Sailing, Part Two, Page Two
I was not due to report for duty at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC until late September, but we had to move all our belongings down there and find an apartment with the relocation advance I received from the Bank. While we were spending the last few days with my family, a rare tornado swept through Edgeworth and neighboring Sewickley at night, dropping a huge old oak tree onto the roof of my parents’ house and nearly killing Susanna. A jagged limb of the tree punched through the roof and slammed into the upstairs bedroom right beside the crib where she was sleeping.
While we were out in the back yard the next day, cleaning up the debris from the tornado, I discovered our old Thistle resting upside down on four discarded car tires against the back wall of the house. Papa said he and Mama had given up sailing, and nobody else wanted the boat, which had deteriorated during ten years exposed to the elements out in the back yard. I asked him if I could have it, and he agreed gladly. I said I would come back from Washington and pick it up in a few months.
It was not until spring arrived at our little apartment on Columbia Pike in the Virginia suburbs of DC that I had time to think about going to pick up the sailboat from my parents’ house. I had become very friendly with another young sailing enthusiast at the World Bank, Gus Schumacher from Massachusetts, a taller, leaner, younger version of my Uncle Clancy. Gus and I hung out with the same crowd of World Bank management trainees after work. As a perpetually malnourished bachelor, he was a frequent visitor at our apartment for lunch or dinner on the weekends. Christa enjoyed cooking for our friends.
One day I mentioned the Thistle, gradually decaying in my parents’ back yard. He said that he was looking for a sailboat himself, so I told him that, if he would help me restore the boat, we could be partners in owning and racing it on the Potomac River.
“What do you think it would take, John, to put the boat back in first class condition?” Gus was sitting at our kitchen table, just finishing his lunch.
“Well, the molded plywood hull is starting to come unglued along the keel. I think we have to coat the entire hull with a layer of fiberglass and epoxy. If we do that, we won’t ever have to worry about leaks.”
Gus looked doubtful. “Do you think you and I could pull that off by ourselves?”
I had helped Clancy and Papa apply a fiberglass patch to the hull of the Weezie once after a collision had punched a hole through the molded plywood. “I don’t see why not. Let’s give it a try.”
Gus had a friend who owned a vacant warehouse in Anacostia, just a block from the Marine Barracks. He got permission for us to use a corner of the building to work on the Thistle, which at the time was still resting on its trailer behind my apartment building. Using evenings and weekends, Gus and I went to work. Once we had laid the strips of fiberglass fabric over the plywood and impregnated them with epoxy resin, we began the drudgery of sanding it all down to a smooth finish. Finally it was ready to paint, and we applied several coats of expensive marine enamel in the original robin’s egg blue color Papa and I had chosen fifteen years earlier. Soon the job was finished, and we took the boat across the Fourteenth Street Bridge to its new home port at the Potomac Sailing Marina on the Virginia side.
Gus and I were equal partners in boat ownership for the next five years or so. As a bachelor, his weekends were his own to enjoy, and he did quite a lot of racing on Sundays in the wide part of the river just below National Airport. I, however, was the father of a growing family (three children all in diapers at the same time during one memorable summer!). Christa wanted me at home on the weekends, and so I had less and less time for sailing. Added to this was the sad fact that she herself did not enjoy sailing at all. She had grown up in the Swabian Jura of southern Germany’s Wurttemberg Province, far from any navigable water. She got very anxious out on the water, especially when we took the babies with us. So the handwriting was on the wall.
Over the years since giving my share of the Thistle to Gus, I have had only occasional opportunities to indulge my life-long love of sailing. As I traveled, worked and lived in the Third World, I went sailing a few times in borrowed or hired boats on exotic bodies of water such as the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Sudan; Lake Malawi in Eastern Africa’s Rift Valley; the Java Sea in Indonesia … but I never again had a sailboat of my own until 1996, when I finally retired from my thirty-three-year international career. Christa and I bought a house in the Florida Keys that year, right on open water with a long dock and a swimming pool in the back yard. I bought my last boat then, a fifteen foot Hobie Wave catamaran that was even faster than my old Thistle.
I loved my little Hobie Cat. It was small enough that I could easily handle it by myself, which was good, since Christa had never gotten over her aversion to being afloat. I spent many happy hours sailing single-handed around the Lower Keys, until, in September 1998, Hurricane Georges scored a direct hit on Big Pine Key, our little island retirement paradise. We sold the house and the Hobie to a couple that had lost everything in the storm and decided to look for another retirement home somewhere in the mountains, far from the path of hurricanes.
Three years ago, on my seventieth birthday, Christa and our children chartered a big sailing yacht out of Naples, Florida. The whole family gathered for a day of sailing out on the Gulf. Our grandchildren had a ball.
So did I.
Return to Page One of Part Two<<
©2009 John Malone for SeniorWomen.com
