![]() ![]() We would throw the wadded-up acetone paper towels and Popsicle sticks over the side of the boat onto the ground. ![]() We made a two-person assembly line, often at night-because once you start fiberglassing, you can’t stop-layer after layer cutting the glass sheets, dabbing, cutting, dabbing, under a yellow light plugged into an extension cord. For kneepads on the deck, crouched over, as we sliced out the rotten wood. The sound of a Popsicle stick mixing epoxy in a paint cup, the fulfilling slice of a jigsaw through vinyl, and the sudden release of wood when it separates from the blade-these all make me nostalgic for the discomfort of that time. Sometimes we’d sit there on the bow at sunset, our bodies aching, and say, “These will be the best days of our lives.” The worst, I’ll give you, but also the best. And there he would be with his bandana tied around his head, holding a blowtorch to the rudder to straighten it out, whistling something always. Seeing his car and the ladder already up against the hull, I’d allow myself a little smile. The only other car parked next to all the boats-on-stilts would be Josh’s, his dinged-up silver Mazda 3, its entire back seat a tool shelf that rumbled over speed bumps. Every Saturday, I would drive to the boatyard, past the bend in the road that floods at high tide, to the smell of marsh grass and paint. The first year we owned her, she was on stilts, as we re-did every last part of her, down to the epoxy in her keel. Our boat would become a beautiful bond between us, and not just out on the water. I called Josh: “What if we lived on the boat?” To which he said, “The last time I lived on a boat, it wasn’t fun.” I convinced him that a sailboat wasn’t exactly an aircraft carrier, and that this way we could save money for our big trip. The dream was on, the dream was off-too expensive or too outlandish, until one day I sat in particularly bad traffic on my way to work, and I had time to do some thinking about how this wasn’t what I wanted for my life. Commuter traffic exacerbated the urgency. We would buy a boat, fix it up, quit our jobs, and sail south to the Caribbean. city life, the dream became more pressing. When we found ourselves in an old farmhouse on Church Lane in Hampton, Virginia, after years of D.C. We sat in knee-deep water, found mussels in the sand, and we dreamed of clear blue water, of sailboats. ![]() When we were dating, Josh and I spent a weekend away at Assateague, where we canoed against 20 knots of wind, only to realize that the water was so shallow we could walk in it, and so Josh did, pulling the canoe with a rope tied to his waist. We’d climb as though we were on flat ground with buckets in our hands, jigsaws and epoxy, rolls of fiberglass, and plastic bags with 7-11 lunch, and we’d sit on the slabs of cardboard covering up the cockpit wood and take a break. Later, we would climb up that ladder from the gravel to the deck, as easily as you would walk through your house in the middle of the night with lights off to get a glass of water. ![]() “She can hear you,” I said for the first of many times over many years, knocking on her inlaid teak table, her wooden cabinets, and her bookshelves that change to that golden hue in sunlight. We climbed, delicately, 15 feet up the ladder, and looked, stooping down into her cabin, while the broker told us, “She’s a real piece of work.” She was out of the water-“on the hard”-when we went on a hot August day in 2015 to see her at a boatyard in Deltaville, Virginia: a 44-foot 1979 Kelly Peterson sailboat built for the open ocean that could take us around the world if we let her. Combined with years of striving to be unlike everyone else, it was our way in. This eight-minute documentary was a visual representation of our dream. Listening to the words and the music in the car, at work, in bed, I could see the color of the sun on wood, soapsuds on the deck, a saltwater shower. One video in particular we watched so many times that I could imagine it without actually viewing it. And know that they all once had a name.įor years, my husband, Josh, and I watched the sailing videos on YouTube, with their clear teal water and their rolling waves. Find that very back part of a boatyard where boats go to die and the grass grows up around them and their insides are gutted. Instead, walk down the farthest dock at any marina and find the boats that were once loved: varnish peeling, decks soft. There you’ll find clear teal water, rolling waves-the edited versions of other people’s dreams. When you dream of sailing into the sunset, the best place to start is not the Internet. ![]()
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