Sailing
by Titus Daniel Gee
The sailboats in Germany reminded me of my father. I thought of him, one day, while watching the sails on Bodensee (Lake Konstance). I had been in Germany 45 days, working at Bodenseehof Bible School & Christian Youth Center in Fichbach, a tiny resort town near Friedrichshafen Harbor in the utter South.
Germany has little in the way of coastland. That fact might seem obvious to anyone who paid attention in 5th grade geography, but it was oddly disconcerting for a beach boy who grew up at the Jersey shore.
At six years old, I staged battles against the breakers of the Atlantic kicking, punching and karate chopping the swells to foam. Sometimes the big ones bowled me over, but I came up sputtering brine and ready for more. At a much wiser eight, I dodged the big ones dove to the bottom and gripped sand while they crashed over, sucking at my legs. At ten, I had learned to ride them bareback, make the surging power work for me. At 13, I found inspiration in the ocean's churning music and, at 15, walked the sand by moonlight with a girl. At 17, it reminded me how powerful it was one fumbled dive and I came up streaming blood down my face like the victim in a horror flick. (My mother thought my face had been ripped off. I still have the scar between my eyebrows.) At 22, I braved the tips of jetties in the wee hours of the morning, while the Pacific tried to pull me into its cold embrace.
For me, the ocean was a constant, like sky or earth or air. For the people of Germany, deep water is a rare and precious treasure. In summer the masses crowd the edge of the cold Nordsee, or drive their big RVs to the "campgrounds" on the shores of Bodensee. There is not nearly enough sand for all of them, but public parks augment it with acres of open lawn and sometimes even swimming pools. The upper classes spend their days tacking their little sailboats around the lake, pausing for open-deck picnics of bread, cheese and wine.
In the afternoons, after work, I would stroll along the shore and watch them idling about with the Alps as backdrop. Some might compare all those billowing sails to scudding clouds or soaring gulls. For me there is no comparison. The image of sleek, sharp angles of white above dark wood decks, slipping silently along on the invisible power of wind defies metaphor. It is the metaphor.
Learning to sail, to catch the wind in my lariat and ride, is a dream I share with my father. When I was in middle school, his life took an uncertain turn and left the future open. His favorite idea was to sell everything, buy a sailboat and set out for some distant island. My parents were teachers; they would school us along the way. I imagined the cabins half-filled with books, Mom in the galley, brothers in the rigging, sisters on the deck, and myself atop the mainmast sighting land. We would stop only to put on food and water, meet the natives. Even the island would be no destination; the voyage was the goal. We would just keep going, riding the wind and our own collective whimsy across the sunlit waves. (And always behind my idyllic imaginings hung the unbreathed threat and thrill of storm.)
We had voyaged together before, my family and I. We had walked through the Wardrobe to meet the Lion and the Witch. We had wandered with Taran. Even went by ship sometimes once on The Dawntreader, other times with Captain Cook and John Paul Jones, several times we braved the Cherek Bore with Barak and Garion. Mom would read aloud after dinner, with the dishes uncleared and us kids lounging in our chairs smelling the salt air from the windows, feeling the dining room pitch and roll with the waves, and meeting barefoot heroes with long knives in their teeth. (I never knew Momma was censoring the violence until one day Poppa took over to give her voice a break. "Honey, please ") After thirteen years of adventures, the home school yacht to distant shores seemed reasonable to me. I thought we might actually do it. I suppose if my Dad had found a way, we might have.
I don't know where my father caught the fascination with wind travel. Perhaps he went sailing as a boy spending summers at Long Beach Island. Or maybe, like me, he watched from the shore, captivated by the life of the sea but bound to its edges except on brief diesel-powered forays in search of fish. Whatever the spark, the fascination seems to fit him, though many who know him might be surprised.
My dad wears a suit to work, and wears it well. He always has. He likes ties; has at least a hundred, each a masterpiece of mood. My childhood memories of him feature feels of silk and linen; smells of starched cotton, cologne and dry cleaning chemicals. I grew up in his office, building things with the little magnetic men on his paperweight and drinking the last of his cold coffee. See, my dad was not only a teacher, but a leader of teachers principal, administrator, headmaster. He was the boss. Not the type that had to strut and swagger. You just knew he was in charge, maybe because he always had been. (At his first teaching interview they made him principal. He was 23.) Or maybe because he didn't strut and swagger. He wore the position like the suit, comfortably but without too much attention. He was calm, quiet, confident, and there could be danger in the softness of his voice. These are my earliest memories of my father from when he was my age and I was barely conscious. That was before I began to see his secret.
Despite that calm exterior, my father is in love with adventure.
He grew up reading about Tom Swift's rocketships and the Adventures of Danny
Orlis. His mind wandered down hidden roads with Jules Verne and walked with Frodo
up the paths of
Mount
Doom.
He watched the Space Age dawning on the nightly news and collected the cinematic
adventures of James Bond and Crocodile Dundee. Once he had kids, we spent our long
weekends with the wild horses on Chincoteague, and two weeks every summer wandering
the woods of
Eastern Canada
from
Niagara
to the
Bay of
Fundi
and fishing in every stream or puddle along the way that was big enough to support
a bobber. He took us hiking in virgin forests, canoeing to inaccessible beaches
and rafting on white water. When he took me to college in
Los
Angeles,
we stopped by
Mexico
(got up at
When the car broke down (which was fairly often), or thunderstorms followed us (which was almost constant we used to say we ought to visit lands of drought and save their crops), when the canoe tipped over or the propane lamp malfunctioned and took out the screen tent, he never called it a catastrophe, a failure, or a flop. He had a better term adventure. (The car loses power inexplicably and coasts to a stop on some back road half-way to nowhere. Poppa says, "Looks like it going to be an adventure.") And, to my mother's surprise, we all believed it. This was all part of the game.
It's no wonder I caught the wanderlust and set out, at the first opportunity, to put my Bachelor's degree to good use building sheds and planting hedges in Southern Germany, walking in the afternoons and watching all the sailboats.
On this particular afternoon, I followed the wind onto a bus in Fichbach. I had nothing in my pockets, except Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in paperback and some Euro I was using for a bookmark. But the bus stopped as I was walking toward the beach. The gust of the opening doors caught my sail and I got on. It was the bus to Meersberg, a little port town off to the west. I sat two rows behind the driver. I meant to read the book; I tried, but my attention wouldn't hold. The afternoon lakeshore, with its alternating beaches and gardens and gravel paved tracks leading off to tiny hedged-in fairytale cottages, and the overloud German conversations of old women with scarves about their ears, pulled my head up from the pages. (I could almost understand them.) The 14th Century in print could not compete.
Meersberg is a town, meaning there were fewer gardens and more cobblestones than the equally neat and densely populated countryside I had just been through. It had two bus stops the church and the ferry. I got off at the ferry. Then I got on the ferry. (There is little else to do in Meersberg on a weekday.) There were no fares posted. I hoped the bookmark would hold out. Fifteen minutes out into the lake, the ferryman came around to collect the fares. Paying him was a double pleasure. First because I understood the price in German, and second because I had enough left over to get back home. Soon we were out among the whispering sails, with the alps looming before us and the hills of Southern Germany behind, dieseling our way toward Konstance, the city that gives Bodensee its English name.
Konstance is the best preserved of all the German cities built before the world wars forced an update in European architecture by way of the B-52. Its intimate proximity to neutral Switzerland made bombing unadvisable. Instead of building new things, the locals now set up scaffolding and cranes to repair medieval stones and bring cathedrals back to age-old glory. I could spend days wandering the streets and taking pictures, or watching the latest films in English at the art-house theater downtown. But this day I had a different agenda. I wanted to be near the lake a more difficult task than I expected. I set out west from the ferry, but was thwarted by a fence. I headed east and got mired in a private marina. I ended up wandering the city after all, just looking for a left-hand turn, and finally got into a street just above the beachfront houses. The low wall along the lake side of the street was broken only by the strangely narrow gates that admitted tiny European sports cars to the gardens of those miniature palaces with their private slices of shoreline.
Finally, I wandered out into a park dotted with abstract sculpture. It seemed to belong to a nondescript industrial building that stood nearby. The building's one feature, besides the large pipes running in and out, was a glass fronted section on the first floor. Behind the glass, white painted pedestals supported dusty plastic models and the walls were lined with charts and paragraphs of explanation, presumably describing the esotery of whatever processes took place within. The little complex of building and park had the neglected feel of things people saw all the time but never looked at a good place for chain smokers to gripe over cigarettes and the occasional new employee to eat lunch and look at the statues until he found the company lunchroom or the path down to the beach. That path was not difficult to find a well-worn track straight through the park and into the woods where the general public trudged past without noticing the sculptures or the glassed-in display. I spent a moment trying to work out the inscription on one of the sculptures, but finally gave up and added my boot prints to the beaten path.
I walked an hour through the dappled cool where the beach side was shaded right down to the water by overhanging branches. The forest to my right occasionally broke open into squares of lawn where families with blankets and lawn chairs and lotions claimed every available centimeter of sunshine. They tossed about Frisbees and fuzzballs (soccer balls), and read paperbacks. The place had more the feeling of early summer in a city park than a beach resort.
Once I stopped and wedged myself in among them; watched them a while over the top of my book. No one seemed to be looking back. I was just another blond in a pair of shorts. I soon wandered on, hoping for a little more sun and sand. The wooded parts were large enough and empty enough to feel secluded, but crissed and crossed with more paths than seemed necessary, another testimony to the heavy traffic this paradise supported. (Try answering the call of nature when every time you get behind a tree there is another path in front of you, and no underbrush to hide in either.)
Eventually I found what I was looking for. By appearances, half the country was already in on the secret. I emerged from the woods via what appeared to be the back gate of the park, past the modestly hedged nude sunbathing area, and strolled out into about twenty acres of tree-dotted grass, edged by slim but pleasant beaches and covered from water to woods with people. Small children stomped each other's castles in the sandboxes. Men played chess with knee-high pieces on checkered cement slabs next to the shuffleboard, giant generals directing their dwarfish armies. Wives challenged their husbands to tournaments at the ping-pong tables, and teenagers flirted on the deep sand volleyball courts. I spent the afternoon ostensibly looking for a good place to read. That is, I walked around, sitting here for a moment, there for a while, hiding behind my book and watching the people quietly doing beach things on the grass. Or I waded along the shore and looked out at the floating wooden platforms with their strange absence of ten-year-old boys throwing each other into the water. No one splashed or romped or had chicken fights in the shallows. They seemed too intent on resting, soaking in the sun and the water and quiet. Finally I joined them, settled on the grass at the base of a tree, where I could watch the water and listen to the breeze.
When shadows had turned and the sun was dipping west, I headed back. Caught the last ferry back to Meersberg. The water was nearly empty, now, with most of the remaining sailboats headed toward harbors. On the bus back to Fichbach (also the last of the day), I sat on the right side and watched the alps put on their purple shroud of fog and Bodensee turn to gold.
Twilight walked the halls at Bodenseehof. It was the in-between time when the light is fading but no one has turned on the lights. I met my roommate, Michael, in the front hall. He fell in beside me.
"Where you been?" he said.
"Went for a walk."
Three days later, the wind was strong again, this time toward the east and south. Again I stepped onto a bus with a book in my hand (a travel guide) but also my camera, my wallet and, hidden in the secret pocket sewn into my undershirt, my passport. At Friedrichshafen station I bought my tickets, took a five-minute train down to Friedrichshafen Hafen (harbor), then the ferry. Once more I joined the sails on Bodensee, and felt the roll of water beneath the deck. (As a boy I thought I could "get my sea legs" on the half-hour ferry across the Delaware Bay. When we reached the shore I walked bowlegged and imagined the land felt strangely solid.)
I invited Michael this time, and he almost came, but he couldn't quite escape the doldrums of ten months in the same location. So again I rode alone. I didn't mind, too much. I am by nature a social person, but it is always simpler traveling solo, setting out alone and free just me and the road and the wind and the world.
I like the actual motion of traveling. Most of the people I talk to like the destination best, but I love the going. Each vehicle has its own atmosphere, its own romance. I like planes with their roaring take-offs and the drop and catch of turbulence; buses with the local people climbing on and off, and the radio playing local news and pop-rock; trains with their rattling sway and each compartment like a tiny office perfect for writing.
And the ferries. I think I like the ferries best cutting smooth water with the wind rushing past, and dragging our churning wake. There is a hint of magic in it. I sleep through jet flights at 30,000 feet, but spend every moment of a ferry crossing walking from stem to stern and grinning. Once we left the harbor, I even forgot to take pictures.
The ferry docked at
Romanshorn,
Zurich station marks the northern end of the city, and Zurichsee the southern. Down the middle runs the river with its myriad bridges. The city is small and low, by American standards, the skyline dominated by church towers with their clocks and bells. Every major city has its own personality, its own flavor, but in Europe they are all cousins. Vienna, Paris, Budapest, or Prague, each has its river with its bridges, and its cathedrals with their bells. In Zurich, the river divides the churches and museums, on the west bank, from the shops and cafιs on the east. Spans of stone or intricate steel crisscross the water, most of them for pedestrians, with one great causeway at the top and one at the bottom of the city. The bridges run low across the water; there could not be more than four or five feet between bridge and water. Yet flat, low-riding tour boats squeeze under them like mice slipping under a door, giving their passengers a view of the city from water level.
I bought lunch at a grocery store near the station juice, bread and chocolate then ordered a wurst (sausage) from a deli outside. I asked in German how much it cost. The seller answered first in English, then translated into German. That was my first clue that I had stumbled out of the Swiss countryside into a little pocket of the world at large. I found a bench by the river to eat my lunch and watch the people of the world stroll past. They were every shade from pale to brown and spoke more languages than I could recognize. An old German man in coat and hat. A Middle Eastern couple in western dress with baby toddling between them. A black man in droopy warm-ups and a football jersey with gold chains around his neck speaking French to a well-dressed black woman with purple lipstick. As I was finishing my wurst, a man approached me. He was heavily pierced and not very clean. He had tobacco caked on his lips and the holes in jeans showed bare cheeks. His language was a mystery to me, but he wanted my grocery bag to clean up the mess his dog was making in the sidewalk. He used the bag like a glove, picked up the pile, then turned the bag inside out to wrap it up and dumped the hot little bundle into a trash can. He waved, called the dog and returned to the little group of raggedy punks sitting on the sidewalk and playing guitar.
I started on the west bank of the river, preferring museums to restaurants both by inclination and by budget. I saw St. Peter's church, which boasts the largest clock face in Europe, and the church where Ulrich Zwingli preached. In the basement of Zwingli's church, I compared my hand to the pommel of Charlemagne's sword, a two-meter monster with a blade as wide as my palm. I visited private galleries and took pictures of some of Zurich's famous fountains (all reportedly drinkable). I visited the Starbucks, followed a guy with swirling sleeves tattooed on his arms from shoulder to wrist, and watched young boys ride water bicycles in the river.
Between five and six o'clock, everything started closing from churches to shops. Only the cafιs stayed open. By then I was making my way back up the eastern shore toward the station. The last train would leave at seven. I made it with just time enough to buy some postcards and a kilogram of chocolate for the folks back home. Once more it was the last ferry, the last train, the last bus, and the familiar twilight hallways of the place that after just two months had become a home, and soon would be a memory.
I called my dad, that night, from a closet office in the basement of Bodenseehof.
"Hey, Traveler," he said, "How goes the adventure?"
His voice danced with envy and vicarious excitement as he pressed me to elaborate the things that I had seen. Just before we finished I talked about the sailboats on Bodensee.
"One of these days, I'm gonna learn to sail," he said, and the old, familiar dreams were in his voice.
"Me too," I said, "me too."
But as I set the receiver down it seemed me: He already knew.
Maybe not how to tack, or come about, or mind the boom, but certainly how to sail.