This morning, while looking for something else, I came across this old mimeographed single page. So I retyped to share with you. I am wondering if anyone has seen this and might know the author.
“A POWER SO PRIMITIVE”
Why do you sail the boy asked. He was a stranger, watching me make sail on our little pot. Put a motor on that boat, he said, and you'll get there faster and a lot straighter. I would, I agreed, but that wasn't the idea. I sail because I like it, I told him. It was a limp explanation. But how do you explain the odd mixture of muscle and delicacy, science and instinct, turmoil and utter peace that is sailing? How when your luffing main is thundering at you?
I have heard it said that the sailor enjoys his mastery over nature, which is pure rot. He doesn't master nature; he accommodates himself to it, uses it, borrows an atom of its infinite power – and keeps himself braced for its dynamite kick of retaliation.
Man in a sailboat is a juggler, balancing a subtle array of forces to gain forward motion. He pits ballast, inert and human, against the wind's buffet. He constantly adjusts the angle of sail to wind for maximum drive, spills wind in the vicious puffs, calculates leeway, tide and current, adjusts his centerboard for hull balance. And sometimes the juggler comes unglued, the pieces crash to the stage around him and he is a humble and wet clod again. Perhaps in these flatulent times, this is why we sail: for the rich, humbling, unpredictable man testing, elemental, infinitely subtle variety of it.
I told the boy none of this. He watched me sweat up the jib halyard, cast off and slip away. He still looked skeptical, wondering, perhaps, why a grown man would mess about with a power so primitive in the age of the atom.
“A POWER SO PRIMITIVE”
Why do you sail the boy asked. He was a stranger, watching me make sail on our little pot. Put a motor on that boat, he said, and you'll get there faster and a lot straighter. I would, I agreed, but that wasn't the idea. I sail because I like it, I told him. It was a limp explanation. But how do you explain the odd mixture of muscle and delicacy, science and instinct, turmoil and utter peace that is sailing? How when your luffing main is thundering at you?
I have heard it said that the sailor enjoys his mastery over nature, which is pure rot. He doesn't master nature; he accommodates himself to it, uses it, borrows an atom of its infinite power – and keeps himself braced for its dynamite kick of retaliation.
Man in a sailboat is a juggler, balancing a subtle array of forces to gain forward motion. He pits ballast, inert and human, against the wind's buffet. He constantly adjusts the angle of sail to wind for maximum drive, spills wind in the vicious puffs, calculates leeway, tide and current, adjusts his centerboard for hull balance. And sometimes the juggler comes unglued, the pieces crash to the stage around him and he is a humble and wet clod again. Perhaps in these flatulent times, this is why we sail: for the rich, humbling, unpredictable man testing, elemental, infinitely subtle variety of it.
I told the boy none of this. He watched me sweat up the jib halyard, cast off and slip away. He still looked skeptical, wondering, perhaps, why a grown man would mess about with a power so primitive in the age of the atom.
