Sailing

As I walked around the Amon Carter Museum, I took in and analyzed the various masterpieces. Every one beautiful in its own right. With that being said, I have a tendency to struggle with art because of my inability to relate to it. Maybe it’s the scenes depicted or that I have never painted in any serious manner in my life. There are exceptions though and the painting I saw that is seen above was one of those. I found immense meaning through it because the painting immediately took me to my last day as a sailing instructor during the summer of 2017 at Camp Sea Gull.

            We had just raised the orange flag, indicating to all sailboats and powerboats to return to mooring. The weather had been beautiful. Clear skies. Clean winds. Perfect sailing weather. It happened almost immediately. Skies turned black. Winds picked up. The most dangerous weather I had ever seen develop right in front of my eyes. All within 5 minutes max.

            Within quite literally 5 minutes, a black squall had developed right over our camp. I ran into mooring to start furling any boats I could, yelling for kids to rush to shore. I remember vividly trying to furl these sailboats while I was being drilled by a combination of hail and rain. You could see lightning strike all around us. At that moment, we were soldiers though called to carry out a certain mission: get the boats tied down and more importantly account for all campers. I have a hard time explaining the feeling out on the water during such scary weather, standing in literally a lightning land mine with 50 surrounding metal sailboat masts. Adrenaline just tends to take over in an inexplicable way that only those experiencing the story can comprehend.

            When I glanced at the painting, I could not help but picture the twelve-year-old campers on those sailboats coming back into shore as quickly as they could. A literally dark wall of rain and hail coming towards them at a deceptively fast speed. The only hope is that they reach shore or can anchor down fast enough to ground them against more damage. Thankfully, my last day at camp ended with all campers and counselors safe and sound, and I like to think that the painting has a similar ending as well.