Boats

Bradley Davidson

I recently bought a boat, with sails. I don’t know what I was thinking. A long, long time ago in what seems like another life, I had a sailboat. It was a wooden vessel compiled of pine planks, oak ribs, teak decks, mahogany cabin and enough brass and varnish to keep me constantly busy. And I lived on it. My new boat is plastic, fiberglass to be exact. It is a compilation of, well, fiberglass and stainless steel. It has just enough teak on it to keep the appearance of the salty tradition of wooden boats. And I don’t live on it.

I say I don’t know what I was thinking, but deep down inside there must have been an instinctive urge or a primordial magnetism that drew me to the water in search of a boat. It seems our very beings are wired somehow to seek out the constant undulating, pulsating rolling waves of an ocean from whence we came eons ago. Or not. I do know there is some magic to sailing over an ever moving landscape which has been in motion before life itself and more recently has seen Polynesians island hoping, early European explorers sail from horizon to horizon and whalers crisscross its bodies in search of the largest mammals on earth, great white or otherwise. I have memories going back to childhood of sitting silently on a boat with sails full as the bow sliced through the salty water making foam and bubbles. The wind would make its music through the rigging and the water would hiss, sizzle and splash with every wave the hull would plow into. The boat, in the arms of the ocean, would hypnotize me.

But there is more, I think. God created the horizon to tease us. See as far as you can, then wonder what lies beyond that. What a tease! We had to build boats just to see the waterfall at the edge. Then when the world became round, we had to have more boats to explore lands beyond the horizon. It’s human nature to want to know the unknown. Our curiosity demands we investigate. And somehow a boat can make that happen.

Then there is that other thing. The oceans are big, and are highways and byways to all the world. A fictitious pirate from the Caribbean recently made popular put it well when he rambled, "What a ship is, you know, it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs. But what a ship is … really is, is freedom." It’s another piece of human nature, that desire to be free and have the impression one is the master of one’s own destiny. To be able to take ones little boat, or ship, and point the bow to the horizon, any horizon, and sail off, is a desire a great many in this human race have. What goes on after the voyage begins may not be as expected, but one has the freedom to start if one has a boat.

So, I bought a boat, and I don’t know what I was thinking. But I do think being a part of the salty family I come from, and even more, part of the human race, I do believe I am doomed by nature to have a boat.

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