Aboard Althea: The Baby-Making Boat
By Malena Ida
My mother wanted a water birth. As she readied herself to push from within the tub of warm water, the midwife panicked. Lacking the necessary experience to guide the endeavor, she urged my mom to get out of the tub. I did not swim into this world like I was supposed to.
*
The mainsail bellows with a strong gust of wind and the boat heels over farther than I’ve felt it tip before. “Reef the sail! Reef the sail!” I call out, curled on the floor of the cockpit. Wyatt is still. He’s thinking, before he calmly informs me that “you never make changes in haste on a boat. Unless you have to.” For him – and the 6 years he’s lived at sea – this is not an emergency. For me – and the one year of getting to know him, odd weekends on the boat and a small handful of sails – it is. He reefs the sail, and the boat tips back to a neutral angle. For the rest of the afternoon, I think of the 18 thousand pound keel below that keeps us steady.
In the Summer he asks me if I want to sail to Mexico in a year. I spend a few seconds considering his offer and agree. I’m familiar with adventure and I’m in love. I decide I’ll learn to sail, relieved to have found a sense of direction. I already know the knots, the hitches, and I am diligent about caring for my gear. I’m proud to tie bowlines in the jib sheets and I hoist the mainsail as instructed. I want to catch up to his 6 years of experience. He says he’s made a lot of mistakes. I want to make it perfect.
One afternoon, he tasks me with raising the jib like he’s shown me once before. I talk through the steps, watching for his nod of approval. I walk to the foredeck, where the jib awaits me already unwrapped from its bag. I line it up and clip the hanks to the forestay. My movements are clumsy, each action uncertain. The bow is rocking up and down with the swell. My stomach curls and my head feels light. I want to make it perfect. I continue with the clips, panicked that maybe they’re not facing the same direction. I check. They are. “Looks great!” he blurts out, when he comes to check on me. My big accomplishment is his mundane task. The jib goes up and my stomach does somersaults. The rocking subsides and the boat slices through the swell. I spend the rest of the afternoon half asleep in the cockpit, chewing on Gin Gins, with anti-nausea wrist bands on. I don’t get sick.
*
My mother considered naming me Seine, after the river that runs through Paris, where I was born. My father vetoed it and I was named after my great-grandmother. Malena, an abbreviation of Magdalena. “Abuelita was really a mother to me, she was the one who raised me,” my mom has told me on many occasions, “grandma, was more like a wild older sister.” I’ve heard my grandma say the same about her mother, “it was really my aunt Beatrice who took care of me, my mama was busy.” I’ve often wondered what kind of mother I would be.
*
On a dinghy ride to shore – some months into Wyatt and my love story – I have the arresting sensation that everything is alright. I notice the bustling harbor, fishing boats whir by. I catch the morning breeze on my cheeks, salt in the air. I’m reminded of Maine, where I lived for a year in 2021 – lured in by the promise of a love that was not meant to last. I hadn’t yet learned to be my own provider. It’s easy to forget that I was the captain then, even if I handed someone else the map. I had agency in my choice to move there, where I longed for a life by the water. I had my eye on a crafted destiny – an image of whom I was meant to grow into, beside a man I thought I was meant to be with. I left with the same agency, ready to trust myself. Be my own provider. Here in California, I know I am the captain of my life. I play first mate on the boat, where Wyatt and I study each others’ maps. Led by love, I am back by the water. I’m learning to trust the longing I am not conscious of. I take my time.
Yesterday, Wyatt and I test sailed Althea, his dream boat. It’s the second time I sailed on a proper sailboat. I cried over our dinner that night.
*
My mother sends me pictures of artifacts from my childhood, dug up from the basement. Painted mermaids in seascapes, the details of their scales brushed over with a thin layer of blue. They are underwater. “Keep or no?”
*
Althea is a Chris-Craft 35 ft Sail Yacht. The first Sail Yacht manufactured by Chris-Craft, designed by Sparksman and Stevens in 1964, she is the same age as my mother, one year younger than Wyatt’s father. The spacious cockpit separates the forward cabin and the aft cabin. The forward cabin holds a spacious galley. On one side, butcher’s block countertops and a two-burner propane stove and an oven on a gimbal. On the other side, an icebox we plan to turn into a fridge, a sink with fresh and saltwater foot pumps and a lever to manually pump the water down the drain. There is a wood stove heater and two settees separated by a retractable table. The bed is in the far forward end of the cabin – shaped like a V to fit in the bow, a twin bed at our heads, a King at our feet. A small studio, perfect for a couple. The aft cabin holds two twin beds, and a compost toilet we’re excited to replace. You can fit two beach chairs on the stern, and I stretch on the bow, when the water is calm.
When Wyatt sends me the Craigslist post, the warning catches my eye. “Buyers beware: this boat makes babies! The first owners sailed her from San Francisco to South Carolina, got pregnant and had to sell, the second owners sailed her from South Carolina back to San Francisco, got pregnant and had to sell, and we sailed her to Mexico, Tahiti, Hawaii, Alaska got pregnant, came back and are selling.” Patrick, the previous owner, offers to buy us condoms in bulk before we take off on our adventure. We talk about this with friends who are over for brunch, “I just had the image that no matter how many condoms you bring, Althea will tip strategically with the swell, just enough so that they all spill out of the port hole.” I laugh, charmed by her motives to make grandchildren. Althea, is a mama boat.
*
I raise the jib, afraid I might raise it too high. Eventually I’ll learn how to make it below, how to adjust its angles to fill it with wind from all directions. For now I am proud of myself when I raise it. I clip the jib halyard to the jib head, the hanks to the forestay, and pull it up from the other end of the halyard. When I can no longer hoist it by hand, I wrap the halyard around the winch and attach the handle. The challenge progresses. The triangular cloth extends into the sky and the winch stiffens. Every crank on the handle feels like it should be the last. “Is this good?” I call out, “More!” Wyatt encourages. I’m not sure what I’m scared of, that it’ll break through its upper boundary and endlessly rise into the sky, taking the whole boat with it in flight. This is not the parachute sail, and parachuting is not that sail’s function if we were to use it. Really, I’m nervous that it’ll snap and recoil back down. That it’ll fall over the edge of the boat and dip into the ocean for a swim. We don’t know each other’s boundaries, they shift with every lesson learned. As I settle into a new comfort zone, I’m pushed into the next one.
*
“It scares me not knowing what our futures hold,” I posit, eyes welling. “We’ll figure it out,” Wyatt answers. He is so calm. “What if we don’t want the same things?” I ask, afraid to admit to myself that maybe I want love. As though admitting that my desire for him could supersede the life I imagined without him, makes me a weaker woman. Is following something women do? I know that I want adventure. I’m attracted to his dreaming. Is this where our maps overlap? He watches me, his eyes soft. “What if it doesn’t work?” I ask again. He is still calm when he answers that “we have time.” “I don’t know what I want,” I manage to say, slowly, between tears and careful breath, “what if our lives are meant to go in different directions?” He answers with a certainty that baffles me, “right now, all I know is that I want this,” he gestures to us sitting at a counter in an empty restaurant, facing the dark empty streets of downtown Ventura. I don’t have many words to hypothesize my breakup with this young man I love. I’m already watching us disappear on the horizon, swallowed by the setting sun on the far edge of the ocean. I want a life raft. Can I swim home? We haven’t set sail yet.
The next morning I am reminded of Maine, on our dinghy ride into the harbor. I buy myself fresh orange juice from Tri County Produce and find a seat on the short cement wall that divides the beach from the sidewalk. I journal about deserving. I journal about plans. They never unfold as I expect.
*
“But I’ve always known you were a mermaid,” my friend Hannah says, “that’s how I got to know you.” She responds to my questions of belonging, unsure of my place as a Californian Sea-Farer. We met on a summer wilderness expedition, “Ocean Odyssey for Girls,” and have gathered by the water since.
*
I cut my grandma’s hair under the avocado tree in our backyard when the sun is soft and the breeze is light. She's 93 years old now, my grandpa is 90. I moved to LA two years ago from Maine to care for them. I am close with my grandmother. We share the same judgmental facial expressions. She taught me to question what I’m told, and reminds me to have fun. When we are together, our laughter echoes through the house. I tuck her in, when she retires to bed early. Helping her squeeze the toothpaste onto her toothbrush so that her trembling hands have less reason to ache tomorrow. I find purpose in my nurturing. They do okay on their own. I worry, what will happen when I leave for good? When I leave for now, the fridge is stocked with easy leftovers to heat up and I’m hopeful that no one will fall, they won’t eat rotten food, that my grandma will brush her teeth. I hope she will laugh.
*
On a dinghy ride out to Althea, I am giddy. Comforted as we approach, I find home aboard her. I plan to get her a mezuzah and in the meantime I kiss her directly with each arrival and departure. Her wood finish, along her exterior, shines like chestnut auburn hair in the sun. The green sail cover compliments her, protecting her from the elements like the perfect scarf carefully selected from the back of the closet.
She has the same wood finish along her interior. Varnished and shiny, it lines the ceiling of the cabin which is otherwise painted in a soft white color. Cream or eggshell. We haven’t come up with much of a color scheme yet in our decor. There are blues and taupes in the duvet and the curtains I made for her from a scarf I bought Wyatt when I was traveling. There’s a rug in the galley that I picked out with his mom at Target before we sailed from San Diego to Ventura. “Whatever you do, don’t get rid of it!” she instructed Wyatt. She didn’t know I already pictured us halfway across the world. That was 5 months after our test sail. I am still afraid, but now Althea holds us. “Us,” “we,” Wyatt says.
*
When I show my grandparents a picture of the inside of the boat, they don’t know what to say. This is new, even for them, worldly as they are. The main cabin is captured in a single shot. “Think of all the meals we’ll be able to cook in that floating kitchen.” They don’t speak. When I tell them about Wyatt for the first time, I tell them that we write each other letters. I tell them that I am smitten – I still am. I tell them about Wyatt’s line of work and I speak of the courage and faith that his life on a boat demands, as much as I understand of it at the time.
*
At my age, my mother informed her parents that she planned to pursue a Ph.D in Art History instead of going to Law School. They never imagined one day she would shock them further with plans to divorce her husband of 3 months and put her Ph.D in Art History aside. She would instead be ordained as a Zen Nun with the German Anarchist who is my father. “It was a love I couldn’t help,” she recounts. “You scare me, I don’t know who you are,” was all my grandpa could muster in response. She didn’t care, there was intention in her revolt. Intentionally or not, my grandmother raised her to be defiant in ways she could not afford to be herself.
My grandmother, a woman who could not subdue her spirit to fit the expectations of a traditional Catholic Ecuadorian woman, traded them in for those of a Jewish Beverly Hills housewife. She married a nice Jewish boy. Straight and narrow, my grandfather is one granter of her wishes. He performs his duties as husband as best he knows how. Back in the day he reeled her in by mocking her for her misuse of big words scrambled by her accent, or by making an example of her disorganized ways. Now he decides what is best for her and she abides, mostly.
As a mother, she fell back on Catholic Ecuadorian mores she could not dispel. Mores her mother never attempted to. Their rearing proved to be strict. “Don’t read too much, boys don’t like smart women” later became an exam at the door. Home at curfew my mom was met with her hair sniffed, her breath checked, “Where were you?” “Who were you with!?”
The plan for my mother had been to become a lawyer or a doctor. To be successful by her parent’s measure. A straight ‘A’ student throughout high school, she was captain of the varsity tennis team. She was an editor on the school newspaper. She would have been editor in chief, “but you're a woman, there’s never been a woman editor in chief,” the teacher in charge of the school newspaper informed her.
My mother’s rebelion is deep seeded. Mine spans generations. She received “most-nonconformist” as her senior superlative. She is still proud.
*
In July, Wyatt and I leave for a week-long trip to the Channel Islands. I buy too much food and rush to make sure my grandparents will be okay at home. I’m not sure what to do with myself once we’re out there, anchored at Smuggler’s Cove. Wyatt naps on the starboard side of the cockpit. His bear skin shines in the island sun peeking over the hard dodger. Forget Me Nots by Patrice Rushen plays through my speaker from a Donna Summer’s I Feel Love playlist I downloaded when we still had service. He is an image of peace. Asleep to music he would never listen to, if it weren’t for me playing it. Somehow it fits perfectly.
Malena Ida is a new nonfiction essayist and poet residing aboard a 35 foot sailboat on the coast of Southern California. She graduated from Naropa University with an interdisciplinary degree in Embodied Ecology and Gender Studies, and is still figuring out what that means. Through UCLA’s extension courses in creative writing she is savoring exploring her voice as a queer Latinx woman in the outdoors.