“So, how exactly do we get back?”
I stared at the slowly diminishing strip of beach trees where our friends had shrunk to sand-grain size and tried not to think about Sarah’s question. We had both laughed off our friends’ concerns that we might not be able enough sailors to merely navigate this tiny sailboat out into the upper Hudson River a few hundred yards, turn it around and come back to shore. But as our vessel drifted further downstream despite all my efforts at the rudder and Sarah’s at the sail, the issue was beginning to loom with titanic significance.
“I think we have to tack, or something like that,” I said.
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Umm… it’s like zig-zagging. Let’s try to zig-zag.”
Sarah let out the sail and I did my best to turn us about in some vaguely shore-bound direction, but our poorly chosen angle of departure had left us sailing straight into the wind.
Didn’t the ancient Greeks or Phoenicians figure this out thousands of years ago, I wondered. If they could pull it off, there’s got to be a way for me to figure this out right now. What would Nietzsche do?
“Let’s use that boat to mark our progress,” Sarah said, pointing to a far bigger sailboat moored about 50 yards away, as its occupants gazed upon us inquisitively. “Wait, no, it’s leaving now.”
Portly men with shag-carpet chests and jaws clenched upon cigars chortled at our predicament as their inferior yachts motored by. Their bronzed, blonde trophy wives languidly flipped over to amuse themselves at our expense while tanning. Rationalizing that sailing completely away from our goal would somehow bring us closer to home, we moved farther away from shore. At this point, the boat capsized for the third time on this torturous pleasure cruise.
As I bobbed about in my life vest trying to right the boat, I felt utterly humiliated. Here I was in the prime of my collegiate youth, proud English major, putative journalist, and I couldn’t make this little hunk of fiberglass move anywhere but towards certain death and destruction. I’ve read Thus Spoke Zarathustra! I am the master of my will! I am a man of fire, a man of steel! Unfortunately, at that moment it seemed more like I was a man of skin and bones who had no idea what the hell he was doing.
Sarah and I quickly realized that the lines at the top of the mast had snagged themselves into a knot, keeping us from raising the sail and dumping out all the water. The boat remained upside-down. I had failed. For all my philosophizing and expensive Georgetown education, I was doomed to sink my friend’s boat, drown in the depths of the Hudson and be eulogized as an only occasionally good-intentioned and witty fool.
Then providence came raining down in the shape of a 12-year-old boy with a powerful motorboat wearing his mother’s mirrored shades.
“Do you need a tow?”
Yes we did.
“Are you sinking?”
Well, no.
“Did you lose your sail?”
Uh, no, it was still there.
“Oh … What was your plan if we didn’t come along?”
Good question, young man.
His mother helped us hitch up our craft, and we hunched in the stern, buffoons of the harbor, as the boy expertly piloted us back to shore.
As our worried friends tried to figure out exactly how we had screwed ourselves over so badly, I sat on a driftwood log and thought about the allegorical significance of my pathetic journey. Nothing strips away academically instilled hubris quite like a preteen deus ex machina. We’re told that we are the brightest and the best here at Georgetown by pretty much everyone we know, and we are all too eager to believe it. Good old American rugged individualism is a pretty comfortable ivory tower dream.
But while staring my own incompetence in the face certainly took me down a few notches, I can always learn how to sail. The hardest truth to face was that at the end of the day, a river is stronger than one man’s will.
