I'm stuck here waiting for a passing feeling

A late afternoon shot of Secret

I’m more and more optimistic today. We managed (for “we,” read “my dad”) to get all of the fuel injectors out, even though the nuts were completely frozen. Dad had to go about it in a roundabout way, taking the fuel lines all the way off to get out the injectors, but still--we can get lubricant in the pistons now! I’m a little worried that if we get any gunk into the fuel injectors we’ll foul up the engine forever, but I’m not thinking about that.

Better news is that Andy stopped by for lunch to bring us bread and ice and our newly freed-up starter! Jorge, the Cuban magic man, took it apart and put it back together and it’s now working perfectly. I’m completely convinced that if he came out to Secret, he’d ahve the diesel purring again in half an hour. I have promised all the world baked goods if I have such a fortuitous ending.

Somehow, I feel confident that the motor will run before we leave. I’d be so much happier leaving my boat again in at least semi-working condition. I’m going to leave keys with Andy this time, so he can start the Yanmar up every month or so. Everyone we talked to in town, and we talked to fully three diesel mechanics, said that there’s no reason the engine should be frozen, and these are people who have been working with equipment in a salt-water environment their whole lives.

Dad’s talking now, too, about coming back with me in August if Karl is still unable or unwilling. He’s become sold on this project emotionally, and I know the thought of sailing back to Florida or Georgia is one he loves. It’s been a dream for him, too, for an entire lifetime, and it makes me happy that I’ve brought him closer to it, even if his dream resembles more grubby engine work than open-ocean sailing. Before he came, the next time he mentioned being free was December. He even knows a couple of pilots, so we might be able to catch a ride down here, which would be far more economical.

My thought about Secret are beginning to open up. Maybe I’ll find a buyer for her as she lies, or maybe Dad will help me sail her back in a series of successive journeys, or maybe we’ll just be able to take vacations here, hanging out and doing repair projects until she’s ready to move again. Being here, at least, has made me more than ever confident in my friends and confident in the safety of the harbor here. She’s in the best possible place. Maybe everything doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Like a camel when you frown

The beloved Yanmar

My dad woke me this morning, far too early, thrashing around before seven, and I realized it’s going to be a long week. As much as I love him, we’re two big, clumsy people in a very small space crowded with broken parts, scattered tools, and repair mechanisms. I went up on the bow to grumble to myself and sit in the wind and contemplate the prospect of no coffee. No coffee, and my dad and I alone.

After a while, I thought maybe I’d try to propane tank again. The tanks had been remarkably problem-free before, and we had sprayed WD-40 into the valve, so I had a meager hope of success. Dad was already hard at work on the diesel, beginning to remove the fuel injectors, the next step in our ongoing rebuilding project. (I fear this steop may come back to haunt us. But I remain silent.)

And the propane sizzled into pressurized life, the burner lit, and we have coffee after all! Hallelujah! It would have been a very dismal week indeed with no caffeine and no hot food. I spent the rest of the day holding the other end of a wrench for my dad, and reading in the breaks.

I feel some small amount of guilt for reading, but I have all of these books, and I’m going to have to leave most of them behind. My precious, beautiful books--it breaks my heart. So I’ll just read as many of them as I can before I leave. There’s not much room for more than one person at the motor repair station, anyway. It’s precisely the reason I wanted to spend some time here alone--when am I ever going to get the chance again to spearhead a rebuilding project?--but then again, maybe it’s why I didn’t want to be here alone, either. So I didn’t have to.

Tonight I’m down on my knees

The view from French Wells

I bought my ticket home this morning. Even though I had set my expectations low, it feels like failure. I’m going home with my dad, not even taking the brave step of staying an extra two weeks. As it turned out, based on the events of the day, maybe it was a wise decision.

Dad and I big a fond farewell to my mom at the airport. It was bittersweet saying goodbye--the end of the really fun part of the trip, and the beginning of the intense and stressful part. I always said Mom should come along because of her optimism, and it will be sorely missed. Dad and I are a little less than optimistic on occasion.

We had heard last week of the existence of a free ferry from Church Grove to Long Cay, which zips right past our boat at French Wells, three times a week, and I was excited at the prospect of a new method of transportation, even loaded with fifteen gallons of water and two big bags of still-dirty laundry. Now, if you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that my father is a missionary and a pastor, and that my faith, while conflicted, is a giant part of my life. (See above quote.) You’ll also know that Karl and I have been know to imbibe a glass or two or three of beer or wine on occasion, even though the majority of my family are teetotalers in the extreme. (Which is why alcohol remains, most often, in the subtext.) Still, Karl and I are big fans of fellowship with any locals we happen to encounter, in any situation, we happen to find ourselves, which does, I admit, get us into trouble.

So I set the scene: my dad and I are deposited at Pokey’s Den, with our piles of luggage, to wait for the departure of the ferry. We’d already gotten a hint from David that some drinking might be going on-- “not the ferry driver?” asked my dad-- “I’d be more afraid if he didn’t drink,” answered David. We arrived and I immediately realized that this scene is going to be bad. A culture clash in the extreme. The Crooked boyz are already hard at work on their livers and their lungs, at ten o’clock in the morning, and my dad and I are to sit for two hours watching them.

We’re not ones to sit silent, though, and eventually my dad breaks into Scripture, at which point one of the guys whips out his Bible, which he carries everywhere he goes (in the pocket next to his half-pint, one imagines), and the boys start matching my dad, chapter for chapter, verse for verse. They’re throwing down. “It’s not what goes into a man’s body that corrupts him,” they say, “it’s what comes out.” Touche.

The atmosphere became heated and uncomfortable. Not to mention some of the pointed innuendo directed my way, “Oh, he’s just your father,” people say, meaning: not your husband. These comments came even from Karl’s very best friends from before, who are, admittedly, sloppy drunk.

We did make it back to Secret safely, only to discover that our propane is out and our backup tank is rusted closed and our VHF is malfunctioning. The prospect of a week out here without communication and coffee is dire indeed. I’m happy with the decision I made this morning to come home. My dad said, “I certainly wouldn’t have wanted you on that ferry without a male companion.”

I do hate that limitation. I really, truly don’t believe anyone on Crooked, no matter how drunk, would bring harm to be more my boat. I do, however, believe that every Bahamian with a boat in the greater Acklins/Crooked/Long Cay area who found out a girl was living alone at French Wells would stop by to take their chances, and things could get very, very uncomfortable for me. I say this not out of egotism, but just in acknowledgment that there are so few women out here, and the macho culture of the Caribbean is such that many believe a woman alone is always actively looking for companionship. Of a certain nature.

Maybe I convince myself of this fact to justify my decision a little bit. I do wish I could stay. I wish I were brave enough. There are women who single-hand through the Bahamas, but maybe they’re better able to remove themselves from the local scene, something I can’t quite figure out how to do. Or maybe they simply know karate.

I have far less privacy in the States anywhere I end up, although I don’t generally have to worry about guys hitting on my with tattooed Karl around. The thought of two uninterrupted months on the boat sounds heavenly, if only I were able to stay actually uninterrupted. I guess I’ll have to wait until I’m reincarnated at Kira Salak or someone braver than I am, someone less in need of human presence. Or at least until I take that knife fighting course Karl’s been after me about.

Can’t you help me when I call?

My mom, galley slave extraordinaire

We headed into Landrail Point today on Andy’s brother’s boat. My mom’s flying out tomorrow morning, quelle tristesse, and she wanted the luxury of clean hair for her all-day journey. I don’t begrudge her that at all--she’s been a trooper. It’s not every 56-year-old who’d put up with peeing in a bucket, no running water, and no refrigeration for two weeks.

I even think--hope--she’s had a good vacation out of the deal. She got to eat fresh Bahamian conch, lobster, grouper, and snapper--she found a beautiful little reef crawling with rock lobster and big frilly fish, she lounged on the beach and got a lot of sun and saw dolphins and swam with a barracuda. It’s only the plumbing issues, sail manhandling, and scraping bottom growth that make it less than the Bahamian cruise her coworkers imagine.

So we got a room tonight, a splurge, at Pittstown Point Landing, the one genuine resort on the island. It’s fancy, but still cheaper than the ridiculously overpriced Wyndham we were convinced to stay at in Nassau, and, let me tell you, I appreciate it far more now than I did two weeks ago. I am dismayed that they didn’t let us do laundry, even though the scenery is exquisite. I guess it’s not exactly a backpacker-style hostel. We even got to catch up with some old friends: David, the manager, and the Finleys, our neighbors from the Landrail Point anchorage we used last fall, who are just a short walk down the beach.

Then to the real business of the night. My call to Karl. I must admit, I had lobbied a little bit for Pittstown because I knew they’d have internet access. But my call didn’t go through! It’s been blowing 25 knots here all day, and he couldn’t hear me over the wind. I was so depressed after hearing his sad little voice echo “hello, hello,” for a full two minutes that I curled up in bed and didn’t even really enjoy the beautiful room.

I miss my captain. Secret just isn’t the same without him. Nothing’s the same.

Tomorrow morning I have to make my decision about whether or not I’m heading back, and I think I know what my decision is going to be.

Keep it like a Secret

The view from the anchorage at French Wells

Today we had the worst possible news, my nightmare come true of the last five days. The day started with good news--we were able to remove the starter and discovered that it was, in fact, not working. This news was good to me, even though the nearest available starter is two weeks away. A bad starter is a coherent, manageable problem, easily fixed by a spare part.

Mom and I went for a celebratory swim and conch-diving expedition to the bleached sand bar, at which point Dad decided to try his impromptu manual crank, just to see if the gears are still turning. He had pulled two matching bolts out of the diesel and drilled them through a chunk of 2”x4” we had stashed on Secret, giving himself a four-foot lever with which to turn the crank case. He tried to push down and crack--the wood split, right down the middle. An engine frozen enough to crack a 2”x4” is an engine seized. Fate worse than death.

Now I know that the motor was a $10,000 installation in 2000, and it just seems physically impossible to me. I know boats that sit in Marion harbor all season, longer than my boat has sat here! There’s no water anywhere, and it seems impossible that any could have got in. Still. The facts remain. The dang thing won’t spin.

So tonight I had my first breakdown--tears, bitterness, sobbing. All of the beauty that made me so happy yesterday just makes me angry tonight. How dare it be so beautiful here, and so unreachable? It all seems so impossibly unlucky. Here my fantastic teak-drenched house sits, lined with books, decorated with art and varnish and photographs, equipped with everything I need to live, including months worth of canned food. And it’s all so untouchable. It’s all here, right under my fingers, cradling my body as I go to sleep, and yet I can’t have it; I can’t have the dream. I’ve lost it all: captain, sails, engine.

I ask myself the question I’ve been repeating for the last six months: what am I supposed to do?

Well alright

Andy, our ferryman, holding two lobster

Still no luck on the diesel, still hard at work. We began attempting to remove the starter, which I’m convinced is the problem. Dad disagrees, and continues to focus on his manual crank idea, even though my close exegetical reading of the service manual indicates it should be the starter. We’ve agreed to disagree, however, and I’ve been focusing on the electrical elements of the engine--wiring, connections, fuses--while he works on his crank.

I was pleased to discover that I could easily undo the nuts holding the electrical connections together. I’m sure many readers already know the distinct pleasure of finding the correct wrench for a bolt and then feeling it break free, but it’s a relatively new experience for me, and I love it.

Dad and Mom are trying to convince me to pursue as a career as a diesel mechanic (I can hear it in their voices--anything but freelance writer!), but I think a female diesel mechanic would have as many obstacles in her path as a female single-handed sailor (not to mention my lack of aptitude for either). If there’s anything I’ve learned from these six months of agony and one week of work is that barriers against women breaking free of their stereotypical roles are still firmly in place. I make this comment, dear male readers, not as whining, but as a simple statement of fact. I dare not mention the case of a recent female presidential candidate, although I can risk saying that I am firmly in the center of her thirty-something female demographic who has experienced discrimination in the work force.

More to the point. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing women is fear. I’m afraid of staying here alone, afraid of mockery for picking up the wrong wrench or touching the wrong wire or undoing the wrong bolt. What I’m learning, though, is that with the right resources--the right books, the right tools, the right vocabulary--I know almost as much as my dad does, and he’s been working on engines since he was a kid? How many women ever learn that about themselves?

Andy stopped by again this morning with much longed-for-ice and an offer: a tow all the way to Clarencetown, Long Island, 40 nautical miles away. It’s a possible way out of my dilemma. Clarencetown, potentially, has a diesel mechanic and a rigger. There’s a marina in town. It’s a safe, enclosed harbor with the town built on the water, and I could have rowing access to communication capabilities. It’s a big offer, and a big decision.

I’ll be on that

My dad enjoying the sun at French Wells

We had a grand adventure today, attempting to row to French Wells, the southern tip of Crooked Island. We decided to abandon our engine project for the day, or at least take a break. Our ostensible purpose was to row past the two abandoned fishing boats in the anchorage and see if they had two bolts Dad could use in the manual crank he’s trying to rig. The current blew us right by them, though, about which I was happy. I’m sure we can find another method for the manual crank, and I have qualms about scoping out other people’s boats, even half-sunk ones, when my own’s been left so pristine.

I was more excited about the journey to French Wells, as was my mom. They say there’s an actual well here, with good, sweet water, although we couldn’t find it. I thought there’d be a trail or an abandoned building or something to help us, but I found nothing but mangroves and sand. It was a great vacation from our vacation nonetheless. I brought my sketchbook and drew conch and landscapes, with Secret bobbing on the horizon. Dad and Mom went for a long walk on the beach, and Dad made a shade home for himself in the middle of a mangrove tree.

He also cracked open the two coconuts which we’d been carrying around with us in the dinghy, and they were perfect--sweet, juicy, full of lukewarm milk, with tender baby flesh. It’s easy to see how I could live out here on coconuts and conch, with a fifty-pound bag of rice picked up every now and again. You could call me Alexandra Supertramp. Maybe if he had come to the Bahamas instead of Alaska he could’ve starred in his own movie.

Instead of rowing the dinghy back against the three-knot current, we dragged it back along the sand bar in the water at low tide, and then rowed it the short distance back across to the boat. Dad doesn’t trust my rowing ability and I don’t trust his, and our oars have definitely seen better days. Dinner was a delicious corned beef spaghetti, cooked by Mom, my resident chef, with fresh steamed crab on our salad, picked by Dad, who hadn’t realized how much work they were when he snagged one. Tomorrow I turn once again to diesel mechanics, but tonight I’ll settle for a low yellow moon rising over the rippling water.

Honey, you are a rock

A fish trap full of snapper

My spirits have perked up a bit. After perusing our service manual, I’ve narrowed down the problem to two possible scenarios: either the solenoid or the starter is shot. The third, worst-case scenario, is that the engine is frozen. I’m not even contemplating that possibility.

So my dad and I spent the day exploring the options. It’s fun working with him, although we both have our own quirks and ideas about how things should be done. We’re trying to do the testing necessary to determine which problem is ours, which involves scrounging up voltage meters and battery-operated drills and tools galore. I’ve never really done a project like this before--following along in a manual and trying to use tools and my own wits to solve a problem. My dad says I have an engineering mindset. Maybe I do.

Even better is that Andy gave us three lobsters and three fish for dinner tonight. So we’re feasting on fresh Bahamian snapper and steamed lobster tails. He left his fishing boat rafted up against ours for the last couple of days, but took it down to Fish Cay today for the running of the snapper. Evidently they spawn during the spring full moon.

He left out fish traps last night with his son, and pulled them this morning, stuffed with snapper. They’re leaving out more traps tonight. Dad’s gotten a little bit psyched about fishing now, and is using the squid jig he bought in Boston with elan. I tried to tell him that I’ve never seen a squid in the Bahamas, but to no avail.

Green eyes

Dad fiddling with an engine component

The news just gets worse. After yesterday’s debacle, my mom and I swam to the island. My mom had expected me to be crying, but I had resolved that using our old mainsail and staysail to get to Clarencetown wouldn’t be so bad after all, as long as we had the diesel figured out. Karl and I had known before we left that we had a problem with some bad fuel, but I was prepared to deal with it. I had bought biocide and my dad had bought a fuel pump, and our plan was to pump out the diesel tank, add stabilizer, replace the bad fuel with good, and get to Long Island with a minimum of engine bleeding.

I say, “was.” Dad woke up this morning all set to pump, but I insisted that we start the engine first. “What good is clean diesel if the motor won’t turn over?” I asked.

Prophetic words. We cranked the generator, hooked up the electrical cables, turned the key to start the Yanmar’s annoying beep, and hit the start button. Click. Nothing.

Now I’m faced with the very real possibility that not only do I have unusable sails, but an unusable diesel. I have bought, for $40, a service manual for the Yanmar, foreseeing my need for it, but never foreseeing the dang thing just wouldn’t start. It was always so reliable, so dependable, starting without fail. How could I be so stupid? So foolish? So naive? It simply never occurred to me that there would be anything wrong with the engine, that we wouldn’t just turn the key and have it hum to life, like it always does.

The horror, the horror.

Tonight it shows

Our mast track...

and the new slides.

Today we got our first overwhelming disappointment. My dad and I had been debating for some time our highest priority--he went with the diesel, I, the new roller furler. He’s begun to chicken out of my attempt to scale the mast, even though that was my entire stated purpose for bringing him with me. That, and fear for my life.

So we concurred that bending on the beautiful new mainsail was priority number one. Without it, we can neither sail nor motor. It’s an incredibly gorgeous sail. Stiff, virgin white, crinkly Dacron, our 10158 racing numbers proudly displayed, and at the top the Ranger R, much longed for, in all its radiant glory. I can’t say I didn’t have a lump in my throat at the sight of it.

But. But. I was down in the vee berth, sorting through socket wrenches to find one to remove the pin at the base of the mast when my dad called down. “Come up here, hon,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

I came up out of the hatch, unsuspecting. He had unscrewed a little portion of mast track to see if the slides would go on that way rather than past the bolt, and had discovered that the slides came right off the mast track. I measured the slides. They’re a fraction bigger than an inch. Our mast track is 5/8”. I checked my email--what had we ordered? 5/8”.

Day two, and we have a completely useless, albeit exquisite, mainsail.

French Wells, Bahamas

Chef-in-residence.

My mom had predicted it would take us one day to clean and organize the boat. I thought that prediction far too ambitious and optimistic, but I claimed all along that we brought her along for her optimism, so I kept my mouth shut. Surprise of all surprises, she was right! We spent most of the day wrestling with our old sails, which Karl and I had stored in the main cabin, a necessary precursor to bending on our new sails and getting Secret ocean ready again.

Andy left his fishing boat rafted up to ours, which gives us a great platform for organization and trash disposal, as well as shade from the sun. My parents have agreed that we’re far less isolated than they had expected, mainly because of the overwhelming generosity of Andy. Fishing boats buzz by every so often, which I had counted on but they had not. They agree that I have not oversold the beauty of the surroundings. Deserted islands ring us on all sides, and a beautiful white sand bar breaks free of the tide every day at slack low. Mom and I are going to swim to it tomorrow.

I spent most of the day putting away old and new gear, going through my dishes and books and tools, my heart singing every time I saw an old candle holder or tank top or fishing lure. All these precious things I had counted as lost feel like gifts given back to me. Even my orange-and-white hibiscus sarong is intact, hanging from its old spot of the fire extinguisher, faded a bit by the sun. For the most part my books are undamaged by water, and the most important thing, my writing folder, is intact with only a little mildew lurking in the corners.

I’m even writing with my favorite green pen right now, of which I had stored a full box down here. I knew I couldn’t buy them in the Bahamas when we set sail from the States, so I knew enough to stock my boat with them--I didn’t know I’d be too cheap to buy a new box of them in the States when I left them in the Bahamas. Too cheap and too stubborn.

Tonight Secret feels more than ever like home. Everything’s put away, the wind has died down, I’m burning a candle rather than starting the generator, and the fond old smell of the mosquito coil rises from the vee berth. When I lit it tonight, my mom, remembering Thailand and harassed by mosquitoes, said, “It smells like heaven!” It does: the heaven of my childhood, and of our sail through the Bahamas.

Nassau to French Wells, Bahamas

We arrived at Secret today. At long last, El Dorado. Or so say I. With a fair amount of misadventure, nonetheless.

The first was our luggage, which was sent to the wrong island--Acklins, the next island over. My parents were shocked and disgusted, and I , who have a lot more experience on the island, a little less so. Expect the unexpected on Crooked. That’s all I can say.

It ended up being a better deal than I expected, though. It gave us the leisure to be given a mini-tour of the island by Nappy, to pick up the gigantic quantity of shipped-in boxes that Nappy had been storing for us, to eat a nice lunch of fried grouper at Willie Gibson’s restaurant, and to buy some fresh groceries for our two weeks on the boat. It’s fantastic being back again, seeing all our old friends, especially Nappy. Little had changed--the island is still beautiful, sunny, and remote.

Andy was at the dock with his boat for our trip down to French Wells when our luggage finally arrived, via chartered ferry, from Acklins. The motor down was uneventful, passing the sandy abandoned beaches of southern Crooked, and then I finally saw a mast beckon like a finger. She’s still here. That, the major fear, for eight months, allayed.

Better yet, her floorboards undrenched by ocean water, her teak unstained, even my tools and kitchen implements untouched by too much rust. To be honest, everything is in far better condition than I ever could have expected or hoped. Nothing’s even missing that I can find, aside from a bucket, that probably got knocked overboard. I had faith in the people of Crooked (as they say here-- “da island Crooked, but da people straight”), but I also had doubt in human nature.

Andy’s been doing a fantastic job keeping watch over her, untangling the anchor lines and even moving her to deeper water when she was touching bottom at low tide. Honestly, the anchoring situation’s better than when we left her.

Andy rafted up next to us and made us a dinner of fresh conch salad. I even brought one up on my first swim down here again. The water feels like heaven. This, this is what I’ve been longing for over the last brutal winter. I’m so happy I can still dive. Though the mosquitoes are circling and the generator’s throbbing and stinky, I feel like I’m home. Not a surprise.

For how long, though? How long will I be able to be lulled to sleep by gentle seas? That’s the real question I’ll begin to answer tomorrow. Tomorrow the real work begins.

Nassau, Bahamas

We arrived in Nassau today. I don’t know why home for me is always a foreign country--as soon as I’m on foreign soil I feel like I belong. I’m only belong when I don’t belong. Even the air smells different in a tropical country, heavy, in every way other. The awareness of a whole different wide world outside of this our United States of America immediately hits me.

There are whole civilizations that live, and breathe, and make lives for themselves: mining gravel and growing vegetables and driving taxis, far, far away from the imprecations of our imperial government. Being aware of them again makes me feel like I’m coming alive again, after a long time in the grave. It makes it worse to see all the Americans trekking through in their new brightly colored sweatshop-crafted fashions, their short shorts, their purpose-bought vacation clothes, bought for seven dollars from the discount rack at Old Navy. The contrast between the people living real lives, far away from the unrealities of our existence, is what makes the most striking immediate impression. We float over the surface of rest of the world, like so many Marie Antoinettes with our cake.

Can I really be happy in the US? The pressing question. Maybe the real question is: can anyone?

Abject terror still creeps up on me now that I’m here. Now it’s fear of what I’m going to do when I’m left alone again. Tonight I’m exhausted with the exhaustion of three hours of sleep three days in a row, and the exhaustion of anticipation for everything that lies ahead. I’ll sleep soundly tonight, even with the Boston Celtics on the television.

I leave everything in the hands of God, fate, kismet, synchronicity, whatever your faith deems I call it. For me, more and more by the day, it is the capable hands of Christ in whose hands I leave things. My faith returns to me, the crystal clear faith of my childhood.

Milford, Connecticut

My niece Iris, whom I get to see this weekend!

On the boat, right now, I wonder what’s happening. Are birds circling above? Are fish circling below? Sharks? Rays? The algae on the bottom is growing, cell by cell, unaware that soon I’ll be swooping down on it and scraping with fury. The mildew inside is likewise unaware that soon its reign of terror will be completed. And Secret herself, I hope, knows somewhere deep inside that she soon will be rescued.

Or that’s what I believe, when I’m optimistic. My fear still creeps up on me, generally taking the form of nightmares or irrational panic attacks over things I can’t control. Tomorrow at this point, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be flying high through the atmosphere, above the clouds, heading towards blue water and green islands and the small chunk of fiberglass I call home. Today I’m in Connecticut with my entire family, immediate and extended, celebrating the marriage of my cousin Laura. It’s an appropriate sendoff for us, and though I quail as I tell my aunts and uncles what I’m doing with my life, the general response, instead of pity and terror, is envy. Even though I’m broke, I’m taking a journey that require a semblance of bravery.

What they don’t know is that I envy them--their stability and security. They’ve dug roots for themselves and stretched branches into the sky in a way I can never manage to do, with my compulsive tendency towards constant upheaval. I do crave adventure and movement, but I still want stability. That's why I was so excited about the boat. I thought it was the ideal combination of transience and permanence. I did make it into my home, a home that moved. I love that home, more than I probably should, and I hope I don’t get myself into trouble with it.

I’m trying to build spiritual practice into my life right now, partly as a way to give myself equanimity in case of disaster. I know that that's when I've been happiest, when I've managed to be disciplined enough to build in time every day for calm amid the storm. I've been trying to build habits of meditation and yoga, partly because I know those are practices I can maintain on the boat, but while I know that those things and writing and running are always the things that keep me sane, they're the things I have the hardest time doing. Why is that? I have no idea. I've always been that way.

Now I should probably go and post pictures while I still have internet access, and decide which thing on my life of things I have yet to buy is the highest priority. I know as soon as I land on Crooked I’ll think of a zillion things I should have bought that I didn’t. I hope I’ll be able to do without them. Maybe instead I need time with my family, time to relax, time to enjoy things like clean hotel sheets and plumbing and breakfast buffets and lobster salad and grilled duck breast.

All that we could always see

Northern Maine woods in June.

I’ve been contemplating, for some time, the idea of a long monastic retreat to decide on my future goals. I thought Karl and I had a five-year plan, but, as it turns out, it was not meant to be. I have fond daydreams of some boat life still working out--we could sail around Maine!--but I suspect that Karl’s heart is no longer in it. So my only question is: is my heart in it enough to do it alone? That’s the question I’ve been mulling over for the last five months. Hence the need for a monastic retreat. Those monks, they help you think, right?

It seems like now I’ve been given some time to think. As you can tell, if you are reading this entry, my plans to fly to the Bahamas, yet again, have gone awry. My plan was to fly to Nassau on June 1 and be joined two weeks later by my parents. Then I discovered the rates for being carted back and forth to the boat at French Wells, eight miles into the mangrove swamps from the nearest road, so I investigated bringing an outboard on an airplane, without much hope. Believe it or not, you can check in an engine on international flights. So my parents and I conferred and decided to postpone my portion of the trip to spend that two weeks investigating repairing my Evinrude. We’ll all fly together on the fifteenth, hopefully with an outboard in tow.

Let me count, though. That’s the *eighth* plan since February:

1. I planned to head down to meet our Canadian friends who were sailing through in early March.
2. I planned to fly down with my brother during his spring break at the end of March.
3. I planned to fly down with two local college kids who are experienced sailors in April, and bring the boat offshore back to Marion.
4. I planned to hire a professional delivery captain to help me bring the boat back in May (his words--”the boat is not oceanworthy.”)
5. I planned to go alone. Screw anyone going with me (although Karl did insist I enroll in a knife-fighting course before pursuing this option).
6. I planned to go by myself at the beginning of June and be joined by my parents two weeks later.

So what is that? Plan G? And that’s amid all the other complications, the weddings, the doctor’s appointments, and Karl’s recovery. To top it all off, our Subaru has broken down. So now I’m not even sure how I’m going to get to the airport in Boston, let alone to any place where I can post this entry, and it leaves my parents (and Karl’s dad, who is now working on the outboard) burdened with more of the tasks for our big journey. It’s frustrating. It also gives me an excuse to procrastinate boat-related tasks, and gives me time to wander around the northern Maine woods, which is good for my mental state, if nothing else.

Wandering around in the woods, I suppose, is a kind of monastic retreat. The contrast between life here and life on the boat will at least help me choose between the two lives. I’m not ready to make that decision yet, but I do feel myself letting go of Secret. Maybe that’s what I had to do to save her. This plan will help me salvage what I can of the dream--give me one last gigantic adventure before I have to let go of the dream. This plan’s the one. I can feel it.

Bridgewater, Maine

It was 48 degrees here this morning, at the end of May. I’m still wearing a heavy sweater around the house, and a coat when I go outside. Traveling here from Chattanooga took a total of eighteen hours, on--let me recount: a twenty-minute car ride to the shuttle, a two-hour shuttle ride to the airport in Atlanta, a three-hour plane ride to Boston, a four-hour wait in the Boston airport, a three-hour bus ride to Portland, another three-hour bus ride to Bangor, and then, finally, a two-hour ride north into Aroostook County. Bridgewater is a roadside stop you have to request specifically from the driver or he forgets. We drove by and I saw the Subaru, which desperately needs a name, sitting cozily by the side of the road waiting for me.

The crazy thing about the trip is that as soon as I took off from the airport in Atlanta, I was heading north, unrelentingly north, and I just kept going north. Boston is infamous for being cold in winter, colder than Chicago, farther north than New York, but then I got on a bus in Boston and I kept going north. For eight hours. When my parents and I drove up to Chicago to see my sister’s new baby (congrats, Erica!!!), they were shocked to see redbud and tulips still in full bloom. In Chattanooga, by the time we got back, the azalea blooms had already wilted and the roses were in full flower. Here, I doubt they’ve even had daffodils.

Karl shaved his head, my first big surprise, but the second is spring. I don’t think I’ve ever been on Snow Road when there wasn’t actually snow on the road. Sure, it’s a little chilly for us warm-blooded types, but I keep thinking about the things I could grow here. I spent all morning reading about asparagus. Karl’s talked about building a greenhouse for years. Sam, Karl’s dad, has tomatoes sprouting. Shadow, the wolf-dog, is thrilled to see me, and has been trained by Karl to sit respectably while I scratch through his shedding winter coat. No walk yet, as long as it persists in raining.

It is almost inconceivable to me how soon I will be in the Bahamas. I’m beginning to revert to my childhood daydreams when I was on the verge of flying back to boarding school: maybe the airport will blow up. Maybe the islands will sink into the ocean. Maybe I’ll have a mental breakdown. Anything to make me not have to go.

Am I whining again? Sorry. But I don’t want to go. I don’t. I haven’t, since February, and I’ve been trying to convince myself that I do. The point remains, though, that it’s not what I want to do, but it is what I have to do, and the only reason I don’t want to go is because it’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do in my life, and that includes the Chicago marathon and the Appalachian Trail. And I have to do it alone. That’s the hard part.

Still no hotel reservation in Nassau, still no one picking me up at the airport on Crooked, still no ride to the boat, and no internet access in northern Maine. The phones barely work up here. The silence, though, is extraordinary. And there is a neighborhood moose, it is fabled, who likes to hang out in the beaver pond. Canada geese are nesting nearby, with eggs set to hatch. The grackles eat the bugs in the lawn, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds stop by every morning for breakfast.

I could see myself settling into a routine here--walking with Shadow, hiking with Karl, setting the school bus up as a writing studio with a wood stove and spending the mornings in there, aping Thoreau. If nothing else, the County is probably the best place in the entire nation for surviving on an aspiring writer’s income. There’s no need for a day job up here--you can live off the wood you cut, scarred potatoes left behind by the reaper in neighboring fields, a deer shot once or twice a season, and the occasional partridge or rabbit.

I've been reading the blog of a high school friend who has lives in a really remote village in Alaska, and there are similarities between life there and here. It’s mainly a feeling of living a life apart from the rest of the country, unconnected to the cities and the politics and even the television that belongs to everyone else. I’ve always wanted to live in Alaska, mainly because I crave the idea of true wilderness. But the problem with Alaska is the same problem as here: the brutal, unforgiving winter. Could I really make it? I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to try. Many things, including twenty-degree below winters, seem idyllic from afar.

That wilderness exists in the Bahamas, too, and there’s the same ability to live off the land. Could my entire life really be decided by something as boring as weather? How pedantic.

Money doesn't change a thing

Chattanooga, Tennessee

What is it about traveling that makes me want to write? It’s only when I’m traveling that I feel like I’m living. Being static in a place is entering stasis: I cease to be able to function. I’ve always said that I’m happiest when I sleep in a different bed every night. It’s the truth, sadly. I don’t know why it is I can’t be content when I’m stationary.

Maybe the dorm did it, how we had to change rooms and roommates every quarter, carefully packing up our clothes and toiletries and moving to another room down the hall, with a new closet, a new bed, a new comforter. Kids are adaptive, they say. So now I have to have a new space about every fifteen weeks, or I start clawing my face off. No wonder my favorite thing about sailing is having a home that moves. My bed can stay the same, but my view can change. It’s perfect.

Now I’m slowly emerging from my winter cave, coming out of hibernation, finding out how to take the next step, move on to my new place. I’ve been trying to figure out how to break my big news to the assembled public without risking jinxing it, similar to the way I was unwilling to start my Appalachian Trail journal before I actually took my first step. Tomorrow I fly from Chattanooga to Boston, and ten days from now I fly to Nassau. By myself.

What am I feeling? Sheer, abject terror.

I still don’t quite know why I feel the need to go. Maybe it has something to do with Secret being my only earthly possession and my only financial asset. Maybe it’s my endless longing for something new, some new adventure, a new superhuman challenge for which I am anything but prepared. Maybe it’s wanting to finally have some time to myself, and where better than off the coast of a deserted island? Or maybe it’s just wanting something good to come out of this disaster.

There are still many details to be worked out. As of right now, my plan involves getting off the plane on Colonel Hill, and, if all else fails, walking to the Church Grove dock and rowing the dinghy, with my stacks of gear, the seven miles to the boat. I hope those who were my friends will still be my friends, and I can at least hitchhike, but this I know: I have legs. I have arms. I’ve walked 3000 miles. I can make it to my boat.

That is, after all, what this adventure is all about--self-reliance. Autonomy. I’ve been accused in the last four months of being self-pitying, of acting like a victim, of blaming my problems on others rather than taking responsibility for them myself. So I’m stepping out, and I’m taking a risk. My current mantra is, “leap, and the net will appear.”

When we left Marion last time I wrote about how happy I was to be leaving it in my wake, which wounded some people. It's not that I don't love this country, or my friends and family, it's just this is so, so where I don't want to be. I want to be with Secret. I’ve wanted to be with Secret for months now. The question has been do I want to be with Karl or with Secret more? I know long-term I don't have to choose between the two, but the process of doing all of the repairs and sailing may take months. Do I want to spend that time away from Karl? And do I really have the courage to do that by myself?

I still don’t know, but I’m following my path as well as I know how, and I pray that my faith will be rewarded.

Sleeping in a lion's den

Secret at anchor on Crooked Island

Set it off

It’s obvious that I’ve been having a hard time blogging. It makes me wonder, all the time, why I participate in this bizarre and exhibitionist art. Making decisions in public, going through anguish-causing times of public grief--why do I choose to share this with anyone? It’s been hard for me to admit to even my own family how difficult my path has been to find this last month.

I’m reading a new book right now: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan writer. I’ve been looking forward to reading it for a long time, and had requested it from the library. It begins innocuously enough, two boys at the peak of boyhood, and then it drops down into horrific depths. Much darker and more vivid than I had expected. It’s still, though, the story of how to be a good person, how to right wrongs, how to grow into the person your parents want you to be. I feel much like the lead character, deeply flawed, trying to find the present amid the past.

The worst thing about all of this (well, definitely not the worst, not even close) is that I know how much it would help for me to write, but I can't write without being honest about my feelings, and my feelings open me up to all sorts of criticism. Namely, why don’t you just get over it? An answer that is far easier to ask than it is to answer.

I’ve begun feeling like the man in that legend: (Wasn’t it even an Aesop’s fable?) a farmer and his son are taking their donkey, laden with fruit, to the market. On the way they get passed by a man who criticizes the farmer for forcing his poor young son to walk. So the farmer’s boy climbs on the donkey and they continue on. Then a woman passes by who tells the farmer he’s too easy on his son, letting the boy ride and not riding himself. So both the farmer and the son ride on into town. Then a third person passes by and tells the farmer that he should be shot for over-lading his donkey like that. The farmer and his son end the story by carrying their donkey into town.

I’m like him: if I try to please everyone I’ll please no one. I have a hard enough time being happy by myself, with myself. So the only answer is to “turn my eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”

Was born with roses in her eyes

I’m beginning to feel like a hothouse flower, trying to flourish in the dead of a Northern winter. It’s as if someone took an orchid and transplanted it into the woods of Marion and wondered, “Hmm, why isn’t this orchid doing so well?” What orchids need are greenhouses, and greenhouses cost a lot of exactly the things we don’t have enough of and shouldn’t be using anyway: money and fossil fuels. Heat? Big, bright incandescent sun lamps? Long, scalding hot showers? Warm, dry socks hot from the dryer? All of these things that the the hardy scrub pines and snow drops of New England have learned to survive without. (Okay, so maybe orchids don’t need socks. But they need those fabric cover things.)

I always forget that I’m predisposed to warmth both by genetics and by upbringing. My mother’s Greek, and I read recently in Mother Earth News that darker-skinned people absorb even less Vitamin D from the sun than lighter-skinned people. Almost all Americans are Vitamin D deficient anyway, from too much time indoors and too few fresh fruits and vegetables, so people inclined towards warmer climates genetically (like Mediterranean islanders) are even worse off than all of you Scandinavian types. Combine that with a childhood spent in the hottest place on earth, and I’m in a pretty bad way.

Bangkok really was judged the hottest place on earth while I grew up there, when they averaged for winter and summer temperatures and day and night-time temperatures. It got down into the seventies at night one week a year. Now I fantasize about weather like that--always sunny, always hot, with a sun that goes up every morning at six and sets every night at six like clockwork. With humidity that hits you like a brick wall every time you go outside. Actually, I don’t even know if I could deal with weather like that anymore. I’m too much of a wimp after spending time in the cold.

The real problem with Vitamin D deficiency is that it causes exacerbates the symptoms of depression, something I’m prone to anyway in the winter. I’m trying to cultivate myself as I would a hard-to-grow plant, to keep myself happy and content even in the bitterest of chills. My new attempt on that front is the $10 down jacket I finally bought for myself last night at the L.L. Bean Outlet. I had been making do with a vest for the last two winters. I had forgotten how cozy it is to go outside in the cold when you actually have your arms covered--Karl and I even went for a little beach walk today. Still, even though it’s ten bucks, I feel guilty for allowing myself to spend that much money on something that was for my own comfort in the cold and not for the boat. It paints the difficulty of this choice in brutal colors: do I invest my time and money in staying in Marion, or do I invest my time and money on going to the Bahamas.

The anguish of that choice gets worse by the day. I can buy a one-way ticket from Boston to Nassau on February 26 for $145. I can buy that ticket right now, this minute. The ticket’s ready to purchase in another browser window as I type. I found the price last week, and I haven’t been brave enough to close the window yet. I refresh the page every day, just to make sure the fare’s still there. Our Canadian friends called on Thursday, letting me know that they’re in Georgetown and when they leave they’ll be heading to Crooked Island. Everyone who sails knows how tough it is to coordinate time on sailboats, but I bet they arrive just about on the 26th, and if anyone can help me rerig the forestay, it’s Marcel. But you know when that is? Nine days from now. How ready am I to face the boat alone?

Obviously I’m having a tough time being honest on here about that decision-making process after some of the comments I got with my last post. I love that people care about our journey and my decision, but it can’t be solved with a simple go or don’t go. Am I ready to leave Karl for an indefinite period of time? What does that mean for our relationship? But what does it mean for us if I stay?

In all of this, I need to nurture myself and keep myself from the depression that sneaks up on me like cold frost. I drift through days in a daze, trying to make my way from one hour to the next. I’m working on it. I have my tools, my weapons to keep the demons at bay. If I let them win, I won’t be able to help anyone: neither Karl nor Secret.

The only girl I’ve ever loved

Well, no one believes that I should fly to the Bahamas. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I am just a girl. Girls can’t do anything by themselves, let alone fix engines and hank on sails and install forestays.

No one’s ever believed that I could do anything like that alone, including myself. I still don’t, which is probably the reason I don’t have a ticket in hand right now. Sure, I know it’s ambitious, but isn’t that the whole point? To strive, to seek, to find, not to yield, and all that crap?

In National Geographic, a couple of months back, there was an ad for an unnamed giant software company who was sponsoring some crazy female solo adventurer. She was a real professional adventurer, unlike me, the poser. She was kayaking down the major rivers in Africa solo, and there were pictures of her, pushing off from some unknown village, countless black children staring after her dumbfounded as she paddled her brightly colored over-loaded kayak away through the muddy water. She’s also biked the length of Alaska, hiked the perimeter of Madagascar, and done countless other things I can’t quite recall. I want to aspire to at least that level of bravery.

Still, though, do you think her family’s in favor of her adventures? Do you think when she was eighteen and said, “Hey, Mom, do you think it’s a good idea if I go kayak through the heart of the African wilderness by myself?” her mom was like, “Sure, honey, whatever you want”? Do you think her college boyfriend said to her, “Run off to Madagascar for six months, sweetie. I’ll be right here when you get back”? Do you think her high school guidance counselor thought it was a great idea? No. In fact, what they probably all said was, “Maybe you should think about a nice safe job with some security. Something like chemical engineering, perhaps.” So did she listen to them? Hell no.

So what do I do? Am I brave, and foodhardy, and stupid enough, to be like that unnamed girl, or am I too cowardly, too much a creature of public opinion and home and hearth? I just can’t figure out if this is yet another example of me demanding too much of myself, asking for unrealistic superhuman feats. Should I just bow to the tide of public opinion, surrender Secret to her flooded fate, and go get one of those nice, safe jobs? Maybe as a waitress, or at the local West Marine, or as a management trainee at the new Borders in the next town over. Yes, I too could be one more person chewed up by the cogs of capitalism, one more person with dreams sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism and fiscal responsibility, one more person living one of Thoreau’s lives of quiet desperation.

Obviously, I know what I should do. I believe I know what God wants me to do. I don’t believe decisions should be made based on fear, ever, and if I decide to huddle safely under my electric blanket, with my computer, and my music, and the detritus of American consumerism beginning to gather around me in huge heaps, fear will be the basis of my decision. It should be me and Secret against the world, baby. If I decide to fly down and I did manage to repair Secret by myself, with what help I could cobble together from Crooked Islanders and fellow cruisers and sympathetic visitors, if I did manage to sail her back to her home port single-handed, it would be something I could be proud of for the rest of my life. When I was thirty, this, THIS, is what I accomplished, this huge, gargantuan thing.

Sure, I could die. But I’d be one of the ones who thumbed my nose at conventional wisdom and lived bravely, fearlessly, and foolishly. Is it worth it? More than that, do I have the sheer audacity to simply tell my family and friends, “I’m doing this no matter what. You can either support me or get out of my way.” Am I one of those people who can resist the tide of public opinion to accomplish great things, as all great people do?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I think you, humble reader, are going to get a whole slew of agonized posts about how much I hate my new job. And I will hate my new job. Because I know it’s not what I’m meant to be doing, not the Herculean task to which I have been called. I did hike the Appalachian Trail by myself, at least for a while, before I hitched my wagon to Karl’s star. But how much else have I ever accomplished? I graduated from college and got a degree at an insurance company, of all places, rather than pursue my dream of writing. I worked in Chicago for five years, all the while putting off what I thought of as my real life. Here I sit again, at the crux of another of these decisions. How often had I had the courage to pursue what I truly want? Not often. I don’t even have enough courage to submit an article for publication.

It comes down to belief in myself. Great artists, great adventurers, great people all have a fundamental belief in themselves, whatever happens. I don’t know where they get that. I don’t know what kind of reserves of internal strength they manage to find, or where they manage to find them. But they do. I don’t have that belief in myself, despite all my bluster. At the core of me, it’s simply not there. How do I find it?

There’s something happening here

I think for a while there I was just going through the motions of living without actually living, without being able to be fully present in whatever was going on at the moment. I’m beginning to feel like I’m returning to myself. out of deep fog. My book of the week is Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks, another random book chosen out of a Powells.com recommendation. They were actually recommending Musicophilia, his most recent book, but I do this obsessive-compulsive thing on my library’s inter-library loan site where I go back and request the earliest book published by the author. This means I end up with very random library books that show up in the form of phone calls from the library telling me that my book is in. I love it.

The right book always seems to appear at the right moment. My last book, The Thirteenth Tale, was a recent debut novel by someone in the neo-gothic tradition. It was great--just pulpy enough, not too pulpy--to carry me through the last week at the hospital. This new book, Awakenings, is all about the nature of illness and the nature of the medical profession. It’s about this bizarre sleeping-sickness that swept the world in the 1920s. I had never even heard of it, nor had I heard of the miraculous effects of this drug that brought people out of their sleep-like states. I feel a little bit like that’s what’s happening to me, that I’m beginning to wake up to the reality of things as they stand now. I stand at the crux of this decision: do I need to go back to Secret by myself and try to complete her repair? Or do I need to get a job for a month or two to carry us through this difficult time?

I’m trying not to think about it too much. I’m trying to have enough faith that whatever the right decision is will be made clear. When God closes a door, he opens a window? Right? Can I get an Amen?? I’m also trying not to thing that my faith is actually faith and not dreary fatalism. If nothing else, this situation has done wonders for my church attendance.

I am having a hard time writing, too, which is odd considering how much time I have on my hands. I’ve begun to explore the World of Blogs that exists on the internet, the so-called Blogosphere. It’s a bewildering place. I don’t have the sense of isolation that I did when I was scribbling in my little notebook anchored off deserted islands, feeling like it would be months before anyone would read of our arduous adventures. Instead, here, blogging is a thing, something that one does, a blogger something that one is. I find myself trapped on blogs that evaluate the current state of Britney Spears’s underwear or lack thereof, or blogs where girls talk about their weight-loss or lack thereof, or innumerable addictive blogs that chronicle baby doings. It seems so removed from my little notebooks where I’ve scribbled daily depressive missives about our lack of progress.

It makes the prospect of “freelance writing,” my presumptive career, that much more difficult. Is blogging freelance writing? Not if I don’t get paid for it. How do I get a job writing? Is it too much to demand that society provide me with employment doing what I love? Or should all that society offer me be a job at the corner convenience store?

Marion, Massachusetts

Karl was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday. We’ve been back at his mom’s house a full 24 hours now, and I feel like a light’s been turned back on, as crazy as that sounds. I’ve been remembering our first couple of weeks together back on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. Our second week together was at Trail Days in Damascus, the big trail festival a quarter of the way through. I couldn’t write then the things I can write now: how one night, at a campfire, Karl wandered off with another friend and I had this mysterious feeling like someone had turned off a light. We were outside, by a fire, in the darkness, under the moon and stars, and I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking “Who turned off the light? Wasn’t there just a lamp on?” When Karl came strolling back, I breathed deeply--the light was back.

That’s how I feel now. I don’t think I realized just how afraid I’ve been this last month. I’ve been making my way through every day on the edge of terror, afraid to even acknowledge my fear, unable to put it into words. If I say it aloud, it will be true. The fear manifested itself as a very odd emotion for me, anger. I don’t generally get very angry, but I kept erupting these last weeks, once at the doctors in Chattanooga, another couple of times here at how powerless I felt to get around, to stay on top of all the paperwork, to wrestle with the telephone calls. One operator at MassHealth, well-meaning I’m sure, told me that they weren’t covering Karl’s Chattanooga hospital stay because he didn’t have a “life-threatening illness.” I hung up on him. I’ve dealt with it now, consulted with doctors and insurance advocates, and we’ll appeal the decision, but at that moment I pushed over the edge.

My dreams keep haunting me. I’m happy sometimes that I can process that way, in my sleep, although I think if I told a therapist honestly everything that goes on in my head while I dream I’d be put away. I remember another dream I had that same week of Trail Days. Karl and I had been together nine days, so it must have been May 13. In the dream, Karl was shot in the chest and bled out while I held my hands against his heart. I kept thinking, “at least we had nine days.” I’ve had similar dreams over the last couple of weeks, one in which half of an unrecognizable decomposing corpse was kicked around the middle of a road. The last two nights that he was in the hospital, I wasn’t able to sleep at all. I lay awake for hours, watching the clock, 2:30, quarter to four. It was easiest to sleep, if the least comfortable, when lying an arm’s length away on the hospital cot, able to reach over and squeeze his elbow.

The last two nights, since he’s been back, I’ve slept deeply and dreamlessly. He’s sleeping too, right now, most of the day and most of the night, but I’m thrilled just to sit next to him and listen to him breathe, to watch the vestigial meningitis-related grimaces he still makes, to watch the smiles and twitches cross his face. We even looked back and laughed last night about the one night when his brain actually went, that one terrifying night when I thought I might be losing the Karl I love forever. He remembers everything he said that crazy night, when he was so honest and so alone and so lost. A nurse said to me that day, off-handed, “Sometimes these things are reversible and sometimes they aren’t.” The statistic from when my brother had viral meningitis kept floating through my head: forty percent of people with meningitis have brain damage...

So now I hope I can keep my scary dreams away for a little while longer, that I can begin to sleep again. Visions of Secret still float at the edge of my consciousness, and I have to keep remembering the roots of this blog, that for us casting off doesn’t mean sailing but ridding ourselves of attachments: to the idea of perpetual health and invulnerability, maybe, to that precious boat, even. Nappy did call, though, and said he and his wife are praying for us. Secret, he said, is still fine, bobbing away at anchor. I pray she can make it through a couple more weeks of winter gales. That’s all we can do now, hope and trust that whatever path we should take be made clear.



(A link to the post I made the day Karl and I first began hiking together. You’ll notice I then took two weeks off. And that, my friends, is a picture of the infamous tree, under which our history was written.)

Boston, Massachusetts

I've put off posting this blog entry for too long, without quite knowing how to begin or having the courage to say in words what has turned out to be true. On Christmas Eve, I took Karl to the emergency room in Chattanooga with a severe headache. It had come on when he arrived, and was accompanied by fever, exhaustion, vomiting, and a complete lack of appetite. It turned out to be a kind of rare fungal meningitis.

He was released three days later and we decided to postpone our return tickets to the Bahamas in order to return to Massachusetts where we have health insurance and doctors. On the way back up he had a relapse. He's been now in the hospital here almost a week with no end in sight. Even once he's released, the doctors say he'll need a two-month course of hardcore anti-fungal drugs.

Obviously, my first concern is Karl's health and the second Secret. That being said, I dream every night of her. One recurring dream ends with three of us, who I don't know, plunging into crystal blue water, laughing, swimming to where I can see Secret nestled securely in an empty bay. I wake up in horror and fear, and gather my shreds of courage around me like a blanket.

I turned thirty this week. Everyone remembered--my family sent exquisite packages, Sally gave a card, and Karl, at one in the morning, reached over from his hospital bed to hold my hand where I lay on my cot next to him and said, "Happy birthday Melissa." I couldn't ask for a better present than that. Still, I feel like everything I love and have worked so hard for has been taken away. I was so close to grasping the dream, to holding it tightly in my hand, and its dissolved in my fingers.

It's at times like these that I'm glad I didn't name this journal "The Voyages of the Good Ship Secret" or some other such inane thing. I named it Casting Off for good reason. I can only believe that this is happening because I haven't cast off enough, haven't sacrificed enough, because God knew I need more things stripped away: my pride, my ambition, my sin.

I can only believe that I'm being punished for something. But maybe that's just New England at this time of year bringing out the worst in me. Perhaps there is simply too much Indian blood and too many whale bones scattered among the foundations of these cities. I've started dutifully taking St. John's Wort to combat my Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I'm not sure it's working. I keep wondering if it's named such after St. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul.

Why? I keep asking myself. Why now? Why here? What can it mean? Does it mean anything? Or does nothing mean anything and it's all a great big magician's trick? The cloth is whisked away and ta-da! Everything's disappeared. God as the great malevolent illusionist.

Have I traded all my hope for a lie? I can't believe that, so I don't. I'm writing late at night, alone. I don't know if these thoughts are fit for public consumption. It could be so much worse. I should be grateful, not angry. Karl's condition is completely treatable. He's only weak, not dying.

One of Karl's friends, on our drive up to the hospital, told me a story of another friend of his who's been diagnosed with bone cancer. His ribs are dissolving. The doctors say there's no point in even giving him chemotherapy until the pain gets too bad. It's only a matter of time for him.

By comparison, my complaints seem insignificant and selfish. Things could be so much worse. We have families and friends who love and support us. We have each other. We have our memories of the last four years. And we have hope. Or I try to have hope. I fight to have hope that one day that'll be me diving into the water to chase Secret again.

At church on Sunday, I kept breaking into tears every time the priest said, "Grant us thy peace." Grant me thy peace, Lord. As impossible as it is to imagine.

I remember the words of Keats: "Fled is that vision. Do I wake or sleep?"

And I cling to the words of the ancient Christian mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, who says, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."

Bridgewater, Maine

Temperature: 18°F

“If love can be and still be lonely, where does that leave me and you?”

I’m sitting at the dining room table at the house in Bridgewater, looking out the three large front windows at the newly plowed white driveway, the dusting of snow on the pine trees, the empty birches, and the broken-down goat shed out back. Under his pine tree, the wolf-dog, Shadow, paces around on his chain. That dog’s keeping me sane--we go on two-mile walks in the snow every day. We had seventeen inches of snow on Tuesday, and since then I’ve been plowing through in my boots and crampons, beating a path in the shin-deep snow.

The physicality of it reminds my muscles of the work they did on the Appalachian Trail. Walking even that small amount makes me miss walking, makes me remember when walking used to keep me sane, when walking used to be what I did for a living. The best part of being here would be the walking, hands down. I push myself a little farther every day, into the untracked snow, the wolf pulling me forward, sniffing the new smells on either side of the woods, tracking voles and moose and deer and partridge. I like seeing the world through a wolf’s eyes, imagining the two of us as a lean pack, hunting together through the northern waste.

The crazy thing about Shadow is that he really is eighty percent wolf. Karl got him when he was just a puppy from the previous owner of the land, who bred wolves and huskies. I don’t know how you end up with eighty percent, but he did all sorts of crazy cross-breeding, the way animal breeders do, and ended up with dogs that are mainly wolf, toned down a little with the husky blood. Shadow is the smartest dog I’ve ever encountered. I swear he understands English, to the point where Karl thinks I’ve gone a little off--I explain things to him the way I would talk to a three-year-old. The first day I walked with him I showed him my crampons and told him I was trying out a new system, that he had to be careful. Since then he slows down when he feels me slipping on ice.

He’s like my sled dog, and he knows how to take care of me. One of Karl’s neighbors up here, Slim, says that people actually ski like that, with a single dog. He thinks I could train Shadow to do it. I think so too, although training a dog is never been on my list of personal ambitions. Shadow, though, is like fallow soil. I feel like I could teach him to spin a beach ball on his nose in about a week.

It’s a perfect example of how I feel about this beautiful place. All the things we could do here! Can and press apples, grow tomatoes and flowers and basil, raise goats and chickens, harvest wood and build things, have a farmstand, train dogs, learn to cross-country ski, take some graduate-school classes at the neighboring universiy. But the million-dollar quesion is: do we want to do these things? That’s why I feel so ambivalent about Karl selling the land. It’s such a great back-up plan for if we sink the boat. But if we’re never going to come back here and really invest in the earth and the community, is it fair to let it sit here and rot? Every time we leave, Shadow watches us with baleful eyes. Karl talks to him every time we leave, and I hope he understands to a degree, but he’s still just a dog. All he knows is that when we leave he’s kept on a chain again. You can explain things to a person, but not to an animal. It breaks my heart.

The realtor came by yesterday morning and Karl listed the property. The compromise is that he listed it at a high price in a bad market, so it probably won’t sell. If it does, it might be such a financial windfall that it would be worth it to part with the place. It just throws all of our plans into question. Maybe we should back up here and cruise Maine and Nova Scotia, one of the plans that Karl’s always talked about. Maybe somehow we can have both dreams. I always want everything, though, and it’s just not possible. We can either have the tropics or we can have the snow--we can’t have both. Every choice we make precludes another one. Soon I’ll be thirty, and the story of my twenties will have been written. I will have done the things I’ve done, and no others.

The necessity of making choices has always been my least favorite thing about life. Not so much making the choices, but but that each choice means another one can’t be chosen. Each choice blacks out the option of its alternative. It’s so final. As final as death.


(The quote at the beginning is Townes Van Zandt, the best country singer of all time.)

“If I had a flying schooner, I’d sail into the light of day,
If I had your love forever, I’d sail into the light of day...”

Presque Isle, Maine

Presque Isle, Maine
14°F, with a windchill of 5°F, snow showers

We’re here in the neighboring “big” city to Bridgewater, at another one of thesee small-town libraries that so graciously provide internet access. I must say that Northern Maine is as close as you can get to the Bahamas in the States as far as access to services goes, although it’s worlds away weather-wise. Still, though--northern Maine has pharmacies, hardware stores, and libraries with wifi, even if they’re thirty miles away over icy roads from Karl’s homestead. I’m having a great time up here, fighting my Seasonal Affective Disorder by taking long icy walks with the wolf-dog, Shadow. At least I have been once I figured out how to wear crampons on my beat-up old green Doc Martens.

Twenty-four inches of snow are forecast for tonight, so it might be a while before I can post another update. In fact, I’m worried about getting back down to Boston in time to catch my flight to Atlanta. I hope the roads will clear enough for the buses to run sometime in the next week. It’s nice to feel, though, that our trip is winding down. Slowly, we’re ticking off all people on our to-visit list, and when I get back down south I’ll be that much closer to Crooked Island and Secret. That’s our last stop... I’m still hoping we’ll be back for a tropical Christmas.

The best part of being here? How much writing I’m getting done. There’s nothing else to do up here.

En route from Marion, Massachusetts, to Bridgewater, Maine

434 statute miles
50°, dropping to 30° in the course of our journey

We took the bus today up north, up, up, heading up into the big county Karl is named for. On the trail his trail name was “Big County,” not just because of his physical stature, but also for Arookstook County, the biggest county east of the Mississippi. He has a farm up here, 120 acres and a three-bedroom house. When I first met him, I was utterly confused by a 26-year-old with his own land avec horse. How many 26-year-olds do you meet like that? Since then, the place has become a little bit of an albatross around our collective neck, but it’s still an amazing place to come back to. A reminder of what we could have if we decided to settle down.

That’s the worst part of being here, feeling torn between two places. On the one hand, I can feel how much our families want us here, how much they’ve missed us, and how much we’ve missed them. And on the other hand, I see my picture of forlorn Secret on the hard every time I boot up the computer. The picture mysteriously appeared as my computer background when we were first back in the States, and I’ve left it ever since as a reminder of what we’re going home to.

We showed up finally at Snow Road at about ten, left off by the side of the road by the bus like some kind of drifters, picked up by Karl’s dad at Bridgewater center, the post office. Snow Road doesn’t have that much snow on it yet, just a couple of inches. The beaver pond’s full of water, and the land stretched out to the horizon in all directions, featureless and empty and beautiful. The sky is huge up here above the potato fields, framed by pines. If I could only survive the cold.

We immediately booted up the computer and began showing off our pictures to Karl’s father. I feel like such a dork sometimes, like a hippie couple from the seventies: watch our slide show! I don’t know how else to get across the magnitude of what we’ve experienced, though, and even then I’m not sure it does it justice. We’ve come so far and changed so much since we’ve been here last, and here the place is, still the same.

Thanksgiving was great, too. My brother came down from Somerville for the night before Thanksgiving and the morning of, and I enjoyed being able to spend at least some time with some of my family in addition to Karl’s. After Thanksgiving, Karl’s mom began to put up Christmas decorations and play Christmas music... It’s a reminder of just how much time has passed. I’ve also been working on the article I posted here way back when. I’m finding it difficult to come to any closure, though I am proud of myself for plugging away at it at all.

I still feel so betwixt and between. I know that visiting our families is a necessity, but it’s expensive, and it’s taking time away from all these other pressing concerns. I know that’s ludicrous. Maintaining relationships with the people we love is more important than anything else we can do. I just feel a little lost in all of these other people’s houses in all this travel. I just have to keep pushing through to the light at the end of the tunnel, our little house that we pray is patiently waiting for us.

Somerville, Massachusetts

Weather: 36°F, light snow, with a windchill of 30°F

Yup, it’s winter, folks. I know it’s still allegedly fall, but if the windchill is below freezing, it’s winter in my book. I woke up this morning on Peter’s futon, and looked out onto a gray street, closed in by fog. After my rather melodramatic, sleep-deprived post of yesterday, we had an even slower and more exhausting trek on the train into Boston. The most depressing part was pulling into South Station an hour late, but still five minutes before the last commuter rail left for Middleborough, and then being stopped on the tracks just long enough to wait for the MBTA train, our train, to pass us outbound. Argh.

So after an exhausting 26-hour sojourn around the great lakes, we had to hop a red-line T to my Harvard Square, yet again, and trek the mile to my brother’s apartment, where I pray we aren’t wearing out his and his roommates’ welcome. I made French toast this morning as a palliative, and it is always great to see Peter. Even with all our exhaustion, we managed to get in two discs of The Office before we drifted off into a Steve Carell-spiced slumber. Today we head back to Marion (via two more trains and a truck) for Thanksgiving. And that gives you just a taste of our travel-weary ways over the last month.

The sad part is that we’re not even half done. We still have treks to make to Chattanooga and Maine.

Later...
South Station, Boston, Massachusetts

At the apartment this morning, Karl finally dragged himself out of bed, asked about trains, and we had a frenzied forty-minute dash including a one-mile walk through damp, messy, slippery snow and a twenty-minute T ride that was supposed to be fifteen, only to miss our train at South Station. I am consoling myself with a clementine and with free public wifi. Still, argh. It seems to sum up our travel travails in general. Travel just involved travail, I know, but it’s becoming far too exhausting.

Now we have a two-hour wait in the frigid climes of the vast public train station, surrounded by tempting, expensive coffee, magazines, and food. All of this is beginning to wear on me, and I want to go home. Home to my own French press coffee pot, my own slowly rusting RV stove, my own skillet, my own icebox, my own slow breakfast over New Yorkers and a blue-green view in hot sunshine. I love my family, I love my friends, and I hate, I absolutely hate, the cold. I hate snow, I hate slush, I hate the way wind drives through my clothes, I hate how my nose and chin turn red and my ears numb, and I hate how all of my body’s mucus gathers flows out of every bodily orifice every time I go outside. I’ll survive, I know, I always do. Probably by holing up with books, my usual method.

En route from Chicago, Illinois, to Albany, New York, currently between Rochester and Syracuse

982 statute miles
Weather: 50°F, some light snow in the trees as we pass

I’m continuing to read “The Spell of the Sensuous” as we cross upstate New York by train. Today’s chapter focused on oral cultures and their intrinsic, synaesthetic connection to the earth. He talks a lot about aboriginal Australians, members of the world’s oldest living culture, and their birth--instead of being merely conceived physically, they arise from the spirit animal tracks that criss-cross the land, from the literal footsteps of the Spirits who walked across Australia laying spirit seed that rests dormant in the earth until someone’s mother feels an awakening in her womb at the exact site where the spirit animal stepped.

When an aboriginal woman becomes pregnant, the clan elders get together and decide which footstep the baby is most closely tied to. The track is remembered by elaborate song, each set of spirit footsteps paired with a couplet of a poem. That person, when born, becomes that couplet, and that piece of land is their birthright. When they die, they return to that piece of land so that their spirit can once again meld back into the soil and become one.

I can’t imagine a connection to the land that intense. I don’t suppose any of us can. I watch the narrow trees rush past the train’s windows, and the contours of the landscape are meaningless to me. I’ve never seen them before, chances are I’ll never see them again. I’m moving too fast to understand the ground, the birds, the brush. It’s all beautiful, but it’s silent.

In front of me, behind me, next to me, people are watching computer-generated DVDs on their laptops, playing video games on their cell phones, listening to iPods. They don’t even see the silent earth we’re whizzing past. It’s invisible to them.

I suppose my connection to the earth is more tenuous than most. I don’t even have a home country, a home state, a home city. Wandering through the streets of Chicago this last week reminded me of the trails I’ve walked through the city these last ten years, each step a memory. But I don’t belong there the way an aboriginal belongs to a particular piece of earth. I don’t belong anywhere. I’ve uprooted Karl successfully, too, dragging him along in my endless wake as we wander far from his true home turf. He truly belongs in New England. Its seasons echo in his body, its landscape speaks to him in a way it doesn’t speak to me.

Maybe it’s why I’m so drawn to the sea--featureless, changing, vast, empty. A blank canvas, terrain where no human belongs. I like teh story of Ulysses, our last true story, the last story from when our culture, too, was oral, tied to the earth. Back when we meant something other than desolation. Ulysses spent ten years trying to find home. I’m trying to do that, too. The only part that doesn’t ring true is the happy ending.

I kept apologizing to my hip Chicago friends for our “homeless chic”--Karl’s raggedy hair and beard, my patched jeans and old ratty sweaters, clothes from thrift-store bins and ancient basement-mildewed cardboard boxes, holey socks and shoes, stained tee-shirts. Perhaps being somewhere that was home to me, however briefly, reinforced how thoroughly homeless I am again, my only shelter a little fiberglass house bobbing forlornly thousands of miles away. I don’t like living out of an ultralight backpack and a giant Turkish purse, never able to costume myself correctly or feel the comfortable familiarity of a local. I used to be able to do these things.

Still, though, I thrive on the existential edge that not belonging brings to my existence. Everything is uncertain, everything new, everything exciting. I can’t be an aboriginal. But maybe I’ll wander forever like Ulysses, searching for my lost couplet, my lost song. And when I finally do, I can lay my bones to rest on my lost piece of earth.

Warrenville, Illinois

I've finally posted our Crooked Island pictures, so head over to my pictures site to check them out. Make special note of my pictures of Little Maddie, our friend Maddie's doppelganger whom she sent with us on the boat. We were supposed to take her around the world: unfortunately, we only got to the Bahamas. We're staying at the Levis tonight, watching old episodes of Lost until all hours.

Oak Park, Illinois

I feel like doing my sister's gimmick tonight. Here's my subject line (taken from a Bob Dylan song, which one to be discovered by vous): "She's everything I need in life, but I can't be swayed by that..."

Hello, everyone. Long time no see. I'm feeling a little guilty about a long absence, but we've also been on the road A LOT. I spent a week with my brother in Somerville, Massachusetts, while Karl slaved in the icy cold cranberry bogs of Carver for a week and a half. Then we spent another weeks (including Halloween!) with Karl's nephews, and hopped a 24-hour Amtrak to Chicago to spend some time with my niece and sister.

We just spent a fantastic evening playing "Settlers of Cataan" with my sister and her husband. Settlers of Cataan is the best board game of all time. And I know I'm a dork for saying that, but I love board games. I've also played a lot of cribbage with Karl's mom, and taught my brother and his roommates how to play Bahamian dominoes. It may sound like nothing, but it's amazing how much we need this focused time with the people we love. I feel like I'm a plant getting rain.

The travel doesn't end here, either--we take a train back to Boston, another train to Middleboro, and a truck back to Marion for Thanksgiving, and we still have a trip to Maine to arrange. It's difficult to catch my breath. Or, more aptly, it's difficult to keep my breath caught and at the same time pay the focused attention to my family that I want to. The stress of not being with Secret is wearing on us, too. Tropical Storm Noel gave me a lot of nightmares.

Emotionally, it's weird to be wandering my old stamping grounds. I visited Oak Park for the first time probably ten years ago. It's the first place I had my own apartment, it's the first place I really felt like my own person. I've criss-crossed these roads over the last decade, with different people, in different years. It's the closest thing I've had to a home.

I feel bad for not chronicling my gut reactions to our return to this country. I guess I did to some degree. But all sorts of things have been floating around my head lately. I'm reading this amazing book entitled The Spell of the Sensuous, written by a sleight-of-hand magician who won a Fulbright to study traditional magic in Bali and Tibet. He was a philosopher, and he tries to figure out, philosophically, what's caused the modern disconnect with the physical world. It's really brought my time here into perspective. Why are we so separated animals and the birds and the plants and the earth in this country? Why am I so much more connected to all that on the boat? What caused that?

Somebody's gotta to tell the tale. I guess it must be up to me.