The Windsurfer

This blog entry has been a long time coming, but I have to get it out of me. There was a period of my life when I wasn’t the most careful person when it came to money. If I happened to experience a windfall, I would do my best to make exactly the wrong choices about how to spend the money. Forget saving it, that idea didn’t even enter the picture. Besides, I didn’t have a savings account so how on earth could I save it? No, it was better to spend it on “fun” things.
This was right after I had returned from Africa and I was experiencing a sort of reverse culture shock. After eighteen-months in Africa I had become used to only having one choice when it came to everything from toilet paper to guava juice, and now I found myself back in the States where there are a hundred choices for just choosing a candy bar. I would walk in to a grocery store which was twenty times larger than the Cash and Carry in Umtata and become overwhelmed by the size and amount of merchandise offered at these monolithic temples of retail. And this was before Wal-Mart and superstores had entered the scene.
I suppose I was oblivious to all of the excess before I trotted off to Africa to try to single-handedly stomp out Apartheid. My friends, who had remained in the good ole’ U. S. of A., on the other hand, seemed completely comfortable with the domestic supply and demand situation and seemed to be able to catalogue information about products that would remove nose-hair or make your toilet gleam. My ignorance over hair-gel and minute-rice might have led me to overcompensate in order to acclimatize back into the cliques and pecking-orders that made up my social circle during my early twenties.
One large item I bought at this time was a sail-board, better known as a wind-surfer. My mother could never get the name of the thing right and would call it a sail-surfer, or a wind-sailor or a surf-sailor or whatever combination of surf and sail that was possible other than the correct name. I had come upon this nemesis in the form of fiberglass and canvas when my sister Lindsay had suggested to my other sister Emily and me that we go to the Outer-Banks and take wind-surfing lessons. Lindsay had had some experience with this sport/sado-masochist ritual while she was living in Scotland, where the Scots, being fooking Scots, like to wind-surf in the North Sea in January during gales for light entertainment. Lindsay, exercising her Scottish DNA to its fullest, did just this, without a center-board (the thing that keeps you on course), and was picked up after hours of drifting by some bewildered Scottish fishermen. She was suffering from hypothermia and the story made the local paper, but this did not deter her from wind-surfing some more and now she was planning to spread its joy to her siblings.
So we drove to Nags Head one morning and each of us paid fifty dollars to take the lesson. The instruction was given at a little inlet on the sound side of the Outer-Banks by some very patient instructors who must have either been very good at holding their laughter in or had just seen so many spectacularly uncoordinated patrons that they were immune to the spectacle. Either way we spent the hour or so just trying to pull up the sail. For those who have never tried this sport, first you have to make sure that the sail is lying flat on the surface of the water, somewhat perpendicular to the actual board which is basically a surf-board with a hole stuck in it for a sail. Then, you have to haul yourself up onto the board and kind of kneel until you get your balance. By this time, if you have lower back problems, you will know it, for this is a very unnatural act for Homo sapiens and I’m guessing all other species. You are then required to pull on a rope that is connected to the sail and haul it up. The sail is around nine or ten feet high and pretty hefty in and of itself but, adding weight to this task, is the element of the wind. This will be your first meeting with it, and if you are like me, you will learn to hate it with every fiber of your being.
The hauling up of the sail is problematic for a couple of reasons. As stated before, it is hard on the back, and this is one of those many instances in life where people will shout at you: “Use your knees! Use your knees!” What does that mean? In my case, it meant shifting my weight backwards and doing a sort of half-backward flip off the other side of the board and beginning the process all over again. I remember that there was a lot of concern about how your butt was positioned. It was a bit like being someone’s cell-mate. Emily is a big laugher, and she can get us into fits by seeing humor in the most humiliating situations, so our lesson was peppered with moments where we tried to get a hold of ourselves and tackle another go on the board.
The other problem is that when the sail starts to rise up, the wind immediately catches it and you are instantly mobile, headed toward which ever way the wind is blowing. In the case of our lesson, this usually meant right toward another student or right toward the dock where we paid our fifty dollars. Then you would have to abandon ship and hope the tip of your board didn’t knock out someone’s dental plate or something. I can see why we had to sign an insurance waiver. By the end of the session we had had a few small successes and some sever pain in our upper arms, but, for some reason, I had gotten strangely hooked on the idea of purchasing one of these things and mastering the sport, probably not as a personal challenge but as a way to impress people.
Lindsay tried to talk me out of it. I would be returning to school soon and this was a time when I should have been hoarding money. But the windsurfer consumed my thoughts. I needed a physical challenge that would build strength and character and, most importantly, draw the attention of females. The experience did very little of any of these.
So I went back a couple of days later and bought the very wind-surfer that I had taken my lesson on. I paid five-hundred dollars for it. A couple of years later I bought a 1972 Ford LTD for the same amount. The LTD is an example of the good use of five- hundred dollars; the wind-surfer is an example of the bad use of five-hundred dollars. I toted the wind-surfer home to where my parents were living in New Bern and immediately started transforming myself into a hip windsurfer dude. Their house was on the Neuse River, right where it opens into an estuary about a mile wide, and if anything was perfect about this ill-advised venture, this body of water was ideal for learning the techniques of wind-surfing without endangering anyone except yourself.

I was attending classes at a community college at the time, so after classes I would come home and don my Billabong short shorts (this was the eighties) and begin to prepare the wind-surfer for sailing. After about half an hour of unfurling and mast positioning and rope attaching and center board placing, I would put the thing in the water for launch. I would then try to get a general direction of the wind and point the tip of my board away from where the wind was coming. Then I would start the process I have described above, this time with no instructor holding onto my board and no sister laughing hysterically at how dorky I looked. If the wind happened to be particularly strong that day there was a good chance that I would have to make this effort over a dozen times before actually pulling away from my parents’ dock. Also, if the wind was strong at the river’s edge, it was likely that it would be even stronger out in the middle, so once I got out that far it was sort of do or die.
On a windy day, it took all of my effort to go anywhere or even get back to the house. Sailors do what’s known as tacking, which is to complicated for me to explain with any degree of confidence, but basically if the wind is blowing toward where you want to go you’re fine, but if it is blowing in any other direction you have to make about twenty-five-and-a-half trapezoids and a couple of figure-eights to get back to point A. For a while, just not getting dumped off the board was my main focus and by the thirty-ninth time of being hurled head-first over the collapsing mast or being clothes-lined by a very fickle boom, the entire estuary was being exposed to the most foul and graphic streams of cursing this side of a Scorsese film. This was “WHY ME GOD?!!!” style cussing, and I was oblivious to how the wind, along with being my immediate tormentor, was also acting as a kind of communicator to all the shoreline residences along the Neuse. My parents’ neighbor mentioned this to my father once, and remarked that he was somewhat impressed with the creativity of my invectives. I sometimes imagine that he would see me start out from the dock and call a couple of buddies, break out some beer, and sit on his deck to watch the show. I sure put on a few good ones.
A couple of times the wind abandoned me when I was a half mile from shore. I would be clipping along at about a tenth of a knot, which was about the only speed I could maintain for any length of time, and then the sail would empty and I would just stop. There are a couple of things you can do when this happens, both of which are a pain-in-the-ass and make you want your five-hundred dollars back very badly. On the Neuse, I had the option of just getting off the board and walking home because it never gets any deeper than five feet for most of that segment. I could also turn the board around and move the sail back and forth which would painstakingly propel me toward my destination. I usually used a combination of these to get home where I would vow that I was through with sail-boarding forever. The next day would see me out again, stringing together new blasphemies and providing entertainment for the neighbors.
Until autumn brought colder weather I endured this ritual, and after a while I did get somewhat competent. Once or twice, the wind conditions were such that I was able to tack across the river and back a couple of times in a morning. This made the purchase vaguely justifiable, but when I returned inland to start school, I rarely had the opportunity to use the wind-surfer again. I sold it a couple of years later to, ironically, my parents’ neighbor. Looking back, it was a mistake of youth to buy it, but I have good memories of that time when my parents had a house on the Neuse, and the wind-surfer plays a large part in those recollections.