From sixth grade on, Alia Eaton was never without a boyfriend. The first one was a boy who was a leader in junior high and high school; the second, an opposite to the first, a struggling student involved in sailing but immersed in the drug culture; and the third, the one she married, a smooth talking, rich kid with no apparent abilities other than siphoning money out of his parents and charming Alia to be his personal servant.
Alia knew, as she walked down the aisle, that she was making a big mistake. She knew when she got pregnant the first time that she was making a bigger mistake. She knew when she got pregnant the second time that she was making an even bigger mistake. She didn't tell her husband about the third pregnancy that she aborted. Despite her doubts, her husband smoothed her fears with charm, cash and assurances that all would be well.
Watching from a distance I thought that each turn in Alia's life was sending her over a cliff, but the guardrail of money held her on the road.
"Dysfunctional family" is redundant. Family means pain, confusion, stress and disappointment. I guess there could be methods for measuring any kind of functioning family, oxymoron noted, but it would be impossible to know the whole truth as the truth is always concealed. So, there is no point.
The Eaton family was, therefore, not unusual. One year out of high school, Alia's father died from sclerosis of the liver. As a traveling musician, he found companionship and escape to the tune of a fifth of vodka a day. That was the first time a man abandoned her. Her high school sweetheart left her soon after that. She got into a curious relationship with a known drug abuser. I don't know what became of him. Then, Alia married someone the rest of her family didn't like. She moved to Las Vegas with him, but not out of harm's way. She needed a minor operation on her leg that a doctor screwed up, leaving giant scars, one on her leg and one in her head. She stuck it out, raising two kids. When I asked if she was still married, "Separated," is all she said.
After Alia's dad died, her mom rumbled in and out of several relationships, some involving quick marriages. She eventually settled down and married a wealthy man in Laguna.
For our twentieth high school reunion, Alia and her mom hustled out to buy a pair of high heels for the evening. Her mom paid seventy dollars for shoes that Alia wore once and that made the evening even more uncomfortable. "Well, you have to look nice, this of all nights," her mom insisted.
Alia arrived at my house an hour and fifteen minutes late. I wasn't surprised. I knew she was stopping at her mom's first, so her lateness must have been caused by some type of family thing. Shoes, this time.
In sixth grade, we never formally met but as a ten-year-old, I recognized cute when I saw it. We were in different classes. Alia was in the brainy class, I was in the middle class and there was a third class for slower kids, creating a form of social segregation that branded many of the students for life. Thus, I would only see Alia outside of class and being as shy as I was, stare from a distance. Circumstance kept my crush one-way for the better part of three decades.
An infatuated ten year-old sees, admires and craves the purity that comes with that age. All we had to do was finish our homework, do our chores and go out and play. It was our privilege to have landed in a seaside resort and to play in the water more often than we played on land. Our backyards changed with the seasons, but not like other backyards. In autumn, the "September Swell" brought huge waves generated by the hurricanes off the coast of Baja. In winter, Santa Ana winds howled through, cold or hot, but always dry. The bay and the ocean were our playgrounds, and being that young, I assumed it was the same for everyone, at least in this area.
Growing older, my alliance with the ocean increased while Alia's faded. Alia put more emphasis on boys. I always existed outside of Alia's realm, but I still noticed her whenever she surfaced.
Alia and I taught sailing together for a couple of summers as teenagers. Since I was the lead instructor, she worked for me. This time her relationship with the lowlife drug abuser kept me at my distance. The innocence of youth was fading quickly. Her baggage handlers had their hands full.
July 1992
A month ago, Alia popped back into view. I'd had an overdose of work and took a Wednesday afternoon to sail my Finn dinghy on a summer afternoon. While I was rigging in the parking lot, Alia Eaton walked up to me. Finally, after decades of following her from a distance, we hugged that day. The cruelty in her life left her looking older for the first time, a little heavier. She was teaching sailing for the city. She lived up the coast. We agreed to get together after I sailed and after her classes.
Our high school reunion was coming up and I mentioned it to her. She knew of it, but wasn't planning to go. She also had forgotten that we were in the same graduating class, confirming my crush was one-way.
High school reunions, by definition, are for the people that survived the years sufficiently intact to assemble and announce to the others what they've accomplished. The brave and self-assured do so despite losing hair, gaining weight and losing freckles while accumulating wrinkles. In every case, however, the baggage, the pain, the suffering, the loneliness, the second-guessing, the failures and the compromises remain hidden to the untrained eye. Nothing in the brochure says you have to show that off.
But I have a trained eye.
There was still time for one drink at my house. We flipped through the yearbook briefly while listening to old rock favorites. Alia couldn't conceal her growing nervousness.
After arriving, my curiosity only lasted a couple of minutes. Walking around the room, I would see a familiar face, start to utter something and then see another and another. I was looking for two things. What had twenty years done to the beautiful people (a lot) and how many countenances would I find that revealed, yes, they had changed, seen the light, grown wiser, and become amused by our antics as kids (just one).
Alia ran into her first boyfriend right away. He's married now and Alia was intent on meeting his wife and "getting that part over with." Alia was afraid that the wife would perceive the reunion as the kick-off to some big marriage ruining triangle. Alia and her ex spent the better part of the next hour catching up, decades jammed into sixty minutes, life as a sound bite, a commercial, an hors d' oeuvre.
The room was full and each step brought me a new face yet somehow familiar. Groups formed and I'll be damned if they weren't the exact groups that formed in the quad twenty years ago. I could even make a case that each clique had staked out the same relative geographic position. And like I did in high school, I walked across all boundaries, saying hello to everyone, going through the formalities briefly, making mental notes and moving on.
Someone who knew me well but of whom I had no clue, approached. He rambled on about our commonality in high school. Each reference to the past made me more confused. I had no recollection of this person. I concluded that high school and the people he met there were important to him and that he had mistaken me for someone else. Or, he said the same shit to everyone.
I bought drinks for Alia and me. I overpaid for what amounted to a swallow of gin and tonic for each of us. I should have had a beer, a known quantity. This started feeling more like a typical yacht club wedding reception. There was finger food all over the room and a bar at each end. With a concerted effort, one could make a decent meal out of it, but it wasn't worth it. Plus, it was awkward dealing with Hawaiian chicken on a stick and a drink while greeting someone who had alphabetic adjacency and thus always a proximal locker. I didn't eat much.
The reunion committee had prepared a videotape. They coerced a few of the faculty members who still taught at the school to say a few words via a camcorder. Those teachers must say the same old crap to every class. I can see that old cranky football coach saying, "Look, why don't you use last year's tape and change the year." There was no such thing as a VCR in our high school days, so they took old Super-8 movies of "memorable" football and basketball games and converted them to tape and added those to the show. My eyesight is still perfect but all I could see was a bunch of fuzzy people running around.
After the tape, the lead drama guy introduced the same faculty members that were on the tape. Then they left the microphone open for anyone who cared to stand up and reminisce. Soon enough, the old football heroes gathered up there, then the basketball jocks and then the cheerleaders. Someone in the crowd yelled out a request for them to do their old routine. Shit, no, please, no.
Time slowed. There was nothing new to discover. I stopped smiling at pictures of old classmates' children. Alia and I retired to the bar in the adjacent room for a break from the noise. She complained about the constant interrogations. She was still married, had a ring on her finger but came to the reunion with me. She felt as though she hadn't played the game right. I had never married, was alone and I felt that I had.
Eventually, some of our friends from the sailing world arrived and, on cue, formed our own familiar clique. I hadn't seen some of these people dating clear back to Wednesday. This made the reunion even more like any other party. I was ready to leave.
Sadly, someone dragged Alia out to the dance floor. Since I loathe the ritual, my choices were to work the room once more or sit by the dessert table with a cup of coffee and watch. I chose the latter. The DJ had a playlist from the sixties. He was too young to know that the music of that era was an enhancement for ingesting drugs, not for practicing the latest moves on a dance floor. People tried to remember how they once danced to acid rock in a gym.
The loveliest lady in the room that night, another sailing friend, caught up to me. Her husband was smiling falsely through all the bullshit. She was Homecoming Queen, against her wishes, and considered that "honor" forgettable. She had to deal with that title, amazed at how many people still thought it significant. We looked at the gathering through similar eyes, from a common vantage point on the cliff of cynicism.
The decades had been indifferent. The earth whipped around the sun and spun on its axis no matter who was standing on it. Time didn't care how it was abused. I saw the changes as more of a function of what these people had done to themselves, rather than what Time had done to them.
Alia hasn't done the work towards understanding who she is and subsequently wanders through life a victim to the forces around her. She is out of control, for the most part, even though there is little in her outward appearance that reveals this. None of her desires are being met and she has no goals. For her, it is day-to-day, dealing with what is to her an excessive amount of pain. The playback loop featuring the question of "why this is happening to me" has little chance of a response.
Back at my house, she asked if she could stay. I said, "for a little while." We went up to my room, shed some of our clothes and climbed into bed. Twenty-seven years after my crush as a ten-year-old, I kissed Alia, but just briefly. I rolled her on her side so she could look at the view. We spooned. She fell asleep but I was still wide awake. I woke her up, gave her a robe and put her to bed in the guest room.
A couple of years after that reunion, when the younger of Alia's children was in high school and the other in college, something fired from within her. She filed for divorce and refused financial support. She was thirty-nine when she marched into the community college, got a job teaching sailing in small dinghies, enrolled in classes and started a new life.
She took all the classes in The School's Maritime and Seamanship Academy, many more classes in the Culinary Arts program and any class about engines. Since she knew all about sailing, she was allowed to go on many of Osprey's cruises, neither paying nor being paid, but helping in all aspects. For the first time in her life, she could see a self-reliant path.
At any one time, The School had three yachts in various parts of the world. Osprey, a sixty-two foot sloop that used to race around the world, might be gunkholing around the waters of Tahiti while Candlewind, a sixty-four footer, built for luxurious "performance cruising" might be wandering through the Caribbean. Anthem stayed closer to home, her crew suffering through attempts at racing against newer, lighter and faster yachts. The School's classes that involved long-distance cruising lasted between one and two weeks, after which a new group of students (and sometimes teachers) would arrive by air, replacing the beat-up, beleaguered, salty, smiling and refreshed students, who had to fly home and face the unchanged congestion of real life, in whatever setting that was so miserable it made them flee to the high seas.
Because of her success in the classes she took, and due to her diminutive size, Alia became known throughout The School as someone who could fix anything on a boat and many things on land. When something required more muscle, she asked for it. When something required squishing into a small space or going up the mast, she was the one. Soon enough, Alia could look at the big calendar strewn across the walls of The School's office and pick where she wanted to go.
It was around this time that Alia convinced me that I needed to quit whining about the confines of my office, acquire a Coast Guard Master License and become involved with The School. So I did. We worked together once again, on short, local trips, twenty-two years after teaching together at The Club.
October, 1994
I became a ship's captain today, on the 502nd anniversary of Columbus' so-called discovery of America. My teacher may be a walking encyclopedia of maritime knowledge but it's time for him to hang it up. He had three strokes during the ten weeks of my class and is too old to care anymore. He should go drive a boat west until he falls over the edge. I was not prepared for those tests.
The cheat sheet, our supposed salvation, was missing information. Passing the Rules of the Road test (what road? It should be Rules of the Sea, like the tight ass instead of the head) demanded a complete memorization of the book, nothing less. The Deck General test required full text books, not notes from the meanderings of an old fart. There must be other organizations that can do a better job than this ancient mariner of a teacher. I wonder how my clueless classmates will ever pass. And their livelihoods depend on it.
My brief notes:
Tuesday – I passed Navigation General with the minimum seventy percent. Scary. Failed Rules of the Sea missing five of thirty. Really scary. Got eight of ten right on the chart tests. Still scary. Worked three hours on seventy Deck General questions – seventy-four percent, squeaking by. No food, no water, like stranded at sea. Stopped at the store on the way home. A computer screwup at the market made that a forty-five-minute ordeal. At home, I ate and studied. I'm allowed one re-take.
Wednesday – Finished memorizing the Rules of the Sea book, while sitting in traffic on the way up to the Coast Guard. Towing test: 90%; sailing – 100%; Rules of the Sea re-take, for all the marbles: 97%. Licensed. Wee. Ate lunch and then captained my fifty-ton Finn dinghy in the bay.
The Coast Guard handed me a certificate that allows me to make a living carrying people, cargo or anything else that displaces up to fifty tons of water. They did this without seeing me on a vessel of any kind, not even on a dock and for all they know the only knot I know how to tie is on my sneakers or marrying. They do not know if I can use a wrench or a winch or tell the difference, or whether I can leave a dock or return to one. What about radios? What about navigating?
They took documents that could have been easily forged as proof of my hours at sea. They never verified them. They had me absorb and regurgitate, temporarily, just enough information to slide through their bureaucracy.
Worse, even though I have sailed to Hawaii five times and survived, the license forbids me to do that for hire. I'm required stay within 200 miles of a coast. That would be where all the rocks and beaches and waves and wrecks are. I'm allowed to sail through Alaskan waters and fight massive tidal currents, without ever having read a tide table. I can pass through locks in canals, never having even seen locks, other than in banks, on doors or on the heads of lovely women.
Who wants to ride with me?
The FAA, conversely, has every moment of training documented and verified. Instructors are watched by instructors who are watched by the FAA staff. Mindless information must be spit back on a multiple-choice test, yes, but then someone designated by the FAA takes a deep breath and climbs into a plane with the student and watches for hours to ensure that metal won't rain down on civilization, at least in the near future.
Both industries call their certificates "licenses to learn." Everyone had better stay out of my way.
While I was taking advantage of corporate ineptitude, redundancy noted, and staying on or close to shore, except for the occasional big race rides, Alia was making herself indispensable to The School. In four years, she surpassed my sea time, experience and capability.
The unrelenting waves over the thousands of miles of ocean prevented Alia from broadening her experience in other things. Like me earlier, she had drenched herself in too much of what was once a good thing. Unlike me, she avoided stark declarations of "never again" and instead, slowly reduced her commitments to The School. She signed up for more coastal routes that stopped at night to anchor or, better, dock in port. So, it was in the latter stages of her sailing career, in the summer of 2010, that she worked Osprey up the Columbia River and met Emileanne Lendennon, without any introduction from me.
That summer day, Alia arrived in Hood River on the Osprey. For this trip, she was the captain. She had a first mate and a cook helping her muscle six students down the Washington coast from Vancouver, B.C. and up the Columbia River. After negotiating the locks at the Bonneville Dam, they sailed the remaining twenty miles downwind and up river to the marina, where they stayed for a day and a half.
Emileanne was windsurfing when the boat sailed by. She sailed out to take a closer look, hopped its wake a few times and escorted Osprey to the marina. The boat was beautifully maintained and sailed, helmed by what really caught Emileanne's eye: Alia. Alia was five feet two, with shoulder-length, dark red, almost burgundy colored hair and a body and face completely covered in freckles. This tiny powerhouse had a confident air about her and commanded a sizable situation. As Osprey approached the harbor, Alia directed the students to lower and stow the sails, deploy dock lines and fenders, start the engine and make Osprey ready to dock. It was the smoothness with which it all happened that impressed Emileanne, who half watched and half managed her own windsurfing.
Emileanne left her gear on the beach and walked across the road to the marina. There was a gate with a card reader, so Emileanne jumped in and swam over to Osprey. Without asking, she climbed up the swim ladder on the transom and introduced herself to Alia, who was sitting in the aft cockpit drinking a beer. Her first mate, cook and students had left, swallowed by the town. Emileanne asked, "Isn't this one of Ian Young's boats?"
"You know Ian Young?" asked an incredulous Alia.
"Do I ever!"
"Let me get you a towel."
Tall, lean and powerful, Emileanne Lendennon outdrank tiny, lithe and equally powerful Alia four bottles to three until the beer ran out as they compared stories, traced their history to me and bonded irreparably.
Emileanne, not drunk, but nicely buzzed, windsurfed back to where she had launched, just gliding in before the wind died. She unrigged and packed her car, grinning the whole time. Emileanne called me and asked if I was in town.
"Which town?"
"Hood River."
"No. I'm in Portland." After Emileanne explained, I hopped in my car and made the hour drive.
Emileanne drove, not drunk, but still nicely buzzed, back across the bridge to the marina. Alia met her at the gate. I arrived about a half-hour later, nodding at the coincidence.
It was at this marina gate that I developed my card key app, but that was a few years in the future. This time, I waited for about three minutes and followed someone through. Down on Osprey, Alia and I, who hadn't seen each other in eight years, gave each other a long, heartfelt hug. Emileanne and I did the same, having not seen each other in four days. We added to that hug a one, two, three second kiss. Alia, observing, said, "you really do know each other."
The three of us, in two cars, drove to my house. From the pantry and the refrigerator, Alia, with my help, put together a big meal. We stayed up talking until four.
Over the next year and a half, the three of us, at Emileanne's urging, formed a Limited Liability Corporation. Emileanne owned half; Alia and I a quarter each. The LLC became the owner of Emileanne's Valley View Acres. I sold my house and built a much smaller one on Valley View Acres and moved in. With Alia's help, I acquired a tractor and myriad other mid-size yard machinery -- chippers, mowers, a stump grinder, two chain saws -- and set about transforming Valley View Acres into a garden paradise, a quarter of an acre at a time. To keep my hand in trailing edge technology, I worked for the largest of the three bike shops in town, Wheels Down. I learned to edit images, video and music and applied a lot of that to expand their "online presence" and their e-commerce website, something I found to be asinine, degrading, an abuse of technology and altogether humorous.
Alia further reduced her trips with The School and moved into the guest house though with full access to the main house. She did most of the cooking when all three of us were there. She worked in the Hood River valley fixing orchard equipment like tractors and mowers, the type of machines I owned. She also rented a small space in town that she converted into a kitchen. During the slower winter months, she baked breads, rolls and various sweets for the hotels in town.
The demand for Emileanne and her talents at "bending the truth," as she liked to say, took her all over the country. As the demand increased, she cut back on the amount of work she accepted, thus increasing the demand further.
Emileanne gave up her apartment in Portland.
It was to this idyllic setup that, after landing my now sold airplane at the airport in Hood River valley, I rode my bicycle. Arriving, I found no one home, no surprise. I showered, watching California grit circle and disappear down the drain. Clean, I slept for hours.
Rather than walk the perimeter, I drove the tractor, surveying the eight acres and imagining the next project. I had with me, in the drink holder, watered-down lemonade and gin. I parked in the carport, sat quietly and gazed at the valley below. Drink emptied, I went back in and slept another hour. Waking, I flipped through the channels and watched a golf tournament for five minutes. The first commercial featured a drug with an indecipherable purpose and an impressive catalog of side effects, including, in some cases, death. The second commercial showed a young mother carrying her newborn son up a snowy path to her front door. I wondered if that child would evolve into a hockey player who fought more than skated. Then I wondered how my brain generated such random thoughts. The next channel featured a hunting show where killing animals was a competition. Why was I alive to witness this massacre? TV off. Laptop on, desktop computer on, I synchronized the former to the latter and backed up my writing.