Don’t let the big stuff bog you down, just go sailing

I was standing in my backyard, reflecting on the absence of my swimming pool. Well, it isn’t exactly absent. It’s sort of there.

As a newcomer to Florida, I’ve discovered that Florida pool contractors are the southern kin to the Terrible Williamson clan of con artists. I only remember from old Saturday Evening Post stories that the Terrible Williamsons either tarred your roof with used motor oil, or repaved your driveway with new roofing tar. Either way, they conned homeowners out of their money and left them with a dreadful mess to clean up.

In Florida, the pool jerks, as I now call them, take your money, dig a hole, and then go off to giggle about their scam. The Terrible Williamsons used to return to Cincinnati every year to divvy up their booty: I think the pool jerks go to Orlando and hang out at Disney World.

In any case, I’ve been looking at a 10-by-40-foot hole in the ground for a year. In the spring, it was just dirt. By the summer, it was dirt and reinforcing steel. By late fall, it was covered in gunite (which also covered everything else they came near in the backyard). It’s still gunite. Sigh.

Leo, my friend across the street, has a great little boat that he bought three years ago, intending to do a quick spruce up and start enjoying. Leo now visits a nearby boatyard regularly to look at his version of my backyard swimming pit. The seemingly simple and straightforward task of a new diesel engine became new exhausts, new engine mounts, new cooling system, new prop and rudder.

Then the “might-as-well” disease spread elsewhere: new interior panels, new cushions, new electronics, new, new, new. He has a guy, like my pool jerks, who is moving glacially toward completion. His boat is such a fixture in the boatyard that the workers use his long-removed fuel tank as a work bench. So Leo goes to the boatyard, sits in the cockpit, closes his eyes, and imagines himself dropping the hook in some wonderful little cove.

As I said earlier, there I was, looking past the pool/hole at the waterway behind the house. And I saw the kid.

There’s a youngster, maybe 10 years old, whose parents recently bought him a little plastic sailboat of some sort. It’s not a class dinghy by any means and, when he once sailed past close enough to call to, I asked him what it was. He yelled back, “Wal-mart.” Maybe he misunderstood me. Or maybe not.

In any case, this kid has been burning up the lake with his new toy. I can set my clock in the morning when he walks down to the water’s edge with mast and sail in his arms, followed by a second trek with rudder and board. Then he climbs in, and just uses the hell out of his boat. He’s on the water until dusk, when I can hear one of his parents calling him in to dinner.

I realized that he was without cares when he was on the water. He wasn’t sweating his homework, he wasn’t worried about having enough allowance left, and he certainly wasn’t feeling gloomy about an unfinished swimming pool or a semi-gutted boat.

He was at one with the wind.

I know, because I’ve been there. As a kid, I could spend hours in splendid solitude, sailing the waterways in a dink. Sometimes, of course, the Walter Mitty in me would emerge and I’d be at the helm of a great schooner, shouting orders at the crew. Other times, I’d be in the race of a lifetime, heading for the finish line to clinch the America’s Cup. But most of the time, I was just enjoying the wind on my face and the occasional tingle of spray.

That’s really what sailing is all about: there is something magical about a day on the water that can make your heart soar and your worries disappear. How can you worry about a swimming pool when the jib needs trimming? How can you fret about a missing diesel engine on a rail-down beam reach in a breeze?

I defy anyone to spend an afternoon on the water and be able to worry about shoreside distractions. Bills go away. Cranky bosses are invisible. Mowing the lawn, painting the shutters, getting new tires for the car: all are gone.

But it’s too easy to forget that special potion of sailing—that salve for the soul. We get so caught up in the bustle of everyday life that we don’t spend nearly enough time on the water. I know, because that #&$% swimming pool has been nagging at me for a long time.

But just watching that kid tacking and jibing with a grin plastered all over his face made the troubles melt away. It would have been better to have been on my own boat with that grin and the breeze, but just watching him made me promise myself that I would spend more time on the water and less time worrying.

One look at the kid had reminded me of something very important: he was at one with the wind and the water, and that’s a special place to be.

This column is dedicated to my friend, Bruce Vandale. His footprints in the sand are gone, but his footprints in our hearts will last forever. Fair winds and Godspeed, Bruce.