The Nightmare of Never
Sometimes the worst dream isn't about the awful things that could happen, it is the dread that some things never will.
Steinbeck once said that if something seems like a good idea at three in the morning, it probably is. It is three in the morning. It is winter. There is still ice on the lake but I am awake and dreaming of boats.
There was a time, a very long time, when my three a.m. idea of finding a boat to explore the islands brought on a kind of an ache, a boatless fever felt from head to toe in a slow, persistent pressure. It was my whole body reacting to the potential of never finding one, the right one, leaving my feet, and the soul attached to them, stuck in the mainland mud for another boating season, another year, another lifetime. I would pester my boated friends with questions, sending them links at all hours to some rust-bucket hulk whose main attractive feature was its “for sale” sign and asking them “how about this one?” in a voice that likely cracked with desperation. They were very patient. My dreams were not.
I would lie in bed and dream of slipping the lines, feeling that first moment of free floating, the boat beneath me some amorphous conjecture of years of boat dreams backing out of the slip, its nose clearing the breakwall, that first flush of power when you ease the throttle up, the hum of the engine, the sound, like ripping cloth, of the bow slicing the water as you come up on plane, islands ticking by like the dot-dash of Morse code as you steer for the horizon that is nothing but blue and blue and blue.
And then it would all turn: the lines would not uncleat, tangling in some Gordian knot of never, the engine would not start, the anchor would not raise. It would never happen. I was never going to find a boat and that was all there was to it. Land-locked and longing was all I had to look forward to.
But things all changed in a flash.
What seems to take years can happen in a second. It was a Sunday night, late. Out of desperation, I turned to crowd sourcing and put up a plea for anyone who knew of a boat for sale. Someone did. A friend sent a timid email. I could almost feel her tentative fingers on the keyboard typing out the words, “I don’t know much about boats but my neighbor told me today he was going to sell his boat.” At the bottom was a thumbnail picture. “Would this work?” The picture struck like lightning. That was it. That was the boat. And it wasn’t halfway across the country or halfway to the junkyard. It was in the next town over. Even though it was late Sunday night, I grabbed the phone. The voice on the other end seemed tired, skeptical at a call this late on a weekend as if I were calling about an extended warranty on his car or to inquire about his religious status but I pushed on and asked about the boat. “I was just sitting here writing up a ‘For Sale’ sign at my kitchen table,” the voice told me. “Let me save you the trouble,” I told him. “Don’t write up the sign until I can get there. I’m buying your boat.”
By 10 the next morning, the Little Dipper was in my driveway and my dreams had changed. Now when it strikes 3 a.m. and the fever comes over me, my off-season dreams are not nightmares of the never, they are dreams of what is to come — slipping the lines, pointing the bow of the Little Dipper towards the horizon, and throttling up. This time, in my dreams, the Little Dipper comes nicely up on plane. Nothing is going to stop us. We are headed for the islands.
(photography by Jeff Rennicke unless otherwise noted)
Cute! But I know that ache! We used to have boats, for the first 11 years of our marriage. Then we had kids and the boat got sold, and we are landlocked again. Just a note: if you had more than one picture loaded they did not come up.