Marching forth again

I am going hiking.  I have this sneaking-out-the-door feeling, as I did when I left on March 4, 2004, and I posted my first trail journal entry, nervous and self-flagellating.  To announce one's plans too early is to jinx them, to let them out of the protective circle of one's own intention, and that means that people can crap all over your parade.  So I keep things quiet, hold them inside, stoking my own inner fire.

I may go camping and hiking for much of the summer.  I've been needing it, a vacation for the soul, hermitage, solitude, trees.  So the Appalachian Trail calls me again, for all of these reasons, and I want to go.  I want to walk.  Unlike last time, though, when I was a 26-year-old marathoner, my body feels weak and feeble, my joints aching.

I am not sure this is a good idea at all.  But I know the only way to know if one can do something is by doing it, and I am doing it.  I don't know for how long--for as long as my body lasts.  I'm bringing enough food to feed an army, and that way I can take my time, do four-mile days, spend sunny afternoons at vistas, hike shelter to shelter.

In related news, we are thinking of putting the boat in the water next season and going back to Maine in the interim, once I'm back, if I come back.  This is a difficult thing for me to admit, or even contemplate.  I want to finish things, follow through, and I find this difficult process of waiting, of living day-to-day with things uncertain, unresolved--almost impossible.  Maybe that's why I'm leaving, to walk, to follow blazes, where the course is predetermined, the route already set.

Watermusic

Lace, cage

I live in a pretty lace cage.  Yesterday was the eleven-year anniversary of my start date on the Appalachian Trail, when I marched forth, and still, here the snow piles in drifts.  It is pretty hard to cut a mast, or install chain plates, or scrape bottom paint, with four feet of snow on the ground.  It's hard to imagine the harbor melting enough for a launch.

Snowshoes

Office

Cedar and wood stove in Maine, winter 2012

And yet we came down here to rebuild a boat because it's farther south, closer to the ocean and the Gulf Stream, and we could work almost year-round.  Instead, I miss my snowshoes and wood stove and office.  I could tell you the reasons for this chaotic stormy precipitous winter--how the ocean is 21 degrees warmer than normal and all of that warm water evaporates and then crystallizes and again falls on top of us, how the ocean rose five inches in two years in New England, how the changing climate has shifted the prevailing planetary winds south, allowing the Gulf Stream to be less mobile and giving those in Massachusetts all of Alaska and Maine's weather, how these scientific facts are not covered by the media because our news outlets including public radio are bought and sold by the same people causing this outlandish weather, and how this kind of climate chaos is the new normal--but you wouldn't listen.  You wouldn't divest yourself of fossil-fuel stock or organize or protest;  I haven't either.

Computer, vitamin D, toilet paper, window

I rearranged my room to face the window, an alleged treatment for depression, and already it is bearing fruit as this blog post.  February is a hard month for me, maybe the hardest.  Maybe it is for everyone and God made it the shortest month because we could only endure 28--or, in some years, 29--days of it.  March can't come fast enough.  But here when it came, it came with snow.

So the branches pile with drifts white as layer cakes.  The roots wait embalmed, and entombed, covered by what Eliot called "forgetful snow."  I hibernate.  The whole world waits, coiled to spring.

Might as well keep going now

Courtesy of s/v Estrellita 5.10b

Okay, so I’m going to move on to what I’m supposed to be working on and writing about:  the boat.

Spirit, not at sea

A boat under progress is not very photogenic.  Note the pine needles, the antifreeze bottles full of tap water  used as weights, the carelessly hung rags and ratchet straps and cleaning accoutrements.  Doing boat work in the middle of a pine forest is likewise not very easy.  Every day starts with clearing the pine needles from whatever needs to be worked on.

I am resentful and angry about boat work.  I didn’t want to buy a boat.  I was happy with my little farmstead and office in Maine, and I was burned so badly by the last boat that I didn’t think I could ever trust a new boat.  I remember how my heart broke last time.

I remember that the day-to-day reality of boat life involves mammoth amounts of brute physical labor.  Cleaning.  Plumbing maintenance.  Cooking with limited ingredients and space.

And still I want to sail, not because I actually want to sail, but because I am still hungry for adventure, for travel, because my peripatetic urge is never satisfied.  I want to cross an ocean.  I want to drop luffing sails in the harbor of the Azores.  I want to traverse the Suez and Panama Canals, cruise the Mediterranean, round the great Capes, cross from Newfoundland to Ireland.  These are things I hunger after.

In Stephen King’s “On Writing” he says, of his wife:

In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tie-breaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.

As with a writing life, what really matters in cruising is who you choose to do it with.  I know, from meeting many grounded sailors, that what most often gets in the way of achieving a sailing dream is not hurricanes, or pirates, or broaching whales—but unwilling partners.  Your feet get tied up to the ground, not by roots, but by people.

And now I am one of those people.

I believe that the thing that entranced so many [elderly, male, ex-] sailors about the voyage of sailing vessel Secret is that I—the nubile female blog heroine—wanted so desperately to keep sailing and my partner did not.

This indecision has been a problem for a long time between us.

A Wharram catamaran sings her siren song for me, at her port in Phuket.  So does the idea of a beach camping cruise along the Mexican coast.  The Continental Divide Trail.  Cyprus, where my grandfather is from.  Bangkok, always.  Not to mention the best gift K. ever gave me, a writing room.  Again, King:  “Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.”

Also, famously, he said:  “Write with the door closed.”

Virginia Woolf, much more famously, said:  “All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”

Worst of all, I remember that a boat has no door that closes.

[Well, there’s a head, smelling of holding tank, but certainly not a private writing room, not a place where you go to dream.]

I’ve been reading boat blogs, trying to get a handle again on this life that I’m not sure I’ve quite chosen again, and all of the sunniest cruising and travel blogs open with whimsical romantic stories of carpenters meeting bookworms, or spur-of-the-moment decisions over beer and pizza, or one partner convincing the other that what they really needed was a sailboat:

“I have long had a dream of going cruising in a sailboat and have gradually lured Mark into this dream.  His response has ranged from all smiles to the rare bout of kicking and screaming, but he finally agreed to purchase a boat a year ago.”  —s/v Groovy

“In May 2011 Tammara and I made the decision to purchase a sailboat to sail and live on and eventually take her down the west coast…  It is our dream to one day voyage across oceans to distant and foreign lands.  We hope to achieve this with our new boat.”  —s/v Lynn-Marie

“Have you ever dreamt of running away to live on a tropical island, spending your days basking in the warm sunshine while sipping piña coladas? We have. In fact, our dream included running away to live on a sailboat in the tropics, even though when we started we had never even sailed before!  Zero to Cruising is the story of how we took that dream and made it a reality. Follow along... you can do it too!”  --s/v Zero to Cruising

“Our goal is to share meaningful thoughts on simple living, to help sailors with life aboard, and to inspire others to chase their own creative dream through honest and uplifting writing.”  —s/v Sailing Simplicity

I find that so much of actual life aboard—which is constant interpersonal decision-making—gets left out of these blogs.

Then there’s the much more honest s/v More Joy Everywhere, posting shortly before deciding to sell:

“These blogs are all written by people who are younger and prettier and smarter and more creative than we are.  They fix engines, install solar panels, sew cushions, grow sprouts, revarnish their teak, and understand how their systems work.  In their spare time, they sketch, make jewelry, write poetry, play the banjo, kayak, scuba dive, take fabulous underwater pictures, and never watch television.”

It’s easy to paint a romantic vision of life aboard—all sunsets and dolphins and glowing teak and tranquil anchorages.  It’s easy, when one is parsing a life a post or two at a time, to focus only on the beautiful things.  It’s why everyone, in our age of social networks, has a chronic diagnosis of FOMO.  We see everyone else’s gorgeous handmade children’s crafts, or snapshots of family vacations—we don’t see the dirty dishes, the arguments, the days spent in front of the television, the exhaustion, the chaos.

Some of the most inspirational and optimistic blogs drift slowly off into the ether with no explanation as to what exactly happened to the pina colada dream.  Some others, as with the second example above, have posts stop soon before the Sailboat Listing appears.  [Click here for a great collection of blog posts about cruisers who decide to quit.]

You’ll know, if you’ve read for a long time, that I love to write about being covered in poison oak, or boat poop explosions, or frigid Maine winters.  It’s the part of life that’s interesting to me.  What interests me about life—what interests me about travel—what interests me in literature and film and art—are the things that are difficult, the things that are hard, the challenges remaining to be overcome.

I know that I want to write, as I’ve always known, but as I said to Karl, when we first met:  I can do that anywhere.

He asked me what I did for a living, what I was, and I said:  a bum.

He asked me to live aboard a boat with him, on our first date, and I said, with no hesitation:  yes.


Sailing is a full-time job.  Boat work is a full-time job.  Writing, too, is a full-time job.  So what then?  I wrestle what time I can from the ether, and I use it to put words on paper, or onto a screen, or I stare into space and avoid putting words on paper or onscreen.  I miss my grandmother’s typewriter.  I miss my office and my desk and my view of the drained beaver pond.  I miss my literary dog and cat.

Can I really do it anywhere?  I guess we’ll find out.

And I guess, dear reader, you can always trust me, yours truly, to delve my hands deep down into the dirty painful nitty gritty of life, can you not?  I commit to you that I’ll continue to explore the dark side of life afoot or a-sail—at least a sunny post or two a month at a time.

Marion, Massachusetts

K, me, and Spirit in October at the dock

Spirit arrived at the house on Front Street today and tonight she sleeps in the driveway, her mast unstepped and in the grass of the front yard. It's been an eventful and difficult few months. We discovered shortly after my last post—or maybe before—that the wooden mast probably needed to be replaced. There are a couple of prospects for aluminum replacement masts, and another option is the repair of the existing wooden mast. My preferred option, cutting a spruce tree in Aroostook and allowing it to cure, was not chosen. My second preferred option, wrapping the thing in duct tape and sailing to the Azores anyway: also shot down.

Autumnal sea grass at Old Landing in Marion

We also didn't live aboard as much as I would have liked. I stocked the boat with groceries and toiletries and dishes, but the comforts of a family dwelling—laundry and electricity and hot water and plumbing—are often too hard to turn down, as they also were seven years ago, with Secret. Can it really have been that long? Yes.

The last row of the season

Exactly three nights were spent at anchor, two nights in harbors we'd already visited, once off the Elizabethan Islands alone, open to the current. We didn't make it to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. And still I focus on the things that were not done, rather than those that were. Spirit, herself, is exquisite. Beamy, roomy, comfortable, warm, thoroughly equipped. She's the perfect boat, already a personality, a boat I cannot bring myself to call an “it” whatever you landlubbers may do.

Mast coming down at sunset, as the boatyard dudes pounded down the boom gallows with a rubber hammer, far more viciously than I would have

But she is not yet a home. I remain perennially homeless. The most stressful thing about these in-between periods, the stretch between adventures, is a feeling of constantly imposing on the kindness of strangers, or at least friends and family. So we're in a holding pattern, and in the meantime, as we mast-hunt and paint and powerwash and decommission, draining water from the holding tank and the engine and the water bladders, we prepare also for another winter ashore.

From Aroostook County, Maine, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and back again

I have awaited long the day when I could announce with a drumroll that I am again Casting Off, not merely metaphorically, but actually. I thought I'd be able to say that last month, when K. signed on the dotted line for our new boat, a 36' Mao Ta cutter, Spirit, Secret's successor. She's a blue-water cruiser, a double-ender, an ocean crosser. We are, or will be soon, at last Casting Off. Here she is:

Three feet longer than Secret, but wider, beamier, bigger in every dimension. Already I am in love. So this post was intended as triumphant, as with Caesar's armies returning from Sparta, or wherever—but instead I have chaos and disaster and loss to report—although also their underbelly, their paired twin: hope and light and freedom. Here's how it went.

It's our second day on the boat, August 1, and there's a grand festival going on in swanky Newburyport, our current hailing port. The Yankee Homecoming, of all things, featuring live music all week, dinghies piled up on dock, fireworks, fried dough and clam chowder in the streets. The whole nine yards. We come to town to buy a guidebook and charts and an Eldridge for tides plus to stock up on groceries and water. We drop $350 among West Marine and Home Depot and Market Basket. I send out my money-earning email at the library. Then we wait at a bench beside the dinghy dock as the RIBs motor drunkenly away, and the band cleans up, and the teenagers engage in elaborate mating rituals.

We await the turning tide so we can cruise gleefully back to the boat with nary an oar stroke. Two days before we'd been unable to row against the outgoing current on the Merrimac River. This time there's almost a full moon, and we use the oars more to steer than to row. We get back to Spirit briskly and tie up. K. hefts a few bags on deck but leaves more bags below to steady the dinghy while I clamber aboard.

Then the fatal flaw of hubris. We don't drop the teak ladder. I don't ask for it, and it isn't offered. Both of us think I can make it over the freeboard (far higher from the water than was Secret's) without assistance. After all, I did it more or less effortlessly two days before.

I don't. You can see what's coming, but I couldn't. It's just like when people talk about car accidents. All I remember are brief snapshots, everything happening at once. I remember having one foot on deck and the other back in the dinghy, and feeling spreadeagled, like I wasn't going to make it. I remember looking back at the dinghy and seeing water coming over the side. I remember floating away, with the blue-colored paper bag from West Marine floating away in front of me, and thinking: that's $100!

K. yelled after me to grab the next mooring ball. (Moorings, for the uninitiated, are like anchors permanently affixed to the bottom of the harbor, to protect the ecosystem and to aid the mariner.) I tried, but was unable to. It was then I realized what a fix I was in. The current was sweeping by at a rate of at least six knots. I realized I had to swim, and swim hard. The next mooring was the last before the open Atlantic. The water was cold. The tide had already swept off one of my shoes, and was threatening to carry away my flannel.

I swam hard. I caught the mooring ball. And then I realized I was in a deeper fix. Could he see me? Would he know I was safe and not swept out to sea? How long would it take for someone to find me? How long could I hold on? How long before hypothermia set in?

I didn't know then what I know now: that the dinghy had completely overturned. That everything in it was lost. That my partner in crime managed to hold on, barely, and pull himself on deck to immediately radio the Coast Guard. When I thought of my backpack, containing my computer and my camera and my purse—everything of value I'd brought with me onto the boat—I assumed K. would have rescued it first thing. I just worried about my computer getting wet.

I used my yoga breath. I took turns with my arms, holding on with one side, then the other. Even then, I realized how quickly I'd become tired. I thought about letting myself drift back, thinking that maybe I could hoist myself onto the stranger's boat and find a way to get warm and to radio my location. But then I stopped that line of thought: if I let go, there was almost no way I'd be able to grab onto anything again. My body was carried back in a straight line by the current, parallel to the boat's waterline.

Then I saw the Coast Guard light up its boat. I started to yell for help, worried that they'd go out to sea rather than see me at the mooring two boats down. They heard me, and minutes later I was wrapped in a blanket and safe. I can testify that the major emotion one feels on being rescued by the Coast Guard is embarrassment. I couldn't believe that I'd made such a fool of myself. If only I'd been skinnier, stronger, more limber, I could have made it over the freeboard. If only I'd been humble enough to ask for the ladder. If only I could be a responsible human being, for once in my life.

As I expressed my humiliation, my apology, they were resolutely affirmative: “It happens all the time. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's our job.”

Thank God for the US Coast Guard and George Washington who established them, lo those many years ago, at this very port, Newburyport on the Merrimac River, for exactly this reason—wicked tidal currents and related carnage.

After I was warm and safe and drinking hot tea, I began to worry about my computer. Had K. put it on deck? Of course he had. It would have been his first priority. It had to be safe.

But of course it wasn't. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde by way of Dave Eggers: to lose two computers is a tragedy. To lose three seems careless.

These are the things I've had to think about over the last three weeks, as I've begun to process not just the loss of $2500 worth of gear, but also a five-year-old Moleskin, almost full of story ideas, my dream journal, my everyday journal, my legal pad with assorted yoga notes and boat lists. I am attempting faux Buddhism about it: they are just things, after all. It's just money. The important ideas I'll remember.

And in another universe, if the abstract mathematicians are to be believed, I am dead. In another universe, the computer is salvaged and we are just pissed at each other. In yet another, we're still looking for the perfect boat. In another, we have never met.

In the last universe: I didn't lose my data when I bought a computer two years ago. I didn't institute a rigorous weekly backup process. I didn't recover everything despite myself, as a result of my own insane persistence. I'm not typing right now into a file recovered from my Aroostook backup, on a program recovered from the backup, listening to music recovered from the backup, using settings recovered from the backup.

All this to say: nothing was lost except some money, ephemeral ideas, and my pride. God has his reasons when we don't understand his reasons. If you'd told me that when I was beating my breast over my computer data loss two years ago, I'd probably have hit you. But you would have been right.

So maybe now, in my 35^th year, halfway to 70, I'm starting to learn some things. I'm learning that the life I've chosen is one of risk. I haven't lost three computers because I'm careless, but because I've chosen to risk valuable things in order to achieve a higher goal. To some sheer adventure as a cause celebre is insufficient—especially maybe to our families, our parents. But we've chosen this life because it's the one we want, even if it means losing things. Losing money. Losing health, whether by hypothermia or by shoulder bursitis from too much backpack-carrying. Losing dreams, and ideas, and the stories that may have been borne from them.

That's our tax on the life we've chosen. The life we continue to choose. So all hail Spirit, our new vehicle of destruction and rebirth. We live in Spirit while Spirit lives in us.

Bridgewater, Maine

Cat and dog love each other

Well, the rain beating down on my window pane
I got love for you and it’s all in vain
Brains in the pot, they’re beginning to boil
They’re dripping with garlic and olive oil

--Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

It has been raining here almost constantly on the days when there are not deer flies buzzing around in the sun.  If that sounds like complaining it's because it is and also an excuse for everything that's not planted, everything that's not done.  The thing they don't tell you about farming (or maybe they do) is what hard work it is.  Maybe that's why everyone wanted to get out of it.

Which makes me--or maybe it's K.'s continuing adventure across the Atlantic, where he lost his rudder and two sails and ended up stranded adrift amid the gulf stream, essentially--more on that when I have more details--spend all day looking at Wharram catamarans on the internet.  Here.  I'll show you the one that made me fall in love, years ago:

I don't know why that particular photograph made me fall in love, but who can explain love?  And all my love for all of the Wharram cats in southeast Asia is all in vain, as Bob Dylan so elegantly quoted himself quoting Robert Johnson singing to Willie Mae.  My grandfather used to eat brains with garlic and olive oil, but I can't help thinking that the brains in a pot reference is to Macbeth, because everything comes back to Macbeth.  Brains with garlic and olive oil are what Greeks eat for Christmas.

Maybe I've been alone with my cat and dog and garlic scapes and boat searches and Dylan for too long.  I want the rain to stop.  I want to get on a train with a suitcase in my hand and ride and ride.  I want to find a catamaran and beach her amid ruins and then sail wing and wing away.

Grand Rapids, Michigan (by way of Marion, Massachusetts, and Muskegon, Michigan)

An Ingrid interior--a boat on the boat list

Traveling again, this time for my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary (believe it or not) and a three-day camping trip with Sonia and her two beautiful boys. We pulled into a campground I'd chosen on the internet, sight unseen, with thunder roaring and lightning cracking directly overhead, rain flooding the ranger station, at ten at night—me coming directly from the airport and two awake children in the car. Luckily the kind ranger allowed us the use of a cabin for one night, because when we pitched the tent in the morning, we discovered we had no poles. Not to worry. The 1920s army tent we'd brought as a playplace for the children pitched just fine. Another victory for the brave, foolhardy, impulsive travelers who do not plan.

As is this one: K. is currently in the middle of the Atlantic, racing to Bermuda. Check here. He is on the little pink boat, Elusive, almost dead last. It's okay. It's a rookie boat, class C, and although we'd had our names on the crew list since last year, it was only when we took the brave and foolhardy step of waltzing through the yacht club doors to handwrite our names on the bulletin board that we got a call. So he gets to cross (or half-cross—let's call a spade a spade) the Atlantic before I do.

I'm not jealous. Really, I'm not.

Okay, I am. Desperately jealous, but also so immensely thrilled and pleased for him. His first real ocean race, his first experience with a structured watch list, and five blessed days in blue water under sail.

He'll come back either ready to settle down and farm again, or even hungrier for one of the steel ketches he's been surfing online, the ones with built-in woodstoves that we could sail to Iceland or Greenland or through the Northwest Passage. Casting Off has been metaphorical for a time now, but it's a good reminder that it could always become literal.  Again.

And tonight we dined on kale and beets and local fennel sausage in downtown Grand Rapids, a town which has suddenly, and without my noticing, become hip. I used to say, when I visited my family here, that it was like stepping back in time to 1952. But now it feels the opposite—like stepping forward to, say, 2020—a place where all cafes have their own greenhouses, and art galleries host their own deejays, and every bar stocks jalapeno-infused local vodka. One can only hope.

Can't see over to the other side

The Psychedelicates and their wine-soaked songs

Last night I went to see my friend Carol's show in Presque Isle, at Bou's, a club aptly named. It made me feel, as usual, on most days when I wander around Aroostook County, that I don't belong. Spending time with Carol, who belongs so thoroughly, who builds community as art practice, as much as I love her and love spending time with her and at her home in Castle Hill, makes the feeling especially acute. All of the county girls were out last night, in kitten heels and shorts, all of the twenty-somethings, one of which I once was.

Now I'm not. Now I'm watching my blown-out garden, praying I get tomatoes indoors, and maybe a pepper or two before frost, bolting cilantro and lettuce, basil I can't bear to cut back. I feel always like the odd man out, the one that doesn't know the score, the thin man in Bob Dylan's ballad. Here I am, the one thing that I want—belonging--the one thing I can't have.

It makes a better story that way. K.'s been looking at boats and boat blogs again. Here are two:

Downeast Cutter

Ingrid 38

I'm not allowed to post links whereby you might go find these fine sailboats and buy them yourself.

And then, what follows soon after sailboat searches?  Adventurer blogs.  This guy, Grillabong Quixotic, flew to Mexico with nothing but a dream, to build an outrigger sailboat. Now he's in Panama.

These people raised a child on their engineless Ingrid. Who needs an engine?

As soon as I'm happy, comfortable, putting down roots, I begin to make plans to pull them up again. Kayak searches to Baja. Lonely Planet guides. Emotional separation from the dog that'll never survive Mexico.

Casting off, you say? Casting off indeed. Sometimes I believe that the best thing to do would be to stay put, that again I'm just running away from belonging, from stability, from home. Sometimes I don't want to run aymore.

I want to paint walls. I want to plant rosebushes. I want to put up bookshelves and brackets for hanging plants and window boxes. But what's the point of buying paint or bolts or lumber for someone else's house? Better save that money for epoxy and teak-and-holly ply and bosun's chairs.

There's a boat for sale, a 38-foot Ingrid Ketch, down in Baja. It can be yours for the paltry sum of $42,000. These are the things one googles when it's breaking records at fifty degrees in March.

Here's a link:



But no. I'm not complaining about the weather. Today the snow turned brown from the muck underneath it. But I'm happy. I can see sprigs of grass, in places where the van leans up against the front lawn spruce, the tree the internet dish is now nailed to.

I keep reading Moby Dick. I've been reading it for months now. I wonder how many people manage to read it inside of a year. And yet the language is so grand, so precise. And gruesome. The parts where the whales get murdered are almost impossible to read. I read them like I'm watching a horror movie, with my hands over my eyes.

Don't believe me? Here you go:

“The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men....”

“...Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his 'flurry,' the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that frenzied twilight into the clear air of the day....”

“At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.”

I guess we've always had to mutilate living beings for the sake of technology.

In through a doorway

Secret, in mangroves

I feel like winter steals my creativity, my ability to think about new things in new ways. The landscape is as blank as a piece of paper, and that's how my mind feels. Or maybe it's just a lack of focus, an ability to carry an idea to completion, or the soreness in my joints from trying to trek through snow.

I also hate complaining about winter. Then again, I don't believe that I'm really complaining about it, more explaining my ongoing state of mind as I exist in suspended animation, of hibernation.

The picture above, of Secret in the mangroves, came this week. Maybe I feel like I'm as washed up as she is. Or maybe I just acknowledge that this is the time my body is the most in rebellion, the coldest.

I don't know. I'm dreaming, these days, about water, according to Jung a symbol of the subconscious. I dreamed I stood at the water’s edge. My mom had broken an acrobat’s fish tank, and fish and water spilled all around me. In another, I was washing the beautiful girl with water from the sink.

We cracked open another jar of our green-tomato salsa yesterday—two left. Many other jars of piccalilly and mincemeat, but they're not as delicious as the salsa. The three places where we attempted to store vegetables, in lieu of a root cellar, all destroyed the produce that I'd hoped to keep. The unheated front bedroom was still too hot, the broken freezer outside and the bus were both too cold. I roasted frozen cabbage the other day, and while it was edible, it certainly wasn't delicious.

These things depress me, more than they should. I'm working on a story about water, too. About a girl in boarding school, a missionary kid, a swimmer. I spent the last week carving 300 words off of it. A week's worth of work to delete 300 words.

It's almost February, though. And once February rolls around, it'll only be two months until April.

It’s bloodied and broke

Autumn begins

Another in my ongoing series of little book posts. I don’t know why I keep going back to the little books I kept on the boat for source material. Or I do. The time I lived aboard was a dream come true, a dream that some days I wish I hadn’t woken up from. And then I find a note like this one:

more space

Each word underlined individually, as if a prayer. There are things that I miss about the boat, and there are thing I don’t—the daily olfactory onslaught of an onboard septic system is one. I kept lists and lists of designers and names, boats I longed for, and what they all had in common was more space.

Space I now have in spades. I have acres of space. I look out the horizon at Canada, at the single white pine that sticks above the tree line. I go for mile-long walks and have miles to spare.

Is it true that we always want what we cannot have? I stood at the bottom of my lawn the other day, chasing the last ray of sun as the line of shadow crept across the grass. I looked up, over the beaver pond, at my neighbor’s bus, on top of the hill, blessed by a full hour more of sun. If I were to start my own religion, a la Ron Hubbard, it would be a Ra the Sun God revival.

Then I remembered the last of the ten commandments: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, or wife, or animals, or manservant, or maidservant, or prime piece of real estate. No wonder God said that. How easy is it to cast my eyes up the hill, to covet the fruit from his apple trees, to not appreciate the jewel that rests in my own hand.

Then I came home, and K. said: Just wait till winter, and the wind’s howling at the top of that hill.

So. On the boat I wanted vast openness, and now I crave heat, and motion, and international travel. Maybe that’s why I write here, to explore the choice between those two lives. This blog began as a record of my travel by sail, and it continues as a record of my search for stability.

I wrote one of those six-word Hemingway autobiographical short-shorts, once upon a time. It reads:

A traveler learns to stay still.

Saeglopur

Another boat on my list of dream boats is a 42’ Wharram catamaran. On Secret we had about five old Cruising Worlds, donated by the previous owner, and one had a full-page spread of a Wharram cat, under full crab-rig Chinese sails, coming into harbor. It was like a centerfold. I pored over the article again and again.

It’s hard for me when sailing friends say I’ve swallowed the anchor, when I meet people whose husbands used to race boats in the Gulf of Mexico. The internal battle I feel between motion and stillness is ongoing. It’s merely a peace treaty I’ve signed. I want to be here, yes, in my Snuggie with my foot heater on, frost beginning to show on the buttercup squash, but I also want to be raising sail under a waning moon, setting my sights on Hispaniola. I want to know what the next adventure will be. I want more stamps in my passport, my passport that expired thirteen days ago.

I do cherish the sun more with every day. Every day my walk inches closer toward noon, even now, even before the equinox. I try to tell myself that sun is not a limited resource, that what I lose in autumn here, I make up for in spring and summer. Heat, however, is. It’s not logical, my internal Mr. Spock says. Why would human beings choose to live above the thirtieth degree? More logical is a life closer to the equator.

Still today, wood was lugged, and split, and stacked. I ground up radishes for relish, made brine for pickled peppers. My apples await a magical not-yet-established process to turn them into cider. The basil, which may already be dead from frost, now adorns the glass room. Still no fire. Still no heat.

Today, Garrison Keillor of Minnesota said, half-joking: Then October, and the suffering resumes.

I’m doing my absolute best not to complain. But not complaining is different than acknowledging and dealing with reality. Maybe I’m still unprepared, when on nights like this one, when the temperature dips below 40 degrees, I start daydreaming of setting a course by the stars, of bathing suits and sunscreen, of clinging to a mast while breeze blows off the bow.

Nocturne

It’s 1:04 in the morning and a Quebecois movie is on Canadian television about a six-year-old Catholic boy given the ability to heal people. I’m listening to Chopin as I read French subtitles. My garden was hit by hail this week, the day after I posted all of those pictures, which was depressing to the point that I haven’t been out there lately. My chard has immense amounts of tiny little holes in it. The plants that have fruit are less wounded, but it’s still tough to face.

The frustrating thing is that I’ve been meaning to harvest the chard for weeks now. I knew it was edible ages ago, but I was distracted by massive quantities of radishes and turnip greens and radish tops. It’s a good problem to have, a problem I wouldn’t have expected to have even in March of this year. I didn’t realize how much of the task of a garden is keeping up with the harvest and finding ways to cook and eat things. My grandma always made sauteed chard to go with her meat and potatoes, but I don’t cook meat and potatoes that often. Today I had holey sauteed chard for dinner. With macaroni.

I’ve been reading my little boat notebook again, never a good sign when I’m looking for stability. I read this notation today: I can tie a bowline now!! 7-7-07

Except I can’t. Try as I might, that knowledge has slipped away from me. I can’t get the rabbit to go around the tree and into its hole. I know I could look it up, relearn it, but I keep expecting the knowledge to magically reappear. I guess I’m learning new things, that chard is still delicious with holes poked in it, and how to eat it with pasta and horseradish cheddar. Time moves on. The past slips away, and its lessons go with it.

God gave me style

Another unidentified flower

I distinctly remember the day I learned the meaning of the phrase “I like the cut of your jib.” Secret was anchored in Georgetown harbor, and we were hanging out with crew from two other boats—a duo of crazy western Australians and another couple, the female half of which was Native American and the male half of which was a treasure hunter. He bought a video camera to fasten to the front of his hull, and they were heading to the Ragged Islands, a chain of rugged coral outcroppings in a remote part of the Bahamas, famous because so many boats wrecked there. That’s the idea behind treasure hunting—you go to the places where the most boats have wrecked, which doesn’t seem like that brilliant of a strategy for one’s own boat. This same couple took a Boston Whaler across the Gulf Stream, so elements of their sanity may have been questionable.

She wove us a rainbow-bead dream-catcher to hang in our boat. It still hangs from the bulletin board of my Chattanooga office, and I remember them, and wonder if they ever made it past the Ragged Islands.

They had a Cal 33, designed by Gary Mull, the same dude who designed the Ranger 33s, which Secret was. Cals are slower boats, beamier, more for cruising than for racing, and I was jealous. Not only did their boat have standing head room for us tall people, but it had space. They had old-fashioned hanked-on foresails, which they bemoaned, but I was jealous of those, too. Our roller-furler was barely working at that point and hanked-on sails sounded so much easier.

Best yet, they had a blade jib. A sail shaped like a blade, 87 percent of their sail area—as sexy as it sounds. I said, almost without hearing myself, “I like the cut of your… jib.” I meant it, standing there, in front of someone’s jib, envying it.

I’ve been doing that with land lately, with weather. I love this little chunk of land carved out at the bottom of Snow Road. Bridgewater is the local town, with 700 residents, but the denizens of Snow Road like to claim that this city is a separate village altogether. Snow Settlement. Where people like to drink boxed wine and Mountain Dew, where you hear the neighbor shoot a couple of rounds of .22s on a Sunday afternoon, where free-range moose roam across the road, where you walk home using the fireflies to light y0ur way.

If there’s one thing that Snow Road has in spades, it’s snow. We had snow here about two weeks later than anyone else, and we get snow about two weeks earlier. Spending three days up at a lake made me feel like I was living in a separate micro-climate. There was actually sun. It shone. I got color in my face. My shoulders grew back their freckles.

Not only is this the road of snow, but the house is located at a little divot at the bottom of the road, where, even on these long summer days, shade begins at five pm. I have to go to the corner of the lawn to do a sunny sun salutation. The garden’s located at the edge of the beaver pond, so it gets the most light. It’d be the perfect situation for a house. If the house was in Alabama.

On nice days, like today, I trek uphill to R.’s place. He’s the neighbor that lives in a bus, and I sit out on the bus’s attached hardwood deck until the last glimmer of sun disappears from the top of the hill.

I’m not complaining. I refuse to complain about the weather. I’m just noting that a road on the wrong side of the only hill in 500 square miles, on the lowest ground on that road, in the county that I theorize has the worst weather in the continental United States (Perhaps barring parts of northern North Dakota—someone look it up for me? Please? Someone who has internet?), makes for some cloudy, dreary days, even in June.

So. Whoever you are, wherever you live (unless perhaps you live in North Dakota). I like the cut of your jib.

Younger faces, distant places

Beaver pond (view from my office)

I’m sitting at my desk, writing by hand in a notebook, as I did on my boat. It feels a bit like a boat here, a single-wide trailer on the edge of the wilderness, looking out on a beaver pond. Two moose sightings last week, plus two in one day when we went fishing with a friend from Caribou. My brother-in-law asked if I was watching ABC tonight.

I said, “No, I don’t get ABC. I’m watching Boston beat the Canucks in hockey, because I get Canadian TV.”

He said, “Don’t worry, just go to abc.com and watch…”

“I don’t get internet,” I said.

“What are you, in 1910?” he asked.

Not really, but it feels like it some days. I get dial-up, which means no video and that I write things offline and then upload them by super-slow copper phone line. Probably from 1910. As I did on the boat, with my G3 iBook and the little solar panel that kept it charged.

I keep thinking about when I assisted in the recoring of Secret’s deck. When we bought her, the balsa core between her plywood decks was soggy with water, and I played first mate as we stripped it down, bought marine-grade plywood, cut plywood, relaid chopped glass and epoxy resin, sanded everything down… It felt like the process took an absolute eternity, but recoring the deck was a fundamental, part of the structural core of the boat, one of the things that had to be taken care of first.

I’m in that stage with my soil right now, wrestling with it, trying to give it the structural strength it needs. Each endless truckload of horse crap loaded into the garden feel like it just dissolves into clay-ey rocky dirt nothingness. A whole truckload, and it’s gone. I know it takes years. Years. I’m hoping the process only feels eternal, like the deck recore of yore.

Part of it is accepting that the garden is playing second fiddle to my writing, and it’s never going to get my full attention. I had that problem on the boat, too. In order to stay sane, I have priorities, and the things that are the most important come first. New in the garden as of today are: turnips, turnip greens. Popping their heads up are radish seedlings, that came from a three-year-old Family Dollar seed packet. Twenty cents!

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Peter, my brother, in Grandpa's garden

When I lived on my boat, I woke up every morning at six AM to listen to the weather on the shortwave. I developed a notation system so I could record every variable reported. How many knots the wind would blow, the swell, the projected systems beyond the ten-day forecast. The weather was a daily, ever-present part of my life.

I remember the first tropical system that reached us. Andrea, she was called. The first named storm of the season. By the time she reached our boat she had dwindled to little more than a line of black clouds. But I remember that line of darkness. I watched them drift forward, a clear system, a line, an identifiable being. This is Andrea, I thought. She menaced on the horizon, a named thing.

She passed, and we had other storms to deal with, none severe, but it was then I figured out a meteorologist’s intimacy with her storms. I understood why they named them. Each system had its own presence, its own being, as if it was, in fact, a created individual.

One of the things I gained on the boat was the equivalent of a university degree in astronomy, meteorology, and marine science—all the ancient nautical arts. That’s not quite true (in fact, I’m rather sure it’s not true at all) but it felt that way. In order to survive, I had to study my texts, listen to the radio, dig through data. If it wasn’t a degree, it was certainly a crash course.

The storm that passed through northern Alabama and Georgia last week had that same gravity. I’ve only seen the barest edge of its passing on my drive, but my friends, the maps, and the photographs all convey that same presence. The storm had its own identity, its own individuality. The destructive force felt personal, as if it came from something with a name.

I don’t know what’s causing all of this horror. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami, this tornado, now earthquake clusters along the Maine coast and flooding in the Midwest. One thing follows another, like there’s something seriously off-kilter that needs correcting. Like it’s personal.

The Christians say rapture is near, the scientists say climate change, the Aztecs say the world is ending. I don’t know. I can’t quite believe in any of those answers (I believe in global warming, not that it causes earthquakes), but it does feel like something major is changing in our weather systems. Right? Don’t you feel that way, too? Why aren’t the scientists saying it? There has to be a reason.

Maybe there isn’t. Maybe this is how it’s always been, always will be. Years of peace, followed by years of disaster. The farmers and the sailors both know it. I’ve talked about it before, how both farmers and sailors have the same intimacy with their weather. They hug the weather to themselves, hold it next to their bodies like a lover.

His ghost is lying thirsty

In case anyone wants to make the best-ever Bahamian mix CD, in order to celebrate the end of summer, here are my choices:

1. Rake ‘n Scrape Mama – The Lassie Doh Boys


2. Only in Exuma – Dry Bread

3. Junkanoo Rock – Ira Storr

4. Tonight Is the Night (You Make Me a Woman) - Betty Wright


5. Fat Gals - Sir Kai

6. I Ain't Asking Fa Much - Ancient Man


7. Cry Baby - Eddie Minnis

8. Neighbour! Neighbour! - Colyn McDonald

9. Gal If I Had You - Eugene "Geno D" Davis

10. Mosquito Bite - Eugene "Geno D" Davis


11. Onion - Wilfred Mullings

12. Shame and Scandal in the Family - Shawn Elliott


13. Call da Fire Engine - Ancient Man


It took me forever to put this post together, but it was so fun to relive all those days chopping up onions in the galley and listening to Radio Bahamas. Some of the links get you to live streaming songs, and some to places you can buy albums. And you all should buy albums.

I have to admit, also, that Ancient Man has got to be at the top of the list. I can't believe there are videos of Crooked Island's Homecoming on YouTube! Click on the links, too, because they'll take you to the studio versions of his songs, with much better sound quality. But much worse dancing.

John A Hobson was a good man

Bahamian cumulus cloud

I had fun finding that forecast applet yesterday, although the flash may crash your computer. One of the advantages of having internet while you blog is squandering time trolling for toys. Distracting me from the actual work of crafting my experience into compelling mini-stories. My cultural stream of consciousness. Although maybe all of our streams of consciousness are made up of applets now.

Anyway. My stream of consciousness is made up of weather. Or it used to be. The one phrase written in my little notebook that used to break me into tears every time I read it, every single time, was:

whole conversations about clouds

That alone. I used to have whole conversations about clouds. That’s what sailors do. I used to sit in the cockpit of Secret, watching them flow over, and discuss what they meant. Watch the looming cumulus, tracking the course of summer thunderstoms across the landscape. Watch the strung-out cirrus, the arrows they pointed in the sky following the frost in the upper atmosphere. Watch the feathered clouds for the angle of winter squalls.

I can’t do that anymore. As much as I love my new career, it involves sitting at a desk for the majority of the day. A desk where I can’t see the sky, let alone clouds. I can watch the wind breathing through the oaks and peach trees, see the moths that settle on my screen, hear the crickets swooning through the greenery--but no clouds. When I do see them, they’re meaningless. They don’t speak to me the way they used to. I used to be able to read them, like a book, like a script written in the sky.

That makes me weep. As much as I believe that the decision I made was a good one, the right one, the loss still hits me sometimes, a blow to the solar plexus.

As you can tell, I’ve been rereading my little notebook from Secret. So I find things like this:

Fri- S5-10kts <2ft
Sat- W5kts, SE, SW5-10 kts <2ft
Sun- Nassau: frontal trough, shifted E near Haiti- clouds & showers in SE- strong low N of Bahamas move to GA, swells subsiding NW- SCA extreme caution NE swell S-SW 15-20 kts 5-8 ft swell

I remember how I used to wake up at six every morning to hear the weather, to copy it down. How weather used to be such a presence in my life, the third personality on the boat, its spirit always in my mind.

Every decision, every choice, means loss. I’ve gained something, but I’ve lost things, too.

Wrapped around your finger

That day--sailing

“Cutter-rigged ketch bruising along at six knots under power, no sail out—beam wind of 5-10 kts.” --Melissa Jenks

A note I wrote in my little notebook as I was sailing through the Bahamas, from Paradise Island to the Exumas… My point, perhaps obscure to non-sailors, was very much the same as the point that Edifice Rex makes here, in an excellent post that I can’t recommend highly enough. It blew my mind that these people could have a boat, so beautiful—my dream boat, a cutter-rigged ketch, with boatloads (ha!) of sail—and be using it like a motorboat. Not even a sail out, with a beam wind, the best kind of wind God breathes.

Admittedly, we were sailing that day at around three knots. Not fast. (Actually, I can check my logbook! Our average that day, 6 May 2007, was 3.5 knots, and we achieved a maximum speed under sail of 4.1 knots. So not that slow after all!) A five-knot beam wind has a harder time moving a heavy boat. But still.

That boat was heading the opposite direction. The other way. Bruising back to the States, over the banks, probably trying to make it to Nassau in time for dinner. They were forcing their way forward, on the backs of the dinosaurs and the whales, burning up that diesel as fast as they could, instead of being willing to take the slow way, the difficult way, the harder and truer path.

I understand Edifice Rex’s reluctance to toot her own horn in her subsequent post. It’s difficult to say: I’m doing it right, and you all are doing it wrong. On the other hand: if we didn’t believe we were doing it right, we wouldn't be doing it this way.

When something breaks, the fast solution that most of us turn to is to go to Walmart and buy something new. The easy way is to buy something made of petroleum in China. The slow solution is learning to fix it. The slow way is learning to build something new that won’t break, that’ll be worth fixing. Americans take the easy way a lot. Because it’s easier. It’s more comfortable.

I haven’t used air-conditioning all summer. Here’s the forecast for Chattanooga:

Chattanooga, TN (37421) Weather Forecast

And I’m so comfortable. I spend most of the time in my basement, where it’s ten degrees colder anyway, but I wear almost no clothing all the time. I drape a sarong around myself first thing in the morning, and I live in it as much as possible. I have a fan that I cart around from room to room. Really, that’s all one needs to deal with hot weather: minimal clothing, and air flow. Something I learned, very well, from the Thais.

The point is that taking the difficult way generally isn’t all that hard. It requires swimming upstream, yes, or sailing in a beam wind—but it’s generally cheaper, better for the earth, better for my body, and better for my mind.

Underneath the covers

Best time for salads is summer (beans are from our garden, tomatoes from someone else's)

Wednesdays I am supposed to post, and Wednesday I wrote this horrible, horrible post, where all of my darkness exploded, as it likes to do. I wasn’t brave enough to make it public. But I keep thinking about it. I’ve always believed that once I write something it doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to its intended audience. In this case, the ether.

That’s basically what I wrote about on Wednesday. How useless I’m beginning to feel like this exercise is. How I’m developing all of these carefully wrought arguments, crafting and shaping them into essays that make compelling points about the issues that are the most important to me, and how no one on earth gives a flying miracle.

I’ve been rereading my posts from the boat, and they were brilliant. Brilliant. I’m stunned I even wrote them. How could I have tapped into such depths? I felt like what I was doing then was nothing. When what I’m doing now is nothing. Nothing.

My blog’s title is “Casting Off,” which used to be a cute double entendre—cast off earthly things, and cast off the bow lines! Now it just feels farther and farther from what I’m doing. I wanted to name the site “Ultralight Life,” because I felt like whatever happened my commitment to living the purest, simplest life possible would never change. It hasn’t changed, but I do feel a bit like I’ve lost my way.

I miss my home. I miss Secret. I miss the clarity that I felt in those days. Now, so aware of my audience, or of my lack thereof, I’m too afraid to tell the truth in this space. The truth is that I am a writer. I’ve always been a writer. No matter what hat I put on--adventurer, backpacker, bicyclist, pilgrim, sailor, traveler—all I ever will be is a writer.

I cast off Secret partly because things fell apart, but mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to be both a writer and a sailor. That dream wasn’t working, or wasn’t working in a way that helped me follow my true calling. Adventuring is a dream for me, but it’s only secondary.

The next adventure I have planned is building a sustainable homestead and farming my own land. It’s in keeping with my primary values—purity, simplicity—but my main reason for it is that it’s the only way I know how to survive on the $6000 a year I can earn as a writer. That makes me feel disingenuous, like somehow I’m lying when I say I want to build my own house. No. I don’t. Not really. I want to build my own house so I can have space to write and don’t have to pay rent. That’s why I’d be fine in a tent or in a camper, at least for a while, until I write that best-selling novel. Ha. Anywhere I can put up a desk and have a place to dispose of my own waste.

That’s what Casting Off means to me. Read the verse. Cast off everything that so easily entangles. So easily entangles from what? From that bright shining goal, that truth I’ve known about myself since I was three years old. All I do, every moment I spend, is simply to help me find the clarity to become the person I’ve always been. Even if no one cares.