Rocky (before it sank in SF Bay...a whole nother story)
A blog is supposed to be a 250-500 words expressing a viewpoint, opinion, or offering information. Tonight I have no standpoints, opinions, or information. So, I’m going to pass the buck on to my friend Matt J. This is a story about our disaster of a sailing trip back in college. He is a way better writer than I am so I’m taking the easy way out this week. My professors want me to be professional, my readers want to be entertained, I want to go to bed. On that note, Windblown a Memoir. I hope it lends some credibility to my self appointed position of fun provider and adventure master mind. If you like it thanks for reading. If you didn’t, next week I will talk about cultural delusion or eco friendly hot air balloons or something else more academic. Hang in there.
Windblown: A Memoir
“Eight…nine…ten. We have ten… That should do right?”
“One more. We’ll go through ten easy. Grab a reserve.”
We were going sailing for a weekend. One weekend. There were only five of us, and somehow the collective logic of the crew had lead us to be standing in front of a shopping cart boasting eleven thirty packs of beer. If shopping carts had maximum occupancy limits, we were neglecting them. Ours stood like the leaning tower of Pisa, and the law of gravity had it pathetically skidding along the tile floor of the grocery store like an Iditarod sled being pulled by a team of three-legged Chihuahuas.
We steered through the worried stares of the cashiers and hired a few bellmen to usher our beer mountain out to the parking lot, where our sailboat sat on top of wounded trailer brakes. After spending an hour trying to fix them, we finally hit the road. I’m not saying they were repaired, I’m just saying we hit the road. For the first few miles, the sound of the trailer shifting without the help of brakes was concerning, but we got used to it, the way you get used to turbulence on a long flight. Plus, we used some duct tape.
Pulling the boat was our magenta van. Not the family, soccer mom kind of van. It was the hippie, shady, middle-aged-man-offering-candy-to-kids kind of van. Equipped with shag carpets and seats, fluorescent lights lined the ceiling and floor. It was like a dance room at a frat party, except we had more beer. Creeping slowly down the coast, we were on our way. Next stop, the harbor of Santa Barbara.
Matt is driving. One hand holding a beer, the other hand controlling the steering wheel when his knees got tired. There’s a reserve beer in the cup holder to his right. This is our captain, and I wouldn’t want anybody else. He is devoted, confident, and has this contagious, carefree aura that seems to forbid anybody around him from taking a situation too seriously. He was ready to make a memory we would never forget, and though we were ignorant to anything of, about, or even rhyming with sailing, we were right there behind him
Jarad is in the passenger seat, a beer to his lips and two in his sweatshirt. Sean and Tony took the middle row. Their feet and arms rested on the several thirty-pack towers we formed on the floor of the van. The already opened pack was in the middle of the two, and they were in charge of providing the reloads, mostly to themselves. Im holding down the back, drinking my sippy-cup of milk. A bottle of water to my right if I get dehydrated. When I drink heavily, I can down up to three beers like its nothing. The rest of the guys knew this, and still agreed on three hundred and thirty beers as a reasonable supply.
We got to Isla Vista, which I think when translated means ‘parking sucks here’. Especially when you have a boat. Mostly because we didn’t need just an open spot, we needed an entire fucking parking lot. Luckily we found one within walking distance of Freebirds and Del Playa, which, if you asked the inebriated, are the two happiest places on earth. The lot was at a church. God frowned.
We spent the rest of the partying. Well, we ate a burrito, pissed in a bush, stole a pillow from a kid’s house, and threw beer cans at drunk girls. In that order. That’s partying in Isla Vista, right? We figured our job there was done, so we drove to the harbor, cussed out the guy working there for making us pay, and posted up for our nights sleep.
Tony and Sean got to sleep in the van, because they had the poorest chance of climbing into a boat in their condition. Matt, Jarad, and I crawled into the cabin of the sailboat. It had one triangle shaped bed upfront, molding with the contour of the boat, and two narrow benches lining the sides of the only official room of the boat. Matt took the triangle. Jarad took a bench. I slept in a coffin. Well, it was more like one of those body-drawers they have walls made out of at mortuaries. For some reason, there where two of these in the boat. I didn’t know if it was in case of an at-sea death, or to actually sleep in, but I figure either way I could make due. I woke up periodically throughout the night pounding at the roof of whatever the fuck I was sleeping in, sometimes with my head, because I felt like I was being buried alive. You know when you’re at the beach and you have your friends bury you in the sand, and its funny and entertaining at first but sooner or later you feel like your in a straight jacket and start to go ape shit because you can’t budge and you think a hermit crab might be crawling up your ass? That’s how I slept.
Finally morning came. I woke up with a figure standing somewhere above me, and I was pretty sure he was holding a wooden stake. Fuck, he thought I was a vampire. Before I started to defend myself that I wasn’t Dracula, and this wasn’t a coffin I was sleeping in, I realized it was just Matt holding some sailing gadget. Maybe it indeed was a wooden stake. I didn’t know what you needed to sail. But I was ready to find out. We woke everybody up and lined up outside the boat waiting for our captain’s orders. We had to prep the boat for the water.
“Jarad, swing the jib and crank the gullyhoo. Tony, Matt… climb the penlip and feather the bamperton. Sean, check the gargoyle hamper, make sure its not getting too hot.”
What the fuck was he talking about? Never had been sailing before, I thought step one was talking like you were schizophrenic. Eventually, Captain Matt was able to convey to us what we were supposed to do, and we started swinging more jibs and feathering more bampertons than you would ever believe. Soon enough, the sail was up and the boat was ready. Matt backed the trailer down the ramp, separated the boat from the trailer, and drove the van back out of the water while simultaneously pushing the sailboat into the Pacific Ocean. The rest of us just held on to ropes attached to the boat, looking like retarded toddlers holding the strings of balloons some sympathetic waitress gave us. We were ready to let go of our strings. To watch our balloon sail slowly, farther and farther out of vision’s capabilities, until its destination was left up only to imagination. We were ready to disappear.
Matt ran down the dock and jumped eagerly into the boat. We threw our ropes in and followed. Matt grabbed the spot in the back of the boat, starting the engine and aiming our vessel towards the Channel Islands: our target. The rest of us crawled around the boat, examining it like a dog circling the grass finding a perfect place to lie down.
We were manning a twenty-seven foot Balboa sailboat named “Rocky”. The centerboard was broken and stabilizing our sail was a series of wrought cables that looked like bad hair days. The radio, the one used to shout “mayday! mayday!” into as a last resort in movies, was a jigsaw puzzle of shattered plastic on the floor of the cabin. The boat should have been called “The Foreshadow,” but our captain wasn’t concerned, so I tried not to be.
There wasn’t much wind yet, so we had to use our motor to get as far as we could off the coast, which brought up a question.
“So, what if we never get wind, and have to use our motor the whole time, how far will our gas take us?”
“No worries, man, we got a full reserve ready. Jarad, its under your seat, just make sure it’s there.”
Jarad got up and turned over the cushion he was just sitting on, looking for some sort of gas container, but it was taking him a while to come up with it. He reached his arm deeper into the seat, fishing for anything, until he finally got a bite.
“Thank God.” He said, pulling the huge gas canister out of the seat. But the sun shined through the translucent container, revealing that it was maybe one-sixth full. Jarad shook the gas to emphasize its scarcity, “So what damage are these few drops going to do?”
Matt shrugged, “Honestly, I don’t know what kind of mileage this thing gets.”
My captain’s confidence stopped being so contagious, we seemed to lack everything necessary for survival. Our saving grace was a handheld GPS that I as far as I’m concerned was accidentally brought along because somebody thought it was a Gameboy. Inputting our location, it used our current speed, which volleyed between five and eight miles per hour, to gauge how far time-wise we were from our destination, the Channel Islands. According to our GPS, we had six hours to kill.
The back of the boat, the stern, had three cushions that formed to make a “U”. The cushion forming the bottom of the U was split in half by the motor, and Matt spent most of his time there. The other two cushions forming the prongs of the U met a wall at a ninety-degree angle. That short wall ended where it met the bow, which was also the ceiling of the cabin. The open end of the U turned into three steep, downward steps into the cabin, which was full of our bags, blankets, pillows, food, and alcohol. Along with the thirty packs, we had three bottles of wine. Two were cheap bottles of Chardonnay in case we ran through our beer too quick. The third was a Sauvignon Blanc from a winery in France. This was in case we encountered a ship, or an entire island, populated by bikini-clad girl pirates. We calculated this at only having about a forty percent chance of happening. But just in case, Sauvignon Blanc from France.
Our stern, our cushioned U, is where we would spend most of our time. After all of our individual exploring was done, we all grabbed spots on the cushions. I reached inside for the Coors Light and tossed everybody a beer. As soon as the first can was opened, Sean threw up over the side of the boat. The night before, he had drunk the majority of the downed thirty-pack, and didn’t get a good nights rest on the shag carpets of the van. He started feeling sick as soon as he saw the ocean. His right armpit hugged the thin plastic border lining the boat, his arm dangling overboard catching the occasion wave. His head buried quickly into the inside of his left arm’s elbow and his left hand clung desperately onto the metal railing. He didn’t say anything, just occasionally moved his head to rest on his other arm, but it was always close enough to the edge of the boat to puke again. Which he would prove over and over. The rest of us felt bad. Sean looked like shit, so we tried to make him feel better by calling him a little bitch and continuously offering more beer.
The rest of us passed around stories, enjoyed the beautiful weather, and ate the little food we ended up bringing. I made tuna sandwiches for everybody, which was fucking annoying on a rocking boat. I was curled in a ball, opening cans, managing the bread, and spreading mayo, all while trying not to drop anything in the water. Depending on which thing I dropped, I would have either fed, or killed marine life. Mostly, I would just drop extra tuna, which I hoped some live tuna would come along and eat for irony’s sake. It wouldn’t matter though, because I didn’t know what the fuck a live tuna looked like. It probably looked like a salmon. Which probably looked like a trout. Which I think are the only other kinds of fish in the world. I offered a sandwich to Sean. He responded by dry heaving a bunch of times. I didn’t know how to take that. So I just ate his sandwich. The least he could of done was say “No, thanks.” I mean, I went through hell to make that sandwich.
Looking at Sean, I remember thinking that his face permanently hovering over the ocean must have been becoming familiar to the creatures below. That maybe they would even eventually surface to greet him because they were becoming so comfortable. And when they did, Sean would just puke on them.
Wind started picking up, and Captain Matt cut the engine.
“Enough of this motor bullshit. Lets Sail.”
He gave Tony a crank, which he would be in charge of for the remainder of the trip, and directed Jarad and me to the bow to start and raise the sail. Jarad and I were pulling all sorts of strings and pushing a bunch of metal around like two apes in a junkyard, looking at Matt for approval.
“How this?”
“No”
“Oh. Like this?”
“No, that’s not even part of the sail.”
“You’re not even part of the sail!”
“Just do the exact opposite of what you think might work.”
The secret combo. Tony tightened some gears on the sides of the boat with his crank, the sail caught wind, and we were headed towards the Channel Islands, gas-free.
An hour or so passed the halfway mark, we contemplated turning around. The ocean was, is, and always will be unfuckwitable, and we were fucking with it. Our destination was nothing but a series of black, irregular blotches on a GPS screen. That’s as much as we knew, and it’s tough to gauge which portion of darkness is going to turn out to be a harbor. I guess we just assumed we would find a port if we blindly sailed towards the islands, but we finally realized how the overwhelming majority of the islands had to be composed of rocky shoreline. Uncertainty of how much we could depend on our gas ration also infected the boat with skepticism. We called the Channel Islands earlier in the trip, when we still had cell phone service, to see how much gas would cost on the island—
“Hello, Channel Island State Park, how may I help you?”
“Yea, we’re heading your way on a sailboat, for no good reason at all, and we might just need to motor this sucker back. How much is gas over there?”
“We don’t have any gas.”
“Oh, well could I have the number of a place that has some.”
“No, I mean the Channel Islands altogether has no gas.”
“You have absolutely zero gas on the islands?”
“Correct sir, no gas at all.”
“Do you have cars?”
“Yes”
“Well, what do they run on, pixie dust?”
“We have no gas on the island, sir.”
Dick head. They had to have something, but we would never get it. Still, we knew we couldn’t quit. We set out for bullets for our storytelling arsenal. Turning back, the story would only be about Sean’s weak stomach, and our weak hearts. We agreed to keep going. To bring back a story worth our pride. Sean grunted. I think he was excited, which was nice to see.
I hadn’t noticed so much until this point, but the collection of empty cans was growing steadily. I thought maybe people just held their liquor well on the ocean, because everybody seemed pretty sober. Then Matt got into his boxers, grabbed a spear gun, and jumped off the side of the boat. It all made sense now.
I drank a total of a half of beer our entire trip. The biggest reason being that if we had to fend for our lives at some point, I thought one sober kid could come in handy. The second reason is I was secretly becoming sick myself. I had to sit in a position where I was looking directly out the back of our boat, or my stomach would begin to turn. In fear of becoming green-faced and ridiculed, in fear of becoming Sean, I sat with my back to the cabin and tried as hard as I could to smile and laugh and joke with the rest of the guys. Finally, we reached Channel Islands. I could let my body recalibrate.
We were greeted by the jagged shoreline we belatedly anticipated. It was an iceberg of grass, rocks, and dirt. Icebergs and boats have never shook hands. We sailed six hours, and the pot at the end of our rainbow held only discouragement. We were forced to shimmy along the coarse outline of the island until we met a break in the wall, until we met a cove. Unfortunately for us, it was already taken.
The other boat was a towering, sparkling pirate ship looking thing made out of one-upmanship. Silver and gold accented the features of the boat, and the sails were swollen with pride. The USS don’t-you-wish-you-were-us. We looked like a three-wheeled ice cream truck putting into a Bentley showroom, our music sadly slowing down to a melancholy death. The proud aristocrats aboard were shooting us varieties of the “you know you don’t belong here” look. Maybe we didn’t. If we anchored, we would no doubt wander and crash into the other boat while we slept.
Too many variables battled against our desire to camp there for the weekend. The only safety we knew of was the land on the other side of the Santa Barbara channel, and it became clear we would have to make that trek again. Jarad laid back and dug his fists into his eyes. Matt stood with one hand on the motor, one hand rubbing his face. Sean vomited on a sea lion. All of us getting ready for another six hours. We took a deep breath and flipped the boat around.
As we departed, I stood at the back of the boat and finally took some time to really look at where we just were. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice, it may have been the frustration of the situation, or the snooty pirate, but the place was beautiful. Especially at this time of day. The sun was almost at the end of its descent, as it acted like a warm, glowing buoy treading in playful wisps of the Pacific. Its candle-like blaze bounced off the slippery cobblestones of the island’s beach and accented the velvet red flowers that hung off the scaling earth walls like chandeliers. From this far the pirate ship didn’t look arrogant; instead it was at home, an eagle hovering over an echoing valley.
Jarad snapped me out of my trance.
“Ho-ly Shit!”
I turned around.
Ahead of us were the literal rolling, salt-water hills of the Santa Barbara channel. The swells were only five or six feet, but I’ve never seen anything close to that. Jarad and I jumped onto the sail and started to raise it again. Tony grabbed the crank. Then he threw it into the ocean.
“Oh my God, bro, I’m so sorry I didn’t mean…” Matt interrupted him.
“It’s fine. We’ll be okay without it, just pull on the ropes as hard as you can and tie them off.”
This time, when the wind caught our sail, it did it with what sounded like vengeance. It was the sound a moist towel makes when your friend twists it up and whips you in the spirit of poolside shenanigans. Only this towel must have been huge. This was God’s poolside shenanigan. The boat was rocking up and down like it was nodding yes, but slowly as if with purpose. On the down nod, sometimes the bottom of our boat would slap loudly against the water beneath. God’s high-five. Though initially intimidating, we got used to the rocking, and were able to carry on casually. I stood on the bow, balancing myself with the mast, the center pole for the sail, pretending to surf the high seas. Jarad and Tony whipped out the portable grill and tried cooking some hot dogs. Sean puked on a hammerhead shark.
When I returned to the stern, we all huddled around the grill, trying to keep the hot dogs on. Despite our best efforts, they kept falling to the wet plastic ground. We would throw those ones at the groaning pile of clothes we called Sean. We had the Costco two thousand pack, so we could be wasteful with our ration.
“Check out that one!” Jarad pointed out in the distance. A wave came in that was at least eight feet. And then another. Until they were consistently larger swells.
“What?! Are you serious?!” Tony pointed out even farther. The next set coming in was ten feet tall.
It was getting too hard to act casual. To conceal concern.
The waves would raise us up to where we were able to look down ten feet on either side of the boat until we saw water. Then, they would lower us, until we could look up at ten-foot ocean walls on either side of us. Like riding radio frequency. Laughter was replaced by cringes as we embraced the power of the waves, and before I knew it I wasn’t having fun anymore. All I could see when I looked around me was a vicious, unpredictable militia of infinitely deep water. The salt-water peppered against my face like sand. If I ever tried to stand up, the sways would throw me across the boat into the metal railing, or into Sean, and I’d have to hold on to either to stay on board. I reached inside and threw my hand around frantically until I stumbled across the GPS. I was hoping it would tell me if these waves would calm down. It was then when I heard it.
It was the sound of a fencing sword cutting thing air. It was the sound of a cat fiercely scratching its claws across fiberglass. In reality, it was the sound of a cable snapping and recoiling. This particular cable held the sail in place. Instantly, the sail swung out of its position and whipped to the right side of the boat until it was perpendicular with us. Jarad and I looked at each other, scared shitless because we knew we had some sort of responsibility here. We looked at Matt, his hair getting thrown by wind and water, his feet shuffling to stay balanced.
“Swing it back!”
We were paralyzed
“Guys, I know its fucking crazy right now but you need to get that sail back if we’re going to make it out of here.”
Jarad made an attempt to get up, and I followed. When we found balance, we hugged the railings like missed relatives. I was on the left, Jarad was on the right. We slowly crawled up the sides of the boat to meet on the bow, where we both embraced the Mast, the pole that kept the sail erect. The pole that kept the sail parallel, the boom, the one attached to the cable, was behind Jarad. Somehow, we had to get this thing back. Jarad reached back for the boom, but quickly retreated to the mast. Our arms choking the metal, we gave each other looks confirming that what we were about to do might be the single most terrifying moment in our lives.
“You push, I’ll pull.”
Jarad nodded.
He leaned back and grabbed the boom. I leaned forward and did the same. We used half of the life left in us the move the sail. The other half was expended in the hand that was glued to the mast. The sail wouldn’t budge, and the waves were tossing our bodies against the mangled rope and metal. Occasionally the ocean would hurl my face toward the sail and cast a rope across my neck, rubbing and burning my skin when I was thrown the other direction. Finally, the boat tilted to the left far enough for us to bring the sail parallel once again.
“Now what!” We looked back at Matt, our eyes wide, our faces grimacing under the weight of the boom.
“Matt! Now what?! Now what the fuck we do?!”
He looked down at Tony.
“Tony…” Then he looked away. Pensive.
We were still waiting. Barely.
“Matt! We can’t hold this fucking thing forever! It wants to go back. What. The. Fuck. Do. We. Do!”
“Tony… will you…Ah…. Shit!” He didn’t know the next step. If he didn’t, we didn’t.
“It wants to go back Matt!” I caught eyes with him. He knew I was serious.
“Matt, we’re slipping… we can’t hold this thing much longer…we need to get the fuck down because we’re going to fall in. Do something, Matt. Help us.”
His eyes darted around the boat until they settled. A light bulb may as well have haloed over his head. He jumped off the motor and into the stern. Without somebody to control it, the motor whipped back and forth in the fury of the waves. In one swift motion, Matt grabbed a screwdriver and stabbed it through a hole in the end of the boom, as well as the piece of the boat the cable used to run through. He ripped open a roll of duct tape with his teeth and wrapped several layers around his custom fasten. He then handed the roll to Tony, told him to finish the job, and retreated to the back of the boat. The motor was flailing in the ocean like an angry fish at the end of a line. Matt grabbed the handle to wrestle it back to neutral.
It was without a doubt the single more impressive display of sailorship I’ve ever seen. Fuck Pirates of the Caribbean.
Matt’s ingenuity solved the problem of the sail. I wished it could have solved the problem of the ocean. Jarad and I were still glued to the mast while clutching each other’s shirts at the same time. Playing both hero and coward. We dearly missed ten-foot swells. Everything hitting us was now was between twelve and fifteen. To get back to the stern, we would have to scale the sides of the boat we shimmied up. There would be a point where half our bodies were hanging off the boat, dangling over the infinite blue beneath us. This temporary suspension was the closest I’ve ever been to death. If for one half-second, the ocean water created a lubricant under my grip on the already slippery metal railing, I’d fall into the most unforgivable force on earth. The waves would rapidly have their way with me, either sweeping me out into the vast and open loneliness of the Pacific, or against and under the hull of our boat. Either way, the conditions were unyielding to navigation, and the chance of whipping the boat around to save me would be about the same as me developing gills and a dorsal fin.
Neither Jarad or I would get half-way to the back of the boat before making the desperate jump back to the mast, throwing ourselves around the metal pole that became our safe haven. Our legs would swing back and forth as the sturdiness of our arms’ grip dictated life or death. We were flags in the wind, flapping at half-mast.
“Go through the trap door!” Matt yelled from the back.
“What?!”
“There’s a trap door in the floor of the bow, up a little way from where you’re standing!”
We slid across the boat and attached ourselves to the hatch in the floor. Behind the force of our hurried hands, the lid flew open, exposing the inside of the cabin briefly before slamming down violently once more. It wouldn’t stay open. It remained chattering like our cold and frightened teeth.
Jarad made the fall, his back scraping against the plastic as he descended. Biting my lip I crawled through after him, the hatch shuttering against my neck, back, and then ankles. I landed on a collapsed version of Jarad. We tumbled around until we found ground and made our way back towards the rest of the guys. When we reached the cabin, the floor held a foot of water, and all of our belongings.
We marched dizzily through the depressing swamp of dampened duffel bags and soggy bread. Dodging the plates and silverware firing out of the cabinets. Finally we escaped out of the cabin like a lucky pinball shot and landed on the cushions of the boat. I tucked my knees to my chest, grabbed the railing, bowed my head.
Exhausted, cold, and scared for my life, all I wanted to do was bask in silence, to close my eyes and somehow escape. I figured the rest of the crew would feel the same. And then there was Tony.
Tony was hammered, and through receiving the steadiest flow of alcohol out of the group, he turned into Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump. He held on the railing with one hand while his other held his ridiculous straw hat to his head. He wore aviator glasses, despite the fact that somewhere along our journey the sun had completely absorbed into the horizon, and it was alleyway-at-midnight dark. He alternated between kneeling on the bench and standing up, but either way would yell a cacophony of almost-words as the waves drenched him one after another.
“Yaaaaadoooooooooooo!! Weeeeeeehaaaaaayyyyyy!”
Although I was jealous of his liquid courage, I just wanted him to shut the fuck up. His level of comfort in such a situation, to me, seemed ominous. Like in cheesy horror movies where the brave and at-ease jock boldly ascends into a dark and maybe-haunted attic. Then his head rolls down the stairs.
“Tony. Get serious, bro.”
“Dude, this is awesome are you kidding?!”
“You’re not even scared at all? Look around you, man.”
“Haha! Haaaaaaaaaraaaaaaaah!! I’m loving it!”
The waves were hitting us with the consistency of an assembly line. Sometime the force would be so great that it would knock us sideways to where our sail would dip into the water. The ocean was, indeed, unfuckwitable. And Tony was laughing in its face.
“Bring it on!! Haha! You ain’t shit!”
“Just chill out, you’re making me nervous.”
“Pussy!”
“I think you’re just insane.”
“I think you’re just a PUSSY!”
“Ugh. Have another Tony. Have another.”
Tony finally settled down, and took his place on the cushions. He reduced his theatrics to a smile of content and let the rest of us gather.
I looked at Matt, asking for comfort with my eyes. He did his best by mouthing, “It’s all good,” bobbing his head up and down. The look on his face failed to mirror his message. It was the first time I read concern on Matt, the most carefree person I’d ever met.
I started talking to God. I don’t remember what I was saying as much as I remember hoping He remembered me. It had been a while since I sat down to talk with Him. I made a lot of promises, gave a lot of apologies, and asked for a few favors. Balance.
The next hour was defined in silence. When that silence broke, it shattered.
Bombs were exploding all around us. Panicked and confused, we awoke from our daydreams and tried to make sense of everything. They weren’t bombs at all. An army of dolphins surrounded us, weaving in and out of the ocean. In numbers well above fifty, they danced gracefully among the waves we perceived as chaos, defying the imminent death swallowing our boat. It was amazing, our heads spun trying to take it all in. Like galloping beacons of hope, the dolphins were fireworks, blasting out of the ocean and settling comfortable back in. Even Sean awoke from his grave to watch, which goes to show, that even the dying can appreciate a dolphin or two.
From that moment forward, things started to settle down. Our heart rate. The ocean’s waves. Slowly, we were back to telling stories again, but these ones we’re more about the things we looked forward to doing once on dry land, and were told through bated breath as opposed to the vigor of our earlier tales. Mostly, we sat and stared at the ocean, which was an endless desert of shiny obsidian that glittered under the moonlight. It was hypnotizing, and its trance fast-forwarded time until we were docked at Santa Barbara harbor once again.
We jumped out and kissed the land like stranded-at-sea individuals are supposed to. Sean bent down for his kiss, and showered an unsuspecting starfish with the remains of his hollowed stomach. He came up with a half-smile. We all wore the same one.
We dragged the carcass of a boat out of the water and onto our trailer. One by one we threw our dripping wardrobes in the back of the van, and crawled inside. I limped to the back, and collapsed into the seat like a used shower towel. I fought to stay awake until I realized I no longer needed to. We were going home. My heavy eyelids closed as curtains to a story immortal. The story our captain promised us.
Cabo is an absolute blast, the entire peninsula is devoted to American fun. I’m an American. I also love fun. That being said I feel the nagging of a guilty pleasure. The unfortunate reality is that an entire culture has evolved itself to accommodate America’s obsession with cheap thrills, obnoxious drinks, and an MTV culture. To be perfectly honest I’m not sure if I’m doing Mexico a favor by spending my money here or taking advantage of third world people. As I enjoy an ocean front villa is it because of the Mexican people, instead of them or in spite of them. The fact is the entire region would dissolve if the American dollar revenue stream was suddenly cut off, yet, we fuel a dependency.
Outbound with Matt Ulinski 