True North

My parents were committed sailors, in completely disparate ways.

Once, the Captain of a catboat told my mother, "Whatever happens, don't let go of that boom."

So, she flung her arms around it, and, as the wind swung the seven hundred pound boom out over the blue Atlantic, my mother held on.

When he later saw her predicament, the Captain shouted in astonishment, "Jan!  What are you doing?"

"I'm holding on!" she answered.

Her eventual splash into the water below was balletic.  She was elegantly dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses at the time, and the rest of us were incredulous that she was now treading water below.

But, her actions had actually helped to prevent a capsize, and so she was heroic in her drenched state of beauty.  We all stared as if we had never seen anything so glamorously accidental, so gorgeously committed.

She climbed back on board with laughter and Grace.

My father, by contrast, sailed across the sea like Magellan.

He turned his halcyon blue eyes to the currents, the waves, the cat's paws with which the wind was patterning the water -- and he knew how to chart his course.

"We're going to be coming about in fifteen seconds or so," he would say, calmly.

But, if we were in the middle of a race, which we often were, those quiet words meant, be ready, because it's important that we're expert throughout this tack.

My father always won his races.  And on the water, he was as calm as a compass pointing to True North.  Steady.  Imperturbable.  Stoic.  And mysterious.

He communicated with the sea in the way a mystic would, with long silences, profound insight, and a gaze that traveled all the way to the horizon.

His crew never wanted to let him down.

In the summer of 1976, when I had just turned fourteen, my father announced to me that he thought I was ready to Captain my own races.  There was a Junior racing series starting in a few days' time, and he thought I should sign up.

My noble and expert father proposed himself as the crew.

So, we traded places in our Herreshoff, and the tiller suddenly appeared under my own hand.

Much to my astonishment, I won my races, too.

The most important things to know were not to be learned in a sailing lesson, it turned out.  The transformative knowledge lay in the pull of the tides, which I could feel if I held myself still and grasped the tiller lightly.  It lay in the sound of the wind passing over our close-hauled sail.  It lay in the arc of the spinnaker, ballooning brightly above our heads.

It lay in knowledge, in judgement, in goodness, in intuition, and in faith.

The sea was a wilderness and the beast within it, and it would swallow you whole if you forgot that truth.

So knowledge, judgement, goodness, intuition and faith were all required.

President Biden, as our Commander in Chief, knows this wisdom well.

I see in him the Captain's True North, as I have seen in the best sailors.  I see in him the gaze that extends all the way to the horizon.  I see in him the expert knowledge of the currents and the waves.  I see in him the measure of the wind and its intent.

President Biden is navigating our way through the shallows and the narrows that represent democracy's greatest test.

On the deck of that endeavor, may we be worthy, may we be ready, may we be expert, may we be committed.

The endurance of our freedoms will depend on the gifts of our Captain, and it will depend on the character the rest of us bring to the race.

President Biden is sounding the call that we in the American electorate need to bring everything we've got to this voyage.

I am answering him with my sovereign promise to do so.

Lane MacWilliams