Email this article

Grandfather Habitats

By Katharine Niles

Found in: | Sailing |

"As Chris navigates his soul, he'll discover that he's got the spiritual mettle of both mountains and sea running through him."

My son is "a Niles boy." This means he behaves in line with his father and grandfather, both of whom exhibit a placid, kind demeanor underneath which lies a formidable stubborn streak. This is not a loud streak. It does not announce itself in violent no's or foot stomping. Rather, the more you push a Niles male, the less they will say, until you've run fuming from the room in frustration. I have yet to figure out a way around it except by putting all my marbles on the table and saying, in as deadly a voice as possible, "We need to talk," or by recognizing that they are, irritatingly, right and giving into them, or by joining the camaraderie of other Niles women - my mother- and sister-in-law - who roll their eyes knowingly.

The other aspect to being a "Niles boy" involves sailing. Sailing is not a strong suit in the Southwest, and so Chris' exposure to it has been on annual trips to Florida or New England. He has loved it from the get-go, whereas his Western-reared mother trails along for the ride and really hopes she'll never be asked to do anything boat-like the entire trip. Last time, Chris took the helm for quite some distance, and while dolphins played at our side and an osprey with lunch in its craw flew overhead, low talk of "sailing camp" rumbled through the cockpit.

The Niles clan, it must be understood, is New England born and bred since Pilgrim days, and it seems to me that the harsh coastal realities of that part of the country lead to a tough and ingrained affinity for the sea. Boat craft is the New England equivalent of mountain climbing or canyoneering in the West, and if you don't believe me, read The Perfect Storm.

Genetically speaking, then, my kid has sails in his veins. He also, though, has the West, and I'm a little sorry of late that my relationship with my father was so difficult and unsafe that Chris could not have learned that West directly from him. Moms are good for many things, and I told him I thought he'd learned a lot about who my Dad was via me, but it isn't the same. You see, my difficult father died in March, and his other grandson - Chris' cousin Nick - did get to know him a bit, and Chris was jealous. I understand this. We need to know who our grandparents are - and boys their grandfathers in particular, perhaps - or else we don't know who we are.

So I want to explain to Chris that my Dad loved mountains. Canyons. Backpacking. He grew up in Southern California in the 1930s, crawled around in the Mojave Desert and the High Sierra as a young man, and discovered Canyonlands in Utah when I was a child. He had two chunks of himself intact: his love of the West, and his scientific education. He knew chemistry and freeze-dried dinners, molecules and topo maps. Nothing was done without a frightening amount of order. Photography and carpentry were undertaken with equal meticulousness, and I think some joy lay in that mastery of organization. But his feelings around home and all that this stood for were disastrously chaotic, and we all paid dearly for them. I'll not go into the specifics of that payment, as I have elsewhere, but suffice it to say that as Chris navigates his soul, he'll discover that he's got the spiritual mettle of both mountains and sea running through him. This is his male legacy, one direct, the other less so. It is my job, and his father's job, to let those legacies course through, sifting the wheat from the chaff as mature specimens of the human race are meant to do.

It is said we need to bequeath two things to our children: the one roots, the other wings. It has been my experience that a person can't have the latter without the former or otherwise they are a poorly moored Icarus, melting as they go too high. So this little column is a small gift of roots as I understand them - for you, my Niles boy, my Christopher, my fledging, stubborn, seaborne son.

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker.