Pacific Lady
So while I’ve been waiting on the adjustments to my rudder, I bought a couple of books from Amazon. Their suggestions are getting better and better. It used to be they were offering me medical school textbooks — Ugh! Like I really wanted to be reminded of things I’ve already read!!! But, their selection offerings work, I guess based on all the clicks I make on “sailing” stuff. Whee!
But I didn’t buy this book because of their suggestions. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything they’ve suggested to me. No, this was a serendipitous find because I messed up my feedback review of a seller, and I was so upset about it, I decided to buy a couple more books from them just so I could leave them positive feedback. In a search for “sailing” books, I found a bunch. All less than $3. So I bought 3.
One of them was Pacific Lady.
I post an excerpt below:
Chapter One A Widow Finds the Sea I took him home and nursed him. I rented a hospital bed and put him in our living room. I gave him formula and painkillers, watching his spirit wither. He was fed through a tube and lost a hundred pounds. We lived in a cramped little one-bedroom duplex in West L.A., just behind the dental office where I worked. In that small neighborhood, my world unfolded — job and home, life and eventually death. The death of my husband. Chuck had cancer. Fate sent me the sweetest, motherly licensed vocational nurse to care for him through the day, though I went back and forth every hour or so between house and office just to hold his hand for a few minutes or to say a few words. Before the end, he couldn’t talk. I would talk to him, but he couldn’t even smile. He could do little more than move a finger if he wanted my help. Ten weeks this went on. Then he slid into his final coma. Like that, I watched my husband die. *** I snipped a few paragraphs here. About his death. I see this a lot at work, and I didn’t care to relive this part through someone else’s writing.*** So I drove toward the tall masts, toward boats tugging at their mooring lines. Marina del Rey eventually grew to encompass restaurants, shops, high-rise apartments, and whole families living aboard their boats on the water — an entire community unified in salt water and sail. The world would come together there, against the sea. But in 1964 it was just the beginning, just a few skeleton buildings, just a few boats and so many empty docks spreading like concrete fingers into the water. I sat and watched the boats zigzagging their way up the channel. Now I know they were tacking — that’s what it’s called. But that day, I wondered how those sailors knew what to do. How did the boats know where to go? I was intrigued. And that was it, my transformation. My genesis. It was honestly that much chance, or karma or kismet, that brought me to the ocean. I looked up and saw a billboard for the Al Adams Sailng School, and I thought, “Why not?” |
Sharon Adams is the first woman who solo-sailed across the Pacific. She’s also the first woman who sailed solo from California to Hawaii. She didn’t really intend to set a record. She just had the urge to do it. I really identify with that. There are so many books on Amazon about how to convince your wife to sail with you, and it seems strange to me that someone would have to convince someone to sail with them. (Although *I* have had to do that many times with my husband.) I cannot comprehend not wanting to sail. So her book (although partially written by Karen Coates), really touched me. It always puzzles me *why* I have this desire to sail, and my husband does not. Actually, many women do not.
Apparently Sharon wonders the same thing, as she says in her introduction at the beginning of the book:
And yet I chose solitude. I chose to endure it twice on the world’s largest ocean. I wanted to cross those waters so badly — why? Just to say I had? Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure, even after all these years. I just felt the need to do it once I’d dreamed up the idea. |
Excerpts are from Pacific Lady by Sharon Sites Adams and Karen Coates.