Hello folk -- Today I am a True Proa Sailor. I am sitting here late
at night in a bood-stained shirt, hospital pants with no underwear, a
forehead fastened back together with Krazy Glue (no shit!). Let me
tell you about my first day out with the crabclaw.

The NOAA site said thunderstorms 50% likely, winds SW 10-15 knots.
But I just had to get out or you folk would never belief that I made
a crabclaw rig or even had a proa. I was furiously making last-
minute parts up until the time I left. "Oh, no, I need a parrel.
Damn, I need a cleat for the halyard. Oh yeah, I wanted those oak
hooks I made for some reason last year for the sheet. And the seat,
for the crabclaw I finally gotta have a seat on the akas...." But
that is what drill presses, belt sanders, jig saws, and expensive
heavy stainless steel screws are for. Ah, the smell of sweat and
burning oak (I think my drill press is running too fast for oak). So
I am finally at the ramp by 2PM.

Right away, the yokel factor sets in -- all the yokels have to launch
their boats at the same time on a ramp that will fit two. It's a
male ritual. Women would not do this: they would just know who goes
first, who needs to hold back, who needs help, and if they didn't,
they would talk it over; this is not sexism, it is brain science,
proved in many studies. I assemble my proa in the gravel away from
the cement ramp, but a guy squeezing his giant army truck (it seems
like an army truck) by almost hits it any way. The boat takes much
longer to lash and bolt together under a burning sun and amok the
fumes of trucks, cars, jet-skis, inboards.... it seems that my new
cleat-method of attaching akas and amas replaces time wasted on
groping for dropped nuts and washers with time wasted on groaning and
tightening the lashings and lacerating my palms (but the rig is
flexy, and that is better).

And then the crab-claw --- it has become a beast out of science
fiction, or perhaps Polynesian mythology -- it has a hundred octopus
lines -- shunting, staying, brailing, no -- two brailing lines.
They were thoughtfully arranged when I stowed them last night, tied
off on each their own cute little oak cleats I made lovingly. In the
drive over the highway, the highway gremlins went in and wrapped the
shunt line around the mast fork, and the stay interwove through the
mast heel tie-down and the shunt-line, sitting there smiling at me
like an innocent babe, snake-like braids itself like a tart, like a
wanton, around any line-like object. But it gets untangled, and I
impress the boaters by a constant mumble of foreign-sounding words to
impress them with my wisdom -- "Yes, boys, this is all planned out,
all is well -- just a high-strung, finicky rig is what we have here.
Better not try it until you're older."

OK, I push off. The wind is SW, just enough angle that I can almost
sail off the ramp close-hauled. The rig is looking very nautical,
now, boom brailed up in yard, mast at rakish angle, fashionable and
keen, yes, yes, there is order here, even sense. I don't want to
touch anything because it is so very nautical, just let me sit at the
ramp with this brailed perfection and answer the questions of the
curious, but no, one must sail, in the end. Release the brail, the
wind is about 10 knots, and the inexpensive blue triangle shudders
once and tightens, and I'm a real proa sailor at last.

If that first run could only have continued for the whole afternoon!
This rig is good, the boat is moving sprightlier than ever. I try to
see the vortex but as has been suggested, it is invisible. The
center-of-effort is farther back than with my old rig, so I have to
sit more toward the rear of the hull on the protruding bolt I had
cleverly situated right there on the aka seat because I figured my
butt would be six inches to the right. No matter. I cut across
South Bay (sounds very nautical but this is just a piece of the
lake). I want to ram the farther shore before I disturb this rig,
running so well. Damn, I have to shunt sometime today. OK, now! It
should take 15 seconds at the most. OK, 30 seconds, OK, 45, really,
not so bad. NOW I am a true proa sailor. Especially because I have
to beat the yard heel around the akas, which protrude 4 inches beyond
the lee gunwale -- a miserable, bitter, passive-aggressive four
inches, that is.

New discoveries are falling thick and heavy on me. The thick-seeming
nylon stay is stretching, so my mast is canting in two dimensions,
and the sail is not performing as well as it could. And the nylon
rope that is my shunt-line does not quite pull the yard heel tightly
into the bow. With the wind on, the rig is tight enough, but the
yard heel is hanging a bit in space, and I hear it thinking: "Hmmn.
What force can I generate with this 5-inch play? And how thick is
the plywood around the bow? Well, we'll take our time and just see
about that." The yard heel bounces a little and starts looking like
a small but earnest pile-driver. I try to uncleat the line and pull
it tighter.

And then the other shore is close. Shunt again -- not too bad, I'm
getting the hang of the sequence, though another New Discovery wants
attention. The sheet gets wrapped around the sail with the shunt.
The physics of this astounds me with its simplicity. It is
beautiful, life should be this easy to understand: when the sail
weathervanes, it winds the sheet around it. What have I missed on
the Proa group discussions? Was it one of those short-but-wise
messages I skimmed and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and skipped to get
to the next one about carbon composite masts? Why hasn't Todd said
something about this? Why hasn't John dedicated an entire link to
the sheeting issue? Is this why Rob likes the Baelstron so much?

Shunt number three: "C'mon you fucker! You damn fucker! Go around,
my sweetheart, don't jamb...." The shunt line is twisted; the yard
heel pauses midway, and leaps for freedom, the way a yellow parakeet
looks inquiring at an open door when one is vacuuming and
ventilating the room of noxious dust, and the parakeet rises up, up,
up for freedom, and such did the yard heel rise. I stand, grab,
grunt, wrestle it down. "I lost that parakeet, but you, my pretty,
are roped down." The boat pirouettes. The rig goes aback and comes
down like a delta-parachute, and the strange vision of a Gemini space
capsule comes to mind, artist's conception, Rogallo wing re-entry,
from one of my childhood science books. OK, good. Now I have an
abackness story to tell. But no one told me about the nutcracker
effect.

Why hasn't Gary, or Jerry, or Janusz described the nutcracker
effect? It is a significant force on one's ankle. It is a
disarmingly slow yet crushing, levering, shattering pressure when the
mast falls aback against the ankle that was somehow there, and the
weight of two 14 foot Douglas fir yards aided by the 32 ft per second
squared acceleration of gravity, further abetted by a roughly 12-to-
one levering ratio where the mast end presses the ankle against the
alarmingly narrow gunwale, so narrow it seems that it is a knife-
edge, my ankle a choice cut of meat, the mast the butcher..... And
that, comrades, is the Nutcracker Effect. I muscled it away after
some trauma occurred. We'll hear more about this Effect later on!

I will not lie to you, but I will spare the details -- the rig was
nice when it was rigged, it was a terror when abacked, and a horror
when abacked partly in the water. A kindly man in a pontoon boat
(you know, awning, table, cooler, martinis, family and friends) came
by to ask if I was all right. For one of those martinis I could be
very much in need of help right now, but I think of the hard work of
my proa buddies, their joys and successes, their pioneer spirit, and
I say, `Wade, you are here for them, not for yourself. You are
nothing. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,' and I
answer cheerily enough, briefly lecture on the proa when he calls it
a `Hawaiian boat', and in general make the blue delta now scooping up
water into the clearest case of ethnographic study and predictable
sailor-like behavior imaginable.

OK, my last shunt for the day -- I can tell you that now, because I
I'm sitting here tonight telling you abut all this. I am noting that
the boat is not really clawing its way to windward. I am not sure
how bad the leeway is, but the last two shunts were probably done
over the same GPS coordinates. Paddle back against the wind? No!
See if the zillion-but-fast broad reaches works better than
attempting what has always been for me the mythical 45-degree tack'.
Oh blessed 45 degrees! As far away as Parnassus, as ephemeral as The
Rainbow Bridge! On the way to reproducing the third exact set of
coordinates, I see a motorboat and water skier ahead. No matter.
They'll be done fiddling around when I get there. But I'm on a reach
with a crabclaw, and yes boys, I am flying the ama! So I'm getting
there fast, and the motorboat guy is yelling at the skier guy. I
luff up, but the wind is still carrying me somewhy. I yell, "I have
no steerage!" The boat guy looks, and turns away. Closer still, "I
have no steerage! I'm coming through, sorry!" and I want to add, I
have goddamned right of way, too, but then, these are weekend lake
powerboaters, and they don't know what `steerage' means either.
Finally the boat guy answers his wife's question with something
sounding like "Sailboat!" spoken in the same way I speak when I hawk
up some spit, then spit, and then say, "That there bug is called the
pissworm, but in Pequod Indian folklore it was called the
paquatucamak, or `vomit-mucus beetle'." So he yells at the skier to
let go the rope, let go the rope, will you let go the rope, and he
guns off. I apologize to the skier, but he says, "That's OK, that's
OK, it's still fun," and I think he must be half answering me, half
answering the boat-guy.

The boatguy returns too soon, and now I am being blown into him
again. I stand and reach up to spill the sail, when a gust hits me --
that's why the ancients believed in gods and evil, because gusts of
wind tended to come just when you were leaning to get a good look
over the cliff to see if the mammoth herd was napping down there.
The proa flipped. (Have you ever noted that there is always time to
say, "Oh shit" between the initiation of an event and the concrete
validation of the event? When the Killer Asteroid hits the earth
someday, there is going to someone who says `oh shit' a
micromillisecond before the shockwave arrives. It's going to be just
touching the nose as the final "t" sound is sounded.) And then the
ama flipped around and caught me on the head as I was bobbing up.

They were inquiring after my health, and I was saying I was OK, when
they said, "You're bleeding real good, buddy!" The baby on the boat
starts to cry. I say stupidly, "My foot's stuck." And it is. I am
floating in a pool of blood, my eyes are covered a strange film that
I later know was blood, and I'm drinking ounces of my own blood, but
I am happy that I wore the life jacket today, because I am floating
while -- yes -- the Nutcracker Effect. I didn't even have the words
to say, "How can this happen again?" I fish for my knife to cut my
foot off (I have heard of stuck people who to do this, and when the
pain of capture is as much as amputation, I've heard it can be
done). But I remember dropping the knife in the bottom of the boat
some minutes before (the one time I didn't use the lanyard!) when I
had to cut the sheet, which had tangled again (I think I solved this:
you tie the end of the sheet to the lee gunwale and throw the sheet
into the water when you shunt, right? With luck, the yard heel
passes over it in during the shunt). Now the knife is gone, and I
consider asking the guys to help, but give up on that immediately and
pull free viciously, and that will explain why my leg looks the way
it does right now.

So I am sitting on my ama, and I am very glad it has the buoyancy to
carry my full weight. The boatguy and skier are doing something, the
wives are hovering about, the kid is screaming, and I am drinking my
blood. It has soaked my shirt, my PFD, my pants, and later in the
hospital I will discover my underwear is brown. Did I cut loose a
prodigious fart when the ama cracked me? No, the blood soaked
through and died the tighty-whities brown. The skier guy jumps in
and says he will tow me back to the shore. He ties off on the damned
ama. I say, "Don't tie off on the ama, tie up here," but the blood
in my mouth makes it come out as a bubbly, "Donth tie opthf thrub
amba," so he thinks the concussion is getting to me and carries on.
I marvel that blood doesn't taste too bad, all in all -- rather like
low-salt V8 juice that has been sitting in the sun. More advice is
being shouted to me, they are going to take me aboard, and I clamber
up. The poor child aboard howls because his father has just hauled
up a bloody thing out of the sea. The mother shields her dear one
from the sight, but he leans around her legs to peek. I say, "Hi
there!" but I know he only hears, "I'll be there in your closet
tonight. I will be that sound you dread, that sinking feeling you
feel in your heart when, at the edge of sleep, something moves in the
shadows of your room."

The boatguy yells at his wife for coddling the child as he gets a
first aid kit out. He proud of the first aid kit but can only
produce an inch and half square bandage to press on my wound, but
that checks the bleeding. In the chaos I admire my upside down
proa. The main hull is floating high, right on the gunwales, and so
I learn that the watertight enclosing of my foredecks and addition of
those cute plastic watertight screw-in ports was a good decision.
But now the boat guy's boat will not start, so they flag over other
boatguys to drive me to the ramp. A thoughtful wife has dialed 911
for an ambulance. I had asked her not to, that I am fine, but she
tells me many Tales from the Crypt, whose dominant themes are
concussions, blood clots, internal injury, and "people just get head
injuries and seem fine and tomorrow they're dead."

The other boatguys can't quite maneuver close, and I've been watching
the skier spending 5 minutes trying to figure out how to cleat off my
boat, and I give it all up for lost and jump in the water and swim
for the boat that runs. They toss me a rope and I haul myself over,
as the wind finally brings the two boats together and I am caught
between two icebergs. It is all too funny, and I get aboard and say
my good byes, and we speed across the lake (the wind had blown us a
half mile down in the fisaco)and the other boatguy rams his outdrive
on the lake floor a second after his passenger says, "It's getting
shallow." This boat is now disabled, so I say thanks and sorry, and
swim for the ramp (he gets it going later). There the EMTs are
waiting, and with clever jokes and coaxing they lure me into their
truck, and then that's that, I'm going to the hospital. The nice guy
and nice gal are volunteers, and I have dragged them away from
barbecues, probably. The gal is proud of the nice head wrap she
makes for me (the rural EMTs don't get much practice), but she gets
car sick in the ambulance with the air-conditioning off. When she
turns green I say, "Oh, I'm warm enough, these clothes dry out fast,
so turn it on," and for this gallantry I become a shivering mess by
the time I am admitted into the emergency room.

I wait a few hours, because there are true emergencies at this place,
but the doctor is apologetic and I forgive him because he looks like
Mark Greene on the TV show ER (except he has hair), and I always
liked Mark. I am shifted to different cubby holes, and I note each
cubby has a used swab on the floor. This makes my feet tingle -- the
hospital floor must be writhing with viruses and pissworms. But
then, what are the odds that two different waiting rooms would each
have a used cotton swab on the floor? Not high; perhaps this is a
little-known ritual of some kind. I read somewhere that the folklore
and rituals of medical people are very hard for an anthropologist to
observe because these customs are closely guarded.

There is a rack of magazines, some good ones, but upon inspection
they are only the covers of good magazines, their interiors torn out
and sold, I guess, on the black market. Perhaps this is all a fake,
perhaps behind the CAT scan room is just some two-by-fours shoring up
the exterior walls to fool me. I've read science fiction stories
about that. While I am pondering this, I see some wet wipes in a
container on the wall. Since the inside of my nose is itching with
blood I've inhaled, now caked in there, I pick out a wipe and start
probing and cleaning. The wetwipes make my nose really, really sting
bad, and the volatile odors gag me, but they do a great job at
cleaning. Later I look on the bin and read that these are not human
wetwipes; they are very strong, disinfecting floor and furniture
wetwipes "to eliminate the chance of cross-infection." You can now
use my nose as a utensil, no problem.

Eventually the TV doctor puts me back together with Krazy Glue ("used
for 5 years in Europe for straight incisions before it was approved
here"), though he comforts me by saying, "but it is surgically
formulated." I feel a kinship with the doctor, not because I am a
doctor, too, (though I am: a brain surgeon, for what else is an
English professor, when you think of it?), no, not because of my PhD
but because he can tell me about Surgical Krazy Glue, and I can chat
with him about System Three epoxy, and maybe he could try the fast-
setting System Three on the more ragged wounds.

I will not say more about such things as the cute nurse dressed in
bright red like the warriors of Sparta (perhaps for the same reason,
too) who guided me to the CAT scan room by wrapping me with a sheet
to keep me warm but tugging it like a leash as she made faintly
suggestive jokes about leashes -- this would not be appropriate for a
discussion group serving the serious proa-sailing community.

I dragged from his comfortable living room a retired professor of
English from my school (and fellow boat-lover) to come get me at the
hospital (my girlfriend is away for the weekend visiting family and
eating at expensive restaurants while I ingest blood and bacteria-
laden lake-water) and then drive me 30 miles to the lake to get my
keys and wallet, cleverly protected in one of my proa's watertight
chambers. He was good about it and regaled me with tales of Bantam
Lake, where he learned to sail, as we drove in his convertible in
warm air and under the stars. (He informs me that the lake has a six
foot tunnel under it, built in the 1920s to carry water to the city
of Waterbury. That was in the days of Egypt-envy and Rome-envy, when
the United States built Big Stuff out of stone and concrete all
across the land.)

The fireman had told me they would tow the boat to a private marina
nearby, and there we found it after trespassing past the locked
gates -- tied up to the dock, everything there, and looking very
innocent. Really, the boat is innocent. The crabclaw had nothing to
do with the accident. Well, not much, anyway. I will get the boat
tomorrow, mount the goddamned mast in some rig on the WW gunwale, and
find me a less stretchy stay, and think again about the shunt line,
think about many other things too, and attach guide-lathes to let the
yard heel clear the evil four-inch protruding-on-leeward akas, and
will try again after the headache goes away and when I can wash the
dried blood from my hair (30 more hours to go -- Surgical Krazy Glue
is not good under the waterline, apparently).

Any questions? --Wade