Gogama

A day on the water, and what it showed me about life and death

He wore red. A red shirt, a red hat, standing in the parking lot, near the base of the dock like he’d been placed there… like the morning itself had arranged him. His name was John. His wife had passed a few months back. And the first thing he did when he saw me was smile and laugh. A real laugh, from somewhere low and warm, the kind that tells you everything about a person before they say a word. In fact, I couldn’t tell where he ended and the unusual warmth of the day began. He was wearing his heart. Outside his body. Where we could all see it.

That was the first thing the sea taught me that day. Before we even left the dock.

The name of the boat was Gogama. I made a dad joke of “Barack Gogama”, in that we would all be fine. Not sure it landed. But I needed to be honest about where I was before we pushed off. I was in my head. Running the day like a simulation… will my son get seasick, will he be scared, is this too much, is this not enough. I was standing on a dock in the Bay Area doing math on a moment that hadn’t happened yet.

Mike cut through it without knowing he did. John’s friend. Five years sailing, a body that had given him some trouble, a mouth full of jokes about both. He made fun of himself with such genuine ease that my anxiety had nowhere to stand. You can’t be tightly wound around someone who has that clearly decided to be loose. I felt something release in me. Something I hadn’t known I was gripping.

John and Mike were like blood brothers… giving each other shit like they’d known each other across lifetimes.

My wife told our son, Miles, in the car on the way down: no phone. No shows. No screen of any kind. Just be here. I watched his face register the sentence… that specific six-year-old look that is half protest and half surrender… and then I watched him comply. Life-vest and all. On the Gogama, GoMama is law. John heard it and nodded. Said this generation had lost the art of conversation. Said if you can’t carry one, you can’t sail. It was that simple.

He walked us through the boat… the sails, the rudder, the ropes with their specific names, their specific purpose. A whole language I didn’t speak. I stood there and listened the way you listen when you know something matters but you can’t yet say why. I could feel the culture in it. The centuries. The humility you have to carry when the water beneath you is deep and it doesn’t know your name.

They warned us: the wind was low. Rare for the Bay. We might not get much sail. I caught something move through me… a small reaching for the day I had imagined instead of the day that was here. I noticed it. Let it go. John started the motor and we moved out.

And then.

Something I don’t have the right words for. A lift… not physical, not quite emotional, somewhere in between. The same thing I felt the first time I stood on a surfboard and the wave took me and I understood for one second what it means to be held by something larger than yourself. It arrived without asking. It just came. The sea did in thirty seconds what I’ve been working toward my whole adult life. I stopped thinking. I was just… there. On the water. With my family. With new friends. With John in red… who chose to share his grief by sharing his joy, which is maybe the bravest thing a person can do. I didn’t ask how he was holding up. He was holding us up. In a way, he felt like everyone’s dad.

The Bay Bridge came into view from an angle I had never earned before. From below. From the water. The way it was always meant to be seen. Its cables holding the sky up, or the sky holding the cables… I couldn’t tell anymore which was supporting which. The birds that hovered near the surface did it without effort. Wings out. Trusting the air that pressed up off the water. Just… open. Receiving. I watched them and I thought: that is the way. Right there. Those birds have it.

Mike talked about how the sea had changed him. Without pretense. The way real change happens… so slowly you don’t notice until you’re already different. He said out here, he started seeing the ecosystem. Started feeling like he was inside the earth rather than on top of it. It settles you, he said. To be out to sea.

And then… pom pom pom… the coast guard on the loudspeaker. A man lost at sea. A couple of miles past the Golden Gate. We all questioned. Someone was out there, in trouble, in the same water we were floating in wonder. I thought about a film I once saw… The Bridge. 2006. The Golden Gate. Twenty-four people. Jumped. How I never looked at that structure the same way again. How beauty and devastation share the same address and always have.

I looked at the city from the water. Moving in slow motion. Like a film. The cars on the bridge, so small. The humans inside them, smaller. Some moved like driverless cars… perfectly in motion, no one inside. All that noise. All that craving and self-importance, the hurry, greed, and anger, packed into tiny metal boxes on a bridge over an ocean that has been here since before we had words for it. The sea doesn’t shrink you. It returns you. To your actual size, which is not small… just right.

And then all of a sudden… Mike said, “Look, a whale…!”

Conversation stopped. Just stopped. All of us turned to look in a rippled area of the water’s surface. We looked out past Alcatraz at the flat gray water and we waited. Nothing. Maybe a seal. Maybe Mike’s eyes had gotten ahead of him. Phone already in cam mode. But none of us blinked. Something kept us looking in a gaze. Not hope exactly. More like… willingness. The willingness to wait for what might not come.

Then.

A hump. Slow. Dark. Rising through the surface like a held breath finally released. A mist upwards towards the heavens blew our minds. The long dive. The disappearance into dark water. And then the tail… awe… that shape, that ancient signature… rising and curving and sliding back under as if to say: I was here. I am going now. That’s enough.

It was a juvenile. Young. And we watched it move through our path for minutes, surfacing, submerging, completely unbothered by us, completely itself. Miles came away from whatever interior world he’d retreated into and looked up, forward, on his own. Just my son and a whale and the Bay between them, and something passing between them that I don’t have the language for and am not sure I should.

Meditation. Yoga. Chanting. Prayer. I have read every book. And I am not sure anything ever dropped me into the present moment the way that tail did. Gone in three seconds. And we were waiting for the reappearance. Like a rebirth after death.

The Golden Gate appeared the way great things do… already present before you realize you’re looking at it. From the water it is a different structure. A question rather than an answer. Steel and cable and audacity, stretched across a strait that told engineers for years it couldn’t be done. Can we build bridges with all life? I don’t know. But I looked at that bridge and I wanted to try harder than I did yesterday.

Two more calls on the radio. A boat on fire. Another sinking. We laughed… all of us, not at the danger but at the completeness of the day. The full package. Loss and wonder and fire and whales and coast guard dispatches and the Golden Gate in afternoon light and Miles now asleep on his mother’s lap, his face soft, all the screen-cravings drained out of him, just a boy who had been somewhere real.

On the way back we noticed the birds. Dozens of them, gathering low over something on the surface. We got closer.

A whale. Dead. Humped on the water, still and enormous, the birds working at it in that patient, impersonal way that nature has always worked… We had seen one alive less than an hour before. Now we were looking at one returned. The same water. The same afternoon light. Birth and death sharing the same bay on the same Sunday, not asking our permission, not waiting for us to be ready.

We just… sat there. Felt it. The sadness. The circle wasn’t a metaphor anymore. It was in front of us. Asking nothing. The living whale and the dead whale and Miles asleep and John in red and Mike still cracking jokes somewhere in the background because that’s who Mike is… all of it was one thing. All of it was the same thing. And the same thing was: this is how it is. Be here. All of it counts.

Then I told John this had been an incredible experience. He smiled and said, “Wait until I send you the bill.” And we all just… died laughing.

As John docked the boat, a woman from the other side of the marina came over to help with the lines. Just a neighbor, doing what neighbors do. A community, taking care of itself. I watched that and thought: this is all we have to do. Just show up for each other. Just be the woman who comes to help with the lines.

Miles woke up slow, the way kids wake from deep sleep… adrift, soft, not sure where the dream ended. I wondered if he thought the whole thing had been one. I hope it lands in him someday. Just as a feeling in his body. A door he knows how to find. A tail rising and curving and slipping under, telling him without words: I was here, and so were you, and that was everything.

We went to sea to see. And we saw. We saw that the water holds the living and the dead with equal tenderness. That a man can be in grief and still laugh from somewhere real. That a six-year-old can forget, for an afternoon, that the world has a screen in it. That presence is not a destination. It’s what’s left when you finally stop running toward somewhere else.

Nothing is fixed. Not one thing. The whale proved it twice.

And the beauty… the unbearable, specific, irreplaceable beauty… lives exactly there. In the unfixed. In the movement. In the willingness to stand at the rail and wait for what might not come, and then… when it does… to let it be enough.