Essays/Poems
Essays / Poems:
Reflections on The Spirit of Sailing, by McCabe Coolidge
THE SPIRIT OF SAILING: A Celebration of Sea and Sail
By Michael Kahn, Courage Books,
2004
I purchased The Spirit of Sailing as a Christmas present for myself in 2006. It was just a year after my wife and I moved from the coast of
I threw a couple of more logs into the wood stove, sat back down in my rocker and turned another page. Small boats, fast sleek sloops, lines and sails, all in black and white. I could feel the pull of the tides and the visual images of wooden boats I had owned, especially the old 20’ racing Flying Dutchman sailboat that just strained at the mainsail when a gust would sweep by.
A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind. Webb
I’m a lucky guy. I still have passion in my life. One is going into my studio/gallery and throwing pots, trimming them, then wood firing them in my little kiln next to our cabin. Another is writing about pottery, water and boats. Maybe my passion for sailing could be the metaphor of my life.
There are no lakes in my county and the coast is a six hour drive away. When I’m iced in or snowed in, I go the bookcase and pull out The Spirit of Sailing, ready for a photo of a classic wooden boat or a quote that transports me back to the sea.
Ships are the nearest things to dreams that hands have made. Robert N. Rose
Twenty-five years ago, I went on a sabbatical to the North Carolina Mariners’ Museum in Beaufort. I needed a change of pace and I wanted to learn how to repair my old wooden sailboat, a 19’ Lightning. Jeffrey, the master boat builder looked her over and said, “Mate, she’s too far gone to repair. Stay here for the summer and I’ll teach you how to build a real sailing vessel.” Jeffrey, a Brit, had apprenticed himself in
Four of us showed up as students that summer at a converted aluminum airplane hanger across the street from Turner Creek where a number of old hand built
Hot! Oh boy was it was hot that summer! Jeffrey taught us to build two small sailing dinghies with hand tools. I remember the sweat, the scent of sawdust, learning and relearning how to sharpen my chisel and finally at lunchtime walking out the dock to catch a breeze. On Saturdays, I’d take my eight year old daughter out on the creek in a Sunfish and teach her how to sail, figuring out both the winds and tides. On Sunday mornings, I’d get up early and ride my bike with my fishing pole over the bridge to throw a line into the
A man must be obsessed by something, I suppose. A boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. E.B. White
I grew up in the 1950’s surrounded by wooden boats on
Every Memorial Day, in went the docks, the boat lifts and then the boats. The engines were choked followed by several pulls on the rope and wham!, those Johnsons, Everudes and Mercurys started up and streaked down the lake. In the midst of all this activity, a lone man stood along the shore, a pipe in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, his boat turned upside down at the edge of the lake. It was a Lightning and the man’s name was Alex Carlin. He had three sons. They did not own a motorboat. He taught his kids, one by one how to sail that Lightning. On Sundays, one of the boys would be at the tiller while Alex took care of the main and the jib and sailed across the lake to Higgins Lake Regatta and won every race.
As an eight year old, I’d walk down and watch him. He scraped, he sanded, he painted, then sanding lightly and then carefully laid on another coat. He didn’t seem to notice me. The pipe in his mouth, his hands working stern to bow along the wonderful lines of that boat. I stared, in a trance. Later I learned that during the winter season he was a hired captain in sailboat races around
Michael Kahn, the author and photographer of The Spirit of Sailing grew up along the coast of
My dad took his vacation the first two weeks of August. When I was twelve, he said,
“Son, let’s go over to the marina, there is something I want to show you.”
We jumped into his Mercury station wagon, our English Setter in the far back and set off. We wound down a dirt road past a number of tin roofed buildings and stopped in front of what appeared to be someone’s large white garage. We parked the car and walked up to the garage while the dog headed into the woods, hot on the trail of something, probably a chipmunk. My dad pushed the sliding door, on trolleys, sideways, which allowed the sunlight to glance in.
“I want you to look at this,” he motioned to me, pointing at a flat red and white small sailboat, “This is a sailfish, do you like it?”
I nodded slightly, wondering what he was getting at.
“Look, he pointed over in the corner, “There’s the mast, and the sail. Just right for a boy, don’t you think?”
I nod again.
“I’ve watched you go down to Alex Carlin’s. Maybe this boat would be a good way for you to begin sailing.” He stepped back.
I knelt down, felt the flat plywood, gazed at the varnished centerboard and tiller.
“You mean, this is mine? You’re buying it for me?”
“You bet, let’s see if we can push it into the back of the station wagon. Give me a hand.”
Like Michael Kahn, I was hooked. I taught myself how to sail. And over the years, I fiberglassed the bottom of that Sailfish just to have one more summer to sail her. My dad gave her away the year I graduated from college.
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part. Herman Broch.
In the Spring of 2007, I did what I had vowed never to do again. I bought another wooden sailboat. I blame this on Michael Kahn and The Spirit of Sailing. This time it was a 13’ Herreschoff/White Catspaw Dinghy. Built by a master boat builder living near
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain
While living on a sailboat in
Oh the wind, oh those deep, deep blue blue waters, oh the snorkeling and those dark green sentinels of islands. Those protected anchorages inside the coral reefs. The spearing of fish, eating on the deck, gazing at the Tahitians. But too soon, we flew back to
For all at last return to the sea- to ocean, the river, the lake… the beginning and the end. Rachel Carson
It’s mid-April, 2008 now and we have taken the plastic off the windows, opened the doors and done some spring cleaning. I’ve recently discovered Claytor Lake, two counties over, a dammed up thirteen mile portion of the New River, a river so old that it twists and turns north and then west cutting through the Appalachians and the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi.
I’m picturing me on
So if I take off now, my wife Karen won’t miss me for an hour or two. By then I’d be there, rowing out the cove into the main body of the lake, setting the oars aside, putting up the boom on the bow and then rigging the spritsail!
Alex Kahn would say “Yes!” Alex Carlin would nod his head, take the pipe out of his mouth and watch me, that slight grin on his face. I’d be home before dark. It’s only an hour’s drive.
To me, nothing is more beautiful than a sailboat underway in fine weather and to be on that sailboat is to be as close to heaven as I expect to get. It is unalloyed happiness. Robert Rose.
I’ve just turned sixty-five. The fever of sailing has not subsided. What theology I have about eternity can be summed up in a few phrases, a few images. A wooden boat slicing through the waves, me leaning out, tacking into the wind, maybe toward the further shore but maybe the water is the ocean, the horizon limitless.
EMPTY BOWLS PROJECT
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
Tao te Chung.
From a headline in the Floyd County News, “The Empty Bowls Project made $4700 for the Backpack Project. Thanks to the 15 planners, the 101 volunteers and the 281 donors who made this project a success!”
When my wife, Karen and I moved into the mountains of Southwestern Virginia we were excited by the music and art of rural Floyd County. We rented gallery space at the Jacksonville Art Center where I threw pots and sold them. Karen makes little books out of homemade paper and told heroic women stories to teenage girls.
We were doing well but something was missing. Where were all the potters that we had heard about before we moved up to Floyd? My pottery experience had always been in a community setting, working alongside other potters. But in Floyd County, potters lived miles away isolated from each other.
As I was musing about this one spring afternoon, a friend walked by and mentioned that she was going down to the New River Community Action (NRCA) to work on the ‘Backpack Project.’ I had never heard of it. She told me that students in the Floyd School System didn’t have enough to eat during the weekend, and that over fifty per/cent of school children qualified for free breakfasts and lunches. But what about the weekends?
New River Community Action came up with a great idea. Backpacks! They started buying backpacks and filling them with food. Within a couple of months over 60 students had signed up to pick up their backpacks on Friday and return them to the school on Monday. But this program had no funding and more kids are signing up.
“Aha!” I said to myself. “That’s it! Empty Bowls Project for Floyd County.” When I lived in North Carolina I had contributed many soup bowls to various Art Councils for their Empty Bowls Program. Maybe it was time we did this in Floyd County.
Karen and I invited a dozen people, artists, community volunteers and the NRCA executive director to come to a planning session. We quickly hooked up Empty Bowls and the Backpack Program and it just took off. Eight months later on Sunday, March 9 2008, a cold, blustery winter day, over 250 women, men and children showed up to pick out their bowl, donated by one of twenty potters. They walked up stairs and chose from 17 different homemade soups, the Italian Wedding soup was one of the favorites. A dozen different homemade breads, brown bread being a highlight. Several dessert selections made by students from the high school Culinary Arts Program, sweetened and unsweetened tea from Hardies. While everyone ate they were entertained by local musicians. Everything was donated. The tickets to buy the bowls were sold out two weeks before the event.
Karen was the emcee but soon took on the mantle of ‘huckster.’ We already had received $3100 for the sale of the bowls. But she stood up during lunch (11:30a.m. to 2:30p.m.) and challenged the diners to contribute more. They emptied their pockets for $1600 more.
Empty Bowls. It was like folks in the county were waiting for this, knowing that there were families living on the edge. So they came and filled up the “Hayloft Room,’ of the old dairy barn, now the Jacksonville Art Center. These folks had a hunger too. A hunger to do something. When they started coming and saw three tables filled with 281 bowls, they were bowled over. Gratefulness began early and expectations were high. Our planning group just gave folks an opportunity to give.
What did we do right? Started eight months early. Googled ‘empty bowls’ and discovered what other villages and cities were doing. Formed little small working sub-groups: soups, facilities, publicity, breads, desserts, and bowls. A local potter and I volunteered to come up with all those bowls. Here’s how we did it: First I contacted the Blue Ridge Potters Guild and begged them for bowls. At our annual big sale in mid-October they brought their bowls with them- small, medium and large. (The small ones it turned out were a boon. Children from six to twelve years of age proudly picked out their bowl.) We also scheduled two ‘throw-ins,’ inviting local potters to spend a morning together throwing pots. Eight potters did this. Each threw about twenty bowls. We later trimmed and fired them. Then we called up all the potters in the county and asked for more bowls, another sixty came in this way. (Seconds are good). Then three of us in January threw and threw until we had 281 bowls.
What else did we do right? Two of us went to the October county ministers meeting and asked them to sell tickets to the members of their congregation. They went for it. In January when we began distributing the tickets, half of them went to the churches. So we had a fine cross section of people showing up that Sunday morning after church to share soup and bread together.
Thirdly, we invited the local newspaper in October to begin writing features and taking photos of our backpacks, our pots, our committee, the teenagers making desserts, etc. Every month there was a news item about Empty Bowls.
Fourth. Karen facilitated the monthly planning meetings which lasted 50 minutes and we furnished homemade soup and bread for the luncheon meeting. She made the meetings fun and short.
Fifth. Because we had never done this before, all suggestions were welcome. We didn’t tell people what to do but encouraged them to find their own way. In our small county, there are lots of informal networks, (book clubs, quilting circles, etc.) Word of mouth generated gobs of volunteers.
What’s next? Our studio had a display of backpacks and empty bowls with news stories and photos. Shoppers came in and asked about the project and then we heard about another hunger. Young children and snacks.
Becky Thompson, a kindergarten teacher told us some students in the kindergarten and first grade classes came to school without a snack. So when the mid-morning break came, four or five kids in each class sat there without a snack and watched the other kids eat and drink.
Becky motions to a book shelf, near her desk, “I go to the grocery store and stock up for them, but it’s getting more and expensive and some teachers don’t have the money to do this.”
We named this new project, ‘Healthy Snacks for Hungry Kids.’ We started in April with a small planning group and now we are weekly supplying one hundred boxes of fruit juices and one hundred healthy snacks. Third, fourth and fifth grade teachers have heard about this new project and have asked for help in securing snacks for their students as they go into two weeks of testing.
In the fall, we will expand this project to other rural elementary schools. The local health food store and Food Lion are donating some snacks. One of our members works in the emergency room of a nearby hospital and he’s recruiting donations from the doctors and nurses who work with him. A woman who baked ‘brown bread’ for the Empty Bowls Project and whose son is in the Army stationed in Faluga, Iraq asked for school supplies for the children in his neighborhood. She organized that project, heard about us, recruited her next door neighbor and they are off and running.
Karen and I are grateful. We started with our empty hands and an idea. An idea that people could respond to and it just went slam bang. Our “empty bowls” can become whatever we want. Feel free to contact us for more information.
McCabe's work is published through many magazines. The best way to find his work online is to "Google" him.
SPOTTING DEER
the gravel pit
a long curving dirt path
veering off from the ‘old dump road’
at dusk, moody mist
covers the water
while frogs croon and croak
told my dad,
going to look for deer,
he smiled, handed me the keys
to his ‘60 Ford, wood on the side, station wagon
back seats that fold down
we stay in the front seat
windows open
wind waffles through northern Michigan pine
we will separate soon
no words to convey the mystery of desire
how it threads up calves, lodges in thighs
empties the belly,
first, a button unbuttoned
light touch of a few fingers
behind the neck
no words to convey that ache
tightening around my heart
summer over, Labor Day
just school, long walks with my best friend
Rip, the English Setter
along needled logging trails
summer job over, basketball,
homework, but no Marianne
she shifts toward the window,
I turn the ignition key
Sonny James singing on the radio,
‘Young Love’
defroster on, windshield clears
deep dark pines, a few stars
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