Katie takes the wheel

Off to the sand quay with Katie, in the middle, behind the wheel. Photo by Christopher Southwick.

Katie, who is from Sandpoint, Idaho, wants to do everything. She has been trying for two days to get someone to go out kayaking with her because she has never been kayaking. And she’s never gone sailing so she wants to take out a Hobie Cat. And she has never been snorkeling so, of course, she wants to go snorkeling.

“Wait,” I said to her. “You’ve never been snorkeling? Ever?”

She shook the damp locks of her dark hair. “There’s not a lot of snorkeling in Sandpoint,” she dryly said.

I just don’t know what to think of Katie. On the one hand she’s the most intrepid person I’ve ever met; on the other hand, she’s never done anything. I’ve subtly tried to tease out more information about her. Like yesterday I asked her if her family were like those Idaho white supremacists who stockpiled guns.

“Of course not,” she said. “We weren’t wealthy enough to stockpile.” Later she told me that she and her siblings were home schooled and not allowed to do certain things.

“Like what?”

“Like listen to music.”

“Do you know who Jim Morrison is?”

She shook her head.

“Michael Jackson?”

“Of course. Everyone knows who Michael Jackson was. But I never listened to his music.”

Then she tells me that she didn’t have sex until after she got married.

“I just thought that’s the way it was for everybody,” she says casually.

Okay, so she tells you this and you start to form some sort of Mormon-teen-living-on-the-compound picture in your head and then she goes on to tell you that she got divorced less than two years after getting married partially because her husband wasn’t really into sex.

“I just liked it a lot more than he did. Which didn’t seem right.”

Yesterday morning, Grahame offered to take us all out on a little cruise to a sand quay about fifteen or twenty minutes off Davui. The sand quay comes and goes with the tide so you have to time it just right. What you want to do is arrive at this little spit of white sand in the middle of the ocean exactly at low tide. Which yesterday was 10:03. So Grahame instructed us to be down at the dock by 9:45.

Everyone slathered on the sunscreen and got their hats and sunglasses and we pushed off. As we all scrambled to find seats on the tiny skiff, Katie ended up behind the wheel. After Grahame pushed off and got on board, Katie tried to scoot over to give him room to steer.

“That’s okay,” said Grahame. “You can drive.”

“I don’t know how,” said Katie.

“Not a problem,” said Grahame. “You see that island on the horizon? Just aim for that.”

Katie gripped the wheel tightly, straightened her back, and pushed down the throttle. We were off. Sort of. The thing is, boats, unlike cars, take awhile to respond and so you have a tendency to constantly over-correct. Which is why rather than going in a straight line, Katie had us going in big loopy S turns. First one way and then another.

“You’re pretty good at this,” Grahame lied.

“Thank you,” said Katie, smiling broadly. “It’s easier than it looks.”

And like everything she says, I couldn’t be sure if she was serious or just joking. None of us could.