Evanston: captiaterraphobia
Evanston: captiaterraphobia
I had two years of Latin in high school, but that was long ago and not far enough away--which is at the heart of this post--so when I sought a name for my present malaise, I turned to Google Translate, which informs me that ‘trapped by land’ in Latin is ‘capti a terra.‘ That is what I have a fear of: being trapped by the land. Captiaterraphobia.
I was born three hundred miles SSE of here in Saint Louis, Missouri, and grew up in a suburb named Kirkwood, which is an unconscionable distance from any ocean. If you live in the U.K. or New Zealand you probably can’t even imagine a place that far from a shore. In Australia, think Alice Springs.
I didn’t like it there. When once asked by a reporter what sailing means to me, I replied instantly: freedom. And for the first twenty-one years of my life, except for the three summers I spent with my grandparents after they retired to Mission Beach, California, I constantly felt oppressed by the land. This was not just mental. It was a weight I could feel. Land, thousands of miles of land in all directions pressing in on me. I started driving west the day after I graduated from college and, until we moved to Chicago, have never since lived away from the ocean.
I like Chicago. It is a great city. But again I am feeling trapped by the land.
There are two routes a boat can take from Chicago to reach the ocean on her own bottom: out through the Saint Lawrence or south through the rivers.
I’ve considered both, and recently more seriously the rivers. Buy a gasoline outboard, lower the mast, and power for 200 hours at 5 knots and I’d be in Mobile, Alabama, where I could sell the gas outboard and become a quiet sailboat again. That is a lot of sitting in the cockpit steering with the sun beating down and listening to an engine. And in the end I’d be on the wrong ocean, just as I would be if I went out the Saint Lawrence, though considerably better placed. The main virtue of that route, perhaps the only virtue, is that I could do it myself, with no help beyond perhaps lowering the mast at the start and raising it again at the end.
The desired Pacific Ocean is just over 2,000 miles to the west. I own a trailer, so what’s the problem? Four days driving and it’s done.
One is my eye. Another is that fitting a trailer hitch to Carol’s car is extremely difficult and extremely expensive. Like $2000 expensive, apparently mostly due to problems with wiring. And a third is that the trailer is not registered.
I can solve the first two by paying someone else to tow the trailer to San Diego, which shouldn’t cost much more than putting a trailer hitch on the Audi. And, after several days of frustration which revealed that Illinois is one of the worst states in which to try to register a non-new unregistered trailer, I may have solved the third.
It seems that the State of Maine is the Panama and Liberia of trailers. More trailers are registered in Maine than any other state except California. California’s population is over 37 million. Maine’s population is 1.3 million, ranking it 41st among all states. Go figure.
Still if the fine citizens of Maine are willing to make my trailer road legal for a reasonable fee, I am happy to pay. I sent paperwork and a check off this morning.
In going through various documents that came with GANNET, who was built in 1979, I have found that in 1981 she was registered to an owner in Sonora, California, which is a hundred miles east of San Francisco Bay.
In 1986 she was sold to a man in Wichita Falls, Texas, almost on the Oklahoma border. There are a couple of small lakes around Wichita Falls where I suppose she was sailed.
She was still in Wichita Falls in 2007, and then went north to Duluth, Minnesota, before moving to Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, last year.
The little boat may be as glad to be on the ocean again as I.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012