While discussing weekend plans with a jocular neighbor earlier, I started to understand the appeal of sailing. It is similar to distance-swimming, though on a scale far grander. One takes the thought of traveling from point A to point B, then expands that to include, say, New York to Shelter Island, Shelter Island to Block Island, then Newport, Portsmouth, and Maine. My mind took this trip straight up to Newfoundland, and from there, the improbable ideas begin. It had never occurred to me that travel could be on such a scale with such a simple vehicle, so close to one's own abilities, and able to be handled, if not easily, by one alone.

A breeze blows in and it is suddenly chilly. The weather here is terribly obvious and almost impossible to ignore. I am quickly understanding what it means to be a sailor and read the winds; there is no more trick to it than spending a good deal of time outside, experiencing the meteorological shifts and the jumping fish. The ocean smells clean today, like some form of dry linen. We are still snug inside New York Harbor.

28 June 23:57

Visiting friends, boat parties...returning from a wild sail under a beautiful blue sky.

First sail to near-open ocean, close to the separation zone beyond the Lower Bay. This is the furthest I have ever travelled by sea in the City. We arrived skirting the Sandy Hook side, that part of the harbor which I have attempted to traverse by swimming, yet have never met. In fact, I am overdue for a trip to those New Jersey beaches, which appear as a sharp sandy line on a clear day's horizon, or a glowering sea-anemone purple, dull in the distance in midwinter.

Here is one small sailboat, two people aboard, one admittedly mostly decorative—and the wind blowing from the Southwest, me sitting on the bow near the jib sheet in a sort of wind-tunnel, imagining the power of all the city's millions simultaneously breathing on me, the sheer force of it.

[At this moment, V., Denis and I are all hovering outside our boats, which are oddly, I now realize, in a row, on the same axis parallel to Manhattan. Each of us is going about our laptop business, as nonchalant as one can be in this peaceful public space.]