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.

Lay me back down

“I hate blogs. I even hate the name. Blog, blog, blog. Awful word.”

“I rather like it. It recalls snog, the British word for kissing a stranger. A nice echo.”

Embarrassed laughter by assembled audience.

“Also there's the sense where it's a web log. I keep my blog because I began at a time when I kept a boat log.”

“According to the Writer's Digest, you're suppose to have one if you want to publish. But you're supposed to write about something other than what you want to publish!”

“Can't you think of each post as an essai, in the French sense? An attempt? A brief questioning into the nature of a subject? A petite picaresque? Montaigne wrote essays about asses farting.”

“Awful. No. All of that electronic stuff. I've never read a blog I liked.”

“Maybe they're the best books being written, ones that read beautifully as complete oeuvres. Bumfuzzle, I recommend. This guy, trying to sail in a canoe to South America, after building his boat himself in Mexico. Then there's this couple, living in a 21-foot Sea Pearl in Argentina.  The Secret Life of a Former Prostitute. The Out of Eden Walk. Scarlett Lion.  And Tavi, a gift from the spirit of the age, thank God. But each blog is like ether. They drift off and disappear, to be mined, in the future, but cultural archaeologists.”

“What about the comments? You have to deal with the things people say!”

“And they do say awful things. Someone once told me to burn in hell. Some else told me I'd be better off dumping my loser boyfriend. It was not cool. But now, mainly, I take every comment as a precious gift.”

Even you could comment, for instance, if you wanted, and I'd love it.

Into the big sleep

Fat, I think

Cynthia Timmons was the youngest of a missionary family's second set of twins, both adopted. Her family came from California. Her dad worked for World Vision—a development organization that my family judged as being too rich—proved by the vicious monkey he kept chained in their driveway. He'd adopted the chimp young and it turned cruel later. When we went to visit their house, we had to sprint from the car to the house. Cynthia and her identical twin were different, also, aliens among us, if I feel like making excuses for her. Filipina by descent, adopted as an infant, she bullied me on the playground—really a park attached to a pool, accessible to us because of the apartment our missionary cooperative rented as a schoolroom. I remember the crucial moment when she convinced me, cornered me. She was casually, unintentionally cruel.

“Fatso,” she said.

I didn't know enough to let it lie. I chased her, first one side of the littorea bush, then the other. She was dark, lithe, small. I was chubby and easily winded, the girl always sitting in the corner reading, the girl who walked with an open book in her hand along the soi to recess. Cynthia dodged and laughed.

“Fatso, fatso, fatso,” she said, as if discovering that word's power. As if discovering the magic spell that would hold me in thrall for the rest of my life.

Fat, I think, looking in the mirror. Fat, I think, putting my body through cleanses and fasts. Fat, I think, gaining it all back. Why couldn't I just let her run away?

Oh lord, big fat woman

Great-great-grandma. We share DNA.

I'm sitting at my desk, listening to Leadbelly croon the above-quoted song, from 1936. Here are some lyrics:

Big fat woman
With her meat hanging on her bone
She was born and raised in old Kentucky home
I love my woman and I tell you what I do
I love my woman and I tell you what I do
I love my woman and I tell the world I do
Oh Lord
She's so good to me just like I do you

I woke up this morning and I found my baby gone
I woke up this morning and I found my baby gone
I was so mistreated
But I wouldn't let on

Today we're told that food is bad, that it possesses a moral quantity. We're told to deprive ourselves of food. We're told that food should bring no joy. We're told that the highest good, the most possible value we can have, especially as women, is to look like this photograph:

You can never be too skinny or too rich, say the fashion magazines. She who wins, dies, read the pro-anorexic sites I used to frequent.

The fact is that farm wives look like the first photograph, my great-great grandmother, not like the second. Being a farm wife means spending all winter eating potatoes, and sauerkraut, and sausages made from the nasty bits of the pig you slaughter in the fall. It means spending all winter gathering layers of clothing and fat around yourself, to prepare yourself for the dearth of nutrients you'll suffer through during the cold season. That's what it used to mean. Now it just means self-hatred.

These beliefs are completely dysfunctional, and they drive all of us, those of us on the wrong side of the line, the vast cultural divide that no one who's ever been skinny understands, straight into the arms of the donut. It doesn't help for you to call me disgusting, to roll your eyes, to say: “I don't eat that. I eat healthy food. Do you really need to eat that?”

Another song, from 2008:

I cannot emphasize enough that my body
Is a badly designed, poorly put together vessel
Harboring these diminishing so called vital organs
Hope my heart goes first, I hope my heart goes first

We are beautiful, we are doomed
--Los Campesinos! [Buy an album.]

People have been telling me that I'm fat, or “beefy,” as my mom likes to put it, since I was eight years old. At a certain point, say when I was eight-and-a-half, I started believing it. Even the day I finished the Appalachian Trail, when I was burning 7000 calories a day, I was a full fifteen pounds heavier than the medically approved median weight for my height. What hope does that leave for me with a career as a writer, spent with an ass spreading in a chair made of wood, and a winter spent eating potatoes and shoring my body up against the cold?

And still, even now, people on television tell me how disgusting and repulsive I am. Last night on The Colbert Report, the director of the National Institutes of Health brought in a five-pound chunk of fat and slapped it on the table to show all of us overweight Americans how horrible we are, how much better we need to be doing. As if I don't punish myself enough already. As if I don't know how to punish myself further. It makes me, it makes all of us, want to obliterate ourselves with a pound of ice cream and a shotgun blast to the head.

You don't know how it feels, I want to scream to all of you skinny bastards. You don't know how it feels to know: I'm never going to be a normal person. I'm never going to be able to eat like a normal person. I'm never going to be able to eat when I'm hungry. I can never eat what I'm hungry for. I can never listen to my body and answer it. Not without guilt, without shame, without punishment from the culture at large, condemnation from the people I love, and judgment from numbers on a scale. No. What you want from me, what you've always wanted from me, is for me to starve myself. You want me to be miserable. You want me to suffer.

Childhood obesity is a problem. But I know, from personal experience, what it does to a child to tell her that she's somehow less, by being bigger, than everyone else. We have a giant cultural problem with food, clearly. It's a more dangerous addiction for us than alcohol, drugs, or sex, far more dangerous than any addiction except, perhaps, gasoline or television, but still our culture sandwiches ads for Weight Watchers in between ads for Burger King and ads for heartburn drugs.

It's not a problem of farming, or advertising, or big food companies. It's a problem of psychology. Until you can teach me not to hate myself, not to spend my life trying to be something other than I am, it's a problem for which I have no solution. If I did, I'd be a Victoria's Secret model.

Leap Day

We only get this day once every four years. A gift, the anniversary of nothingness from the year before. The day when we're all—or most of us, at least—perpetually less than twenty. Heck, I'm only eight in Leap Days.

Today I pulled down my McSweeney's 8 from the shelf. There's a chary balance, as a writer, between reading and writing. It's so easy to sidle over to the bookshelf, and think—I should just do some serious reading today.

But I digress. McSweeney's 8 happens to be full of stories about truth and fiction and the difference between the two. The one I happened to flip to, the one I had dog-eared, was a story/essay by Jonathan Ames, about how two chapters of his novel were stolen by a woman named Julia, the daughter of a famous writer, who deluded him for months into believing that he was being invited to Sweden for a symposium held by a literary magazine. Halfway through reading the essay, which I assumed was autobiographical, I began to question whether it was in fact fiction.

In it, Julia publishes her novel with the same publisher, with an epigram from Balzac: “How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes.”

So who's swindling whom? The best part is not knowing.

Then this review, of a book based on a Believer article, also published by McSweeney's, about an essayist's war with his fact-checker over facts. And the reviewer folds his facts around, too.

“Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth,” said Tim O'Brien, as quoted by Dan Kois. But he may have been lying.

If you want it you got it

Woodpile

Today's quote, from a Chicago Tribune profile of a McSweeney's writer:

As for Levin, after initially worrying about the book's length, he decided at page 700 that the book would be as long as it needed to be. "If I have arrived at a stance on literature, I guess, it's this: I want books to be huge. Not page counts — I want giant stories that end big," he says. "Because as I get older, I'm getting bored, with domestic fiction, especially. And I want to read writers who are bold, who go for it all. I want all the significance, everything."
McSweeney's editor Eli Horowitz agreed: "The reason most books are not as big as 'The Instructions' is not necessarily because books are not supposed to be as big as 'The Instructions.' It's because publishers are afraid of them and authors get worried people won't read them. To get past that and write to the length you truly believe you should write to requires a mixture of courage and obliviousness that Adam has. He's brave, and when it works well, it's thrilling."

Reading quotes like that are the good part of the internet. Reading quotes like this one (from a Poets and Writers interview) are the bad:

Stein: Novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it's like the novel is the new short story.
RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem...
STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story.... It's hard out there.
RUTMAN: If you're talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, "Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can't be far behind."
STEIN: There is no easy street.
RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn't exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.
STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.
STEIN: Did you make that number up?
STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.
STEIN: I think that's a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.

100 out of 300 million people. Might just as well start buying lottery tickets.

Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

0 nm

At Frenchie’s last night, he let us know that he’s going to be hanging around the Bahamas a little longer. It’s kind of bad news, kind of good--in one way I was relieved to not have the pressure of an imminent departure looming over us when he said he was leaving so soon and we knew we wouldn’t have the boat ready in time. In another way, I can imagine nothing cooler than zooming back to Florida on a private plane, gazing below at the scattered jewels of the “crown of 700 islands,” as Radio Bahamas put it, gracing an aquamarine brow. I guess it’s good. More options are always good.

It’s also good to feel like we’re really making friends down here at this end of the island. All along we’ve been worried about close-knit this community is, about how our role is being perceived down here. I should have learned by now that the best option is always complete honesty, and now that we’ve been a lot more up-front with them about who we are and what we’re doing here, how we’re helping Nappy with the house, it feels like the air has cleared. Jim flew out this morning to a conference in the States, so I toddled over to visit Lin at her house, Island Time. I hadn’t been there before, and it was great to see yet another house on the sand.

All of these houses have so much care and love poured into them. They all have beautiful stories behind their building and their names, stories about the plans and organization, stories about the people who helped to build them. Lin, while building her house, took the innovative step of asking everyone at the end of the island what they would have do differently if they could build their house again. Inside, the house is all gorgeous unfinished pine, with slatted windows, giving the inside a feel of cool duskiness. A 20-year-old long-haired white cat named Sashe keeps them company, and she wandered around arthritically while we talked, making me miss my cat Rumor ineffably.

Lin also loaned me copies of two books written by the island’s famous circumnavigator, Fritz Damler. (His book, available on the internet, I imagine, is called Ten Years Behind the Mast.) We haven’t met him yet, as he spends summers in Wisconsin, but I can’t wait. He set sail in a 35-foot wooden cutter named Theodora R and circumnavigated in ten years, losing two wives in the process, the most fascinating part of his journey. TR, as he calls her, is a gorgeous boat, which I compared favorably, and somewhat guiltily, to Secret. She was full-keeled and beamy, with a long bowsprit for a big genoa, and enough room to house seven people, occasionally his full complement of crew It’s hard to imagine having half that many on Secret.

Karl eventually stopped by with three conch, which he tried to give away. He spent the morning hard at work, as usual, helping a local guy, Robbie, fix his boat’s engine. In exchange, Robbie’s offered us a ride back from French Wells, the safe anchorage where we plan to moor Secret. It seems the pieces are falling into place for us to take a jaunt stateside--a ride from French Wells and maybe a second ride to Florida by Cessna... I have mixed feelings. Dare we leave Secret alone? Are we tempting fate?