Grief is suffocating. One minute I'm fine, then with the next breath I'm crying. It makes it hard to find, buy and learn to sail a boat when you're feeling like you're five years old and helpless. I'm sure God had some divine reason for this complex hierarchy of parent, child, grandparent thing. He hasn't yet shared it all with me. All I know is that relationships are complex, and explaining myself and my plans to sail the TN-TOM with my mother's ashes to doubting friends and curious strangers is difficult. I'm beginning to thing the "coming of age" and the "journey to self-discovery" book era has died, but maybe not.
The last thing I want to do right now is make decisions. I want to lie in bed and weep and sleep and eat fudgesicles. I want to hug my cats and peel string cheese and eat junk food and argue with strangers on the Internet and play video games and do whatever it takes to ignore how I'm feeling.
The more I learn about what I'm about to do, the more it intimidates and scares me. It reminds me of the Wildland Fire Fighting course I took - the training I needed to have to get certified and insured so I could go fight forest fires back in the 80s. After I spent 40 hours in training to "fight fires," my editor at the time, Tom Dekle, asked me what I'd learned. "Mostly how to stay alive, not a lot about how to fight fires," I said. It's true. About 10% of the training was in learning how to use a Pulaski (see below), and our fire tent - the thing you crawl into and hope you survive in when a fire passes over. They were called "Shake and bake bags" because mostly people cook inside them, like human baked potatoes. All you have to know to fight fires (at the basic entry level) is how to use a shovel, a Pulaski and assorted digging and scraping tools. The other stuff you learn is how to avoid snags (dead branches hanging in trees waiting to fall on your head and kill you), holes (usually filled with fire, coals and stuff that would burn you if you stepped in them, and a lot of escape techniques. Fire fighting is less about fires and more about survival. I'm beginning to think that the same is true of sailing, that it's more about being prepared for the worst day you can have on the water, than on the sailing.
It's not that sailing is dangerous. It can be, but it's the safest sport (so I've read) that old people and idiots can engage in. You're almost always within eyesight of the shore, you're wearing flotation, keeled boats rarely flip over. They can...but it's not usual. File the times they do under "preparing for the worst day you can have."
At worst I can keep the sails rolled up and use the engine to motor my way down the river. I had considered a houseboat, but learned that to navigate certain portions of the trip I need an "ocean worthy" boat and that, as a rule, this does not include houseboats within my price range. The sailboat has a couple of things going for it. You can use the sails, or the engine, to get places. It's the cheapest form of boat if you're going to spend a lot of time on the water, and not so much in port. It's stable, affordable and there are a lot of models to choose from. Get the right kind and you can take it on the ocean. The cons, there's not as much room on a sailboat as there is on a houseboat. It takes longer to get places because you're sailing, not power boating. You have to furl and unfurl sails, hoist jibs and do a lot of sailboat stuff I haven't learned to do yet. It's physical. You steer while sitting in the rain and wind, not from inside a protected, and dry cabin house. House and powerboats burn a lot of fuel, and at $6 to $9 a gallon (and a gallon an hour), it can get pretty expensive to power up and down a river. Sailboats make about 50 miles max on any given day. Powerboats can do double that or more.
The romantic notion of "sailing wild Betty's ashes to the sea" sounds great, but the reality is pretty sobering in terms of "funeral costs." Consider this:
Buy a boat = $3,000 to $15,000.
Make sure boat is water worthy, painted, outfitted etc =$2,000 to $5,000
Insure boat =$500 to $2,000
Supply boat = $1,000 + for water, fuel, food, bedding, radio, emergency gear, maps, etc.
Learn to sail = $800 plus cost of practice
I also have to take and pass a class to get my powerboat license. Then there's the driving to and from the marina every weekend, additional classes, books, and so on.
I'm essentially devoting at least 6 months to a year to do this. It's not like I've always sailed. I haven't. I could kayak the whole trip, but it would take me a year to go 400 miles.
So why bother? It's like I tell my clients, the ones who want to write a book - you don't do it so you have a book. you do it so you heal. If you have a book at the end of the writing, that's great. What's more important is that you're a different, and hopefully better person, at the end. And that's why I'm doing this. It's for me. Yes, I'll scatter my mother's ashes at the end, but this is all for me - to come to terms with what I know, what I don't know, and my relationship with both Wild Betty and Mommy Dearest, because she was both.
The last thing I want to do right now is make decisions. I want to lie in bed and weep and sleep and eat fudgesicles. I want to hug my cats and peel string cheese and eat junk food and argue with strangers on the Internet and play video games and do whatever it takes to ignore how I'm feeling.
The more I learn about what I'm about to do, the more it intimidates and scares me. It reminds me of the Wildland Fire Fighting course I took - the training I needed to have to get certified and insured so I could go fight forest fires back in the 80s. After I spent 40 hours in training to "fight fires," my editor at the time, Tom Dekle, asked me what I'd learned. "Mostly how to stay alive, not a lot about how to fight fires," I said. It's true. About 10% of the training was in learning how to use a Pulaski (see below), and our fire tent - the thing you crawl into and hope you survive in when a fire passes over. They were called "Shake and bake bags" because mostly people cook inside them, like human baked potatoes. All you have to know to fight fires (at the basic entry level) is how to use a shovel, a Pulaski and assorted digging and scraping tools. The other stuff you learn is how to avoid snags (dead branches hanging in trees waiting to fall on your head and kill you), holes (usually filled with fire, coals and stuff that would burn you if you stepped in them, and a lot of escape techniques. Fire fighting is less about fires and more about survival. I'm beginning to think that the same is true of sailing, that it's more about being prepared for the worst day you can have on the water, than on the sailing.
It's not that sailing is dangerous. It can be, but it's the safest sport (so I've read) that old people and idiots can engage in. You're almost always within eyesight of the shore, you're wearing flotation, keeled boats rarely flip over. They can...but it's not usual. File the times they do under "preparing for the worst day you can have."
At worst I can keep the sails rolled up and use the engine to motor my way down the river. I had considered a houseboat, but learned that to navigate certain portions of the trip I need an "ocean worthy" boat and that, as a rule, this does not include houseboats within my price range. The sailboat has a couple of things going for it. You can use the sails, or the engine, to get places. It's the cheapest form of boat if you're going to spend a lot of time on the water, and not so much in port. It's stable, affordable and there are a lot of models to choose from. Get the right kind and you can take it on the ocean. The cons, there's not as much room on a sailboat as there is on a houseboat. It takes longer to get places because you're sailing, not power boating. You have to furl and unfurl sails, hoist jibs and do a lot of sailboat stuff I haven't learned to do yet. It's physical. You steer while sitting in the rain and wind, not from inside a protected, and dry cabin house. House and powerboats burn a lot of fuel, and at $6 to $9 a gallon (and a gallon an hour), it can get pretty expensive to power up and down a river. Sailboats make about 50 miles max on any given day. Powerboats can do double that or more.
The romantic notion of "sailing wild Betty's ashes to the sea" sounds great, but the reality is pretty sobering in terms of "funeral costs." Consider this:
Buy a boat = $3,000 to $15,000.
Make sure boat is water worthy, painted, outfitted etc =$2,000 to $5,000
Insure boat =$500 to $2,000
Supply boat = $1,000 + for water, fuel, food, bedding, radio, emergency gear, maps, etc.
Learn to sail = $800 plus cost of practice
I also have to take and pass a class to get my powerboat license. Then there's the driving to and from the marina every weekend, additional classes, books, and so on.
I'm essentially devoting at least 6 months to a year to do this. It's not like I've always sailed. I haven't. I could kayak the whole trip, but it would take me a year to go 400 miles.
So why bother? It's like I tell my clients, the ones who want to write a book - you don't do it so you have a book. you do it so you heal. If you have a book at the end of the writing, that's great. What's more important is that you're a different, and hopefully better person, at the end. And that's why I'm doing this. It's for me. Yes, I'll scatter my mother's ashes at the end, but this is all for me - to come to terms with what I know, what I don't know, and my relationship with both Wild Betty and Mommy Dearest, because she was both.
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