Prologue

United Nations headquarters, NY. November 1974.

"Is that you?" He asks the same question each time he calls.
"Of course it's me. Where are you?" I answer the same way each time.
I know that he is calling me, once again, from a pay phone because he believes his
phone is tapped. This is 1974, after all. Nixon. Watergate. J. Edgar Hoover. More
essential to this story, however, 1974 is B.W. Before Windsurfing.

"He" is a diplomat from a Middle Eastern country and I am an American reporter
working for the United Nations news service. Come to think of it, my phone is
probably tapped, too. But then, maybe it isn't. Maybe this is just part of the intrigue
of international politics, along with the love affair that he and I are having here
between the shadows of the Chrysler building and U.N. headquarters. Anyway, we are
developing a telephone ritual.

"I am between the earth and the sky. Where are you?" he asks.

I smile. "Between the light and the water."

I'm joking, of course, but something seems to tug at me whenever I say this, as
though my spirit is pulling at a wetsuit zipper, wanting to get out. Lately, I have been
sitting at the window, staring as sunlight catches the East River, chasing the current
in silvery ripples, downstream. Somewhere, the background seems to hold a
thoughtform from a Joni Mitchell song about wishing she had a river she could sail
away on.

In the meantime, "he" and I are in a kind of suspended time zone. I feel as if he
is my twin, my shadow. We are about the same height. We have the same smile.
Similar facial structure. We walk and breathe in the same rhythm, totally comfortable
together. One evening, I notice, with curiosity, that people seem to be staring at us as
we walk through the East Side of Manhattan holding hands. When we stop to kiss
under a streetlight, I look at him. For the first time, I realize he is dark coffee brown.
Since I tend to see people from the inside out, it has never occurred to me that there
is such a striking physical difference.

"I just noticed why people stare at us." It's hard not to feel a little foolish.

"That's not it," he says. "They see our light."

One night, after we have made love, and before he is getting ready to return to
his country, I ask him why he always says that he is between the earth and the sky.
"Because I am, silly. Why do you always say that you are between the light and the
water?"

The truth hits me. "Because that is where I'd like to be."


Volendam, The Netherlands. May 1981.

Springtime in Holland. Wall-to-wall tulips, just like in the pictures, except it's very
cold. Maybe about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, with floor-to-ceiling Eurofog. My husband
and I are on our honeymoon, biking along the Dutch coast.

"Look!" Three men, off the coast, standing on the water, holding on to sails. I
hold my breath as they ride, suspended between two mutable elements, their physical
shapes dissolving into an etheric mist. (No, that's impossible.)

"I don't believe...they're doing it!"

"Doing what?"

"They are between light and water." Almost lightheaded at the idea that it is
physically possible, I have no idea what's involved in learning how to do this.
Somewhere in my cells, sighting these three sailors is awakening some primal DNA
code.

"What's the big deal? They're windsurfing," he shrugs.

"Is that what it's called?"

I like to think that Pete, my husband, grew up in the Pacific Ocean. He was a
lifeguard in Australia, before we met, in the middle of the Ambrose Channel, the
shipping lane for New York City. We were sailing a friend's 28-foot Triton that
afternoon. (A lot of people are surprised to hear about a sailing community in New
York City, but before there were roads, Dutch and English explorers and tradesmen
sailed wooden boats to what is now the Big Apple, through the same excellent system
of bays and rivers.) Blessed with fearlessness and impeccable coordination, Pete was
the one soul onboard, that day, who actually enjoyed being hoisted, in a canvas harness,
forty feet up, to the top of the aluminum mast, where he untangled the halyard lines.
I can't even stand on a chair without getting dizzy.

"Windsurfing." Spoken softly, for the first time, the sound of the word contains
all the mystery of a solitary buoy, in the fog, echoing across the water, at the end of the
day. Just that word brings back the tug, from here, to somewhere between the light
and the water. A feeling, something like tears, is forming at the back of my eyelids. "I
have to do that."

Pete's expression goes long and strange: Amazement, concern, and amusement
mix with just a hint of mockery. After all, I am the clumsiest, least athletic woman he
has ever met. Ever. On our first date, I set fire to our table, by putting my linen
napkin over the little candle. It was an accident, but he was pretty angry. By way of
apology, I blurted out a confession: the time my cousin took me to see Lawrence of
Arabia, and I slipped on my high heels, sliding on my butt, all the way down the steps
of the packed balcony of the Ziegfield theater. When Pete didn't laugh, I merely
compounded my own discomfort. "...and I once stretched out my legs and knocked a
table clear across an Italian restaurant in the Bronx." What I haven't told him, yet, is
how I was five feet eight inches tall when I was eleven years old. At summer camp,
where everyone else my age was age-appropriately petite, the other girls called me
"Dumbo" and "Freak." When it turned out that I was inept at sports, they put
toothpaste in my sheets as punishment. At sixteen, when I started working as a
waitress in the Poconos, the cooks regularly placed bets on how many trays I would
drop during a meal.

"Windsurfing?" Pete laughs. Now, he is looking at me as if I have just announced
that I intend to flap my arms and fly off the top of the World Trade Center. "You?
You want to windsurf? Why?"

(Okay. Maybe I'm the world's least likely candidate for this, but...)

"So I can know what it feels like to hang out between the light and the water."
Inside, my spirit is sparkling like foam on the crest of a wave, at high tide under
a full moon. Like Archimedes in the bathtub, discovering the principles of
displacement, I have Eureka'ed. I have found it. I am going home.

Port Washington, New York. July 10, 1982.

I should have known better than to take this up. After all, one is supposed to learn
from experience, isn't one? By now, you would have thought I would have realized my
own, very genuine limitations.

It looks so deceptively easy, like that bumper sticker promises: "Happiness is a
hand-held sail." And me, unfazed by the prospect of falling into the water a few times.
(Ha!) All I need is that black and white image of those three windsurfers off the Dutch
coast to conjure up sureness in the solar plexus.

Although I welcome the Unknown, there is an aspect to all this that I hadn't
taken into account: the pain. Physical and emotional. To be perfectly truthful, I have
absolutely no natural ability for windsurfing. After nine months of diligent weight
training three times a week in order to build upper body strength for hoisting the sail,
(ouch!), I'm still unprepared.

Even with today's light wind, I am unable to stand and hoist the sail. Two hours
and more than fifty attempts later, I'm a failure. Of the three students in the
beginners' class, I am far and away the worst. (By worst, I mean the klutziest, most
ineffective, and incompetent.) Even the fat, fifty year old doctor does better than me.
Adding to my humiliation is a small crowd of people standing on shore, laughing as my
legs and arms pretzel into Chaplinesque tangles, flipping me ungraciously off the board.
By force of will, I drag myself back onto the board again and again, while the
young woman instructor calls out, across the water:

"Straighten the mast, don't grab it! Hold the uphaul! Not the mast!" (In my
mind's eye, she's a two-dimensional cartoon, with her thoughts floating in a bubble over
her head: "Not the mast, dummy!") "Pull with your shoulders, not your back!"
It is way too much to remember when simply standing up takes all my energy.
It's hot, about 85 degrees, and I'm getting dizzy. Finally, I heave myself onto the
board, stand up with shaky, shaky legs, put my left foot just in front of the mast and
pull-yank-pull the sail up, using my shoulders not my lower back, and grab hold. A
minor puff of wind carries me about twelve feet towards a seawall.

"Drop the uphaul! Drop the uphaul!" the instructor yells, in time for me to avoid
smashing into the wall. Now I have to get back. No matter how hard I try, I can't
change my course and end up banging into the seawall. (Basic beginner's mistake
number one: Allowing yourself to be carried downwind.)

The instructor swims out to retrieve the board. She stands up easily, hoisting the
sail, skimming back to shore, as I swim behind her like a disgruntled seal pup following
its mother. "You did well," she says, as I wade ashore.

"You don't have to lie to me." I grab my towel, wiping away embarrassed tears.
I hope she doesn't notice.

"No, really," she says, gently. "Most people can't even stand on the board their
first time out."

Now, lying on the sand at Manorhaven Beach, about half a mile from the site of
my first lesson, the inner critic, that part that does a really good job of putting me in
my place, is having a field day. (You could hardly stand up. You were terrible. So
clumsy. It's too hard. Damn.) My back and leg muscles are contracting, in spasms.
My arms feel like I've been hanging from them for hours. (Cartoon: "The Wizard of Id."
A medieval torture chamber.) My knees burn, somewhat bloody, from rubbing against
the board. (Beginners' knees, I think they're called.)

Various aches throb in their own distinct rhythms, disappointment being the
hardest to take. I had no idea it would be so difficult. Not to mention the unexpected,
bottomless surge of fear as I slammed into that seawall, out of control.

(This is pathetic. Surely I'm wasting my time. I'll never even master the
basics.)



Port Washington, NY. August 15, 1982.

Every Tuesday (my day off), I drive to Olympic Windsurfing in Port Washington and
get a portable, tie-on roofrack for my 1978 Oldsmobile. Then I help whoever's working
in the shop to carry a Windglider to the car, where we tie it to the rack. The
Windglider is a cumbersome twelve and a half feet long sailboard/windsurfer, weighing
in at about 55 pounds. Getting it on and off the roof of the car is an ordeal in itself.

After driving two miles to the bay, I struggle with the rig, which seems to have
a will of its own. The cloth sail is wound, like a flag, around the fifteen-foot long mast.
I have to unroll it, then attach a teak wishbone contraption called a boom. The boom
is what you hold onto when you are actually windsurfing. Not that I have actually
windsurfed yet. The boom ties onto the mast and to the outside tip of the sail, called
a clew. Everything hangs together, or not, depending on how well you can tie a half-
hitch. You'd think after five years of earning Girl Scout merit badges, I'd have this
skill down, but half-hitches were never required for those little round merit badges:
"First Aid to Animals," "Swimmer," and "Cook."

After the rig thing is tied together, I jam it into a contraption, called a universal
joint, which then gets jammed into a narrow slot in the middle of the sailboard. The
universal holds it all together. Hopefully. Sometimes, universal, sail, boom, and mast
all come off in the water, but I'm learning how to slam the rig back into the slot. One
of the kids in the store says that if you wrap some aluminum foil around the mast base,
it holds better, so I'm now driving around with a roll of aluminum foil in the trunk, just
for Tuesdays.

Eventually, I push off, maneuver the Windglider into position, and attempt to
hoist the sail. It's usually around now that I begin my regular routine of falling off,
crawling back onto the board, and smashing into moored sailboats. In the background,
I hear howls of laughter from my fans, about a half-dozen locals who come to the bridge
every Tuesday to watch me make a total fool of myself. Funny, no one else is
windsurfing.

Back home, Pete jokes that I look like a tomcat after a fight. My knees are
perpetually skinned, like a kid learning how to roller skate. My shins are black and
blue. My fingertips are scraped raw from getting caught in the rig, my palms are
blistered, and my back feels like it was hit by a truck. In the CBS newsroom, people
give me strange looks. (What's wrong with this picture? Why is this woman smiling?)

"Are you having trouble at home?" Ernestine, the newsroom manager, whispers,
one afternoon as I pass her desk.

"No, why?"

"Well, dear, you're looking a little bruised. Your coworkers are worried."

This makes me giggle. "I'm learning to windsurf!"

Now she looks really concerned. "What's...what did you call it, dear?"

I start to describe the surfboard and the sail, moving my arms to demonstrate
holding onto the boom. Ernestine is trying to look cool, but it's clear that she thinks
I'm weird.

"Are you sure it's worth all this, dear?" She is scanning from my shins up to my
knees, looking into my eyes for signs of dementia.

"Nice lats." Jack, the weekend producer and newsroom bodybuilder, grins as he
walks by during my demonstration of how to hold onto a boom.

Jack's the man. A few months ago, when I told him about wanting to windsurf,
he brought in all these magazines with pictures of guys like Arnold Schwarznegger and
Lou Ferrigno using metallic torture devices. Spreading the pages all over the newsdesk,
he pointed out upper body muscles with bizarre names. Delts. Tris. Lats. (Ugh.)
"You're going to have to train," he said, firmly. (Double ugh.) "Where do you live? I'll
find you a gym."

Jack's research leads us to the Ferrigno family gym, just five miles from my
home, in a converted supermarket, under the same elevated subway where they filmed
the car chase scene in The French Connection. In another sign of true friendship, Jack
and his wife, Marlene, have trekked to Brooklyn, all the way from the Bronx--an hour
and a half on the subway--one freezing afternoon in February to check on my training
routine. (Now I know: "Never do abs first. Save them for the end.") Personally, I think
maybe they just wanted the thrill of doing French curls and lat pulls underneath a
giant poster of The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno.

Lou's mom, dad, brother, sister, and inlaws, wander in and out, carrying new
babies, making jokes to each other and laughing. A warm, traditional Brooklyn family,
the Ferrignos' enthusiasm makes the gym seem like an extension of their home. They
are each, in their own way, encouraging and interested in how I'm making progress.
I'm not sure whether or not I am--I still don't know a lat from a delt--but I'm quietly
persistent. And, when I am working on a magazine story called "Laundry Secrets of the
Stars" --even celebrities have to deal with makeup and food stains-- Mrs. Ferrigno
shares her very own, secret technique for removing sweat stains from the Hulk's
workout clothes. When Lou comes home for the holidays, he stops in for a quick
workout, twirling two forty-five pound weights in his fingers, as if they were frisbees.
If I even tried to lift one of those things, it would mean a one-way ticket to Walter B.
Cooke .

As far as the workout scene goes, Ferrigno's is a serious place. I go through my
training routines in silence, nodding hello to the bench-pressing cops and firemen who
come in after the night shift. No one flirts. Well, hardly anyone. For me, workout time
is when I stop thinking about the lists of things I have to do, people I have to call, and
stories--as many as 100, between 30 seconds and two minutes apiece--that I'll write
later in the day. The TV news syndication department, where I work, is really a news
factory that broadcasts footage via closed circuit feeds to all the network affiliates, as
well as to overseas clients, including Japanese TV, every day. People think it's a
glamour job, but the fact is, syndication work is so unglamourous that, inhouse, it's
known as the "ass end" of TV news. Every day, our department scrambles for scraps
of footage and outtakes that the evening news rejects, which we recut and freshen up.
In addition to the day's hard news, we specialize in oddball feature stories, like talking
squirrels, trailer park artists--my favorite being the man who makes lamps out of
washing machine agitators; watermelon spitting contests, and bizarre events, such as
rattlesnake festivals. These "slice of life" stories are supposed to give people overseas
a look at lifestyles in America, but my partner, Sal, and I often wonder what a family
sitting down to breakfast in Seoul must think of us, when they see this stuff on their
morning news programs. A writer and news editor here, for the past twenty years, Sal
is my Siamese twin. Our desks are joined so that we can pitch ideas, copy, jokes, and
frustrations back and forth, throughout the day. I don't know how I would handle the
load without Sal's laid back senses of humor. The high volume of material that we
turn around for broadcast, between the peak hours of three and seven p.m., makes me
feel like I'm a cross between a short order cook and a canner in a sardine factory. (How
many words can you pack into a 30-second can? How many cans can you fill up every
fifteen minutes, while taking "orders," simultaneously, about incoming stories, over the
phone? Multitasking, I think it's called.) Learning how to zone in on the quiet spaces
between so many different sounds, in order to write, must be excellent training for
something. I'm not sure what. I tell myself this is like practicing Hahnon scales on the
piano, and that someday, when my wrists are really strong, I'll be able to write longer
pieces, maybe even books. Writing TV news in cramped, noisy rooms with no windows
is not what I pictured when I studied writing in college and a one-semester flying leap,
in and out of grad school. I can't help thinking, sometimes, that my writing professors-
-Grace Paley, Alan Dugan, and Jerzy Kosinski--would be disappointed, somehow, that
after all their good efforts, one of their students ends up on a media assembly line. But
I landed here after four years of working on a novel about television news coverage of
the Middle East war, in the future. Maybe it makes people nervous because Tel Aviv
gets nuked in the first chapter and the book is set in the Palestinian Democratic
Republic, or maybe it's just not good enough, but, so far, it has been rejected by 36
publishers, two networks, and one Hollywood production company, after which, even
my literary agent gave up on it. It was my intention to stay here six months, save
some money, then work my way around the world with Pete. Instead, I've been here
for four years...and counting...(Going on twenty one, himself, Sal says, "God help you
when you start counting those years.")

In contrast to the friendly chaos of the newsroom, the morning workout requires
focusing in, on one repetitive movement after another. The rhythm of reps and sets
pushes all thoughts of news out of my mind, so that I lose track of time and place. In
Zen, there is something called walking meditation. I imagine that something similar
occurs as, with each movement, conscious focus dissolves, taking you into that zone
where you no longer think.

After one Saturday morning workout, while I'm grabbing a cup of coffee, around
the corner from the gym, I get to indulge one of my favorite vices: listening in on
strangers' conversations, in places where I don't belong. Until now, the top two
nuggets in my collection have come from the New York subways: "Yeah, he got boined.
You know how it is in a fire" and "'Ja hear about the moidah in 3c? The cops sealed
off everything and now I can't get no hot water in 2c." Leaning my head over my coffee
cup to make it seem as if I have no interest in anything else, I can hear two young,
local gentlemen in the next booth talking about the going price of a "contract". (It's
quite creepy. Sounds like bad dialogue from a de Niro movie. $300 for a contract? It
costs more than that to make a car "disappear." At low tide, you can see them rusting
away in a marsh near Kennedy Airport.)

I'm about to tell Jack about that conversation, when he asks, "You're really doing
that thing with the surfboard and the sail?"

"Of course," I smile.

He and Ernestine exchange looks. They think I'm not playing with a full deck.
"Ain't you afraid of them sharks?" The homeboy accent is burlesque; the
question, half-serious.

(Surely he knows that "Brooklyn Girl Eaten By Shark" is not a viable lead? When
I wrote the Saturday night news for a local station, it was so bad, we called it "News
for the Hard of Thinking." I got laid off, the week after I refused to participate in the
Gary Mark Gilmore Execution Sweepstakes. It was in poor taste, I said, to bet on the
time someone was going to be put to death, even if someone was a convicted killer. The
question of what constitutes "poor taste" is mighty flexible, when the average lead story
you write for the Saturday night news is probably a random shooting, a corpse dredged
out of the Gowanus Canal on a giant meathook, or a headless torso found in a
dumpster. That job gave me nightmares, with the outtakes replaying in my sleep.)
Thus, the very idea that I might be at risk for an encounter with Jaws makes me
laugh, "The only sharks I'm afraid of are the ones that wear three-piece suits and write
memos."

"Amen!"

In the end, one of them is more likely to get me, than any of those sharks in the
water.



Port Washington, NY. August 22, 1982.

Did you ever think about what happened when you were learning how to walk? With
each new step, your parents cheered. Now, think back: When you fell down, did
anyone applaud? Yet, if you didn't fall down, you would never have learned how to
pick yourself up. That's because falling down, which we perceive as failure, is a built-in
part of learning how to walk.

Maybe I should congratulate myself whenever I fall. Or fail, for that matter.
Then again, didn't someone point out that success is 99 percent failure?

Today, I finally stand up, take sight of a buoy about four meters away, mentally
set a course, and windsurf all the way there, without falling!

I even turn around and make it back, in one smooth tack.

That might not seem like a big deal to you, but to a klutz like me, it is simply
one of the most elegant moments of my entire life.



Port Washington, NY. September 15, 1982.

I have my own sailboard now, a three-piece German-made Shark. The trail to the
Shark started on a railway platform in London, twelve years ago, when I sat down on
my suitcase, next to a young Dutch woman, who was also sitting on her suitcase in
Euston station. Anne-Mieke had just spent a year working as an au pair in Chicago,
and she was on her way home. Would I like to come with her? A train and a boat and
a train later, we arrived in a village with a windmill on the river. Awesome. Not only
was she great company, her parents were almost as happy to see me as they were to
have her home again. (My family would not have been so thrilled had I arrived home
with a stranger, after a year's absence.) Anne-Mieke and I still visit each other. Last
week, she and her fiance, Leo, brought this board over from Amsterdam. It's ideal for
anyone living in a narrow, Victorian townhouse, without a garage or storage shed.
Rather than one twelve-foot long plank of polyethylene, the Shark breaks down into
three, four-foot planks.

Before I can get out on the water, I have to put it together with a few dozen
metal rods, screws, washers, and other unidentifiable alien metal thingies. It comes
with a 5.0 meter, yellow Neil Pryde sail but I now have acquired a black and white Neil
Pryde 4.0 meter sail, which is what I am sailing with today, even though the wind is
out of the northwest at 10 knots. I realize that sailing with a 4.0 in 10 knots is
ridiculous, but I want to succeed. With a beginner's sail and beginner's wind, I might
have half a chance.

Today's triumph is launching off the shore at Manorhaven and floating through
the sailboats anchored in the bay without hitting any of them!

Hovering smoothly along the surface of the water, I head across the point where
the abandoned beach club looks like a cross between a ghost town and a scene from The
Great Gatsby. As I round the tip of Sands Point, a squeaky door on one of the
abandoned cabanas echoes across the bay, a haunting sound carried by the wind,
blending with the harmonics of halyards clinking against the sailboats' aluminum
masts, and the sad crying of incongruously named laughing gulls. One gull crosses my
wake, dive bombs for food and sweeps back in front of me as I balance, repositioning
against the swell of the open bay. There is no one else around. The feeling of freedom
and scent of sea air are intoxicating. As the wind picks up, I gain speed, holding on to
life with a capital L.

"Drunk with turpentine and long kisses, like summer I steer the fast sail of the
roses, bent towards the death of the thin day, stuck into my solid marine madness."
--- Pablo Neruda


Plumb Beach. Brooklyn, NY. May 22, 1983.

"...the way of the 'artless art' is not easy to follow..." -- Eugen Herrigel
Zen in the Art of Stubbornness. Or is this the fine line between stubbornness and
determination?

In windsurfing, there are rituals of assembly and disassembly. As in the two
classic "Zen in the Art..." books, Zen in the Art of Archery or Zen in the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, patience and focus when assembling the equipment is an art
form in itself. In Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel describes how he spent his first
year of Zen training holding the bow. No arrows. No shooting. Just holding the bow.
We, Americans, would consider that to be a year wasted. But there's a reason for this:
A Zen master archer's arrows seem to release themselves, traveling straight to the
center of the bulls-eye. Even blindfolded, the masters' arrows will split the center of
arrows that have already found their target! Wanting to find that zone of excellence,
that takes you beyond Everyday keeps pulling me to the water.

Like Herrigel learning how to hold his bow, I see how the act of rigging can
become a form of training essential for the mental focus needed on the water. (Paying
attention to details, the way a skydiver does, when packing her parachute.) Mistakes
can be fatal, since your life hangs on the connections between boom and mast, mast and
board.

Which is pretty scary, considering that I'm so mechanically challenged that the
three most dreaded words in the English language are, "take a screwdriver." As in,
"Lady, this is easy to fix. You just take a screwdriver." After "take a screwdriver," my
three least favorite words are "easy to assemble." Or disassemble. Disassembled, the
"Shark" fits into the trunk, along with the sail, the collapsed mast, aluminum boom,
clunky teak daggerboard, and the world's most complicated metric tool kit. Each time
I open the trunk, it feels like I'm staring into the heart of my deepest lunacy. Zen in
the art of....what?

Today, it takes me half an hour under overcast skies to rig. By the time I am
finished, it is raining. Having done all this work, I can't stand the prospect of having
to take it all apart, so I shimmy into the black wetsuit with its long, red neoprene stripe
that makes me look like Wonder Woman on drugs, and lug the board about 150 meters
through the muck of low tide. As I head out, four guys beach their boards, grumbling
about no wind.

New York harbor is famous for its patchy fog. There have been many afternoons
when my friends and I have gone out for a "short sail", only to find ourselves becalmed
somewhere in the middle of the harbor, navigating slowly home by flashlight, trying to
coordinate the markings on the marine map with the shallows that could bring us
aground. One Memorial Day, as we tacked across the Upper Bay at dusk, the entire
skyline of Manhattan disappeared to starboard! We had been heading toward the
Statue of Liberty, but the Lady was now invisible, as well. Grey mist, thick as cotton
candy, matted our hair and eyelashes. We were poring over a damp navigation chart
when a bank of lights whipped past us, setting up so much wake that we almost
capsized. It was the Staten Island ferry! One other afternoon, the rest of the world
vanished into a circle of white when we disappeared into a solid patch of fog in the
middle of the Ambrose channel. Every tanker, cargo, and passenger ship that comes
through New York harbor--including the QE2--has to pass through the Ambrose
channel, and here we were, invisible, as the deep horn of a giant tanker let us know we
were about to be run over. We managed to jump start the engine and motor out of
there in a hurry. Sailing in New York harbor must be about as crazy as riding a bicycle
on Broadway. I used to bike everywhere in the city, until an altercation with an angry
bus driver in midtown made me realize how tiny a human being on a two wheeler really
is...

Today, I'm within sight of the Ambrose Light and nothing can stop me. I trudge
past the mud, get on the 'Shark', and uphaul. Nothing moves. I am standing alone in
the middle of nowhere. Standing still, wondering if this is a metaphor for something
else. As in, "I feel stuck in my life and now I'm stuck in the fog." As in, "I was going
nowhere and now I'm going crazy." Or maybe it's the other way around. Then I realize
the daggerboard is stuck in the mud--a simple mechanical problem--so I tug it loose and
walk the board a few meters further south. It looks as if I'm halfway across Dead
Horse Bay, so named because of the glue factories along its shores during the 19th
century. Then I am up, moving slowly but steadily, picking up breeze from the east.
Downwind, a green and orange spinnaker puffs out.

Looking back, from Breezy Point, Plumb Beach is nothing more than an exit off
the Belt Parkway which hugs the coastline of Brooklyn. Famous as a primo spot for
watching submarine races, spotting Coney Island whitefish (which seem to proliferate
the morning after those "submarine races"), the occasional drive-by shooting , this tiny
crescent of sand is the only windsurfing beach within the city limits. Because it gets the
prevailing southwesterlies from spring through fall, it is home to a loyal contingent of
Brooklyn boardheads. On any given weekend, from April through November, there
seems to be a floating population of transient Eurosailors and Israelis who launch from
Plumb so that they can spend more time on the water than in their cars. You can catch
some neat urban scenery from the water, starting with commercial fishing boats
heading in and out of Sheepshead Bay. Sailing 'round the point into a clearing, I can
make out the hazy outlines of the World Trade Center, the Verrazzano Bridge, and
Coney Island's parachute jump. I spent the entire fifth grade, looking out the window
at that parachute jump. (Fortunately, I don't remember anything else about fifth grade.
And on those really bad days, when nothing goes right, it's helpful to remember that
they can't lock you up, again, in P.S. 193. Cheers me up every time!)

On Friday afternoons, in the middle of winter, my dad would take me to visit
Aunt Sadie, who lived in a Victorian mansion that had been converted into a
boardinghouse in Sea Gate, a gated community at the western tip of Coney Island. Four
years of Fridays, I watched the copper colored Verrazzano Bridge go up, pillar by pillar,
cable by cable. When it was finished, they painted it battleship gray. God knows why
and She's not telling, but even now, in the middle of Dead Horse Bay, I can't help
thinking that the Verrazzano, over there, would look a lot prettier if someone would
paint it back to its original orange. (Whoever thought I would be touring the
landmarks of my childhood on a sailboard?)

Out here, it's a fine line between feeling in control, and losing it altogether.
Heading southwest, the openness becomes unnerving. If I get into trouble, I am alone.
This flash frame of anxiety interrupts my focus, so that I start to fall, reclaiming
balance. Just in time. (Another important lesson: Don't allow the board to get parallel
to the angle of the waves. Keep it at an angle.) A speedboat passes, cutting as close as
it can. There aren't very many women windsurfing around here. Some of those
motorboat captains like to see if they can kick up enough wake to knock me over. I'm
learning: Today, I drop sail and wait for the wake to pass, but end up, drifting into the
anchor line of a small fishing boat.

"Sorry," I apologize, paddling (it's cold!) out of the way.

"Not enough wind for that," a fisherman calls out to me.

"Well, it got me this far." Now it has to get me back, as the tide starts coming
in.



Port Washington, NY. May 23, 1983.

We argued last night and he fell asleep. He tells me he doesn't like being tied to me,
that he doesn't find me attractive any more. Besides, sex with the same person is
boring. We have been together for about five years. I don't know what to say. Driving
today, I'm fighting a fuzzy cloud of heaviness in my head, and a harsh tightness in my
heart and throat. High tide was at 10:30 this morning; hopefully, there'll be enough
wind to get out. I buy some grapefruit juice at a deli in Port Washington, rubbing
sadness from the corners of my eyes.

At the launch ramp, it is humid and cloying. Very hot. I sweat while putting the
board together. The tide is sucking out quickly. When I get in the car, to move it off
the launch ramp, but the battery is dead.

A young man with a moustache who is eating his lunch near the shore says,
"Sounds like your battery's dead." I ask for a boost, the car starts, and I move it off
the ramp. Just to check, I turn off the ignition then switch it back on. The car starts,
so I suit up, fasten the mast to the board, and push off. There is no wind at all. I stand
on the board for about fifteen minutes, sweating. Since I am worried about the car, I
tack and catch a tiny fluff of breeze back to shore where I take the board apart. When
I try to move the car back to the ramp, it's dead again. This time, I get a boost from
another man who is putting his motorboat into the water.

En route to the mechanic, it occurs to me that the whole day is a disaster. I miss
the turnoff for the Van Wyck Expressway and end up at the exit for the Triboro Bridge,
heading north instead of south. I find a turnaround, fearing that the car will die, but
I manage to get the car back safely to the garage where it promptly dies. Apparently
the battery has slipped off its casing and gotten punctured when I went over a bump.
A sudden, cool fog moves in from the bay. Now, I'm shivering in my shorts and
bathing suit so I walk to the gym where I have some sweatpants and a sweatshirt in
my locker.

"All's well that end's well," I think, but not really. I slam the glove compartment
door on my finger.



Plumb Beach, NY. May 30, 1983.

Wind 15 knots, southwest. High tide, 11:30 A.M.
Joan and Ben are boardheads. They each own several sailboards, a bunch of masts, a
quiver of sails and several wetsuits apiece. Joan gets the wetsuits from the shop where
she works, although, to call it a shop would be to glorify it. Actually, it's a grungy
wholesale warehouse in the equally grungy garment district, but they have great prices.
Joan's two Israeli bosses yell at her a lot. I don't know how she stands it. I would have
quit by now.

Joan and Ben hang out in an old post office truck that he won in a poker game,
cooking vegetarian hot dogs on a little burner. On the weekends, they drive out East,
looking for beaches with good to excellent launch conditions.

Hanging out in the van, today, studying the waves, we talk about mushrooms
and the wind. (Not that kind of mushroom.) Joan tells me her last boyfriend was
"almost perfect," except that he had a mushroom phobia. (That's not "almost perfect"
in my book. Flash frame: Woody Allen freaking out at the sight of a mushroom
mistakenly hiding in a pepperoni pizza.) The mushroom conversation is distracting me
from worrying about the wind getting too strong. (It is. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Just get
out there.) After an hour of debating with myself, it's time. As I'm putting the
"Shark" together and rigging, a bearded Eurosailor walks over to observe the mini-
rituals. In an accent like Arnold Schwarznegger, he tells me that my three-part "Shark"
is no longer being manufactured. (Does that mean I could be holding onto a collector's
item or a potentially useless relic? Or both?)

Under gray sky and slight fog, I head out on a reach, into whitecaps, and waves
that look pretty high. A clear run in stiff wind. My right hand and left foot start to
cramp. I direct the muscles to relax. Surprisingly, they do. Heading back is trickier,
with waves foaming around the tip of the board. My foot slips on the daggerboard and
gusting wind tugs the sail out of my hand. I sheet in, expecting to get dumped.
Instead of falling off, I am dancing with the wind.

Exhilaration: Swiveling, second-by-second, feeling my way along the edge of the
swell. Eventually, after falling in and coming up, face-to-face with some oncoming boats,
I'm stretched to elation by all this open sky and water.

"You did really well, kid." How rare to talk to myself out loud. It sounds good,
out here. So I say it again. "Back there. You did real well." (Adroit! One of those words
nobody uses. Especially not me since it means skillful and graceful.)

Back to the wind, shuffling onto the board, I uphaul, heading southwest, on a
clear run until I fall backwards, twisting an ankle and clonking myself in the head, with
the boom. (Adroit, my ass!)

It starts to rain, a slight drizzle at first, then larger, sloppier drops. Almost
sleeting, in fact. Wet on wet on wet. I head back, nervously watching the sky. It looks
like it's clearing, but then there's thunder. Hightail back to shore. Fifteen minutes
later, the sun comes out, but the tide is getting very low. "If I go out now, coming back
will be a bitch," I'm thinking, as a patch of fog envelops Plumb Beach and the wind
picks up. Joan heads out, a terrific run, disappearing into the fog and reemerging. A
sudden thunderstorm, a quick downpour, more majestic thunder, and jungle-like sheets
of rain for twenty minutes while I'm derigging. Nearby, a couple huddles under the
aluminum rain gutter of the round, concrete New York City Department of Parks
restroom building. More Neruda:

"The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye,
the wind, traveling, waving them in its hands.
The numberless heart of the wind
beating above our loving silence...
Wind that topples her in a wave without spray...
Her mass of kisses breaks and sinks,
assailed in the door of the summer's wind."




Port Washington, NY. July 9, 1983.

Windsurfing dreams: I am windsurfing on a Mistral near the Battery, at the tip of
Manhattan.

Dissolve to: windsurfing in Indian Harbor, a waterfront community in
Greenwich, Connecticut.

Dissolve again to Seattle. My father tells me that I am a spiritual hitchhiker...

"That's why you are so restless," he says.

But, hey, aren't we all spiritual hitchhikers, in a way?





Oak Beach, New York. July 11, 1983.

About fifty miles east of New York City, and twelve miles due east of Jones Beach, Oak
Beach is a narrow strip of stubby grass and rocky sand, a few picnic tables, a parking
lot, and a bikers' hangout called the Oak Beach Inn. Hardly anyone is here this
afternoon. Now, at low tide, a wide sandbar forms a channel, about fifty yards just to
the south of where I stand. At high tide, this evening, the sandbar will be filled in, and
the bay, wide-open.

A minor rigging accident: smashing headfirst into a telephone pole while
attempting to carry the sail to the water. A Southwest, about 10-12 knots, is coming
off the ocean. Happily pointing into a sandbar, I tack back to shore as the wind starts
gusting, pushing me into a rocky point. I tack back to the sandbar. The third time, as
I'm heading east/southeast, one small fish wriggles over the sandbar. (If she can do it,
I can, too.) Picking up energy from the incoming tide, I glide over it, into deceptively
calm, shimmering cobalt water. A man in a skiff, pulling a girl kneeling on a
wakeboard, motors by.

"Good windsurfer," he says. I'm not sure if he means the "Shark" or me, but I'm
pleased.

The current feels much stronger, now, and the wind is picking up. Hanging on,
whipping along on a reach, I seem to be speeding southeast, towards the obelisk at
Robert Moses State Park. Suddenly, instead of placid bay, I'm running into whitecaps!
That hospitable blue is now greenish gray, the color of a threatening sea in November.
On the next tack, the wind tears the sail out of my grip. Waves pitch me off the board,
into the air. Coming down, I feel like a pancake in search of a pan. But the "Shark" is
floating away, downstream. Flopping into the water, I swim quickly, grabbing its tail,
counseling myself to stay calm as I climb back up, grateful for the wetsuit's insulation.
Incoming tidewaters are freezing cold around here, even in the middle of July.

Now, I'm talking to myself, as windsound wraps around my head. Auditory
whiplash. (You can do it!) Hauling the sail into position, grabbing the boom, whizzing
along a starboard tack, feeling the pull through the right side of my body, along the
lats, down into the biceps, every rep of the past two years now paying off because my
life is hanging here, taut against the wind, miraculously braced along the heaving,
curling, foaming edge of water underneath me. Hanging on with everything I've got,
knees bent, my weight pulling on the boom. (Simultaneous narration: If I don't make
it all the way across, I can ditch the board on the other side of the bay, hitchhike across
the Robert Moses bridge, walk along the Ocean Parkway to Oak Beach, and pick up my
car.) Contingency plans are in full gear as dark clouds scud across the horizon, from
the southeast. A port tack, heading for the sandbar, turns foul as the wind yanks the
sail away. In the water again, I hang onto the board, telling myself not to be scared,
to get on the board again, when a fragment of dialogue resurfaces: "Ain't you afraid of
them sharks?"

"Sharks," I say the dreaded word out loud, as if anyone could hear me. "Oh shit.
There are sharks at Jones Beach." Images from late summer newscasts of shark
fishermen flash across the screen of my conscious mind, as I scramble back on the
board, reassuring myself that there are no sharks here, there's nothing to worry about,
don't panic. Remember, "Brooklyn Girl Eaten By Shark" doesn't cut it as a headline,
and besides, God didn't bring me out here to get eaten by a shark, did She? (Did You?)

Getting up again. Knees bent. Hanging out on a port tack, through greenish
waves. This time, I last about 30 seconds before wind grabs the sail. It has been about
an hour since I launched, and I'm getting tired, which is not great, considering that my
neoprene-covered legs are dangling in potentially sharky water. Imagining something
taking a swipe at my toes, I lecture myself about the dangers of fear and panic. (And
so what about them sharks? They live near the bottom of the sea, don't they? Maybe
I'd better swim over to that sandbar.) Holding onto the board and kicking, while the
current carries me toward the sandbar, I find it ironic that I should be using a sailboard
called a "Shark" as a flotation device while my lower appendages are vulnerable to
Jaws.

A small motorboat with two fishermen heads toward me. One of them shouts,
over the sound of the engine, "Do you need help?" When they get closer, I can see two
potbellied characters. The one with a St. Christopher medal around his neck leans over
to grab the tip of the mast, while the other one pulls me up, gasping for breath like a
dying fish, flapping on the tiny deck of the boat. "Rest, rest," one of my rescuers says,
giving me some water to drink. Sitting up, surveying the whitecaps around us, I'm
beginning to understand that, like Zen archery, windsurfing "..is not a pastime, not a
purposeless game, but a matter of life and death!"

Together, we grab the rig and haul it up to the deck. The "Shark" is tethered to
the stern as we motor back to Oak Beach. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," I repeat
over and over again, explaining how the wind got too strong for me.

"It's the law of the sea," says the St. Christopher character. "My father once fell
off a fishing boat and no one stopped to help him. In Joisy, remember Oinee?"

Apparently Oinee is the other guy, since he answers St. Christopher with "yes."

"You go out alone?" St. Christopher asks me. "No one would know where you
was."

"They would know tomorrow when I didn't show up for work," I say. Pete's out
of town, and I can't help wondering if Jack and Ernestine would say it serves me right,
and whether my disappearance would rate even a paragraph on United Press
International, or fifteen seconds on the CBS Evening News.

Not that it would make any difference to me. At least, I wouldn't have to write
the obituary.





Heckscher State Park, NY. July 24, 1983.

Wind, 15 knots. Southwest.
I was kind of half-joking about not having to write my own obituary.
The other day, a producer joked, "You must be the Obit Queen of CBS News."

It is now my job to research, write and produce obituaries of famous people,
preferably before they die. Sounds ghoulish, but hey, someone has to do it. Besides,
when a celebrity dies, don't you think he or she would like a mini-documentary, about
two and a half minutes long, with highlights of his or her career, ready to air that very
same day? Wouldn't you? If you were really, really famous and you died two hours
before the evening news, and no obit producer had squirreled away a special reel of
your best soundbites or photo opps, wouldn't you be disappointed? Wouldn't you wish
you were "in the can," ready to go, except for those frantic, last-minute calls to the
studios to get permission to broadcast your clips? (No, you can't get permission in
advance, unless you want to pay a minimum of $1,000 for one minute of, say, Sir
Lawrence Olivier as Richard II: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!")

If you were a just-dead celebrity, wouldn't you rather there was someone like me,
keeping a "Ghoul Pool?" That's the list of famous people considered "most likely to die
in the near future." So, who's in the Pool? For starters, let's round up the usual
suspects. In the past six months, I've updated Yasser Arafat's obituary three times. I've
done Henry Kissinger's and former President Richard Nixon's and former First Lady
Pat Nixon's, and right now, I'm looking for good, early pictures of Haffez Assad, the
ruler of Syria. Updating Rose Kennedy's obituary is becoming one of those obligatory
annual stories, like the world's longest electric train at Christmastime. I've been
hearing producers joke that "when Laurie does someone's obituary, it's a guarantee that
he or she will live at least another five years, or until the obituary is outdated at least
twice." (That's not a bad thing. Especially if it's your obituary.)

Obituary writing is a quirky tradition in American journalism. I understand
there is even an obituary writer on staff at the Pentagon, whose job is similar to mine,
except that she also coordinates plans for the top brass' military funerals. Douglas
Edwards, something of a tradition in his own right, narrates most of my obituaries in
that measured, rich baritone that was, for many years, the Voice of CBS News.
Writing a script so that it is paced for an announcer's individual rhythm and speech
patterns is something of a Zen art. Officially, we're trained to write announce copy on
the right half of an eight by eleven sheet of paper, estimating that every two lines of
copy equals about five seconds of air time. Some announcers read faster; others, more
slowly. Juggling syllables along with facts, so that the commentary synchs up with the
shot changes, while, simultaneously gauging how someone else's inflection, tempo, and
tone of voice will sound, and succeeding, to the extent that the viewer gets a powerful
impression of the person being profiled, is the heart of producing a relevant obituary.
I'm very fortunate to have Douglas Edwards' voice, which adds a sense of authority,
and it's a privilege, whenever he lets me know, with a word and a smile, that he likes
the script.

Producing obituaries is also a way of creating a legacy to remember important
people of our times and their contributions. Whether I'm working on Sir Lawrence
Olivier, Count Basie, or Ansel Adams, I look for something inspirational about each
person. Perhaps it's how he or she approaches adversity. Rose Kennedy: "Early on in
life I decided that I would not be vanquished." Count Basie: "I haven't ever felt
discouraged." Sir Laurence Olivier: "Use your weaknesses. Aspire to your strengths."
Or, photographer Ansel Adams, quoting Alfred Stieglitz, on the perfect epitaph: "Here
lies Ansel Adams. He lived his life for better or worse, but he's dead for good."

Historically, obituaries "offer clues to our cultural values." While nineteenth
century obituaries described the deceased person's character, today's obituaries
concentrate on his or her career accomplishments, status, and wealth. Women's
obituaries used to focus more on their relationships with prestigious or notorious men,
rather than on their own life journeys. Blacks and Native Americans did not have
obituaries written about them, unless they died in unusual ways. Between 1910 and
1930, newspapers published dozens of obituaries of people who claimed to have
witnessed President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Nowadays, we write similar
stories about people who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Somewhere in the next century, when 65-million of us baby boomers get to
somewhere between the ages of 72 and 85, we'll probably be watching "The Obituary
Hour" after the evening news. By the year 2050, more than 834,000 Americans will be
at least 100 years old. In addition to becoming a demographic bonanza for the
funeral industry, the years between 2020 and 2035-- the "golden age of death," as
some funeral directors call it, could make obituary writing and producing a
transferrable skill.

Although profiling celebrities and world leaders takes me away from the daily
grind of explosions, train wrecks, and natural disasters, it has its own macabre
pretensions: "This little number includes your loved one's greatest soundbites, plus
those moving crowd scenes...And yes, we have laid down those memorable and poignant
cutaways..." Well, I haven't actually said that, but there have been a few Q and A's that
have given me pause:

"Why, exactly, do you need this footage, now?" the Vatican's public relations
priest wants to know.

"It's for...it's for...well, we do these profiles for world leaders on a regular
basis...in case... I mean, it's for if..."

"I understand." Something in that cold tone of voice makes me feel as if I should
be kneeling in one of those little wooden booths, saying, "Bless me, Father. Someone.
Make that Anyone."

"It's for when he dies. That's what you tell 'em," barks the Executive Producer,
who happens to be standing behind me. A tough little cigar chomping angel, he's
allegedly the prototype for the TV character, Lou Grant, although I'm not convinced.

"It's for if he dies," I repeat.

"Not if. When. Holy Father's gonna die. President's gonna die. You're gonna die.
I'm gonna die, sweetheart. Say 'When, not if.'"

"When. It's for when he dies."

"Good." (Too bad we don't have that Q and A on tape...it would be boffo footage
for our own respective obits.)

Even though we all watch dying people on the news every night, death is near
the top of some bizarre list of topics that most people hate to discuss.
Understandably. It's not my own personal favorite, by any means. On the other hand,
I cover my eyes whenever there's a medical story with pictures of injections or bloody
surgery. Sal, who also covers his eyes, sometimes jokes that this job is making us so
weird that we can look at the most gory pictures of death without flinching, but we
can't watch a human life being saved. On really grisly days, when we're on overload,
we compete with each other to see who can write the blackest humor:

"The death team...gravity and concrete...claimed two more lives in Chicago today,
when a couple of construction workers fell off a scaffold..."

"Twenty-eight people in a McDonald's in Omaha failed to get the break they
deserved today when a homicidal maniac carrying an Uzi gunned them down before
killing himself...but not before he downed three big Macs..."

"Florida is known for its juice...and convicted killer Mark Ansom got a real taste
of it today when the Sunshine State turned it on for him..."

Overload. "Our minds are so warped all this stuff that we'd probably get booed
off the set of Johnny Carson," Sal says between laughing attacks.

Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know. If there's one
takeaway from this M.A.S.H. unit, it's knowing that, as bioorganisms, we are, each of
us, a walking time bomb, programmed for cellular self-destruction. (Not if, when.)
Maybe there's more to it than that, but it doesn't show up in any footage.

Which is why windsurfing is now a necessary counterbalance to the constant
ringing of telephones, walls of monitors cranked up to high volume, and the occasional
telex tantrum. (Our Tokyo bureau chief has an annoying habit of banging on the bell
in Japan, so that it goes off, in a fury, a few feet from my desk, whenever he wants our
immediate attention.) Like windsurfing, newswriting is a continual exercise in focus
and concentration. Matching up words with moving images, with just a few minutes to
make it work, you zone in on the quiet spaces between the onslaught of sound.
Sometimes it feels like the news is coming in, on the wire machines, constantly, in
waves, like the ocean.

Speaking of ocean...

"Get here early and we'll save you a space." Joan and Ben call the newsroom
from a pay phone at a new beach. It's only an hour's drive from the city, and I can't
believe we're the only ones here. A parking lot, the size of an airfield in a Third World
country, extends from a four-lane road, all the way to a narrow strip of shoreline, ideal
for launching a windsurfer when the wind is out of the southwest. The Great South
Bay reflects a five-mile stretch of shimmering gray sky. On the far shore, lies Fire
Island.

I have decided to sell the "Shark" and get a real, one piece sailboard, even
though that will mean getting it off and back onto a roofrack. Today, I am fixing the
"dings" with a file and "Liquisole" so that I can sell it. In the meantime, I sail Ben's
Alpha Competition board, leaning way back, like sitting in mid-air. It flies through the
water, confirming that I am doing the right thing by selling the "Shark." It is time to
move on.


Heckscher. July 25, 1983.

Wind: 8-12 knots. Southwest.
Dancing on the water, smiling at the sky. My worries--job, marriage, fires, bombings,
earthquakes, building collapses, assassinations, obituaries, news conferences, and
assorted daily mayhem--seem to dissolve on land, where I left them. Sometimes, when
I'm out on the water, I wish I never had to go back. I could pack the sailboard on the
roof of the car, continue driving east, and become a waitress in Montauk. (Except for
the part about being called Dumbo and dropping those trays, it's a good fantasy.)

Holding the mast just below the boom to tack, my legs go wobbly, dumping me
into the clean saltwater, as the sail falls on my head. The underwater tack maneuver:
swimming underneath the sail, popping up, alongside the clew. Back in position, on a
reach, about a mile, southeast, for a visit to a clam boat, where the clammer talks about
his work, dredging up little necks and cherrystones. We exchange small talk about the
wind as it picks up. Another tack: across the ridge of the swell, under a fearless sky.

Whenever I fall, I am thinking about
a) how well I am doing
b) whether people on shore can see me
c) how hard it is to balance
d) something other than what I'm doing at that very moment

In Zen, mindfulness means simply paying attention. Or perhaps paying simple
attention. Or maybe paying attention to simple things like where you put your hands
and feet. My mistakes, on the water, come from not focusing on that place that knows
from within, how to adjust to fluctuations of sea and wind.

Attunement, I think it's called.

Clearing and emptying the mind are the keys.



Smith Point, NY. September 19, 1983.

The Sun is dying.
And I am crying.

Last night, the first hint of winter: The air loses warmth so quickly when the
sun fades, that the wind cuts through my wetsuit. It feels as if I'm just getting started
this season, and I'm not ready to stop. If only I can build up stamina to withstand the
cold... Hey, anyone can windsurf in the summer.

And "it's deja vue all over again," to quote Yogi Berra. Watching my brother-in-
law learn to windsurf one afternoon when the wind is blowing 20-25 and I'm already
tired of being blown off, is like watching myself learning, a year ago. I can feel his
persistence from across the water, as he pulls himself up time and again, three hours
straight. (My limit for uphauling self and rig has never been more than one hour.)
Today, I can't even get the sail up! Although I allege not to be competitive, I feel
jealous that he is getting the hang of it faster than I ever did. Must be those years of
rugby, plus more athletic genes.

Flashback to August: I lose the mast!

When it comes to the technical part, windsurfing must be the world's biggest
pain in the ass sport. Case in point: My brother-in-law pulls the mast plate off the
board. By accident, of course. Apologetically, he rivets the metal plate back on, only the
rivets pop out right away. He fastens more rivets, this time with fiberglass. At Plumb
Beach, I sail for an hour in a gentle 8-10 knots, southwest, no problem. But, when it's
his turn, no sooner does he uphaul the yellow regatta sail than the entire rig flies off!

Like Indiana Jones, we encounter one hazard after another in our quest for
stainless steel rivets. You would think they would be easy to find, but apparently,
stainless steel rivets are not for sale in any marine store in the New York metropolitan
area. Not that I know what stainless steel rivets are, mind you. All I know is that
without them, the mast plate will never hold, thereby making it impossible to attach
the rig; consequently, the "Shark" is not sellable.

An hour and a half on the phone leads me to Uncle Charlie's marine supply
house in Mamaroneck, about an hour's drive from home. Uncle Charlie offers to lend
us a rivet gun, which we decline, only to find, after driving another hour and a quarter
in heavier traffic, that the rivet gun at home is now broken! ("Se rompio, pues." Said
with a shrug. Meaning, "It broke itself." At times like this, "se rompio, pues" serves as
a universal, fail-safe explanation for those mysterious, mechanical breakdowns for
which no one wants to claim responsibility.) On his way home from work, Pete detours
to Uncle Charlie's for the rivet gun so that his brother can fix the "Shark" with rivets
and yucky looking brown fiberglass. This time, it holds. "FOR SALE" signs go up on
message boards and the car. Someone from work comes to see it, but when I unpack
the "Shark," its mast has disappeared. ("Se perdio, pues." Said with a shrug. Meaning,
"It lost itself.")

Questioned patiently by her husband, who asks her to retrace her steps to the
last time she saw the mast, Miss Mechanically Challenged thinks "maybe" it fell out
of the trunk one afternoon when she was removing the skeg so that her husband's
brother could attempt to repair the mast plate.

Indiana Jones Quest Number Two: aluminum tubing. ("Aluminium," as the
brothers call it.) After a series of overseas phone calls, Anne-Mieke calls Leo, who calls
the store in Amsterdam where they had imported the "Shark" from Germany a few
years ago, and guess what, they don't make this type of mast anymore. (Didn't someone
at Plumb Beach tell me that?) Going beyond the call of friendship, Anne-Mieke writes
to the "Shark" factory in Germany. While we wait for a response, one of my dad's
friends offers to have a new mast machined with one and a half inch diameter
aluminum rods. He promises to have it by Sunday but his friend, the machinist, has
cracked one of the tubes.

Today, Monday, my day off, the wind is blowing 10-15 on the Great South Bay
and I am sans windsurfer. ("Mierda." Meaning, "Oh, shit.")




Heckscher State Park, NY. September 23, 1983.

The HiFly 343, has arrived. It looks huge, probably because it's one solid piece instead
of three. Actually, at 12 feet 6 inches long, it's not much bigger than the "Shark." It
looks fast and stable, kind of like a Lincoln Continental. Naturally, the first thing I do
is misplace the mast attachment that locks onto the boom.

Although Pete is naturally athletic, he has refused to try windsurfing, on the
grounds that it's "not fast enough." Over the summer, he has made friends with a
group of Hobie Cat sailors who launch near our windsurfers' section of the beach. The
Hobie crowd is fun to hang with, and Pete's now hooked on flying the hull when the
marine forecast calls for small craft warnings.

Along with the HiFly, we have managed to acquire an eighteen-foot Hobie Cat,
a trailer to tow it to the water, a $5,000 loan, and a new circle of friends. After a
weekend of windsurfing and flying hulls, we talk, back and forth, on the phone, all
week. On Monday, we talk aches and sprains, rehashing tacks, gibes, and best
maneuvers. On Tuesday, we're depressed because it's only Tuesday. By Wednesday,
we focus on the weekend weather outlook. On Thursday, we plan menus. By Friday,
some people are already sailing, having gotten off work early. I take breaks between
writing stories to call the weather lady for the wind reports, repeating with a grin,
"Southwest 15 to 20!"

"She's talking to the weather lady again," someone says.

"Must be nuts," someone else says, patting my shoulder.

"What do you mean, 'must be?'" laughs Sal, tossing a crumpled 'bombing in
Belfast' script at my head.

Friday evening, we shop, cook, and pack for the weekend. A lot of effort goes into
making this fun.

Today, with 15 knots spilling out of the northwest, this is flying! The offshore
wind takes me to Fire Island in less than an hour. (And this, without using a
daggerboard for stability. It's the first time I've sailed without one.) When it's time to
head back, the wind shifts to southwest, picking up to 20, with whitecaps, no less. My
arms give out as swell keeps pitching me off. A grayhaired fisherman in a brown,
wooden fishing boat motors over to ask if I need help. (Flashback to St. Christopher
and Oinee: "The law of the sea.")

"No thanks, I'm waiting for my husband." I speak as if it's perfectly normal to
be stranded on a bank of whitecaps, sitting on a twelve-foot long plank of polyethylene.
With wind howling cold around my ears, this is no longer fun.

When my ride shows up, we tie the HiFly to the Hobie through the hole in it
upturned nose, lash boom and mast to the trampoline, and scream out of there, with
me in mild shock at how suddenly the sea is out of control.

"Don't be afraid," I'm told, as we start flying the hull, so that I'm slipping down
the trampoline, yelling. Hanging by a hook, suspended eight feet off the water, on a
Hobie captained by a maniac is my idea of terror. Especially when the maniac is my
own husband, and he's annoyed because I'm such a wimp.

"Everyone's scared of Hobies at first," Scott and Pam, two Hobie veterans,
reassure me, while I settle down by taking the rig apart, letting everything dry out.
(No screws, nuts and bolts. So much easier than the "Shark.")

Changing in the car, I wrap myself under two sleeping bags, lying on the grass
in the sun. "Cats get to lie in the sun like this. Maybe in my next life, I can be a cat,"
I'm thinking, as a seagull walks straight up to my head peeking out to look at orange
shafts of light fanning down from a screen of dark clouds over the Captree Bridge.

"Here." I offer small pieces of cheddar cheese, sopresata, and wheat crackers to
the seagull.

"Who's your buddy?" Pete asks, touching my hair.

We laugh, lying together in the sun.




Heckscher State Park, NY. September 25, 1983.

Towing the Hobie and the HiFly down Sunrise Highway in a red 1972 Chevy Malibu:
flat, six lanes wide, whooshing with cars. Passing BJ's Jungle, Divers' Way, Exotic
Adult Entertainment. Gas, gas, gas. Almost 100 miles long, running from Kennedy
Airport all the way past the Shinnecock Canal to Southampton, Sunrise is to Long
Island what Ventura Boulevard is to L.A., without the palm trees. Maybe someday, I
can write a Hunter S. Thompson road trip chronicle about Sunrise Highway and the
new, windfreak/wind worshipping culture.

Lucid dreams, where you are participating in the dream as well as aware that
you are dreaming, often feel like this--as if you are observing yourself from a point over
your shoulder--arms flexed, hands curving around the boom, breathing, in three
dimensional silence. Like those multidimensional dreams remembered, years later,
details along the horizon stand out: the black silhouette of a clamboat, a ferryboat's
flashing wake, one cedar house on stilts, and a water tower, backlit, in flaming, late
afternoon sun.

We are very much aware of winter coming on. Our friend, Warren, says he gets
depressed when he sees little kids wearing coats at night because it means that our
summer is over. I will miss how our mildewed wetsuits smell, as they dry over the
bathtub, after these end-of-summer weekends.



Heckscher State Park, NY. October 2, 1983.

Heckscher's Law:
"The wind shall blow until you get your sail rigged and board in water.
Then the wind shall stop blowing until you get your board out of the water, up
to the car, derigged, with the sail drying out.
Then the wind shall blow again."

Just my luck. I almost get mugged walking out of Macy's on Thursday night but
reach the car and go before my pursuers can catch up. Then the car won't start on
Friday. I drop a heavy thermos on my toe on Saturday and now there is no wind at all.
"Here, wind, come on, come on." (Like that'll work.) Talking to the wind makes as
much sense as calling a cat.

First a hint, then a tickle. Dune grass ripples and "it's picking up," we tell each
other. Seduced, I put on the wetsuit, rig the board, and I'm off. One gust later, and
it dies. I should have known. Any sport which requires that you encase yourself in
neoprene is probably of questionable merit to begin with.

Nonetheless, there is always something to learn, out here, on the water, as long
as I'm willing to remember that it's not all about picking up speed. "The beginner's
mind is good for trying a new approach," writes Herrigel, who might just as well be
writing about writing. Or windsurfing, for that matter.

Tacking, I head up into the wind and let the board do the work instead of
yanking the sail. A lesson in the art of effortless motion, like the Zen arrow that
releases itself from the bow.


Indian Harbor, Connecticut. October 10, 1983.

"Windsurfing looks like a great sport if you have servants!" Charlene observes with a
wry smile as she watches me wrestle the HiFly and rig down a rickety set of wooden
stairs.

We are visiting a couple who are moonlighting as groundskeepers on this estate.
The owners, emergency room surgeons who have emigrated from Eastern Europe, have
decorated their halls and balconies with smuggled Bulgarian icons and red velvet
wallpaper. Gives the place that charming neoDracula look. Not that I would ever say
anything like that.

Out in the channel, it's just a few brown ducks, a handful of dinghies, and me,
on a private tour of the most massive homes I have ever seen: one after the other,
after the other, spreading across the waterfront. Their size is almost scary. (What
would I do with 13 bedrooms?)

Floating toward a stone seawall that juts out past the point, a comparatively
modest eight bedroom colonial perches on top of a hill. But, 'round the point, this
"modest eight-room colonial" turns out to be merely one side of a house so big, I can't
see its full span!

Surprise spills me into the water. I come up laughing, face to face with a duck.



Heckscher State Park, NY. November 13, 1983.

"People die all the time." -- Chairman Mao's Little Red Book
The news god must be having fun.
It's raining death.
It feels like I live in the control room:

"Go to 5837. Give me a three second close-up of a bloody face. Forward to 8973.
Let's take five seconds of rescue workers in debris. Bring the sound up till the end of
the shot. Now back to 4595. Pick up the slow pan of the bombed-out embassy. Forward
to 7864. Zoom into body bags being carried out and bring up the siren sounds till the
end of the shot."

"Why are you being such an asshole?" Less than an elbow away, another
producer is starting to lose it with the senior tape editor.

"I went to asshole school," the editor smirks.

"Really? On a scholarship, I bet." (Are they laughing or getting ready to kill
each other? Hard to say, really. Besides, we've got two minutes to check our edit of the
U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut and cue it up for the five o'clock feed.)

"That looks great. Thanks...and could you cue it up, please..."
But the editor who is supposed to be feeding to the net is not at the control
panel. "Walking is not in my IBEW contract," he's hollering, as another producer
wheels him in to the control panel, in an office chair.

"Pushing buttons is in your contract," she says, patting his bald head. "Now, I
wouldn't want you to strain yourself, honey..."

October 25: We're still cutting aftermath of the Beirut bombing when the
Marines invade Grenada, two days later. By the end of the day, all anyone thinks
about is going home. At least, that's what I'm thinking, on my way through that last
set of doors, to the hall, when the new Executive Producer calls out, "How's that JFK
special going?"

"Coming along." (Strange time to ask about that, isn't it? Well, maybe he's just
being sociable. On the other hand, he looks pretty wired for a guy who just wants to
make nice about a special that doesn't air for another two weeks...)

"Good. We just got a call that Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos is dead. Get
your butt up to the library."

(Obit Alert! If only I had a police siren, for these mad, last-minute chases
through the building.)

Hours later, having combed through numerous card catalogues, ordering cans of
film from the archives across town--yes, I can authorize overtime for the file search--
there is still no bulletin about Marcos on any of the wire services. Maybe he's not dead
and I can go home. (Funny thing about being an obit queen. You start to take it
personally when anyone newsworthy kicks the bucket on your shift. It's like they do
it to you, personally. It's bizarre, how some little dictator on the far side of the planet,
whom you've never even met, can impact whether you eat or sleep.)

And, if he is dead, we'll need his obituary for the early morning feed.

Picking up the phone, I identify myself to the foreign editor of United Press
International before asking the magic question: "Have you heard the rumor that Marcos
is dead?"

(Great. Maybe Marcos isn't dead, but those gagging sounds, it seems as if you've
killed the poor guy on the foreign desk across town.)

"Marcos, dead? Did you say, 'Ferdinand Marcos is dead?'" (Uh-oh. More gagging
sounds.)

"No. I didn't say that. I asked whether you had heard the rumor that Marcos is
dead."

"Rumor? What rumor?"

"The rumor that Marcos is dead. I guess you haven't heard it. And if you're not
running a bulletin on the wires, my guess is that it's only a rumor...What's your guess?"

"Probably just a rumor," he sighs. "And if you get any other details, could you
please call me right away?"

"Of course." (Let's not tell him you're going home...)

There are two kinds of special events: planned and unplanned. Marcos' death
would have fallen in the "uplanned" box, if it hadn't turned out to be a rumor that came
from a Japanese cameraman in Washington, D.C., who got it from someone who heard
it on the radio in Tokyo. It's been a great week for unplanned special events, if you
include the American embassy bombing in Beirut and the Marines' invasion of Grenada.
We know the invasion must have been planned by someone--maybe the Invasion
Planners Service--but as far as we're concerned, it falls into the unplanned category.

Planned special events would include the upcoming twentieth anniversary of
President John F. Kennedy's assassination. For the past month, I've been working all
hours, producing a one-hour special on the anniversary with Walter Cronkite and Dan
Rather. Everyone old enough to remember is talking about where we were when we
first heard that the President had been shot. (Ms. Signorella's art class on the fourth
floor of Midwood High School...) Immersed in research: Hour upon hour, frame by
frame of the original black and white footage gets logged, seen, again, as if for the first
time. In Bettman Archives, dozens of manila folders, each one as thick as a Manhattan
phone book, crammed with black and white stills of those four days in Dallas...looking
for images that have not been shown on TV. Was it two or three mornings later...there
it was: a black and white picture from United Press International...in the limo, Jackie
and J.F.K., right after the first shot was fired. Her head is turned away from the
camera, but the President is smiling into the lens. The picture jumps out, making me
catch my breath. It's his last smile...

After the still image is transferred to videotape, and the rest of the black and
white footage has been cranked, by hand, through a moviola, or squawk box, by a film
editor old enough to remember how, there remains the logging of shots, then the
cutting and scripting of various versions, including a five minute package, narrated by
Douglas Edwards:

"November 22, 1963....a day of awesome tragedy, which, even now, twenty years
later, has the power to shock and horrify, and to fill us with a sense of tremendous loss.
On that day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas...

"It started innocently and happily enough, on a Friday..."

"At 1:40 in the afternoon, CBS News interrupted the network program, As The
World Turns. Walter Cronkite announced, "...A bulletin from CBS News...President
Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS
News for further details."

Sitting across from him, twenty years later, I can see Cronkite's expressive,
sharp, light blue eyes tear up again, when he talks about that day. "In the news
business, two things happen. First, you're struck by the enormity of the story, whatever
it is. And right away, on top of that, you turn professional, and your thoughts are on
how you approach the story and how you get it out. There's underlying emotion, of
course. And I think that's what happened in my reaction to each of these bulletins. I
couldn't help thinking, "How terrible!" But then, "How will we get the story told in the
best possible fashion?" The point where emotion is really hard to suppress, is when I
have to say, 'He's dead.' It was tough."

It wasn't long before Cronkite's next bulletin: "From Dallas, Texas, the flash,
apparently official...President John F. Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time,
2 PM Eastern Standard Time. Some 38 minutes ago...."

As much a part of history as the assassination itself are those next few seconds,
in which Cronkite removes his glasses to wipe his tears. Clearing his throat, now, to
describe the images that evoke all the sadness of those three days, he talks, almost as
if thinking out loud, about "...the doctor at Parkland Hospital, who was trying to avoid
saying there was no hope for the President, but who obviously couldn't disguise
it...Jackie Kennedy in the airplane, in her bloodstained suit, standing there while
President Johnson took the oath...the riderless horse always gives me a gulp, and the
reaction of people along the cortege...and the picture of Charles de Gaulle and the other
heads of state, all of them looking like midgets compared to de Gaulle's lanky form as
they came down through a long lens, out of the White House and down the East
Driveway of the White House....all these heads of state coming down through a misty
haze that you get through a long lens...it was quite an effective shot..."

Despite the zoning out that comes from nights of reviewing every sequence of old
footage, frame by frame, the pictures from the Kennedy assassination continue to have
a haunting effect on me. In the second half of the special, it's Dan Rather, with his
intense, cobalt blue eyes and precise use of language, who puts words to the feelings
that I'm sure millions of Americans must have whenever they watch any of those
scenes. "It was a special time. I happen to believe that for television journalism, we had
gone through our childhood and were entering our adolescence. And during those four
dark days in Dallas, we grew into adulthood. From that time forward, television
journalism moved with a confidence that it had not had before. It moved with an
assurance, not always for the better, that it had not had before. I think that we had
learned a great deal about ourselves, and I think the country learned a good deal about
ourselves. I think before those four days...television journalism and television
journalists, whether we would admit it or not, had a deepseated inferiority complex as
compared to print. We came out of that day, not feeling superior, but feeling parity,
saying, 'There are some things that we can do better than print.' Like cover an
assassination of a President."

Apparently, our one-hour special has made television history, as well. On
Thursday, when the network carried the Cronkite-Rather interview, an engineer at
KHOU-TV in Houston jumped into action when he heard "This is a CBS News
bulletin." Not realizing it was file tape from twenty years earlier, he punched it, live,
so that the daytime program was interrupted with the "news flash" that President John
F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas!

Today, my first day off in more than three weeks, I can't seem to come down
from the news high. Juxtaposed against flashing mindframes of cutaways and medium
close ups, panning across to those classic wide shots of Presidential coffins and bodies
loaded onto stretchers and all that debris are lower key montages of pastel afternoons
like this, floating between space and time. Today's fading, gentle waltz on slow water,
shimmering against a backdrop of rainbow tinted clouds, will be filed in my own private
archive, to be retrieved and savored during the long, icy months ahead.

Tacking back to shore, on this, the last day of my own windsurfing season, it's
hard not to zoom in to a superfat man, like Jabba the Hutt, who is smoking a
mammoth cigar and walking his chubby little dachshund on shore. Pumping the
regatta sail to keep from getting becalmed, a giggly thought breezes by:

He should have walked the cigar and smoked the dog.



Auckland, New Zealand. February 21, 1984.

Mokoia Island rises, forested and green, from the middle of Lake Rotorua on New
Zealand's North Island. This island-within-an-island is the setting for a legend that
could be considered the Maori equivalent of Romeo and Juliet. About 400 years ago.
Tutanekei, the illegitimate son of a Maori chief, was living on this island when Princess
Hinemos appeared "like a white heron in the water." Forbidden from ever meeting
because their fathers were sworn enemies, when the Princess heard Tutanekei playing
the flute, she swam to Mokoia. In the morning, when Tutanekai's slave went to wake
his master, he saw their four feet and ran to get the Maori elders. Unlike the
Montagues and Capulets, the elders blessed them and declared them married.

A sixteen foot, five and a half inch-tall wooden gateway representing Tutanekei,
carved in 1836, will soon be flown to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art as the
centerpiece of a traveling exhibit of 174 Maori art objects. The question--whether
to allow Tutanekei and the other carvings out of the country--is extremely controversial
to the 227,000 Maoris who make up New Zealand's indigenous population. They
believe that these carvings are not merely wooden statues; rather, that each person's
spiritual essence lives its respective statue. As one Maori professor explains, "A cynic
may argue that it's just a piece of wood, but you cannot convince a Maori that it is so."

As Pete and I are learning from the curators whom I am interviewing for a series
of magazine articles on the "Te Maori" exhibit, it has taken ten years for the Maori
elders to let themselves be persuaded that the artwork will be safe if it leaves New
Zealand. The Maori professor has pointed out that "the American public takes art for
granted but it has taken us a lot of soul-searching to decide."

As it has taken both of us a lot of soul-searching to decide to spend a big chunk
of our life's savings on this one-month trip to Australia and New Zealand. We have
been talking about leaving New York and relocating to this part of the world. I have
a tentative job offer with a TV news operation in Sydney, which seems ideal, except for
a feeling I can't explain, that keeps saying, "No." ("Australia is very far away," our
friends said, sadly, the night before we left. Far away from what? The F-train?)

Now, after 26 hours of flying, with a middle of the night pit stop at Honolulu
airport, "far away" has a whole new meaning. It feels as if we've been dropped on an
island underneath an invisible dome that seals it off from contact with the rest of the
world. Withdrawal from TV news set in on Day Two. There are only two, ten minute
world news programs, broadcast on BBC radio. If you miss those ten-minute newscasts,
you miss out on information about the rest of the world. ("So what? Isn't that what
you want?" a part of me asks.) As for the other part, well, coming down a steep
mountainside, a crackly voice, so faraway that it could barely be heard, was announcing,
"Thousands of people lined up outside the Kremlin to pay their respects to Yuri
Andropov..."

"I hope they remember where I left his obit." An automatic reflex--pick up a
phone!--strikes, just as a few hundred sheep begin to wander across the road. There are
sheep everywhere you go in New Zealand, sixty million of them and three million of
us, as in, people. We've been hearing the casual warning, "Watch out for the sheep
shit," ever since we stepped off the plane and into one of those genuine Monty Python
moments when culture shock and jet lag collide, in my first visit to a Kiwi grocery
store, with floor-to-ceiling wall shelves stacked with round, white cans (tins): SHEEP
TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES SHEEP
TONGUES, SHEEP TONGUES. Bold font. Bright blue capital letters. SHEEP
TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES SHEEP TONGUES... Just
thinking about it makes me laugh, which annoys my husband no end. "What's so funny
about sheep tongues? They happen to be delicious." Twenty minutes later, only half
the sheep have made it across the road and I really, really want to call the newsroom.
Knowing that there are no phones for a hundred miles only makes it worse. Five hours
later, we have driven only fifty miles, and it feels as if we're time traveling backwards.
Who needs phones in the nineteenth century, anyway?

Like Salvador Dali's painting of watches melting in the sand, time wanders at
its own curious pace whenever you're on vacation in a foreign country...like those
airports in the Third World, where you ask,"What time does the plane leave?" And the
man at the ticket counter shrugs, "It leaves when it gets here." Anyway, isn't time
more valuable when counted as sunsets reflecting in streams, or mystical, balsa-colored
hills dissolving into white mist, the cries of curlews in forests of the night, or the most
poignant of personal reunions? The juxtaposition of differences in geography and
culture with the familiar makes this an extraordinary journey for us, as we reconnect
with old friends and meet various members of our extended family. My in-laws, who
emigrated from the Netherlands, after the Second World War, to a town of 30,000
people on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island, have retained their language,
love of classical music, and old world gentility. My father-in-law, now seventy, dresses
in a bowler hat, crisp, starched white shirt, necktie, and cardigan, with his umbrella or
newspaper rolled up under his arm, for his morning walk to the wooden sidewalks of
the town's main street, with its hitching posts, for the shepherds who ride in from the
hills, on horseback, for haircuts and beer. Against the frontier town backdrop, he
resembles an endearing character from a short story by du Maupessant, not so much
out of place, as out of time.

Pete is having fun, driving the rented van through winding, rugged mountains
that resemble Scotland's, in the north, and Colorado's, in the south. "The beaches back
home are clean," he often complains. To prove his point, we detour to "the most
beautiful beach in New Zealand." At least, that's the pitch. Climbing down a bluff, past
a gnarled pine, to a wide strand of silver-white sand, past a couple of ubiquitous sheep,
I trip over something that turns out to be a rotting, yellow, sheep carcass, covered with
maggots.

"Very clean." (I can't help myself.)

"It's not that bad."

"How can you complain about a few beer cans and used condoms, when this is
totally gross?"

"It's biodegradable, isn't it?" he shrugs, as a downpour chases us back to the van.
The weather is suspiciously English, considering it's the middle of summer. The Maori
name for New Zealand is Aoteoroa, which means "The Land of the Long White Cloud."
What they don't tell you is that the long white cloud rains a lot. And, as we
newswriters like to write over those Sunday parades, "The weatherman failed to
cooperate today..." With an assignment to write about windsurfing in New Zealand for
Boardsailor magazine, I'm delighted by the 5700 miles of coastline, and steady wind,
but the cool, damp weather is bringing me down. Good thing I insisted on the
wetsuits for Pete and myself, even though he tried to persuade me that we wouldn't
need them, because, "after all, it is summer." (Think: South Pacific. Then check the
map. New Zealand is relatively close to Antarctica, and the wind from the south is, say,
assertive, even in summertime.)

I had assumed that because New Zealanders are water sports addicts, sailboards
would be as common and as easy to find as sheep. And since the first three letters of
the word assume are a.s.s... I should have brought my own gear. We could have been
windsurfing every afternoon. As it is, we've scoured both islands, from the Bay of
Islands, in the north, to Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, on the south island, and just
when I thought I would go into windsurfing withdrawal, we discovered Wakatip
Windsurfing on the Frankton Arm of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown. Queenstown is
the jumping-off point for organized wilderness adventures--rafting, jetboating through
the Shotover Gorge, glass bottom boat and hair-raising plane trips to the fjords of
Milford Sound, trout fishing, and ski trips to the Southern Alps. "Four years ago there
were no sails on this lake, but each year, there are more and more, " Lake Wakatipu's
manager Harry Rankin told us, as he rigged up a New Zealand-made Superstar--a
twelve-footer, with fiberglass over foam construction. The wind soon picked up to a
steady, onshore 25 knots, whisking me to the middle of the clear, glacier lake, with an
exhilarating 360 degree view of the brown, craggy mountains.
Pete got his Hobie fix, as well.

Back in Auckland, we've connected with the New Zealand Boardsailing
Association, thanks to a newsstand magazine called New Zealand Windsurfing. Linda
Stent, who coordinates the association's regattas and other activities, has introduced
us to Bruce Kendall and Grant Beck, both of whom are contendors for New Zealand's
Olympic team. Grant is encouraging me to go the next step and get into that padded-
vest-with-hook contraption called a windsurfing harness. "You have to try," he says
gently, almost reproachfully, as if it would personally bother him if I didn't attempt it.

Barely ten years old, windsurfing will become an Olympic event for the first time,
during the 1984 games in Los Angeles. Bruce and Grant are the first Olympic athletes
(or Olympic quality athletes) I have ever interviewed. It has been phenomenal to
windsurf near Grant, who is training, here, on Takapuna Bay, the heart of Auckland's
windsurfing scene and the site of the Olympic trials. From Takapuna Bay, you can sail
several miles to Rangatoto Island, in the Hauraki Gulf, or cruise around the bay,
admiring the red-roofed houses and tropical foliage on the shoreline. In October,
November, and December, the wind averages about 20 knots, offshore. In January and
February, it blows consistently 20, onshore. Even better: Takapuna has warm water,
the best pizza in town (all right, the best pizza in the country), a selection of pubs and
restaurants, and a gentle, laid-back atmosphere.

I could stay here forever, if only I didn't have to work.



Breezy Point, NY. Easter Sunday, 1984.

The first launch of the season: a photo shoot for Wind Rider. (Wind Rider and
Sailboarder are the only windsurfing magazines in the U.S.)

The assignment (should you choose to accept it): a look at the best windsurfing
sites in the New York metropolitan area.

The mission impossible: at least one professional quality photo of someone
windsurfing in front of the skyline.

The guinea pigs: Ben and I have volunteered to rig up and float around in our
new $400 drysuits. I can't speak for him, but mine makes me feel like the Michelin
man. Since the booties attached to the one-piece suit have no traction, I'm slipping off
the board more than I'm on it. (But, hey, anything that doesn't kill me builds my
character. Or something...)

There are logistical problems--a combination of the photographer's Wednesday
deadline, our respective work schedules, and the fact that we can't find an accessible
launch site with skyscrapers in the background. Mike's 300mm telephoto lens pulls in
the skyline, so that it appears closer than the twentysomething miles away, and it's a
dicey shot, at best. Here, down a sloping jetty of rocks, alongside the Breezy Point
Coast Guard station, we brace against wind gusting off the pylons of the Marine
Parkway Bridge. My first fall brings on an "ice cream headache," that sudden-onset
pain which shoots between your eyes into the back of your brain. The water
temperature is about as close to ice as anything I've ever experienced, and it occurs to
me that my life is protected by these thin rubber gasket seals around my neck and
wrists. This suit would fill up with frigid water in no time. A break in the neck seal
could be lethal.

After shooting one roll of film, Mike suggests that we drive to New Jersey, where
the skyscrapers are closer and more photogenic. I balk at spending hours in Easter
traffic, but Mike insists the background isn't "strong enough" for the magazine. We
compromise on Staten Island, where, one hour later, we are checking out a crumbly old
pier. Two rednecks in a pickup truck follow Ben's post office truck, all the way to the
pier, where they park a few feet away, so they can stare at us. It's not as if there's a
hardcore community of windsurfers in this part of the world. To these guys, we must
look like spacemen.

The wind is howling from the Upper Bay to the north, through the midspan of
the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. In order to get a shot of the skyline, we will have to
windsurf across the harbor, on a reach, perpendicular to the dock, then run downwind
towards the skyline, past tankers queuing in the Ambrose Channel. Eight to ten feet
below the pier, the swirling water glows an iridescent green. You could get shivery and
clammy just looking at it. Right up there with headless bodies in dumpsters are those
TV stories about toxic waste sites, and I've probably written more of them than I can
count, or remember. Not to mention that, five miles to the west, lies "Cancer Alley,"
the most polluted section of northern New Jersey. (Q: Why does California have the
most lawyers in the country, while New Jersey has the most toxic waste sites? A: New
Jersey got first choice.)

"No way."

Ben and Mike glare at me. "I know we drove all this way and it's cold and
you're going to be mad at me and tell everyone I chickened out..."

"I thought you were a pro." Clearly, the photographer is disappointed. There are
a lot of things I'll do for a story. A lot of things I have done. But...

"No way."

"Don't think about it," says Ben. "Just jump!"

"Are you kidding? Look at the current!"

"We could drive to New Jersey," Mike suggests.

"No way!" Ben and I chorus. Like the Marx brothers, interrupting each other,
we fill in each other's lines: it's late, it's getting dark, we're cold, plus there's all that
Easter traffic.
|
Just before we lose the sun, we fake a few shots. With the rednecks looking on,
amazed, we rig up, with the skyline in the background, as if we're planning to jump
into that slime and windsurf, anyway.





Heckscher State Park, NY. June 24, 1984.

Small craft warnings.
Hard to believe, but I make it out, and back, a few times, before my arms feel like their
being pulled out of their sockets.

"Just getting the sail up and standing is pretty good," someone comments when
I get back to shore. "You definitely need to get a harness."




Heckscher State Park, NY. July 14, 1984.

No doubt, this rainslicker yellow/PFD with chest harness has got to be the ugliest one
in the world, but the extra length gives back support.

Plotting a strategy. At 15 knots, I rig two sizes smaller to a 4.0 and adjust the
boom lines but I nose dive into the sail again and again, scraping my legs. (Beginner's
knees! Not again!) I'm told it takes about a summer to get used to it.

Windsurfing with Ken Winner says to try hooking in, on flat water, in eight
to twelve knots. The southwesterlies kick up quite a bit of chop at 8-12, but after six
attempts, I hook in and ride, for twenty seconds, before catapulting forward, face first,
into the boom. The next time, I go longer, maybe about 30 seconds, but as my body
takes the weight of the sail, it releases strain in the shoulders. (What a relief!)

A longer run, southeast, to the "NO SHELLFISHING" buoy; unhooking, for the
return tack. Hooking in again, riding the crest of the swells. Definitely an
improvement! This contraption could change windsurfing forever.




Heckscher. July 28, 1984.

This just in: Windsurfers are now classified as surfboards. Surfboards are illegal in
New York state parks. Ergo, windsurfing is now prohibited here.

"Question Authority," says that bumper sticker. Act nonchalant. Whistle a few
bars of "Alice's Restaurant." Rig that sail.

No arrests yet. Practice session: getting in and out of the harness, under
overcast skies tinged with orange. No one else is out there today.

A police car pulls up to the launch site. The driver and I watch each other for
what seems like a long time, but it's probably just fifteen minutes. Thinking this might
be the last windsurfing session here, I stay out for two hours, until the wind dies
completely. Becalmed. Swim back, pulling board and rig. Good exercise.

Another police car comes by, this one with two officers. We pretend to ignore
each other as the rig dries on the tarmac.





Heckscher. July 29, 1984.

Southeast, 10 knots.
No police. No "no windsurfing" signs. Celebrate! Whistle a few bars of "Alice's
Restaurant."

With no obnoxious signs to worry about, rigging with a still mind becomes easier.
Each point of assembly falls into its own rhythm: threading the sleeve of the cloth sail
through the fifteen-foot fiberglass mast, pulling the downhaul, fastening the downhaul
cleat on the mast foot, snapping the boom, tying the outhaul, checking the cleat, and
attaching the rig to the Hi Fly. All one, fluid movement.

Maintaining flow, windsurfing five miles, straight across the Great South Bay,
to Fire Island. All one, fluid movement.

Landfall is perfectly still, a shallow marsh. The only sound comes from clams
gurgling in the mud, and seawater lapping against the hull of the board. Quite a
contrast to the frenzy of the newsroom. The other day, as I looked up from my desk
at the freeflowing montage of bombings, plane crashes, train derailments, toxic waste
spills, and assorted murders on the various monitors, the sounds and images swirled
into a blank and time itself collapsed, then telescoped, as if everything happening in the
planet was happening right there, right now. And that was all there was. A horrifying
question: Is this is what God sees when He looks at planet Earth?

Out here, wrapped in the rolling swell and emptiness of the sea, I begin to
unwind.

Heading back around 4 PM, a gust pulls the 6.4 Neil Pryde out of my arms. The
massive HiFly pitches, nose first, over the swell. I start falling in. Crawl back up. Fall
in. Again and again. Defeat. This is usually where I begin to panic, but I've been here
before and recognize fear. "You know what to do, you can handle this," I coach my
fearful, klutzy self. "You can. You did. You will."




Heckscher. Labor Day, 1984.

Wind, gusty as hell around the western point. Whitecaps and foaming current. A 5.5
meter sail and the harness. Flying over the chop. Wind