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FeedThe Battle of Gitche Gumee
Four men, four women, one boat, and an arsenal of water guns in the Apostle Islands
By Jack Gordon
Photo by Brad Swonetz/zefa/corbis
(page 1 of 2)
On the last night, the women turned feral. We had just finished dinner, four seemingly happy couples squeezed around the table in the salon of a 39-foot sailing sloop anchored snugly in Raspberry Bay, which is on the Wisconsin mainland and not to be confused with the anchorage off Raspberry Island about two miles to the north in the Apostle chain. Jean excused herself and disappeared toward the aft head. A minute later she was back—with a yellow squirt gun the size of a .45-caliber semiautomatic. She opened fire on the men. Then she produced squirt guns for the other women. The situation deteriorated faster than a line squall can hit you off Devil’s Island.The attack was occasioned by some remark from one of the males that strayed from the prevailing theme of joy and astonishment at Bev’s having engineered a gourmet meal of jerk chicken with fresh mango salsa. I don’t recall what the remark was. Maybe, once too often, someone reprised the subject of the nautical nudie bar that ought to exist in the nearby town of Bayfield to entertain husbands while their wives shopped—the one in which dancers would perform seamanlike maneuvers (jibe, come about, heave to) and run little pennants up and down halyards. Or it could have been something else entirely. Whatever the offense was, Jean had been waiting for it. That’s why she smuggled the squirt guns aboard.
Eight years had passed since this group last chartered a sailboat on Lake Superior. For all we knew going in, the dynamics might be entirely different. But Jean never doubted that the time would come when the dogs of war must be unleashed. Sure enough, nothing whatsoever had changed. She could have chosen 50 moments before this one to pull her guns.
After the initial skirmish, the women repaired to the cockpit, still armed, snarling and giggling and sassy with mutinous, wine-fueled trash talk, while the soggy men did the dishes.
“Where’s our dessert?” Joe bellowed up through the hatch.
“Maybe we should rethink the concept of Joe as our spokesman,” Randy suggested.
It had finally, officially, come to this: us against them.
Before long, the women began calling us up to the cockpit to witness a display of the northern lights on the horizon.
“Maybe there really are northern lights,” whispered Bones, the ship’s physician.
“This is a test in natural selection,” I said. “If you stick your head up there, you’re too stupid to live.”
The women had the gall to feel genuinely wounded by our distrust. The northern lights really were shooting white beams into the night sky, and eventually we did go up to see them, and nobody got squirted. How could we have been so insensitive as to suspect a ruse?
ON A SAILBOAT, the natural state of affairs between husbands and wives is knocked catawampus. A vessel on which you eat, sleep, snore, use the head, and tow your garbage in a trailing dingy becomes a household. On shore, women make most household decisions and do far more bossing than men do. Are we free to have dinner with the Bickersons two weeks from Friday? I have to ask my wife. Where is practically any object I’m looking for? She knows, I don’t. Oh, we’re going to clean the house now? News to me. Well, I’ll just grab the vacuum and start upstairs…. No? I’ll start in the basement by reorganizing those shelves? But what difference does it make where I start? Oh, I see: You’re going to do X, Y, and Z, and if I do B before A, that will screw up the organizational house-cleaning flow chart that you evidently have been devising since Tuesday. When do I go to the grocery store again?
This is true of every married couple I know. Somewhere out there, domineering, controlling wife beaters are on the prowl, but they must travel in different circles. In the universe I inhabit, women take charge of domestic affairs mainly because they think about this stuff and men don’t. They are therefore prepared to win an argument about any of it with their disengaged husbands. Left to their own devices, as the comedian Rita Rudner said, men would live like bears with furniture. So for the most part, women run the show.
Put men on a sailboat, however, and they become deeply engaged with absolutely everything. Boats under sail demand minute-by-minute engagement in a way that households (and powerboats) don’t. But it isn’t just the sail settings, the placement of the jib blocks, and the significance of wind lines on the water half a mile away. Men also develop passionate convictions about how often to check for marine-weather updates on the ship’s radio, which switches on the electrical panel should remain on when the engine is turned off and the batteries aren’t charging, the maximum amount of water that should be used to flush the head, where the foul weather gear should go, whether the dingy oars should be stowed in the same cockpit lazarette as the bucket and the boat hook, and on, and on, and on.
On a sailboat, a woman who ventures an opinion about where a flashlight or a pair of rubber boots might be stowed will hear from her husband, and maybe three other men, that her suggestion would screw up the organizational flow chart that each evidently has been devising since Tuesday.
Men argue with one another about all of these minutiae, too, and it’s a miracle when four males with roughly comparable sailing experience can end even a three-day charter as friends, no matter who serves as the nominal captain, as I did for this trip. But for women, this male focus on details is more disorienting. They are unaccustomed to dealing with men who care where a bucket is or who have plans for the next hour that do not involve a nap they won’t be allowed to take.
From a woman’s perspective, men on a sailboat turn into space aliens. None of our wives has ever quite said so, but I suspect this was the real reason we hadn’t undertaken so much as a day charter in the Apostle Islands for eight years, never mind the sort of longer voyages we once made, in various groups of six, up and around the Keweenaw Peninsula to Houghton and Copper Harbor, Michigan. Happily, by last August the women finally had forgotten just how aggravating we become to them. Except, obviously, for Jean.
THE APOSTLE ISLANDS offer some of the most scenic and highly regarded cruising waters on earth. Bayfield, Wisconsin, a few miles northeast of Port Superior, our charter base, offers what the women referred to in the trip’s planning phase as “cute shops.”
Planning was complicated by these shops in that our arrival and boarding on Friday afternoon had to be timed to accommodate an expedition into Bayfield to explore them before, God forbid, they might close. Here arose the first sign that priorities regarding this nautical experience differed radically by gender. The women hit the cute shops like barracuda. The men stood on the sidewalks complaining.
“Tourist booklets always talk about ‘exploring’ shops, as if you’re on some breathless voyage of discovery up the Congo River,” I groused. “You’re not a standard-issue American consumer wandering from store to store, you’re Stanley and Livingston. You’re on a mission to bag the wily wildebeest with your credit card before a bull elephant charges you from behind a dress rack. Women actually think that way about shopping. The booklet people know it and prey on them.”
Randy had stopped listening. He was holding out his hat to passersby in front of a store that Marty had walked into. “Please help,” he implored. “My wife is in there shopping. Anything you can spare. God bless.”
Jean drew first blood in a clothing store. Joe, her husband, had wandered in after her, and we were appalled to learn that he had actually encouraged her to buy a skirt. This was just the sort of erratic, unpredictable behavior we feared Joe might display on the boat—tossing a fender overboard for an impromptu man-overboard drill, or disassembling a marine toilet to see why the pump handle squeaked, or who knew what? For half an hour, we snubbed him.
Bev scored next with a pair of earrings. “How are you doing?” we asked Bones.
“Just a flesh wound,” he said. But then Bev entered an art store, and Bones turned ashen. She cut him up pretty good.
Dismayed at having been outshopped by two competitors, my wife, Beth, charged back into a jewelry store whose merchandise she earlier had spurned and put a spear clean through my chest.
Semi-officially, I suppose, it was us against them long before the squirt guns came out.
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Reader Comments:
Excellent article. I smiled all the way through it - both for the author's wit and humor, and for having spent 5 years sailing around the Apostles. I could feel the (lack of) breeze on my face.