By Skipper
Mary
Written way back
in 2006, Revision Thing was
published in Good Old Boat in
2007 under the title, Neptune’s Revenge: payback for insufficient name
expungement.
GOB is the magazine for good old boats and the people who love them. If you haven’t checked them out, you should. It’s quality stuff with high standards. Maybe that’s why they left out my account of the body fluids used in early christening rites. Then there was my reference to that Florida Congressman's creepy IMing to Capitol pages. Ah, the good old days. —M
* * *
From experimental
fiction to humble haiku, be it survey, installation tip, insurance claim,
jingle, grocery list, living will, love note or subpoena—words matter. Just ask
any writer, reader, or one of the I-can’t-believe-they-found-out-about-that
elected officials.
Names matter too.
Just ask any parent, philanthropist, or one of the
I-can’t-believe-they-named-her-that boat owners.
After inking the
deal for our 1990 Catalina Capri 26, my husband Jeff and I stood looking at
each other in a happy glow. Sure, she had a few flaws—a scattering of chips in
her forward deck gelcoat, some cracks around her chain plates and a leak in her
head—all little stuff hardly worth mentioning.
More important
was her solid build; the 3’5” wing keel good for cruising the coasts of the big
lakes; the 9’11” beam of elbow room; and the fact I could stand up
straight in her galley. She also sported four self-tailing winches and a roller
furling jib; her mainsail had been replaced in 1998.
She was ready to
sail and we were ready to sail her. Too bad we’d need to wait seven months as
it was October and she’d just been put on the hard. Then there was something
else. Isn’t there always? But this something was so ethereal we thought we’d
let it go.
THE NAME
WASN'T STUPID
In fact it was
rather nice; but its two words were wedded to the salty sea and according to
her survey she’d only sailed freshwater and that’s where we’d be sailing.
Jeff and I are
can-do Americans who don’t spook easily but, we couldn’t help but wonder, would
our sailing fortunes be better in ill-named boat or re-named boat?
Our puzzlement
kept sinking deeper until we were finally forced into action. After about five
seconds online we found an answer titled, Renaming a boat? How bad could
that be?
Originally
published in the August 1999 edition of GOB, author John Vigor’s Interdenominational
Denaming Ceremony appealed to us because Jeff is Methodist and
I’m Lutheran and we were married by a Universalist minister. Plus it was short.
As per
instructions we began the work of psychic transformation by cutting it out of
paperwork and manuals, grinding it off steel and rubbing its ghostly image off
fiberglass. We weren’t covering it up but expunging it from existence.
We kept finding
and expunging, finding and expunging as the previous captain had put that old
name all over and in the unlikeliest of places. Open a drawer, turn over a
cushion and it’s a jack in the box.
Once satisfied
the old name was no more, we buttoned the boat up for winter and started
thinking about names.
THE CANDIDATES
The slate was
wide open and here’s what showed up:
• Route 66—our hull number is 66 and it could be a nifty
graphic.
• Cock-A-Doodle-Do—came out of the blue and hung around a
surprisingly long time.
• White Noise—the DeLillo novel featuring “The Most
Photographed Barn in America.”
• Jaozi—a boiled dumpling we developed an addiction to
during our year in China.
• Leap Year—in honor of our 2/29 marriage, seemed cool but
we’re not retiring.
• Great Leap—cool but too Maoish and we’re still not
retiring.
Then there was Hummingbird—the favorite bird of my mother who in 2005 had
gone to her great reward.
I’d found it.
Jeff liked it. My sister liked it. Everybody loved it and what an understated
but attitude-leaden graphic that emerald firebrand would make.
Nah. Hummingbird
could fly on something sleek like that Block Island 40 briefly docked in our
marina, but not on our beamy Capri, which is more dumpling than wing.
Then Jeff, a
newspaper editor cum college English worker, found the word that put a fine
point on our lives at the half century with all those red marks on student
papers, the novel I’ve been working on for a while, our parents aging and
dying, our girls nightclubbing in another time zone, and now, a sailboat listed
improbably in our Assets column.
REVISION IT
WAS. YEE HAW!
And he even designed the graphic which a local print shop produced in vinyl.
March rolled
around and with the boat in the shop for some work (new chart plotter and auto
pilot; replacement VHF and pump cylinder), we made the two-hour drive from
Rhinelander to Marinette to polish her up, do a final expungment check, and
perform the Denaming Ceremony.
Falling on the
ritual scale somewhere between the lemming-like flow of the stadium wave and
the compressed singularity of the post-sail cigarette, it’s a ceremony perfect
for two people who can agree on what role they want to play.
In our case, Jeff
recited Vigor’s text while I poured a bottle of California (we figured this
west coast grape was a good choice since the boat was built there) Wild Bunch
White over the bow. Then we gave the spirits one night to take their salty
leave.
We slept fitfully
in the motel, but the next morning the boat appeared to have settled into some
kind of jittery limbo as we approached it with flexible ruler, painter’s tape,
vinyl lettering and burnisher. Maybe she was hungover from the previous day’s
ceremony. Maybe it was the shop’s fluorescent lights, or maybe the metal radio.
Whatever it was, it was obvious we needed to get on with it.
The hull curves,
of course, but the boat was also listing to port in the cradle and the bow was
dropping a tad. Finding the right line proved a challenge but the vantage from
the top of the stepladder was a breakthrough and three hours later we were able
to stand back to admire our work. We’d gone big and it looked great.
BOAT
CHRISTENING LORE
Given that
sailing has a long, long history, it figures that the christening ritual has
changed over time. Here’s what we turned up:
That the gods
were first appeased with the blood of a virgin.
This was replaced
with the less problematic blood of an animal.
In a pinch, one
could have a virgin pee on the bow. (Jeff wondered about the odds of a
woman willing to pee on the bow truly being a virgin.)
That champagne
should be used for big ships, like the Queen Mary but, for our boat, champagne
could be considered overkill.
So Jeff dumped a
bottle of Wild Bunch Red on the anchor locker and around the bowsprit while I
gave thanks and made a polite request for fair winds.
Now she was named
Revision.
Toward the end of
our giddy huddle, Jon, the marina owner appeared searching for a forklift and
we heard him ask one of the technicians why the shop “smells like booze.”
Busted. Those
power boaters thought we were crazy.
But what a sweet
story she’s written. Of course, what else would one expect on a boat with a
typewriter font and editor’s mark on her side?
WHIFF OF
SOMETHING SOUR
After we’d been
on board a fortnight living on crackers, fruit cocktail, smoked meat, and
marinated tomatoes, we woke up to an odor that seemed stronger in the back
berth. I felt around the batteries, but they were dry. I emptied the icebox and
flushed the line. It was clean. The head smelled like a head, nothing worse
than your average outhouse with a pine tree on a string.
We left the boat
for a few hours and returned to a cabin reeking of ‘grandpa.’
The culprit was
discovered in the locker off the head where a cloudy yellow fluid had pooled in
the center/aft corner to a depth of three inches. The stowed foul weather gear
hung on hangers above the stuff, not touching it exactly, but the gear was so
rank we couldn’t even stand to smell it after it had a chance to air out in the
cockpit.
So we bagged it
for the laundry where after a couple cycles it washed out just fine. As for the
locker and the holding tank, it took a couple weeks, buckets of water, rags and
bleach, open portlights and hatches, and the tiny fans whirring on HI before we
were able to reclaim our neutral, vaguely basil-tinged air.
Turns out we
needed a pump out. We hadn’t gotten one because the holding tank experience was
new to us but more so because some plumbing was loose as a politician with a
bottle of Chivas in one hand and a touchpad in the other (Note: this was
written during the Cong.
Mark Foley scandal) and, well…
We breathed
easier after the pump out and the plumbing is now tight as a subpoena’s
language.
And here’s my
point
A couple weeks after
the incident we discovered the source of our problem deep in the three-ring
binder of boat info kept by the previous owner. In all our searching and
expunging we’d just plain missed it. But there it was, plain as the nose on
Neptune’s face—printed in blue ballpoint ink on the inside cover of the Jabsco
pamphlet. Those two little, and oh so salty, words.
__ __ B __ __ D __ 