Manhattan

Manhattan and then Manhasset – that’s what’s on the agenda today. If we didn’t care about sailing, we’d have a perfect day for it; sunny, not too hot, a little breeze. Unfortunately, that means we will have to motor our way there, but at least we will have good visibility. This leg of the trip was perhaps my favorite of all of last summer and I’m really looking forward to doing it again.

It’s a busy day in the New York Harbor. We pass or are passed by all kinds of ferries, barges and sail boats. A tug boat pushes by that is just like the one in a book we both read as kids but can’t remember the name of. Wasn’t it “Tuffy the Tugboat”? We make a special side trip over to the Statue of Liberty before heading up the East River, past Wall Street and the financial district. We can see the new Freedom Tower still under construction at the site of the World Trade Center and Rick and I have a debate about how high the finished building will ultimately be.

Once in the river, we can see a number of familiar buildings– the Empire State building of course, and then the Chrysler and Met Life buildings.

As we pass the United Nations and the Trump Tower, we can’t help noticing a tiny stump of guano caked rock in the middle of the river, upon which a weathered sign proclaims “U Thant Island”, named for the Secretary General of the U.N. in the sixties. We later learn that it’s actually a manmade island, the unintentional result of a landfill buildup during the construction of a trolley tunnel. Its official name is Belmont Island, but nobody ever calls it that. Some hippie types made it green in the seventies, turned it into a bird sanctuary and started calling it U Thant Island. I guess the name stuck. The juxtaposition of this pathetically teeny scrabble of waste rock and weeds named for a world advocate for peace, against the backdrop of giant majestic buildings named for corporations and tycoons leaves one to wonder about the state of our civilization.

As wonderful as it is, the trip up the East River this year is not the magical experience it was last time. I know it loomed large in my memory, and possibly no reality could live up to those images in my head, but part of the magic of that first trip was the newness of it all. I had never thought of, let alone seen New York in such a way before, pretty much ignoring the fact that Manhattan is an island and as such is surrounded by water. Seeing all of those unthinkably tall, familiar buildings from the viewpoint of a tiny sailboat was a mind-blowing experience that simply can’t be repeated a second time around with the same affect. Christmas is just not the same when you’re not seven anymore. Loss of innocence aside, it’s still a pretty cool ride.

After the drama of city views dies down, we spend the afternoon coursing up the Long Island Sound, motoring all the way to Manhasset. We grab a mooring ball and hang out at the boat for awhile. Rick wants to go for a swim, but I just don’t feel like it; I’m feeling rather depressed and deflated. This feeling has been coming on gradually since before we left Baltimore, but I have been unable to find its source. After chatting it out with Rick for a while, I might have a few answers. For one thing, I think the stress of the trip is finally getting to me. Most of our difficulties with the boat have been figured out by now, but we both remain somewhat shell-shocked as a result of them. We jump and startle every time an alarm goes off or there is an unfamiliar noise - “What’s THAT!!!!?” It most often turns out to be something innocuous like the GPS unit telling us we’ve arrived at our destination, or my Kindle telling us it's low on batteries, but the skittishness is getting tiresome.

But the real problem turns out to be something else, something harder to get a hold of. The problem is that I feel guilty about Rick having bought this boat. We have always had a very egalitarian relationship when it comes to money – we split everything fifty-fifty and even though we are married, we keep our finances separate. This worked great a decade ago when we made about the same amount of money, but his salary has continued to rise over time while mine has stagnated and then was pretty severely cut this last year. The economic downturn has had a devastating effect on the symphony orchestra business in general, and has added to an already underperforming financial picture at the BSO. When Rick decided that we needed a bigger boat to accommodate both of us, he knew of course that I couldn’t afford the extra expense and he footed the entire bill himself. He told me he wanted to own the boat outright and that he wanted this boat to be HIS, but I knew he was just saying that so I wouldn’t feel guilty.  Now that he has bought the thing and all these systems seem to be going belly-up, I feel responsible for his choice and helpless to do anything about it. If I can’t be a full partner in the buying of the boat, at least I could be an equal contributor in the upkeep and running of the boat… Except that I don’t know a damn thing about any of this and when things go wrong all I can do is sit around and wring my hands.

I’m glad that we’re finally talking about this because as it turns out, I was wrong about a lot of my assumptions. (Unfortunately I’m right about my low salary, darn it.) First of all, surprise, surprise, Rick is very happy that he has bought this boat. Yes, this PARTICULAR boat. First and foremost, he loves the way she sails. The old boat was a slug in light air and not all that fast even in a good blow. He also enjoys the way the cockpit is cut low so he can feel close to the water even in a bigger boat. He loves the boat’s “shippy” solidity and the obvious craftsmanship of its makers. The boat is well insulated and ventilated, making for a very dry and quiet interior, and yes, he likes the extra space along with the steadiness of the movement that make for a more enjoyable experience for us as a couple. He tries to reassure me about the systems on the boat; some of what has happened has been due to operator error or unfamiliarity with the systems and not due to inherent problems within them. The problems that were real, he says, were actually pretty minor and he has managed to fix most of them already. Apparently when Rick says things like, “Uh-oh, THAT’S not good!”, or better yet, “If we can’t figure this out the boat’s gonna SINK!”, he’s just thinking out loud and I need to step back and take what he says with a giant grain of salt.

Probably most importantly, Rick assures me that in fact, he wasn’t doing me any favors by buying the boat entirely on his own dime. He really does want this boat to be HIS. He wants to be able to make any final decisions about it on his own -perhaps amid consultations with me, but ultimately he wants to have the final say. He wants to be able to go out on his own and not feel badly about it when he does. Basically, he wants his Man-Cave. Even if I could have contributed half the money for this boat, he would have bought it on his own. And even if I and my proneness to sea-sickness weren’t part of the equation, this is the boat he would have bought.

We take the dinghy in to a dockside restaurant called Louie’s on the Bay for a great seafood dinner. I feel so much better now – freer to enjoy the perks of being married to a sailor without actually needing to be one myself. It’s going to be a great trip.