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My favorite leg of the Volvo Ocean Race is now under way. Seven boats embarked from Auckland, New Zealand, last Sunday for Itajai, Brazil. The 7,600 nautical mile race http://www.volvooceanrace.com will take them across the Southern Ocean and around Cape Horn, the most remote, inhospitable waters on the planet as they follow the 50-degree latitude above Antarctica.
“It’s going to be bloody cold,” said skipper Bouwe Bekking. “It’s probably the best sailing you can get.”
I grew up sailing and while I’ve never crossed waters as challenging waters as the Southern Ocean, any sailor worth his salt knows the importance of keeping an eye on the horizon. My father taught all his six kids that the wind is an invisible, magical force. It’s never the same in terms of direction or velocity.
That’s why we learned to look to the treetops when we came down to the dock in Olcott, New York, where the family boat was kept. Out on the water, we soon became as excited as our father when the wind gusted, roughing the water’s surface. The new scallops and divots, appearing as a darker hue -- sometimes called cat’s paws -- were sure signs that more wind, at least a momentary gust, was heading our way.
It wasn’t until decades later that I realized that we started to sail as a family months after my younger brother Eric was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The disease was a death sentence back in the 1960s. Today, it has a 90 percent survival rate, thanks to a resilient, close-knit group of doctors, many of whom treated my brother.
My father never articulated his personal connection between cancer and sailing. It wasn’t until I was nearly finished writing “Cancer Cowboys: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to Childhood Leukemia” https://www.amazon.com/Cancer-Crossings-Childhood-Leukemia-Politics/dp/1501711032/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521422978&sr=8-1&keywords=Cancer+Crossings that I phoned him, realizing the forces he had put in motion.
“You taught us all how to sail as a pushback against having a son with leukemia,” I told him.
After a long pause on the other end of the line, he replied, “Of course I did.”
That’s why the waters of Lake Ontario and the shapeshifter of disease that eventually took my brother remain forever intertwined for me. Decades later, after my own children were nearly adults, I came across Wade Davis’ book “Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest.” It details the initial British attempts to summit Mount Everest, another inhospitable part of the world.
The British came to Tibet in the 1920s gung-ho and driven to reach the top of the world’s highest peak. It was a mindset that completely flummoxed the locals. Yet when you consider the bigger picture, the Everest campaigns were inevitable. The British, along with most of Europe, had just fought World War I. Trench warfare, rapid-fire machine guns, barbed wire and mustard gas were a nightmare for an entire continent, a whole generation. The British climbers were drawn to try and rise above it all, to attempt to climb the highest peak in the world, to move into the silence.
In our way, my family found a way to temporarily move away from the clamor and discord, too. Though we weren’t climbing Mount Everest, a wide horizon of water has always clamed my father. And even though Dad never came out and said it, he had to believe that it would help the rest of us, too.
Our first days on the water, in 24-foot Hinterhoeller Shark, http://www.boats.com/reviews/a-boat-for-when-the-wind-blows/ Dad tied pieces of yarn to the metal shrouds leading down from the mast. We were told to watch the telltales, or “who-whos,” closely. They would show us the next change in the winds and the weather.
Of course, the technology currently at work on the vessels plying the Southern Ocean is a far cry from our rudimentary ways a half-century ago on an inland sea called Lake Ontario. But the basic understanding and respect remain the same.
While I don’t own a boat anymore, I remain enthralled of great undertakings. That’s why I’m following the Volvo Ocean Race, especially over the next few weeks.
