Song cry

Late-blooming roses

My prospects are looking up, in ways that I can’t talk about for fear of jinxes. My last post may have appeared more depressing than it was intended. Yes, those are all things I’m thinking, but I have good days, too, like yesterday when I was driving down the twisting hill into the city, surrounded by oaks, the sun beating down. It makes me happy to be in Chattanooga in October. The weather is beautiful, seventy degrees in the day, sunny. It’s getting chilly at night, but no so cold it’s uncomfortable. I can still wander around in shirtsleeves.

I can’t recommend highly enough this article in the New Yorker. Reading it made me feel like God had reached down from heaven and touched me. At sixteen, in the Philippines, I was berating myself already for not having written the Great American Novel. I was certain that in order to be truly great, I had to be young when I achieved success. Not true, according to Gladwell. How thrilling is that?

My other epiphanious moment this week was reading this interview by Andre Dubus III. I haven’t read any of his fiction, so I can’t vouch for it, but I can vouch for his advice:

I tell this to my students — that they are here because they want to try and create art. Something beautiful in and of itself, that lives on its own. That will affect someone that will never love them. And let's try and work and find what those tools are. Good luck. I hope wonderful things happen. But you may as well get into the lesson now that the real prize is just doing it. Everything else is gravy. Even then it's not such gravy. Now you get reviewed. Anyone can say whatever they want. It's not all good. They have this idea, I probably had it, too, that when you have this hard-covered book all a sudden you've arrived. No, now you just have another level of difficulty. Which is the nature of mature living. It's the nature of adulthood. Reach this, and now bigger obstacles. Now I can climb a bigger mountain. Well, good here's the biggest mountain I've ever seen, right in front of me. You climb that. There's another mountain. And this one's got lightning at the top and lava. And there's a big hole...

Wow. After reading that the world was a much more beautiful place. Of course, it doesn’t sound beautiful, with all the back-breaking climbs and volcanoes, but that’s not the point. The point is that I need to be reminded sometimes, often, daily, hourly, that living itself is the destination, as cliched as that is. This week I’ve been struggling, and procrastinating, and debating internally the process of editing the novel I wrote last year and the short story I wrote this semester, or, heck, anything I’ve written, and it seems this insurmountable process, an unclimbable mountain, an impenetrable jungle. My prose already exists, on the page. How can I change it?

That sounds ridiculous. Of course I need to change it. But I see it there (I’m looking at a manuscript lying on my desk right now, staring at me with malice in its eyes) and I don’t know how to begin. How is this word better than that word? Do I need more words? Fewer words? Better words? Different words? I’m stymied, until I give up and go watch Saturday Night Live. Or a Keanu Reeves movie from the eighties, my latest favorite Netflix choice.

Realizing this about myself, though, is helping me accept that I am the second kind of experimental artist that Gladwell speaks of, and reading what Dubus says means that I just have to keep climbing the mountains. Writing is exactly like hiking. Specifically, like the Appalachian Trail. When I arrived at the Pennsylvania border, dreading the infamous rocks, I didn’t realize that the entire trail, state by state, got worse from that point. Every state was harder, more brutal, more impossible. It didn’t matter. I just had to keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other.

For writing, walking is simply spending time in front of the page. I sit here and stare at my manuscript until I take a pencil to it, or scissors, or until I rip it apart and rearrange it. Until I find an entry point. I haven’t done it successfully yet, but once I do, there’ll just be another mountain to climb.

I say this with hope. Knowing that there’s another mountain beyond this mountain makes this mountain feel so much more climbable. It doesn’t matter. Some days, on the trail, knowing the climbs were going to get worse depressed me more than I could bear. Other days, it filled me with hope. I was getting better, and there was more beauty around the bend.

Don’t panic

The Prodigal Son

On the boat, if I were on the boat right now, I’d probably be complaining about something. I’d be complaining about the heat, or mosquitoes, or my rolly anchorage, or the smell from the head. Here I have nothing to complain about but myself, my own indolence--there are no mosquitoes, no movement, no awful stink. I find myself wondering often, if it’s true what I’ve been accused of. Am I a person incapable of happiness? Incapable of contentment with myself? Was I even ever happy at my happiest, which I know remember as my halcyon days on Secret?

In some small, circumscribed ways, all my dreams have come true here. I have a basement turned into an exquisite office. Although I have a part-time job, I have almost limitless time to pursue my genuine career goals. I should be ripping off and chewing huge chunks of world-changing prose. Instead, I find myself thinking of all of the things I want instead of this. A bungalow on the beach. A cabin in the woods. A high-rise in the city. Limitless time. Not just enough time, but limitless time. What I want is nothing less than eternity. Nothing less than perfection, of myself and others.

Jesus said it: “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

It’s another of those passages that used to disturb me immensely as a child, not so much in what it stated, but that no one took it seriously. Yes, it says that, everyone said. But it doesn’t actually mean that. Everyone was always saying that about the Bible. I could read it. I read it beginning to end. I knew what it said, but everyone said it didn’t say what it said. I knew it did.

The thing that rankles the most, like a constant toothache, is the thought of my boat. That’s the most imperfect thing of all. I’ve had a couple of buyers nibble at the bait, but I’m not committed enough to selling to reel them in. When I’m lying awake at night, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars, I contemplate options for returning on my own, the one-way ticket that always pops up in my dreams as the solution to all of my problems.

The problems remain, though. The recalcitrant diesel. The headstay. Solo sailing. Transportation. My dad has the same look in his eyes as I do when he remembers the boat, when we see the pictures pop up on the computer screensaver--a pained expression of loss and longing.

And failure. That’s what it boils down to for me. I didn’t have the expertise the task demanded, and I still don’t, and I failed. How can I have any faith that the rest of my life won’t end up the same way?

Went to see the gypsy

I just finished a great book called The Thirteenth Tale, a pulpy gothic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre, but really fantastic. It’s a very hard thing to do, write a book in an older tradition, and to do it successfully in this day and age. And then to get it published. My dad, who works for a Christian publisher, keeps going on and on about how it only publishes thirty of the 1500 manuscripts it receives a year, and only prints 2500 copies of each book. In order to be a success, the book has to sell out of its first printing and go on to a second, and only twenty percent of the books they publish do that. Only twenty percent of the books even make any money for the publisher. Those are sobering statistics.

Not encouraging news for the nubile young writer. Has there ever been? Meanwhile, all the news is how Americans are reading less and less, and how all of us might as well just give up and go work at convenience stores. So what does one do? I don’t know.

The Thirteenth Tale succeeds because it has a built-in audience: the bibliophile. By consciously echoing all of a book reader’s favorite books, it’s evidently been a success. According to a friend of mine, there was a three-month wait for the book at her local library. So that’s the secret--write a book about books. Who wants to do that?

I've decided to try to make the best of being here, which means making full use of the local library, even if I’m forever placing books on hold and then forgetting to go pick them up, thereby wasting all of the local library’s precious financial resources. I've also invested the $8 a month in Netflix, which I still have a hard time believing is not a waste of money, as much as I love rating movies for hours on end and updating my queue with crazy old Cannes Film Festival winners and Scorsese's early films. My most recent conquest was an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film festival (meaning me in front of a DVD player until two o’clock in the morning).

It makes me wonder whether books are being left behind and movies aren’t really the media for our time. Should I switch to screenplays? Or, better yet, writing for television? I’m certainly not brave enough for Hollywood yet.

I’ve also ended up with a small job at the local YMCA, which at least allows me free yoga. Only it’s not exactly free if it costs me hours of my life. I have yet to find any employment I actually enjoy. All I do is keep crossing things off my list--nope, don’t like that. Nope, not that either.

Still, I'm chugging along. One day at a time, right? Each day has enough trouble of its own, as someone once said. I try not to think about Secret too much, although every time I visit my little web page, with its sailboat floating up in the blue, it makes me wish I could make a living as a mariner. How do people find work they like? Or do all of us, as Thoreau says, merely live lives of quiet desperation?

Enforcers

I've posted a bunch of pictures, going all the way back to June, on Flickr. Knock yourselves out.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Pelicans in North Carolina

Or maybe not. How many times have I thought I’ve found a home, only to be abandoned by it or have it abandoned by me? More times than I can count. It’s almost a compulsion. I’m a plant that forever pulls itself up by its own roots. A mangrove, maybe. Sending out shoots in one direction or another, then yanking up the old plant as soon as the dirt begins to feel comfortable.

So I’m back in Chattanooga, a town that knows its own, its own of which I am definitely not one. Chattanooga’s the kind of place where there are obituaries that read Ralph Pickett, 99, native of Alabama, lived in Chattanooga 98 years. The kind of place where there’s actual society, with balls and coming-out parties (for marriageable young women, not alternative-lifestyle aficionadoes), like something out of Austen. The kind of place where one must fake a southern accent to avoid discrimination, where yankees are always damn yankees, and mothers shudder to think their children could marry one.

Nothing against the south. I love the south. Its weather, for one thing, is the best in the nation, as is its literature. One could also make a very good case for its food.

Doors are opening for me down here. The one very good piece of news is that I finished a piece on the Appalachian Trail for a Lonely Planet guidebook, and I’m now completing a second so that I can be considered for one of their contracted freelance authors. A dream job for me, to be sure. I’ve enrolled in a graduate-level course down here, my first return to the ivory tower since my departure from it ten years ago, and I’m beginning to seriously consider a Master’s degree. Argh. I know, right? Members of my family can’t seem to escape the magnetic pull of higher education, even though I swore I would always resists.

More good news, as I’m sure everyone is curious to know, is that Secret survived Hurricane Ike unscathed. Nearly unbelievable. It makes me more confident than ever that I left her in the right place. It’s hard for me to imagine a better hurricane hole than French Wells. I have several buyers interested, but we’ll see if they’re able to negotiate me down to a price that I can live with.

I still long for the sunny tropics, especially as summer draws to a close. But life’s not so bad when people shiver as it drops below seventy degrees, I can watch black-tufted titmice (those are birds) out my window, and I spend my days doing yoga and writing fiction. Things could be much, much worse.

Torrington, Connecticut

Melissa is happy, even though she missed her Jeopardy audition.

Connecticut scenery

Our Connecticut friends rescue us from our Subaru nightmare

The end has no end

The view out my window in July

I read a great book on the boat, called Coming Up for Air, by Margaret Becker, about a woman who takes a month off from her life just to be by herself in a cabin by the water. It recalled to me Thoreau, and his time by Walden Pond, and how necessary it is for all of us to take time to withdraw and be by ourselves for a while. In it, she makes a commitment to herself to watch every sunrise and sunset for a month. I wish I could discipline myself to do that here, to spend that time of focused meditation with the world around me.

Maine connects me to the earth. The seasons breathe here. They have pith and substance. I can feel each distinct season as a personality--the jolly sunny face of Bacchus in summer, the hard drawn face of Old Man Winter. Each month has its own flora and fauna: the black flies and dandelions of early May, the deer flies and strawberries of July, the long orange light and potatoes in September. It’s a different life up here, the life of 100 years ago, a life that allows me to withdraw from the maniacal speed of the rest of the world.

Even the relief from the burden of television in Aroostook County is a blessing. We get four channels on a good day: two Canadian, CBS, and PBS. It’s great. I find my time releasing from the electronic world and being deposited in my lap again. Here I pick up books, old classics from college, and read them through in two days. Right now I’m reading the Encantadas, Melville’s travel writing from sailing through the Galapagos Islands. Where else, aside from here, and the boat, could I find time to do that?

I took Shadow the wolf-dog on another walk long last night. I’ve been avoiding the walks, partly because I’ve been avoiding him--I’m trying to do a better job at training him, and it’s hard work. I found a fantastic book at the library called The Loved Dog, by a tiny woman, a former member of the Israeli special forces, who now trains dogs for a living. She explains that the way to a dog’s heart is through its stomach. I’ve always known that, I suppose, but it seemed like far too big of a splurge to give a dog things like chicken and cheese puffs in order to get him to sit. But then I began to think: isn’t chicken cheaper than dog food these days? And don’t even the trainers at the Westminster Dog Show use treats to get their dogs to trot obediently behind them? Maybe she’s onto something. So I’ve begun taking a little baggie of treats with us, and I’ve successfully trained Shadow to go swim in the beaver pond and come back to me and his leash when he’s done. I have an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.

When I went last night it was like the release of a tautly-pulled arrow. Shadow and I all but ran the three miles. When I walk with him, we are pure beast together--united in the run. I am one with my body. He is one with me. Together we hear the gunshots through the forest, the rustle of a bear or a deer in the bushes, an unknown bird song. Maybe, sometimes, I can even hear the sound of the word home, whispered through the pines.

Bridgewater, Maine

What Karl wants to do next

I’ve been attempting to retain my equanimity. I should be ecstatic--we arrived safely in Bridgewater, after more peripatetic travels. Since leaving Alna, we have visited, in Maine: Newry, Mexico, Rumford, and Bar Harbor. We kicked it trail-style for a little while, even sleeping in the truck one night. It’s one of those ideas that seems great in theory, and works out much less than great in actuality. We were so exhausted and grumpy the day afterwards, that we ended up forking over the big bucks for a motel room, meaning that we would have been better off buying a gigantic car-camping tent for half of what we paid for the motel room and we would have been in the black. We could have even been much happier staying for the entirety of rally race, the stated reason for driving all over the state this past weekend.

We had a great time, though. We attended the New England Forest Rally, the largest race of its kind in North America, carried out entirely on dirt western Maine logging roads, at speeds averaging 117 miles an hour. This sport is Karl’s new dream, his new vision for future adventure: build Subarus at the farm in Maine, turn them over for a profit, and meanwhile put together an award-winning rally car. Actually, I’m not sure he cares at all about awards. What he likes is going fast, just like Ricky Bobby, and since he has 120 acres of dirt road to ride around on, riding around on dirt is what he’s going to do.

That’s all well and good. I’m completely supportive (except for, perhaps, when it comes to $5000 struts), but I don’t see how this adventure can be fully mine. He wants me to train as co-driver, the navigator who sits beside the driver and is the brains of the operation, and that sounds fun to me, but I’m not going to get all sold on this adventure like I was on the last one. I’m not having my heart broken again.

So here we are. The turnip greens look fabulous, as do the burgeoning jalapeno peppers. We have a new possibility for an online business, and this house should feel like home. Maybe it will begin to. I’m supposed to be posting my Secret ad today, online, though, and I keep procrastinating it. I don’t want to take that step. I’m not quite ready, even though I need to be, because I’m already broke.

I just keep thinking of that stupid, stupid engine, not starting, and how naive of me it was to expect it to. My boat sat for eight months and I just feel like such an idiot, with all my talk of faith and destiny and hope and a calling. All I am is a stupid, stupid girl, who left her boat for too long, and now it’s useless and virtually worthless.

Alna, Maine

Karl with Puck, the baby Nigerian dwarf goat

In the earth, nestled right in front of me, is a giant thirty-foot yurt, that our friends from the Appalachian Trail have just put up as their new home. Karl’s inside with Cheers, as he was known on the trail, working on the plumbing system. It’s amazing to me how talented Karl is when it comes to this kind of stuff--he’s already fixed the engine on their rototiller this morning. His dad was a mechanic, his brother a plumber, his specialty is electronics, and with those three skill sets there’s not much he can’t do. Plumbing is his least favorite, but it’s always the one everyone needs help with. This is about the third impromptu plumbing job he’s participated in during the last month.

So I’m sitting in the sun at their picnic table. We drove up from Marion yesterday, stopping at Trader Joe’s for the requisite case of unsweetened soy milk before heading up to Maine. We’ve decided to go to a rally-cross race in western Maine this weekend, which gave us the perfect amount of time to visit the friends we’ve been meaning to visit for four years. It’s astonishing to me, and syncronous, somehow, that the week we had available is the same week they’re moving into their brand new yurt, and that we actually managed to get through to all of our trail friends who live in Maine, even though I haven’t emailed them in years.

I met them, Cheers and Grace, the first week I was hiking. They’re another trail couple, who are now married with two kids. They’re going off the grid, using propane heat and refrigeration and cooking, supplementing with a wood stove, and building a privy instead of putting in a septic system. They cleared this land themselves, cut their own boards with a mill they rented, built the whole platform for the yurt themselves.

We got to sleep in the yurt last night, even though they haven’t moved in themselves, after a delicious dinner of burgers made from a steer Cheers himself named and then slaughtered, with speckled leaf lettuce grown at the local organic farm. Karl has wanted a yurt for years, and his eyes widened when he saw it. Being with them is reawakening our dreams, our trail dreams, of sustainable living and agriculture, of being self-supporting and settled. They’re the right people at the right time. I just have to continue to have faith, as we move through time, that the right path will meet us as we take the next step.

Marion, Massachusetts

Silvershell Beach, in Marion

I’m sitting on the deck here in Marion. It’s 72 degrees, but it feels cold to me. I can’t believe I adjusted that fast to the tropical weather, but I guess I did. I thought it was in the low sixties until Karl just looked at me and scoffed.

There are mosquitoes out here, lazier than the Bahamian Type-A-personality mosquitoes, but buzzing around me nonetheless, so I lit on of the mosquito coils I brought back from Crooked. The smell reminds me of home, wherever that is, even though I’m sure they’re giving me about eight kinds of horrible cancer. It’s worth it. Maybe I can order them online when I run out. Until then, I have to hoard them like gold.

Karl and I have just finished a very intense and tear-filled conversation about our future goals. He’s convinced he wants to live in Maine for a while. I’m not as convinced, but I’m willing to give it a try. I wrote my first Secret ad today, to post in the local want ad. I offered to deliver it, so maybe I’ll still have sailing adventures, if I’m lucky. If anyone reading this post wants to buy the world’s best boat, I know where she’s moored. I’ll post a link to my online ad as soon as I have it up.

The stars are out tonight. Not as bright as at French Wells, but still shining above the corner of the house. I can see the first four stars of the Big Dipper, and it makes me forlorn to think of them shining over Secret in her corner of the world. At least I can see them here. The world is not too much with us that we can’t still see stars.

Nassau, Bahamas, to Marion, Massachusetts

The view out my window this morning

Tonight I go to sleep back in Marion. I’m cold. That’s always my first impression upon arriving, even in July. It’s in the eighties during the day, allegedly, but it’s got to be in the sixties now, colder than it was the whole time I was in the Bahamas. I’m joking that with my tan I at least have my Vitamin D allotment for the winter, but fat chance. At least I can count on some sun here, for two more months. I can go to the beach if I need to, and actually wear a bathing suit! (Although this theory is not one that has been actively tested.) July has got to be my favorite American month. Any month where it heads close to the nineties. In Thailand? May. When the monsoon comes.

Maybe my blog’s new name, post-boat, should be Seasonal Affective Disorderers Anonymous. SADA. Has a nice ring, no? Or maybe I’ll convince Karl to let me trade Secret for a winter home on Long Cay. Then I can have a winter cabin in the Bahamas. Just like Johnny Depp.

I had the craziest experience yesterday on the plane flight back from Fort Lauderdale to Newark--I met an amazing woman, an Irish vegan who leads a meditation group in Florida. We had a brilliant, instantaneous connection, like a light coming on. The last time I remember that happening was with Karl. We had similar bags, and she complimented me on mine, and then we began talking. For those of you who don’t know me in person, let me tell you that I am a deep introvert, although I do a very convincing impression of an extrovert when I need to. I hate talking on the phone. I never talk to people on the plane. But she asked me where I grew up, and I answered Bangkok. I never tell people that when I first meet them. Then she told me she was a Buddhist, and she never tells people that, either.

We ended up talking like long-lost old friends for the full three-hour flight. Then we hung out at the airport for a while longer until we lost each other. I feel like I’ve made my first real friend in so long, probably since Chicago. That’s not true--I’ve made amazing friends cruising. But this was a connection of a different order.

Then back to Karl. We had an awful drive back to Marion, through a two-hour construction delay in brutal Boston traffic complicated by a bad accident, and I wished to heaven I had taken the train. Driving in Boston is miserable, no matter how long it’s been or how in love you are. Here we are again, though. back together. Trying to figure out the next step, the next white blaze on the path up the mountain. It feels bittersweet. The end of one journey and the beginning of another.

Crooked Island to Nassau, Bahamas

The view out my window this morning

Today I left Crooked Island. I watched the island recede into green haze beneath me, looking for a last little glimpse of mast. No such luck. Tonight I sleep my last night in the Bahamas, and tomorrow I head back to the land of burgers and baseball.

Dad and I are unpacking and repacking all of our suitcases right now. I have the absolute maximum amount of luggage. In fact, we should have been charged an extra $100 on our Pineapple Air flight this morning. We discovered that my big suitcase weighs more than sixty pounds, so I’m trying to redistribute the weight. My dad’s an elite frequent flier, so he’s allowed three bags of seventy pounds each.

Most of the weight is books. My darn books. Karl complained about them the whole way down, and now I have to tote them the whole way back. My carry-on is stuffed full of them. I’ll probably be carrying 150 pounds in carry-ons through the airport tomorrow.

At least I’ll have less to worry about if a hurricane hits or Secret sells. I’ll have my precious Joy of Cooking and McSweeney’s and Norton’s Modern Poems. My curse, as a nomad, is my need to carry a complete library everywhere I go. And if I move back to Secret? I guess I’ll just have to tote them all back with me. It’s better than buying new ones.

French Wells to Pittstown Point, Bahamas

Secret being left behind

Today I left Secret in my wake. She looked so forlorn and lonely as we zoomed off. I wanted to turn around and stay. I don’t know what I want, to be honest. I never do.

We woke up with the weather forecast on the shortwave this morning so we could pack, and I stuffed as much as I could into our backpacks. Dad’s convinced he’s going to have to mortgage his house to pay for my overweight baggage. You don’t understand, I wanted to stay. This is my house. I left all of the dishes, most of the books, half of the clothes, all of the tools. I was doing pretty well, until Dad started freaking out about the engine.

He had taken the fuel injectors out yesterday, and hadn’t put them back in. We had both half-counted on Jorge, the Cuban diesel mechanic, showing up today. I had told him to put off putting the engine back together for a little while, hoping Jorge’d be able to do something with it. Jorge did show up, but not until three, at which point, Dad had been panicking over the engine for hours. With one deft twist of his fingers, Jorge loosened the bolt that both Dad and I had been striving with for days. He really is magic.

He put the fuel injectors back in but left the fuel lines and the air filter off--he promsied to come back and get the things going, which he’s confident he can do. He once rescued a diesel that had been to the bottom of the ocean and back. He just can’t fix the engine today, is the problem. I’m convinced that if we could stay jsut another week, maybe two, he’d have everything straightened out. We just don’t have time. What sailboats need, more than anything, more than even love, is time.

Jorge had to catch the mailboat at five, so we had to leave Secret by four, giving Dad and I about fifteen minutes, once the engine was back together, to put the dinghy on deck, get everything strapped down, off the deck, and shipshape. We didn’t do that badly, but I felt like one of those World War II families, forced to abandon their homes forever in half an hour’s time. If I sell Secret, I may never see her again after today. Can I live with that?

I was in tears as we left. I’m grieving the loss of all of it: the water, the sky, the stars, the heat, my home. The first stage of grief is denial, they say, and I’m firmly there. I refuse to believe it ends this way, not with a bang but a whimper. I’ll be back, I promise. Dad says August. Teh thing is, until she sells, I have an escape valve. Anytime I discover the bravery within myself, I can buy that infamous ticket I’ve been threatening to buy for six months, and hop on that plane. Will I have enough courage? Probably not. But there’s nothing I love more than the thought of escape.

Tropical charms

Another interior shot of beautiful sunlit Secret

Tonight’s my last night on the boat. Maybe ever. I certainly hope not, but I’ve decided I’m putting Secret back on the market, as she is, as soon as I have internet access. So if anyone’s looking for a fully equipped cruising boat that only needs a little bit of installation, I have the boat for you. I’ll gladly assist as crew (or captain, if you’ll have me) on a delivery anywhere in the world.

It feels like the end of an era. It is. Another stage of my life as a professional adventurer is over. When I get back to the land of internet access, I’ll have to change my headline photo and “about me” section. I’m officially no longer a sailor. It feels so final, so sad.

Then again, maybe not... Maybe Karl will change his mind. Maybe she won’t sell. Maybe my dad will be able to come with me in August and we’ll sail off to Georgia...

Or this may be the last time I lay scribbling in my berth, my headlamp on, the trades howling in the rigging, the dinghy slapping the water, the creaks of teak and fiberglass my lullaby. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss every moment of it, even the stinky head and heeling over on our ear while at sea and the lazy jacks keeping me awake, slapping the mast for all they’re worth.

I love you, dear old boat. I hope, I pray, you can find someone who’ll love you as much as I do, who’ll take better care of you than I can. Finding that person I have to leave in the hands of God (and Craig’s List). Tomorrow it’s on to new and even scarier things: a house, maybe. Land. Plants. Winter. It’s all adventure, right?

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.