You Can Just Do Things, Like Go to Sea

The Saga of Staying Human

A decade and a half ago, ish, I was living in Northampton, Massachusetts, attempting to do a Vineyard church plant (long story) and working for a company which prepared teacher certification tests for public school teachers in most of the states in the union. The company had recently been acquired by Pearson. I was writing test questions and study materials for people who wanted to be high school teachers in fields I cared about deeply: English, history, political science, civics. And the way we had to write these questions was somehow extremely bleak. A typical question:

Which of the following is an example of an opinion as opposed to a fact?

A. William Howard Taft was the president of the United States from 1909 to 1913.

B. It is wrong to lie in order to preserve the feelings of a friend.

C. Baby swans are known as cygnets.

D. The chemical formula of water is H2O.

The correct answer, of course, was that the moral judgment was an opinion, and the others were facts. We were not allowed to write questions that would require someone, in order to get the question right, to make a judgment that there were such things as moral facts. The learning outcomes were what they were. We received outlines of the outcomes that had to be addressed by the tests; they were bullet pointed. The answer that prospective teachers had to come to was there, right next to the bullet point, in every Basic Skills test (which every candidate for every subject had to pass) as well as every English test in nearly all the states in the union.

I had been in some of the rooms (they were largely mid-range hotel conference rooms) where those learning outcomes were debated and decided on (usually by a fairly miscellaneous collection of Subject Matter Experts in the field, i.e. high school teachers and university professors who could spare the time to come to a Marriott in Western Massachusetts to establish these benchmarks.) I had brought up my philosophical beef with that particular bullet point in those rooms. It did not go well.

I was not … incredibly comfortable with this job, shall we say. It was also pretty boring. I did my best to include as many G.K. Chesterton passages as possible in the reading comprehension section of the exams.

Shortly after I left the job, Justin McBrayer wrote a piece for the Times highlighting this baked-in moral relativism, which had trickled its way down to his eight year old’s classroom; I winced as I read it. I knew where it came from.

But honestly it wasn’t this particular learning outcome that bothered me most— it was something that pervaded even the non philosophically fraught questions. All these areas of learning that I cared about so deeply, reduced to widgets of correctness. All the potential history teachers and civics teachers and English teachers, those who are meant to be mentoring young people into what it is too cringe to call the Great Conversation, forced to emit correct answers.

There was something else that I was doing when I was in my cubicle in Western Massachusetts: I was listening to sea chanteys. This was because I had begun reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels, Patrick O’Brien’s 21 book saga of life in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I felt — very, very strongly, and the feeling only increased the more test questions I wrote — that I had to learn to sail a tall ship. It was necessary. If I didn’t get out of this cubicle and learn to sail a tall ship, I would probably die.

When the church plant tanked and I very happily made plans to move back to my native New York City, I googled “tall ship NYC”, and came across what was at the time the only traditionally rigged ship sailing in New York Harbor. Called Clipper City, she is a gaff-rigged schooner built in the 1980s as a replica of a Great Lakes coal-hauling vessel from 1854. She’s 158 feet long, with a beam of 27.5 feet, and her masts reach 120 feet from the waterline.

She did — still does — five sails a day during the season, which runs roughly from late March through late October, with miscellaneous other adventures. She takes loads of tourists and schoolchildren on field trips out into the harbor and around the Statue of Liberty and back, or through Buttermilk Channel that separates Governors’ Island from Brooklyn. Companies charter her for staff parties, photographers charter her for fashion shoots. One memorable night the NYPD chartered her for a detective’s retirement party. There’s a bar on board and after all the tourists are gone and the sails are flaked down and the heads scrubbed and the trash taken to the disgusting garbage area behind the Tin Building, and it’s 2 AM, the crew often sits around for another twenty minutes or so, drinking dark and stormies made with well rum. Something goes wrong every single day. It is wonderful.

When I was sailing on her, she was actually a bit taller — 135 feet from the waterline, with topmasts with yardarms which square sails could be bent to, although they never were, so technically she was a square rigger (I told myself.) This would do it. (Her owner, the delightful Tom Burton, has since taken the topmasts with the square yardarms off, which is probably sensible as we never used them and we always had to make sure they were raked as close to fore and aft as we could get them when we brought her to dock, which was one more step in bringing her in and out. But it makes me a little sad.)

I called the number on the website, when I was still in Northampton, and somehow got an interview arranged for the following week when I would be back in New York. I got the job, which was a combination of punting on Pier 17 to get tourists to come on the boat, and working the sales kiosk for tickets. It paid very little. But that didn’t matter: I was also blogging for Front Porch Republic, which paid nothing at all.

My second shift, I bribed the 19 year old who was working the docklines to show me what to do. As I recall, his price was two hotdogs. The first time I boosted myself up over the fence that prevented people from falling off of Pier 17 into the East River, and walked along the foot-wide wooden beam above the water, and hopped from there down over the rail of the boat onto her deck, something changed fundamentally for me about my relationship with the city of my birth. I had never known before — I thought I had known, but I hadn’t — that New York had a harbor, was a harbor city. I had never known before that the city was a physical place — not like this, not as physical as this. I had never known you could just do things.

From working the docklines — catching the monkey’s fist when the mate throws it as the boat is coming in, then hauling on the light line that is tied to the heavy plasticky blue-green eye of the forward spring line, then putting that over one shoulder and walking it to the bollard, followed by the bow line, and then the stern line — I graduated within two weeks or so, with some mild hazing, to deckhand.

Over that season, and parts of the two that followed, I learned to hand, reef and steer. I learned some basic marlinspike seamanship. (I have learned a lot more since). I learned how to tie a flying bowline, which looks very impressive. I learned to follow orders, which I had never in my life had occasion to do before. I learned how to do things other than things with words. I learned to be a good shipmate and to react well in emergencies, of which there were many.

I climbed the ratlines. I got up on the yards to flake the huge gaff sails down, and went out on the bowsprit to do the same for the staysail and flying jib: I was as far as anyone could remember the first woman to do so, though Isabel, who originally bartended, joined us as a deckhand occasionally after a couple of months and did the same.

“Is it safe?” my mother asked.

“Well,” I remember saying, “… it’s not as safe as not doing it.”

We were once caught out in the harbor in the middle of a major wind-and-thunderstorm: the thing to do, the thing that you need to do, is get the sails down as quickly as you can, to make sure the wind doesn’t catch them and bring the boat to smash; anything could happen. Wrestling with heavy Dacron sailcloth is hard enough. Wrestling with the wind… that’s something else. I got on the E train after that utterly exhausted, heading back to Queens, covered in East River water and slime, with several smashed fingers, and a guy who had also been out in the storm tried to pick me up.

It wasn’t just Clipper City. There was a world — a whole other New York on the water that I hadn’t known about, a whole economy of shipping and tourism and maintenance and ferries and sport and marine engineering and waterfront infrastructure. There were the Sandy Hook Pilots, an extremely exclusive group which every captain who brings a ship into the Harbor must propitiate in various ways, as I understand it. There were the two main rival companies of tug boats, McAllister and Reinauer; every McAllister tug is named after one of the women in the McAllister family. There was the coast guard and the NYPD maritime unit and the New York Waterfront Alliance and the Seaman’s Church Institute. There was the New York Yacht Club and the North Cove Marina and the Chelsea Piers Marina and the Brooklyn Bridge Marina. And there were other schooners as well: the Pioneer, the Seaport Museum’s training ship; the Adventure, the Apollonia, the Argia. A dozen, maybe a dozen and a half schooners that you semi-regularly see in and around New York Harbor, some of them local, some of them visiting. When you are in a different port city, and you go down to the marina, you might see a friend, a familiar face, a familar rig.

And it’s an international world. The waterfronts of New York City and Trieste and Hamburg and Liverpool are closer to each other than they are to the inland parts of each city. One afternoon, in the first two weeks, while I was still working the shore, a very very good-looking Italian man came up to me while I was working and said “you are docklines girl? In Italy, I am docklines guy.” Must pay better in Italy, I remember thinking, if he was vacationing in New York, but then boat-adjacent people do tend to get around.

The second October, I think it was, I joined my godmother’s husband and a buddy of his on the trip from DC down to West Palm Beach to get my godmother’s husband’s sloop where she needed to be for the winter. I stood watch, at the wheel for four hours, seeing the night gradually lighten and the shore to starboard change its shape. Dolphins followed us, their fins breaking the water to port.

Pier 17 is at the foot of Wall Street. Often the hedge fund guys would bring their plastic clamshell containers full of salad down to the pier and sit and look out at the harbor. “Come on the boat!” I would encourage them, and sometimes, after work, they would. I felt frantic for them, frantic for them to learn that they had bodies and that they lived in a port city.

I had a friend during this time who was into gaming. I told him about this. He told me he was getting really into a computer game about the age of sail that included some sailing simulation elements. He believed that this was basically the same.

One time, a group of twelve year olds came on, on a class trip. Two boys sat next to each other on the benches near the hatchway. They were on a gaff rigged topsail schooner in New York Harbor. I tried to get them to help me raise the sail, which kids normally love to do. I offered to show them how to ballantine a halyard so it wouldn’t get tangled. They were on their phones, scrolling or gaming, and they weren’t interested. I became convinced that what I needed to do next had something to do with that.

I googled “Maritime education” “New york city” and came across the New York Harbor School. I cold-emailed Murray Fisher, the school’s founder, and got myself a job doing comms for the foundation which supported the school, as well as the Billion Oyster Project and the New York Harbor School; the goal was to teach high schoolers maritime skills and graduate them with an industry certification as well as a pre-college degree. I also taught them journalism and was the faculty advisor to the student newspaper. I stayed in that job till I started at Plough. It was a very, very hard choice to make to stop having a job that meant hanging out with kids on boats, but now I get to hang out with anabaptists and journalists, which is also fun. And a couple of months ago I capsized a dinghy in the harbor in Marseille when I was sailing with my ten year old niece, so the kids-and-boats theme continues. (And now I can say that technically, I have been shipwrecked in the Mediterranean, just like Odysseus and St. Paul.)

Let me explain myself more fully. What I feel now about the Christian civic humanist public sphere is a blend of what I felt then, in that cubicle in Western Massachusetts, seeing the life of the mind reduced to relativistic widgets, and what I felt for myself and the hedge fund guys and the boys on their phones on the boat. It is this:

There is a real world. It’s physical and intellectual and social. It’s a world of political philosophy and novels and student newspapers and schooners and the East River and kids and grownups and kayaks and cats and blogs and magazines and muscles that hurt after you raise a sail, and splinters of wood that get jammed under your thumbnail, and your immaterial intellect, and a blank page, and your words, and everyone’s stories.

And that is what we are fighting for: to live in that world, and to live in it as human beings. And we will not ask permission, and we will not be bullied out of it.

You can just do things.

Another life is possible.