That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that’s what a ship needs but what a ship is… what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom. – Captain Jack Sparrow
Freedom, as many a bumper sticker will tell you in the American Midwest, isn’t free.
This seems to be as true when it comes to sailing as with anything else.
Each year as we attempt to pull free of the great sucking morass of civilization, we cough up more blood, sweat, and dollars. Somehow, magically, a boat that was perfectly sufficient and comfortable to live on all winter long, a boat that managed to sail without incident or deficiency all last summer, suddenly seems to require a hundred projects and improvements before it can be deemed adequate to leave the dock again each spring.
So we’ve been going through the usual lengthy, stressful, and expensive spring project ritual, this year involving our first haulout of Rosie, and our first haulout anywhere other than Port Townsend… double-stress! As usual, we didn’t get to 3/4 of the things we had hoped to be able to do before running out of time and money.
A curious thing about the money is that it seems to be about the same amount every year, regardless of the size of the boat we own or the magnitude of the work we undertake. Last year it was a new holding tank and solar panel; this year, windlass repairs and bottom paint (the sophisticated sailor will recognize, of course, that each of those apparently straightforward projects encompass within them an entire Greek tragedy of drama and ancillary complication). Both years, as I sift through the ruins of my financial accounts in the aftermath, the damage totals up to right about the same amount.
Partly because of this, I’m starting to look on the costs, that cost, really, less as a collection of distinct boat projects with particular applications and benefits, and more just as a check I have to write in order to be allowed to leave town once the weather gets nice. I feel like I should be able to skip the actual work and uncertainty, somehow, and just mail a check off to, I don’t know, the federal Department of Getting The Hell Out of Dodge somewhere in Washington D.C., and receiving in return some dry form letter acknowledging my right to go off and enjoy my summer of freedom.
This year, the freedom that comes with that check is even more free than usual.
When we pulled out of our marina in Seattle last week, we did so knowing our spot there might no longer be available when we return in the fall. Financial pressures and other business considerations are putting the small marinas on Lake Union (and probably everywhere) in a tight spot and they can’t sublet slips over the summer as profitably as they used to; similarly, we’re not in a position to pay for a space we can’t use for three or four months. So they are not reserving our slip for our return this year, and we’re up in the air about where we’ll be when we come back again.
It’s hard to trace all of where those pressures are coming from, but at least part of it is the Great Westlake Cycle Track Debate. Although I know that the issue is unrelated to any explicit push to reduce or eliminate liveaboards in Seattle, it’s hard not to feel it as just another threat to our home and lifestyle … a lot of folks who don’t know us, don’t know the neighborhood, don’t understand the problems, wanting to tell us how to live our lives. As liveaboards, this is not an unusual dilemma for us, but it’s tiresome all the same.
We don’t own a car, and actually use bikes as our primary mode of transportation. But one of the more likely outcomes of the process will be that other tenants will leave the marina, either putting it out of business to be sold and redeveloped as another lovely wall of condos blocking off the city from the waterfront, or forcing the owner to focus on bringing in fewer larger, more profitable vessels… in either case reducing liveaboard slips in the process, at least for the unwashed, lower middle class sorts such as ourselves.
I’m fairly sick of the whole debate, and it has just become emblematic to me of all the reasons I feel desperate to get out of the city again. There are sane, reasonable solutions to be had for both businesses and bicyclists in that corridor, and I have even heard several folks, on both sides of the debate, propose some of them; unfortunately, they are routinely drowned out by the misinformed partisans screaming past each other with simplistic talking points.
To me, that’s an unfortunately common snapshot of city living, and I can’t wait to get away from it. There’s a sort of madness that affects people there that I want no part of. After being surrounded by it for a few months, I am never confident I’m not contaminated again. It seems so clear once you get away from it for a while… another sort of freedom, I guess, the freedom to not be crazy.
Another cord is being cut as my parents move from their house in Port Hadlock to landlocked Oregon. Their home, and the mooring ball out front, has made a convenient base for all our various excursions further north, as well as providing cheap storage and a scene for various other adventures. It will be in someone else’s hands at the end of June, and we’ll be able to do no more than anchor off the beach in the future and look from afar up at the bluff on which our boat’s namesake still rests.
We’re on the mooring there now, sorting through our stuff and preparing to store it in some large, generic public storage warehouse somewhere, like grownups do. But that space won’t be in Seattle, either, since we access those items so infrequently and storage in the city is relatively expensive, and we don’t even know if we’ll be there in the fall. But where, then, is best to put it all? It’s another conundrum I’m in a hurry to put behind me, but another tie being cut between us and the city.
All the outpouring of money and effort appears to be endless, but I know deep down that it’s not, that instead, we’re churning ahead through apparently endless lists and never-ending delays to build up escape velocity to fling ourselves out past Point Wilson and into the broader seas of the straits.
Even as we build up to that point, there are many things to regret, reasons to delay, considerations that provoke hesitation. Business will be, as ever, uncertain in our intermittent disconnection from the wired world. There are many people I like that we will also be leaving behind. They’ll have events in their lives that we won’t be around for, and we will miss them, and be more distant in some indefinable ways when next we meet: another cost of freedom.
With all these costs, you have to wonder, then, if freedom is anything other than an illusion? In some way or another, it seems that every choice leaves you beholden or bereft. But maybe freedom is about getting to make those choices for yourself, not necessarily enjoying the results.
All I know is that the further north I get, the more I feel like I’m making those choices, good and bad, and less like I am having them made for me. And having made them, I’m anxious to get out there and face the consequences. The westerlies are blowing, up on the strait. It’s time to go.