The timeline of my youth is measured out in 29'4" increments. That's the length of a Dragon Class racing yacht. These boats and the people that sailed them formed my personal mythology. And powering it like a 18-knot northerly, my father Martin Godsil– a true force of nature.
Prologue.
A little over two years ago, my father, Martin Godsil, died. I personally haven’t been witness to a lot of deaths, but it’s my bedside observation that death does not fight fair, and Martin Godsil fought anyway. His bruised ribs became infected and turned to sepsis. Sepsis kills a lot of people and no one talks about it. At least he didn’t have to go out during the present pandemic – that would have been a mess. So that's a blessing. This particular death was not a quiet death with all of the relatives gathered round, holding hands and feeling their spiritual feelings, intoning platitudes, “he’s at peace now.” My Father’s death was noisy, swollen and infected; bruise-colored, brown, yellow and rash-red; grotesquely crenulated with bedsores and angry rebellious body fluids. My Father’s death was haunted by apparitions, while he churned in a malevolent, hellish pit of delusion. True to character, Martin Godsil did not go “quietly in his sleep” into that good night. He only seemed to find peace when my sister spoke into his ear and told him that his wife Sandra would be okay, that we would take care of her, and that his mother - our Grandma Alice – was waiting for him. His body still labored on the breather for another 36 hours or so after that, but his spirit had gone. And so that was that, and may that be the last time I visit a hospital in Bremerton, Washington.
*****
Trying to describe my Dad is like trying to describe the Brahman of the Hindus. Even words turn back, afraid. He was such a formidable personality and had such strength of character and was so, well, how shall I say this … um … LOUD! that even as I write this I feel his presence, just outside my door. Swear to God, I can hear his damaged septum whistling. I would not be surprised if he walked in, looked over my shoulder, and asked “What are you writing? Inspecting your navel again?”
*****
After a B+ grade moderately successful career in the creative arts, along with adolescent dabblings in sports, punk rock, as well as a reasonably dedicated spiritual practice, I’ve encountered quite a number of impressive personalities. Swamis, guitar players, creative directors and entrepreneurs - each of them worth their own novela-length study. But I gotta say that Martin Allen Godsil was quite possibly the most energetic and enthusiastically focused person I’ve ever met. He was like no other character I’ve encountered in film, on the page or in reality.Absolutely larger than life, and it’s hard to believe that death was, in the end, bigger than him.
So this is the story of my unconventional Dad, and his overly-sensitive, vaguely fey, self-conscious, neurotic, artsy, harshly self-driven, anxiety-prone son. So long, and thanks for the DNA.
A little over two years ago, my father, Martin Godsil, died. I personally haven’t been witness to a lot of deaths, but it’s my bedside observation that death does not fight fair, and Martin Godsil fought anyway. His bruised ribs became infected and turned to sepsis. Sepsis kills a lot of people and no one talks about it. At least he didn’t have to go out during the present pandemic – that would have been a mess. So that's a blessing. This particular death was not a quiet death with all of the relatives gathered round, holding hands and feeling their spiritual feelings, intoning platitudes, “he’s at peace now.” My Father’s death was noisy, swollen and infected; bruise-colored, brown, yellow and rash-red; grotesquely crenulated with bedsores and angry rebellious body fluids. My Father’s death was haunted by apparitions, while he churned in a malevolent, hellish pit of delusion. True to character, Martin Godsil did not go “quietly in his sleep” into that good night. He only seemed to find peace when my sister spoke into his ear and told him that his wife Sandra would be okay, that we would take care of her, and that his mother - our Grandma Alice – was waiting for him. His body still labored on the breather for another 36 hours or so after that, but his spirit had gone. And so that was that, and may that be the last time I visit a hospital in Bremerton, Washington.
*****
Trying to describe my Dad is like trying to describe the Brahman of the Hindus. Even words turn back, afraid. He was such a formidable personality and had such strength of character and was so, well, how shall I say this … um … LOUD! that even as I write this I feel his presence, just outside my door. Swear to God, I can hear his damaged septum whistling. I would not be surprised if he walked in, looked over my shoulder, and asked “What are you writing? Inspecting your navel again?”
*****
After a B+ grade moderately successful career in the creative arts, along with adolescent dabblings in sports, punk rock, as well as a reasonably dedicated spiritual practice, I’ve encountered quite a number of impressive personalities. Swamis, guitar players, creative directors and entrepreneurs - each of them worth their own novela-length study. But I gotta say that Martin Allen Godsil was quite possibly the most energetic and enthusiastically focused person I’ve ever met. He was like no other character I’ve encountered in film, on the page or in reality.Absolutely larger than life, and it’s hard to believe that death was, in the end, bigger than him.
So this is the story of my unconventional Dad, and his overly-sensitive, vaguely fey, self-conscious, neurotic, artsy, harshly self-driven, anxiety-prone son. So long, and thanks for the DNA.
1. US 13 - Reluctant
"Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
- – Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in The Willows, was actually a banker by profession. Right now I'm visualizing him jotting notes in a bank ledger in the clerkish half-light of offices of the bank of England, a translucent thought bubble, a sort of writer's aura, visible above his head. There's a Toad, a Badger and a Mole cavorting and yes a Dragon.
One of the many short stories that Kenneth Grahame wrote was The Reluctant Dragon.
The Dragon in question is not fierce but rather sensitive and poetry-loving – in other words, Reluctant to fulfill his accepted role as a terrifying, fire-breathing, village-destroying monster. He simply refuses to scorch fields, eat sheep or kidnap any princesses – much less, horde gold and treasure. Rather, he just wants to lay around all day and compose poetry. Totally against type.
A shorthand summary of the plot: A local lad, who’s a bit of a bookworm and therefore happens to knows all about dragons, drops by the dragon’s lair and they strike up a friendship. The boy basically says, "Look, I get it. You don't mean any harm and you just want to layze about and recite poetry all day and have no interest in doing any sort of menacing dragon-ish stuff. But the fact remains, you're a dragon. And just being a creates a certain amount of fear and trepidation among the villagers." The tension mounts when St. George shows up to do some Dragon slaying. But, with the teenage boy acting as go-between a deal is reached. They will put on a show for the local villager and stage an epic battle. St. George will be declared the victor after a few rounds, and then they will all celebrate with a feast. St. George will regale everyone with tales of daring-do, and perhaps the Dragon will even recite some of his poetry. Huzzah! Everyone goes home happy.
At any rate, very clever and British, don’t you think? To take the most fierce of mythical beasts and make it a poetry-loving daydreamer.
Looking at the story on an allegorical level – as we English major are wont do – it does pose deeper and timely questions.
Exactly what does one do when your appearances say one thing, and your heart says another? Who hasn’t felt a little disinclined to perform the expected roles dictated by family and society? Who of us hasn’t, at times, felt a little out of place in our own body?
Kenneth Grahame tackles this issue with depth, compassion and wit. But not so much in 1940’s Hollywood. In the Disney animated version of The Reluctant Dragon, the Dragon is awkward, ill-at ease with his own decidedly non-athletic body, all stammers and blushes. Because of the 1940’s era caricature of a what an effeminate, flower-sniffing cartoon dragon might sound like – imagine Paul Linde as the English Ambassador the court of Louis the XIV – this short film is not available as a stand alone piece and only as part of a tour of the Walt Disney animation studios. It comes accompanied by this disclaimer: "These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now ..." Well, good for Walt & Mickey. Self-preservation, or sincere mia culpa? Tough to say. Regardless, in recent times, the conversation, and our thoughts and feelings around our expected roles has become more nuanced. Boys were once made of snails and puppy dog tails. Girls were sugar and spice. But maybe you feel like snails and sugar, with a wag of a puppy dog tail. Or some sugar, some spice and a snail. Or maybe none of the above. The point is, that gender is no longer thought of as binary, but a continuum. It’s not this or that, but whatever reflects your true sense of self – and that identity is part feeling, part biology.
A Reluctant Dragon can be anything he, she or they want to be. A doctor. An Attorney. An investment banker. A digital artist. A schoolteacher. A mechanical engineer. Or even an advertising copywriter/creative director.
&&&&
Sooooooo this whole narrative that I PROMISE is the story of my Dad, his boats and my relationships to them - it starts with a self-indulgent aside? Yes - this accomplishes two things. 1) it sets a precedent for what's to come. I have a busy, spiraling, multi-faceted and at times, brilliant mind that I find personally fascinating at any rate and I'd like to invite you along for the ride. And 2) there's some symbolism going on here, just to be transparent. My dad was a builder, a craftsman. And his anxiety-prone, asthmatic, androgynous bookish writerly son? Not so much. A bit of a Reluctant Dragon. But maybe I'm a little bit more like my Dad, and he was a bit more of an artist than he would seem at first meeting? We'll see.
Get your foul weather gear on. It's time to leave the dock.
&&&&&&&&&
In 1962, Martin Godsil was a freshly-minted attorney, a junior associate in the firm of Casey & Pruzan in Seattle, Washington. Their offices were in the Smith Tower. At 42 stories including its iconic four-sided pointed peak, the Smith Tower is now dwarfed by the modern Seattle skyline. But as any long time Seattleite and they’ll tell you “When it was built, in 1914, the Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi.” For any true Seattleite, the Smith Tower is about as mythical as a building can get, without being an actual castle.
One day – let’s call it a Tuesday – Martin boards the rattling old-school elevator. Good morning, Mr. Godsil says the uniformed elevator operator. Good afternoon, Richard. And then another gentleman gets on. Martin Godsil, strikes up a conversation. The weather is fine today, he says. And it was. A crisp, classic fall day in September. The man replies, "Yes indeed, the blessings of an Indian Summer are upon us." As he continues, he goes on to say that he’s going sailing on Lake Washington. Oh, really, says Martin, lighting up. "I have a boat – a 30 foot sailboat boat," he continues. And I'm looking to sell it." Suddenly, all the of my lawyerly preoccupations are whisked away, as ephemeral as Dandelion seeds in a gusting northerly. Martin Godsil had always wanted to sail, ever since being in the boat with his brother on the lake as a child in Alaska. Even his two-year tour of duty in the Arctic aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind had not shaken his love for the water.
“It’s moored down at Leschi.”
“When can I come by and see it?”
“Why don’t you join me for the twilight race this evening?”
Happenstance is the way that we humans are manipulated by God, Fairies, sneaky witches, Jesus, Durga, Krishna, Loki, Eshu, Anastasi, Iblis, Jupiter, Yahweh, Allah, Odin, Shiva, Rama, Athena, elves, and other plotting higher forces.
For without that talk on the elevator, there would be no dragon racing on the Lake, or the Sound, no marriage to Sandra Ruth Badgley, no trips to Vancouver, no regattas in Maple Bay, no son named Max Alan or daughter named Dorothy Alice, no house on East Calhoun Street, no non-stop truckin’, towing the Dragon back east with the Beach Boys Endless Summer on endless repeat, no trophies and plaques and pictures that line the wall, no trips to Switzerland, France and Italy, no sailing on Lake Garda, or on Scotland’s Firth-of-Forth, and of course you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.
&*&*&*&*
Even in 1962, U.S 13 was an older wood dragon. Red Flyer red hull and white below the waterline. At that time, all of the boats were made of wood, as well as the spars. U.S. 13 is outfitted with outdated block and tackle. The lines are frayed and the cotton sails are soft and yellowed, hardly holding shape at all. As they race around the buoys, the boat is viscerally slower than the others. US 13 needs work. It needs love. “TLC” Marty Godsil would say. But as luck would have it, there is a still a bit of warmth in the September sun, the blue of Lake Washington mirrors the sky, clouds and forest surrounding the lake in a green hug, and as the gentle fall northly kisses his cheek, he is smitten.
“I’ll take it” he says. And maybe it’s more accurate to say, the boat takes him.
&*&*&*&*
A Dragon Class yacht is easy to fall in love with. The Dragon Class yacht is quite possibly the most beautifully proportioned yacht design ever. If there’s a flickering shadow of a racing yacht on Plato’s wall of archetypes, it’s in the shape of a Dragon. Svelte, yet muscular. Steady in a storm. Sleek to the eye of but of heavy displacement, i.e. it has a heavy keel and is despite its deceptively low freeboard, is nearly impossible to sink or capsize. The Dragon is 29’4” long, overweight, sluggish in light winds. But when the winds begin to rise, there’s nothing like a Dragon. What is a storm in just about any other sailboat, is a pleasure aboard a Dragon.
Designed 1929 in Oslo, Norway, the Dragon is built for the heavy weather conditions of the North Sea and is the end product of 1000 years of Viking know-how. The Dragon design predates wet suits and life-jackets, hiking trapezes and tiller extensions and fiberglass designs – not to mention carbon fiber and all the space age alloys that go into the high-performance contraptions that pass for racing sailboats today.
Martin Godsil had made of hobby of rebuilding roadsters and he was already thinking of the improvements. That winter he takes possession of the boat, and begins to saw, grind, sand and modernize. By Spring, he’s ready to be at the helm of his own racing yacht.
For Martin Godsil, you were either racing, or you were building or you were in training. In life, there is always the next mark. And when the race is finished, eat your lunch and get ready for the next start. But it he did break his rule, at least once, and went for a nice, relaxing, romantic evening sail – just for fun. Maybe he had another goal in mind.
Sometime in 1963, Martin Godsil met a young woman named Sandra Badgley. Who knows. It was probably at the Red Onion – that part is veiled in the mists of pre-history.
But the end result was that Martin Godsil invited her on a date – and not just any ol’ date – but an evening sail on Lake Washington on his boat. Well, that’s different, she thought. And so she accepted.
And as luck would have it, it was a beautiful summer evening. A gentle northerly blowing the full length of Lake Washington as they departed from Leschi Marina. This was in the years before the 520 bridge was built. Bellevue was just a small, rural hamlet and the memory of the ferry service across the lake still fresh in everyone’s memory.
The Pacific Northwest Sky was the blue you sing about, the freshwater of Lake Washington was the blue you dream about. As Sandra Godsil sat on the stern and listened to the waves caress the hull of the Dragon, Martin Godsil explained how the sheets and sails and worked and then offered her the helm. Holding the tiller lightly, Sandra had an instant affinity for the boat. She could feel the wind, the waves and moreover, she could feel the boat itself – the boat itself had a spirit all it’s own - it wanted to get somewhere. It was just like the horses she’d grown up with on the farm in rural Washington – this Dragon was a living thing. The wind, the water, the dragon – Sandra Godsil was smitten. And maybe perhaps possibly even a little bit smitten with Marty Godsil, too.
And off they went, as my Mother so poetically states, to “see the world on the back of a Dragon.” All they needed was a name. And so they rechristened the boat Reluctant. And I believe it’s noteworthy that in the mid 60’s, Martin Godsil named his first dragon Reluctant. Not Smaug. Not Puff, but Reluctant. My father was not the poetry loving type, but you’ve got to admire the self-effacing humor. The humility and awareness of limitations. He knew he was a beginner and had a long way to go.
Truly it was a fairy tale beginning, Once Upon a Time, Upon a Lake, Upon a Sailboat. And my earnest prayer is that we should all have such luck, and a brisk northerly, and not a lot of powerboat slop, as we sail off in search of our own … Happily Ever After.
2. US 250 - Mistral
Mistral
The Mistral is winter northerly that blows across the south of France and out into the Gulf of Lion – the long arching Bay that makes up the storied seashore of the rich and famous. There is nothing gentle or laid back or even vaguely “Mediterranean” about the Mistral. It is a cold, vicious wind that regularly blows 15-25 knots for sustained periods of over 24 hours and can even reach gale force strength.
The Mistral is the meteorological opposite of the Scirocco, the southerly that blows off of the hot deserts of northern Africa. I imagine the Scirocco to be basically analogous to Southern California’s Santa Anas, which bring unspeakable heat, an itchy dryness to the sinuses and in these early years of the 21st century can fan our catastrophic seasonal fires. But Southern California’s Santa Ana winds can be a midwinter’s gift, as well. Warm days at the turn of the new year – clear January mornings without a cloud on the horizon, where the sky, sea and land seems to recline lazily in a blue bold stillness; Mt. Wilson touchably clear from the Palas Verdes Peninsula, and sunsets that bring the locals to the beach to watch Mother Nature’s slow motion fireworks.
I’ve been blessed to visit many places around the globe, either on production shoots for car commercials, or else on sailing trips with my family when I was young. However, I’ve never visited the South of France, sailed the Mediterranean, or seen North Africa. I’ve always wanted to visit North Africa. I’m fascinated by Egyptian history, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and I’ve always had a sort of minor obsession with ancient Carthage, and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Carthage had had a succession of legendary generals like Hannibal and had won all three Punic Wars. Would the balance of power then have rested on the South Side of the Mediterranean? (As it had for so long when the Pharaohs reigned?) Would Africa have been ascendant and not Europe? Would our globe be turned upside down? I promise this to be my last tangential flier, for today our theme is wind and sea and sometimes you just gotta just take what the wind gives you, ride the puffs, take the lifts and tack on the headers ….[i]
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a native of Seattle, Washington. Before moving to Southern California to take a job at BBDO at the age of 26, I had never lived anywhere else. I never owned a car. I lived in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill less than a quarter mile from the hospital room I was born in. My life was agoraphobically small, and I couldn’t wait to get out. But as the saying goes, home is the place you can’t wait to get away from, and spend the rest of your life trying to find.
Seattle, with its moss encrusted sidewalks and evergreens, its ferns and nettles and tangles of blackberry brambles, the slugs and constant drip of rain and the scent damp rotting undergrowth, that’s my home. Never too hot and never too cold and contrary to its reputation, it doesn’t really rain that much. And what I mean by that, is that compared to Texas Gulf rain, or East Coast rain, or Deep South Atlanta rain, Seattle rain is just a gentle mist. It really only rains a few days a year. Okay, enough days to make a collection of weeks. But you get the point. It’s a clammy Goldilocks climate without extremes – never-too-hot-or-too-cold. And as for the near constant damp, as my mother, Sandra Godsil says, “That’s why it’s so green.”
For the record, the top ten rainiest cities in America are:
🤷🏻♂️
My mother, Sandra Godsil, was a bit of a weather mage and taught me to read and predict the weather simply by reading the clouds, checking the barometer and the direction of the wind. As I was growing up, this was our morning ritual. Coffee in hand, she would check the direction of the wind by looking across the park to the flags on Seattle Yacht Club. I it was northerly, that meant clear. If it was a southerly, that meant rain and clouds. Next, she would tick the barometer with her fingernail. If it stayed steady or went down, the weather was changing for the worse. If it went up, sunshine was on the way.
The reason you can predict the weather with unfailing accuracy is due to the idiosyncratic nature of Seattle’s geography. Imagine Seattle as a sort of topographical hallway, running north-south. To the east, Seattle in hemmed in by Lake Washington and then the Cascade Mountains. The west, you have Puget Sound and then the snow-covered Olympic range. Along with its 47° latitude and proximity to the Pacific Ocean, this results in a delicate interplay of mountains and sun, wind and water - a predictable and ritualized seasonal ballet of weather patterns and temperature.
This geography, and it’s meteorological consequences, inform how I orient myself in the world. Even in my dreams I have a magnet’s sense of true north. On the other hand, I can get comically lost when I don’t have mountains or bodies of water to navigate by or have a clear line of sight to the horizon – witness, my one directionless year spent in Dallas, Texas, endlessly orbiting on the beltway.
From the house I grew up at 1633 East Calhoun in Seattle, Washington, if you walk out the door, you’re facing Montlake Playfield. Even now, when I think about the cardinal directions I imagine walking out that front door, crossing over into the park – perhaps noticing the cherry blossoms on the stately row of trees … it must be late March or April. Now I’m standing out in the park on the grass. Across the playfield through the trees, mud, marsh and cattails is Portage Bay, where you’ll find SYC (Seattle Yacht Club), NOAA[ii](National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and then beyond that, the UW (University of Washington, Go Huskies). If you go further still along I-5, you’ll get to North gate, and then Everett and eventually Bellingham and Blaine, the U.S. Canada Border and Vancouver.
So, that’s my North.
Once your internal magnet is pointed north, the other directions fall into place. To your left, that’s west. And as you’re standing out in Montlake Playfield to your left is the Roanoke neighborhood, a sort of hilly extension of the northside of Capitol Hill. Beyond that, Lake Union and the rest of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which winds it’s watery way from Lake Washington to Puget Sound, dividing Seattle in half crossed by four draw bridges and two highways, in order, from right to left – Montlake, University Bridge, I-5, Aurora, Fremont, and Ballard. Then come the Locks and Puget Sound, or as the locals call it, The Sound. Beyond Puget Sound is the Olympics and then on the other side of that, shrouded in fog and mist, the Pacific Ocean. So, that’s my West.
To my right, is the hill with all blackberries bushes– in the fall, there will be so many blackberries the neighborhood children will consider running away and living off the land. Beyond that, Montlake Elementary sets atop a small, nameless hill and if you continue you’ll arrive at the Stop-n-Go. Crossing 24th, after a few blocks you’ll arrive at the arboretum and then the gated community of Broadmoor and then Madison Park and then Lake Washington and then eventually the Cascade Mountains, a thousand mile long fence made of stone, evergreen and glaciers keeping the rest of the country out. The sun rises over the Cascades, so that must be my East.
And behind us, rises Capitol Hill, with the rest of south Seattle, Tacoma, Portland Oregon, California, Disneyland and all of California crouched behind it.
So even now if I take a break and walk out into the Labor Day sunshine on my deck at 387 Highland Avenue in Montclair, NJ, 3000 miles from 1633 East Calhoun and I face North I think of my four cardinal directions, Montlake Park (N), Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains (W), Lake Washington and the Cascades (E) and Capitol Hill (S).
***
The magic of the Seattle climate, explained, summarized in plain science:
Because of the mountains to the East and West, the prevailing winds come from either the North or the South. The Northwind brings dry and cold weather in the winter, and warm dry weather in the Summer, because it journeys overland from Canada. The South brings wet, slightly warmer weather in the winter – cold, but rarely cold enough to freeze, because it comes off of the ocean. In the spring, fall and most of the summer, the South wind brings wet slightly colder weather except for a few glorious weeks in August when the southerly is as warm and gentle as a lover’s fingertips and brings day after day of sunshine.
As I’m write this I’m suddenly 15 years old again dangling my feet off of the platforms and into the life-warm waters on the second footbridge on the path through the marsh out to Foster Island. The blue-green warmth is so lush and fragrant that that time itself slows to a leisurely summer pause. The only movement in the universe is the orderly ripples emerging from the shaded inlets and recesses of the arboretum; the only sound the steady whirr of wheels on the 520 bridge.
☀️
In the Lushootseed dialect of the coastal Salishan, the language in which Chief Sealth made his famous speech, the northwest wind was called Stul-axaud and the southerly was called Stul-cak. The winds in Seattle have no names in modern English, but Mistral always makes me think of winters in the Pacific Northwest. Cold clear days where the dry, ice-cold northerly howls down from Canada, turning cheeks pink, numbing fingers and whipping Puget Sound and Lake Washington into a whitecaps. I can hear the rigging clanging and rattling in the masts at Shilshole Bay Marina. Because mostly, Mistral makes me think of my father, Martin Godsil – the boats and the sailing he loved.
⛵️
It’s Saturday, January 16, 1971 and the rain come as reliably as night follows day – or what passes for the day during winter. Sometimes weeks pass with the sun never seeming to quite get it together to properly rise.
A 1971 White Econoline Van drives through half-awake streets of a gray Saturday morning, tires hissing on the wet pavement.
I do not question the where or why of accompanying my father on this rainy Saturday morning. I’m too young to have a personal agenda. I have no basketball practice, no band practice, no friends meet.
Emerging from the grid of blocks that make up the neighborhood of Montlake, we come to the five way stop at the end of Boyer Avenue, we veer right and drive along Fairview. The steep hill of Roanoke climbs away to the left and Portage Bay is to our right. We pass the Red Robin Bar and Grille, a neighborhood biker joint with a reputation for cold beer, great fries and legendary hamburgers. Over the next fifteen years, someone with vision will expand it and turn it into a family restaurant and then take it national.
But it’s 1971. Starbucks is a new hippie spot selling bulk coffee and tea, and there is no Microsoft or Amazon. No one has ever used the terms “Tech Startup” or “Cell phone” in a sentence, much less “Frappuccino.” Frederick and Nelson is still the destination for Frangos. All of existence is in its right place, undisturbed by greed and fear and other market forces. Red Robin, and much else about Seattle is still wonderfully provincial, comfortable and insular as a Cowichan sweater.
My dad drives across the University Bridge, tires humming on the metal grating. The road turns right and wraps under itself like the eye of a bowline and follows the ship canal to the west. As we drive, I ask my father questions. My father is pleased with my curiosity and answers each question with thoughtfulness and patient humor, like you would talk to an adult, never mocking. The white van comes to a four-way stop and then jogs left under the train trestle, followed by a quick right as the road hugs the north shore of Lake Union. The lake opens wide before us and on a clear day would see the buildings of downtown and the Space Needle and then Queen Anne Hill to the right – but not today. Emerging from the mist you see the fenced-off ruin of the Gasworks; a ghostly monument to what happens when the wear and tear caused by heat and friction meet the fallibility of tired, bored men. And then to our right, we pass the Seattle Municipal dump. Inside, a vast, sourly pungent pit echoing with the roar of machinery. Huge dozers like mechanized moles push mountainous piles of human refuse. The boy and his father are not taking anything to the dump – not today. After passing the Seattle Municipal Dump, Lake Union narrows to become the ship canal once again. We pass through the itinerant Bohemian storefronts of Fremont, turning right onto Leary Way and into Ballard proper. We pass warehouse after warehouse, the collective closet of Seattle’s fishing industry. On 46th we takes left and the boy and we arrive at a two story, block long building with “Chef’s Campers, Van Conversions stenciled in bold 3-Foot Letters across the side. As we walk in, they are greeting by the smell of damp and motor oil. The boy’s father flicks on his worklight with a fluorescent buzz and reveals inside the quiet of the semi-submerged garage where we see a sleek racing yacht boat sat in its cradle. In the dim light it’s surface seemed to glow with a light of its own – a cold and clear yellow, the official team color of joy, as purely optimistic as a spring sunrise.
This was the boat my father christened Mistral. The last of the great wooden dragon class yachts, US 250. My dad was finishing it himself, getting it ready for the 1972 Olympic Trials. Mistral was a fast boat, a lucky boat, full of dreams and magic. Night after night, and weekend after weekend my father would sand, and paint and drill. Crafting, sawing, measuring. He filled sheaves of legal yellow pads with lists and drawings. Fittings were ordering then altered to his specifications. His mind hummed and the bandsaw roared, and when it fell silent, you could once again hear Don McClean sing:
… bye bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the Levy but the Levy was dry. Good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die.
For us, those were good times, uncomplicated times. No one had heard of global warming. My dad had a purpose – And I had not yet met insecurity, anxiety, puberty or drugs. Moral ambivalence, cynicism and the ideological fallout from Viet Nam were there, certainly, but as hidden from view as Mt. Rainier behind the cold blanket of clouds.
My father was preparing this boat to compete in the 1972 Olympic trials and possibly win a berth in the 1972 Olympic games.
In the political arena, there was another contest to be held in 1972. The president was a Republican named Richard Nixon. Nixon was the incumbent, running for reelection against the Democratic contender, McGovern. The dominant issues in the public consciousness at the time were the Viet Nam War, and inflation, followed by the Equal Right’s Amendment. The country was as divided as it is now, but along different and more raggedly demarcated lines. It occurs to me as I write this that the extremists were on the left and calling out the conservative monied power structure, and in my view they had the facts right and some of their methods wrong. Now the extremists are on the right, make up their own truth, and are manipulated by the conservative power structure. That’s one take on it anyway.
The Watergate break-in took place the night of June 17, 1972.
The 1972 Summer Olympics took place from August 26th-September 11th in Munich, Germany. Munich is in Bavaria, in Southern Germany where there are many lakes, such as the Bodensee. But because of internal bylaws governing Olympic Sailing Competition, Olympic racing must take place on salt water, a specified number of nautical miles away from shore so that racing is fair and not effected by landmasses or any other geographical interference. For these reason, the 1972 Olympic Sailing Regatta took place in Kiel, a resort town on the Baltic Sea – a nine hour drive north from Munich.
The US Olympic Trials were held San Francisco Bay, on what is called the Olympic or Berkley Circle. The reason they held the Olympics there: They expected the wind to blow hard at the Olympic games in Kiel. “To blow like stink” as my father would say.
As always, my father prepared superlatively well but did not do well at the Olympic Trials in San Francisco in 1972.
The winds blew as predicted in San Francisco Bay. Like clockwork – as they always do in the summer. Kind of light in the morning, and then as the Sacramento Valley heats up, it creates the “Venturi Effect.” My father explained this effect many times around the dinner table. As the heat rises out in the Sacramento Valley – “Like an oven, sometimes over 110 Degrees!” it creates a vacuum and all of the cold air from the Pacific “howls” through the narrow golden gate and up the Sacramento Valley. This explanation would be accompanied by sweeping vigorous hand movements. And I gotta say, when I finally visited San Francisco, and saw the fog stack up on the Golden Gate, and spent time all that time on the rail beating to weather, it was every bit as awesome as my father described it.
My Dad never really talked about the Olympic trials. He did not finish well. As to how hard the wind blew, he left a few clues. One, he would always refer to his friend Robby Wilcox and his crew as “animals.” This was not a pejorative term. In my father’s view, anyone over 6’2” and physically imposing was an animal. It was a compliment. Robby Wilcox and his crew did well at the 1972 Olympic trials because they were “animals” and they could handle the heavy weather. There was one other clue he left. To his young son, he would point out the heavy duty backstay system on Caprice, a jet black Dragon in the Lake Washington Dragon Fleet. The ¼ inch running backstay wires – stainless steel woven like rope, wound around the wheels and even if you weren’t that strong you could turn the wheels and they would hold and lock the backstay. They would click tighter, and tighter, never giving back an inch – with a sensation like a huge safe combo lock that only goes one way. With this wheel-and-drum system you could get the weather backstay so tight it would twang like an E string on a bass guitar. And then when you’d tack, you’d throw off the locking mechanism, and the leeward backstay would run free, and you’d tighten the backstay on the weather side and jump up on the rail to hike out. This backstay system was heavy duty, durable, and capable of incredible purchase – as my father pointed out, it was purpose built for heavy air. Though it had been sold to new owners, the Morgans, Caprice was the boat that won the Olympic trials in 1972 and went to Germany. In the Olympics, Caprice was helmed by Don Cohen. My father often spoke of Don Cohen in reverential terms, but never mentioned that we was Jewish. The reason I bring it up: in 1972, the Olympics were tragically disrupted by a terrorist attack in which 13 members of the Israeli Olympic team lost their lives.
When Don Cohen arrived at Kiel, the wind was unreasonably light. It did not “blow like stink;” rather the regatta was a “drifter.” No word could relate such disappointment and hands-up surrender to the whims of Mother Nature as the word “drifter” as spoken by my father.[iii] Still, Don Cohen persevered with his boat that was not rigged for the conditions, and brought home a bronze medal. The captain of the Israeli Olympic team told Don Cohen, you’re taking this medal for all of us now.
💨
On August 8th, 1974, my Dad knocked on my bedroom door and told me to come join him in the TV Room. “You should see this. You’ll remember it for the rest of your life.”
What I saw on TV was earnest and emotionally perplexed man barely holding it together. Used to being in charge of his emotions, and other people, he was struggling. My dad confirmed that this was the President, Richard Nixon. “It is not in my nature to quit. I am not a quitter.” said Richard Nixon - and then he quit.
The societal winds that blew him into power, that made him the most powerful man on earth for 6 short years, turned around and blew him right back out to sea to live alone in ignominious obscurity. “I am not a crook,” he said. And the whole world pointed, and laughed.
🛠
On August 8th, 1974, Mistral was long gone. Marty Godsil had sold it to Bob Burgess in 1972 after the Dragon Class was dropped from the Olympics. Mistral would go on to win many regattas, including a world championship, but not with my father at the helm.
My father never called our boats The Mistral, or The Eclipse of The Phoenix like, you know, The Titanic or The USS Enterprise or The Missouri. They weren’t “The” anything. Our racing yachts had names like people. Or pets. And they all had personalities. My Dad loved Mistral. I don’t think he ever got over it. My father not only finished building Mistral, but built a model replica of his lemon yellow dragon from a kit. I imagine he saw the model kit in a hobby shop and couldn’t help himself. It was a boat that needed love. It needed to be built.
On August 8th, 1974, I watched the president resign. I wasn’t really sure what to do. As I was trying to form a question, perhaps on behalf of all of us, something along the lines of, “What happens now? What are we gonna do?” my Dad stood up, turned off the TV and went back to his workshop. He had a new project. Good enough, I thought. I went back to my room to play with my toys.
[i] Lifts and headers are technical terms taken from sailboat racing. Sailboat races being with a weather leg, with the weather mark set directly to weather – or straight upwind – from the start line. Obviously, you can’t sail directly into the wind. The closest you can manage with a racing yacht is about 20°, give or take. Adjusting for drag and slide-slip, the result is that when one is beating to windward toward the weather mark, one is always tacking through angles of about 45°, from one tack to the other. A lift is a shift in wind direction that “lifts” you closer to the weather mark. A header means a shift in wind direction so that you’re “headed” away from the mark. A starboard tack lift is a port tack header, and vice versa. Wind shifts can be incremental, or huge. That can be temporary or sustained and even continually clocking from around the compass dial throughout the day. You don’t want to get caught on the outside of a lift, because this means that you end up travelling a longer distance to the weather mark – you’re “on the outside of the wagon wheel,” as my father used to say. Along with wind velocity, and the ability to adjust your sails to maximize the speed of your boat, managing the angles of headers and lifts account for nearly all of the grand and glorious strategic chess-game that is one design sailboat racing.
[ii] During my Elementary School years, I can remember NOAA releasing weather balloons up into the atmosphere every day at 7:30 on the dot. “There it goes,” we would all say as we sat at the breakfast table. But I didn’t need a weather balloon to know which way the wind blows. We had Mom.
[iii] Martin Godsil had many sayings. One of them was to always remember the five p’s. I rolled them out at the Post Office when my 18 years old kids were getting their passports. Always remember the five P’s – Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. My son Will added under his breath, it’s actually six. Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
The Mistral is winter northerly that blows across the south of France and out into the Gulf of Lion – the long arching Bay that makes up the storied seashore of the rich and famous. There is nothing gentle or laid back or even vaguely “Mediterranean” about the Mistral. It is a cold, vicious wind that regularly blows 15-25 knots for sustained periods of over 24 hours and can even reach gale force strength.
The Mistral is the meteorological opposite of the Scirocco, the southerly that blows off of the hot deserts of northern Africa. I imagine the Scirocco to be basically analogous to Southern California’s Santa Anas, which bring unspeakable heat, an itchy dryness to the sinuses and in these early years of the 21st century can fan our catastrophic seasonal fires. But Southern California’s Santa Ana winds can be a midwinter’s gift, as well. Warm days at the turn of the new year – clear January mornings without a cloud on the horizon, where the sky, sea and land seems to recline lazily in a blue bold stillness; Mt. Wilson touchably clear from the Palas Verdes Peninsula, and sunsets that bring the locals to the beach to watch Mother Nature’s slow motion fireworks.
I’ve been blessed to visit many places around the globe, either on production shoots for car commercials, or else on sailing trips with my family when I was young. However, I’ve never visited the South of France, sailed the Mediterranean, or seen North Africa. I’ve always wanted to visit North Africa. I’m fascinated by Egyptian history, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and I’ve always had a sort of minor obsession with ancient Carthage, and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Carthage had had a succession of legendary generals like Hannibal and had won all three Punic Wars. Would the balance of power then have rested on the South Side of the Mediterranean? (As it had for so long when the Pharaohs reigned?) Would Africa have been ascendant and not Europe? Would our globe be turned upside down? I promise this to be my last tangential flier, for today our theme is wind and sea and sometimes you just gotta just take what the wind gives you, ride the puffs, take the lifts and tack on the headers ….[i]
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a native of Seattle, Washington. Before moving to Southern California to take a job at BBDO at the age of 26, I had never lived anywhere else. I never owned a car. I lived in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill less than a quarter mile from the hospital room I was born in. My life was agoraphobically small, and I couldn’t wait to get out. But as the saying goes, home is the place you can’t wait to get away from, and spend the rest of your life trying to find.
Seattle, with its moss encrusted sidewalks and evergreens, its ferns and nettles and tangles of blackberry brambles, the slugs and constant drip of rain and the scent damp rotting undergrowth, that’s my home. Never too hot and never too cold and contrary to its reputation, it doesn’t really rain that much. And what I mean by that, is that compared to Texas Gulf rain, or East Coast rain, or Deep South Atlanta rain, Seattle rain is just a gentle mist. It really only rains a few days a year. Okay, enough days to make a collection of weeks. But you get the point. It’s a clammy Goldilocks climate without extremes – never-too-hot-or-too-cold. And as for the near constant damp, as my mother, Sandra Godsil says, “That’s why it’s so green.”
For the record, the top ten rainiest cities in America are:
- Mobile, AL.
- Pensacola, FL.
- New Orleans, LA.
- West Palm Beach, FL.
- Lafayette, LA.
- Baton Rouge, LA.
- Miami, FL.
- Port Arthur, TX.
🤷🏻♂️
My mother, Sandra Godsil, was a bit of a weather mage and taught me to read and predict the weather simply by reading the clouds, checking the barometer and the direction of the wind. As I was growing up, this was our morning ritual. Coffee in hand, she would check the direction of the wind by looking across the park to the flags on Seattle Yacht Club. I it was northerly, that meant clear. If it was a southerly, that meant rain and clouds. Next, she would tick the barometer with her fingernail. If it stayed steady or went down, the weather was changing for the worse. If it went up, sunshine was on the way.
The reason you can predict the weather with unfailing accuracy is due to the idiosyncratic nature of Seattle’s geography. Imagine Seattle as a sort of topographical hallway, running north-south. To the east, Seattle in hemmed in by Lake Washington and then the Cascade Mountains. The west, you have Puget Sound and then the snow-covered Olympic range. Along with its 47° latitude and proximity to the Pacific Ocean, this results in a delicate interplay of mountains and sun, wind and water - a predictable and ritualized seasonal ballet of weather patterns and temperature.
This geography, and it’s meteorological consequences, inform how I orient myself in the world. Even in my dreams I have a magnet’s sense of true north. On the other hand, I can get comically lost when I don’t have mountains or bodies of water to navigate by or have a clear line of sight to the horizon – witness, my one directionless year spent in Dallas, Texas, endlessly orbiting on the beltway.
From the house I grew up at 1633 East Calhoun in Seattle, Washington, if you walk out the door, you’re facing Montlake Playfield. Even now, when I think about the cardinal directions I imagine walking out that front door, crossing over into the park – perhaps noticing the cherry blossoms on the stately row of trees … it must be late March or April. Now I’m standing out in the park on the grass. Across the playfield through the trees, mud, marsh and cattails is Portage Bay, where you’ll find SYC (Seattle Yacht Club), NOAA[ii](National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and then beyond that, the UW (University of Washington, Go Huskies). If you go further still along I-5, you’ll get to North gate, and then Everett and eventually Bellingham and Blaine, the U.S. Canada Border and Vancouver.
So, that’s my North.
Once your internal magnet is pointed north, the other directions fall into place. To your left, that’s west. And as you’re standing out in Montlake Playfield to your left is the Roanoke neighborhood, a sort of hilly extension of the northside of Capitol Hill. Beyond that, Lake Union and the rest of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which winds it’s watery way from Lake Washington to Puget Sound, dividing Seattle in half crossed by four draw bridges and two highways, in order, from right to left – Montlake, University Bridge, I-5, Aurora, Fremont, and Ballard. Then come the Locks and Puget Sound, or as the locals call it, The Sound. Beyond Puget Sound is the Olympics and then on the other side of that, shrouded in fog and mist, the Pacific Ocean. So, that’s my West.
To my right, is the hill with all blackberries bushes– in the fall, there will be so many blackberries the neighborhood children will consider running away and living off the land. Beyond that, Montlake Elementary sets atop a small, nameless hill and if you continue you’ll arrive at the Stop-n-Go. Crossing 24th, after a few blocks you’ll arrive at the arboretum and then the gated community of Broadmoor and then Madison Park and then Lake Washington and then eventually the Cascade Mountains, a thousand mile long fence made of stone, evergreen and glaciers keeping the rest of the country out. The sun rises over the Cascades, so that must be my East.
And behind us, rises Capitol Hill, with the rest of south Seattle, Tacoma, Portland Oregon, California, Disneyland and all of California crouched behind it.
So even now if I take a break and walk out into the Labor Day sunshine on my deck at 387 Highland Avenue in Montclair, NJ, 3000 miles from 1633 East Calhoun and I face North I think of my four cardinal directions, Montlake Park (N), Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains (W), Lake Washington and the Cascades (E) and Capitol Hill (S).
***
The magic of the Seattle climate, explained, summarized in plain science:
Because of the mountains to the East and West, the prevailing winds come from either the North or the South. The Northwind brings dry and cold weather in the winter, and warm dry weather in the Summer, because it journeys overland from Canada. The South brings wet, slightly warmer weather in the winter – cold, but rarely cold enough to freeze, because it comes off of the ocean. In the spring, fall and most of the summer, the South wind brings wet slightly colder weather except for a few glorious weeks in August when the southerly is as warm and gentle as a lover’s fingertips and brings day after day of sunshine.
As I’m write this I’m suddenly 15 years old again dangling my feet off of the platforms and into the life-warm waters on the second footbridge on the path through the marsh out to Foster Island. The blue-green warmth is so lush and fragrant that that time itself slows to a leisurely summer pause. The only movement in the universe is the orderly ripples emerging from the shaded inlets and recesses of the arboretum; the only sound the steady whirr of wheels on the 520 bridge.
☀️
In the Lushootseed dialect of the coastal Salishan, the language in which Chief Sealth made his famous speech, the northwest wind was called Stul-axaud and the southerly was called Stul-cak. The winds in Seattle have no names in modern English, but Mistral always makes me think of winters in the Pacific Northwest. Cold clear days where the dry, ice-cold northerly howls down from Canada, turning cheeks pink, numbing fingers and whipping Puget Sound and Lake Washington into a whitecaps. I can hear the rigging clanging and rattling in the masts at Shilshole Bay Marina. Because mostly, Mistral makes me think of my father, Martin Godsil – the boats and the sailing he loved.
⛵️
It’s Saturday, January 16, 1971 and the rain come as reliably as night follows day – or what passes for the day during winter. Sometimes weeks pass with the sun never seeming to quite get it together to properly rise.
A 1971 White Econoline Van drives through half-awake streets of a gray Saturday morning, tires hissing on the wet pavement.
I do not question the where or why of accompanying my father on this rainy Saturday morning. I’m too young to have a personal agenda. I have no basketball practice, no band practice, no friends meet.
Emerging from the grid of blocks that make up the neighborhood of Montlake, we come to the five way stop at the end of Boyer Avenue, we veer right and drive along Fairview. The steep hill of Roanoke climbs away to the left and Portage Bay is to our right. We pass the Red Robin Bar and Grille, a neighborhood biker joint with a reputation for cold beer, great fries and legendary hamburgers. Over the next fifteen years, someone with vision will expand it and turn it into a family restaurant and then take it national.
But it’s 1971. Starbucks is a new hippie spot selling bulk coffee and tea, and there is no Microsoft or Amazon. No one has ever used the terms “Tech Startup” or “Cell phone” in a sentence, much less “Frappuccino.” Frederick and Nelson is still the destination for Frangos. All of existence is in its right place, undisturbed by greed and fear and other market forces. Red Robin, and much else about Seattle is still wonderfully provincial, comfortable and insular as a Cowichan sweater.
My dad drives across the University Bridge, tires humming on the metal grating. The road turns right and wraps under itself like the eye of a bowline and follows the ship canal to the west. As we drive, I ask my father questions. My father is pleased with my curiosity and answers each question with thoughtfulness and patient humor, like you would talk to an adult, never mocking. The white van comes to a four-way stop and then jogs left under the train trestle, followed by a quick right as the road hugs the north shore of Lake Union. The lake opens wide before us and on a clear day would see the buildings of downtown and the Space Needle and then Queen Anne Hill to the right – but not today. Emerging from the mist you see the fenced-off ruin of the Gasworks; a ghostly monument to what happens when the wear and tear caused by heat and friction meet the fallibility of tired, bored men. And then to our right, we pass the Seattle Municipal dump. Inside, a vast, sourly pungent pit echoing with the roar of machinery. Huge dozers like mechanized moles push mountainous piles of human refuse. The boy and his father are not taking anything to the dump – not today. After passing the Seattle Municipal Dump, Lake Union narrows to become the ship canal once again. We pass through the itinerant Bohemian storefronts of Fremont, turning right onto Leary Way and into Ballard proper. We pass warehouse after warehouse, the collective closet of Seattle’s fishing industry. On 46th we takes left and the boy and we arrive at a two story, block long building with “Chef’s Campers, Van Conversions stenciled in bold 3-Foot Letters across the side. As we walk in, they are greeting by the smell of damp and motor oil. The boy’s father flicks on his worklight with a fluorescent buzz and reveals inside the quiet of the semi-submerged garage where we see a sleek racing yacht boat sat in its cradle. In the dim light it’s surface seemed to glow with a light of its own – a cold and clear yellow, the official team color of joy, as purely optimistic as a spring sunrise.
This was the boat my father christened Mistral. The last of the great wooden dragon class yachts, US 250. My dad was finishing it himself, getting it ready for the 1972 Olympic Trials. Mistral was a fast boat, a lucky boat, full of dreams and magic. Night after night, and weekend after weekend my father would sand, and paint and drill. Crafting, sawing, measuring. He filled sheaves of legal yellow pads with lists and drawings. Fittings were ordering then altered to his specifications. His mind hummed and the bandsaw roared, and when it fell silent, you could once again hear Don McClean sing:
… bye bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the Levy but the Levy was dry. Good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die.
For us, those were good times, uncomplicated times. No one had heard of global warming. My dad had a purpose – And I had not yet met insecurity, anxiety, puberty or drugs. Moral ambivalence, cynicism and the ideological fallout from Viet Nam were there, certainly, but as hidden from view as Mt. Rainier behind the cold blanket of clouds.
My father was preparing this boat to compete in the 1972 Olympic trials and possibly win a berth in the 1972 Olympic games.
In the political arena, there was another contest to be held in 1972. The president was a Republican named Richard Nixon. Nixon was the incumbent, running for reelection against the Democratic contender, McGovern. The dominant issues in the public consciousness at the time were the Viet Nam War, and inflation, followed by the Equal Right’s Amendment. The country was as divided as it is now, but along different and more raggedly demarcated lines. It occurs to me as I write this that the extremists were on the left and calling out the conservative monied power structure, and in my view they had the facts right and some of their methods wrong. Now the extremists are on the right, make up their own truth, and are manipulated by the conservative power structure. That’s one take on it anyway.
The Watergate break-in took place the night of June 17, 1972.
The 1972 Summer Olympics took place from August 26th-September 11th in Munich, Germany. Munich is in Bavaria, in Southern Germany where there are many lakes, such as the Bodensee. But because of internal bylaws governing Olympic Sailing Competition, Olympic racing must take place on salt water, a specified number of nautical miles away from shore so that racing is fair and not effected by landmasses or any other geographical interference. For these reason, the 1972 Olympic Sailing Regatta took place in Kiel, a resort town on the Baltic Sea – a nine hour drive north from Munich.
The US Olympic Trials were held San Francisco Bay, on what is called the Olympic or Berkley Circle. The reason they held the Olympics there: They expected the wind to blow hard at the Olympic games in Kiel. “To blow like stink” as my father would say.
As always, my father prepared superlatively well but did not do well at the Olympic Trials in San Francisco in 1972.
The winds blew as predicted in San Francisco Bay. Like clockwork – as they always do in the summer. Kind of light in the morning, and then as the Sacramento Valley heats up, it creates the “Venturi Effect.” My father explained this effect many times around the dinner table. As the heat rises out in the Sacramento Valley – “Like an oven, sometimes over 110 Degrees!” it creates a vacuum and all of the cold air from the Pacific “howls” through the narrow golden gate and up the Sacramento Valley. This explanation would be accompanied by sweeping vigorous hand movements. And I gotta say, when I finally visited San Francisco, and saw the fog stack up on the Golden Gate, and spent time all that time on the rail beating to weather, it was every bit as awesome as my father described it.
My Dad never really talked about the Olympic trials. He did not finish well. As to how hard the wind blew, he left a few clues. One, he would always refer to his friend Robby Wilcox and his crew as “animals.” This was not a pejorative term. In my father’s view, anyone over 6’2” and physically imposing was an animal. It was a compliment. Robby Wilcox and his crew did well at the 1972 Olympic trials because they were “animals” and they could handle the heavy weather. There was one other clue he left. To his young son, he would point out the heavy duty backstay system on Caprice, a jet black Dragon in the Lake Washington Dragon Fleet. The ¼ inch running backstay wires – stainless steel woven like rope, wound around the wheels and even if you weren’t that strong you could turn the wheels and they would hold and lock the backstay. They would click tighter, and tighter, never giving back an inch – with a sensation like a huge safe combo lock that only goes one way. With this wheel-and-drum system you could get the weather backstay so tight it would twang like an E string on a bass guitar. And then when you’d tack, you’d throw off the locking mechanism, and the leeward backstay would run free, and you’d tighten the backstay on the weather side and jump up on the rail to hike out. This backstay system was heavy duty, durable, and capable of incredible purchase – as my father pointed out, it was purpose built for heavy air. Though it had been sold to new owners, the Morgans, Caprice was the boat that won the Olympic trials in 1972 and went to Germany. In the Olympics, Caprice was helmed by Don Cohen. My father often spoke of Don Cohen in reverential terms, but never mentioned that we was Jewish. The reason I bring it up: in 1972, the Olympics were tragically disrupted by a terrorist attack in which 13 members of the Israeli Olympic team lost their lives.
When Don Cohen arrived at Kiel, the wind was unreasonably light. It did not “blow like stink;” rather the regatta was a “drifter.” No word could relate such disappointment and hands-up surrender to the whims of Mother Nature as the word “drifter” as spoken by my father.[iii] Still, Don Cohen persevered with his boat that was not rigged for the conditions, and brought home a bronze medal. The captain of the Israeli Olympic team told Don Cohen, you’re taking this medal for all of us now.
💨
On August 8th, 1974, my Dad knocked on my bedroom door and told me to come join him in the TV Room. “You should see this. You’ll remember it for the rest of your life.”
What I saw on TV was earnest and emotionally perplexed man barely holding it together. Used to being in charge of his emotions, and other people, he was struggling. My dad confirmed that this was the President, Richard Nixon. “It is not in my nature to quit. I am not a quitter.” said Richard Nixon - and then he quit.
The societal winds that blew him into power, that made him the most powerful man on earth for 6 short years, turned around and blew him right back out to sea to live alone in ignominious obscurity. “I am not a crook,” he said. And the whole world pointed, and laughed.
🛠
On August 8th, 1974, Mistral was long gone. Marty Godsil had sold it to Bob Burgess in 1972 after the Dragon Class was dropped from the Olympics. Mistral would go on to win many regattas, including a world championship, but not with my father at the helm.
My father never called our boats The Mistral, or The Eclipse of The Phoenix like, you know, The Titanic or The USS Enterprise or The Missouri. They weren’t “The” anything. Our racing yachts had names like people. Or pets. And they all had personalities. My Dad loved Mistral. I don’t think he ever got over it. My father not only finished building Mistral, but built a model replica of his lemon yellow dragon from a kit. I imagine he saw the model kit in a hobby shop and couldn’t help himself. It was a boat that needed love. It needed to be built.
On August 8th, 1974, I watched the president resign. I wasn’t really sure what to do. As I was trying to form a question, perhaps on behalf of all of us, something along the lines of, “What happens now? What are we gonna do?” my Dad stood up, turned off the TV and went back to his workshop. He had a new project. Good enough, I thought. I went back to my room to play with my toys.
[i] Lifts and headers are technical terms taken from sailboat racing. Sailboat races being with a weather leg, with the weather mark set directly to weather – or straight upwind – from the start line. Obviously, you can’t sail directly into the wind. The closest you can manage with a racing yacht is about 20°, give or take. Adjusting for drag and slide-slip, the result is that when one is beating to windward toward the weather mark, one is always tacking through angles of about 45°, from one tack to the other. A lift is a shift in wind direction that “lifts” you closer to the weather mark. A header means a shift in wind direction so that you’re “headed” away from the mark. A starboard tack lift is a port tack header, and vice versa. Wind shifts can be incremental, or huge. That can be temporary or sustained and even continually clocking from around the compass dial throughout the day. You don’t want to get caught on the outside of a lift, because this means that you end up travelling a longer distance to the weather mark – you’re “on the outside of the wagon wheel,” as my father used to say. Along with wind velocity, and the ability to adjust your sails to maximize the speed of your boat, managing the angles of headers and lifts account for nearly all of the grand and glorious strategic chess-game that is one design sailboat racing.
[ii] During my Elementary School years, I can remember NOAA releasing weather balloons up into the atmosphere every day at 7:30 on the dot. “There it goes,” we would all say as we sat at the breakfast table. But I didn’t need a weather balloon to know which way the wind blows. We had Mom.
[iii] Martin Godsil had many sayings. One of them was to always remember the five p’s. I rolled them out at the Post Office when my 18 years old kids were getting their passports. Always remember the five P’s – Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. My son Will added under his breath, it’s actually six. Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
I would love to find a picture of Phenix but this will do for the moment. My Aunt Karen sent me a box of pictures that they had cleaned out of my parents house. Much of it was from my late adolescence, when I was severely drug addicted. You could see the cartoon tombstones in my eyes and I feel viscerally the physical and emotional discomfort like a dream you can't shake off. But this picture is pure. It reminds me that I'm loved, that I am love, that love is all there is. It is free from the self-loathing that has haunted me all my life, and again, I wear like Kurt Cobain's tossed off sweater. This is who I was before life killed me and it is who I am again, beneath the smeared grubby stressed out surface of things. I am the thrice born, the eternally recurring, I am, the bird that rises from the ashes. Oh, and I found this trophy while cleaning out my Mom's apartment in Madison Park (1/08/23, mom's 84th b-day). Still haven't found a pic of a sky blue dragon – so this unpolished silver trophy from 1973 will just have to do. Looks like Dad won the fleet championship for the year. A belated congrats.
3. Phenix
It was 1972, a Saturday morning, early winter. My dad, Martin Godsil, received a phone call. My 9-year old ears could tell that something bad had happened. I could hear the person on the other end of the line going on, emotional; my father’s answers were short and full of empathetic warmth. “Mmm-hm.” “Oh.” “Oh-no.” My dad had a reputation for being as loud as a rebellious church bell but he was also a patient and practiced listener. Hanging up, there was a thoughtful and serious set to his strong chin.
After breakfast, we took a drive. It was the usual Seattle November weather so my ski jacket was zipped up and Dad had on his long sleeve sweatshirt – the uniform he wore for weekends and working on boats. Saturday and Sunday morning drives with Dad were a part of my life then. I went everywhere with him, to Leschi and Shilshole, to the boatyards, to West Marine and Fisheries Supply. I was introduced wherever I went and I became a sort of marina mascot to the other sailors. After each introduction, my Dad would tell me about the sailor I’d just met. The class of boat they owned and regattas they’d races and the places they’d travelled and the trophies they’d won. Each new story it added to the pantheon of sailors and expanded my inner navigational chart of the world. Lake Washington. Puget Sound. Pulley Point. Bellingham. Vancouver. Maple Bay. Swiftsure. San Francisco Bay. Victoria to Maui. The Great Lakes. My dad and I were companionable, as a father and son should be. I kept him company and watched and learned, with that unclouded and uncynical attentive curiosity that only kids have and that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. But the drive that morning was out of the ordinary. I did not recognize the scenery as we drove along Seattle streets. We weren’t going to the warehouse where he stored and worked on his boats during the winter, but a different warehouse, where there’d been a fire. As we drove, I imagine my father was wondering if there would be anything salvageable when we got there.
I’d never seen the aftermath of a fire before. What I remember most is the smell of burned wood, counterpointed against the Pacific Northwest mist that hung in the air, mixed with the overnight dousing from the firehoses. Daylight filtered dimly through thin slats in the walls. There was no electric light of course for it had all burned in the fire. The windows had a cracked and burst from the heat and that parts of the roof had burned away. The building creaked and settled and water dripped in the quiet as our footstep echoed on the wet concrete. In the middle in the blackened industrial hulk of a building sat a 30’ foot Dragon Class racing yacht in its cradle. In the gray light, it was hard to tell what color the boat had been or if it had been painted at all. Its long sleek silhouette was blackened by smoke and its bow was charred where the fire had tried to grab hold. Martin Godsil walked fully around the sailboat, looking at it from all sides, and I followed. He then jumped up on the support on the side of the cradle, and peered down inside the cockpit. Structurally, it seemed intact. Testing the deck, he lifted himself up onto the deck and stood. I tentatively made to follow but he held up a warning hand. In response, I took a few steps back. Honestly, there was something a little spooky about the blackened hull. He continued to cautiously explore around the deck, crouching to test the integrity of the wood around the cabin, the cockpit and then on all fours, he crawled toward the bow. To his practiced eye, the damage was mostly cosmetic. He let himself down over the side, and wiped his blackened hands on his sweatshirt. Martin Godsil had a new project. The first task would be to get it home. Because if you’re Martin Godsil, when you hear about a warehouse fire where Dragon Class Yacht U.S. 212 is kept, you can’t just leave it there. You can’t. Because my father’s calling, his dharma, if you will – was to fix that which was broken. To build and rebuild, restore, design and refine. The more logistically challenging the project, the more he liked it.
***
Years later, when I was studying English at the University of Washington, the professor drew a horizontal line across the chalkboard. Below this line, he said, is H-U-M-A-N- I-T-Y, and he wrote it out in all caps just like that “HUMANITY.” Above this line, he said, is The Realm of the Gods, G-O-D-S. And tragedy, my dear students, is what happens when people try to go above this line. But there’s another kind of worse human tragedy – and that’s when people don’t try. My dad, Martin Godsil did impossible stuff all the time. Striving to be more than we are, to accomplish the impossible, doesn’t make us tragic. Our drive to be more like Gods and less like animals – to steal the fire, to ignore the odds, fly ever closer to the sun, to never give up, in the face of all rational evidence to contrary – to risk, redraw, ignore, push against, leap over, and otherwise mess with The Line that separates us from the realm of the immortals – that is altogether the most human of projects.
** ** **
And along the way, if you’re Marty Godsil, Once again, you will fill legal pads with lists and diagrams of how the rigging will work. The bandsaw will hum and the disc sanders whine. You’ll re-plank the entire deck, and furthermore, weigh each plank as you go to ensure that you hit the minimum weight. The bow of this particular boat was burnt so badly that my Dad simply cut it off and made it sort of triangular and straight to a point. So rather than having the glamorous aquiline curve usually associated with Dragons and 6-Metres and J-Boats of the era classic yacht design, the final effect was one of a boxer with a broken nose. But come spring, it was ready to race. And what did Marty Godsil name the boat that he saved from the burned warehouse? He painted it sky blue, the color of hope and possibility and re-christened it Phenix, of course. As in, risen from the ashes.
The story of the Phenix is emblematic of rebirth, the comeback kid. The Phenix is the official mascot of green sprouts after a forest fire, of fertile soil enriched by the rain of volcanic ash. It’s a salmon spawning, and new saplings rising from an old growth stump. It’s the story of Spring, of life after never-say-die. The Phenix is the story of Easter and the story of Christ. As myths co-mingle in my hippocampus, it strikes me that the boat had survived its own funereal rites, its own Viking sepulcher. So it makes sense that he sailed Phenix for a season and then sold the boat to a young sailor of Scandinavian heritage named Arvid Berg – and then my Dad moved on.
*********
Fast forward to the Summer of 1978. Microsoft had not yet sold its OS to IBM. Howard Schultz had not yet bought out Starbucks. The Seahawks were a terrible expansion team and the Mariners were worse. Nordstrom was local institution with a cute plush toy mascot named Nordy and virtually unknown nationally. Jeff Bezos was in Jr. High in Albuquerque and the internet was communication network of last resort, a system of packets and protocols that would allow us to find out if anyone was left alive in the event of Nuclear War. And yet, all over Seattle, there was optimism mixed in with the Western Washington spring rain. I would argue that the positive vibes started on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1978 in Pasadena, California when the Huskies won Rose Bowl. Leading 17-0 at halftime over the heavily-favored Michigan Wolverines, the Husky marching band, in the midst of a rousing rendition of Tequila, broke ranks and each tuba player, trombonist and drummer began dancing wildly each to their own inner Herb Albert. They then “dropped trou” showing off brightly colored boxers, one and all. The Huskies held on for the win, and the nation took notice. We even elicited a Monday morning apology from Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley on The Today Show. Don James, Blair Bush, Spider Gaines and Warren Moon (the only undrafted quarterback to ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame, by the way) had put Seattle and the Dawgs on the map. But I would say that the half-time show made just as much of a statement. Rebellious, irreverent, it told the world that in Seattle, we don’t need to march in orderly rows. We will boogie fever all over your uptight traditions and still kick your ass. Tequila!
***
That year, the Dragon Class North American Championships were held in Seattle. Arvid Berg, the owner of Phenix, invited a young collegiate sailor, Brian Thomas, to guest helm is boat. Maybe no one in the Dragon fleet knew who Brian Thomas was but I did. Brian Thomas was on the University of Washington sailing team. But more importantly, Brian Thomas was the head instructor at the Seattle Yacht Club summer youth sailing program.
The SYC Summer sailing program was as close to summer camp as I ever got. An intoxicating mix of lake water and summer sun, with a little bit of sailing thrown in. My sunburned nose pealed to a permanent scab, no matter how much zinc peroxide I applied. I also developed a budding adolescent interest in the tanned skin of the well-born suburban girls, lithe and exotic – not to mention the bikini-clad college age instructors. I was the top student sailor, and I ruled the waves of Portage Bay, from Eastlake to the Montlake Cut. Yes, I was the star student and Brian Thomas was my idol. He was our coach, our Captain with bullhorn in hand. Imagine Bill Murray from Meatballs plus Sean Cassidy’s puckish pop star good looks – whistle around his neck, and every strand of his wavy 70’s feathered hair somehow miraculously in place, no matter what the wind conditions and you’ll get a pretty good picture. I hung on his every word, every joke, every diagram in every chalk-talk.
***
So maybe the rest of the Dragon fleet didn’t know who Brian Thomas, was but I did. Brian Thomas was a dingy sailor and the Dragon was a different beast all together. Designed in 1929 in Norway, a Dragon is a heavy-displacement keelboat – even at the dawn of the 1980’s it was an anachronism. Smaller, light-displacement, high-performance boats that are able to “plane” or surf on the top of waves were becoming increasingly popular. This trend started in the 1970s and has continued to this day. There are no longer one-design keelboats in the Olympics, and even the America’s Cup is carried out in hyper-technological wind-powered contraptions that are hardly recognizable as sailboats.
So the Dragon was bigger, heavier and harder to maneuver than Brian was used to. But as the week-long regatta wore on, it just didn’t seem to matter. Going into the last day of racing, Phenix, with Brian Thomas at the helm, was leading the field. At that point, anyone in their right mind would have taken a conservative approach. But Brian Thomas had other ideas.
Now, by way of background, the start of a sailing race is, hands down, one of the most exciting single events in sports. It’s like a hybrid of backgammon and chess on a liquid board, with a countdown clock thrown in. Or think about it this way: imagine you’re watching the Kentucky Derby but first of all, all of the horses and their jockeys hold a collective jousting match to see who gets the best prime position for the start. It’s sort of like that. But with sails.
Usually, because of minor shifts in the direction of the wind, one end of the start line will be favored by a few degrees. Starting at the favored end can give you a significant advantage. Dozens of other factors, including wind strength, current, the size of the fleet, timing, clear air, the speed of your boat, your point of sail relative to the wind and who has the right-away, the personality, skills and appetite for risk of each yacht and their crew – all of these factors and a hundred more come into play.
And so it’s the start of the 7th race, the last race of of the 1978 North American Dragon Championships. Brian Thomas decides he’s going to attempt a dip start. What, you ask, is a dip start? A dip start is a maneuver whereby you approach the start line from the wrong side, dip the line and set off to windward. There are a lot of assumptions that go into this maneuver. You’re assuming that there will be a place for you and you won’t be pushed over early – even though every single boat below the line had the right-of-way over you. But, if there is actually room, and you’re not over-early and you don’t foul anyone and no one protests you and throws you out – then you’ve basically got a head start in clear air. It’s a ridiculously risky maneuver in any boat, much less a keelboat regatta. It’s especially brazen, in the final race when you’re leading the North American championship. Afterwards, my Dad couldn’t stop talking about it, and not without derision. My dad did not appreciate arrogance. And it was, without question, a cocky move. For my part, I listened and kept my mouth shut. In my heart I felt a certain pride and satisfaction in Brian Thomas’ victory. He confirmed that youth, cunning, and audacity wins. And being his star student, wasn’t the victory somehow partially mine? But I also felt what I now recognize as guilt, for how could I say out loud that the winds of my loyalties had shifted?
***
But looking back, amidst the general grumpiness of having a “hot shot college sailor” come in and swipe their trophy, the most amazing feat was lost. Brian Thomas was just a ringer – the first of many ringers and a harbinger of the increasing professionalism of yachting and perhaps all sports. In hindsight, the true miracle was the builder who gave the boat he named Phenix the chance, against all odds, to not only sail again, but win a championship. Martin Godsil built boats and by extension, built a fleet so more and more people could join him in the competition that he loved. Long live – and die – and live again, the spirit of the Phenix. (Epilogue: “1978 Phenix” is engraved on the North American Trophy – a bowl almost as big as the Stanley Cup – presently in the trophy case of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Stop by, next time you’re on Pt. Grey Road.)
After breakfast, we took a drive. It was the usual Seattle November weather so my ski jacket was zipped up and Dad had on his long sleeve sweatshirt – the uniform he wore for weekends and working on boats. Saturday and Sunday morning drives with Dad were a part of my life then. I went everywhere with him, to Leschi and Shilshole, to the boatyards, to West Marine and Fisheries Supply. I was introduced wherever I went and I became a sort of marina mascot to the other sailors. After each introduction, my Dad would tell me about the sailor I’d just met. The class of boat they owned and regattas they’d races and the places they’d travelled and the trophies they’d won. Each new story it added to the pantheon of sailors and expanded my inner navigational chart of the world. Lake Washington. Puget Sound. Pulley Point. Bellingham. Vancouver. Maple Bay. Swiftsure. San Francisco Bay. Victoria to Maui. The Great Lakes. My dad and I were companionable, as a father and son should be. I kept him company and watched and learned, with that unclouded and uncynical attentive curiosity that only kids have and that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. But the drive that morning was out of the ordinary. I did not recognize the scenery as we drove along Seattle streets. We weren’t going to the warehouse where he stored and worked on his boats during the winter, but a different warehouse, where there’d been a fire. As we drove, I imagine my father was wondering if there would be anything salvageable when we got there.
I’d never seen the aftermath of a fire before. What I remember most is the smell of burned wood, counterpointed against the Pacific Northwest mist that hung in the air, mixed with the overnight dousing from the firehoses. Daylight filtered dimly through thin slats in the walls. There was no electric light of course for it had all burned in the fire. The windows had a cracked and burst from the heat and that parts of the roof had burned away. The building creaked and settled and water dripped in the quiet as our footstep echoed on the wet concrete. In the middle in the blackened industrial hulk of a building sat a 30’ foot Dragon Class racing yacht in its cradle. In the gray light, it was hard to tell what color the boat had been or if it had been painted at all. Its long sleek silhouette was blackened by smoke and its bow was charred where the fire had tried to grab hold. Martin Godsil walked fully around the sailboat, looking at it from all sides, and I followed. He then jumped up on the support on the side of the cradle, and peered down inside the cockpit. Structurally, it seemed intact. Testing the deck, he lifted himself up onto the deck and stood. I tentatively made to follow but he held up a warning hand. In response, I took a few steps back. Honestly, there was something a little spooky about the blackened hull. He continued to cautiously explore around the deck, crouching to test the integrity of the wood around the cabin, the cockpit and then on all fours, he crawled toward the bow. To his practiced eye, the damage was mostly cosmetic. He let himself down over the side, and wiped his blackened hands on his sweatshirt. Martin Godsil had a new project. The first task would be to get it home. Because if you’re Martin Godsil, when you hear about a warehouse fire where Dragon Class Yacht U.S. 212 is kept, you can’t just leave it there. You can’t. Because my father’s calling, his dharma, if you will – was to fix that which was broken. To build and rebuild, restore, design and refine. The more logistically challenging the project, the more he liked it.
***
Years later, when I was studying English at the University of Washington, the professor drew a horizontal line across the chalkboard. Below this line, he said, is H-U-M-A-N- I-T-Y, and he wrote it out in all caps just like that “HUMANITY.” Above this line, he said, is The Realm of the Gods, G-O-D-S. And tragedy, my dear students, is what happens when people try to go above this line. But there’s another kind of worse human tragedy – and that’s when people don’t try. My dad, Martin Godsil did impossible stuff all the time. Striving to be more than we are, to accomplish the impossible, doesn’t make us tragic. Our drive to be more like Gods and less like animals – to steal the fire, to ignore the odds, fly ever closer to the sun, to never give up, in the face of all rational evidence to contrary – to risk, redraw, ignore, push against, leap over, and otherwise mess with The Line that separates us from the realm of the immortals – that is altogether the most human of projects.
** ** **
And along the way, if you’re Marty Godsil, Once again, you will fill legal pads with lists and diagrams of how the rigging will work. The bandsaw will hum and the disc sanders whine. You’ll re-plank the entire deck, and furthermore, weigh each plank as you go to ensure that you hit the minimum weight. The bow of this particular boat was burnt so badly that my Dad simply cut it off and made it sort of triangular and straight to a point. So rather than having the glamorous aquiline curve usually associated with Dragons and 6-Metres and J-Boats of the era classic yacht design, the final effect was one of a boxer with a broken nose. But come spring, it was ready to race. And what did Marty Godsil name the boat that he saved from the burned warehouse? He painted it sky blue, the color of hope and possibility and re-christened it Phenix, of course. As in, risen from the ashes.
The story of the Phenix is emblematic of rebirth, the comeback kid. The Phenix is the official mascot of green sprouts after a forest fire, of fertile soil enriched by the rain of volcanic ash. It’s a salmon spawning, and new saplings rising from an old growth stump. It’s the story of Spring, of life after never-say-die. The Phenix is the story of Easter and the story of Christ. As myths co-mingle in my hippocampus, it strikes me that the boat had survived its own funereal rites, its own Viking sepulcher. So it makes sense that he sailed Phenix for a season and then sold the boat to a young sailor of Scandinavian heritage named Arvid Berg – and then my Dad moved on.
*********
Fast forward to the Summer of 1978. Microsoft had not yet sold its OS to IBM. Howard Schultz had not yet bought out Starbucks. The Seahawks were a terrible expansion team and the Mariners were worse. Nordstrom was local institution with a cute plush toy mascot named Nordy and virtually unknown nationally. Jeff Bezos was in Jr. High in Albuquerque and the internet was communication network of last resort, a system of packets and protocols that would allow us to find out if anyone was left alive in the event of Nuclear War. And yet, all over Seattle, there was optimism mixed in with the Western Washington spring rain. I would argue that the positive vibes started on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1978 in Pasadena, California when the Huskies won Rose Bowl. Leading 17-0 at halftime over the heavily-favored Michigan Wolverines, the Husky marching band, in the midst of a rousing rendition of Tequila, broke ranks and each tuba player, trombonist and drummer began dancing wildly each to their own inner Herb Albert. They then “dropped trou” showing off brightly colored boxers, one and all. The Huskies held on for the win, and the nation took notice. We even elicited a Monday morning apology from Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley on The Today Show. Don James, Blair Bush, Spider Gaines and Warren Moon (the only undrafted quarterback to ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame, by the way) had put Seattle and the Dawgs on the map. But I would say that the half-time show made just as much of a statement. Rebellious, irreverent, it told the world that in Seattle, we don’t need to march in orderly rows. We will boogie fever all over your uptight traditions and still kick your ass. Tequila!
***
That year, the Dragon Class North American Championships were held in Seattle. Arvid Berg, the owner of Phenix, invited a young collegiate sailor, Brian Thomas, to guest helm is boat. Maybe no one in the Dragon fleet knew who Brian Thomas was but I did. Brian Thomas was on the University of Washington sailing team. But more importantly, Brian Thomas was the head instructor at the Seattle Yacht Club summer youth sailing program.
The SYC Summer sailing program was as close to summer camp as I ever got. An intoxicating mix of lake water and summer sun, with a little bit of sailing thrown in. My sunburned nose pealed to a permanent scab, no matter how much zinc peroxide I applied. I also developed a budding adolescent interest in the tanned skin of the well-born suburban girls, lithe and exotic – not to mention the bikini-clad college age instructors. I was the top student sailor, and I ruled the waves of Portage Bay, from Eastlake to the Montlake Cut. Yes, I was the star student and Brian Thomas was my idol. He was our coach, our Captain with bullhorn in hand. Imagine Bill Murray from Meatballs plus Sean Cassidy’s puckish pop star good looks – whistle around his neck, and every strand of his wavy 70’s feathered hair somehow miraculously in place, no matter what the wind conditions and you’ll get a pretty good picture. I hung on his every word, every joke, every diagram in every chalk-talk.
***
So maybe the rest of the Dragon fleet didn’t know who Brian Thomas, was but I did. Brian Thomas was a dingy sailor and the Dragon was a different beast all together. Designed in 1929 in Norway, a Dragon is a heavy-displacement keelboat – even at the dawn of the 1980’s it was an anachronism. Smaller, light-displacement, high-performance boats that are able to “plane” or surf on the top of waves were becoming increasingly popular. This trend started in the 1970s and has continued to this day. There are no longer one-design keelboats in the Olympics, and even the America’s Cup is carried out in hyper-technological wind-powered contraptions that are hardly recognizable as sailboats.
So the Dragon was bigger, heavier and harder to maneuver than Brian was used to. But as the week-long regatta wore on, it just didn’t seem to matter. Going into the last day of racing, Phenix, with Brian Thomas at the helm, was leading the field. At that point, anyone in their right mind would have taken a conservative approach. But Brian Thomas had other ideas.
Now, by way of background, the start of a sailing race is, hands down, one of the most exciting single events in sports. It’s like a hybrid of backgammon and chess on a liquid board, with a countdown clock thrown in. Or think about it this way: imagine you’re watching the Kentucky Derby but first of all, all of the horses and their jockeys hold a collective jousting match to see who gets the best prime position for the start. It’s sort of like that. But with sails.
Usually, because of minor shifts in the direction of the wind, one end of the start line will be favored by a few degrees. Starting at the favored end can give you a significant advantage. Dozens of other factors, including wind strength, current, the size of the fleet, timing, clear air, the speed of your boat, your point of sail relative to the wind and who has the right-away, the personality, skills and appetite for risk of each yacht and their crew – all of these factors and a hundred more come into play.
And so it’s the start of the 7th race, the last race of of the 1978 North American Dragon Championships. Brian Thomas decides he’s going to attempt a dip start. What, you ask, is a dip start? A dip start is a maneuver whereby you approach the start line from the wrong side, dip the line and set off to windward. There are a lot of assumptions that go into this maneuver. You’re assuming that there will be a place for you and you won’t be pushed over early – even though every single boat below the line had the right-of-way over you. But, if there is actually room, and you’re not over-early and you don’t foul anyone and no one protests you and throws you out – then you’ve basically got a head start in clear air. It’s a ridiculously risky maneuver in any boat, much less a keelboat regatta. It’s especially brazen, in the final race when you’re leading the North American championship. Afterwards, my Dad couldn’t stop talking about it, and not without derision. My dad did not appreciate arrogance. And it was, without question, a cocky move. For my part, I listened and kept my mouth shut. In my heart I felt a certain pride and satisfaction in Brian Thomas’ victory. He confirmed that youth, cunning, and audacity wins. And being his star student, wasn’t the victory somehow partially mine? But I also felt what I now recognize as guilt, for how could I say out loud that the winds of my loyalties had shifted?
***
But looking back, amidst the general grumpiness of having a “hot shot college sailor” come in and swipe their trophy, the most amazing feat was lost. Brian Thomas was just a ringer – the first of many ringers and a harbinger of the increasing professionalism of yachting and perhaps all sports. In hindsight, the true miracle was the builder who gave the boat he named Phenix the chance, against all odds, to not only sail again, but win a championship. Martin Godsil built boats and by extension, built a fleet so more and more people could join him in the competition that he loved. Long live – and die – and live again, the spirit of the Phenix. (Epilogue: “1978 Phenix” is engraved on the North American Trophy – a bowl almost as big as the Stanley Cup – presently in the trophy case of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Stop by, next time you’re on Pt. Grey Road.)
Note - this was a letter to my Mom & Dad. The file is dated April 12, 2017. My parents were headed out for a drive down the coast.
Ahoy Crew, The good ship Have Fun Every Day,
I’m very excited for your road trip through my favorite part of the world.*
The coast from Tomales, California to Astoria, Oregon. Here are some top-of-mind highlights and observations.
One big tree farm full of depressed lumber towns, gun shops, and restaurants serving tough steak and spotted owl stew, interspersed Indian reservations wishing the white folks had more money (other than their government checks) to gamble away. I love the damp dreary perpetual dusk of the Washington South Olympic Peninsula. But it’s an acquired taste and better things lie ahead.
Remember, this part of the world – the winter here, almost killed Lewis and Clark. Speaking of Lewis and Clark, the museum at the mouth of the Columbia is worth checking out. A nice walk through timeline and a good overlook of the mighty Columbia.
Rolling on to Astoria.
Astoria, as a town, seems like one big might-have-been that almost happened. You’ll probably be able to find something gluten free to eat down by the river. I’d stick with diner coffee and not try to order a latte. But maybe things have changed.
The Oregon Beaches really start here. We stayed in a Yurt south beach, just south of Astoria. If you’re hard of hearing and can’t hear the foghorns, that could be an option. Say …!
Next stop, Manzanita. Which you are more than familiar with. Say hi to Betsey and Steve for me. What a wonderful spot. I’m envious!
After, that, the Oregon coast really, really gets rolling. Taking your Time. Gold Beach. Agate Beach. Lincoln City. Tons of Bed & Breakfasts along here.
Brookings is one of my favorite places in the world. We always stay at Rainbow Rock – a condo development north of town. This is definitely a happy place on earth for you son Max, and one of the few places on earth I actually relax. I have no idea why. Please feel free to call Debbie at (541) 846-1242 or (702) 460-1929.
Highlights in Brookings – A Get a Blizzard at the Dairy Queen and go to Azalea Park. Very pretty.
After Brookings: Now you’re crossing into California. Del Norte County is probably one of the least developed counties in California, and full of farms and redwoods and Siskyou wildness and hippies. This area around where the Smith River hits the sea is beautiful. Highway 199 winds down through the mountains following the river. If you take a left – which you won’t – that’s a gorgeous drive and you come out at Grant’s Pass, just a little north of Medford, and Ashland.
Ashland is wonderful.
If you take a left, there are some wonderful redwood groves. Lots of Elves and magical frogs and fairies.
Then comes Crescent City and then Arcata and Eureka, which is one of the mostfog bound places in all of America. America WWII pilots would practice taken off and landing here, to train for England.
In Crescent City there’s a “golden age of motoring” motel made of one entire redwood tree called the Curly Redwood lodge. You’ll see it on your left.
The Curly Redwood Lodge. It was built from one curly redwood tree that produced 57,000 board feet of lumber. Curly redwood is unique because of the curly grain of the wood, unlike typical straight grained redwood. You’re real close to the ocean and redwood forests. Phone: (855) 264-8957
South from there, is plenty of gorgeous country.
After Garberville and Leggett, the 1 and 101 separate and I would take the 1 to Fort Bragg and then turn inland.
I haven’t explored this road over to Williams/Willows on the 5 - so you’ll have to give me the report.
Heading North again, the 5 doesn’t get interesting really until Redding. The reservoirs and Mt. Shasta should be AMAZING after all the rains, though. WWWWOOWW.
As will Mendocino County, etc.
Taking a right at Weed and going inland toward Klamath Falls … pretty country.
Crater Lake is of course stunning.
We camped at La Pine, which is between Crater Lake and Bend.
At any rate, take lots of pictures and send us updates as you drive. Take lots of breaks. Enjoy yourself. It’s a cruise. Not a race.
Love,
Max
****
Addendum. I guess the trip turned out to be a real challenge. Dad was tense and not feeling well. Had health issues dealing with the plumbing. I'm sure my mom was suitably passive-aggressive and not helpful. My Dad had a big resentment toward my mom because she kept working and they never got to enjoy retirement together. Since he's gone, I'll carry on the resentment on his behalf. To be fair, she was probably terrified - who wants to be stuck at home all day with a crazy person? On the other hand, these are the people that didn't own a couch. My mom never stops moving - not like a shark; more of a hummingbird. Is it the asthma drugs she's on? A lifetime of backed-up trauma? Cognitive degeneration? + energy.
Ahoy Crew, The good ship Have Fun Every Day,
I’m very excited for your road trip through my favorite part of the world.*
The coast from Tomales, California to Astoria, Oregon. Here are some top-of-mind highlights and observations.
- Heading South from Kingston towards the Washington coast.
One big tree farm full of depressed lumber towns, gun shops, and restaurants serving tough steak and spotted owl stew, interspersed Indian reservations wishing the white folks had more money (other than their government checks) to gamble away. I love the damp dreary perpetual dusk of the Washington South Olympic Peninsula. But it’s an acquired taste and better things lie ahead.
Remember, this part of the world – the winter here, almost killed Lewis and Clark. Speaking of Lewis and Clark, the museum at the mouth of the Columbia is worth checking out. A nice walk through timeline and a good overlook of the mighty Columbia.
Rolling on to Astoria.
Astoria, as a town, seems like one big might-have-been that almost happened. You’ll probably be able to find something gluten free to eat down by the river. I’d stick with diner coffee and not try to order a latte. But maybe things have changed.
The Oregon Beaches really start here. We stayed in a Yurt south beach, just south of Astoria. If you’re hard of hearing and can’t hear the foghorns, that could be an option. Say …!
Next stop, Manzanita. Which you are more than familiar with. Say hi to Betsey and Steve for me. What a wonderful spot. I’m envious!
After, that, the Oregon coast really, really gets rolling. Taking your Time. Gold Beach. Agate Beach. Lincoln City. Tons of Bed & Breakfasts along here.
Brookings is one of my favorite places in the world. We always stay at Rainbow Rock – a condo development north of town. This is definitely a happy place on earth for you son Max, and one of the few places on earth I actually relax. I have no idea why. Please feel free to call Debbie at (541) 846-1242 or (702) 460-1929.
Highlights in Brookings – A Get a Blizzard at the Dairy Queen and go to Azalea Park. Very pretty.
After Brookings: Now you’re crossing into California. Del Norte County is probably one of the least developed counties in California, and full of farms and redwoods and Siskyou wildness and hippies. This area around where the Smith River hits the sea is beautiful. Highway 199 winds down through the mountains following the river. If you take a left – which you won’t – that’s a gorgeous drive and you come out at Grant’s Pass, just a little north of Medford, and Ashland.
Ashland is wonderful.
If you take a left, there are some wonderful redwood groves. Lots of Elves and magical frogs and fairies.
Then comes Crescent City and then Arcata and Eureka, which is one of the mostfog bound places in all of America. America WWII pilots would practice taken off and landing here, to train for England.
In Crescent City there’s a “golden age of motoring” motel made of one entire redwood tree called the Curly Redwood lodge. You’ll see it on your left.
The Curly Redwood Lodge. It was built from one curly redwood tree that produced 57,000 board feet of lumber. Curly redwood is unique because of the curly grain of the wood, unlike typical straight grained redwood. You’re real close to the ocean and redwood forests. Phone: (855) 264-8957
South from there, is plenty of gorgeous country.
After Garberville and Leggett, the 1 and 101 separate and I would take the 1 to Fort Bragg and then turn inland.
I haven’t explored this road over to Williams/Willows on the 5 - so you’ll have to give me the report.
Heading North again, the 5 doesn’t get interesting really until Redding. The reservoirs and Mt. Shasta should be AMAZING after all the rains, though. WWWWOOWW.
As will Mendocino County, etc.
Taking a right at Weed and going inland toward Klamath Falls … pretty country.
Crater Lake is of course stunning.
We camped at La Pine, which is between Crater Lake and Bend.
At any rate, take lots of pictures and send us updates as you drive. Take lots of breaks. Enjoy yourself. It’s a cruise. Not a race.
Love,
Max
****
Addendum. I guess the trip turned out to be a real challenge. Dad was tense and not feeling well. Had health issues dealing with the plumbing. I'm sure my mom was suitably passive-aggressive and not helpful. My Dad had a big resentment toward my mom because she kept working and they never got to enjoy retirement together. Since he's gone, I'll carry on the resentment on his behalf. To be fair, she was probably terrified - who wants to be stuck at home all day with a crazy person? On the other hand, these are the people that didn't own a couch. My mom never stops moving - not like a shark; more of a hummingbird. Is it the asthma drugs she's on? A lifetime of backed-up trauma? Cognitive degeneration? + energy.
4. US 258 Eclipse
slMartin Godsil was always prepared. His motto, which he often quoted, was the “5 Ps:” Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. Sometimes, with a knowing grunt, he would add a 6th P: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
It’s the spring of 1974. Hard Rock is still king, and big American cars are his chariot, but both are running out of gas – and I mean that literally. The US is dealing with an oil crisis. There’s trouble in the Middle East and OPEC turned off the spigot. Disco, and the malaise-filled final dismemberment of the American backbone is on its way. But at 1633 East Calhoun, all of this news of the wider world is just so much ink off a mallard’s back. We watch the 6 o’clock news and we’re done with it. Put on some nice classical music on the Maxell tap deck, and let’s eat dinner. Roast beef, chicken or my personal favorite, pork chops. (I’m been vegetarian for over two decades but still enjoy my hearty meals.)
But back to that April morning in 1974. The van is already running, warming up, puffing exhaust out into the cold morning air. Behind the van is an empty trailer. Marty Godsil double-checks his tail-light connections to the trailer, the safety chain, the load-levelers and the 50-gallon container of extra fuel in case the lines as the gas station are too long. He’s got his ‘coffee traveler’ in a Thermos and a rack of cassette tapes of truckin’ music. (Beach, Boys, Stones, Beatles, Neal Diamond.) Like I said, he’s prepared.
It’s still dark as he pulls away from 1633 East Calhoun and heads south. It will take two days to run the length of I-5, from Seattle to El Cajon, California – a desert town east of San Diego and mere 22 miles from the Mexican border. He drives up 18th street for two blocks and takes the right onto East Lynn St. Alone on the pre-dawn streets, he barely slows at the 5-way stop before powering up the hill. He passes Seattle Preparatory Boys’ Academy, then through the light at 10th Avenue with Roanoke Park on the right, then left at Seward school before merging onto I-5, which runs like the Main St. through our lives, from the Canadian-American border, all the way to Mexico. As he merges onto the freeway, Lake Union reflects the lights of the Seattle skyline, the Space Needle in the right foreground. On the opposite side of lake is Queen Anne Hill, topped with radio towers. To his left, the steep tree-dense bank of Capitol Hill, presided over by imposing and ghostly presence of St. Mark’s Cathedral. He picks up speed and the first of 1200 plus miles roll under his wheels.
Now he’s passing through downtown. The tallest building is the Seafirst Bank Building, the tallest in Seattle at the time, the all-black “Box the Space Needle Came In. His eyes briefly alight on the Smith Tower, where he used to have his office. Recently his firm of “Casey & Pruzan” moved from the Smith Tower to the 11th floor of the less distinctive Pacific Building on 3rd and Columbia, which you’ll only pick out if you really know where to look. Later, Casey and Pruzan added names to the letterhead, but not my Dads. He never wanted to be on the letterhead. What he wanted was in El Cajon.
Leaving downtown, he passes the turnoff to I-90, which could take you all the way from Seattle to Boston. The trip back East to Rochester and Toronto is for another time. Today’s mission is south.
He takes another sip of coffee and pulls out a maple bar. On his left, is Beacon Hill topped by the regal edifice of Swedish Hospital. (Later, this would briefly be the home of an emergent online bookshop and marketplace called Amazon). He passed the Rainier Brewery with its conic cursive R, briefly taking in the scent of sour hops. He then passes the turnoff to the West Seattle bridge, and then the runways and hangers of Boeing field. Congress has recently cancelled the contract for the Boeing 2707, America’s answer to the British-French built supersonic Concorde jet. With the deal scrapped, 70,000 people lost their jobs. “The last person to leave Seattle,” said a billboard at the time, “please turn off the lights.” The only thing that’s dry in Seattle, is the sense of humor.
The white Ford Econoline towing the empty trailer is now travelling at a steady 75 mph. Steady as metronome the tires roll and the evergreens and building of South Seattle whip by. Past Sea-Tac airport. And then Tacoma, Olympia and the Sleater-Kinney turnoff.
Marty finishes the last of his Thermos of coffee. He’ll have to pitstop soon.
Now through Puyallup, and Chehalis as the dawn turns the gray to green. Well before lunch he’ll be in Vancouver, Washington and then crossing the Columbia into Portland, Oregon. In later years, Marty would stop and visit his Mother and sister in Vancouver, Washington, but today he is on a mission. And nothing, not family, nor gas shortages nor gutters that need fixing are going to stop him from his appointed task. He passes Mt. Rainier, the still-quiescent and pre-eruption Mt. St. Helens with its full voluptuous silhouette still intact, and Mt. Hood, known in later years for its year-round snowboarding and the pointiest of the Cascade Range volcanic peaks. Through Portland and Salem and the outskirts of Eugene. Then on through Medford, Grant’s Pass and finally Ashland before climbing, climbing the V-8 chugging away up through the Siskiyou Pass and then crossing into California passing through an idyllic high alpine valley where I-5 takes a wide scythe-shaped turn round Mt. Shasta, and then descending, rolling downhill to Redding, into the gently seasonless pale brown and infinitely wide agricultural plains of California. He spends the night in Sacramento. Sipping a Napa Valley Red, he reflects “750 miles down and 525 to go.” That’s enough reflection for the evening and he’s off to bed, falling asleep with a Gary Cooper movie still playing on the tube.
In the morning, he’s back in the saddle. He skirts the Bay area, barely taking the foot off the gas at Stockton. The carpet of grassy hills dotted with cows rolls on, through Weatherly, and Avenal and Kettleman City where he stops for gas. The 41 would take him to Yosemite, but Yosemite is just one more place you don’t sail, so it doesn’t even cross his mind. He keeps chugging south through the San Jacinto Valley, with its prison and penitentiaries, almond ranches, irrigation channels, and beef processing ranches smelling like the effluent of hell. The Beatles play. Neal Diamond plays. Only the Rolling Stones really work. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Get off of my Cloud. Street Fighting Man. You Can’t Always Get What You Want. (But if you try some time, you get what you need.) The Grapevine appears, first as a mirage and then more substantial. Now he’s climbing, empty trailer rattling behind. He moves to the right hand lane, patient as Jeb Methuselah the long haul trucker, keeping an eye on the temperature gauge. Up and up he rises without adverse event, up through 4,100 feet, the truck and trailer holding steady, no overheating, blowouts or accidents. Riding with Lady Luck, Tejon Ranch on the left, Los Pinos to the right. Cresting the summit, downhill he winds, coasting. If you ever stop at Gorman for gas in the middle of the night, you’ll ringed by otherworldly peaks in in the clear night sky you’ll see stars as countless as the sands of the desert. But it’s 11:47 a.m. on Tuesday, and right now it’s scenic as a trailer park porta-potty. He descends past Pyramid Lake into the San Fernando Valley and suburban sprawl soon announces that you’ve arrived Southern California proper and then in a moment of disloyalty to I-5 which has brought him thus far, Marty Godsil take the exit to the 405, intending a scenic distraction. He climbs once again just a short hike up and over the Sepulveda Pass and now he’s flying down the grade into Los Angeles, Bel-Air and U.C.L.A. to left and Brentwood to the right. As he’s reaching the bottom of the hill, traffic suddenly come to a halt. Mile-upon-mile of red taillights. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 am, or 10 pm. On the 405, every hour is rush hour. He stops. He waits. He thinks.
As the traffic grinds along, he wonders aloud why anyone would live here, a post-apocalyptic world of endless gray-beige grids and dry choking brown horizonless vistas. And besides, there’s never any wind at Marina Del Rey – everyone knows that. Every regatta is a lumpy drifter, your sails and spars racking back and forth in the rolling sea swell slop. The traffic crawls past Sunset Boulevard and the Veteran’s Cemetery and Westwood and over Wilshire and then past the turnoff to I-10 which takes the imagination out along old Route 66 – mesas, roadside attractions, cactus and cowboy country. But there are no sailboats in the painted desert so he stays on course. The traffic accelerates to a tolerable 20-25 mph and it’s still dense but moving as he passes the exit to LAX and the South Bay beach towns of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo. He would get to know these towns later – decades later – but not today. With the Palos Verdes Peninsula at two o’clock, the 405 veers left across the top of San Pedro and Long Beach. Another time, and he would pull off the freeway onto the 101 and head to Long Beach to see the Frosts and park the boat at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club for a regatta. But, again, that’s a story for another day.
He crosses into Orange County, and through Seal Beach. Only two counties to go – Orange and San Diego – albeit both are larger than some European countries or East Coast states. The scenery improves and there’s even a straggle of orange groves off to the left, innocently minding their own business, waiting to be mowed down for suburban housing developments. At Irvine, the 405 rejoins the 5 and suddenly the bright sunshine and magic of California sets in, full-throated as a Beach Boys chorus. The green hills of Laguna, the beach hamlets of Point Dana, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente and then onto San Onofre and Camp Pendleton with its coastal ranges standing sentry, guarding San Diego from the rest of the world. The stale air in the van is replaced by the scent of anise and wild sage. It’s the scent of California, the fragrance of a bullet-proof optimism, clear yet earthy. He sees the Pacific to his right, and his spirits crank up another notch. Leaving Camp Pendleton, the beach towns of San Diego County click by. Carlsbad. Encinitas. Del Mar. La Jolla. And now he crosses into San Diego proper, veering left at the split and heading out to El Cajon where Kelvin Savell has the molds to build Dragon Class Yachts out of fiberglass. Plastic boats, some would say derisively. For some, to build a dragon out of anything but wood, was sacrilege. The Dragon is a classic wooden boat, as evocative of sailing’s golden age, with its clean lines, as the J-Boats that competed for the America’s Cup.
But Marty Godsil doesn’t have any sentimental attachment bygone days. He is no romanticist. He knows first-hand what it takes to restore and maintain a wooden boat. The stacks of sandpaper. The coats of varnish. The measuring. The sawing. The dry rot. He knows intimately the joys and challenges of working with teak, mahogany and pine. Sure, fiberglass is nasty stuff. But in the end, the result is a boat without temperamental planks that expand and contract with moisture, or bow and bend with time. Fiberglass can be crafted to be beautiful and requires a helluva lot less upkeep. Fiberglass will do just fine.
*****
My Dad built quite a number of Dragon Class yachts with his fiberglass molds. Sometimes, he would build them to spec for others, but just as often it seems he would build them for himself, sail them for a season or two, then sell the boat and get to work building another. He was always making, dreaming, plotting, sketching. He always had a project, always on his conceptual toes, leaning forward. There was Spectre, US 263, which was all black and had to be constantly polished. Next, or somewhere around that time frame, he built a boat for an older, low-key retired couple that sailed together. They called their Dragon Second Wind. Low-key clever. He built one for Dr. Dick Buckingham the anesthesiologist. Anesthesiologists make a lot of money. Dr. Buckingham was kind of intense. He also collected Lancias. You know, the curvaceous Italian sports cars. My dad was not an impetuous man, but he once did buy a limited edition Lancia with a flawless aluminum body that he shipped back to America. He kept it in the garage and was so worried about denting the pristine body,, that he never drove it and eventually sold it to Dick Buckingham. Again, we’re not doing too many detours today, so that’s a story for another time. Buckingham’s Dragon was yellow but not the clear yellow of Mistral; rather it was a yellow that leaned more orange and he called it Sunkist.
My father’s next boat was called Target. US 263. This boat was a white and red color scheme, and fittingly sold in Switzerland. This was the first boat that he shipped to Europe, pre-sold. He sailed Target in the 1977 World Championships in Thünersee, Switzerland. I accompanied my parents on this trip, as did my mom Sandra Godsil and her All-Girl crew (this made quite a stir in Switzerland, which had only recently allowed women the vote in all cantons) as well as my Aunt Karen and Uncle Frank.
Next came Vim, US 271. Vim was the best of everything, the culmination of everything he knew. Teak decks. Tasteful gold leaf trim along the gunnel. The hull itself was a sort of off-white, that gave it a more timeless worn-in feel – less clinical than a bright-white boat might be. I don’t think he ever really wanted to sell this one – not really. He shipped it to Europe and kept it in storage in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Every summer he would fly over and compete in a regatta or two somewhere in Europe and then drive it back to Rotterdam to store for Winter. He sailed Vim in a number of European Championships and Gold Cups. He won the 1980 Dutch Championship, and Vim is the Boat that he sailed in the 1981 World Championships in Travemünde, Germany where he came in 5th. We sailed Vim the 1985 World Championships in Douenenez, France, as well. (I sailed the warm-up regatta before Pat Dore his foredeck crew showed up in Travemünde as a 15-year-old, and I sailed in the World Championships in France in ’85 when I was 19. We placed in the teens, probably.)
The last fiberglass Dragon my Dad built was Ariel, US 288. It was his swan song and fittingly nod to Shakespeare’s Tempest. We will come back to each of these boats in time.
But the very first boat he built, the prototype, as it were, was called Eclipse. I don’t remember too much of the racing that happened with Eclipse, and what I do remember is aided by the pictures that were on the walls in the basement of my parent’s house. Pictures of him and his crew – Neil Gunn, or Bob Cairns, or Bob Vynne or Robert Butt – and a big trophy, all smiles, after winning the North American Championships in Picton, Ontario or Rochester, New York. He did the run back east a few times, to sail on the Great Lakes. It “blew like stink” and often gear and masts were broken. For these adventures, the drive was talked about as much as the sailing – but yeah. Lord, all these tempting detours.
What I do remember: In celebration of the coming Bicentennial, it had a white hull, blue deck, with red trim. The name itself – I remember drawing the design myself – was red, white and blue, as was the Spinnaker. Designing the Spinnaker was a big deal around our house. The Spinnaker, for those who are unfamiliar with the names of the sails on a sailboat is the colorful sail out front shaped like a parachute. In fact, the nickname for the Spinnaker is ‘the chute.’ legend tells us, that spinnaker was Max Godsil’s first multi-syllabic word. I spent a lot of time drawing and coloring spinnaker designs as a kid. My Dad would generally prompt me with an idea – “It’s red white and blue with a star in the middle!” I’d get out my Crayolas, and do numerous studies. Part of the exercise was that you had to follow the pattern of the way the cloth was sewn together. In fact, we had a template and I would color in the panels. At first, I was purely symmetrical; a star pattern or a single bar but after a while I became more adventurous. Think Mondrian, but with triangles instead of a squares.
*****
At any rate, did my father Marty Godsil know that the mold he was picking up in El Cajon held so much potential for joy and adventure, going new places and making lifelong friends? Who knows. How could he? He loaded the Dragon mold on the empty trailer, cinched down everything tight, checked his knots, ate dinner with the Savells, and the next morning, was up at dawn and rewound the entire west coast, all 1265 miles back to Seattle and 1633 East Calhoun.
*****
Arriving back home, my Dad had to figure out a place to build the fiberglass Dragons. He settled on Miller Marine, on Bainbridge Island. Laying up fiberglass boats is not comfortable or pretty. Fiberglass is just icky stuff. I mean, just look at the word. It’s fiber. And it’s glass. There are different types of fiberglass. There is the fluffy pink kind that looks like soft cotton candy that they use for insulation. But don’t eat it! Don’t even touch it! And once you get it in your hands, it’s tough to get out. Don’t even want to think about your tongue. The kind of fiberglass you make boats out of is obviously different. It’s hard, and made out of epoxy resin, reinforced with woven fiberglass. On its own the resin wouldn’t be stiff enough. Basically here’s how it works: You lay down one layer of epoxy resin throughout the inside of the mold, and then someone has to get down inside the boat and put down layers of the woven fiberglass cloth from bow to stern. Then, someone has to put down a layer of super-light balsa wood square tiles. These tiles are about 2-3 inches square, and to reinforce the hull and to make sure the hull is stiff enough you need to place these balsa tiles, one at a time, everywhere from all the way up in the bow, and back to the stern. You also need to reinforce the deck and around the cockpit as well. Since the bow and stern of a dragon are very narrow, this is not pleasant work – and yet, it requires an attention to detail. Once you’ve laid down the balsa wood squares, you lay another layer of epoxy on top of that to seal it. And another. The resin actually adds the most weight, so you need to be someone calculating in how much you add in the bow and stern – you want to keep most of the weight in the center of the boat – as much as the rules allow. The point is to hit the minimum weight, with as muh of the weight as possible centered and lower – this makes the boat more stable. So bottom line, when you’re dealing with the hydrodynamic forces, even in the case of a standardized one-design racing yacht, the variables involved in optiimizing the speed and performance are a bit more involved than one might think – you don’t just pour a bunch of liquid epoxy resin the mold and out comes a boat. Not at all. It requires skill and care and backbreaking effort. My Dad had a guy he really liked and was respected for his work. His name was Dave Miller, a good sailor in his own right. Dave would basically lay up the hulls and then my Dad would put the keel on, sand, fare and rig the boats.
Three points on this, and we’ll move on: 1) My Dad knew enough to not let his reach exceed his grasp – he did, after all have an actual day job as an in-demand family law attorney handling multi-million dollar high-profile divorce cases. Building boats was his vocation … and a vacation from representing angry jilted wives or rich, ego-driven husbands and playing therapist/attack dog to one or both. So he wasn’t going to spend his weekends crawling around the bow of a boat. He never mowed the lawn, or cracked his own crab, either. 2) My dad respected hard work and craftsmanship and if a skilled person could do something with their hands that he couldn’t – he had no problem hiring them. 3) Finally, Martin Godsil was never elitist and treated everyone the same, from the guy pumping gas to cops to rich people. Everyone got respect, or got torn a new one, depending. He was an equal opportunity aggressor.
*****
Okay, let’s leave Martin Godsil to his sanding, faring and drilling and allow ourselves just one tiny detour. Let’s take our bikes just a little farther down the road.
*****
I used to ride the ferry to Bainbridge with him a lot. At the time I was, probably, what?, 10 or so. Definitely still in Elementary School because I remember Morgan would come out with us sometimes. We’d all take the Winslow Ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge – the Spokane, or the Puyallup – which were the newest Super ferries at the time, and then we’d do the 15 min drive along the one main highway the runs the spine of Bainbridge Island and take a left and there it was, Miller Marine. Basically, two really large sheds – almost hangars - filled with half-built boats out in the rainy northwest woods. Sometimes Morgan and I would bring our BMX bikes and ride the country roads. Only short distance away there was a big hill with a farm at the bottom. The hill called to us in that voice that only elementary kids can hear … “How fast can you go … come ride me … how fast can you go?” So as my Dad went to work on his new boat, sanding and faring and grinding and drilling, we rode over and started down this epic hill, pedaling as hard as we could, and then stopping, because we were going so fast, our feet couldn’t keep up so we just tucked and rode and listened to the wind in our ears. Just as we get to the bottom two huge Afghan hounds – probably outweighing us – come running, barking and snarling out of the gates of the farm at the bottom of the hill. We start to slow as we’re at the bottom of the hill and there’s another big hill in front of us – as steep as the one we just came down. Morgan is nervously laughing like he always did when we pulled a prank, but I’m not. I’m pissing my Toughskins in terror. My legs are pumping away and the dogs are barking viciously and loudly and snapping at our heels and wheels. I look back and Morgan’s laugh is turning higher pitched as one of the dogs noses toward his calf, jaws snapping. He’s terrified but still laughing and smiling as he screams; for Morgan, this was the way of nature, and a contest worth having. Boys ride bikes. Dogs chase them. Let’s see who wins. Morgan was always better friends with fear than I was and braver by a factor of 10. The high dive has never been my preference, not in any area of my life. Finally, the dogs pull back and adrenaline powers us to the top of the hill where we stop, legs straddling our top bar and look back down the hill at the idyllic little farmstead nestled in the small valley. Such a tranquil, bucolic scene – all except for the two boy-eating dogs patrolling the road at the bottom of the hill. I calculate in my head - is there another way back to the boatyard? I really have no idea. There are no detours. It seems that the only way back is to pedal as fast as our fourth grade legs will allow, and try to blow by the dogs again, and go up the hill we just came down. The Afghans pace across the yellow line of the road, back and forth. Every step is statement, “my road, my yellow line, my farm, my territory.” They occasionally look up the hill, locking in on the prey with sighthound eyes. No owner calls, or comes out to see what the ruckus was about. The dogs aren’t going away.
Morgan leans over the bars, puts his foot on the pedal and with a wicked smile, he says “You ready?”
It’s the spring of 1974. Hard Rock is still king, and big American cars are his chariot, but both are running out of gas – and I mean that literally. The US is dealing with an oil crisis. There’s trouble in the Middle East and OPEC turned off the spigot. Disco, and the malaise-filled final dismemberment of the American backbone is on its way. But at 1633 East Calhoun, all of this news of the wider world is just so much ink off a mallard’s back. We watch the 6 o’clock news and we’re done with it. Put on some nice classical music on the Maxell tap deck, and let’s eat dinner. Roast beef, chicken or my personal favorite, pork chops. (I’m been vegetarian for over two decades but still enjoy my hearty meals.)
But back to that April morning in 1974. The van is already running, warming up, puffing exhaust out into the cold morning air. Behind the van is an empty trailer. Marty Godsil double-checks his tail-light connections to the trailer, the safety chain, the load-levelers and the 50-gallon container of extra fuel in case the lines as the gas station are too long. He’s got his ‘coffee traveler’ in a Thermos and a rack of cassette tapes of truckin’ music. (Beach, Boys, Stones, Beatles, Neal Diamond.) Like I said, he’s prepared.
It’s still dark as he pulls away from 1633 East Calhoun and heads south. It will take two days to run the length of I-5, from Seattle to El Cajon, California – a desert town east of San Diego and mere 22 miles from the Mexican border. He drives up 18th street for two blocks and takes the right onto East Lynn St. Alone on the pre-dawn streets, he barely slows at the 5-way stop before powering up the hill. He passes Seattle Preparatory Boys’ Academy, then through the light at 10th Avenue with Roanoke Park on the right, then left at Seward school before merging onto I-5, which runs like the Main St. through our lives, from the Canadian-American border, all the way to Mexico. As he merges onto the freeway, Lake Union reflects the lights of the Seattle skyline, the Space Needle in the right foreground. On the opposite side of lake is Queen Anne Hill, topped with radio towers. To his left, the steep tree-dense bank of Capitol Hill, presided over by imposing and ghostly presence of St. Mark’s Cathedral. He picks up speed and the first of 1200 plus miles roll under his wheels.
Now he’s passing through downtown. The tallest building is the Seafirst Bank Building, the tallest in Seattle at the time, the all-black “Box the Space Needle Came In. His eyes briefly alight on the Smith Tower, where he used to have his office. Recently his firm of “Casey & Pruzan” moved from the Smith Tower to the 11th floor of the less distinctive Pacific Building on 3rd and Columbia, which you’ll only pick out if you really know where to look. Later, Casey and Pruzan added names to the letterhead, but not my Dads. He never wanted to be on the letterhead. What he wanted was in El Cajon.
Leaving downtown, he passes the turnoff to I-90, which could take you all the way from Seattle to Boston. The trip back East to Rochester and Toronto is for another time. Today’s mission is south.
He takes another sip of coffee and pulls out a maple bar. On his left, is Beacon Hill topped by the regal edifice of Swedish Hospital. (Later, this would briefly be the home of an emergent online bookshop and marketplace called Amazon). He passed the Rainier Brewery with its conic cursive R, briefly taking in the scent of sour hops. He then passes the turnoff to the West Seattle bridge, and then the runways and hangers of Boeing field. Congress has recently cancelled the contract for the Boeing 2707, America’s answer to the British-French built supersonic Concorde jet. With the deal scrapped, 70,000 people lost their jobs. “The last person to leave Seattle,” said a billboard at the time, “please turn off the lights.” The only thing that’s dry in Seattle, is the sense of humor.
The white Ford Econoline towing the empty trailer is now travelling at a steady 75 mph. Steady as metronome the tires roll and the evergreens and building of South Seattle whip by. Past Sea-Tac airport. And then Tacoma, Olympia and the Sleater-Kinney turnoff.
Marty finishes the last of his Thermos of coffee. He’ll have to pitstop soon.
Now through Puyallup, and Chehalis as the dawn turns the gray to green. Well before lunch he’ll be in Vancouver, Washington and then crossing the Columbia into Portland, Oregon. In later years, Marty would stop and visit his Mother and sister in Vancouver, Washington, but today he is on a mission. And nothing, not family, nor gas shortages nor gutters that need fixing are going to stop him from his appointed task. He passes Mt. Rainier, the still-quiescent and pre-eruption Mt. St. Helens with its full voluptuous silhouette still intact, and Mt. Hood, known in later years for its year-round snowboarding and the pointiest of the Cascade Range volcanic peaks. Through Portland and Salem and the outskirts of Eugene. Then on through Medford, Grant’s Pass and finally Ashland before climbing, climbing the V-8 chugging away up through the Siskiyou Pass and then crossing into California passing through an idyllic high alpine valley where I-5 takes a wide scythe-shaped turn round Mt. Shasta, and then descending, rolling downhill to Redding, into the gently seasonless pale brown and infinitely wide agricultural plains of California. He spends the night in Sacramento. Sipping a Napa Valley Red, he reflects “750 miles down and 525 to go.” That’s enough reflection for the evening and he’s off to bed, falling asleep with a Gary Cooper movie still playing on the tube.
In the morning, he’s back in the saddle. He skirts the Bay area, barely taking the foot off the gas at Stockton. The carpet of grassy hills dotted with cows rolls on, through Weatherly, and Avenal and Kettleman City where he stops for gas. The 41 would take him to Yosemite, but Yosemite is just one more place you don’t sail, so it doesn’t even cross his mind. He keeps chugging south through the San Jacinto Valley, with its prison and penitentiaries, almond ranches, irrigation channels, and beef processing ranches smelling like the effluent of hell. The Beatles play. Neal Diamond plays. Only the Rolling Stones really work. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Get off of my Cloud. Street Fighting Man. You Can’t Always Get What You Want. (But if you try some time, you get what you need.) The Grapevine appears, first as a mirage and then more substantial. Now he’s climbing, empty trailer rattling behind. He moves to the right hand lane, patient as Jeb Methuselah the long haul trucker, keeping an eye on the temperature gauge. Up and up he rises without adverse event, up through 4,100 feet, the truck and trailer holding steady, no overheating, blowouts or accidents. Riding with Lady Luck, Tejon Ranch on the left, Los Pinos to the right. Cresting the summit, downhill he winds, coasting. If you ever stop at Gorman for gas in the middle of the night, you’ll ringed by otherworldly peaks in in the clear night sky you’ll see stars as countless as the sands of the desert. But it’s 11:47 a.m. on Tuesday, and right now it’s scenic as a trailer park porta-potty. He descends past Pyramid Lake into the San Fernando Valley and suburban sprawl soon announces that you’ve arrived Southern California proper and then in a moment of disloyalty to I-5 which has brought him thus far, Marty Godsil take the exit to the 405, intending a scenic distraction. He climbs once again just a short hike up and over the Sepulveda Pass and now he’s flying down the grade into Los Angeles, Bel-Air and U.C.L.A. to left and Brentwood to the right. As he’s reaching the bottom of the hill, traffic suddenly come to a halt. Mile-upon-mile of red taillights. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 am, or 10 pm. On the 405, every hour is rush hour. He stops. He waits. He thinks.
As the traffic grinds along, he wonders aloud why anyone would live here, a post-apocalyptic world of endless gray-beige grids and dry choking brown horizonless vistas. And besides, there’s never any wind at Marina Del Rey – everyone knows that. Every regatta is a lumpy drifter, your sails and spars racking back and forth in the rolling sea swell slop. The traffic crawls past Sunset Boulevard and the Veteran’s Cemetery and Westwood and over Wilshire and then past the turnoff to I-10 which takes the imagination out along old Route 66 – mesas, roadside attractions, cactus and cowboy country. But there are no sailboats in the painted desert so he stays on course. The traffic accelerates to a tolerable 20-25 mph and it’s still dense but moving as he passes the exit to LAX and the South Bay beach towns of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo. He would get to know these towns later – decades later – but not today. With the Palos Verdes Peninsula at two o’clock, the 405 veers left across the top of San Pedro and Long Beach. Another time, and he would pull off the freeway onto the 101 and head to Long Beach to see the Frosts and park the boat at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club for a regatta. But, again, that’s a story for another day.
He crosses into Orange County, and through Seal Beach. Only two counties to go – Orange and San Diego – albeit both are larger than some European countries or East Coast states. The scenery improves and there’s even a straggle of orange groves off to the left, innocently minding their own business, waiting to be mowed down for suburban housing developments. At Irvine, the 405 rejoins the 5 and suddenly the bright sunshine and magic of California sets in, full-throated as a Beach Boys chorus. The green hills of Laguna, the beach hamlets of Point Dana, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente and then onto San Onofre and Camp Pendleton with its coastal ranges standing sentry, guarding San Diego from the rest of the world. The stale air in the van is replaced by the scent of anise and wild sage. It’s the scent of California, the fragrance of a bullet-proof optimism, clear yet earthy. He sees the Pacific to his right, and his spirits crank up another notch. Leaving Camp Pendleton, the beach towns of San Diego County click by. Carlsbad. Encinitas. Del Mar. La Jolla. And now he crosses into San Diego proper, veering left at the split and heading out to El Cajon where Kelvin Savell has the molds to build Dragon Class Yachts out of fiberglass. Plastic boats, some would say derisively. For some, to build a dragon out of anything but wood, was sacrilege. The Dragon is a classic wooden boat, as evocative of sailing’s golden age, with its clean lines, as the J-Boats that competed for the America’s Cup.
But Marty Godsil doesn’t have any sentimental attachment bygone days. He is no romanticist. He knows first-hand what it takes to restore and maintain a wooden boat. The stacks of sandpaper. The coats of varnish. The measuring. The sawing. The dry rot. He knows intimately the joys and challenges of working with teak, mahogany and pine. Sure, fiberglass is nasty stuff. But in the end, the result is a boat without temperamental planks that expand and contract with moisture, or bow and bend with time. Fiberglass can be crafted to be beautiful and requires a helluva lot less upkeep. Fiberglass will do just fine.
*****
My Dad built quite a number of Dragon Class yachts with his fiberglass molds. Sometimes, he would build them to spec for others, but just as often it seems he would build them for himself, sail them for a season or two, then sell the boat and get to work building another. He was always making, dreaming, plotting, sketching. He always had a project, always on his conceptual toes, leaning forward. There was Spectre, US 263, which was all black and had to be constantly polished. Next, or somewhere around that time frame, he built a boat for an older, low-key retired couple that sailed together. They called their Dragon Second Wind. Low-key clever. He built one for Dr. Dick Buckingham the anesthesiologist. Anesthesiologists make a lot of money. Dr. Buckingham was kind of intense. He also collected Lancias. You know, the curvaceous Italian sports cars. My dad was not an impetuous man, but he once did buy a limited edition Lancia with a flawless aluminum body that he shipped back to America. He kept it in the garage and was so worried about denting the pristine body,, that he never drove it and eventually sold it to Dick Buckingham. Again, we’re not doing too many detours today, so that’s a story for another time. Buckingham’s Dragon was yellow but not the clear yellow of Mistral; rather it was a yellow that leaned more orange and he called it Sunkist.
My father’s next boat was called Target. US 263. This boat was a white and red color scheme, and fittingly sold in Switzerland. This was the first boat that he shipped to Europe, pre-sold. He sailed Target in the 1977 World Championships in Thünersee, Switzerland. I accompanied my parents on this trip, as did my mom Sandra Godsil and her All-Girl crew (this made quite a stir in Switzerland, which had only recently allowed women the vote in all cantons) as well as my Aunt Karen and Uncle Frank.
Next came Vim, US 271. Vim was the best of everything, the culmination of everything he knew. Teak decks. Tasteful gold leaf trim along the gunnel. The hull itself was a sort of off-white, that gave it a more timeless worn-in feel – less clinical than a bright-white boat might be. I don’t think he ever really wanted to sell this one – not really. He shipped it to Europe and kept it in storage in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Every summer he would fly over and compete in a regatta or two somewhere in Europe and then drive it back to Rotterdam to store for Winter. He sailed Vim in a number of European Championships and Gold Cups. He won the 1980 Dutch Championship, and Vim is the Boat that he sailed in the 1981 World Championships in Travemünde, Germany where he came in 5th. We sailed Vim the 1985 World Championships in Douenenez, France, as well. (I sailed the warm-up regatta before Pat Dore his foredeck crew showed up in Travemünde as a 15-year-old, and I sailed in the World Championships in France in ’85 when I was 19. We placed in the teens, probably.)
The last fiberglass Dragon my Dad built was Ariel, US 288. It was his swan song and fittingly nod to Shakespeare’s Tempest. We will come back to each of these boats in time.
But the very first boat he built, the prototype, as it were, was called Eclipse. I don’t remember too much of the racing that happened with Eclipse, and what I do remember is aided by the pictures that were on the walls in the basement of my parent’s house. Pictures of him and his crew – Neil Gunn, or Bob Cairns, or Bob Vynne or Robert Butt – and a big trophy, all smiles, after winning the North American Championships in Picton, Ontario or Rochester, New York. He did the run back east a few times, to sail on the Great Lakes. It “blew like stink” and often gear and masts were broken. For these adventures, the drive was talked about as much as the sailing – but yeah. Lord, all these tempting detours.
What I do remember: In celebration of the coming Bicentennial, it had a white hull, blue deck, with red trim. The name itself – I remember drawing the design myself – was red, white and blue, as was the Spinnaker. Designing the Spinnaker was a big deal around our house. The Spinnaker, for those who are unfamiliar with the names of the sails on a sailboat is the colorful sail out front shaped like a parachute. In fact, the nickname for the Spinnaker is ‘the chute.’ legend tells us, that spinnaker was Max Godsil’s first multi-syllabic word. I spent a lot of time drawing and coloring spinnaker designs as a kid. My Dad would generally prompt me with an idea – “It’s red white and blue with a star in the middle!” I’d get out my Crayolas, and do numerous studies. Part of the exercise was that you had to follow the pattern of the way the cloth was sewn together. In fact, we had a template and I would color in the panels. At first, I was purely symmetrical; a star pattern or a single bar but after a while I became more adventurous. Think Mondrian, but with triangles instead of a squares.
*****
At any rate, did my father Marty Godsil know that the mold he was picking up in El Cajon held so much potential for joy and adventure, going new places and making lifelong friends? Who knows. How could he? He loaded the Dragon mold on the empty trailer, cinched down everything tight, checked his knots, ate dinner with the Savells, and the next morning, was up at dawn and rewound the entire west coast, all 1265 miles back to Seattle and 1633 East Calhoun.
*****
Arriving back home, my Dad had to figure out a place to build the fiberglass Dragons. He settled on Miller Marine, on Bainbridge Island. Laying up fiberglass boats is not comfortable or pretty. Fiberglass is just icky stuff. I mean, just look at the word. It’s fiber. And it’s glass. There are different types of fiberglass. There is the fluffy pink kind that looks like soft cotton candy that they use for insulation. But don’t eat it! Don’t even touch it! And once you get it in your hands, it’s tough to get out. Don’t even want to think about your tongue. The kind of fiberglass you make boats out of is obviously different. It’s hard, and made out of epoxy resin, reinforced with woven fiberglass. On its own the resin wouldn’t be stiff enough. Basically here’s how it works: You lay down one layer of epoxy resin throughout the inside of the mold, and then someone has to get down inside the boat and put down layers of the woven fiberglass cloth from bow to stern. Then, someone has to put down a layer of super-light balsa wood square tiles. These tiles are about 2-3 inches square, and to reinforce the hull and to make sure the hull is stiff enough you need to place these balsa tiles, one at a time, everywhere from all the way up in the bow, and back to the stern. You also need to reinforce the deck and around the cockpit as well. Since the bow and stern of a dragon are very narrow, this is not pleasant work – and yet, it requires an attention to detail. Once you’ve laid down the balsa wood squares, you lay another layer of epoxy on top of that to seal it. And another. The resin actually adds the most weight, so you need to be someone calculating in how much you add in the bow and stern – you want to keep most of the weight in the center of the boat – as much as the rules allow. The point is to hit the minimum weight, with as muh of the weight as possible centered and lower – this makes the boat more stable. So bottom line, when you’re dealing with the hydrodynamic forces, even in the case of a standardized one-design racing yacht, the variables involved in optiimizing the speed and performance are a bit more involved than one might think – you don’t just pour a bunch of liquid epoxy resin the mold and out comes a boat. Not at all. It requires skill and care and backbreaking effort. My Dad had a guy he really liked and was respected for his work. His name was Dave Miller, a good sailor in his own right. Dave would basically lay up the hulls and then my Dad would put the keel on, sand, fare and rig the boats.
Three points on this, and we’ll move on: 1) My Dad knew enough to not let his reach exceed his grasp – he did, after all have an actual day job as an in-demand family law attorney handling multi-million dollar high-profile divorce cases. Building boats was his vocation … and a vacation from representing angry jilted wives or rich, ego-driven husbands and playing therapist/attack dog to one or both. So he wasn’t going to spend his weekends crawling around the bow of a boat. He never mowed the lawn, or cracked his own crab, either. 2) My dad respected hard work and craftsmanship and if a skilled person could do something with their hands that he couldn’t – he had no problem hiring them. 3) Finally, Martin Godsil was never elitist and treated everyone the same, from the guy pumping gas to cops to rich people. Everyone got respect, or got torn a new one, depending. He was an equal opportunity aggressor.
*****
Okay, let’s leave Martin Godsil to his sanding, faring and drilling and allow ourselves just one tiny detour. Let’s take our bikes just a little farther down the road.
*****
I used to ride the ferry to Bainbridge with him a lot. At the time I was, probably, what?, 10 or so. Definitely still in Elementary School because I remember Morgan would come out with us sometimes. We’d all take the Winslow Ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge – the Spokane, or the Puyallup – which were the newest Super ferries at the time, and then we’d do the 15 min drive along the one main highway the runs the spine of Bainbridge Island and take a left and there it was, Miller Marine. Basically, two really large sheds – almost hangars - filled with half-built boats out in the rainy northwest woods. Sometimes Morgan and I would bring our BMX bikes and ride the country roads. Only short distance away there was a big hill with a farm at the bottom. The hill called to us in that voice that only elementary kids can hear … “How fast can you go … come ride me … how fast can you go?” So as my Dad went to work on his new boat, sanding and faring and grinding and drilling, we rode over and started down this epic hill, pedaling as hard as we could, and then stopping, because we were going so fast, our feet couldn’t keep up so we just tucked and rode and listened to the wind in our ears. Just as we get to the bottom two huge Afghan hounds – probably outweighing us – come running, barking and snarling out of the gates of the farm at the bottom of the hill. We start to slow as we’re at the bottom of the hill and there’s another big hill in front of us – as steep as the one we just came down. Morgan is nervously laughing like he always did when we pulled a prank, but I’m not. I’m pissing my Toughskins in terror. My legs are pumping away and the dogs are barking viciously and loudly and snapping at our heels and wheels. I look back and Morgan’s laugh is turning higher pitched as one of the dogs noses toward his calf, jaws snapping. He’s terrified but still laughing and smiling as he screams; for Morgan, this was the way of nature, and a contest worth having. Boys ride bikes. Dogs chase them. Let’s see who wins. Morgan was always better friends with fear than I was and braver by a factor of 10. The high dive has never been my preference, not in any area of my life. Finally, the dogs pull back and adrenaline powers us to the top of the hill where we stop, legs straddling our top bar and look back down the hill at the idyllic little farmstead nestled in the small valley. Such a tranquil, bucolic scene – all except for the two boy-eating dogs patrolling the road at the bottom of the hill. I calculate in my head - is there another way back to the boatyard? I really have no idea. There are no detours. It seems that the only way back is to pedal as fast as our fourth grade legs will allow, and try to blow by the dogs again, and go up the hill we just came down. The Afghans pace across the yellow line of the road, back and forth. Every step is statement, “my road, my yellow line, my farm, my territory.” They occasionally look up the hill, locking in on the prey with sighthound eyes. No owner calls, or comes out to see what the ruckus was about. The dogs aren’t going away.
Morgan leans over the bars, puts his foot on the pedal and with a wicked smile, he says “You ready?”
This poster was in kitchen when I was growing up. My Dad would say "keep on truckin' and kind of stick is foot out like the guys in the picture. He had lots of stories about truckin' Dragons all up and down the coast, and across the country. The stories of these road trips were as memorable as the stories of the regattas. I had no idea it had any cultural reference to the Grateful Dead or R. Crumb, and I don't think my Dad did either. "Keep on Truckin'" was one fun family motto among many.
5. US 260 - Spectre
In fear of him fire burns; in fear of him
The sun shines, the clouds rain, and the winds blow.
In fear of him death stalks about to kill.
- Katha Upanishad
*****
The sun shines, the clouds rain, and the winds blow.
In fear of him death stalks about to kill.
- Katha Upanishad
*****
There’s a black dragon chasing us.
Eighteen hours into cross-country drive, somewhere in the badlands of the Dakotas, your imagination unhinges from reality just a little. You might start to think things, feel things.
There’s a black dragon chasing us.
To set the scene: It’s the middle of the summer in the middle of the 70’s and it’s the middle of the night and Martin Godsil, a man in his mid-forties is somewhere on Interstate 90, somewhere between the Pacific and the Atlantic, definitely past the mountains and not yet to the cities. It’s flat and dark all around. Martin Godsil is behind the wheel of a white Econoline Ford van. Riding shotgun, was Bob Vynne. Bob Vynne leans back against the headrest of the passenger's seat, eyes closed and in full repose but not asleep. In the back of the van is Elizabeth Walker, a grad student, our next door neighbor lying down on a bed of pillows and and sail bags. Three people together, alone. A van full of sailing gear, sails three people and their stories. And as for the black Dragon in question that was chasing them, it was a 29’ Foot Dragon Class racing yacht, black as night, black as coal, Dragon US 260, christened Spectre and of course being pulled on trailer. As if truly being chased, the white Econoline van never stops rolling. They even keep the engine running while they fill up on gas and use the rest room. The three drivers would rotate between sleep, driving and shotgun.
The driver, Martin Godsil is of course, my dad. Lawyer. Boat builder. Fan of Ronald Reagan as a politician, Gary Cooper as a cowboy and not a fan of moral ambiguity. His decision trees are always binary. Good and evil. Black and white. Yes or no. My side or the wrong side. My father was boisterous, gregarious – he had an unself-conscious generousness of spirit that brought people out of themselves. People were never neutral about Marty Godsil. He was the opposite of a shoulder shrug. Always memorable, never invisible and nearly always the loudest voice in the loudest of rooms. You were invited to either rise to the occasion, or take the bait. I had no problem finding him as I dodged through legs at the many parties at our house or the post race events at Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.
Bob Vynne had a big personality too, but in contrast, he didn’t have to say much. His voice was deep, his movie star smile was wide and he stood probably 6’3” of classic Pacific Northwest imposing physicality. The kind of fit that was capable and strong that doesn’t waste time with weights or running; after all, why in the world would you, when you could build a deck or sail a boat? I honestly have no idea how tall he he because he loomed bigger than life. When Bob Vynne came to our house, my little sister Dorothy would go into paroxysms of joy. “Bob Vynne! Bob Vynne!” and she would come running to the door, eyes bright and jumping up and down. He would greet my sister and then sit down at our kitchen table, with his huge head of curly hair, his Burt Reynolds mustache and the ever present smile. Laid back as only someone in complete confidence and control of their surrounding, my mom would ask “would you like a beer?” With a twinkle in his eye, he would say “Thank you, Sandy.” He had way of being that put people at ease, of saying, without speaking a word, I don't have anything to prove and neither do you. We can all just let our guard down, we're all friends here. And with a Rainier Beer in his hand, the picture was complete. That was Bob Vynne, laid back favored son of the Seattle sailing community. Always in demand as a crew and never at home on Saturday night. They only time I saw Bob Vynne intense was in the midst of pre-race maneuvers. He was calling out the time, during the countdown to the start. 30 seconds! 20! I remember thinking, that's how you sail, in complete control, willing the boat through maneuvers with absolute skill and physical strength. He was honestly kind of a badass.
One year on Halloween the doorbell rang and it the Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin took off his head it was Bob Vynne, dressed head-to-toe long johns he’d died orange, with an actual huge carved pumpkin on his head. I think he was just dropping by for a beer before he went to party.
On Good Friday Bob dropped by with a present: fresh killed rabbit from Friday Harbor which was overrun by rabbits at the time. Rabbit does indeed taste like chicken, but without the stringiness. Mom served it on Easter. My sister found out it was rabbit and ran to her room. The dinner was a gift, but it wouldn't cover the cost of therapy.
Bob Vynne attended the University of Washington. This was of course back before anyone thought about going out of state to school - why would you do that? Bob got a degree in English – as did I. I imagine him in those same classrooms I attended, only huge and sprawling, surrounded by bookish and shy girls – big smile on his face, and then later at home typing out his papers with calloused fingers meant for jib sheets and power tools. Bob Vynne's father Sonny Vynne was an icon in the 6-Metre fleet, and in later years, his niece - also called Sunny, crewed for my Dad on his Thunderbird. Sunny was gay and married a woman and adopted a kid. My parents didn't blink an eye. That's another tribute to the open, non-judgmental northwest ethos - who you are as a person comes first, and there's never any sense of what this means in a wider, media-driven context. Social issues didn't belong at the dinner table and definitely not on the boat.
Elizabeth Walker, the third person in the van, and I'm sure felt differently. Elizabeth was an idealistic, intellectually imposing woman in her twenties who was hitching a ride back east. Who knows where she was going. It’s lost in the folds of pre-internet time as is her present whereabouts. She must be in her 60's now, where ever she is. Elizabeth Walker was our next door neighbor and she used to baby sit me. She had an older sister named Mary who ended up in a horrible abusive relationship which made my Dad cry when he heard about it, and a lazy, pot smoking younger brother named Rick. Every time my mom wanted to criticize me, she would say, "don't be like Rick Walker." Rick Walker was a hippie who smoked unfiltered cigarettes wwhile he mowed the lawn with the other, and married the fattest woman I have ever seen outside of a circus freak show. He was not a good advertisement for hippies or the Grateful Dead or any of that shit. The father, Dr. Dick Walker was stern and germanic and a biology professor at the University of Washington. His lawn always looked a little spotty - the worst on the block. As I kid, I wondered why - how can someone who's an expert on plants have a crappy-looking lawn. Now I realize that that's probably because he didn't want to put any pesticides or chemical fertilizers. I'm sure he hated it when my parents sprayed the trees to get rid of the aphids. I can still remember the smell of the chemicals and the taste of how they coated your tongue, even though we closed the windows and doors. Elizabeth Walker followed in her Dad's footsteps and got a doctorate in biology or some science and then instead of teaching or becoming a researcher she just stayed in school and got an advanced degree in Art History as well. She liked learning so much she even liked school.
Elizabeth Walker was our babysitter. Most memorably, asking me, when I insisted that boys and girls were different, "Okay then, what job can't a woman do?" I through out a few suggestions. what about a fireman, mailman the milkman? She said, "How about a fireperson, a mailperson the milk person?" I saw her point. I was stumped. I had no answer. But I thought, there has to be something and the next time she came over, I would tell her. I thought about it all day and night and then at school, looking at the profiles of the many presidents, from Nixon, all the way back to Washington, I found my answer. The next time Elizabeth Walker babysat, I had an answer for her. "A woman can't be president." Elizabeth Walker said, "A woman can be president - we just haven't had a woman president, yet." And that literally blew the top off my 5 year old skull and rearranged my gray matter and put me back together. A woman can do anything a man can do, had been proven to me by Socratic method, by my own relentless inquiry. So I was radicalized as a feminist before I was a punk rocker, before I was a writer or a runner or a meditator or a boyfriend or a husband or a dad or a failed youth coach or anything else. Thank you, Ms Walker, where ever you are and bless you, whatever bardo state you're in the middle of, at this present moment.
So those were the three people in the van. And as for the black Dragon chasing them:
Spectre was the second fiberglass boat my Dad built – and possibly the Dragon with which he won the most championships. The color scheme of Spectre was no color at all. Completely lack hull, no break in the blackness, black everywhere on the hull, from the keel to the gunnel, black cockpit rail and cuddy, the only break from the blackness being the white textured gelcoat deck, the name Spectre calligraph4ed on the side. There was no other boat like it. And one reason for that: Maintaining an all-black fiberglass boat is a time-consuming nightmare. The gelcoat must be continually buffed or else it gets sort of dulled out looking and chalky. So, in addition to the constant maintenance that my father constantly performed, Spectre was constantly being polished. To buff Spectre’s black hull, my Dad had a special head for his disk sander that looked like a puffy piece of flattened out cotton candy. He would put buffing liquid on it and then run it over the entire boat until it gleamed like the obsidian eyes of Satan’s favorite pet crow. Dad was always buffing and polishing and cleaning and massaging his boats in a caring attentive manner that should have made his wife jealous - and who knows, who knows. When he sold Spectre, I'm sure who ever bought it painted a different color, changed the name, and like everything about this story, it became just one more ghost haunting the folds of time - a part of my own personal mythology.
Eighteen hours into cross-country drive, somewhere in the badlands of the Dakotas, your imagination unhinges from reality just a little. You might start to think things, feel things.
There’s a black dragon chasing us.
To set the scene: It’s the middle of the summer in the middle of the 70’s and it’s the middle of the night and Martin Godsil, a man in his mid-forties is somewhere on Interstate 90, somewhere between the Pacific and the Atlantic, definitely past the mountains and not yet to the cities. It’s flat and dark all around. Martin Godsil is behind the wheel of a white Econoline Ford van. Riding shotgun, was Bob Vynne. Bob Vynne leans back against the headrest of the passenger's seat, eyes closed and in full repose but not asleep. In the back of the van is Elizabeth Walker, a grad student, our next door neighbor lying down on a bed of pillows and and sail bags. Three people together, alone. A van full of sailing gear, sails three people and their stories. And as for the black Dragon in question that was chasing them, it was a 29’ Foot Dragon Class racing yacht, black as night, black as coal, Dragon US 260, christened Spectre and of course being pulled on trailer. As if truly being chased, the white Econoline van never stops rolling. They even keep the engine running while they fill up on gas and use the rest room. The three drivers would rotate between sleep, driving and shotgun.
The driver, Martin Godsil is of course, my dad. Lawyer. Boat builder. Fan of Ronald Reagan as a politician, Gary Cooper as a cowboy and not a fan of moral ambiguity. His decision trees are always binary. Good and evil. Black and white. Yes or no. My side or the wrong side. My father was boisterous, gregarious – he had an unself-conscious generousness of spirit that brought people out of themselves. People were never neutral about Marty Godsil. He was the opposite of a shoulder shrug. Always memorable, never invisible and nearly always the loudest voice in the loudest of rooms. You were invited to either rise to the occasion, or take the bait. I had no problem finding him as I dodged through legs at the many parties at our house or the post race events at Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.
Bob Vynne had a big personality too, but in contrast, he didn’t have to say much. His voice was deep, his movie star smile was wide and he stood probably 6’3” of classic Pacific Northwest imposing physicality. The kind of fit that was capable and strong that doesn’t waste time with weights or running; after all, why in the world would you, when you could build a deck or sail a boat? I honestly have no idea how tall he he because he loomed bigger than life. When Bob Vynne came to our house, my little sister Dorothy would go into paroxysms of joy. “Bob Vynne! Bob Vynne!” and she would come running to the door, eyes bright and jumping up and down. He would greet my sister and then sit down at our kitchen table, with his huge head of curly hair, his Burt Reynolds mustache and the ever present smile. Laid back as only someone in complete confidence and control of their surrounding, my mom would ask “would you like a beer?” With a twinkle in his eye, he would say “Thank you, Sandy.” He had way of being that put people at ease, of saying, without speaking a word, I don't have anything to prove and neither do you. We can all just let our guard down, we're all friends here. And with a Rainier Beer in his hand, the picture was complete. That was Bob Vynne, laid back favored son of the Seattle sailing community. Always in demand as a crew and never at home on Saturday night. They only time I saw Bob Vynne intense was in the midst of pre-race maneuvers. He was calling out the time, during the countdown to the start. 30 seconds! 20! I remember thinking, that's how you sail, in complete control, willing the boat through maneuvers with absolute skill and physical strength. He was honestly kind of a badass.
One year on Halloween the doorbell rang and it the Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin took off his head it was Bob Vynne, dressed head-to-toe long johns he’d died orange, with an actual huge carved pumpkin on his head. I think he was just dropping by for a beer before he went to party.
On Good Friday Bob dropped by with a present: fresh killed rabbit from Friday Harbor which was overrun by rabbits at the time. Rabbit does indeed taste like chicken, but without the stringiness. Mom served it on Easter. My sister found out it was rabbit and ran to her room. The dinner was a gift, but it wouldn't cover the cost of therapy.
Bob Vynne attended the University of Washington. This was of course back before anyone thought about going out of state to school - why would you do that? Bob got a degree in English – as did I. I imagine him in those same classrooms I attended, only huge and sprawling, surrounded by bookish and shy girls – big smile on his face, and then later at home typing out his papers with calloused fingers meant for jib sheets and power tools. Bob Vynne's father Sonny Vynne was an icon in the 6-Metre fleet, and in later years, his niece - also called Sunny, crewed for my Dad on his Thunderbird. Sunny was gay and married a woman and adopted a kid. My parents didn't blink an eye. That's another tribute to the open, non-judgmental northwest ethos - who you are as a person comes first, and there's never any sense of what this means in a wider, media-driven context. Social issues didn't belong at the dinner table and definitely not on the boat.
Elizabeth Walker, the third person in the van, and I'm sure felt differently. Elizabeth was an idealistic, intellectually imposing woman in her twenties who was hitching a ride back east. Who knows where she was going. It’s lost in the folds of pre-internet time as is her present whereabouts. She must be in her 60's now, where ever she is. Elizabeth Walker was our next door neighbor and she used to baby sit me. She had an older sister named Mary who ended up in a horrible abusive relationship which made my Dad cry when he heard about it, and a lazy, pot smoking younger brother named Rick. Every time my mom wanted to criticize me, she would say, "don't be like Rick Walker." Rick Walker was a hippie who smoked unfiltered cigarettes wwhile he mowed the lawn with the other, and married the fattest woman I have ever seen outside of a circus freak show. He was not a good advertisement for hippies or the Grateful Dead or any of that shit. The father, Dr. Dick Walker was stern and germanic and a biology professor at the University of Washington. His lawn always looked a little spotty - the worst on the block. As I kid, I wondered why - how can someone who's an expert on plants have a crappy-looking lawn. Now I realize that that's probably because he didn't want to put any pesticides or chemical fertilizers. I'm sure he hated it when my parents sprayed the trees to get rid of the aphids. I can still remember the smell of the chemicals and the taste of how they coated your tongue, even though we closed the windows and doors. Elizabeth Walker followed in her Dad's footsteps and got a doctorate in biology or some science and then instead of teaching or becoming a researcher she just stayed in school and got an advanced degree in Art History as well. She liked learning so much she even liked school.
Elizabeth Walker was our babysitter. Most memorably, asking me, when I insisted that boys and girls were different, "Okay then, what job can't a woman do?" I through out a few suggestions. what about a fireman, mailman the milkman? She said, "How about a fireperson, a mailperson the milk person?" I saw her point. I was stumped. I had no answer. But I thought, there has to be something and the next time she came over, I would tell her. I thought about it all day and night and then at school, looking at the profiles of the many presidents, from Nixon, all the way back to Washington, I found my answer. The next time Elizabeth Walker babysat, I had an answer for her. "A woman can't be president." Elizabeth Walker said, "A woman can be president - we just haven't had a woman president, yet." And that literally blew the top off my 5 year old skull and rearranged my gray matter and put me back together. A woman can do anything a man can do, had been proven to me by Socratic method, by my own relentless inquiry. So I was radicalized as a feminist before I was a punk rocker, before I was a writer or a runner or a meditator or a boyfriend or a husband or a dad or a failed youth coach or anything else. Thank you, Ms Walker, where ever you are and bless you, whatever bardo state you're in the middle of, at this present moment.
So those were the three people in the van. And as for the black Dragon chasing them:
Spectre was the second fiberglass boat my Dad built – and possibly the Dragon with which he won the most championships. The color scheme of Spectre was no color at all. Completely lack hull, no break in the blackness, black everywhere on the hull, from the keel to the gunnel, black cockpit rail and cuddy, the only break from the blackness being the white textured gelcoat deck, the name Spectre calligraph4ed on the side. There was no other boat like it. And one reason for that: Maintaining an all-black fiberglass boat is a time-consuming nightmare. The gelcoat must be continually buffed or else it gets sort of dulled out looking and chalky. So, in addition to the constant maintenance that my father constantly performed, Spectre was constantly being polished. To buff Spectre’s black hull, my Dad had a special head for his disk sander that looked like a puffy piece of flattened out cotton candy. He would put buffing liquid on it and then run it over the entire boat until it gleamed like the obsidian eyes of Satan’s favorite pet crow. Dad was always buffing and polishing and cleaning and massaging his boats in a caring attentive manner that should have made his wife jealous - and who knows, who knows. When he sold Spectre, I'm sure who ever bought it painted a different color, changed the name, and like everything about this story, it became just one more ghost haunting the folds of time - a part of my own personal mythology.
****
I came to an age of awareness during the heyday of the post-Olympic, pre-professionalization of the International Dragon Fleet, when the Canadian Championship and the North American Champion were sailed as tandem regattas each year, alternating between West and East Coast. Our home seemed like one big trophy case, and filled with the scent of silver polish and heady legends of the long drives, silverware and salt shakers appropriated to act out mark roundings. The perpetual trophies of the Dragon Class were in our house for so long during the late 70’s that I began to think of them as part of the furniture. For the Canadian National Championship, there was the Big Bowl on a square base. For the North Americans, there was a huge chalice on pedestals, very impressive. I would read the past years and champions with awe - Stromboli. Williwaw. Jinx. And then, with pride read the newest plaque - Martin Godsil, Spectre.
The previous year, my Dad had won the North American Championship in TorontoAnd this year, the prize was even bigger. And as they drove with high hopes, through Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and finally upstate New York to their destination of Rochester New York, where the 1975 World Championships would be sailed. The autumn winds of Lake Superior blew harder than a the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The 1975 World Championships weren't so much a race as a test of survival, with a lot of DNFs (Did not Finishes). I don't think any boats actually sank, but a lot of gear was broken and many of the boats competing were dismasted. My dad spent all night fixing his boat just so he could be on the starting line in the morning. He didn't complain. My Dad never talked about his performance other than to say "it blew like stink" and to express admiration for the Swedes who, handled heavy weather like the Vikings they were. The regatta was won by Bengte Palmquist, sailing with his two sons - Johan and Bjorn. I think this cemented in his head to sail together, with his son. And for my 10th birthday, I received my own boat - an El Toro named Rascal. But first, an interlude.
****
IN THE MIDDLE.
There's a black dragon chasing us. In the middle of it all, you've forgotten where you come from and you don't know where you're going. Maybe you're in the middle of writing a biography of your father and people tell your fiction reads like "creative non-fiction." So you set out to write creative non-fiction, whatever that is, and it's suggested to novelize your past. (At times, most times, because you weren't there, you have no other choice but to simply make it up, this has the consequence of doubly motivating you to write out everything you know before it's permanently lost, just a shoebox full of pictures at a stranger's garage sale.) And then a best-selling writer's new book has your same title as the project you're working on. That takes the wind out of your sails. It's not that big a deal, is it? You let a day pass and then another. You find distraction. Work, ESPN, Instagram, sleep, repeat. You're on a disheartened byroad - you lose cell coverage, and your nav doesn't work. You twist and crumple analogies and toss them away rather than pushing the story forward. You're tired of the world and at 56, as you soak up his story, you feel yourself becoming your father and not the valiant captain, ever energetic and industrious but the bitter, brittle old squirrel feeder uptight about the everything last little meaningless thing. You retire to smaller place - reducing your emotional footprint - you look for Solace but Solace is the first boat name your Dad rejected and so it's not part of where you come from. You continue the project by writing letters to your mother, one Boat at a time. She's losing her memory but you can write new ones for her. This is your gift. This motives you. You're back on track. But now, in the middle of the badlands Bardo State of one of the Dakotas, he's getting to the point where she doesn't even remember that you sent something. It's apparent that the black dragon doesn't overcome us all at once. You can feel it's breath. Its breath reeks of sadness as it slowly it takes you mind. Its fire burns your body from the inside out, breaking you down in stages - the very effort of life burns the vessel, a candle in a paper bag. Dear reader, what does one do when one's one reader is failing? There's nothing to do but get back in the van. If this was a different kind of narrative, we would build some of these personality traits into the ride. Show don't tell. Bu we’re in the middle - not much to narrate in the stillness generated by Goodrich tires, spinning, pushing I-90 under you and back toward the west and the orange glow of another sunrise beginning to brighten a new day. There’s not much to do but watch listen to the Eagles. Watch the scenery go by. Keep on truckin.
I came to an age of awareness during the heyday of the post-Olympic, pre-professionalization of the International Dragon Fleet, when the Canadian Championship and the North American Champion were sailed as tandem regattas each year, alternating between West and East Coast. Our home seemed like one big trophy case, and filled with the scent of silver polish and heady legends of the long drives, silverware and salt shakers appropriated to act out mark roundings. The perpetual trophies of the Dragon Class were in our house for so long during the late 70’s that I began to think of them as part of the furniture. For the Canadian National Championship, there was the Big Bowl on a square base. For the North Americans, there was a huge chalice on pedestals, very impressive. I would read the past years and champions with awe - Stromboli. Williwaw. Jinx. And then, with pride read the newest plaque - Martin Godsil, Spectre.
The previous year, my Dad had won the North American Championship in TorontoAnd this year, the prize was even bigger. And as they drove with high hopes, through Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and finally upstate New York to their destination of Rochester New York, where the 1975 World Championships would be sailed. The autumn winds of Lake Superior blew harder than a the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The 1975 World Championships weren't so much a race as a test of survival, with a lot of DNFs (Did not Finishes). I don't think any boats actually sank, but a lot of gear was broken and many of the boats competing were dismasted. My dad spent all night fixing his boat just so he could be on the starting line in the morning. He didn't complain. My Dad never talked about his performance other than to say "it blew like stink" and to express admiration for the Swedes who, handled heavy weather like the Vikings they were. The regatta was won by Bengte Palmquist, sailing with his two sons - Johan and Bjorn. I think this cemented in his head to sail together, with his son. And for my 10th birthday, I received my own boat - an El Toro named Rascal. But first, an interlude.
****
IN THE MIDDLE.
There's a black dragon chasing us. In the middle of it all, you've forgotten where you come from and you don't know where you're going. Maybe you're in the middle of writing a biography of your father and people tell your fiction reads like "creative non-fiction." So you set out to write creative non-fiction, whatever that is, and it's suggested to novelize your past. (At times, most times, because you weren't there, you have no other choice but to simply make it up, this has the consequence of doubly motivating you to write out everything you know before it's permanently lost, just a shoebox full of pictures at a stranger's garage sale.) And then a best-selling writer's new book has your same title as the project you're working on. That takes the wind out of your sails. It's not that big a deal, is it? You let a day pass and then another. You find distraction. Work, ESPN, Instagram, sleep, repeat. You're on a disheartened byroad - you lose cell coverage, and your nav doesn't work. You twist and crumple analogies and toss them away rather than pushing the story forward. You're tired of the world and at 56, as you soak up his story, you feel yourself becoming your father and not the valiant captain, ever energetic and industrious but the bitter, brittle old squirrel feeder uptight about the everything last little meaningless thing. You retire to smaller place - reducing your emotional footprint - you look for Solace but Solace is the first boat name your Dad rejected and so it's not part of where you come from. You continue the project by writing letters to your mother, one Boat at a time. She's losing her memory but you can write new ones for her. This is your gift. This motives you. You're back on track. But now, in the middle of the badlands Bardo State of one of the Dakotas, he's getting to the point where she doesn't even remember that you sent something. It's apparent that the black dragon doesn't overcome us all at once. You can feel it's breath. Its breath reeks of sadness as it slowly it takes you mind. Its fire burns your body from the inside out, breaking you down in stages - the very effort of life burns the vessel, a candle in a paper bag. Dear reader, what does one do when one's one reader is failing? There's nothing to do but get back in the van. If this was a different kind of narrative, we would build some of these personality traits into the ride. Show don't tell. Bu we’re in the middle - not much to narrate in the stillness generated by Goodrich tires, spinning, pushing I-90 under you and back toward the west and the orange glow of another sunrise beginning to brighten a new day. There’s not much to do but watch listen to the Eagles. Watch the scenery go by. Keep on truckin.
6. Rascal
Going through these boxes of photos my aunt sent me. I’m drowning in a well of dust mites, mildew and nostalgia. Sadder than a deaf composer writing a dirge he can’t even hear. God, wasn’t I on someone’s 30 to watch under 30 list at some point, and now this. The old wisdom says, save everything. Because the one thing you throw away, will be the one thing you need. The new wisdom says, throw everything away because it’s all just a sub-par garage sale. The junkies are already fencing your powertools and vinyl and anything else that’s worth anything … and this is all that’s left, stuff for weird old ladies and neighborhood kids to finger through. On that note,
*****
A brief interlude, a break from Dragon Class Yachts –
For my 10th birthday, my Dad gave me an El Toro. What is a El Toro, you ask? Well, an El Toro is single person dinghy, 8-feet long, a rowboat but with a mast and a single sail. It’s the perfect little craft for kids just learning. The El Toro has a pram bow – that means that it has a flat nose on the front and a square back. With its snub nose and hard chines, it has a sort of ugly-cute appeal. My dad used to say to say that the El Toro got its name from all the b.s. that the builder had to shovel when he was designing the boat. At ten, I didn’t really understand what kind of b.s. is involved in designing an 8-foot pram, but at ten years old, you don’t really question these things. Pretty much everything grownups do basically seems like some kind of bullshit. At any rate, as proof of his argument, the class emblem is a shovel – it’s right there on the sail.
*****
I have a December birthday and my new boat, was brought into the living room and set in front of the Christmas tree. I had reached ten years old, double digits, and here was an actual boat, a lifetime beyond the mere toys I’d received up to that point; it the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. The hull was made of an elegant mahogany. My Dad showed me how to apply varnish. Too thin and it doesn’t cover. Too thick and you can see the brushstrokes and it stays tacky too long. We’d let it dry, sand it down and then apply another coat. Each successive coat of varnish brought the grain out more and more. I’d just read name my little boat Rascal after the hero of a book I’d just read, Rascal the Raccoon by Sterling North. We painted Rascal on the side, and made the R look like the famous cursive R from local legendary beer Rainier, so the side of my boat was a beautifully subtle tribute to a regional beer label. Ominous warning sign of impending alcoholism?, Reverence for a cheeky iconic Pacific Northwest brand? Both?
*****
There was a pretty decent-sized El Toro fleet north of Seattle in Everett. A friend of my Dads from their college days and one-time crew, Dick Watson helped organize the fleet up there. Who was Dick Watson? I can’t believe you haven’t heard of Dick Watson. I thought everyone had heard of Dick Watson. Dick Watson was a legend. Imagine the love-child of Mike Ditka and Larry Csonka, raised by Dick Butkus’ mustache. Close your eyes and picture the Marine who went to went to college on the GI Bill, played college football and became a High School Football Coach. That’s Dick Watson on the sidelines, chin jutting, aviators on, whistle around his neck, and wearing his blue polo shirt with the Everett H.S. emblem. My Dad had two stories to tell about Dick Watson. One, when the Korean War heated up, my Dad promptly marched on down to the local Coast Guard recruiters and volunteered for the Coast Guard. This was in the days of the draft, of course, and there was absolutely no way in hell that he was going over to Korea. He spent his active service years on an icebreaker in the Arctic. Dick Watson, on the other hand, spent his years in the service bayonetting North Koreans. When Dick Watson came back, he engaged in another kind of trench warfare, as a lineman on a college football team. Dick Watson wasn’t big enough to play Division 1, so he went to the University of Denver, becoming the all-American center on the team that went to the Division II national championship. Apparently, he was so dominant and verbally abusive, that in the championship game the opposing team set him up with some sort of trick wedge move and broke his leg – just to get him out of the game. They carted him off the field on a stretcher, still spouting expletives.
By the time I met him, Dick Watson had the rounded shoulders, slightly protruding rock-hard belly and sandpaper voice of the Adult Male Suburban High School PE Teacher. Dick’s wife’s name was Donna. Dick and Donna Watson had a son named Kirby and a daughter, named Krista, both adopted. Krista was there, and ate, and slept and did her laundry but Kirby was the absolute Washington-grown Delicious Apple of his parent’s eyes. Krista made constant effors to be perfect but Kirby could do no wrong. If Kirby had walked in the door tracking dog shit, smoking Afghanistan blond hash out of crucifix-shaped bong and swinging a gunny sack full of dead kittens, his parents would have laughed it off. “Oh Kirby, haha, I’ll clean up. Make sure you wash your hands for dinner. We’re having having your favorite, glazed ham with pineapple!” Everything around the Watson house was always about Kirby. Kirby does this, Kirby does that. Kirby swims, Kirby plays football, Kirby can’t find his cup – for godsakes, let’s help Kirby find his cup! It’s almost time for the football game! And poor Krista was always running around trying to get Dad’s attention – “Hey, Dad! Look at these 5 gold medal champion Jr. Olympic medals I won for swimming!” “Ho, Ho, Ho, that’s great Krista, but Kirby got this red ribbon and next time, he’s going to train hard and win! Won’t you son!” Krista was always out to prove herself in her Dad’s eyes. Maybe it’s because her mom was a falling down drunk and Krista didn’t want any part of that. At any rate, even when I was a kid, 11 or 12 years old, I could see this dynamic at work.
Dick and Donna Watson lived in a house on a little lake in North Seattle. It had its own little dock, and every year we would have a regatta called the Root Beer Regatta. I of course had my own boat, Rascal, and so did Kirby. T and they’d borrow some El Toros and get some neighborhood kids to fill out the fleet. For the grownups I’m sure it was one big photo-op. Cute boats, cute kids all on a cute little neighborhood lake – the sailing version of watching puppies cavort at the dog park. But for Kirby and I, it came down to a head-to-head grudge-match race, boyo y boyo. The son of the legendary Dick Watson, swim coach, football coach vs. the son of Marty Godsil, boat builder, North American Champion.
First place was an A&W Root Beer mug, a case of Root Beer and bragging rights for a year. Second place was a smaller mug and a six pack of root beer, and a red ribbon which I still have. I keep it with the chip on my shoulder.
*****
A brief interlude, a break from Dragon Class Yachts –
For my 10th birthday, my Dad gave me an El Toro. What is a El Toro, you ask? Well, an El Toro is single person dinghy, 8-feet long, a rowboat but with a mast and a single sail. It’s the perfect little craft for kids just learning. The El Toro has a pram bow – that means that it has a flat nose on the front and a square back. With its snub nose and hard chines, it has a sort of ugly-cute appeal. My dad used to say to say that the El Toro got its name from all the b.s. that the builder had to shovel when he was designing the boat. At ten, I didn’t really understand what kind of b.s. is involved in designing an 8-foot pram, but at ten years old, you don’t really question these things. Pretty much everything grownups do basically seems like some kind of bullshit. At any rate, as proof of his argument, the class emblem is a shovel – it’s right there on the sail.
*****
I have a December birthday and my new boat, was brought into the living room and set in front of the Christmas tree. I had reached ten years old, double digits, and here was an actual boat, a lifetime beyond the mere toys I’d received up to that point; it the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. The hull was made of an elegant mahogany. My Dad showed me how to apply varnish. Too thin and it doesn’t cover. Too thick and you can see the brushstrokes and it stays tacky too long. We’d let it dry, sand it down and then apply another coat. Each successive coat of varnish brought the grain out more and more. I’d just read name my little boat Rascal after the hero of a book I’d just read, Rascal the Raccoon by Sterling North. We painted Rascal on the side, and made the R look like the famous cursive R from local legendary beer Rainier, so the side of my boat was a beautifully subtle tribute to a regional beer label. Ominous warning sign of impending alcoholism?, Reverence for a cheeky iconic Pacific Northwest brand? Both?
*****
There was a pretty decent-sized El Toro fleet north of Seattle in Everett. A friend of my Dads from their college days and one-time crew, Dick Watson helped organize the fleet up there. Who was Dick Watson? I can’t believe you haven’t heard of Dick Watson. I thought everyone had heard of Dick Watson. Dick Watson was a legend. Imagine the love-child of Mike Ditka and Larry Csonka, raised by Dick Butkus’ mustache. Close your eyes and picture the Marine who went to went to college on the GI Bill, played college football and became a High School Football Coach. That’s Dick Watson on the sidelines, chin jutting, aviators on, whistle around his neck, and wearing his blue polo shirt with the Everett H.S. emblem. My Dad had two stories to tell about Dick Watson. One, when the Korean War heated up, my Dad promptly marched on down to the local Coast Guard recruiters and volunteered for the Coast Guard. This was in the days of the draft, of course, and there was absolutely no way in hell that he was going over to Korea. He spent his active service years on an icebreaker in the Arctic. Dick Watson, on the other hand, spent his years in the service bayonetting North Koreans. When Dick Watson came back, he engaged in another kind of trench warfare, as a lineman on a college football team. Dick Watson wasn’t big enough to play Division 1, so he went to the University of Denver, becoming the all-American center on the team that went to the Division II national championship. Apparently, he was so dominant and verbally abusive, that in the championship game the opposing team set him up with some sort of trick wedge move and broke his leg – just to get him out of the game. They carted him off the field on a stretcher, still spouting expletives.
By the time I met him, Dick Watson had the rounded shoulders, slightly protruding rock-hard belly and sandpaper voice of the Adult Male Suburban High School PE Teacher. Dick’s wife’s name was Donna. Dick and Donna Watson had a son named Kirby and a daughter, named Krista, both adopted. Krista was there, and ate, and slept and did her laundry but Kirby was the absolute Washington-grown Delicious Apple of his parent’s eyes. Krista made constant effors to be perfect but Kirby could do no wrong. If Kirby had walked in the door tracking dog shit, smoking Afghanistan blond hash out of crucifix-shaped bong and swinging a gunny sack full of dead kittens, his parents would have laughed it off. “Oh Kirby, haha, I’ll clean up. Make sure you wash your hands for dinner. We’re having having your favorite, glazed ham with pineapple!” Everything around the Watson house was always about Kirby. Kirby does this, Kirby does that. Kirby swims, Kirby plays football, Kirby can’t find his cup – for godsakes, let’s help Kirby find his cup! It’s almost time for the football game! And poor Krista was always running around trying to get Dad’s attention – “Hey, Dad! Look at these 5 gold medal champion Jr. Olympic medals I won for swimming!” “Ho, Ho, Ho, that’s great Krista, but Kirby got this red ribbon and next time, he’s going to train hard and win! Won’t you son!” Krista was always out to prove herself in her Dad’s eyes. Maybe it’s because her mom was a falling down drunk and Krista didn’t want any part of that. At any rate, even when I was a kid, 11 or 12 years old, I could see this dynamic at work.
Dick and Donna Watson lived in a house on a little lake in North Seattle. It had its own little dock, and every year we would have a regatta called the Root Beer Regatta. I of course had my own boat, Rascal, and so did Kirby. T and they’d borrow some El Toros and get some neighborhood kids to fill out the fleet. For the grownups I’m sure it was one big photo-op. Cute boats, cute kids all on a cute little neighborhood lake – the sailing version of watching puppies cavort at the dog park. But for Kirby and I, it came down to a head-to-head grudge-match race, boyo y boyo. The son of the legendary Dick Watson, swim coach, football coach vs. the son of Marty Godsil, boat builder, North American Champion.
First place was an A&W Root Beer mug, a case of Root Beer and bragging rights for a year. Second place was a smaller mug and a six pack of root beer, and a red ribbon which I still have. I keep it with the chip on my shoulder.
*****
Kirby won the first year and I came in second. The next year, I won and Kirby came in second. When it came to being sore losers, we were a solid tie. I did a granite-solid pout after losing the first year; I still remember the gunmetal gray blanket of self-hatred settling down over me. Kirby was definitely more a jock than me but how could I lose at sailing? My depression was dreary, inconsolable, and relentless as a December rain. The next year, when I won, Kirby was demonstrably and more athletically sore, stomping and tossing his way through the posting of sails and gear clean up, while I tried to hide my secret gracious winner’s smile. We continued to sail against each other through the summer in bigger fleets that included adults. I think he started to get the better of me as the season wore on, but the glow of winning the Root Beer Regatta kept me warm.
I have no recollection of there being a third annual Root Beer regatta. However, in the box of crap my Aunt sent me, I did find a second place trophy from 1979, which absolutely terrifies me. One - because I don't remember it. Two, because if I was second place when I was 13, that meant that I was second when I had actually really started to try - which actually makes more sense, in the sense of my healed over emotional scar tissue - I mean, Jesus - that was the year before I went to high school. The only other possible theory is that my mom ordered the trophies, and transposed a 6 and a 9, which is possible, but not entirely plausible - her dyslexia notwithstanding. Anyway, two years or four it was time to move on to sailing Lasers and Kirby probably moved on the football and whatever other forms of red-blooded American trouble suburban boys get into.
****
As an epilogue: Recently, I did track down Kirby Watson. He and his wife are living aboard a 45-foot sailboat, cruising the Sea of Cortez. We had a great talk. His parents are both dead now – Dick went first – he was an alcoholic too, but not the sort prone to “Surrender” like they talk about in the rooms of AA. Donna had been to treatment but couldn’t make it stick. I remember Donna showing up at my wedding reception, looking like a jaundiced shade from Hades, touched up with eyeshadow and lipstick. I don’t mean to be unkind; but the end game of Alcoholism is not pretty. Kirby’s sister Krista doesn’t talking to him. Unsurprisingly, she’s got some issues. We didn’t get into it. But Kirby and I – no issues.
The telescoping of memory is an interesting phenomena. At this point in my life, despite the emotional topspin, I don’t remember the specifics of any of the races. For the life of me, I can’t remember a specific start, finish, tacking duel or mark rounding. I have general memories of what it was like to sit on the rail and balance out the boat while going upwind, trimming the sails on a reach, raising the centerboard, what it felt like to jibe or hold the mainsheet in my teeth – the taste of lake water in my mouth.
My clearest memory of being on the lake where the Watsons lived has nothing to do with sailing at all.
I spent the night at Kirby’s house for the specific purpose of staying up late and viewing the Perseids, the yearly meteor shower that peaks each year around August 12th. It was late, past midnight, and as warm as summer nights get in the northwest. We paddled out to the middle of the lake and laid there in the darkness at the bottom of the boat, together, looking up the sky. Every time we’d see a shooting start, one of us would call out – there’s one! The lake was still. No wind, no waves, no lights to obscure the stars and only the frogs and crickets stirring. And no one was there to keep score of who spotted the most.
****
Glossary
Couple notes.
One – I use a fair amount of sailing terms that may not be familiar to people that haven’t spent time around boats. I figure people can Google most of them.
Chine – A chine in boat design is a sharp edge on the hull. The Thunderbird, the Star, the Snipe and the El Toro have “hard chines” – the Dragon is all sinuous and smooth.
Class Emblem – As an aside, all one-design sailboats have an emblem that denotes their class, from America’s Cup yachts (the silhouette of the cup itself) to a Sunfish. The Dragon Class emblem was a simple D, and the Thunderbird was the head of a bird of prey, in profile.
Kirby won the first year and I came in second. The next year, I won and Kirby came in second. When it came to being sore losers, we were a solid tie. I did a granite-solid pout after losing the first year; I still remember the gunmetal gray blanket of self-hatred settling down over me. Kirby was definitely more a jock than me but how could I lose at sailing? My depression was dreary, inconsolable, and relentless as a December rain. The next year, when I won, Kirby was demonstrably and more athletically sore, stomping and tossing his way through the posting of sails and gear clean up, while I tried to hide my secret gracious winner’s smile. We continued to sail against each other through the summer in bigger fleets that included adults. I think he started to get the better of me as the season wore on, but the glow of winning the Root Beer Regatta kept me warm.
I have no recollection of there being a third annual Root Beer regatta. However, in the box of crap my Aunt sent me, I did find a second place trophy from 1979, which absolutely terrifies me. One - because I don't remember it. Two, because if I was second place when I was 13, that meant that I was second when I had actually really started to try - which actually makes more sense, in the sense of my healed over emotional scar tissue - I mean, Jesus - that was the year before I went to high school. The only other possible theory is that my mom ordered the trophies, and transposed a 6 and a 9, which is possible, but not entirely plausible - her dyslexia notwithstanding. Anyway, two years or four it was time to move on to sailing Lasers and Kirby probably moved on the football and whatever other forms of red-blooded American trouble suburban boys get into.
****
As an epilogue: Recently, I did track down Kirby Watson. He and his wife are living aboard a 45-foot sailboat, cruising the Sea of Cortez. We had a great talk. His parents are both dead now – Dick went first – he was an alcoholic too, but not the sort prone to “Surrender” like they talk about in the rooms of AA. Donna had been to treatment but couldn’t make it stick. I remember Donna showing up at my wedding reception, looking like a jaundiced shade from Hades, touched up with eyeshadow and lipstick. I don’t mean to be unkind; but the end game of Alcoholism is not pretty. Kirby’s sister Krista doesn’t talking to him. Unsurprisingly, she’s got some issues. We didn’t get into it. But Kirby and I – no issues.
The telescoping of memory is an interesting phenomena. At this point in my life, despite the emotional topspin, I don’t remember the specifics of any of the races. For the life of me, I can’t remember a specific start, finish, tacking duel or mark rounding. I have general memories of what it was like to sit on the rail and balance out the boat while going upwind, trimming the sails on a reach, raising the centerboard, what it felt like to jibe or hold the mainsheet in my teeth – the taste of lake water in my mouth.
My clearest memory of being on the lake where the Watsons lived has nothing to do with sailing at all.
I spent the night at Kirby’s house for the specific purpose of staying up late and viewing the Perseids, the yearly meteor shower that peaks each year around August 12th. It was late, past midnight, and as warm as summer nights get in the northwest. We paddled out to the middle of the lake and laid there in the darkness at the bottom of the boat, together, looking up the sky. Every time we’d see a shooting start, one of us would call out – there’s one! The lake was still. No wind, no waves, no lights to obscure the stars and only the frogs and crickets stirring. And no one was there to keep score of who spotted the most.
****
Glossary
Couple notes.
One – I use a fair amount of sailing terms that may not be familiar to people that haven’t spent time around boats. I figure people can Google most of them.
Chine – A chine in boat design is a sharp edge on the hull. The Thunderbird, the Star, the Snipe and the El Toro have “hard chines” – the Dragon is all sinuous and smooth.
Class Emblem – As an aside, all one-design sailboats have an emblem that denotes their class, from America’s Cup yachts (the silhouette of the cup itself) to a Sunfish. The Dragon Class emblem was a simple D, and the Thunderbird was the head of a bird of prey, in profile.
7. US 233 - Dixie Doodle II
(A story of the Green & the Gray)
PART 1. New Orleans
I’ve been to New Orleans exactly once – the date was 11/11/11. The reason I remember this alliterative date as that J.C., aka, Jack Blood, the singer of my band was getting married to his longtime grrrlfriend Toni and they chose the date 11/11/11 for the festivities. A vudoo priestess from Haiti did the honors. Here’s the part where people ask, “So what’s the name of your band?” “Stomach Pump.” That always gets a laugh and a smile. I’m the bassplayer. Leighton Beezer is the guitar player. Duff Drew is the drummer. Our singer has gone by many names over the years. I’m fairly certain that the name that he was given at birth is John Clayton. He called himself JC for short. Now he calls himself Jack Blood and has some sort of crazy so-alt-right-it’s- -left online radio show about koo-koo conspiracy politics. J.C. is a master at self-mythologizing and you never quite know what’s real and what’s not. So as you can imagine, a weekend in New Orleans with such a character held promise. I was surprised as to how normal his wife seemed. I mean, she had dyed hair and was tatted up and very punk rock, but entirely too sane and too cute to actually get married to J.C. But like I said, Stomach Pump was never according to script.
****
As part of the weekend, Stomach Pump played a show at dingy little gem of a club called Checkpoint Charlie’s. We hadn’t seen each other for years, but that made no difference. Stomach Pump isn’t like other bands. We’re never really together and we’re never really apart. In 30 years, we’ve practiced once. We don’t play a planned set of songs. Whatever’s inside, just comes out. It’s a sort of a improv jazz aesthetic, played by punk rockers who revere Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Basically, here’s how it works. We get together before a gig and everybody gets stoned except for me. (I don’t like pot and I’m a better musician sober but to each their own.) We’d make up around 9-12 song titles. “Hard on Pants Off! Bad Plaid Daddy! Young White Gift” We write down song titles for songs yet to be written with a sharpie on whatever’s handy. One time we used a menu for a hot dog restaurant as a set list, ie “this song’s called Jumbo Brat with Kraut, hit it.” I’ve gotta say, there’s nothing quite so thrilling as getting up on stage, looking out at the audience and having no idea what you’re going to do. There was always that moment when you’re nervous and wondering – is this going to work? Our goal was for the audience to not know – to think that we were a quote “real band” that actually rehearsed. JC would announce the name of the song “Good evening … we’re Stomach Pump … this is the title track from our forthcoming album, Sucking and Blowing …. “ And we’d start playing. Duffy and I were pretty tight as a rhythm section so that kept things rolling and Leighton, would squeal and scree-dee-dee and scrunch and howl over the top. Usually JC had a notebook full of poetic ramblings. We’d sorta verse /chorus /verse /solo and maybe come back, chorus until it all collapsed under the weight of the accumulated noise. If things really lost cohesion we’d fall back on Hendrix or Stooges riff, but never play the song complete or right. For this gig in New Orleans, we picked up right where we left off, pouring everything in our heads and hearts through our instruments. A really loud and sincere I MISSED YOU and I MISSED THIS.
Leighton arranged the gig through a promoter named Mardi Claus (formerly, Claudia) he’d kept in touch with from the Seattle days. She and her girlfriend and they spent a lot of their time dressing up like skeletons and doing these sort of ritualized parades that they do in New Orleans. Before we played, a line of black creoles Indian tribespeople came in, all be-feathered and masked-up and dancing and playing drums. Then another line of people – apparently a different tribe – came in through another door, also playing drums, dancing and they too were festively costumed and body-painted. The two tribes faced off against each other and then the leaders took turns dancing and chanting and challenging the other to “beat that.” Back and forth they went, one upping each other. The drums got louder and then with shouting and whistling then as if by signal they all turned and the whole line snaked out of the club, still dancing, still playing drums. It was a sort of mix of black Haitian culture, indiginous culture with some Hip-Hop rap-battle attitude thrown in and it definitely set the bar for the night. I knew it would be a good show. We had a solid, together set. JC did not wear crotchless chaps or wrap himself in Saran Wrap from head to toe. I think he had a wig and a fuzzy coat that made him look like a blue muppet but he took off after a song or two. Sometimes we were best when we just played without pretense, baggy old dad pants and all. Honestly, JC could really sing and all the Marylin Manson BS was just a sideshow. Two journalism students from Tulane there, doing a music review for the Tulane newspaper. They were web very enthusiastic about our set and gave us a positive write up (long since lost).
New Orleans was still recovering from Katrina, and we stayed in Bywater, which is one neighborhood over and walking distance to the French Quarter. Bywater is part of that Sliver by the River that was not flooded but being there, watching the superstructure of ships pass by above our heads, on the river behind the Levee, I find that hard to believe. The house we stayed in was a relic from an Anne Rice novel. One of those places that’s so old and full of of the stink of dead people’s emotional wounds that you can’t imagine it NOT being haunted. There was a cartoonish amount of deadbolts on the front door and every part of the interior had been whitewashed with a thick institutional enamel over all the baroque pre-victorian details. Out back, was a small pool around which we sat, sipped and shot the breeze. The whole neighborhoodd smelled like bilgewater mixed with cat excrement. Cats were everywhere, on top of cars, under cars, curled against the curb, humping each other, all looking at you with ferrel untrusting eyes. The murals were extraordinary and generally they spoke to pride of people and place. It seemed that everywhere, at any time of the day or night an impromptu parade might break out. People would start marching, in costume and playing instruments, and someone would pull up with a pickup truck, stand in the bed and start stacking bottles on top of the cab, start pouring and passing out drinks. Walking through the Bywater on Sunday morning, I heard the Saints game coming out of someone’s house, it would grow quieter, and then louder as I approached the next house. The City was as one; every single house had the Saints game on. Someone started playing the trumpet which rang clear, echoing through the warm gulf stillness of the empty morning street, oh when the saints … oh when the saints … oh when the saints come marching in … I want to be in that number … when the saints come marching in.
*****
Writing this, I got ot sort of excited about maybe doing a reOnion tour but Leighton said no. He says Marla, his wife or longtime girlfriend thinks our singer is an alt-right Nazi. I can’t make any sort of coherent sense of his deviant politics in but she’s absolutely right of course.
*****
PART 2. The Gray.
I’m sure that everyone who’s ever been to or spent any time at all in New Orleans has a story. The place drips with magic and myth. It’s the most foreign of all major American cities. Part French, part antebellum confederacy, part Caribbean, part swampy underworld. The reason I relate the above is that it gives context and counterpoint to my Dad’s stories about New Orleans, and they boat he built. He talked about going out in the bayou on an airboat. He described viscerally how the airplane engine propeller was mounted on the back of the aluminum hull and would hurtle the boat forward with a deafening rush. My father, ever interested in boat design, described how these airboats did not have a traditional outboard that stuck down below the hull. The flat-bottomed hull had no draft, ie didn’t displace much water at all so you could go anywhere, skimming over swampgrass and shallow areas and even catch air off of low-lying sand bars. He and his friends described going to fast that they actually chased down a duck in flight– they just reached out and grabbed it out of the air. My Dad also described staying in what sounded like a tenement building in the French Quarter – it was generously offered by a friend and fellow sailor named Buddy Friedrich so good manners dictated that they could not complain. My father described quite viscerally the Louisiana heat and humidity and how there was no air conditioning. They slept or rather, laid down without sheets and sweated it out while the cockroaches scurryed over nad around them all night. And then there was Buddy Friedrich, a story unto himself. Buddy won numerous North American championships and a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics. My dad and of course my mom were absolutely enthralled by his southern charm and my mom would always smile and with a sigh attempt an accent, “Buddeh … Buddeh Friedrich ….” (It was pretty much the same accent she used for Germans, Italians, Aussies – anyone that wasn’t from the Pacific Northwest.) One thing my dad didn’t talk about was the sailing. There was a picture on the wall in the basement of the house at Sandy Beach lane where he kept all of his trophies that said “North American Championship 1971, Lake Pontchartrain.” The boat he’s helming running downwind with the Spinnaker out- US 250. The angle of the photo is from dead in front, from the distance of 3-5 boatlengths. When my Dad didn’t do well he didn’t talk about the racing, other than Lake Pontchartrain was big and shallow with a bridge that spanned its width. So I haven’t heard much from him or any other source about the racing on Lake Pontchartrain but it was competitive enough to create a home-grown Olympic Champion. But after 1972, the fleet died out. After the Dragon fell out of the Olympics in 1972, many Dragons were simply left to rot on dock of the Southern Yacht Club - and I do mean literally rot with what is called dry rot, a type of fungus that eats away at wood until the timber is basically the consistency of a sponge. We’ve already established, I think, that the humidity can be heavy as a witch doctor’s sauna. Warm + moisture is not good for the preservation of anything physical, and most especially wood boats. One of these boats left to rot on the dock was Dixie Doodle II. How Dixie Doodle was transported from her moist and humid native environment to a cold and rainy backyard in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle, Washington is anyone’s guess. That’s 2500 miles, give or take. My best working theory is that my dad, Martin Godsil, had installed some sort of magnetic-gravitational-dark matter device that attracted old broken Dragon class yachts. Sailboats in need of TLC (not the girl—group or the tv channel but my Dad’s term for Tender Loving Care) were always just magically appearing in our backyard.
****
When my Dad started building and rebuilding Dixie Doodle, his conceptual abilities and boatbuilding skills took a midnight flyer south of the Mason-Dixon. What I’m about to describe is like the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard, awesome in its present-day inappropriateness. It’s going to do a powerslide across the page, jump the shark, and stick the landing. The South rose again, and right in our backyard. First, he cut out all of the dry rot and rebuilt the hull. The skillsaw and the jigsaw and table saw and the bandsaw were going night and weekends. Whole sections of the hull had to be replaced and fared in. In addition, the ‘cuddy’ or cabin and deck of the boat was so far-gone that he ripped it off and replaced it with a sort of aerodynamic cabin like you might see on a high-performance speed-boat. No one had ever put a “modern” cabin like this on a dragon and to my knowledge, no one has since. The idea of an aerodynamic cabin was purely ornamental. The dragon has sleek, classic lines but it is a heavy displacement boat, weightng in at about 3,700 lbs with the iron keel being about 2,225 lbs of that. But after my dad painted the entire boat a flatly aggressive confederate gray, the boat looked like an ironclad torpedo, ready to sink both the Monitor, the Merrimack and anything else that stood in her way. He designed the spinnaker to be a confederate flag replica, with crossed bars, and the effect was complete. And so the launch party for Dixie Doodle was appropriately themed as well, with confederate infantry hats handed out, Ranier beer painstakingly rebranded with the Dixie Beer labels – where in the heck did they get the labels, and why didn’t they just get the beer? These things are lost in the melting coolers of time. Plus, a mule named Jefferson Davis that people took turns riding around the neighborhood. You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, you could, but I did not. “LOL”when I think of the kind of reception such a party and such a boat would have now. Fellow competitors started protesting the cabin (which was too slippery anyway; he added non-skid and then eventually ripped it off and put on a more conventional cabin.) And I’m sure the boat would have caused protests in the streets, if he had launched it today – in our era of tearing down statues. Of course for my Dad, who was somewhat apolitical but with a unwavering moral compass focused on fairness for all, it was only a exuberant, well-crafted joke – a well-intentioned ode to the boat’s name and origin, and a perhaps naïve impression of the regional charm.
*****
Every joke must have an audience, otherwise you’re just another crazy person on the subway laughing and talking to themselves. My Dad’s audience, in this case, was Henry Batte. Henry Batte had the corner house at the other end of block on East Calhoun Street – our two houses bracketed the orderly row of seven Colonials, all built in the 40’s. Henry Batte – pronounced, “bat” like a baseball bat – was a man of imposing stature, with a southern accent thick as Mississippi mud. He was not a quiet man by any stretch of the imagination, but a humble man when you got right down to it, and a good man. Henry Batte owned a concrete business. As a child, I was very impressed. His company had their own concrete mixer trucks and everything. Once, after being sued, refused a lawyer took the stand in his own defense. He won the lawsuit. Being an attorney, you might think my dad would find self-representation questionable, but for my Dad, any and all types of self-reliance qre always applauded. For my Dad, it became an unending source of half-buzzed toasts on Henry Batte’s behalf, while Mr. Batte himself protested and sat there looking abashed. “Now Marty … I just told the judge what happened – “ and then then my Dad would shush him with a wave of his hand, and double down – tell the story again, at twice the volume and expanding the details.
Henry Batte and his wife Kaye had three kids. Laura Batte was my age, Melanie Batte was a little younger, and runny-nosed Hankie Batte was the baby of the family. I’m not sure if little Hankie Batte’s nose ever saw a hankie. My mom resisted the urge to wipe it. My mother, an acolyte St. Vacuum the Tidy, just didn’t get it. With a sigh, she often repeated that Kaye Batte had once said “Why make the beds? You’re just going to get back in them.” I don’t think my mother ever felt any sort of derision or superiority towards anyone, ever – and that’s not why she kept revisiting it. It was more like an observation – maybe in the south they aren’t as obsessed with upkeep. They’ll just let things lie a bit. Maybe Dixie Doodle was even an example of my parents inability to let things lay around. It might has well have been an antebellum mansion (or beach house, if there is such a thing.) Clean. Rebuild. Expand. Fill it with love and life. And regardless, when it was to move onto the next project – a new fiberglass dragon. Apparently there were no takers for a confederate gray dragon named Dixie Doodle in the Pacific Northwest. But he had a better idea.
PART 3. The Green.
The gray surrendered and then there was a period of reconstruction. (See what I did there?)
So my Dad decided to give Dixie Doodle to my mom. Of course my cute little 5’2” eyes-of-blue mom, couldn’t be piloting an aggressive gunmetal gray dragon around Lake Washington (pronounced Worshington) so Dixie was due for one final makeover. So the question on the table was, what color would it be.
If you knew my parents, which you don’t, but if you did, you would know exactly what kind of conversation this would engender. I’ll do my best to recreate it here – or at least give it a shorthand. It would start in the following manner. My dad would ask, “So what color do you want your boat to be?” And my mom would say, “Well –“ And then my Dad would say something like, you can pick any color of the rainbow. But you need to make a decision. (Pause.) The decision is all yours. (Pause.) You can have any color you want. (Pause.)
And then my mother would say quietly without too much confidence but at the same time in way that let you know she’d come to a conclusion, “Green.”
And then my dad would say, “But there’s already a green boat in the fleet! Cappy Neu’s boat! You can have any color you want in the rainbow. Why would you pick the same color as another boat in the fleet!”
“I want it to be a different green.”
“A different green?” Are you sure? You can have any color you want.”
“Yes, a lighter green.”
“Well, what kind of lighter green.”
“I don’t know. A green … that’s lighter.” My mom had a love of plants and it makes sense that she would want a green boat.
“Well,” my father thundered. And could he ever thunder over even topics that only needed a light spring rain. “Find a sample of the color.”’
So then a week or so passed where my mom was searching for a sample of the color green that she wanted. This was before the internet, and they had no idea what a pantone color, and since it was a skeptical thundering control freak dealing with a passive aggressive fixer, they could never just go get a paint chip or something. My Dad would bring magazine advertisements. “Is it this green?” “No that’s not it.” My Dad would bring objects. Green plus toys, and statues of the world’s best mom, with a green base. “Is this the green you want?” “No, that’s not it.”
Finally, my mom found a scarf and showed it to my dad.
“Ohhhh! You mean Lime Green! Why didn’t you say so!”
And that’s how my Mother ending up as the helmsperson of Dixie, a lime green dragon. As a self-proclaimed dyslexic, or “dylexic” as she used to say, you would think that my mom would have difficulty steering a sailboat. Most people, who are used to a wheel, find a tiller to be initially counter-intuitive –But for my mother, who grew up riding horses, the boat for her, was a living thing. She always said that the tiller was like the mouth of a horse.
So in the house, we had Dad, and whatever boat he was building and campaigning whatever big regatta, and we had Sandra and her Lime Green Dragon with the All-Girl Crew.
This was the 70’s. The time of the ERA, and increasing female empowerment. My mom competed in woman’s events like the prestigious Adams Cup, which would have regional qualifying regattas for a chance to compete in the a National Championship Regatta. But mostly she competed in the same regattas that my Dad and the rest of the boys did. She even took her all-girl crew to Switzerland for the 1977 World Championships in Thun, on the Thunersee. There was a little bit of a surprise – not quite a backlash, but if you can imagine an older Swiss gentleman saying “let us see your credentials” with a German accent and you’ll get the picture. Women had only earned the right to vote in national elections five years previous, and the last of the Swiss Cantons to grant women the right to vote wasn’t granted until 1991. But us, it was more laughed at, than offense taken. My mom, with Paul Wilcox and Sally Neu crewing, did well against international competition – roughly middle of the fleet. They made a bit of a splash and most people were supportive.One gentleman even went out and bought my mom and graceful sterling silver chalice, with “Dragon World Championship Ladys Trophy” engraved on the side.
The last time I saw Henry Batte I was working at the Hop-In. A voice from my past, thick as memory, rose above the hum of the flourestent lights and Album Oriented Rock. “Where is the melba toast? Excuse me, do you know where the melba toast is?”
A man on a mission. His daughter, Laura, said “Daddy!” As if to quiet him – there’s no reason to make a spectacle out of a search for melba toast. But why settle for Ritz Crackers, or Triscuits, or Wheat Thins or Saltines or Breadsticks or Ak-Met Rye Crisps? The man wants Melba Toast. All hail the man who knows what he wants, who isn’t afraid to just tell his piece, represent himself in court.
List of 114 monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd Protests, summer of 2020.
I’ve been to New Orleans exactly once – the date was 11/11/11. The reason I remember this alliterative date as that J.C., aka, Jack Blood, the singer of my band was getting married to his longtime grrrlfriend Toni and they chose the date 11/11/11 for the festivities. A vudoo priestess from Haiti did the honors. Here’s the part where people ask, “So what’s the name of your band?” “Stomach Pump.” That always gets a laugh and a smile. I’m the bassplayer. Leighton Beezer is the guitar player. Duff Drew is the drummer. Our singer has gone by many names over the years. I’m fairly certain that the name that he was given at birth is John Clayton. He called himself JC for short. Now he calls himself Jack Blood and has some sort of crazy so-alt-right-it’s- -left online radio show about koo-koo conspiracy politics. J.C. is a master at self-mythologizing and you never quite know what’s real and what’s not. So as you can imagine, a weekend in New Orleans with such a character held promise. I was surprised as to how normal his wife seemed. I mean, she had dyed hair and was tatted up and very punk rock, but entirely too sane and too cute to actually get married to J.C. But like I said, Stomach Pump was never according to script.
****
As part of the weekend, Stomach Pump played a show at dingy little gem of a club called Checkpoint Charlie’s. We hadn’t seen each other for years, but that made no difference. Stomach Pump isn’t like other bands. We’re never really together and we’re never really apart. In 30 years, we’ve practiced once. We don’t play a planned set of songs. Whatever’s inside, just comes out. It’s a sort of a improv jazz aesthetic, played by punk rockers who revere Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Basically, here’s how it works. We get together before a gig and everybody gets stoned except for me. (I don’t like pot and I’m a better musician sober but to each their own.) We’d make up around 9-12 song titles. “Hard on Pants Off! Bad Plaid Daddy! Young White Gift” We write down song titles for songs yet to be written with a sharpie on whatever’s handy. One time we used a menu for a hot dog restaurant as a set list, ie “this song’s called Jumbo Brat with Kraut, hit it.” I’ve gotta say, there’s nothing quite so thrilling as getting up on stage, looking out at the audience and having no idea what you’re going to do. There was always that moment when you’re nervous and wondering – is this going to work? Our goal was for the audience to not know – to think that we were a quote “real band” that actually rehearsed. JC would announce the name of the song “Good evening … we’re Stomach Pump … this is the title track from our forthcoming album, Sucking and Blowing …. “ And we’d start playing. Duffy and I were pretty tight as a rhythm section so that kept things rolling and Leighton, would squeal and scree-dee-dee and scrunch and howl over the top. Usually JC had a notebook full of poetic ramblings. We’d sorta verse /chorus /verse /solo and maybe come back, chorus until it all collapsed under the weight of the accumulated noise. If things really lost cohesion we’d fall back on Hendrix or Stooges riff, but never play the song complete or right. For this gig in New Orleans, we picked up right where we left off, pouring everything in our heads and hearts through our instruments. A really loud and sincere I MISSED YOU and I MISSED THIS.
Leighton arranged the gig through a promoter named Mardi Claus (formerly, Claudia) he’d kept in touch with from the Seattle days. She and her girlfriend and they spent a lot of their time dressing up like skeletons and doing these sort of ritualized parades that they do in New Orleans. Before we played, a line of black creoles Indian tribespeople came in, all be-feathered and masked-up and dancing and playing drums. Then another line of people – apparently a different tribe – came in through another door, also playing drums, dancing and they too were festively costumed and body-painted. The two tribes faced off against each other and then the leaders took turns dancing and chanting and challenging the other to “beat that.” Back and forth they went, one upping each other. The drums got louder and then with shouting and whistling then as if by signal they all turned and the whole line snaked out of the club, still dancing, still playing drums. It was a sort of mix of black Haitian culture, indiginous culture with some Hip-Hop rap-battle attitude thrown in and it definitely set the bar for the night. I knew it would be a good show. We had a solid, together set. JC did not wear crotchless chaps or wrap himself in Saran Wrap from head to toe. I think he had a wig and a fuzzy coat that made him look like a blue muppet but he took off after a song or two. Sometimes we were best when we just played without pretense, baggy old dad pants and all. Honestly, JC could really sing and all the Marylin Manson BS was just a sideshow. Two journalism students from Tulane there, doing a music review for the Tulane newspaper. They were web very enthusiastic about our set and gave us a positive write up (long since lost).
New Orleans was still recovering from Katrina, and we stayed in Bywater, which is one neighborhood over and walking distance to the French Quarter. Bywater is part of that Sliver by the River that was not flooded but being there, watching the superstructure of ships pass by above our heads, on the river behind the Levee, I find that hard to believe. The house we stayed in was a relic from an Anne Rice novel. One of those places that’s so old and full of of the stink of dead people’s emotional wounds that you can’t imagine it NOT being haunted. There was a cartoonish amount of deadbolts on the front door and every part of the interior had been whitewashed with a thick institutional enamel over all the baroque pre-victorian details. Out back, was a small pool around which we sat, sipped and shot the breeze. The whole neighborhoodd smelled like bilgewater mixed with cat excrement. Cats were everywhere, on top of cars, under cars, curled against the curb, humping each other, all looking at you with ferrel untrusting eyes. The murals were extraordinary and generally they spoke to pride of people and place. It seemed that everywhere, at any time of the day or night an impromptu parade might break out. People would start marching, in costume and playing instruments, and someone would pull up with a pickup truck, stand in the bed and start stacking bottles on top of the cab, start pouring and passing out drinks. Walking through the Bywater on Sunday morning, I heard the Saints game coming out of someone’s house, it would grow quieter, and then louder as I approached the next house. The City was as one; every single house had the Saints game on. Someone started playing the trumpet which rang clear, echoing through the warm gulf stillness of the empty morning street, oh when the saints … oh when the saints … oh when the saints come marching in … I want to be in that number … when the saints come marching in.
*****
Writing this, I got ot sort of excited about maybe doing a reOnion tour but Leighton said no. He says Marla, his wife or longtime girlfriend thinks our singer is an alt-right Nazi. I can’t make any sort of coherent sense of his deviant politics in but she’s absolutely right of course.
*****
PART 2. The Gray.
I’m sure that everyone who’s ever been to or spent any time at all in New Orleans has a story. The place drips with magic and myth. It’s the most foreign of all major American cities. Part French, part antebellum confederacy, part Caribbean, part swampy underworld. The reason I relate the above is that it gives context and counterpoint to my Dad’s stories about New Orleans, and they boat he built. He talked about going out in the bayou on an airboat. He described viscerally how the airplane engine propeller was mounted on the back of the aluminum hull and would hurtle the boat forward with a deafening rush. My father, ever interested in boat design, described how these airboats did not have a traditional outboard that stuck down below the hull. The flat-bottomed hull had no draft, ie didn’t displace much water at all so you could go anywhere, skimming over swampgrass and shallow areas and even catch air off of low-lying sand bars. He and his friends described going to fast that they actually chased down a duck in flight– they just reached out and grabbed it out of the air. My Dad also described staying in what sounded like a tenement building in the French Quarter – it was generously offered by a friend and fellow sailor named Buddy Friedrich so good manners dictated that they could not complain. My father described quite viscerally the Louisiana heat and humidity and how there was no air conditioning. They slept or rather, laid down without sheets and sweated it out while the cockroaches scurryed over nad around them all night. And then there was Buddy Friedrich, a story unto himself. Buddy won numerous North American championships and a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics. My dad and of course my mom were absolutely enthralled by his southern charm and my mom would always smile and with a sigh attempt an accent, “Buddeh … Buddeh Friedrich ….” (It was pretty much the same accent she used for Germans, Italians, Aussies – anyone that wasn’t from the Pacific Northwest.) One thing my dad didn’t talk about was the sailing. There was a picture on the wall in the basement of the house at Sandy Beach lane where he kept all of his trophies that said “North American Championship 1971, Lake Pontchartrain.” The boat he’s helming running downwind with the Spinnaker out- US 250. The angle of the photo is from dead in front, from the distance of 3-5 boatlengths. When my Dad didn’t do well he didn’t talk about the racing, other than Lake Pontchartrain was big and shallow with a bridge that spanned its width. So I haven’t heard much from him or any other source about the racing on Lake Pontchartrain but it was competitive enough to create a home-grown Olympic Champion. But after 1972, the fleet died out. After the Dragon fell out of the Olympics in 1972, many Dragons were simply left to rot on dock of the Southern Yacht Club - and I do mean literally rot with what is called dry rot, a type of fungus that eats away at wood until the timber is basically the consistency of a sponge. We’ve already established, I think, that the humidity can be heavy as a witch doctor’s sauna. Warm + moisture is not good for the preservation of anything physical, and most especially wood boats. One of these boats left to rot on the dock was Dixie Doodle II. How Dixie Doodle was transported from her moist and humid native environment to a cold and rainy backyard in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle, Washington is anyone’s guess. That’s 2500 miles, give or take. My best working theory is that my dad, Martin Godsil, had installed some sort of magnetic-gravitational-dark matter device that attracted old broken Dragon class yachts. Sailboats in need of TLC (not the girl—group or the tv channel but my Dad’s term for Tender Loving Care) were always just magically appearing in our backyard.
****
When my Dad started building and rebuilding Dixie Doodle, his conceptual abilities and boatbuilding skills took a midnight flyer south of the Mason-Dixon. What I’m about to describe is like the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard, awesome in its present-day inappropriateness. It’s going to do a powerslide across the page, jump the shark, and stick the landing. The South rose again, and right in our backyard. First, he cut out all of the dry rot and rebuilt the hull. The skillsaw and the jigsaw and table saw and the bandsaw were going night and weekends. Whole sections of the hull had to be replaced and fared in. In addition, the ‘cuddy’ or cabin and deck of the boat was so far-gone that he ripped it off and replaced it with a sort of aerodynamic cabin like you might see on a high-performance speed-boat. No one had ever put a “modern” cabin like this on a dragon and to my knowledge, no one has since. The idea of an aerodynamic cabin was purely ornamental. The dragon has sleek, classic lines but it is a heavy displacement boat, weightng in at about 3,700 lbs with the iron keel being about 2,225 lbs of that. But after my dad painted the entire boat a flatly aggressive confederate gray, the boat looked like an ironclad torpedo, ready to sink both the Monitor, the Merrimack and anything else that stood in her way. He designed the spinnaker to be a confederate flag replica, with crossed bars, and the effect was complete. And so the launch party for Dixie Doodle was appropriately themed as well, with confederate infantry hats handed out, Ranier beer painstakingly rebranded with the Dixie Beer labels – where in the heck did they get the labels, and why didn’t they just get the beer? These things are lost in the melting coolers of time. Plus, a mule named Jefferson Davis that people took turns riding around the neighborhood. You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, you could, but I did not. “LOL”when I think of the kind of reception such a party and such a boat would have now. Fellow competitors started protesting the cabin (which was too slippery anyway; he added non-skid and then eventually ripped it off and put on a more conventional cabin.) And I’m sure the boat would have caused protests in the streets, if he had launched it today – in our era of tearing down statues. Of course for my Dad, who was somewhat apolitical but with a unwavering moral compass focused on fairness for all, it was only a exuberant, well-crafted joke – a well-intentioned ode to the boat’s name and origin, and a perhaps naïve impression of the regional charm.
*****
Every joke must have an audience, otherwise you’re just another crazy person on the subway laughing and talking to themselves. My Dad’s audience, in this case, was Henry Batte. Henry Batte had the corner house at the other end of block on East Calhoun Street – our two houses bracketed the orderly row of seven Colonials, all built in the 40’s. Henry Batte – pronounced, “bat” like a baseball bat – was a man of imposing stature, with a southern accent thick as Mississippi mud. He was not a quiet man by any stretch of the imagination, but a humble man when you got right down to it, and a good man. Henry Batte owned a concrete business. As a child, I was very impressed. His company had their own concrete mixer trucks and everything. Once, after being sued, refused a lawyer took the stand in his own defense. He won the lawsuit. Being an attorney, you might think my dad would find self-representation questionable, but for my Dad, any and all types of self-reliance qre always applauded. For my Dad, it became an unending source of half-buzzed toasts on Henry Batte’s behalf, while Mr. Batte himself protested and sat there looking abashed. “Now Marty … I just told the judge what happened – “ and then then my Dad would shush him with a wave of his hand, and double down – tell the story again, at twice the volume and expanding the details.
Henry Batte and his wife Kaye had three kids. Laura Batte was my age, Melanie Batte was a little younger, and runny-nosed Hankie Batte was the baby of the family. I’m not sure if little Hankie Batte’s nose ever saw a hankie. My mom resisted the urge to wipe it. My mother, an acolyte St. Vacuum the Tidy, just didn’t get it. With a sigh, she often repeated that Kaye Batte had once said “Why make the beds? You’re just going to get back in them.” I don’t think my mother ever felt any sort of derision or superiority towards anyone, ever – and that’s not why she kept revisiting it. It was more like an observation – maybe in the south they aren’t as obsessed with upkeep. They’ll just let things lie a bit. Maybe Dixie Doodle was even an example of my parents inability to let things lay around. It might has well have been an antebellum mansion (or beach house, if there is such a thing.) Clean. Rebuild. Expand. Fill it with love and life. And regardless, when it was to move onto the next project – a new fiberglass dragon. Apparently there were no takers for a confederate gray dragon named Dixie Doodle in the Pacific Northwest. But he had a better idea.
PART 3. The Green.
The gray surrendered and then there was a period of reconstruction. (See what I did there?)
So my Dad decided to give Dixie Doodle to my mom. Of course my cute little 5’2” eyes-of-blue mom, couldn’t be piloting an aggressive gunmetal gray dragon around Lake Washington (pronounced Worshington) so Dixie was due for one final makeover. So the question on the table was, what color would it be.
If you knew my parents, which you don’t, but if you did, you would know exactly what kind of conversation this would engender. I’ll do my best to recreate it here – or at least give it a shorthand. It would start in the following manner. My dad would ask, “So what color do you want your boat to be?” And my mom would say, “Well –“ And then my Dad would say something like, you can pick any color of the rainbow. But you need to make a decision. (Pause.) The decision is all yours. (Pause.) You can have any color you want. (Pause.)
And then my mother would say quietly without too much confidence but at the same time in way that let you know she’d come to a conclusion, “Green.”
And then my dad would say, “But there’s already a green boat in the fleet! Cappy Neu’s boat! You can have any color you want in the rainbow. Why would you pick the same color as another boat in the fleet!”
“I want it to be a different green.”
“A different green?” Are you sure? You can have any color you want.”
“Yes, a lighter green.”
“Well, what kind of lighter green.”
“I don’t know. A green … that’s lighter.” My mom had a love of plants and it makes sense that she would want a green boat.
“Well,” my father thundered. And could he ever thunder over even topics that only needed a light spring rain. “Find a sample of the color.”’
So then a week or so passed where my mom was searching for a sample of the color green that she wanted. This was before the internet, and they had no idea what a pantone color, and since it was a skeptical thundering control freak dealing with a passive aggressive fixer, they could never just go get a paint chip or something. My Dad would bring magazine advertisements. “Is it this green?” “No that’s not it.” My Dad would bring objects. Green plus toys, and statues of the world’s best mom, with a green base. “Is this the green you want?” “No, that’s not it.”
Finally, my mom found a scarf and showed it to my dad.
“Ohhhh! You mean Lime Green! Why didn’t you say so!”
And that’s how my Mother ending up as the helmsperson of Dixie, a lime green dragon. As a self-proclaimed dyslexic, or “dylexic” as she used to say, you would think that my mom would have difficulty steering a sailboat. Most people, who are used to a wheel, find a tiller to be initially counter-intuitive –But for my mother, who grew up riding horses, the boat for her, was a living thing. She always said that the tiller was like the mouth of a horse.
So in the house, we had Dad, and whatever boat he was building and campaigning whatever big regatta, and we had Sandra and her Lime Green Dragon with the All-Girl Crew.
This was the 70’s. The time of the ERA, and increasing female empowerment. My mom competed in woman’s events like the prestigious Adams Cup, which would have regional qualifying regattas for a chance to compete in the a National Championship Regatta. But mostly she competed in the same regattas that my Dad and the rest of the boys did. She even took her all-girl crew to Switzerland for the 1977 World Championships in Thun, on the Thunersee. There was a little bit of a surprise – not quite a backlash, but if you can imagine an older Swiss gentleman saying “let us see your credentials” with a German accent and you’ll get the picture. Women had only earned the right to vote in national elections five years previous, and the last of the Swiss Cantons to grant women the right to vote wasn’t granted until 1991. But us, it was more laughed at, than offense taken. My mom, with Paul Wilcox and Sally Neu crewing, did well against international competition – roughly middle of the fleet. They made a bit of a splash and most people were supportive.One gentleman even went out and bought my mom and graceful sterling silver chalice, with “Dragon World Championship Ladys Trophy” engraved on the side.
The last time I saw Henry Batte I was working at the Hop-In. A voice from my past, thick as memory, rose above the hum of the flourestent lights and Album Oriented Rock. “Where is the melba toast? Excuse me, do you know where the melba toast is?”
A man on a mission. His daughter, Laura, said “Daddy!” As if to quiet him – there’s no reason to make a spectacle out of a search for melba toast. But why settle for Ritz Crackers, or Triscuits, or Wheat Thins or Saltines or Breadsticks or Ak-Met Rye Crisps? The man wants Melba Toast. All hail the man who knows what he wants, who isn’t afraid to just tell his piece, represent himself in court.
List of 114 monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd Protests, summer of 2020.
8. Target - US 263.
On our timeline, it’s now August of 1977 and somewhere in Switzerland Martin Godsil has just stepped in a fresh cowpie. You might assume that cowpies are, I dunno, more perfectly round and somehow neutral in Switzerland, but they’re pretty much the same as they are in America. Some are dried and desiccated to a crisp light disc, and ready for tossing, frisbee-style; others are more medium-baked, crusty on the top but still moist in the middle; but the one that Martin Godsil just stepped in was fresh, juicy and he notices it’s even still just a bit warm as it squelches between his bare toes.
HMMMmmmm.
If you didn’t have fresh cowpie squishing between your toes, you might take a moment to notice the idyllic setting. It’s nighttime, and the glaciered peaks encircling the valley are wrapped in silver gowns of moonlight. Vague, shadowless light from the streetlamps of the nearby road further illuminate the setting. Behind you, is a small Gasthaus with a single light on and in the distance across pastures of stillness, you can see the outline of a farmhouse – no doubt the home of the farmer who owns the cows. And then of course there are the cows, with their low mooing and the gentle clanging of the bells around their necks. And it’s the clanging of the bells that brought Martin to this cow pasture, on a summer night, in 1977. But we’ll come back to that.
*****
The reason we’re in Switzerland is to sail in the 1977 Dragon Weltmeisterschaft (World Championship). This was the family’s first sailing trip to Europe, and no, we didn’t sail across the Atlantic. People always ask that, but no. We didn’t sail to Europe. We got on a Lufthansa flight same as everyone else and flew over a continent and an ocean, through night and day and maybe six time zones and landed in Amsterdam. From Amsterdam we drove to Rotterdam, the largest Port in Europe by a factor of two, and we picked up the boat my dad had shipped over on a freighter, Target. Upon inspection, we were relieved find that the boat, mast, and other gear stuffed inside such as the all-important sails were miraculously undamaged and unpilfered. We observed as crane lifted the boat onto a flatbed truck outfitted with a cradle. The bow was a little deep and it looked like it was going to hit the top of the cab of the truck so my Dad and his crew had to manually create an indent or crease in the cab so there was room for the deep draught of the bow as it extended forward over cab. The customizing of the cab was accomplished with good ol’ American smashing and swearing, same way we won WWI & WWII. A patriotic moment really. This was all part of the learning curve of driving with a boat in Europe where, unlike the USA, they don’t allow you to trailer yachts over 25 feet long behind your truck. Once we were all settled and arranged, we all divided up and into two 70’s era eurovans and set out for Switzerland. The Netherlands was flat as a table and as I looked out on the mesmerizing landscape, I imagined that we were actually standing in place between two infinitely large green cow-and-windmill bedecked endlessly spinning wheels laid flat, centered at the horizon and extending for forever. We ran both borders of Luxemburg (if you run the border of a small country coming in, why stop at the second?); crossed a slice of France, stopping for a spicey sausage around Strasberg before entering the clean comforting neutrality of Switzerland. Most Europeans might take 8 to 10 hours to complete this trip, but Martin Alan Godsil, crew and family did it in 7½, and gave these Europeans in their Jaguars & Mercedeses a few lessons along the way. Our destination: Lake Thun (pronounced, “Toon” or “Toonerzee” in the local dialect).
Target was the first boat my Dad built and shipped to Europe expressly for the purpose of sailing in a regatta. He never made money – maybe broke even – but the side business of “Martin Godsil, boatbuilder” allowed him to go to Europe every summer for 13 years running. Target was shipped to Europe pre-sold, the agreement being that the owner would take possession at the end of the regatta. Whether by design or no, Target was pure white with bit of red trim and an understated red circle on the stern – clean and mean, and almost a reverse of the color scheme of the Swiss flag.
*****
THE FIRST THING we saw as we rolled into the yacht club parking lot was a boat that had been struck by lightning. (Don’t worry; this is not some sort of dramatic foreshadowing.) But there it was, just sitting in a trailer. No one was hurt. When the lightning struck the mast, it went straight down to where the mast was stepped over the keel, transferred to the keel and then through the keel to the water––and apparently no one touched any metal. The paint was bubbled and blistered the paint, creating a deep-fried dark outline where the keel met the hull and raising blisters all over the surface of the keel, the electric charge apparently lifting the gelcoat right off.
Switzerland is a very clean country. The roads, the trains, everything is well-kept and runs with watch-like predictability. Even though you expect it, it still kind of blows your mind. And the picturesque town of Thun – well, I mean look up the Wikipage – is exactly like you imagine it. Storybook architecture, postcard setting on blue alpine lake, surrounded by mountains that are snowcapped year-round. In the summer, the thermas winds created by this dramatic mix of landscapes make the weather predictably unpredictable; one minute it’s sunny, and then next minute dark ominous thunderheads are rolling in. Always assiduously prepared, the lake is surrounded by sirens that begin to blare when a storm approaches. When you hear the klaxon wail, it means get off the water. This happened as I was out on the spectator boat. We had a motor; the competitors did not. The sky turned suddenly bone dark and the lake, expressionless as a mirror, reflected the gray right back. The faces of the grownups turned dour. Those who had jackets, put them on as the first raindrops began to fall. The competitors pointed their bows toward the marina and safety, but just sat there in the windlessness, sails drooping, distant thunder rolling like the dice of like Zeus – who gets struck? And then an hour and a half later it was sunny again.
I was d eleven and too young to sail (though I really wanted to – even then, I was obsessive and all-business when I should have been chillin’) so I engaged in a few kidlike activities. Before the regatta started in earnest, someone gave me a fishing pole. Since I had learned to fish the summer before it was assumed by all, including me, that I liked fishing. I was a very sensitive boy, and I did not like killing things – even putting the worm on the hook tied my insides in queasy knots – but I just figured I was a “sissy” and pushed through mere caring for my fellow creatures and tried to numb myself. I briefly left my fishing pole on the dock and a baby duck ate the bait and caught its bill on the hook. I’m not sure if the baby duck was able to get back to the mother duck. This completely shattered me.
Oh, were we talking about sailing? These are the recollections of an eleven-year-old boy.
So the place we were staying at was called the Gasthof de Lam. And what eleven-year-old me found most interesting were the breakfasts - the little Mini Babybel cheeses, the toast, eggs poached still in their shells on little stands that that we would crack with the tap of a spoon and then scoop out. There was also Ovalmaltine with steamed milk. Ovalmaltine is known as Ovaltine in the States, where everything and especially breakfast is abbreviated. Add in sparkling apfelsaft and the Swiss Toblerone – I wasn’t such a big chocolate fan, but I did love the white chocolate with nougat – and I think I was a bit of a roly-poly by the time I got home. Europe always makes me chubby.
Ah yes. Back to the sailing.
Every sailing venue has its own distinctive quirks. Lake sailing is a completely different ballgame than sailing on the open ocean. Generally speaking, when you’re out on the ocean, the wind is strong and steady, and the tides are a non-factor because they affect all the competitors equally. This levels the playing field with “local knowledge” being less of a factor. That’s why the truly big, prestigious regattas have bylaws which dictate the parameters of each day’s race. That you need to be such-and-such nautical miles away from land and the race must be so many miles, with the weather mark being set exactly so far from the starting line. If there’s a huge wind shift or no wind, the race is cancelled. This held true for Olympic class racing when keelboats were still in the Olympics – and I imagine it’s still true for the Dragon Gold Cup. Or maybe the Gold Cup, too, is now just one long advertisement aimed at rich people. God I miss the golden age of monohull one design yachting. At this point, keelboats are no longer in the Olympics and the last time I checked the so-called America’s Cup had become some sort of corporate-sponsored space race – prohibitively expensive, and excruciatingly uninteresting. When my Dad bought his first wood boat, Reluctant, and learned how to sail on Lake Washington, sailing in the Pacific Northwest was a joyful summer middle class pastime. Now everything’s about having a “factory team” – hired guns for the “RO” rich owner or sponsor.
But I digress. These are the recollections of a 56-year-old man. Back to the sailing on Thunersee.
Because my Dad and his crew learned to sail on Lake Washington, they should have been set up for success. Marty Godsil was a superlative light air helmsman. To keep a heavy displacement boat like a dragon moving in light shifty air requires substantial powers of concentration, patience and constant adjustments – especially if there’s “motor boat slop.” A Dragon has the classic aesthetically appealing but notoriously un-hydro-efficient bow that means that in light air, the boat can be basically stopped cold by a rogue wave. I can still hear my Dad as we ghosted along on the lake, moving in an unseen breeze … “Nobody move ….” So it only makes sense that in this particular regatta every time a race was called for light air, my Dad was either in first or second place. In his good-humored way, he said that he won the 1977 “cancelled world championships.” I don’t remember where he ended up finishing – probably in the top ten.
The regatta was won by a boat called U2 from Austria, captained by Harry Frerburger. which if I got my geography right, means that another lake-trained light air sailor was the 1977 world champion. We did not get to know Harry because he didn’t know any English. Second place went to Jimmy Ulrich, a lake sailor from Bavaria.
Jimmy Ulrich was memorable because of the good-natured glint in his eye, his easy laugh and his laid-back manner. When he was a little boy, Jimmy Ulrich had learned English from the occupying American GI’s who he would fence watches and other items. Jimmy Ulrich loved Americans and my Dad was the very best of America – generous of spirit, positive, energetic, loyal, and absolutely self-assured. My Dad was fond of Jimmy Ulrich and respected his toughness and was fond of quoting him - for Jimmy Ulrich, every regatta, “was just another weekend regatta.” Growing up in a decimated Germany, fencing watches to the occupying GI’s, Jimmy wasn’t going to get too wound up about everything. He had the survivor’s attitude of detachment. Just glad to be here.
While my parents were sailing, I went on sightseeing ventures and hikes with my Aunt Karen. We were on one such scenic hike, and she looked up at yet another dramatic alpine peak and said “Talk about sheared-off cliffs!” I thought she said “Talk about shitting off cliffs!” which added another even epic visual to the surroundings, as I imagined a guy playing his Alpenhorn with his lederhosen down around angles his naked ass hanging out over the 1000-foot drop.
My parents also made some life-long friends there. Some young Swiss guys that came over and stayed with us, Martin and Uli. They even came over and stayed at our house and sailed in a regatta. Uli was in the Swiss Army and gave me his actual Swiss Army issue knife. It was silver, with anti-slip grip and had all of the stuff that a Swiss Army knife has, except it did not have a corkscrew, because as he assured me, a Swiss Army Man does not drink on the job. Of all objects I have owned in my life, this is one of the ones I miss the most. That, and the house in San Diego. Uli also told me that everyone in Switzerland has to be in the army, and that’s why he was sometimes late to races. During one race, his boat was actually winning the race without him. they were being chased by a rubber raft delivering him to the boat. My dad got a kick out of that – “They were winning without you!” “Why have an army?” My Dad asked, “If the Russians come, they’ll just drop a bomb or overrun the country.” It’s interesting that someone with such a stubborn independent streak would not understand someone else’s dedication to autonomy and distrust of imperialist bullies. My Dad would have had interesting things to say about the current conflict in Ukraine.
***
My Dad finished out of the hardware. But he did come back with a trophy, of sorts. Let us return to the pasture, where we find Martin Godsil shoeless, wearing a pair of polka-dot men’s boxers and a white undershirt, because that’s what he wears when he sleeps. But he’s not sleeping and he’s not sleepwalking. The quaint and homey budget hotel where we’re staying, The Gasthof de Lam has no air conditioning, so you’ve got to open the windows to keep it from getting too stuffy. But when you open the windows in come the mosquitos … But as always, my dad is an innovator and a problem solver. He removes the mesh chenille curtains from their rods and then duct tapes them over the windows for makeshift screens. This helps quite a bit with the ventilation and stops the plague of cowpie-born mosquitos, but now there’s issue of noise. Because as soon as one begins to drift off to sleep, the quaint Swiss milk cows come a-grazing beneath your window, a-clanging and a-mooing. My father was a patient man, but this was something like our 5th sleepless night and he’d had enough. The cows are becoming restless. Their bovine 6th sense is picking up something amiss, and but they’ve never met a sleep-deprived and very intense American sailboat builder/divorce lawyer with a reputation for being aggressive, and they have no idea that one is now headed their way at a full-sprint.
They begin to move away. Why is there a man in his underwear chasing them? Invader! Call in the Swiss Guard! It ain’t milking time! Like a barefoot hunter of old, Martin Godsil soon has his arms around the neck of the slowest udder-dragging Mamma Holstein. He removes the removes the offending bell and as the herd retreats, he walks back to the hotel.
The next night, no noise. Problem solved. The cows stayed away from the hotel.
***
So I don’t have the real Swiss Army knife but I do have real Swiss cowbell. And now I’ll ring the bell for good measure, and like a Hindu monk at his shrine, I’ll send a shout out to all the Gods and Godsils in all their lokas. I pray to those who have left, those here and there and those yet to come – may you take a cue from Marty Godsil and always remember that taking care of business is about much more than taking care of “business.” And I’ll send a prayer to the gods of water, bless us – we are 90% you after all. I call to the God of the Sun, may he shine on our face, and not burn our Irish American faces too bad in case we forget the sunscreen. I call to the Gods of wind, blow steady and true and may we be on the right side of every shift.
9. US 271 Vim, part 1 – Travemünde & Sweden
In the summer of 1981, I was fifteen years old and I was truly, wholeheartedly, completely fifteen. I was perpetually one panicked whitehead away from exploding into a muddy puddle of sweaty ectoplasm at all times. My body felt like an ill-fitting heavy winter coat and at the same time I felt entirely exposed and emotionally naked. Girls gave me nightmares and nuclear winter kept me up at night. This is entirely normal at 15. I think. Sorta. Intuition told me that the odds were 50/50 as to whether the world would last long enough for me to be an adult and have the opportunity to make the same mistakes I saw everyone around me making. I had no idea how right I was. As a generation, we had absolutely no sense of control over our own destiny. X marks the spot. The tail wags the dog. I was just along for the ride. We all were.
In the summer of 1981 the Dragon Weltmeisterschaft was held in Travemünde, Germany. Travemünde is a resort town on the Baltic Sea. Travemünde means the “Mouth of the Trave” because its harbor is located where the Trave River empties into the Baltic Sea. The Baltic is the inland body of water that reaches up behind Denmark and Sweden. Think of the Baltic as the Viking Mediterranean. An enclosed salt sea, it is surrounded by Finland to the North and then Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland in clockwise order to the East. Along its southern shore lies Deutschland, separated from Denmark by a narrow isthmus that opens to the the North Sea. and that’s where you’ll find Travemünde. Travemünde has a strand and a beach and it’s a popular port-of-call for cruise ships; if Germany has a Riviera, this is it.
My Dad was the one of the few American entrants in the regatta and he brought along his family and paid for his crew as well – he was exceedingly generous that way. We all stayed in one of these generic high rises that you’ll find in resort towns from Cancun to Dubai. From our floor-to-ceiling windows on the 9th floor you could see red bouys extending out into the bay that marked the border with East Germany. On our side, the Bundesrepupublik side, it was a busy resort town, with people and building and at the border they just stopped. On the Deutsche Demokratische Republik side, nothing but trees – no buildings and never saw a single boat or a person.
At 15, I was obsessed with basketball. I somehow imagined that I was going to be the next Ernie DiGregario or Calvin Murphy – undersized, but all the more respected for it. I’d had an early and abrupt puberty, and didn’t grow much after 15. With no basketball courts around, the first thing I did as a stranger in ein seltsam land was to go for a walk on the strand. It was the middle of a summer day and I was wearing my San Franciso riding gear elephant flares. I quickly became exceedingly self-conscious – though I must say, it felt right in a strange way, as if for once my outsides matched my insides. I was a complete alien. The German vacationers who weren’t wearing swimwear were all wearing skintight jeans – European brands I’d never seen before. I was self-concious about the size of my thighs and actively terrified of wearing Levis, which were just beginning to come into fashion, as the 70’s devolved into disco demolition record burnings, with “disco sucks” on every rocker’s lips. As I swooshed along, two German girls my age approached from the other direction. They smiled. I couldn’t help but smile back, wide enough to break my cheeks – knowing I looked ridiculous but there was nothing to do but just Keep on Trucking, like an R. Crumb comic – the full American swagger. As I passed, yards of denim flapping around my legs, squawooshing with every step, I could hear the girls break into the explosive wildfire laughter of teenage girls that needs no translation.
*****
My inner punk rocker scratched a little harder on its shell. It was ready to break out.
*****
At fifteen, I was a promising junior level sailor. Truly, a boat was one of the few places I felt comfortable and like I knew what I was doing. Perhaps it’s because its by nature, not of earth. By this time, I had graduated from El Toros to Lasers. Interestingly, my laser never had a proper name but was always “the Laser.” My Dad got a deal on it. It was used and had been painted blue and was slightly overweight with sand in the hull. He bought me a new sail and I did alright. We kept my laser at a dock over by Husky Stadium, the scene that has now become famous for “sailgating” for Husky football games. Now that I live back east, it’s always nostalgic to watch the national TV broadcasts with the wide overhead drone shots of the Montlake Cut and all the purple-clad fans drinking on their boats, rain or shine, with announcer intoning “Welcome to the most spectular setting in college football ….” Not a bad place to learn to sail. I raced on Mondays with some success, regularly beating many of the adults who knew my father. For a time I would go over there after school and take the boat out on my own. This took some doing, it seemed at the time. I can remember sailing one day and mulling over in my mind whether I should focus on basketball or sailing. I knew that I wanted to be great at something and when you’re 14 or so, anything is possible. As the path of my life hung in the balance, I weighed the ease of shooting at the hoop in my backyard and walking over to the gym across the street from my house, vs walking 20 minutes to where my Laser was stored. Basketball won. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that I didn’t focus more on sailing and instead focused obsessively on basketball, and then after that on playing music and the druggy alt-lifestyle that went along with it, none which, as it turned out, died I have much of a talent or facility for. At that time, I was a promising junior level sailor in a city that was a hotbed for Olympic Calibre racers – I coulda done alright – not Buchan or McKie Gold Medal level, but alright and maybe it would have kept me out of trouble a bit. Ah well. At least I could have sailed maybe in college – when I couldn’t even make the high school basketball team and pretty much shit the bed every time I went in the recording studio, to be honest, it can’t help but haunt me a little.
****
At any rate, the sailing that I did do was good training. My Dad was one crew short, so I was able to sail and crew in the foredeck position with my Dad for the warm up regatta in Travemünde. The boat we sailed was US 271, Vim. An elegant crème colored hull, tasteful gold leaf details along the gunnels and though it was a fiberglass hull, it had a teak deck which gave it a sense of old-world craft and beauty. As a side note, teak is an amazing wood – beautiful, and durable with non-skid properties and was often used as as the deck on classic wood yachts – the Chriscrafts motor yachts being the prime example of golden age wooden boats. On older wooden sailboats, you might varnish the hull and the rest of the boat so it gleamed but you would leave the teak deck unfinished so that your Sperry Topsiders wouldn’t slide when the waves washed over the deck.
My Dad’s were always a spectacle, and Vim was my Dad’s Opus, his finest and most complete creation – the final repository of all his learning and go-fast knowledge. Every block, every line was placed optimally so that the crew would not interfere with each other, and every tack or mark rounding could be a smooth choreographed maneuver. Much of the hardware was one-of-a-kind and handmade or modified in his garage/workshop. The spinnaker launcher, backstays, and barber hauler setup for the genoa – everything was intelligently laid out and top-of-the-line Haarken or else ordered from some specialty machine shop somewhere in the world that made only those cleats or winches. Every fitting was thoughtfully engineered to be as lightweight as possible while still being strong. Just one example – in the anodized aluminum mainsheet traveller that spanned the cockpit he had cut out circles and then sanded them. This was done to lighten the weight but still retain the strength. They were laid out with mathematical precision so that it looked like a machine had made the cuts – but he had to make the circles and cut them with a drill with a circular blade attached and then sanded the edges by hand. Mathmatically precise, the effect was both space age and classically crafted. My dad always had an open boat policy and was an open book in terms of boatbuilding and boat-rigging knowledge. People from all countries would drop by and ooh and ah and ask to come aboard in their accented English. They would express admiration for the way it was rigged and for the aesthetic care and craft with it was built. Each complement was fielded with a humble pleasure and a self-depracating joke.
Every major internation regatta generally followed the same format – a six or seven race series that lasted most of a week, preceeded by a warmup regatta. Usually the warm up regatta will be a local or regional championship, and then the main regatta will be the North American Championships, or else European or World Championship. In this particular regatta, there were about 40-50 Dragons on the start line. This was my first taste of one-design keelboat racing at the international level – and I’ve got to say there’s nothing like it. With high-performance centerboard boats and modern designs with planning hulls, there’s much more emphasis on physical skill and managing the boat speed and a lucky puff can be the difference between winning and losing. But not so with Dragons and other classic keelboats boats. In lighter winds, adjustments to sail and course are slight. Everything you do is about creating and then maintaining momentum. Differences in boat speed between skilled competitors are incremental and manifest gradually. Because it’s one design, with tight rule restrictions on hull, sails and weight, no boat has a huge advantage over others. The even-ness of the playing field, and the purity of the geometry makes one-design monohull fleet racing one of the grandest games on earth. Imagine a sort of geometric gameboard stretching over maybe 6-9 square nautical miles, with 40 or 50 people playing at the same time. The start line will be set at a 90-degree angle to the wind with a fifteen-minute countdown to allow the 40-50 boats to tussle and maneuver for the best position. Once the starting gun goes off, the game is all about staying in clear air and maximizing your angle to the wind, without sacrificing boat speed. This requires being aware and taking advantage of any wind shifts and variations in the strength of wind and any tidal or current effects before anyone else. This was the first regatta where I got to see a tactician use a hand-held compass with which you could monitor and calculate the speed and angle of boats on the other side of the course. Because of marketing and the jingoism associated with “The America’s Cup” match racing and high performance has received overmuch public attention – but formula racing, while fascinating with its emphasis on space age composites and technique is, in my view, a perversion of true yachting and just one more instance where the progression of technology has not necessarily moved the human experience forward.
In this particular set of regattas, my Father placed well – probably the best finish he ever had. He was fifth in the warmup regatta and 5th in the world championship. My dad always kidded that all Pat Dore added was volume – like my dad, Pat was a screamer. Maybe there is something in that whole Irish-getting-your-Irish-up deal. The data is anecdotal, but convincing. But there was no yelling when it was just David, myself and my Dad.
This was helped in part by the seas and conditions. The summer breeze was light but steady and you could sail in your shirtsleeves. There was little swell and working the foredeck was as easy as walking around your apartment – just your feet slightly wide and knees subtley bent, like shock absorbers and when you jibe, but your back to the mast.
The most drama we had was while mooring next to the huge German coast guard boat that was acting as the race committee boat. As I was paddling the last few feet into the dock, I pushed off and the gunmetal gray side of of the hulking ship was so slippery that the tip of the paddle just slid and I fell the water – definitely a shock to the system. I was right by a huge propeller. I could feel it sucking me under. I started dogpaddling madly. My dad reached out with a paddle and I pulled myself up to the boat. Ever cool in a actual emergency, he quietly told me to head back to the apartment and get changed. I sloshed along the dock, feeling like Sigmund the Sea Mostly with all of the people who did not know English looking on, the only thing that was hurt was my pride.
*****
Before we progress to the final denouement of our story, let’s take an intermission and relate a number of observations – all of which could be stories on their own, illuminating Godsil family life, a few sketches to fill out the portrait of the Artist as a young Max.
1)I had taken German in junior high school and high school, but I was so self-concious about getting something wrong that I did not try out my German at all. Ugh.
2)I was super obsessed with basketball. In Germany, I would dribble in the resort condo and then people would pound on the ceiling below. What was I thinking? What was my mom thinking? Later, when we visited Sweden during the second half of our trip, we drove by a school that had courts with 9-foot hoops and trapezoid-shaped key. I walked back along the street, dribbling my basketball. When local kids saw me they said, trying out their English – “pass the ball” – but no one joined me to play. Basketball was an American sport in 1981. Us and the Soviets.
3)Sailed in Sweden as well – blew a little harder but it was fun.
4)There’s a song by Iggy Pop called Five-foot-one. And the chorus is, “I wish life could be, Swedish Magazines” In Sweden I encountered some of these magazines. None of that corny Playboy romantic moodlighting or airbrushed retouching. I treated these magazines with the manic attention, reverence and insatiatiable curiousity that any healthy 15-year-old male might. Maybe more. Who can say.
5)Goth enburg is on the opposite site of Sweden from Stockholm and is called Göteborg and pronounced YO-teh-borg. The nearby mall was called Frölunda Torg. For some reason, we had a Frölunda Torg poster in our kitchen for years afterwards. I wonder if people in Sweden have “American Dream” posters. Unfortunately, they don’t need one as the American Dream, in all it’s glory is the virus we gave – and there’s no vaccine. My sister and I would listen to the older Swedish men and after a while we could mimick them perfectly but in nonsense language. But sometimes we would walk by kids our young people and we could hear them mimicking us – shhh-ing and chh-ing their way through nonsense words that sounded like English. This was instructive. In summary I would say, umlauts have always made me smile.
6)The Dragon was designed in Norway in the 1920’s. We took an overnight trip and visited Oslo, Norway. I remember seeing mods on scooters and thinking that it was kinda cool. We saw a varnished, wooden Dragon Class Yacht in a museum. This was kinda of a joke for my dad, that Dragons belonged in a museum. We stayed in a boat at a marina. This was a lark for my parents but terrifying for a kid – to be homeless and basically break into someone else’s property. I was ashamed that I was so upset but my parents just smiled and mocked. They could have handled it better. My parents are certifiable. My parents were pretty cool, actually. I slept fine. To this day, I can really sleep anywhere (except my own bed, which is a middle age stress thing)
7)We drove from Travemunde up through the flats of northern Germany through Denmark – stayed with the Borresens. The Borresens were cool people and built most of the dragons in Europe. At one point, the older Borresen protested my Dad’s designs or maybe even sued him. (As it turns out, he was right – the fiberglass mold that my Dad built boats from was ever-so-slightly narrow in the deck – an unintentional breach of the class rules. Bottom line, the elder Borreson and my Dad were sort of frenemies, we might say, to borrow a modern term. We stayed for dinner. Borresen also sailed with his sons, who were extraordinary and accomplished world-class sailors in their own right. I remember my dad filled the boat he was trailoring with cases of a Korn, a German clear liquor that’s distilled from grain, a little like vodk With obvious distaste, the younger Borresen said something to the effect of, “Why are you carrying that around? That’s cheap, disgusting rotgut. What are you doing?” This was one of my first inkling that not everyone had a atomic-clock drinking ritual in their lives. (Classic foreshadowing, I know. Discuss amongst yourself, English majors.)
8)The Swedish people were nice and spoke impeccable English. The parties we attended were in gorgeous homes on rocky outcroppings overlooking the North Sea. At the parties there were literally towers of peel your own shrimp. The owner complained of the high taxes – the universal privilege of free peoples. I remember looking around and thinking, looks to me like you’re doing alright.
9)My sister was along on this trip as well. Maybe 10 at the time – she played with Dillon Jones, the special needs son of one of my Dads’ crew.
10)My Dads crew could fill out a whole chapter of their own – part of the Pacific Northwest pantheon of sailors. [come back to this]
11)Travemünde means ‘Mouth of the Trave River.” Travemunde falls under the jurisdiction of Lübeck, one of the historic Cities that were part of the Hanseatic League. Lubeck is unchanged, with an intact guildhall and many historic buildings. The nearest big city is Hamburg, which was decimated during WWII. We did a day trip to Hamburg, and I climbed up inside a huge Cathedral to the top to look out over the city. A narrow stairway with worn steps ran around the outside outside of the tower, and up and up I climbed. I never have liked elevators. This is the only time in my life I’ve felt claustrophobic and the dizzing effects of agoraphobia at the same time. Outside once again, I walked out into the the fresh air and there is a bell that fell from a church tower embedded in the the cement in 1943 – they had just left it there, resting quietly, as a reminder of the WW II devestation caused by the RAF – a firestorm that melted cement, and killed 40,000 civilians – a death count equivalent to Nagasaki.
**********
So we met these Australians in Travemünde. They were younger – in their 20’s, just off for an adventure, and just scraping by, having a good time, bumming their way across Europe, navigating by finding sailing, girls, hash, beer. Not necessarily in that order. There were three of them, two brothers, and a third; the perfect number to sail a dragon. Two of them were named Bruce – recalling the Monty Python sketch, “’ello, Bruce!” – we all had a good laugh about that. Older Bruce was the leader and their skipper on the water. His younger brother Matt was quieter, and Bruce #2 was the foredeck. They were competent and finished respectable middle of the fleet in their chartered boat. If the regatta had been held back home in Geelong or Hobarth they’d never have been able to qualify – and I’m sure it felt good to fill out the Aussie entries from four to five.
I’m no doubt making a vast generalization, but the Australians I’ve met are hard drinking, easy-going, positive, unselfconscious, boisterous, charming, irreverent, clever, proud of their heritage, physically vibrant, brazenly brave and likeable – in other words, they are rugged sailors and great competitors and the kind of guys that get along super-duper with my Dad and Mom. It seems my parents have always had a connection with Australians. Once we had an Australian visiting professor at the UW come for dinner and stay for 6 months. He stayed in the basement which was thereafter known as “Down Under.” At some point a little later in our familial story, some Australians came and sailed in a regatta – they had a flag with a boxing kangararoo – or “Roo” – which first became prominent as the flag from Australia II, the first non-American boat to ever win the America’s Cup, which was a big media deal when I was growing up. My mom then was always talking about “Roos” – so much so, in fact, that my sister started calling her “Roo.” The belief was that it was a contraction of her middle name, “Ruth” but now the truth. This is the point where the toilet bowl started spinning the other way. The name stuck – she is known as grandma Roo to this day.
*****
But like I said money was a bit tight and so when a handpurse was left at a bar they saw no harm in lightening it by a few hundred Deutschmark. From their point of view, none of these well-off sailing types were missing any meals after all. They left the empty billfold with ID and credit cards and everything intact on top of the bar. They weren’t complete wankers. And the regatta is almost over and they’re off to Marseilles and that’s what we do to get by. You do what you do and what’s done is done. End of story. Except that was really the beginning. Because the next night they’re talking and drinking with my Dad, even spending a few of those ill-begotten Deutschmarks, they’re really hitting it off, and then this gregarious America’s wife walks up from a day of sightseeing and hold on to your Alligator Akuba hats, but guess what – it’s the woman that they stole the money from. She’s a good sort and they all fall to talking –does she recognize them from the bar from the night before? They play it off cool and another round and all that. And they all start talking and – get this – the European championships are in Marstrand, outside of Gothenburg, Sweden and this couple wants them to go with them. At first they refuse, of course, how could they accept this kindness? (I mean, really, how could they?) But Sandra and Marty Godsil simply won’t hear of it. They must come with them to Sweden. And after a few beers they’re warmed up and persuadable. At first they hedge in a guarded way – when’s the switch coming? Just waiting for the probing questions under the single fluorescent spotlight. Matt and Bruce #2 give each other sideways glances and stay mostly quiet and just try to laugh in the right places. But Bruce, the older brother, captain and acknowledged leader, is increasingly enthusiastic. The French Riviera can wait. They Aussies will drive the flatbed truck with the boat and he’ll drive the van with his family. It’s all worked out and comes together just like that.
They Australians offer to pay for dinner, but Marty won’t hear of it.
The more they talk to Marty, the more they admire him. They love that he builds the boat he sails. There isn’t a blemish or imperfection anywhere on the boat. Everything top notch. And my Dad has some sort of go-fast zero-friction advanced graphite paint on the bottom which they can’t get over. He’s always wet sanding the boat till it’s smooth as as a baby’s arse. They all have laugh about that. Caressing his boats – does the wife get jealous. And only he can touch the boats. The Aussie boys offer to help, but my dad says “no that’s fine, I’m just finishing up here” and then goes on for another hour.
They love that my dad has – again, in modern terms – hacked the system. Some blokes have a girl in every port and Marty Godsil had a ready-to-race Dragon waiting for him. He’s been coming to Europe every year for four years. He keeps Vim it in a dry-storage warehouse in the Netherlands near the Hague. Every summer he flies into Amsterdam, and heads for Bodensee, Lake Garda, the Firth of Forth in Scotland, wherever the big regatta is happening that year – whether it be the Gold Cup, European or World Championship. And they love the truck – She’s a beaut. The s aging 50’s era Opel matte red diesel flatbed with it’s unceremoniously squashed in the cab so that the deep bow of the dragon can stick out over the roof as we sail down the highway. And our crew Jones and Dore – and they’re every bit as much of a hoot as my parents. David Jones is the tactician and sharp. He’s some sort of doctor back home with a movie start looks and a swagger. He can keep his collar flipped up like James Dean and no one’s going to snicker. The other crew is as wild as his ginger with a rockstar mustache to match, like the Keyboardist from The Band, circa 1972. So that’s their team, and good sailors, finishing top five in the Worlds.
World Championships complete, off we go, one happy English Speaking Commonwealth Circus, travelling north from Travemünde across the flat nowhere lands up through Denmark. And as we’re travelling along and sharing meals and stories and getting to know each other there’s this elephant in the room and they’re petting it, scratching it under the chin and feeding it peanuts. There’s this unspoken thing – but it’s like my parents don’t care. They’re oddly completely at ease with the unease.
For their part, the three Aussies hop to attention whenever Marty appears on the scene, ready to go to work. They volunteer to sand, saw, scrub, rig, help move the boat, drive – whatever needs to be done.
***
When we get to Copenhagen, the Aussies tell my mom and dad to go out and have a good time. They’ll take good care of me, take me out in the city. My parents take off and I’m left with the Australians. Before the four of us head out for the evening, the older Bruce takes out some some rolling papers, tobbaco and a small block of tar-black hash, and start rubbing off some bits, and rolling it into the joint. I want to partake, by I’m self-conscious and I don’t. I’ve smoked weed and hash back home and I’m always up for getting altered in any way that’s offered – I really want to – but these Australians are part of my parents sailing circle, fringe though they may be , and just I can’t reconcile the two worlds– my rebellious drug usage and people that know my parents. Bruce seems apologetic and explains by way of excuse, “If life wasn’t so boring, we wouldn’t need to smoke hash to liven things up.” I’m thinking here I am with three Australians heading out for the evening in Copenhagen and I may be so terrified that my sphincter may never unlock but I’m not bored. After they get stoned, the Aussies are just jabbering among themselves, going full-speed full Australian and I’d need subtitles to keep up and I just start zoning out and smiling ocassionally. They laugh and joke and eventually ask me three times or so before I finally understand what they’re saying, if I’ve ever been laid and if I’d like to buy a hooker. Let’s remember I’m 15 and I’m sure that I wouldn’t be able to pee if someone else was watching much less achieve an erection, so I lie and say I’ve got a girlfriend back home. We head out into the Danish night, stepping around and over blonde girls who crowd the stairs of the cheap hotel we’re staying at – to me they look like nothing less than mischievous fairies from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, and up to the best kind of no-good.
At the bar, after a couple Tuborgs I’m feeling a bit more relaxed and social. Nothing too vicious, mate – it seems we're settling into a night of quiet buzzed reflection. Just another night – one of many to come throughout my protracted adolescence – where I have a few beers with the boys, completely sure that the real party (with girls) is happening somewhere else. And it begins to slowly dawn on me and maybe it’s still slowly dawning to this day, as I crab my way through memories as numerous as the gray fine sands of a northwest beach, that the whole “getting hookers” was just one more of a series of macho Aussie pranks on the young kid. What the Aussies were really doing was babysitting – giving Marty and the Mrs. the night off so they could have a nice dinner alone, and repaying my Dad for his kindness and generosity. My Dad, my Captain, taking care of his crew. At 15 perhaps I was impressed with these vagabond Aussies. But the farther I get from my dad, the larger he gets.
In the summer of 1981 the Dragon Weltmeisterschaft was held in Travemünde, Germany. Travemünde is a resort town on the Baltic Sea. Travemünde means the “Mouth of the Trave” because its harbor is located where the Trave River empties into the Baltic Sea. The Baltic is the inland body of water that reaches up behind Denmark and Sweden. Think of the Baltic as the Viking Mediterranean. An enclosed salt sea, it is surrounded by Finland to the North and then Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland in clockwise order to the East. Along its southern shore lies Deutschland, separated from Denmark by a narrow isthmus that opens to the the North Sea. and that’s where you’ll find Travemünde. Travemünde has a strand and a beach and it’s a popular port-of-call for cruise ships; if Germany has a Riviera, this is it.
My Dad was the one of the few American entrants in the regatta and he brought along his family and paid for his crew as well – he was exceedingly generous that way. We all stayed in one of these generic high rises that you’ll find in resort towns from Cancun to Dubai. From our floor-to-ceiling windows on the 9th floor you could see red bouys extending out into the bay that marked the border with East Germany. On our side, the Bundesrepupublik side, it was a busy resort town, with people and building and at the border they just stopped. On the Deutsche Demokratische Republik side, nothing but trees – no buildings and never saw a single boat or a person.
At 15, I was obsessed with basketball. I somehow imagined that I was going to be the next Ernie DiGregario or Calvin Murphy – undersized, but all the more respected for it. I’d had an early and abrupt puberty, and didn’t grow much after 15. With no basketball courts around, the first thing I did as a stranger in ein seltsam land was to go for a walk on the strand. It was the middle of a summer day and I was wearing my San Franciso riding gear elephant flares. I quickly became exceedingly self-conscious – though I must say, it felt right in a strange way, as if for once my outsides matched my insides. I was a complete alien. The German vacationers who weren’t wearing swimwear were all wearing skintight jeans – European brands I’d never seen before. I was self-concious about the size of my thighs and actively terrified of wearing Levis, which were just beginning to come into fashion, as the 70’s devolved into disco demolition record burnings, with “disco sucks” on every rocker’s lips. As I swooshed along, two German girls my age approached from the other direction. They smiled. I couldn’t help but smile back, wide enough to break my cheeks – knowing I looked ridiculous but there was nothing to do but just Keep on Trucking, like an R. Crumb comic – the full American swagger. As I passed, yards of denim flapping around my legs, squawooshing with every step, I could hear the girls break into the explosive wildfire laughter of teenage girls that needs no translation.
*****
My inner punk rocker scratched a little harder on its shell. It was ready to break out.
*****
At fifteen, I was a promising junior level sailor. Truly, a boat was one of the few places I felt comfortable and like I knew what I was doing. Perhaps it’s because its by nature, not of earth. By this time, I had graduated from El Toros to Lasers. Interestingly, my laser never had a proper name but was always “the Laser.” My Dad got a deal on it. It was used and had been painted blue and was slightly overweight with sand in the hull. He bought me a new sail and I did alright. We kept my laser at a dock over by Husky Stadium, the scene that has now become famous for “sailgating” for Husky football games. Now that I live back east, it’s always nostalgic to watch the national TV broadcasts with the wide overhead drone shots of the Montlake Cut and all the purple-clad fans drinking on their boats, rain or shine, with announcer intoning “Welcome to the most spectular setting in college football ….” Not a bad place to learn to sail. I raced on Mondays with some success, regularly beating many of the adults who knew my father. For a time I would go over there after school and take the boat out on my own. This took some doing, it seemed at the time. I can remember sailing one day and mulling over in my mind whether I should focus on basketball or sailing. I knew that I wanted to be great at something and when you’re 14 or so, anything is possible. As the path of my life hung in the balance, I weighed the ease of shooting at the hoop in my backyard and walking over to the gym across the street from my house, vs walking 20 minutes to where my Laser was stored. Basketball won. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that I didn’t focus more on sailing and instead focused obsessively on basketball, and then after that on playing music and the druggy alt-lifestyle that went along with it, none which, as it turned out, died I have much of a talent or facility for. At that time, I was a promising junior level sailor in a city that was a hotbed for Olympic Calibre racers – I coulda done alright – not Buchan or McKie Gold Medal level, but alright and maybe it would have kept me out of trouble a bit. Ah well. At least I could have sailed maybe in college – when I couldn’t even make the high school basketball team and pretty much shit the bed every time I went in the recording studio, to be honest, it can’t help but haunt me a little.
****
At any rate, the sailing that I did do was good training. My Dad was one crew short, so I was able to sail and crew in the foredeck position with my Dad for the warm up regatta in Travemünde. The boat we sailed was US 271, Vim. An elegant crème colored hull, tasteful gold leaf details along the gunnels and though it was a fiberglass hull, it had a teak deck which gave it a sense of old-world craft and beauty. As a side note, teak is an amazing wood – beautiful, and durable with non-skid properties and was often used as as the deck on classic wood yachts – the Chriscrafts motor yachts being the prime example of golden age wooden boats. On older wooden sailboats, you might varnish the hull and the rest of the boat so it gleamed but you would leave the teak deck unfinished so that your Sperry Topsiders wouldn’t slide when the waves washed over the deck.
My Dad’s were always a spectacle, and Vim was my Dad’s Opus, his finest and most complete creation – the final repository of all his learning and go-fast knowledge. Every block, every line was placed optimally so that the crew would not interfere with each other, and every tack or mark rounding could be a smooth choreographed maneuver. Much of the hardware was one-of-a-kind and handmade or modified in his garage/workshop. The spinnaker launcher, backstays, and barber hauler setup for the genoa – everything was intelligently laid out and top-of-the-line Haarken or else ordered from some specialty machine shop somewhere in the world that made only those cleats or winches. Every fitting was thoughtfully engineered to be as lightweight as possible while still being strong. Just one example – in the anodized aluminum mainsheet traveller that spanned the cockpit he had cut out circles and then sanded them. This was done to lighten the weight but still retain the strength. They were laid out with mathematical precision so that it looked like a machine had made the cuts – but he had to make the circles and cut them with a drill with a circular blade attached and then sanded the edges by hand. Mathmatically precise, the effect was both space age and classically crafted. My dad always had an open boat policy and was an open book in terms of boatbuilding and boat-rigging knowledge. People from all countries would drop by and ooh and ah and ask to come aboard in their accented English. They would express admiration for the way it was rigged and for the aesthetic care and craft with it was built. Each complement was fielded with a humble pleasure and a self-depracating joke.
Every major internation regatta generally followed the same format – a six or seven race series that lasted most of a week, preceeded by a warmup regatta. Usually the warm up regatta will be a local or regional championship, and then the main regatta will be the North American Championships, or else European or World Championship. In this particular regatta, there were about 40-50 Dragons on the start line. This was my first taste of one-design keelboat racing at the international level – and I’ve got to say there’s nothing like it. With high-performance centerboard boats and modern designs with planning hulls, there’s much more emphasis on physical skill and managing the boat speed and a lucky puff can be the difference between winning and losing. But not so with Dragons and other classic keelboats boats. In lighter winds, adjustments to sail and course are slight. Everything you do is about creating and then maintaining momentum. Differences in boat speed between skilled competitors are incremental and manifest gradually. Because it’s one design, with tight rule restrictions on hull, sails and weight, no boat has a huge advantage over others. The even-ness of the playing field, and the purity of the geometry makes one-design monohull fleet racing one of the grandest games on earth. Imagine a sort of geometric gameboard stretching over maybe 6-9 square nautical miles, with 40 or 50 people playing at the same time. The start line will be set at a 90-degree angle to the wind with a fifteen-minute countdown to allow the 40-50 boats to tussle and maneuver for the best position. Once the starting gun goes off, the game is all about staying in clear air and maximizing your angle to the wind, without sacrificing boat speed. This requires being aware and taking advantage of any wind shifts and variations in the strength of wind and any tidal or current effects before anyone else. This was the first regatta where I got to see a tactician use a hand-held compass with which you could monitor and calculate the speed and angle of boats on the other side of the course. Because of marketing and the jingoism associated with “The America’s Cup” match racing and high performance has received overmuch public attention – but formula racing, while fascinating with its emphasis on space age composites and technique is, in my view, a perversion of true yachting and just one more instance where the progression of technology has not necessarily moved the human experience forward.
In this particular set of regattas, my Father placed well – probably the best finish he ever had. He was fifth in the warmup regatta and 5th in the world championship. My dad always kidded that all Pat Dore added was volume – like my dad, Pat was a screamer. Maybe there is something in that whole Irish-getting-your-Irish-up deal. The data is anecdotal, but convincing. But there was no yelling when it was just David, myself and my Dad.
This was helped in part by the seas and conditions. The summer breeze was light but steady and you could sail in your shirtsleeves. There was little swell and working the foredeck was as easy as walking around your apartment – just your feet slightly wide and knees subtley bent, like shock absorbers and when you jibe, but your back to the mast.
The most drama we had was while mooring next to the huge German coast guard boat that was acting as the race committee boat. As I was paddling the last few feet into the dock, I pushed off and the gunmetal gray side of of the hulking ship was so slippery that the tip of the paddle just slid and I fell the water – definitely a shock to the system. I was right by a huge propeller. I could feel it sucking me under. I started dogpaddling madly. My dad reached out with a paddle and I pulled myself up to the boat. Ever cool in a actual emergency, he quietly told me to head back to the apartment and get changed. I sloshed along the dock, feeling like Sigmund the Sea Mostly with all of the people who did not know English looking on, the only thing that was hurt was my pride.
*****
Before we progress to the final denouement of our story, let’s take an intermission and relate a number of observations – all of which could be stories on their own, illuminating Godsil family life, a few sketches to fill out the portrait of the Artist as a young Max.
1)I had taken German in junior high school and high school, but I was so self-concious about getting something wrong that I did not try out my German at all. Ugh.
2)I was super obsessed with basketball. In Germany, I would dribble in the resort condo and then people would pound on the ceiling below. What was I thinking? What was my mom thinking? Later, when we visited Sweden during the second half of our trip, we drove by a school that had courts with 9-foot hoops and trapezoid-shaped key. I walked back along the street, dribbling my basketball. When local kids saw me they said, trying out their English – “pass the ball” – but no one joined me to play. Basketball was an American sport in 1981. Us and the Soviets.
3)Sailed in Sweden as well – blew a little harder but it was fun.
4)There’s a song by Iggy Pop called Five-foot-one. And the chorus is, “I wish life could be, Swedish Magazines” In Sweden I encountered some of these magazines. None of that corny Playboy romantic moodlighting or airbrushed retouching. I treated these magazines with the manic attention, reverence and insatiatiable curiousity that any healthy 15-year-old male might. Maybe more. Who can say.
5)Goth enburg is on the opposite site of Sweden from Stockholm and is called Göteborg and pronounced YO-teh-borg. The nearby mall was called Frölunda Torg. For some reason, we had a Frölunda Torg poster in our kitchen for years afterwards. I wonder if people in Sweden have “American Dream” posters. Unfortunately, they don’t need one as the American Dream, in all it’s glory is the virus we gave – and there’s no vaccine. My sister and I would listen to the older Swedish men and after a while we could mimick them perfectly but in nonsense language. But sometimes we would walk by kids our young people and we could hear them mimicking us – shhh-ing and chh-ing their way through nonsense words that sounded like English. This was instructive. In summary I would say, umlauts have always made me smile.
6)The Dragon was designed in Norway in the 1920’s. We took an overnight trip and visited Oslo, Norway. I remember seeing mods on scooters and thinking that it was kinda cool. We saw a varnished, wooden Dragon Class Yacht in a museum. This was kinda of a joke for my dad, that Dragons belonged in a museum. We stayed in a boat at a marina. This was a lark for my parents but terrifying for a kid – to be homeless and basically break into someone else’s property. I was ashamed that I was so upset but my parents just smiled and mocked. They could have handled it better. My parents are certifiable. My parents were pretty cool, actually. I slept fine. To this day, I can really sleep anywhere (except my own bed, which is a middle age stress thing)
7)We drove from Travemunde up through the flats of northern Germany through Denmark – stayed with the Borresens. The Borresens were cool people and built most of the dragons in Europe. At one point, the older Borresen protested my Dad’s designs or maybe even sued him. (As it turns out, he was right – the fiberglass mold that my Dad built boats from was ever-so-slightly narrow in the deck – an unintentional breach of the class rules. Bottom line, the elder Borreson and my Dad were sort of frenemies, we might say, to borrow a modern term. We stayed for dinner. Borresen also sailed with his sons, who were extraordinary and accomplished world-class sailors in their own right. I remember my dad filled the boat he was trailoring with cases of a Korn, a German clear liquor that’s distilled from grain, a little like vodk With obvious distaste, the younger Borresen said something to the effect of, “Why are you carrying that around? That’s cheap, disgusting rotgut. What are you doing?” This was one of my first inkling that not everyone had a atomic-clock drinking ritual in their lives. (Classic foreshadowing, I know. Discuss amongst yourself, English majors.)
8)The Swedish people were nice and spoke impeccable English. The parties we attended were in gorgeous homes on rocky outcroppings overlooking the North Sea. At the parties there were literally towers of peel your own shrimp. The owner complained of the high taxes – the universal privilege of free peoples. I remember looking around and thinking, looks to me like you’re doing alright.
9)My sister was along on this trip as well. Maybe 10 at the time – she played with Dillon Jones, the special needs son of one of my Dads’ crew.
10)My Dads crew could fill out a whole chapter of their own – part of the Pacific Northwest pantheon of sailors. [come back to this]
11)Travemünde means ‘Mouth of the Trave River.” Travemunde falls under the jurisdiction of Lübeck, one of the historic Cities that were part of the Hanseatic League. Lubeck is unchanged, with an intact guildhall and many historic buildings. The nearest big city is Hamburg, which was decimated during WWII. We did a day trip to Hamburg, and I climbed up inside a huge Cathedral to the top to look out over the city. A narrow stairway with worn steps ran around the outside outside of the tower, and up and up I climbed. I never have liked elevators. This is the only time in my life I’ve felt claustrophobic and the dizzing effects of agoraphobia at the same time. Outside once again, I walked out into the the fresh air and there is a bell that fell from a church tower embedded in the the cement in 1943 – they had just left it there, resting quietly, as a reminder of the WW II devestation caused by the RAF – a firestorm that melted cement, and killed 40,000 civilians – a death count equivalent to Nagasaki.
**********
So we met these Australians in Travemünde. They were younger – in their 20’s, just off for an adventure, and just scraping by, having a good time, bumming their way across Europe, navigating by finding sailing, girls, hash, beer. Not necessarily in that order. There were three of them, two brothers, and a third; the perfect number to sail a dragon. Two of them were named Bruce – recalling the Monty Python sketch, “’ello, Bruce!” – we all had a good laugh about that. Older Bruce was the leader and their skipper on the water. His younger brother Matt was quieter, and Bruce #2 was the foredeck. They were competent and finished respectable middle of the fleet in their chartered boat. If the regatta had been held back home in Geelong or Hobarth they’d never have been able to qualify – and I’m sure it felt good to fill out the Aussie entries from four to five.
I’m no doubt making a vast generalization, but the Australians I’ve met are hard drinking, easy-going, positive, unselfconscious, boisterous, charming, irreverent, clever, proud of their heritage, physically vibrant, brazenly brave and likeable – in other words, they are rugged sailors and great competitors and the kind of guys that get along super-duper with my Dad and Mom. It seems my parents have always had a connection with Australians. Once we had an Australian visiting professor at the UW come for dinner and stay for 6 months. He stayed in the basement which was thereafter known as “Down Under.” At some point a little later in our familial story, some Australians came and sailed in a regatta – they had a flag with a boxing kangararoo – or “Roo” – which first became prominent as the flag from Australia II, the first non-American boat to ever win the America’s Cup, which was a big media deal when I was growing up. My mom then was always talking about “Roos” – so much so, in fact, that my sister started calling her “Roo.” The belief was that it was a contraction of her middle name, “Ruth” but now the truth. This is the point where the toilet bowl started spinning the other way. The name stuck – she is known as grandma Roo to this day.
*****
But like I said money was a bit tight and so when a handpurse was left at a bar they saw no harm in lightening it by a few hundred Deutschmark. From their point of view, none of these well-off sailing types were missing any meals after all. They left the empty billfold with ID and credit cards and everything intact on top of the bar. They weren’t complete wankers. And the regatta is almost over and they’re off to Marseilles and that’s what we do to get by. You do what you do and what’s done is done. End of story. Except that was really the beginning. Because the next night they’re talking and drinking with my Dad, even spending a few of those ill-begotten Deutschmarks, they’re really hitting it off, and then this gregarious America’s wife walks up from a day of sightseeing and hold on to your Alligator Akuba hats, but guess what – it’s the woman that they stole the money from. She’s a good sort and they all fall to talking –does she recognize them from the bar from the night before? They play it off cool and another round and all that. And they all start talking and – get this – the European championships are in Marstrand, outside of Gothenburg, Sweden and this couple wants them to go with them. At first they refuse, of course, how could they accept this kindness? (I mean, really, how could they?) But Sandra and Marty Godsil simply won’t hear of it. They must come with them to Sweden. And after a few beers they’re warmed up and persuadable. At first they hedge in a guarded way – when’s the switch coming? Just waiting for the probing questions under the single fluorescent spotlight. Matt and Bruce #2 give each other sideways glances and stay mostly quiet and just try to laugh in the right places. But Bruce, the older brother, captain and acknowledged leader, is increasingly enthusiastic. The French Riviera can wait. They Aussies will drive the flatbed truck with the boat and he’ll drive the van with his family. It’s all worked out and comes together just like that.
They Australians offer to pay for dinner, but Marty won’t hear of it.
The more they talk to Marty, the more they admire him. They love that he builds the boat he sails. There isn’t a blemish or imperfection anywhere on the boat. Everything top notch. And my Dad has some sort of go-fast zero-friction advanced graphite paint on the bottom which they can’t get over. He’s always wet sanding the boat till it’s smooth as as a baby’s arse. They all have laugh about that. Caressing his boats – does the wife get jealous. And only he can touch the boats. The Aussie boys offer to help, but my dad says “no that’s fine, I’m just finishing up here” and then goes on for another hour.
They love that my dad has – again, in modern terms – hacked the system. Some blokes have a girl in every port and Marty Godsil had a ready-to-race Dragon waiting for him. He’s been coming to Europe every year for four years. He keeps Vim it in a dry-storage warehouse in the Netherlands near the Hague. Every summer he flies into Amsterdam, and heads for Bodensee, Lake Garda, the Firth of Forth in Scotland, wherever the big regatta is happening that year – whether it be the Gold Cup, European or World Championship. And they love the truck – She’s a beaut. The s aging 50’s era Opel matte red diesel flatbed with it’s unceremoniously squashed in the cab so that the deep bow of the dragon can stick out over the roof as we sail down the highway. And our crew Jones and Dore – and they’re every bit as much of a hoot as my parents. David Jones is the tactician and sharp. He’s some sort of doctor back home with a movie start looks and a swagger. He can keep his collar flipped up like James Dean and no one’s going to snicker. The other crew is as wild as his ginger with a rockstar mustache to match, like the Keyboardist from The Band, circa 1972. So that’s their team, and good sailors, finishing top five in the Worlds.
World Championships complete, off we go, one happy English Speaking Commonwealth Circus, travelling north from Travemünde across the flat nowhere lands up through Denmark. And as we’re travelling along and sharing meals and stories and getting to know each other there’s this elephant in the room and they’re petting it, scratching it under the chin and feeding it peanuts. There’s this unspoken thing – but it’s like my parents don’t care. They’re oddly completely at ease with the unease.
For their part, the three Aussies hop to attention whenever Marty appears on the scene, ready to go to work. They volunteer to sand, saw, scrub, rig, help move the boat, drive – whatever needs to be done.
***
When we get to Copenhagen, the Aussies tell my mom and dad to go out and have a good time. They’ll take good care of me, take me out in the city. My parents take off and I’m left with the Australians. Before the four of us head out for the evening, the older Bruce takes out some some rolling papers, tobbaco and a small block of tar-black hash, and start rubbing off some bits, and rolling it into the joint. I want to partake, by I’m self-conscious and I don’t. I’ve smoked weed and hash back home and I’m always up for getting altered in any way that’s offered – I really want to – but these Australians are part of my parents sailing circle, fringe though they may be , and just I can’t reconcile the two worlds– my rebellious drug usage and people that know my parents. Bruce seems apologetic and explains by way of excuse, “If life wasn’t so boring, we wouldn’t need to smoke hash to liven things up.” I’m thinking here I am with three Australians heading out for the evening in Copenhagen and I may be so terrified that my sphincter may never unlock but I’m not bored. After they get stoned, the Aussies are just jabbering among themselves, going full-speed full Australian and I’d need subtitles to keep up and I just start zoning out and smiling ocassionally. They laugh and joke and eventually ask me three times or so before I finally understand what they’re saying, if I’ve ever been laid and if I’d like to buy a hooker. Let’s remember I’m 15 and I’m sure that I wouldn’t be able to pee if someone else was watching much less achieve an erection, so I lie and say I’ve got a girlfriend back home. We head out into the Danish night, stepping around and over blonde girls who crowd the stairs of the cheap hotel we’re staying at – to me they look like nothing less than mischievous fairies from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, and up to the best kind of no-good.
At the bar, after a couple Tuborgs I’m feeling a bit more relaxed and social. Nothing too vicious, mate – it seems we're settling into a night of quiet buzzed reflection. Just another night – one of many to come throughout my protracted adolescence – where I have a few beers with the boys, completely sure that the real party (with girls) is happening somewhere else. And it begins to slowly dawn on me and maybe it’s still slowly dawning to this day, as I crab my way through memories as numerous as the gray fine sands of a northwest beach, that the whole “getting hookers” was just one more of a series of macho Aussie pranks on the young kid. What the Aussies were really doing was babysitting – giving Marty and the Mrs. the night off so they could have a nice dinner alone, and repaying my Dad for his kindness and generosity. My Dad, my Captain, taking care of his crew. At 15 perhaps I was impressed with these vagabond Aussies. But the farther I get from my dad, the larger he gets.
10. Vigilant US - 280
"
To be Vigilant.
Alertly watchful especially to avoid danger.
VIGILANT suggests intense, unremitting, wary watchfulness.
As in, "to be eternally vigilant in the safeguarding of democracy."
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end …”
- Invocation to The Odyssey.
***
We open on the present day.
Interior, 1923 Blue Colonial Home, Montclair NJ
Time: afternoon.
Early spring light leaks through western facing windows.
The day lies spent around me.
Recovering from a trip back to Seattle to help pack my mom's apartment.
Cleaning out her closets I found this red jacket (pictured)
among other things. A complete list of detritus
would require more than one planet’s worth of internet,
but mostly microbes and ghosts and other allergens
Single earrings, orphan buttons and mysterious lists
Unsent cards and childhood books of horses and
Pictures and more pictures, the decades tangled like
Wet lines on the floorboards of the cockpit.
With sinuses and neurological system in full revolt
Couldn’t spend the night, no way.
And so, I wandered from hotel to hotel,
Like Odysseus the clever sailor,
At home/never at home,
Making my way back to my Penelope.
II
Memory is cobweb, 7 times 70 times stronger than Kevlar,
elastic as guilt. Unreliable, inescapable, shame-based and psychotropic.
Don’t ... move!
says our Captain.
Ghosting along on the lightest breeze
The winds of recall blow light and shifty.
In the Lake of Departed Spirits.
Vigilant, US 280 Sunk beneath the salt-rhymed waves of the wine dark sea of
the late 80’s I guess, Duran Duran, Madonna, Like a Virgin, Jesus!
Smear of of Nagel prints, spikey hair, capezios and topsiders,
Unwatched John Hughes movies, MTV and MDA.
Everybody wants to rule the world, hungry like the wolf,
Sexy and 17, my little rock and roll dream, sweet dreams are made of this,
who am I to disagree
Planes, Trains and a dented ’72 Cutlass Supreme.
Everyone has their navigational beacons through time.
A few of mine: McGraw and East Calhoun
A park, a sandbox, a merry-go-round and swings you could stand on back in the day
and the gym that came later, for basketball during the day and to climb its heights at night.
Interlaken, Foster Island and the Civil War Graveyard
haunted by ghosts of mods, punks, and just plain stoner wearing a Judas Priest t-shirt
drinking Thunderbird and Green Death.
Hit the skip button, forward three years
Trids, Overlord, Lipstick
David St. John, Dario & Robb
Mike Watson & Charlie from Montana;
Iggy and the Dolls, the Pistols and the Ramones.
Stoney and Josh and that whole scene.
Slats. Silly Killers. Paul Solger and 10-Minute Warning
Glen, Kurt & Steve and
Duffy of course, and Leighton and Mark
Chris Peppard. Redd Kross. Tales of Terror. Scream.
The U-Men. Green River. Feast.
Upchuck. Monte. The Vogue.
Scratch Acid, Sonic Youth.
The Bopo Boys.
Matt & Pat.
The Young Fresh Fellows. Lulu & Kim.
Emily, Lena and Suzy,
Big Black, Black Flag and the Butthole Surfers.
Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, My Eye.
Landrew and the dark corridor
God-children, sons and daughters of Icarus
A mythology for an endangered culture
With our own all-but-dead language with an alphabet of a single letter
X's for eyes.
III
Vigilant is intense, unremitting, wary watchfulness.
To guard what is valuable. To be constantly aware of danger.
Vigilant, US 280, a sailboat name in the best UK maritime tradition,
hailing from when Victoria sat the throne,
and the sun never set on her stiffer upper lip.
Colonizing the world with the very best
Kipling-esque qualities a person can possess.
Vigilant in the opposite of -
Hurry up, get it to market, before the VC capitol dries up
and/or someone else has a similarly questionable idea funded elsewhere.
Move fast and break stuff.
No time to do it but always plenty of time to redo it.
(That's where the jobs are.)
With every new version a new layer of authentication
A new layer of layers upon layers of
speaking in code
VII
Below the upper docks, was the moorage proper.
Surrounded on the West and North with a permanent wooden sea wall
With a walkway with railings on top, very civilized
But which you would rarely see anyone on because their
Was no way to reach the boats
And sailors weren’t there to just walk and look and it wasn’t a fishing pier
The general public was not allowed
And we were there to sail.
Inside this wooden breakwater were wooden docks attached to the upper dock
by swivels and held in place by a industrial-sized rings over pilings,
so the entire moorage could go up and down with the heavy tides.
The floating dock.
An amazing engineering enterprise,
but as common in the sailing world as curbs on a sidewalk.
so you never notice.
All the wood was treated lumber, weathered gray as a Northwest winter,
And just as slick with moss and algae, with mesh on the ramp so you don’t slip.
Wheelbarrows, another of humankind's great inventions, to carry your gear.
VIII
The Canadians, part I
The Vancouver Dragon fleet and assorted friends and hangers-on
were my parent’s closest friends growing up.
Close as blood,
In our house, they were simply called The Canadians.
They came in 3s. Because that’s how many it takes to crew a Dragon.
My parents met the three original Canadians in the 60's.
Robert Butt, Dieter Skibbe and Ken Downey.
Robert.
First among Canadians,
and the one I knew best, was Robert Butt.
Yes, Robert Butt, with the Sean Connery smirk.
You have to pretty tough to get away with a name like Robert Butt.
The Eaton version of “A Boy Named Sue.”
Classy, charming, Bond-pedigree handsome.
Robert never spoke directly of his background in England,
Dad said he came from money.
(To my Dad, everyone who was not born in the
depths of the depression in Fairbanks, Alaska and didn’t
have a deadbeat drunk father came from money.)
He was born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
As opposed to a rock chip on their shoulder.
My father left me nothing.
Except the chip.
But back to Robert.
Robert Butt was a British Public School emigre
with a received pronunciation every bit as posh
as Buckingham Palace regular.
When I had some old sailing picture from the 60's developed recently,
the woman in Caldwell, NJ who developed the photos said,
"Your father was very handsome."
I said thank you - but then when I looked at the picture
it wasn’t my Dad, but Robert Butt squinting into the northwest sun
aboard a teak decked yacht, wearing crème colored turtleneck.
If you look back through all the photos, there are a heck of a
lot more photos of my mom with Robert. Dancing, drinking, smiling.
Who was taking them? Not my Dad.
Dieter.
Dieter Skibbe and his wife Ann were from Germany.
Both of them were spoke with lightest, lilting German accent
and chain smoked. They grew up in Hitler's Germany
and emigrated after the war. Their dream was to spend
their retirement years cruising the Mediterranean
in their classic 70-foot long wooden sailing yacht,
The Jacaranda. They they were truly kind people.
They deserved for a life of one Mediterranean postcard after another.
They would charter the boat out, and sail vacationers from one destination to the next.
Monaco. Nice. Sicily. Like Odysseus, but not in a hurry to ever go home.
I'm not sure of the details, but The Jacaranda
burned to the waterline in Majorca.
Dieter and Ann came back to Vancouver.
They lived off of the kindness of friends
for the most part and were never visibly bitter
and returned the kindness to us.
Sounds like a novel, the kind people read when
They want to cry about someone elses life
And not their own.
Three. Ken Downey
I don’t remember ever seeing Ken Downey on a boat
But he would still be around for social gatherings.
He would roll up in his convertible Mercedes-Benz SL 500,
and unfold his athletic rangy six-foot plus frame and
greet my mother with a low, droll "Hello, Sandy."
My mother’s beaming smile as she looked up
is technicolor grade on the film strip of memory.
Ken and my mom were almost exactly the same age.
he was a few months younger, as he often reminded her
And every year and wish her a happy birthday.
Ken was the only one of the crowd that didn’t drink and smoke
to excess and no wonder he was scarce in later years.
Alcoholism is like one of those pointillist pictures
Honest Abe Lincoln only appears from distance.
Up close, it’s invisible. Normal. Another dot.
Ken’s lust for life manifested itself in skiing, playing tennis and running marathons.
In his spare time, he made a shit-ton of money.
Enough to buy a cruising yacht, and have a second home in the mountains near Whistler.
As far as I know he’s the only one still alive.
The pictures, my God, the pictures from the 60s. Legitimately glamorous. Turtlenecks and stripes, they all looked like Movie Stars. The blue of the sky. The rich depth of the varnish. The green Douglas Firs lining the Sound.
Where has this world gone, the one I loved.
Amazoned. Microsquished and Starbucked
Lake Washington smelling like Milfoil’s funeral
Mt. Rainer hiding behind smog, embarrassed to come out. Pot. Homeless.
And Bellevue has a downtown, a final insult of high rises across
our lake that holds my Grandmother's ashes, and someday, mine.
The Canadians, Part II
Robert, Ralph and Willy.
Willy
The last time I saw Willy, we were in the parking lot
His throat cancer no longer allowed him to speak.
He smiled good naturally and waved hello.
I felt the warmth of life passed from someone at the end
My youth a fire to warm his hands
Unappreciated and nearly thrown away by me.
After he died, they spread his ashes on English Bay and re-christened Vigilant
Willy.
The last time I saw Robert it was sunset on the deck
At RVYC backlit against the setting summer sun
with this girlfriend at the time who gave the same visceral reaction
She must have been really something in her day.
By that time I had escaped my own Sirens.
No one else around. He was drinking with defiant abandon
Alone but with a well-put-together middle-aged woman
Stunning as a movie star in decline
But obviously a drunk.
His end was as ignominious and anonymous as any street drunk
I heard and I can see it as plane as a super 8 film strip
Stumbling home from a corner bar
No longer welcome at the club
Weaving out into traffic and struck down.
I don’t remember the last time I saw Ralph,
He was a kind, big-hearted man
Kind in the way that the multiplex of memory isn’t.
Now playing:
Well, there was that one time that Ralph quit drinking
for January and sat with the bottle in front of him and went quiet
And then into a blackout apparently
and opened the door to our basement thinking
it was the bathroom and stepping out into thin air.
I was in bed at the time and heard only the
ka-thump, thump, ka-smash smash, ka-crash crash
dactyl hexameter as the hero fell with a final
dull thump and the voices raised in alarm. In the morning,
Bruised and appropriately sheepish
There he was, head slung low at the breakfast table.
And then there was that other time when I was with Ralph as
He drove his Pontiac Firebird home from RVYC along Point Grey Rd.
repeating, “Navigating the Dardanelles”
with cautious humor. In the morning, he asked me if he had driven
home, because he did not remember. I said yes, indeed he had.
He said “If I’m ever that drunk, just take the keys, don’t let me drive.”
Okay. Fair enough. I will.
My mother's in memory care now.
I'll see her for the Mother's Day tea and we'll see what she can remember.
She, too, is writing on water.
You think, if that ever happened to me, if I don’t remember,
Then I hope I pass on. But are we more than our memories?
She says she feels Marty is very close
And when she intones His name, rich with familIarity
I lay down into a tidepool on the beach
Warmed by the summer sun.
This where life began, in warmth, in saltwater, in bio-nutrient rich love.
I too often feel him near and I ask, do you have anything to say?
I'd like to give you the last word, after all.
But he wasn't one for
poesy. And so with something between a grunt and a laugh,
His last words would be no words at all.
But take a coffee traveler, and head down to dock
And get the boat ready for another day on the water.
11. U.S. 283 - Ariel
This pic was salvaged this out of the basement bathroom when we cleaned out my parents' house. Here we are sailing on San Francisco Bay. Note the Transamerica tower to the left. I guess we ended up third - I have no idea who was second. All I remember is chasing the Aussies around the course - that's them, with the green, white and yellow Spinnaker. "Predator."
12. Invader -
Thunderbird 1244
Our tale is blown off course and makes landfall at the south of Ireland – Kinsale, in County Cork. It's 1982 and my parents were in Kinsale, Ireland for the Dragon European Championships. Kinsale is a resort town at the far south of Ireland in County Cork. It was my parents's first visit to Ireland. Family lore, my Aunt's obsessive genealogical research – and backed up by 23&M and historicgraves.com – that the Godsils came from the South of Ireland County Cork.
So my dad's at the local pub in this, our ancestral homeland. I'm not there but I don't need to be to know see it clear as irish rain, he's in his element, an expansive storyteller in the land of storytellers. As he begins to unwind his tale for everyone within hearing distance – of his Irish ancestry and how the five Godsil brothers, including his Grandfather William, came from County Cork to work on the railroad. "So we're originally from Ireland!" he looks around the pub - to see if any relatives are going to stand up and come forth. I can see it in my minds eye. And then the owner of the pub replies, “If you weren’t here before the 11th Century, you're invaders.”
And so that's the legend of how Invader, Thunderbird 1244. got its name.
My Dad never tired of telling that story.
And I can't say that we got tired of hearing it.
*****
When the last of the Dragons went back to Narnia or Westeros or Parnu, Estonia or wherever, my Dad had to make a choice. Etchells? Solings? Stars? J-24s?
He settled on a Thunderbird. It was an established northwest fleet. I don't think he had any desire to run off to the Bahamas and get the crap kicked out of him by a bunch of hot shot pros in the J-24 midwinters. He would keep campaigning in Europe and have the Thunderbird for the west coast.
Like a dragon, the Thunderbird has a mainsail, a genoa and a spinnaker. But the similarities end there. The Thunderbird does not have the sleek classic lines of the Dragon, nor the mystique. It does not have trophies deeded by John Foster Dulles or the Duke of Edinburgh, nor does the Thunderbird have the Kings and Greece as sitting members on it's international board. A Dragon won't ever sit next to a Viking longship in Oslo, Norway- though there's a good chance you might see one in a wooden boat museum in Gig Harbor, Washington.
Looking at a Thunderbird, particularly out of the water, in a trailer or hanging in the crane, it is all angles and points. A Thunderbird is 26 feet long with a fin keel, detached rudder, flattened hull surfaces that meet at angles, or hard chines. It looks like it could be built out of joined panels of plywood, for god's sake. (When you learn the origin of the design, all is explained.) A favorite with Pacific Northwest day sailors and weekend cruisers, it’s the sailing equivalent of #vanlife, or maybe even an old school camper. Every Thunderbird has a stove, a table, a head, and a motor well in the back for an outboard. (We'd stow the engine down below when racing.) All of these things were mandated by rule. Our Thunderbird even had curtain for the slit windows in the low-profile cabin.
The true blue origin story of the T-bird's design: In 1958, the Douglas Fir Plywood Association held a contest. The idea was to create design for a cruising sailboat that PNW blue collar sailors could build in their backyard out of plywood. The Thunderbird, designed by naval architect named Ben Seaborn, was the winning design - the boat was a good day sailor, comfortable, sailable and and it ended up being quite successful.
The Thunderbird was a popular local racer and cruiser. Most of the people in the Fleet were just nice middle-class folk, with nice middle-class names like The Nutters (their boat was named Nutter Butter) George Trusk, who always had a cigar clenched in his teeth (you could always tell when you were downwind from George Trusk) and always wore a construction helmet, just in case the boom swung unexpectedly. There was nothing glamorous or international about these folks. They weren’t playing Baccarat or backgammon between races. No, these are the kind of people that might sail what basically amounts to a camper on the water and go cruising in the San Juan Islands every year and sleep aboard, and sure, race a little bit.
Part of what made Invader extraordinary is how my father built it exactly to the rules, but brought a racing-first mentality to the design. If a Thunderbird could be sleek, Invader was sleek. Built out of fiberglass at Miller Marine on Bainbridge, Invader came out of the same factory as our dragon's and was every inch a racing machine. So even though Invader did indeed have the stove, table, bunks and head, he figured out how to stow all this stuff securely and when it came time to race, it was clean, mean, and all-business. I believe that people were intimidated, and immediately went on the defensive. Or, in the case of Grant Chyz, offensive. Grant Chyz, the owner of Raptor (which received an visceral, onomonpoetic nickname on board Invader) protested my Dad's boat even before the first race. So that was awesome. We had a built-in nemesis from the get-go.
There were Thunderbird fleets in Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria, BC, San Francisco, back east on the Great Lakes and in Australia. Again, the Thunderbird wasn't as widespread as the Dragon, but still quite competitive. We sailed in quite a number of regattas together and for awhile my Dad still kept his Dragon, Vim, in Europe.
We sailed quite a bit in San Francisco. We travelled down for a number of regattas, culminating in the International Championship in 1995. Dad made a campaign out of it. We would go down for regattas to learn how to sail in the heavy air of San Francisco Bay. The first time we went down we sailed out of Golden Gate Yacht Club which is the San Francisco equivalent of Corinthian; a bit more low rent with Friday night racing, next door to the St. Francis Yacht Club. Because I was a member of Seattle Yacht Club at the time, I had reciprocal dining privileges at St. Francis so we went there for dinner. (Still can't believer I gave up my Seattle Yacht Club membership - top five regrets of my life.)
Another time, we sailed out of Alameda, an island on the east side of the Bay to the south of the bay bridge. Alameda has a decommissioned Navy base on the point. It's always warmer on the east side of the bay. We would start motoring out of the windless channel and as we cleared the point we would put on our foul weather gear as the breeze came up. As we passed under the Bay Bridge to the east of Treasure Island, the wind would come up and the fog would roll in and you'd forget there was ever such a thing such as being warm and dry on stable ground. We'd spend the day sailing off the Marina between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. There were two races a day and between races we'd take back and forth in the lee of Alcatraz, watching the gulls circle and the ferries full of tourists come and go while we ate our sandwiches.
Even though the sun was shining off of the white-capped waves, there was no way to wear sunglasses because your lenses would get caked with saltwater in no time. It was during this period of my life that I stopped wearing sunglasses all together. Our ancestors didn't wear sunglasses, I reasoned; cave men would just squint under their heavy caveman brows against the noonday sun. "Ahhhh!. There goes a mammoth or a giant sloth ... no it's definitely a mammoth! Let's go Grrü'gh!" But then, I don't think that cavemen were living to 58 and beyond. So my blown out retinas are now paying for my folly - as is my northern-European fair skin, with the pre-cancerous growths that need to get shaved off the top of my balding spot every 4-6 months.
I really fell in love with San Francisco while we were racing there. Staying in the Marina. The Presidio. Walking Pacific Heights and Cow's Hollow. Even now, as I sink into a Googlemaps nostalgia fugue state, I'm transported. Grabbing coffee at the blue bottle at the Embarcadero. Walking the Haight. Getting crepes with kids on our numerous trips on the way top Dillon Beach. I wanted to move there, but I ended up moving to Los Angeles in the spring of 1994 and continued to fly back or meet my Dad and the rest of the crew to sail in the big regattas.
You're probably wondering why it blows so hard on San Francisco Bay. What peculiar conditions of land, see and air create breezes of 25+ knots that roar in and dissipate, like clockwork throughout the summer.
Other than Seattle, I remember there was a pretty decent fleet with some good sailors in Victoria, British Columbia. Vitas Stuckas and Bob Britten were both quite good. It must have been maybe 1999 when we sailed the international championship there. We spent the winter before that – you guessed it – in training regattas. Every other weekend we sailed in the Victoria Thunderbird Winter Series. The idea was that because Victoria is behind the wind shadow of the Olympic mountains, that its winters are more mild than Seattle. It's the same dynamic that makes Squim the "banana belt" of Washington, or at least of the Olympic Peninsula. You're protecting from those drenching Southerlies coming off the Pacific, while the ocean-facing side of the mountains is the Continental 48's only remaining true rainforest. And with a sharp eye, you can tell the trees around Victoria. There are more Arbutus trees and less everygreen. It looks more like Northern California in a way.
In addition to San Francisco, perhaps my best memories are of sailing in Seattle. My very favorite year was 1991 - that was the year that my Dad was named Corinthian Sailor of the Year, even though Grant Chyz trailered his boat back east and won the International Championships back in Rochester. I think there was some grumbling about that - and not without merit. But we did win everything locally. The center sound series, the three long distance races of the winter - Pulley Point, Possession Point and Blakely Rock - these were long distance grinder races, often times near freezing and heavier air. There was a rating system as well as a one-design category. You'd start with any other Thunderbirds that were masochistic enough to show up and measured on the PHRF handicap system, which as a combination of sail area, waterline and displacement.
As I sit here in New Jersey on an early spring day, with the sun pouring in the windows and the birds chirping away outside, it's not so different from Seattle. There is water here as we commute into the city either by train or bus or car. I think as I'm driving along the 95 through The Meadowlands or past The American Dream who beneath the euphamisms and layers of history like toxic pollution there's nature. I wonder what it would be like to take a smile boat up the Passaic or to explore the random marshy inlets of the Hudson Delta. To press a button and return to the untouched environment that Henry Hudson and the Dutch first encountered.
Spring is hope. And in Seattle it would start with the journey from the Sound to the Lake. We would use the crane at the North end of Leschi to lower the Thunderbird into the water and then point South, passing the full length of Shilshole Bay Marina on the left and enter Salmon Bay, passing under the dark rusting railroad drawbridge that has outlived us all into the locks where we wait our turn. Usually we would take the small locks but today, we're in the big locks, sandwiched between a cruiser and some commercial fish boats. And then once spring came, after the Spring Regatta on the Sound, we would motor through the Lake Washington Ship Canal, from Shilshole Bay, through Salmon Bay, under the old railroad trestle and through the locks, through Ballard past all of the moored fishing vessels and warehouses and drydocks under the Ballard Bridge to the Fremont Bridge. There are four draw bridges across the Lake Washington Ship Canal between the Ballard Locks and Lake Washington and a total of 8 bridge spans to go under. The Fremont Bridge was the lowest of all the bridges and one of two bridges that had to open for us. How they would open: You would pull up and then blow and air horn and the guys inside the tower would answer. Sometimes you had to wait, if there was a another boat coming and they would not open during rush hour, 4-6 pm. The Fremont neighborhood was a historically a sort of hippie hangout where the thrifts store, bookstore, bar and restaurant storefronts changed about as often as women's hairstyles. In keeping with Fremont free spirit ethos, the Fremont bridge was could be different color than the industrial/camo drab olive green of the other bridges; I've seen it be orange, lime green or blue over the years. The Fremont Bridge would rise and then we would enter the wider expanse of Lake Union, the lake at the Center of Seattle, with the Aurora Bridge far above, humming with traffic, Capitol Hill to the East, the Downtown skyline to the South with the Space Needle to the left towards Queen Anne Hill, and Wallingford to to the North. You'd veer around the charred silhouette of Gasworks Park to your port side, pass beneath the sky-high expanse of the I-5 bridge and come to University Bridge. After the University bridge you're in Portage Bay, home of Seattle Yacht Club. And then finally you pass through the Montlake Cut, made famous as the Venue of Rowing Races and the Opening Day Parade. The Montlake Bridge, too, would need to open for us. And after the Montlake Bridge you pass by the rowing house and Husky Stadium on your left, Foster Island, the Arboretum and it's network of canoeing channels on your right and then out into the open water of Lake Washington. Banking right, you'd pass under your final bridge - the east span of the 520 Floating Bridge.
There were races every Tuesday night and the ocassional oddball long distance races on the weekend - for example, when we would sail around Mercer Island.
Sailing on Lake Washington - even more than San Francisco. I know that I was a stressed out penniless kid, worried about my future, but in the pastel hues of memory the simple rhythms of my days is a mild-mannered intoxicant. The long dusk lights of summer evenings, particularly Tuesdays sailing the Twilight Series on the Lake. I never did own a car when I lived in Seattle so I would ride my bike from whatever job I was working, up and over the hill and down to Leschi. By this time, my dad was living out in Kingston so it was just three of us - Rob Wilcox, James Murphy and myself. We did really well and it helped to hone us to work together as a team. Rob Wilcox was a very good mentor for me, on the boat and in life and you couldn't have a better friend than James Murphy.
Memorably, we started fighting and telling each other how to do their jobs. And Rob had this great idea – well, if we all know each other’s jobs so well, why don’t we switch? After all, it’s no big deal. This is just Tuesday night racing on the lake. And so we started a new system of rotation: Whoever was helming would get to keep his hands on the tiller, as long as he was winning. I had quite a winning streak and even though my Dad didn’t sail with us, we won Season Overall championship, because we sailed the Lake Spring, Summer and Fall Series’, plus the summer and fall regattas on the sound and the winter long distance races as well.
There are no Thunderbirds in Europe. In fact, they don't even call the Thunderbird World Championships the "Worlds" because technically, there aren't boats in enough countries. They're in America, Canada and in Australia. So we didn't do any globe trotting; but we did some trailering. This is when I-5 became the Main Street of my life. We sailed in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco - plus Port Townshend and one Winter, we did quite a bit of sailing in Victoria. Which is an island of course.
Martin Godsil explains the Venturi Effect.
We’re all seated around the Duncan Fife table. It's usually crowded with an every-changing crowd: as many people as could fit are sitting elbow to elbow – family and friends and a few random strays. Once just for instance a visiting professor from Australia came for dinner came and stayed for 6 months. He slept in the basement, which we fitted out with a That’s how the basement came to be known as “Down Under.” Tonight the invite list has grown to include an all-star list of friends new and old. Mark Twain, and Sly Stone, Harvey Milk and Janis Joplin and Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, they were all there.
Mark – or Sam as my Dad used to call him – my Dad could never abide nicknames unless he gave them himself - twizzles his luxurious mustache and says, “The coldest winter I ever experienced, was summer in San Francisco.” And then settles in to share a story on a par with "Cannibalism in the Cars."
Around the table, people settled in for a good yarn, as only Mark or Sam or whatever his name was could really spin a tale. But before this mustachio'd eminence could continue, my said “And you know why that is?” A general feeling of mild dismay coursed around the table, but my father was immune. His voice deepen to take on it's habitual resonant command “The reason is ...” my father continued. Sam Clemens couldn't believe someone else was taking the floor away from him. He looked around the table with wry askance – of course this situation would self-correct and the floor would return to him. A cascade of whispers cycled around the room. Allen Ginsburg leaned over to Sly Stone and said something under his breath. Sly laughed. A laugh lobbed in from the kitchen. One thousand miles away, 2,226 miles away, in a bunker deep beneath Arkansas hills, a man receives a phone call. The alert was merely a flock of birds. Attention was dissipating.
But Martin Godsil, trained trial lawyer and extemporaneous master of lack-of-ceremony, knows when he is losing his audience. His voice rises, spreading like a Condor's wings on the updraft. "Now just a minute ... Just a MINUTE." He picks up his dessert spoon and clangs it against his wine glass – ding! ding! ding! – everyone falls silent. He is their host, after all, and much beloved for his heart and generosity. The least they can do is pay attention while they drink his food and Sandra cooks.
Another laugh from kitchen. Sounds like Aunt Karen and Judy Friedt.
“So what happens," he says, raising his right hand, "is that the heat rises out in the Sacramento Valley, creating a vacuum and the wind rushes through the Golden Gate." As he speaks, he holds up both hands and the words whooosh and rush as and become viscerally onomatopoetic as whooshing wind itself. "The hotter is is out in the Sacramento Valley, 80, 90, 100, 110 degrees." As he speaks, he conveys the heat of California's Central Valley so viscerally that the temperature seems to go up in the room. "the wind sssucks through the Golden Gate and up the Sacremento Valley. Starts out blowing 10-15 ... and by noon, it's really honking. And that's why summers in San Francisco are windy and the cold with the fog stacked up from Pacifica to Ocean Beach to Outer Sunset to the Golden Gate.
The floor "You know, the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Everyone laughs and the fly on the wall that's me, think about how the Venturi the same force that creates a vacuum under an F1 car and, along with the wings providing downforce, And what it's like to beat into that 30 knot breeze and the narrative eexplodes like a pile just raked leaves out front of Uncle John's cabin into a constellation of San Francisco people and places and the wind howls like Blue Cheer dosed on Owsley. The best minds of my generation I see them destroyed, beautiful angel-headed hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo of the night, and/or just growing old and not looking so hot with our cellulite and bald spots with souls threadbare as Cobain's old sweater. Age, the ultimate indignity. And a toast to those that can’t be here, Willy and Robert, Dick Watson and Janis J, St. Francis and Gary Snyder’s pet turtle upon whose shell all life rides. The wind comes and the tendrils of fog dissipate, but not before getting their last desperate licks in of the GG Bridge's orange superstructure; space/time, and namarupa and basically all subject-object relations all swirl and dip and fly before it. Up and up and up we ride, following the tracks of the Union St. Street car up and and over the basketball court at the top of Folsom as the wind Ferris Wheels and swirls us. There's the Bay Bridge! There's Coit Tower! There's Lombard Street! There we are, there we are! Mike as a bike messenger riding up Fillmore and wait, there we all, Lonnie, Lianne and I, riding Chrissy Field in healthier days, a pack of ocelots.
While we tack back and forth in the windshadow Alcatraz, eating lunch and being part of the show for the tourists. My sunglasses are so caked with salt that I take them off and stop wearing sunglasses for years. We picnic on hand-packed sandwiches as the bow rides up and crashes down and and the gulls whirr in a gyre and we tack back and jibe back and forth with the jib furled and the main luffing crazily. Now we're sailing out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, gazing up at the superstructure. We are the builders. Way to go mankind. Another gust of time blows harder, reversing course and golden gate is ungated. Herds of deer carpet the Marin headlands. Mt. Tam isn't Mount Tam yet, and only Missions, Pueblos and Presidios dot California, surrounded by sickly indigenous peoples, as now their land and way of life has been plowed under by the dull merciless blades of Christianity. The impersonal heaven blue of the Pacific and the chalk green of California, inimitable in all of creation. Scent of sage and sea. The beach blanket America naps on, dreaming of bikinis and Silicon Valleys and Beaches, possibilities and profit and tits.
A whale breaches and time zig-zags once again, like Lombard Street. Flowers bloom and we walk down through Firsherman's Wharf to take the Union Street Trolley up over the hill to downtown to the St. Francis Hotel and going to the piano bar. The twilight sky is orange sherbert and Ralph thinks he's on a date and my mother's guileless smile is as warm as a White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookie, straight from the oven and I'm on the back of Mike Watson's scooter, riding across town, from far west Fillmore to East. The name of the band is Ted Zeppelin and you guessed it, they are playing a setlist of Nugent and Led Zeppellin songs. I'm appreciative of being on the inside of this SF in joke, but I can't help but think: what a waste. And why aren't they playing their own songs? The joke burrows into itself. Everyone in Seattle is trying to make it big. Here, to be on stage in San Francisco is big enough. There is no making it big because we're already here; playing Ted Nugent songs in the style of Zeppelin and vice-versa. It was funny and off-hand and they were good musicians. I'm back at the hotel room and peeing for hours. Three gray hairs sprout prematurely maybe four. I sleep.
The sun rises over the Bay. Who can't help but feel a rising thrill. I walk from the motel the three blocks through the marina to the park and past the hedge that runs along the path leading to the St. Francis Yacht Club, and as the sun warms the hedges they smell impossibly wonderful, of sweet curry. How can bushes smell like sweet curry? Those bushes are gone now. So much of the California that I love, turn the page, up in flames. But I'm absolutely sure that the Bay is still there where I left it.
So my dad's at the local pub in this, our ancestral homeland. I'm not there but I don't need to be to know see it clear as irish rain, he's in his element, an expansive storyteller in the land of storytellers. As he begins to unwind his tale for everyone within hearing distance – of his Irish ancestry and how the five Godsil brothers, including his Grandfather William, came from County Cork to work on the railroad. "So we're originally from Ireland!" he looks around the pub - to see if any relatives are going to stand up and come forth. I can see it in my minds eye. And then the owner of the pub replies, “If you weren’t here before the 11th Century, you're invaders.”
And so that's the legend of how Invader, Thunderbird 1244. got its name.
My Dad never tired of telling that story.
And I can't say that we got tired of hearing it.
*****
When the last of the Dragons went back to Narnia or Westeros or Parnu, Estonia or wherever, my Dad had to make a choice. Etchells? Solings? Stars? J-24s?
He settled on a Thunderbird. It was an established northwest fleet. I don't think he had any desire to run off to the Bahamas and get the crap kicked out of him by a bunch of hot shot pros in the J-24 midwinters. He would keep campaigning in Europe and have the Thunderbird for the west coast.
Like a dragon, the Thunderbird has a mainsail, a genoa and a spinnaker. But the similarities end there. The Thunderbird does not have the sleek classic lines of the Dragon, nor the mystique. It does not have trophies deeded by John Foster Dulles or the Duke of Edinburgh, nor does the Thunderbird have the Kings and Greece as sitting members on it's international board. A Dragon won't ever sit next to a Viking longship in Oslo, Norway- though there's a good chance you might see one in a wooden boat museum in Gig Harbor, Washington.
Looking at a Thunderbird, particularly out of the water, in a trailer or hanging in the crane, it is all angles and points. A Thunderbird is 26 feet long with a fin keel, detached rudder, flattened hull surfaces that meet at angles, or hard chines. It looks like it could be built out of joined panels of plywood, for god's sake. (When you learn the origin of the design, all is explained.) A favorite with Pacific Northwest day sailors and weekend cruisers, it’s the sailing equivalent of #vanlife, or maybe even an old school camper. Every Thunderbird has a stove, a table, a head, and a motor well in the back for an outboard. (We'd stow the engine down below when racing.) All of these things were mandated by rule. Our Thunderbird even had curtain for the slit windows in the low-profile cabin.
The true blue origin story of the T-bird's design: In 1958, the Douglas Fir Plywood Association held a contest. The idea was to create design for a cruising sailboat that PNW blue collar sailors could build in their backyard out of plywood. The Thunderbird, designed by naval architect named Ben Seaborn, was the winning design - the boat was a good day sailor, comfortable, sailable and and it ended up being quite successful.
The Thunderbird was a popular local racer and cruiser. Most of the people in the Fleet were just nice middle-class folk, with nice middle-class names like The Nutters (their boat was named Nutter Butter) George Trusk, who always had a cigar clenched in his teeth (you could always tell when you were downwind from George Trusk) and always wore a construction helmet, just in case the boom swung unexpectedly. There was nothing glamorous or international about these folks. They weren’t playing Baccarat or backgammon between races. No, these are the kind of people that might sail what basically amounts to a camper on the water and go cruising in the San Juan Islands every year and sleep aboard, and sure, race a little bit.
Part of what made Invader extraordinary is how my father built it exactly to the rules, but brought a racing-first mentality to the design. If a Thunderbird could be sleek, Invader was sleek. Built out of fiberglass at Miller Marine on Bainbridge, Invader came out of the same factory as our dragon's and was every inch a racing machine. So even though Invader did indeed have the stove, table, bunks and head, he figured out how to stow all this stuff securely and when it came time to race, it was clean, mean, and all-business. I believe that people were intimidated, and immediately went on the defensive. Or, in the case of Grant Chyz, offensive. Grant Chyz, the owner of Raptor (which received an visceral, onomonpoetic nickname on board Invader) protested my Dad's boat even before the first race. So that was awesome. We had a built-in nemesis from the get-go.
There were Thunderbird fleets in Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria, BC, San Francisco, back east on the Great Lakes and in Australia. Again, the Thunderbird wasn't as widespread as the Dragon, but still quite competitive. We sailed in quite a number of regattas together and for awhile my Dad still kept his Dragon, Vim, in Europe.
We sailed quite a bit in San Francisco. We travelled down for a number of regattas, culminating in the International Championship in 1995. Dad made a campaign out of it. We would go down for regattas to learn how to sail in the heavy air of San Francisco Bay. The first time we went down we sailed out of Golden Gate Yacht Club which is the San Francisco equivalent of Corinthian; a bit more low rent with Friday night racing, next door to the St. Francis Yacht Club. Because I was a member of Seattle Yacht Club at the time, I had reciprocal dining privileges at St. Francis so we went there for dinner. (Still can't believer I gave up my Seattle Yacht Club membership - top five regrets of my life.)
Another time, we sailed out of Alameda, an island on the east side of the Bay to the south of the bay bridge. Alameda has a decommissioned Navy base on the point. It's always warmer on the east side of the bay. We would start motoring out of the windless channel and as we cleared the point we would put on our foul weather gear as the breeze came up. As we passed under the Bay Bridge to the east of Treasure Island, the wind would come up and the fog would roll in and you'd forget there was ever such a thing such as being warm and dry on stable ground. We'd spend the day sailing off the Marina between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. There were two races a day and between races we'd take back and forth in the lee of Alcatraz, watching the gulls circle and the ferries full of tourists come and go while we ate our sandwiches.
Even though the sun was shining off of the white-capped waves, there was no way to wear sunglasses because your lenses would get caked with saltwater in no time. It was during this period of my life that I stopped wearing sunglasses all together. Our ancestors didn't wear sunglasses, I reasoned; cave men would just squint under their heavy caveman brows against the noonday sun. "Ahhhh!. There goes a mammoth or a giant sloth ... no it's definitely a mammoth! Let's go Grrü'gh!" But then, I don't think that cavemen were living to 58 and beyond. So my blown out retinas are now paying for my folly - as is my northern-European fair skin, with the pre-cancerous growths that need to get shaved off the top of my balding spot every 4-6 months.
I really fell in love with San Francisco while we were racing there. Staying in the Marina. The Presidio. Walking Pacific Heights and Cow's Hollow. Even now, as I sink into a Googlemaps nostalgia fugue state, I'm transported. Grabbing coffee at the blue bottle at the Embarcadero. Walking the Haight. Getting crepes with kids on our numerous trips on the way top Dillon Beach. I wanted to move there, but I ended up moving to Los Angeles in the spring of 1994 and continued to fly back or meet my Dad and the rest of the crew to sail in the big regattas.
You're probably wondering why it blows so hard on San Francisco Bay. What peculiar conditions of land, see and air create breezes of 25+ knots that roar in and dissipate, like clockwork throughout the summer.
Other than Seattle, I remember there was a pretty decent fleet with some good sailors in Victoria, British Columbia. Vitas Stuckas and Bob Britten were both quite good. It must have been maybe 1999 when we sailed the international championship there. We spent the winter before that – you guessed it – in training regattas. Every other weekend we sailed in the Victoria Thunderbird Winter Series. The idea was that because Victoria is behind the wind shadow of the Olympic mountains, that its winters are more mild than Seattle. It's the same dynamic that makes Squim the "banana belt" of Washington, or at least of the Olympic Peninsula. You're protecting from those drenching Southerlies coming off the Pacific, while the ocean-facing side of the mountains is the Continental 48's only remaining true rainforest. And with a sharp eye, you can tell the trees around Victoria. There are more Arbutus trees and less everygreen. It looks more like Northern California in a way.
In addition to San Francisco, perhaps my best memories are of sailing in Seattle. My very favorite year was 1991 - that was the year that my Dad was named Corinthian Sailor of the Year, even though Grant Chyz trailered his boat back east and won the International Championships back in Rochester. I think there was some grumbling about that - and not without merit. But we did win everything locally. The center sound series, the three long distance races of the winter - Pulley Point, Possession Point and Blakely Rock - these were long distance grinder races, often times near freezing and heavier air. There was a rating system as well as a one-design category. You'd start with any other Thunderbirds that were masochistic enough to show up and measured on the PHRF handicap system, which as a combination of sail area, waterline and displacement.
As I sit here in New Jersey on an early spring day, with the sun pouring in the windows and the birds chirping away outside, it's not so different from Seattle. There is water here as we commute into the city either by train or bus or car. I think as I'm driving along the 95 through The Meadowlands or past The American Dream who beneath the euphamisms and layers of history like toxic pollution there's nature. I wonder what it would be like to take a smile boat up the Passaic or to explore the random marshy inlets of the Hudson Delta. To press a button and return to the untouched environment that Henry Hudson and the Dutch first encountered.
Spring is hope. And in Seattle it would start with the journey from the Sound to the Lake. We would use the crane at the North end of Leschi to lower the Thunderbird into the water and then point South, passing the full length of Shilshole Bay Marina on the left and enter Salmon Bay, passing under the dark rusting railroad drawbridge that has outlived us all into the locks where we wait our turn. Usually we would take the small locks but today, we're in the big locks, sandwiched between a cruiser and some commercial fish boats. And then once spring came, after the Spring Regatta on the Sound, we would motor through the Lake Washington Ship Canal, from Shilshole Bay, through Salmon Bay, under the old railroad trestle and through the locks, through Ballard past all of the moored fishing vessels and warehouses and drydocks under the Ballard Bridge to the Fremont Bridge. There are four draw bridges across the Lake Washington Ship Canal between the Ballard Locks and Lake Washington and a total of 8 bridge spans to go under. The Fremont Bridge was the lowest of all the bridges and one of two bridges that had to open for us. How they would open: You would pull up and then blow and air horn and the guys inside the tower would answer. Sometimes you had to wait, if there was a another boat coming and they would not open during rush hour, 4-6 pm. The Fremont neighborhood was a historically a sort of hippie hangout where the thrifts store, bookstore, bar and restaurant storefronts changed about as often as women's hairstyles. In keeping with Fremont free spirit ethos, the Fremont bridge was could be different color than the industrial/camo drab olive green of the other bridges; I've seen it be orange, lime green or blue over the years. The Fremont Bridge would rise and then we would enter the wider expanse of Lake Union, the lake at the Center of Seattle, with the Aurora Bridge far above, humming with traffic, Capitol Hill to the East, the Downtown skyline to the South with the Space Needle to the left towards Queen Anne Hill, and Wallingford to to the North. You'd veer around the charred silhouette of Gasworks Park to your port side, pass beneath the sky-high expanse of the I-5 bridge and come to University Bridge. After the University bridge you're in Portage Bay, home of Seattle Yacht Club. And then finally you pass through the Montlake Cut, made famous as the Venue of Rowing Races and the Opening Day Parade. The Montlake Bridge, too, would need to open for us. And after the Montlake Bridge you pass by the rowing house and Husky Stadium on your left, Foster Island, the Arboretum and it's network of canoeing channels on your right and then out into the open water of Lake Washington. Banking right, you'd pass under your final bridge - the east span of the 520 Floating Bridge.
There were races every Tuesday night and the ocassional oddball long distance races on the weekend - for example, when we would sail around Mercer Island.
Sailing on Lake Washington - even more than San Francisco. I know that I was a stressed out penniless kid, worried about my future, but in the pastel hues of memory the simple rhythms of my days is a mild-mannered intoxicant. The long dusk lights of summer evenings, particularly Tuesdays sailing the Twilight Series on the Lake. I never did own a car when I lived in Seattle so I would ride my bike from whatever job I was working, up and over the hill and down to Leschi. By this time, my dad was living out in Kingston so it was just three of us - Rob Wilcox, James Murphy and myself. We did really well and it helped to hone us to work together as a team. Rob Wilcox was a very good mentor for me, on the boat and in life and you couldn't have a better friend than James Murphy.
Memorably, we started fighting and telling each other how to do their jobs. And Rob had this great idea – well, if we all know each other’s jobs so well, why don’t we switch? After all, it’s no big deal. This is just Tuesday night racing on the lake. And so we started a new system of rotation: Whoever was helming would get to keep his hands on the tiller, as long as he was winning. I had quite a winning streak and even though my Dad didn’t sail with us, we won Season Overall championship, because we sailed the Lake Spring, Summer and Fall Series’, plus the summer and fall regattas on the sound and the winter long distance races as well.
There are no Thunderbirds in Europe. In fact, they don't even call the Thunderbird World Championships the "Worlds" because technically, there aren't boats in enough countries. They're in America, Canada and in Australia. So we didn't do any globe trotting; but we did some trailering. This is when I-5 became the Main Street of my life. We sailed in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco - plus Port Townshend and one Winter, we did quite a bit of sailing in Victoria. Which is an island of course.
Martin Godsil explains the Venturi Effect.
We’re all seated around the Duncan Fife table. It's usually crowded with an every-changing crowd: as many people as could fit are sitting elbow to elbow – family and friends and a few random strays. Once just for instance a visiting professor from Australia came for dinner came and stayed for 6 months. He slept in the basement, which we fitted out with a That’s how the basement came to be known as “Down Under.” Tonight the invite list has grown to include an all-star list of friends new and old. Mark Twain, and Sly Stone, Harvey Milk and Janis Joplin and Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, they were all there.
Mark – or Sam as my Dad used to call him – my Dad could never abide nicknames unless he gave them himself - twizzles his luxurious mustache and says, “The coldest winter I ever experienced, was summer in San Francisco.” And then settles in to share a story on a par with "Cannibalism in the Cars."
Around the table, people settled in for a good yarn, as only Mark or Sam or whatever his name was could really spin a tale. But before this mustachio'd eminence could continue, my said “And you know why that is?” A general feeling of mild dismay coursed around the table, but my father was immune. His voice deepen to take on it's habitual resonant command “The reason is ...” my father continued. Sam Clemens couldn't believe someone else was taking the floor away from him. He looked around the table with wry askance – of course this situation would self-correct and the floor would return to him. A cascade of whispers cycled around the room. Allen Ginsburg leaned over to Sly Stone and said something under his breath. Sly laughed. A laugh lobbed in from the kitchen. One thousand miles away, 2,226 miles away, in a bunker deep beneath Arkansas hills, a man receives a phone call. The alert was merely a flock of birds. Attention was dissipating.
But Martin Godsil, trained trial lawyer and extemporaneous master of lack-of-ceremony, knows when he is losing his audience. His voice rises, spreading like a Condor's wings on the updraft. "Now just a minute ... Just a MINUTE." He picks up his dessert spoon and clangs it against his wine glass – ding! ding! ding! – everyone falls silent. He is their host, after all, and much beloved for his heart and generosity. The least they can do is pay attention while they drink his food and Sandra cooks.
Another laugh from kitchen. Sounds like Aunt Karen and Judy Friedt.
“So what happens," he says, raising his right hand, "is that the heat rises out in the Sacramento Valley, creating a vacuum and the wind rushes through the Golden Gate." As he speaks, he holds up both hands and the words whooosh and rush as and become viscerally onomatopoetic as whooshing wind itself. "The hotter is is out in the Sacramento Valley, 80, 90, 100, 110 degrees." As he speaks, he conveys the heat of California's Central Valley so viscerally that the temperature seems to go up in the room. "the wind sssucks through the Golden Gate and up the Sacremento Valley. Starts out blowing 10-15 ... and by noon, it's really honking. And that's why summers in San Francisco are windy and the cold with the fog stacked up from Pacifica to Ocean Beach to Outer Sunset to the Golden Gate.
The floor "You know, the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Everyone laughs and the fly on the wall that's me, think about how the Venturi the same force that creates a vacuum under an F1 car and, along with the wings providing downforce, And what it's like to beat into that 30 knot breeze and the narrative eexplodes like a pile just raked leaves out front of Uncle John's cabin into a constellation of San Francisco people and places and the wind howls like Blue Cheer dosed on Owsley. The best minds of my generation I see them destroyed, beautiful angel-headed hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo of the night, and/or just growing old and not looking so hot with our cellulite and bald spots with souls threadbare as Cobain's old sweater. Age, the ultimate indignity. And a toast to those that can’t be here, Willy and Robert, Dick Watson and Janis J, St. Francis and Gary Snyder’s pet turtle upon whose shell all life rides. The wind comes and the tendrils of fog dissipate, but not before getting their last desperate licks in of the GG Bridge's orange superstructure; space/time, and namarupa and basically all subject-object relations all swirl and dip and fly before it. Up and up and up we ride, following the tracks of the Union St. Street car up and and over the basketball court at the top of Folsom as the wind Ferris Wheels and swirls us. There's the Bay Bridge! There's Coit Tower! There's Lombard Street! There we are, there we are! Mike as a bike messenger riding up Fillmore and wait, there we all, Lonnie, Lianne and I, riding Chrissy Field in healthier days, a pack of ocelots.
While we tack back and forth in the windshadow Alcatraz, eating lunch and being part of the show for the tourists. My sunglasses are so caked with salt that I take them off and stop wearing sunglasses for years. We picnic on hand-packed sandwiches as the bow rides up and crashes down and and the gulls whirr in a gyre and we tack back and jibe back and forth with the jib furled and the main luffing crazily. Now we're sailing out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, gazing up at the superstructure. We are the builders. Way to go mankind. Another gust of time blows harder, reversing course and golden gate is ungated. Herds of deer carpet the Marin headlands. Mt. Tam isn't Mount Tam yet, and only Missions, Pueblos and Presidios dot California, surrounded by sickly indigenous peoples, as now their land and way of life has been plowed under by the dull merciless blades of Christianity. The impersonal heaven blue of the Pacific and the chalk green of California, inimitable in all of creation. Scent of sage and sea. The beach blanket America naps on, dreaming of bikinis and Silicon Valleys and Beaches, possibilities and profit and tits.
A whale breaches and time zig-zags once again, like Lombard Street. Flowers bloom and we walk down through Firsherman's Wharf to take the Union Street Trolley up over the hill to downtown to the St. Francis Hotel and going to the piano bar. The twilight sky is orange sherbert and Ralph thinks he's on a date and my mother's guileless smile is as warm as a White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookie, straight from the oven and I'm on the back of Mike Watson's scooter, riding across town, from far west Fillmore to East. The name of the band is Ted Zeppelin and you guessed it, they are playing a setlist of Nugent and Led Zeppellin songs. I'm appreciative of being on the inside of this SF in joke, but I can't help but think: what a waste. And why aren't they playing their own songs? The joke burrows into itself. Everyone in Seattle is trying to make it big. Here, to be on stage in San Francisco is big enough. There is no making it big because we're already here; playing Ted Nugent songs in the style of Zeppelin and vice-versa. It was funny and off-hand and they were good musicians. I'm back at the hotel room and peeing for hours. Three gray hairs sprout prematurely maybe four. I sleep.
The sun rises over the Bay. Who can't help but feel a rising thrill. I walk from the motel the three blocks through the marina to the park and past the hedge that runs along the path leading to the St. Francis Yacht Club, and as the sun warms the hedges they smell impossibly wonderful, of sweet curry. How can bushes smell like sweet curry? Those bushes are gone now. So much of the California that I love, turn the page, up in flames. But I'm absolutely sure that the Bay is still there where I left it.
What else has sunk beneath the waves of memory?
It's July 25, 2025. I'm in between things, at my desk at work. And I gotta say the weather just keeps getting stranger, inside and out. These tornados of memory - you never know where the next one will touch down.
Kingston to my Aunt Karen's house. 22706 Jefferson Pt. Road is South of Kingston and on the bluff overlooking the Puget Sound. The mornings are spectacular and the house has the architecturally unpretentious stance of a motel, full length deck on the second level, squarely facing the Cascades and the rising sun. The mornings are spectacular - to wake up with a coffee and do yoga is a transcendent experience. All day long, freighter sand cruise ships pass, and the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry makes its crossing. Sailboats and cruisers head north, making their way north to the San Juans.
The weather had a tough time making up its mind. A little rain and mostly sun. Sometimes the Northerly would blow, but without conviction and then it woudl swing around and half-heartedly blow from the South. We had a full house. My wife, myself and our three 21-year-olds, my sister, brother and law and the three cousins - plus, for the first time, someone brought an S.O.; my son brought his girlfriend. We set off fireworks and toasted smores.
It was great, except everyone ended up with Covid. Ha! But I'm aware that gratitude for one's awesome family makes for a dull narrative so I'll get to the point.
I only wanted to visit two people while I was there, and they both had connections to sailing. One, was Lowell Chang. The other was James Murphy.
Lowell Chang is an extraordinary human being. A blithe spirit untroubled by ... troubles. Lowell Chang is a Dragon sailor from Hong Kong. He is the one that bought the Dragon moulds
[And then going to see James Murphy - this would be a great place to talk about sailing with James a little bit, and his son.]
I was telling James of how we had gone to visit Lowell Chang and he reminded me that my dad also had a boat "FANG" and the name on the back of the boat was in Chinese style letters, straight off of a Chinese restaurant.
Kingston to my Aunt Karen's house. 22706 Jefferson Pt. Road is South of Kingston and on the bluff overlooking the Puget Sound. The mornings are spectacular and the house has the architecturally unpretentious stance of a motel, full length deck on the second level, squarely facing the Cascades and the rising sun. The mornings are spectacular - to wake up with a coffee and do yoga is a transcendent experience. All day long, freighter sand cruise ships pass, and the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry makes its crossing. Sailboats and cruisers head north, making their way north to the San Juans.
The weather had a tough time making up its mind. A little rain and mostly sun. Sometimes the Northerly would blow, but without conviction and then it woudl swing around and half-heartedly blow from the South. We had a full house. My wife, myself and our three 21-year-olds, my sister, brother and law and the three cousins - plus, for the first time, someone brought an S.O.; my son brought his girlfriend. We set off fireworks and toasted smores.
It was great, except everyone ended up with Covid. Ha! But I'm aware that gratitude for one's awesome family makes for a dull narrative so I'll get to the point.
I only wanted to visit two people while I was there, and they both had connections to sailing. One, was Lowell Chang. The other was James Murphy.
Lowell Chang is an extraordinary human being. A blithe spirit untroubled by ... troubles. Lowell Chang is a Dragon sailor from Hong Kong. He is the one that bought the Dragon moulds
[And then going to see James Murphy - this would be a great place to talk about sailing with James a little bit, and his son.]
I was telling James of how we had gone to visit Lowell Chang and he reminded me that my dad also had a boat "FANG" and the name on the back of the boat was in Chinese style letters, straight off of a Chinese restaurant.
Beware of Dog
Ernst Hardware didn’t have the sign. They didn’t have it at Fred Meyer, either. Or Pay-n-Save. No one had a plain old sign that just said “Beware of Dog.” This was the dinner conversation for a week. Every sign my found said Beware of THE Dog. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t have a lot of expectations around the behavior of the world, really. But this was disappointing. The colloquial phrase was “Beware of Dog.” The joke was that the boat was a “Dog.” Singular. Proper. Itself. And if he hung a real sign off the back, he wasn’t saying that a dog was going to come out of the cockpit and bark and try to bit you.
The boat wasn’t THE dog. It was undeniably a dog. Like a bad car is a lemon, not the lemon and a slow boat is a dog. So he wanted to find a sign that said Beware of Dog and just hang it off the back.
After all the beautiful boats he’d built and rebuilt, this last dragon was a real project. No one knows where Martin Godsil found his final rebuild. Theories abound. Perhaps it was hidden under a earthen barrow of moss and blackberry brambles. The park across the street of 1633 East Calhoun was rumored to a be a landfill. Maybe he found it half-sunk in the bog along the park’s squelchy border with Portage Bay. Perhaps someone just pulled up with a trailer and left it like an It was a warped mess. It wasn’t a Borreson – it was another one-off type boat maker. Nameless, mysterious, but no dragon soul-less. If a dragon could be inelegant and ugly, this boat was. It wasn’t even a memorable color. Sort of a sky gray, to blend with the water and low clouds of a midwinter day.
Nevertheless, Martin Godsil never met a boat he didn’t want to fix.
And so he got out the tools and once again, all winter he sanded and sawed. Grinding. Cutting. Honing.
The Nameless Boat sat inside a warehouse. Under heat lamps to dry the paint. And when it was ready to go into the water, it was by no means ready, the planks of the hull had so dried out, you could literally see daylight through the hull. Because the boat had dried out so much you could literally see daylight through the planking. That’s the thing that you don’t think about – but a wood boat is in a sense a living thing – made up of cells. Because the boat had dried out, it was a few hundred pounds underweight as well.
Finally the day came when the boat was ready to launch. He drove it on a trailer out to Shilshole Bay, once again, driving along the quiet early morning streets of Ballard, tires hissing along rain-damp streets. Gray low clouds, over gray buildings surrounding gray streets. Even ther colors, the yellow lines of the street, the green and red lights, the evergreen trees and many-colored signs on brick building are not exactly gray, but they aren’t not gray either, but have a gray varnish, the gray misted atmosphere over it all. As he drives, he thinks about his son, sitting the passenger seat. The son has retreated into himself. He no longer asks questions, or laughs. He too has gone gray; opaque; flat and featureless as Lake Washington on a windless February morning.
They arrive at the boatyard at the north end of Shilshole Bay Marina. There are two cranes, identical, on each side of the dock that juts out over the water. The dock is adjacent to a fenced dry sailing yard where you can see many racing sailboats on trailers. Star Class. J-24s. Even a Soling or two. The layperson might ask – why not simply keep your boat in the water. You can, but serious racing sailors generally don’t. Salt water is corrosive, and leaving a boat in the water for any length of time allows barnacles and seaweed to attach themselves to the hull and grow there. It’s not uncommon to see blistered bottom paint from even a short time left in the water, and seaweed hanging long a long skirt from the waterline of boats left for a long time.
This is why a boat isn’t just an investment of money, it’s an investment of time. The upkeep is intimidating and generally sneaks up and takes most people unawares – thus, the boats sitting under tarps alongside houses, or boats neglected in their slips.
Once I even saw a orange and pealing wooden Dragon named Dragonfly that had filled with water and sunk right in its slip at Leschi – only the mast was sticking out as the keel rested on the mud and the lines from the dock reached down into the water, and held the boat upright.
People get busy. While we’re working 9-5, Monday through Friday the elements are working 24/7/365. We get busy and then we look at what it takes to actually care for something, and we’ve simply run low on time, and physical and emotional resources – and interest.
That’s why boats rot, the animal shelters are full, and so are the prison for that matter.
Back to the launch of the Nameless last Dragon, also known as Beware of Dog. In comparison to other boat launches that had been a more celebratory affair, this one is subdued. There are no flags run up the mast, along the stays, fore and aft. There is no beautiful young wife, handsome cultured friends from Canada in their blue yacht club sportjackets with Royal Vancouver Yacht Club insignias. For this launch, the teenage daughter will not recite a passage from Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Christen the bow with a bottle of moderately priced sparking wine bought at Safeway; the boat will simply be lowered into the water. And here’s the remarkable, insanely memorable thing: as Beware of Dog is lowered into the water, the waters of Puget Sound pour through it’s porous hull like, well, imagine lowering a sieve filled with vegetables being lowered into a pot of water. It’s like that. The water level on the outside of Beware of Dog is the same as on the inside. No difference.
And he still hasn’t found a sign for the back.
But it was to be expected. Marty Godsil knew and predicted and planned for all. Nothing took him unawares. A portable sump pump was already in the boat as it was lowered down, and the boat would not be detached from the crane for many days and nights as the thirsty wood soaked up water into it’s shrunken pores and the gaps between the planks tighten. It never became completely water tight, but it was ready to sail.
He never found a sign, either. He briefly considered stealing one, that wasn’t his style. Rather, he got a sign painter to paint “Beware of Dog” on the back and away we went.
But there were no other dragons to race against by this time. The breed had become extinct in these parts. There was still a small fleet in Vancouver, a smattering back East on the Great Lakes and huge active fleets in Europe. But none in Seattle. So Marty Godsil was going to race, he was going to have to race against other boats, or PHRF – Performance Handicap Racing Fleet, which is a handicapping system that allows boats of different classes to be raced against each other.
Generally, the PHRF races were in the winter, when there was wind, which Marty Godsil looked forward to very much, and since he was as oblivious to adverse weather conditions as a polar bear in a snowbank, he thought nothing of physical discomfort. But to the other mere humans on the boat, it could be an ordeal, depending on the amount of foul weather gear you had on, the wind, and the ice on the shrouds.
Once – this is such complete idiocy I hardly even want to say it aloud and I may delete before sharing this with anyone – I wore a wet suit the entire time. I don’t think anyone of us understood how a “wet suit” works but we could have taken a hint from the name. A wet suit only works if you’re wet – it’s meant for being in the water, or at least in and out of the water. We’d bought it so I could go sail my laser. A wet suit is definitely not meant for sitting on the rail for a half hour at a time on the rail in 27° wind chill, is how to turn hungover teenager into otter pop.
Because the other thing about the PHRF races in the winter – the infamous Center Sound Series – was that they were long distance affairs – and point to point. You would start and sail all the way to Possession Point, which was north of Seattle, not quite as far as Sitka, Alaska, but definitely past Everett, and then turn around. Or you would sail all the way to Pulley Point, which as like sailing to Tacoma. Or you would sail to Blakely Rock. So in addition to freezing your ass off, you’re not moving. You’re not tacking. You’re sitting on the rail for long periods of time. Not moving. Not tacking. Just sitting here. A sack of frozen blood and visceral, paralize with cold and miserable.
I remember one time when I was younger my hands were so cold I couldn’t undo the string that tied the top of my foul weather gear and I just peed right in the van.
True to form, no one ever said anything. Pee, feelings of physical or emotional discomfort, these were not things that we talked about around the dinner table.
Here’s what we did talk about: we won.
With this old crappy-looking boat, we won first overall time and again.
On these races they would have staggered starts and since we were one of the slower, smaller boats. For a bit we’d been sailing, just the three of us on the rail, slogging to winward in a 18 knot breeze, spray coming up over the rail, motionless except our torsos rolling with the seas. And then the large yachts that started after us would begin passing us. the huge 70 feet Meridian, and others. As they passed us, the world classes sailors – local celebs – on board would call out “Hi Marty” “Good day for a sail, Marty” and “good luck, Marty” and we would wave back good naturedly. They would pass under us, not even incrementally slowed by our windshadow. Marty Godsil, was an icon and universally respected by the top sailors. And so they would wave to us from their huge yachts, and the go back inside for warm cocoa and hot battered rum, while we slogged along.
Marty Godsil was not universally beloved by the rank and file cruising sailors, and here’s why. He took out that old, crappy looking wooden boat that looked like it was about sink. And he won, and won, and won. So what did they do? They raised our handicap. And then he won again. So they raised the handicap. And we won again, and again.
Then they protested, and tried to make it illegal for us to race. They said the boat was dangerous, and it didn’t have a proper place for a motor. That we would have to mount a motor on the side, where the quarterwake came off, so that the motor would be sure not to rise out of the water in heavy going.
Of course, this was all ridiculous – the truth was, that a Dragon was low slung, but it was a heavy displacement boat, much more stable in heavy seas, and in fact, built for sailing in Nordic seas. On top of that, it was crewed by better sailors.
And so that was the last of the Puget Sound Dragons.
The boat wasn’t THE dog. It was undeniably a dog. Like a bad car is a lemon, not the lemon and a slow boat is a dog. So he wanted to find a sign that said Beware of Dog and just hang it off the back.
After all the beautiful boats he’d built and rebuilt, this last dragon was a real project. No one knows where Martin Godsil found his final rebuild. Theories abound. Perhaps it was hidden under a earthen barrow of moss and blackberry brambles. The park across the street of 1633 East Calhoun was rumored to a be a landfill. Maybe he found it half-sunk in the bog along the park’s squelchy border with Portage Bay. Perhaps someone just pulled up with a trailer and left it like an It was a warped mess. It wasn’t a Borreson – it was another one-off type boat maker. Nameless, mysterious, but no dragon soul-less. If a dragon could be inelegant and ugly, this boat was. It wasn’t even a memorable color. Sort of a sky gray, to blend with the water and low clouds of a midwinter day.
Nevertheless, Martin Godsil never met a boat he didn’t want to fix.
And so he got out the tools and once again, all winter he sanded and sawed. Grinding. Cutting. Honing.
The Nameless Boat sat inside a warehouse. Under heat lamps to dry the paint. And when it was ready to go into the water, it was by no means ready, the planks of the hull had so dried out, you could literally see daylight through the hull. Because the boat had dried out so much you could literally see daylight through the planking. That’s the thing that you don’t think about – but a wood boat is in a sense a living thing – made up of cells. Because the boat had dried out, it was a few hundred pounds underweight as well.
Finally the day came when the boat was ready to launch. He drove it on a trailer out to Shilshole Bay, once again, driving along the quiet early morning streets of Ballard, tires hissing along rain-damp streets. Gray low clouds, over gray buildings surrounding gray streets. Even ther colors, the yellow lines of the street, the green and red lights, the evergreen trees and many-colored signs on brick building are not exactly gray, but they aren’t not gray either, but have a gray varnish, the gray misted atmosphere over it all. As he drives, he thinks about his son, sitting the passenger seat. The son has retreated into himself. He no longer asks questions, or laughs. He too has gone gray; opaque; flat and featureless as Lake Washington on a windless February morning.
They arrive at the boatyard at the north end of Shilshole Bay Marina. There are two cranes, identical, on each side of the dock that juts out over the water. The dock is adjacent to a fenced dry sailing yard where you can see many racing sailboats on trailers. Star Class. J-24s. Even a Soling or two. The layperson might ask – why not simply keep your boat in the water. You can, but serious racing sailors generally don’t. Salt water is corrosive, and leaving a boat in the water for any length of time allows barnacles and seaweed to attach themselves to the hull and grow there. It’s not uncommon to see blistered bottom paint from even a short time left in the water, and seaweed hanging long a long skirt from the waterline of boats left for a long time.
This is why a boat isn’t just an investment of money, it’s an investment of time. The upkeep is intimidating and generally sneaks up and takes most people unawares – thus, the boats sitting under tarps alongside houses, or boats neglected in their slips.
Once I even saw a orange and pealing wooden Dragon named Dragonfly that had filled with water and sunk right in its slip at Leschi – only the mast was sticking out as the keel rested on the mud and the lines from the dock reached down into the water, and held the boat upright.
People get busy. While we’re working 9-5, Monday through Friday the elements are working 24/7/365. We get busy and then we look at what it takes to actually care for something, and we’ve simply run low on time, and physical and emotional resources – and interest.
That’s why boats rot, the animal shelters are full, and so are the prison for that matter.
Back to the launch of the Nameless last Dragon, also known as Beware of Dog. In comparison to other boat launches that had been a more celebratory affair, this one is subdued. There are no flags run up the mast, along the stays, fore and aft. There is no beautiful young wife, handsome cultured friends from Canada in their blue yacht club sportjackets with Royal Vancouver Yacht Club insignias. For this launch, the teenage daughter will not recite a passage from Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Christen the bow with a bottle of moderately priced sparking wine bought at Safeway; the boat will simply be lowered into the water. And here’s the remarkable, insanely memorable thing: as Beware of Dog is lowered into the water, the waters of Puget Sound pour through it’s porous hull like, well, imagine lowering a sieve filled with vegetables being lowered into a pot of water. It’s like that. The water level on the outside of Beware of Dog is the same as on the inside. No difference.
And he still hasn’t found a sign for the back.
But it was to be expected. Marty Godsil knew and predicted and planned for all. Nothing took him unawares. A portable sump pump was already in the boat as it was lowered down, and the boat would not be detached from the crane for many days and nights as the thirsty wood soaked up water into it’s shrunken pores and the gaps between the planks tighten. It never became completely water tight, but it was ready to sail.
He never found a sign, either. He briefly considered stealing one, that wasn’t his style. Rather, he got a sign painter to paint “Beware of Dog” on the back and away we went.
But there were no other dragons to race against by this time. The breed had become extinct in these parts. There was still a small fleet in Vancouver, a smattering back East on the Great Lakes and huge active fleets in Europe. But none in Seattle. So Marty Godsil was going to race, he was going to have to race against other boats, or PHRF – Performance Handicap Racing Fleet, which is a handicapping system that allows boats of different classes to be raced against each other.
Generally, the PHRF races were in the winter, when there was wind, which Marty Godsil looked forward to very much, and since he was as oblivious to adverse weather conditions as a polar bear in a snowbank, he thought nothing of physical discomfort. But to the other mere humans on the boat, it could be an ordeal, depending on the amount of foul weather gear you had on, the wind, and the ice on the shrouds.
Once – this is such complete idiocy I hardly even want to say it aloud and I may delete before sharing this with anyone – I wore a wet suit the entire time. I don’t think anyone of us understood how a “wet suit” works but we could have taken a hint from the name. A wet suit only works if you’re wet – it’s meant for being in the water, or at least in and out of the water. We’d bought it so I could go sail my laser. A wet suit is definitely not meant for sitting on the rail for a half hour at a time on the rail in 27° wind chill, is how to turn hungover teenager into otter pop.
Because the other thing about the PHRF races in the winter – the infamous Center Sound Series – was that they were long distance affairs – and point to point. You would start and sail all the way to Possession Point, which was north of Seattle, not quite as far as Sitka, Alaska, but definitely past Everett, and then turn around. Or you would sail all the way to Pulley Point, which as like sailing to Tacoma. Or you would sail to Blakely Rock. So in addition to freezing your ass off, you’re not moving. You’re not tacking. You’re sitting on the rail for long periods of time. Not moving. Not tacking. Just sitting here. A sack of frozen blood and visceral, paralize with cold and miserable.
I remember one time when I was younger my hands were so cold I couldn’t undo the string that tied the top of my foul weather gear and I just peed right in the van.
True to form, no one ever said anything. Pee, feelings of physical or emotional discomfort, these were not things that we talked about around the dinner table.
Here’s what we did talk about: we won.
With this old crappy-looking boat, we won first overall time and again.
On these races they would have staggered starts and since we were one of the slower, smaller boats. For a bit we’d been sailing, just the three of us on the rail, slogging to winward in a 18 knot breeze, spray coming up over the rail, motionless except our torsos rolling with the seas. And then the large yachts that started after us would begin passing us. the huge 70 feet Meridian, and others. As they passed us, the world classes sailors – local celebs – on board would call out “Hi Marty” “Good day for a sail, Marty” and “good luck, Marty” and we would wave back good naturedly. They would pass under us, not even incrementally slowed by our windshadow. Marty Godsil, was an icon and universally respected by the top sailors. And so they would wave to us from their huge yachts, and the go back inside for warm cocoa and hot battered rum, while we slogged along.
Marty Godsil was not universally beloved by the rank and file cruising sailors, and here’s why. He took out that old, crappy looking wooden boat that looked like it was about sink. And he won, and won, and won. So what did they do? They raised our handicap. And then he won again. So they raised the handicap. And we won again, and again.
Then they protested, and tried to make it illegal for us to race. They said the boat was dangerous, and it didn’t have a proper place for a motor. That we would have to mount a motor on the side, where the quarterwake came off, so that the motor would be sure not to rise out of the water in heavy going.
Of course, this was all ridiculous – the truth was, that a Dragon was low slung, but it was a heavy displacement boat, much more stable in heavy seas, and in fact, built for sailing in Nordic seas. On top of that, it was crewed by better sailors.
And so that was the last of the Puget Sound Dragons.
The last time I saw my father's body was in a funeral home on Bainbridge Island. He was laid out. He looked serene. He had not been able to shave. He didn’t have a beard in life but in death he did. He looked regal, like a king of old, someone from the Lord of the Rings. The person who worked at the funeral home mentioned how strong he seemed.
For a moment I looked down through the eyes of whatever spirit fills the universe on our little family. From on high we seemed very small but precious and I felt the greatest tenderness for our little family – a family where there had been so much love and caring. The family that had been four and now one of the lights had gone out and now we were only three.
I did not want to touch the body but my mother had to, to understand that he was gone. So cold, she said, so cold and pulled away quickly.
After we viewed my Father my mother and I drove to the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. The Bloedel Reserve was donated by the Bloedel family, 140 acres of tailored northwest nature; a place of peace and healing. As we drove we listened to Neil Diamond, and Sandra Godsil hummed and sang along and was comforted. Arriving at the reserve, we exited the car into sunshine, the warm of the July sun warmed the cold shock of grief and the merciless permanence of death. Our memories coursed like paths between the green trees and fragrant flowers and we remembered all the days on the water and the time flowed and filled the between times too. Love never sets. It is always summer here. A moment holding all the moments, like a mother holds her child.
For a moment I looked down through the eyes of whatever spirit fills the universe on our little family. From on high we seemed very small but precious and I felt the greatest tenderness for our little family – a family where there had been so much love and caring. The family that had been four and now one of the lights had gone out and now we were only three.
I did not want to touch the body but my mother had to, to understand that he was gone. So cold, she said, so cold and pulled away quickly.
After we viewed my Father my mother and I drove to the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. The Bloedel Reserve was donated by the Bloedel family, 140 acres of tailored northwest nature; a place of peace and healing. As we drove we listened to Neil Diamond, and Sandra Godsil hummed and sang along and was comforted. Arriving at the reserve, we exited the car into sunshine, the warm of the July sun warmed the cold shock of grief and the merciless permanence of death. Our memories coursed like paths between the green trees and fragrant flowers and we remembered all the days on the water and the time flowed and filled the between times too. Love never sets. It is always summer here. A moment holding all the moments, like a mother holds her child.