresh, exciting crap that you will be happy to learn about: our stuff.
It’s no accident that the phrases “I have a bunch of crap” and “I have a bunch of stuff” are more or less synonymous in English, I have decided. Most stuff is crap, and can safely be disposed of despite our more noble attachments to it. This is a simple fact you learn once you move from a 1400 square foot house to a 33′ sailboat, and it’s almost universally described among those who take the plunge as a sort of liberating experience. My wife certainly sees it that way and I suppose, intellectually at least, I can understand that. The modern tendency of people being owned by their stuff rather than vice versa has been broadly commented on; moving onto a boat is a sure way to short-circuit that unhappy state of affairs, because you just don’t have the room for it (the fact that you will soon end up being owned by your boat is another topic entirely).
The thing is, I’ve never felt owned by my stuff. I have always been pretty happy with an accumulation of goods that could more or less fit comfortably in the back of my pickup truck. Apart from a few random and relatively small items I have spent considerable money on and find routinely useful, I just don’t feel much need for stuff. While living in a house, it’s true that I accumulated a great deal more items than that, but I had little emotional attachment to them and didn’t have much trouble ditching them when the time came to do so.
After a long winter of house-sitting, splitting our time between the house and the boat, we’re finally consolidating almost all our various crap back in one place: aboard. And despite the fact that it mostly all came from here in the first place, we’re having a heck of a time getting all back in comfortably. Unlike when we moved aboard in the first place, however, our space issues now are not really caused by any unhealthy and unwarranted attachment to a surfeit of unnecessary crap. This time, rather, we are confronting a simple irreducible minimum of stuff.
It’s certainly true that necessity is the mother of compromise and most of us can get by with a lot less than what we think of as “necessary” but I don’t think I am going out on a limb when I find it necessary to keep around enough clothes for a week, food, office supplies and tools, and the other various items that we are now finding it a challenge to stow neatly and securely. It was easy, the first time around, to look at some object or other and say, “Pitch it; I haven’t used it in years.” Now, I look at what is left, and as I consider each separate thing, I am either looking at something I use almost every day, or which prudence and common standards of seamanship demand remain aboard.
I think this is the point at which most people decide they simply need another three feet of boat. One wag suggested we just put the stuff in the basement, and I won’t pretend I haven’t considered building some sort of floating filing cabinet that could be towed along behind if necessary. Driven to such desperation, those 36 footers start looking pretty good.
I’m determined to weather the crisis, however, if for no other reason than we simply can’t afford anything larger right now. I have every confidence that, given a few weeks of patient, persistent re-arranging and Tetris-like maneuvering, pretty much everything will fit. Then, I won’t even want a bigger boat… I’d just have to start the organizing all over again from scratch.