The sun rises in the sky but I can’t see it behind the thick cloud cover and the mist that hangs in the air. The day brightens and I see the seagulls soaring overhead, searching for shelter inland from a coming storm. The wind brings with it the smell of salt and freshness from the ocean water, not more than a half-mile from my home. At the beach I stand looking out over the waves, dark and white-capped. Across the turbulent waters, in the sky above the mountains the sun breaks through, brilliantly illuminating the surrounding clouds and making the surface of the water far away from shore much too bright to stare at. I look away. The wave tips are bright and silvery, contrasting sharply with the deep shadows within the water troughs. The wind is blowing strongly now and it is exhilarating, and it makes me sleepy at the same time. The clouds are darkening, the mountains are deep velvety gray, the ocean is a green slate, broken and thrown about, and the sun is far too bright to look into. It is the type of morning one imagines that God might call out from the heavens, or Christ might descend from the clouds and walk across the waters.

A small sailboat ploughs through the waves. Its sail is full and pulling hard. In my mind’s eye I see my father at the tiller and he has a serious expression on his face. Wind tosses the wisps of hair above his ears, and at the back of his head, and sends ocean spray into his face, speckling the surface of his aviator sunglasses, and causes the windbreaker he is wearing to billow and flutter. I don’t recall what he was like in church, but in his sailboat he was a devout man.

We sailed on Tomales Bay, north of San Francisco. We always had the bay to ourselves. I don’t recall another boat on the water when we sailed. It was a lonely, windswept place, beautiful, and unencumbered. It was wild and untamed. As a child this is how I remember it. I didn’t enjoy my time there, but I loved being with my dad, and it felt like we were the only people on earth. Fishermen had caught an enormous great white shark at the mouth of the bay earlier that year, or the year before. I couldn’t get that idea out of my mind. Maybe there were even larger sharks in the bay with us too. Being swallowed by a great white shark seemed likely in that wild place at the end of the world. It would be fitting. I wished that I could have seen that huge shark, strung up by ropes and hanging from a crane. Boldly I dipped my hand over the side of the boat and let the cold pacific water rush through my fingers, tempting the sharks to bite.

I admired my dad. He was a Coast Guard Captain. There was nobody better than a captain. I’d never heard of an admiral; in my mind they didn’t exist. There were only captains, if you were at the top, and that was what my dad was. I felt honored that he invited me to sail with him, even if I didn’t really like it. He scared me a little too. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing when I was with him. It was very possible to do the wrong thing, and that was never pleasant. Sailing was a serious affair; it wasn’t funny if you did the wrong thing. Sometimes I thought it was funny when I did the wrong thing, but usually that made it even less funny. My dad and I didn’t have the same sense of humor when I was a kid. But when I got older we laughed together more, and life became a little funnier. I’m glad that happened eventually.

Our sailboat was moored at a little marina on the east side of the bay. It was tethered to a buoy a few hundred yards off shore. We used a little wooden dingy to row out to it. The marina was a short drive off the highway, down a dirt and gravel rutted road that ended in a muddy parking lot near the water. There was a small dock with a few old fishing boats. Fishing paraphernalia was strewn about the site everywhere: crab pots stacked to the sky, nets, motors, boat carcasses, rusted bric-a-brac and oyster shells littering the corners of everything. A small, dilapidated wood building with cloudy windows stood at the edge of the dock. Faded blue paint clung to the old wood in some places, the rest was rotting wood, and it appeared as though mud held the boards together. A strong smell of grease, salt and creosote hung in the air, and cigarette smoke floated out from the open door. An old guy in greasy overalls always sat in there, or came out and greeted my dad. They always had business together before we went sailing.

~FS