Open water
I was in Santa Ana for the week for work stuff, and as one does in Santa Ana I found myself spending a lot of the time on a boat.
I was talking with a broker — not the one who owned the particular boat we were on, but one who owned a boat — about how he liked the area. He’d lived in Orange County for eight years now: before that he’d lived in San Diego, and before that Oklahoma City, and before that Santa Fe. And in each of those places he found things that he loved — and he loved the time he spent in those places, he assured me, and wouldn’t change them for anything in the world — but each of them were marked by a certain nagging feeling that something was missing.
He didn’t know if it was the area, or how he was spending his time, or his relationships with others. He tried changing all of those things, like an algebra student messing with different variables in an equation: nothing quite ever resolved itself. And he had a good life in all of those places, he said, and he’s never really considered himself unhappy — just afflicted with something like an itch on his back.
I asked if he still felt like that now, if he had managed to scratch his itch.
He smiled and said no — or at least not most of the time. He had his qualms with the area: the food wasn’t great, even if you knew where to look. The culture was — (he paused) — a little consumer-y. And sometimes he didn’t feel like he really fit in.
But, he said, it was the first time he’s owned a boat. Before buying the boat he had taken a bunch of trips on friends’ boats, and was always struck by something wonderful he couldn’t quite articulate, that being on a boat was the first time he was able to quell that feeling of mild discontentment, to feel truly relaxed and unburdened.
I offered a couple clichés as possible explanations: was it the vastness of the ocean? The tranquility of being able to sit and laze and relax without worrying about the rest of the world? The intimacy and pride of owning and maintaining a craft?
No, he said. It was nothing like that. It was just that he loved being on a boat.
He was worried, he admitted, that owning a boat would dispel the effect, that part of the mystique of its singular experience was its being slightly out of grasp. And for the first few times he went out on his boat — Long Journey — he braced himself a little for the magic to end, for the duties and travails of boat maintenance to outweigh his love for the thing, for the sea to lose its sway.
But it never happened.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you spend some time out on open water.