Chickenhawk: Back in the World

I studied the sails that were capturing the power. They were full, perfect arcs, taut as drumheads and trimmed to perfection—not one wrinkle or tremor. People have spent centuries making up names for the parts of sails. There’s the head at the top, the leech at the trailing edge, the clew at the end of the boom, the foot on the boom, the tack at the mast. They call the interior of the sail the luff. To make the whole thing stiffer and less inclined to flap around, they invented yardstick-sized sticks, called battens, and stuffed them into batten pockets they sewed in the leech. I never knew a piece of cloth could be so complicated. These are airfoils, I thought, wings. They just have a lot more names than airplane wings. The Namaste is flying just like a plane, except it’s flying on its edge.

I’m a pilot. Understanding how wings work is part of my nature. I used to wonder where I’d gotten the desire, the obsession, to fly. The first dreams I can recall were about flying. I was born in 1942; not very likely I’d been an airplane pilot in a previous life. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I’d have to think I might’ve been a sailor, or a bird.

Ireland came up from below, where he’d been napping. He had a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. He watched John swinging the sextant and looked at me. “Buenas mornings, Ali. We know where the fucky we are?”

“Not yet,” I said. “We’re—”

“Ready?” John said.

“Ready.” I checked the watch.

“Mark.”

“Eleven forty-six and thirty-one seconds,” I said.

“Now we know, si?” Ireland grinned.

“Yes,” I said. “Now we know.”

“Where?”

I pointed to the sun and said, “We are north of the sun, in the Atlantic Ocean.”

“So.” Ireland grinned and nodded. “Elephant navigator.”

John came up under the dodger with us. He put the pad down on the ledge next to the hatch. “We’ve got two shots. You can fix your position with two, but it’s better to have three. Four, even. Least one of them is going to be fucked up. Trying to put the sun on the horizon from a pitching deck ain’t easy. Wanna try?” He held the sextant out to me.

I went back beside the tiller with the sextant. I’d done this the day before, so I knew the principle. John was right; it’s hard to do. The sextant has a small telescopic sight which you look through. On top of the sextant is a small mirror, an index mirror, that reflects the image of the sun onto another mirror, a horizon mirror, and finally into one half of the split image you see when you look through the telescope. The idea is to sight the horizon through the telescope and then adjust the sextant until you see the sun in one side of the split image. When the sun’s image is close to the horizon, you adjust the mircrometer knob until the image of the the sun’s disk just kisses the horizon. The trouble is the pitching deck makes it nearly impossible to hold the sight steady. I got the sun close to the horizon and then swung the sextant vertically in a small arc, making the image of the sun swing back and forth over the sea. The bottom of the arc of the swing is straight down, something that’s otherwise impossible to know on a moving boat. I called, “Ready?”

John said, “Ready.”

I swung the sextant and twisted the micrometer knob. I nudged the sun until it just kissed the horizon. Got it. “Mark.”

“Twelve oh one, seventeen seconds,” John said. I went back under the dodger as he wrote it down. “What’d you get?”

I read the scale. “Seventy-five degrees, thirty minutes, six seconds, give or take a few seconds.” John nodded and wrote that down next to the time.

“All right. Now we can calculate.” He got the Air Almanac from the clutter—books, cigarettes, my camera, a jar of Skippy’s, and a box of Ritz crackers—we kept behind the windshield and paged to the date. There’s also the Nautical Almanac, but John liked this one; they’re essentially the same. The Air Almanac is a book of tables, updated annually, that show where the sun is for any time of day, relative to Greenwich, England. You have to convert your local time to Greenwich Mean Time and then calculate at what latitude you would have to be to see the sun at the elevation you measured at the time you measured it. It takes a good five minutes to do this by hand, and any small arithmetic errors can put you off by hundreds of miles. I figured I could program my calculator to do most of the math, when I understood how to do it on paper.