Sailing north from Manhattan

The train out of Grand Central Station carves a plodding path north, first through the bowels of Manhattan – a weird, dark world of catacombs – then out into the bright afternoon light up to Harlem and beyond.

The tracks hug the eastern edge of the Hudson, the western shore receding across a wider and wider glinting river. Yet no matter how wide the river becomes they’ve spanned it – just south of Tarrytown there’s an endlessly long, pale bridge and beside it, the twin stretches of new bridges in progress.

Tucked in along the tracks as you lurch northward, are marinas – little yacht clubs, presumably named and known to their denizens. White masted sail boats sit like tired ducks on the shore, parked for looming winter. A few bold boats still bob in the river water, moored to posts. Out on the river, the water is creased by a November breeze. It has the shining texture of a blue elephant’s hide.

But no boats dent those waters. Despite a warm sun and wafting air – seemingly ideal conditions for a sail – there seems to be not one boat daring enough to risk the perfectly beautiful Hudson on this quiet Sunday afternoon. If anyone is in those yacht clubs today, they’re watching football and talking about the gear they’ll buy for their boats this winter.

This seems to be regular fate of amateur boats: solitude and stasis. Even when the season is less rambunctious than November, watercraft have a habit of sitting still for protracted periods of time. They are a peculiar investment: always expensive to build and to buy, prone to rapid rot and even more rapid depreciation, the “pleasure craft” asks much of its master.

More than the expense is the labour, the endless re-fitting of small metal parts, the failure of which might spell peril if ever actually sailing.  There is cleaning and scraping and painting and wrapping in white sheets of plastic, or perhaps paying someone else to do all that. The ownership of a boat is a story of toil. Toil and trouble. Interspersed with the rarest of enjoyments – actually being on the boat, in motion. And if sailing, that is pretty much all work too. But it is work a boat owner does far less often than he or she expects, when first laying out the many thousands of dollars to call a boat their own.

This must be especially vexing for the sailor whose craft is tied up along the Hudson.  It is simply a beautiful river. The Hudson, especially farther north past Ossining, is like a mysterious valley of sun and water between two worlds. From a distance, the far shore has the sultry allure of the coast of Thailand; where it narrows you can see patches of habitation reminding you that you’re somewhere people live so they don’t have to spend time or money in Manhattan.

To be a sailboat on the Hudson is to be the second best quarterback on a team that can’t afford to lose. He rides the bench for what seems an eternity, waiting for the call. Or maybe it’s like being a loyal dog, ready to scratch the paint off the inside of the door as darkness falls but the master has not come home. Our lives sit, waiting for us to come and take them off the shelf, to unlock the door and let them loose.

The objects we collect are storehouses of “value” – vaults in which we stack what we have earned, and what we have done. This is true whether the thing is put to constant, imperative use (a cellphone), or has the most mundane utility (scissors) or rarely gets off the concrete blocks we’ve sat it on (an old Italian car, or here along the river’s edge, a boat). And of course we also store our lives in the biggest objects of all, the places where keep all the other objects: home.

We work and earn and shop and buy and amass and stow away, all the shards of our days, in these objects. These things are a sum total of our experience – not everything in our lives (because we also live in our skin and memory) but a very large part of them.  All the amazing objects we have invented to acquire, purposeful or decorative, are the final extensions of our minutes and moments, the sweat of our brow, fallen and frozen into the shapes of the things we think we own. It is like we are bleeding clay into statues.

Not all of our things sit still. Some hold not only the piled-up past but the promise of some future motion, some daring enterprise – a sharp cold cut across the river of dreams, into a slapping November wind.  All that is trapped inside the skin of the things we have acquired. It must ache to escape and be alive again.

But too often, only the promise lives. The promise and the memory.