When you first take the helm, stand, don’t sit. Then close your eyes. What do you see? The sun through the front window? A light from the command room? A distant swath of land twenty clicks away? What do you hear? The sound of laughter, talking, the scratching of a pencil, birdsong, splashed of something large down below?
Whatever you are were doing or thinking or being before on deck or in your bunk or on the bow of the ship…
STOP
Don’t cry
Don’t laugh
Don’t think about your lover, sister, brother, dinner, father, mother.
Do think about the wood beneath your bent legs
The cement bubbling under layers of red paint.
Don’t think even
Of the ship that bobs like a duck and breathing fire like a dragon
Feel her like you would a horse between your legs
Riding across a valley of tall grass
Do think about the sea because the sea is happening now.
If it is the early morning and the sun is just coming up like a giant ball portside, then you will probably not hear a sound except her creaks and moans. Listen. This is her talking to you. What does she say? Listen! And when no one is watching, open your eyes, find you mark, and hold her in your hand.
And if still no one is watching, place the palm of your right hand on the deck and leave it there for a moment while your left hand is on the helm and your eyes are moving from point to point- compass to rudder to GPS to COG to SOG to fixed point in the horizon, hopefully not a bird or a cloud but something stronger, more stable. The sun if possible, if not then a bit of sky whose blueness strikes you, calls to you. Don’t take your eyes off of it or you will miss it. Stay the course and most of all…
Be patient.
Take a breath and wait. Don’t worry and don’t panic. She hears your every sound, she feels your every touch like an expectant lover or a child needing a quick hug. She will turn, just give her time and in the meantime, as your mate is giving you dirty looks from the deck and calling out numbers with increasing urgency- 5! 6!- stand strong and have faith. She will turn, you have done enough…4! 3!...
Your mate on deck has gone back to smoking his cigarette and in the meantime…
Don’t fuck it up.
Feel her pendulum swing in the momentary calm, as you ease her back into her stable point where she will always want to go. In this way, she is human, seeking the balance point between external forces- wind and water and weather. Her inner compass naturally tells her to go to middle.
And finally, In the ferro cement under your fleshy palm, remember that there are a thousand voices calling, laughing, crying, making love, screaming in anger, being silent in the peace of early morning, pencils scratching on the navigational map, buttons being pushed, ideas being discovered, lives that have changed over the course of three generations.
Try to feel them in the space between your fingers as the sun rises and the oceans swell and call out to her. Duckie, the name you call her when it is only you in the command room because you know that she does not mind.
Duckie kicks up her heals as her sails flap and you know, right then and there, that she is the happiest she can ever be.
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