Ammi Midstokke: When your midlife crisis floats
You know life must be going too smoothly when you decide to acquire a new, expensive and unlearned hobby that takes up your driveway and free time for the foreseeable future.
Having been divorced and remarried, I thought I was immune to the midlife crisis behavior that results in fast cars and yoga teaching certificates. But it turns out we’re never really inoculated against the promise of a bad idea disguised as a good deal.
And I was pretty sure a free sailboat was a good deal.
Only my sailor friends seemed resistant, as if maybe free boats are a known calamity rather than a stroke of good fortune. Sailors have never been associated with positivity and cheer, though. They tried intimidating me with horror stories of complexity and questions like, “Did you do an osmosis test?”
Assuming this was a method of learning how to sail, I studied and tested by putting a sailing manual from 1964 under my pillow for a week. I think it worked because by the time I arrived in Los Angeles to fetch said sailboat, I knew that ropes were to be called lines.
The problem with having a buoyant midlife crisis when you’re married is you have to get spousal buy-in, typically by expressing – in some form other than direct deception – that you won’t have to actually buy anything.
Except gas in California while towing a boat and getting 9 miles to the gallon. And that private cabin at the hot springs because you were so sore from driving. And all the street tacos you ate. And the Indian restaurant you found in Long Beach. And the stiff cocktail necessary as a palliative after paying the marina bill.
I have had boat dreams for years. I thought I’d learn to sail and live on a boat and home-school my kid and travel the world in a flotilla of dog-friendly, self-taught, solar-powered families. Then I married a responsible person and we got paddle boards. Which means the extent of my sailing knowledge beyond the osmosis experiment is recognizing that wind pushes me places when I’m on water. Needless to say, I could not refuse the gift. It was destiny.
To achieve spousal buy-in, there are a few approaches. I just pinned it on my readers.
“People are tired of reading about my running, bike riding and failed gardening,” I said, noting that it is the vocational obligation of the writer to continue seeking new material and perspectives.
Trust me, this venture will have no shortage of material, not to mention a vocabulary about doohickies attached to port sides and starboard sides and such. I hope we all learn some new pirate jargon, too.
At the marina, I offered to “help” in the disassembling of all the parts. It was reminiscent of the time I took my bike apart to discover everything fit in a shoe box and I had no idea how to put it back together. The riggers explained it to me as though they had absolute faith in my ability, though now I suspect there was a reason they gave me their business cards. Fifteen hundred miles later, there are crates of random cables and ropes in our driveway, the bones of a mast and a stack of photographs about how it should look when we’re done rebuilding her.
While all of that is indeed intimidating, there is something in the cells of humans that draws us to travel by water.
Perhaps it is my Viking blood, though even the land-locked peoples of the planet have long navigated by waterways, as if there is some lingering amphibiousness in our DNA. Maybe the acquisition of a boat is no crisis at all, but a return to a self that was established long before one was born.
For now, there is a stout sailing vessel parked in the yard (where both humans and boat are safer) as we embark upon a restoration project. In the meantime, I’m still stacking manuals under my pillow and anticipate being as seaworthy as the boat in due time.
It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s a renaissance. Perhaps that is what she ought to be named.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com