A boat finds its name | Ammi Midstokke

Last year, my friend, Nelson, gave us his sailboat.

When I met Nelson nearly 20 years ago, we were both living in India, where I’d met his wife who overheard me trying to acquire a Thanksgiving turkey in Hyderabad.

The pair came over that year for dinner, and have been an intermittent constant in my life ever since – the kind of friends that remain intimate despite distance and time.

Nelson had bought the boat in San Francisco, and while it is rumored that he sailed it, as far as I can tell, it has mostly been the bobbing craft room of a genius-nerd. For Nelson never tires of research or deeper understanding or historical data or finding brass fittings from a century ago.

Remarkably, he also retains all of these things in his mind.

In my years of sailboat dreaming, Connie offered Nelson’s teaching. The closest I ever came was after a breakup, when I considered a year at sea as a single mother and shopped for boats on Craigslist.

Life happened the way it does. I met and married someone who planted my feet firmly on land.

Connie’s father aged and needed care, as did all the animals he’d acquired.

And Nelson got the Big C, lost a part of a lung, some dexterity in his hands and his ability to sail.

The boat is unique; only a handful of them have been made.

Rigged with classic hemp ropes and wishbone booms, they are designed to be sailed alone as a fishing vessel. Or in my case, sailed alone to nestle into a bay and write the next great American novel.

A “cutter-rigged sloop,” she has three sails, beautiful curves, a teak deck and a name that made me scrunch and raise my eyebrows at the same time.

“Ariele? Really?” Disney mermaid or Shakespearean sprite, I wasn’t having it.

There is clearly an unspoken rule about accepting boat names, for there are a great many embarrassing ones etched into hundreds of vessels, tied to marina docks for everyone to see.

Most of them are a play on words, a pun that makes a dad-joke hilarious by comparison.

A few are pretty darn good. Many are redundant.

In Nelson’s defense, he didn’t name the boat, and it seemed a petty thing over which to refuse a gift.

I spent the fall working on the interior, the winter learning to sail and this spring panicking about all the boat-bits I have laying about the garage.

I cannot tell the difference between the depth sounder and the power distributor, a halyard and a sheet.

Also, the boat is a hodgepodge of history and modernization: a vintage design with an electric motor, kerosene lanterns and an autopilot.

So Nelson and Connie came north from L.A. to help us put her back together again, probably because they got tired of texting with me, or concerned for my safety.

They scheduled their trip between chemo treatments.

On the first days, Nelson’s brilliant mind thought in circles around us.

Then he slept for 20 hours, waking only to request craved foods – blueberry pancakes, Taco Del Sol – and return to the horizontal position, where strange alchemy tries to kill a thing inside a person without killing the person.

From where I sit, the balance seems precarious at best.

Every time he emerged from slumber, he’d join our team of tedious workers covered in dust from sanding.

We are like marching ants and have no direction without him. We started labeling things with tape and a sharpie, as he identified various parts and their uses.

It is a futile attempt to not lose the knowledge in his mind.

Nelson could pick up any bolt, length of rope, pulley or wire and tell one where it belongs and why. It is as though this boat is an extension of his own body, though his wife might argue he takes better care of the boat.

I have a photograph of him sitting inside it with a giant bottle of Coca-Cola, identical to the one he put in my fridge.

Watching him navigate the cabin and revive the engine within minutes, I feel equally lost and found: I have no idea what I’m doing, but if anyone can teach me, it’s Nelson.

One afternoon, Nelson and Connie sat on our patio to read some diagnostic results, surrounded by the spring lupine and wild roses and our adoring dogs.

The pine trees circled them like fortress posts, the blue-sky ceiling a promise that there is something beyond this space and time.

The pair are pragmatists, just as each component of the boat can be addressed with a particular solution, they treat the news with something like acceptance and stoic perseverance.

We all know what the results mean.

Whatever the future holds, it will not be as we imagined. In fact, one cannot imagine it, because there are never direct answers.

Just meetings with tumor boards and surgeons and people saying optimistic things like, “They have such innovative therapies these days,” and terms like “pain management” and “quality of life.”

We respond by attacking the mast with 320 grit sandpaper, and massaging tung oil into the wooden fixtures.

We restore life to the boat as if we were shining and glossing our beloved friend and partner, all our hope placed in the dreams of sailing together.

We refuse to capitulate to grief, but we all wonder in our own lonely minds the same silent fear that we dare not say out loud.

Nelson climbs the ladder and takes his place in the cockpit.

He tinkers on wires and levers and buttons, lost in this instead of that.

Over dinner, we’d made fun of bad boat names, but we didn’t tell him what we’d already decided, which is that the boat will be named Nelson.

One way or another, he’ll be sailing.

“How many coats of varnish on this mast?” I ask, running my fingers over the wood, polished with determination until brilliant with the sheen of my faith that all things can be restored.

“Until you get tired or run out,” he says.

I don’t know if he’s answering my question, or another unspoken one.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com