The Sinking of the Vasa

I’m grateful for an awesome day yesterday. I’m grateful the guy in the coffee shop already knows my order. I’m grateful for lots of discoveries. I’m grateful for the sense of ease I have. I’m grateful for charging up the batteries. I’m grateful to be sober today.

If only I was a pirate…..

I doubled up on the pictures because the sight of the Vasa, once the pride of the Swedish Navy, now set in an enormous museum, is amazing. She sank in 1628 and was raised, mostly intact, in 1961. It’s not often you get to see an entire ship from the 17th Century—I was pretty amazed at the scale and the craftsmanship is unbelievable. The gun ports had carved lion’s heads on the inside, so that when they were opened up to fire, the enemy would see the fierce symbol of King Gustavus Adolphus right before the explosions and timbers shearing and deadly wood splinters and shrapnel everywhere. Naval combat in the 17th Century was pretty rugged. I said I wasn’t going to turn this into a travelogue, and yet.

No, I don’t know these people who were walking this hallway at the Royal Palace as though they were getting married.

I’m sitting here in my adopted morning workspace,¹ drinking excellent Swedish coffee, writing the gratitude list and looking at pictures from yesterday and I laughed out loud.² The Vasa took years and a stupendous amount of resources to build and her maiden voyage lasted only 1,000 meters. It was a windy day when she set out from the shipyard and within moments she heeled hard to port in a gust of wind and began taking on water through the unsealed gun ports and she was doomed. She sank at the entrance to the Stockholm Harbor and King Gustavus Adolphus never laid eyes on her. The very evenly-narrated film at the museum attributes this disaster only to “poor design.”

I laughed because it made me think of a very, very short car trip I took once. A maiden voyage of sorts that also came to an ignominious end.

I went to sleepaway rehab for the first time in 2016. At that point, I had been trying to get sober in earnest for about five years. I’d been through two IOP’s that had generated about 120 days of sobriety between them. I’d met A. in the Fall of 2015 and we were in love. She was beautiful and smart and funny. She got my jokes and told better ones. Her hand fit perfectly in mine. She loved me. She told me on one of our first dates that she was certain that we had been together in a previous life—that was her explanation for why things were so perfect.

I don’t think I was an alcoholic in that other life. Loving an alcoholic, especially an alcoholic trying to get sober, is a pretty rugged road. In August of 2016, she delivered an ultimatum that involved a trip to rehab. I wasn’t sure of our status when I drove to the treatment center in Pennsylvania, but give me a project and I get going. I was the model student in rehab. I read everything, made all of the right comments, was insightful, funny, a good friend. My friend Rob, the Tire King of Buffalo,³ called me the "Mayor of Shakytown."⁴

I filled notebooks with the way I was thinking myself into sobriety. I was discovering connections, understanding so much about myself, finally learning about what had actually happened. I was filled with optimism for a sober life ahead. Unfortunately, Bill W. had already been down this road:

But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize, to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience.

Big Book, p. 39

I had been doing so well, they decided to discharge me a day early, on a Saturday morning. My plan was to drive to Baltimore and spend the weekend with A. I was so excited. There was a lot, and I mean, a lot, of uncertainty about where we were headed. But after nearly a month in rehab, there was still a “We,” and I was pretty optimistic and jazzed. I said my goodbyes after breakfast, loaded the car and left around 10:30 or 11. My ex-in-laws lived in Pennsylvania and I was pretty familiar with Interstate 83 as a consequence. It ran straight to Baltimore where A. lived.

I hadn’t been on the road for more than 30 minutes when a thought popped into my head. Wasn’t there a Chili’s at one of the exits coming up? Hadn’t I seen it once before on a McDonald’s stop with the kids? In about another hour, I was there and I pulled off at the exit—-to get gas.⁵

I really don’t remember much else about what I was thinking. I don’t remember there being a protracted discussion with myself. I don’t remember walking across the parking lot. I don’t remember what the weather was like. I don’t remember walking in. I do remember sitting at the bar. I do remember ordering a Pinot Grigio. I do remember ordering a second one. I do remember thinking, “what the f***, I really hate Pinot Grigio.”

Sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground

Things didn’t unravel that night or that weekend. It took a bit longer until I finally crushed her hope. The hope that I could get better, the hope that I could get honest, that I could get sober, the hope that she could live a second life with someone she loved very much, someone she had been looking for a long time. That took until March 2018.

One of the things I find so moving about the Big Book is the clear sense that Bill knows what the F*** he is talking about. When Bill writes about ‘incomprehensible demoralization,” well, I know a thing or two about that. Sadly, so does A. When I hear those words I think of a Saturday morning at the end of September. I think about a pretty short drive. I think about a maiden voyage of sobriety that didn’t even last until lunch. Incomprehensibly Demoralizing.

I think I saw A. a few months ago. I was headed into Central Park for a walk on a Saturday morning by 90th Street and saw a familiar blonde head from across the street. A bus drove through my field of view, by the time it passed, she was too far away to know it was her for sure. I was pretty certain, but I didn’t try to catch up. There’s a monster Ninth Step that’s been in the works for a while, but to be honest, I have no idea what I would ever say to her.

Sobriety is not always puppies and pink clouds. Sometimes, it’s coming to terms with some really hard things that happened. Things that left a mark. The Vasa sank at the entrance to Stockholm Harbor and part of the impetus in her salvage was the desire to clear the wreckage. I know something about that, too.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. They insist on calling it the “Espresso House.”

2. I do this a lot these days. Also, I know it’s really poor form to drop footnotes after commas.

3. My nickname for him.

4. Sometimes it was the “Mayor of Shaky Acres.” If you were to search yelp for the “Inn at Shaky Acres,” you might find an example of some of my earlier writing.

5. Just a note—-if I had been taking Antabuse, none of this would have happened.