by Erik Orton
“My wife and I are ASA 101 certified, and we’d like to rent one of your boats,” he said into the phone. When he hung up, he hugged me.
“No instructor. No charter captain. Just us. We’re all going sailing!” he said. That’s my soft spot right there, a happy Erik. He’s been my best friend since our freshman year of college. He cheered me through graduation and my first year of teaching middle school before Karina was born. Even though he was raised in a dual-income family, he shifted his paradigm to support and truly value my ambitions as a stay-at-home mom. What exhilarated Erik sometimes exposed me—usually in a good way. His aspirations expanded my horizons. I didn’t want my fears to hold him back.
“Awesome!” I hugged him. “Which direction is Toms River, New Jersey?”
Maybe if you flew a helicopter from New York City to the Jersey coast it would be fun, but the same trip in a minivan in mid-August is no fun. After a couple of hours the kids were all motion sick.
“Finally!” Karina said, stepping into the gravel parking lot. I unbuckled the little kids while Erik checked in at the office. He returned with a preppy employee who guided us to a twenty-foot open cockpit daysailer, the same size as our sailing class boat but much nicer. It had long white benches down each side—perfect for a family of seven. The tiller was made out of teak, beautifully sealed and polished. Striped ropes lay in flat coils on the dock or passed through shiny shackles. The mainsail wrapped snugly around the boom, tied down with crisp square knots. Too bad we weren’t dressed for a Ralph Lauren photo shoot.
The employee handed us a stack of stiff life jackets in all the right sizes. The three older girls managed their own while I snapped Eli and Lily into theirs.
“This jacket makes me look fat,” said Sarah Jane. At six, SJ was already too feisty to play the mild middle child. Nothing about this trip excited her. “Let’s get this over with so we can go home,” she said.
Karina and Alison went to the bow to hank the jib, which means they attached the small triangular sail to a cable at the front of the boat. Eli was nearly three and so scared that he wanted to sit right next to me. He was so close our life jackets rubbed every time I leaned forward. Lily was eight months old, but she couldn’t yet sit up on her own. I put her Bumbo seat on the cockpit floor, where she could face me, and held it steady between my feet. After supervising the jib work, Erik reached out to remove the rope from the dock cleat.
“This boat is really nice,” he said. “I feel a little guilty, like they’re giving me keys to a Porsche when I barely got my driver’s license.”
“We passed the class,” I said wrapping my arm around Eli, his face buried in my ribs.
“Let’s do this,” Erik said, pulling in the rope and shoving off the dock. “Alison, coil up the docking line. Karina, grab the mainsheet. Heading up.”
“Heading up,” Karina repeated, rope in hand and ready to trim the sails. Eli started to cry. Several poles marked the entrance channel. To inexperienced sailors like us, they posed a big challenge, because on our way out Erik was trying to captain and steer the boat while sorting out all the rigging. He got tangled in the lines.
“Karina, trim your line,” Erik snapped.
“I can’t! Alison has to release her line first,” Karina snapped back.
“Alison!” Erik yelled.
“I’m trying. It’s really tight,” Alison said.
We nearly ran into the pylons on our way out of the marina toward the main channel. I rubbed Eli’s chubby arm and looked for Lily’s pacifier to prevent her from starting a sympathy howl. I could at least try to keep the noise down.
Instead of the predictable professionally piloted ferries and tankers of New York Harbor, we shared the river with deeply tanned weekend amateurs in motorboats, powerboats, speedboats, and jet skis. Everyone, except us, had an engine.
“Do you think they can tell we don’t know what we’re doing?” Erik asked over Eli’s sobs.
“I’m sure they’re thinking about themselves and their boats,” I said.
Karina and Alison untied half a dozen square knots to release the mainsail. Karina dropped a sail tie. She lunged to catch it and slumped as it slipped into the water. Erik ran into one of the channel posts trying to recover it. Alison’s hat blew into the water.
“I’m not going back for that,” Erik said. Alison’s usual rosebud mouth made a slim line across her pale face. She nodded, stoic under pressure. When Erik was flustered, the savvy kids went quiet so he could think.
“It’ll be our offering to Poseidon today,” I said extra cheerfully. Nobody laughed. My job was to boost morale. Whatever the task, relationships are my goal. I didn’t care whether the kids liked sailing or not. I wanted them to like being a family. Karina slid her eyes to one side, flared her nostrils, and sighed. Alison maintained her straight-line mouth. SJ curled into the fetal position and rested her face on the bench seat. If Eli was scared in the marina, he was terrified in the channel. He started wailing. Screaming.
“What is wrong with Eli?” Erik snapped. Lily cried too, but it was only the frustrated, hungry cry that follows a long drive. It’s hard to nurse a baby through two life vests. We rocked through the wake of the most recent speedboat crossing. We probably looked like we were bobbing a little aimlessly, but it felt like we were in the movie The Perfect Storm.
Jane clung to the deck repeating, “I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.” The boat leaned deeply to the right. That’s called heeling. I didn’t like it any better than Sarah Jane. I nearly touched the choppy surface of the water. Salt sprayed me in the face. I doubted Erik’s claim that sailing would keep me out of deep water. Eli’s scream modulated up. The deeply tanned people aboard the speedboat were pointing at us and laughing.
“They are looking at us,” SJ glared. I laughed, hoping to keep the mood afloat. This was supposed to be a fun, memorable, family adventure. I hushed and snuggled the babies. I hollered praise to Karina and Alison as they winched or released ropes to control the triangular jib sail. I hugged Sarah Jane. Erik sat stiff on the bench across from me, his right hand on the tiller, brows furrowed behind mirrored sunglasses. We escaped the wake of the main thoroughfare. Beginners need lots of room to make mistakes.
Eli and Lily calmed. The boat stopped threatening to dump us out. With one arm still around Eli, I set my hand on Erik’s knee for a moment. He lifted his sunglasses to see my smile better. He winked at me. We were going to be okay. I may not be a great sailor, but when it comes to our family, I know which way the wind is blowing.
Erik regained his bearing and apologized to the crew. We were all new. There is more to captaining than tillers and mainsails. The captain has to look ahead, think ahead, and decide ahead. On a boat, it’s essential to have one person in command to prevent confusion and injury. Erik ran ideas past us, asked for our opinions, and then told our young crew what to expect. With this preparation, Karina and Alison learned to identify conditions and anticipate commands. Each of them took a turn at the tiller. Erik issued clear orders in a calm voice. I figured out how to trim the sails while nursing a baby through two life jackets on a tippy boat. I’m still waiting for my tiara for that one.
We zigzagged our way up and down the river, jerky and making wide turns, but without crashing into anyone. We did not run into any more poles. We did not run aground. We kept all the Ortons inside the boat. Most importantly, we still loved each other.
“It wasn’t as boring as I thought it would be,” Sarah Jane pronounced as she tossed parking lot pebbles from the pier into the water.
“We just did that,” I said, congratulating Erik with a hug.
“I wish that had been more boring. That was rough,” Erik said, still glassy in the eyeballs. “Not sure I want to take the family again.”
Better done than perfect.
ERIK
The summer ended and winter set in. I spent
those down months trying to find ways to practice sailing within our budget. My best idea was sharing the cost. None of my coworkers or friends wanted to pony up for sailing lessons, but plenty of them wanted to go sailing. I found a place out in the Bronx called City Island that rented sailboats: $100 for half a day. As spring rolled around we drove out as a family to check it out. It was a mash-up of Cape Cod and, well, the Bronx. Most people in the city don’t own a car, so with our minivan, I could be both chauffeur and captain to my friends. I put together a group of three or four people a couple times a month between spring and fall and charged my friends $20 to $25 per sail. My friends got a steal of a deal on sailing. I got to practice, have fun, and stay within budget. I managed one sail with just Karina and Alison. I’d become a much better captain since our first family sail, and they were on point as crew.
Better done than perfect.
That’s how I passed the first season after sailing lessons. The main bummer was we weren’t sailing as a family. I hadn’t officially said that was something I wanted to do, but I felt pulled in that direction.
The following winter, on a cold February day, I wrote in my journal, “Sail as a family.” It was part of a far-fetched “blue-sky” exercise I did with a friend who wanted to practice her life coaching course. In my mind I imagined a whole year relaxing on a sailboat, probably in the Mediterranean. I’d grown up in Europe as a kid when my dad was stationed there with the military. The question my friend had asked was, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” or “What would you do if money were no object?” I forget which. It was probably both. Later that month I had some downtime at work. I found myself googling “sailing as a family.”
I’d spent a lot of time over the previous year taking stock of my life. When the show I produced folded, I felt professionally embarrassed, emotionally vulnerable, and financially scared. I wanted to disappear but I needed to provide for my family. I found an anonymous job where I didn’t know anyone and no one could find me. My family knew what I did for work, but to others I kept quiet. I earned enough for us to live on.
When I was a teenager I delivered newspapers and looked up at the stars each morning. They were always there, timeless. Throughout history, people sailed the planet guided by stars that still move across the sky in the same rhythms and patterns. I wanted to connect with that.
Looking back on my anonymous, disposable job, I can see what sailing meant to me. I needed to feel safe. I needed to feel hope. I needed something to look forward to. Too many aspects of my former dreams depended on the decisions and choices of others. Sailing as a family for a year was something we could control. It wasn’t dependent on the decisions and actions of others—or so I thought. It was a big enough dream to give me hope. It was something to look forward to. That was what I needed.
My google searching turned up some good results. In March, the Orton family—that’s us—started following the Norton family website. They were a British couple with two young daughters and a son. They lived on a sailboat, Miss Tippy, and were planning to take two years to sail around the world. We caught up with their blog after they’d started their trip. They were still close to home. We quickly watched everything they’d already posted: videos of their boat being built, their farewell party, receiving a big box of nautical charts, getting their dental work done. The first leg of their journey was from England to Gibraltar. The son looked over the bow and said, “There’s Africa!”
Emily turned to me and asked, “You can see Africa from Spain?” We were learning all kinds of things.
I checked every day for new posts and videos. Every time something went up, we gathered the kids around the TV to watch and read together. We found other families already out there on boats: Bumfuzzle in Mexico, Totem in Papua New Guinea, Galactic in the South Pacific.1 These weren’t families with big budgets. They lived simple, lean lives. They valued time with their families over careers and over stuff. They parted ways with nine-to-five jobs, minivans, suburbs, and other mainstays of a culture Emily and I knew well. They figured out their actual physical needs were minimal and found ways to earn enough to provide those. They were learning about the world by being out in it. They knew their “prime earning years” were also the same precious years they would be healthy and active enough to be out there with their children. For them, waiting to retire at sixty-five made no sense, and retirement wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. They talked about mini-retirements, mobile jobs, and unconventional solutions. Each family took a custom approach. Their lives were made by hand, from scratch, based on their own recipes. They knew what mattered most to them, and their life choices reflected that. They weren’t saying everyone should do what they were doing, but what they were doing was working for them. They shared it openly, and Emily and I liked what we saw. Maybe we could do it too.
EMILY
Maybe our family was already a little unconventional before we considered living on a sailboat. While washing our clothes in the basement laundry room, a gentleman folding his towels told me about growing up in our neighborhood. In the 1960s, a family with five children and a stay-at-home mom was not rare in New York City. Forty years later, I knew only three other women like me. In that sense, my old-fashioned choices made me unusual. I didn’t know any other families of seven trying to pull it off in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment.
After the birth of each new child, Erik’s parents would say, “Now you’ll have to move.” They live in a typical suburban home with a driveway and a yard. We figured out how to be happy right where we were. I was grateful for my marriage, my growing family, my friends, and good health, but it was easy to want more. Once, I took Karina to Target. Before we left for the store, I asked her if she needed anything, and she said she didn’t. After we arrived, she asked me to buy her an armful of items.
“I thought you didn’t need anything,” I said.
“I didn’t know I needed it until I saw it,” she replied.
“Me too,” I said. I had moved to New York with the conventional mindset that having more stuff and more space to put it would make my life better. But my apartment wasn’t getting any bigger.
Back at home, I had just stepped on a wooden alphabet block and wished for the hundredth time that we had a basement playroom when a thought occurred to me: What could I subtract from my life to make it better? Adding was difficult. Adding a closet organizer, a bookshelf, or even a new pair of shoes required money, which meant a budget strategy meeting. Subtracting could be simpler. I started by subtracting toys instead of adding storage containers. The kids and I assessed, sorted, and kept what mattered most. Our apartment felt bigger. I was learning to curate my space.
I wondered if I could curate my calendar, too. I wanted our whole family to spend more time together. Erik’s night job didn’t allow him to see Karina and Alison on weekdays. He left for work before they got home from school. He wasn’t in a position to quit. We tried an unconventional route: homeschool. Subtracting public school was a thoughtful, protracted process that involved research, discussions with administrators, and prayer. I had a clear vision of why I would fail at homeschooling. Our home was tiny. Erik’s day job was at home. I had three small children at home. I didn’t think I had enough space, stamina, or patience to have everyone home all day. Through books, conversations, and an unshakable buoyant feeling, God showed me that we could thrive: we would be together as a family.
We departed from conventional wisdom again when it came to Lily’s birth. With each child, my labor time was half that of the previous child. If the standard held, and my labor with Lily was half of what it had been with Eli, I’d have only one hour’s warning before she was born. I wanted the professionals to come to me, so Lily was born in our apartment. That old-fashioned birth and bonding experience was calmer and more comfortable than my previous hospital births, and I had delivered at four different hospitals.
The road less traveled was l
ess crowded. We traveled in September when the summer tourists returned to work. Erik asked for sabbaticals instead of promotions. When Brigham Young University produced one of his musicals for TV, we took eight weeks to be on set for the shoot. Erik earned enough to replace his lost wages. The TV show won some awards. They didn’t change our lives and only came up if someone saw them on our living room bookshelf, but ditching work for a creative project was way more satisfying than getting promoted. Promotions meant less flexibility. We were not on the same schedule as everyone else, but we were on the same schedule as each other. The autonomy was delicious.
Erik proposed Family Day: one day a month with just members of our immediate family, usually without an agenda. I liked it, and we went for it. It was hard. We had to put Family Day on the calendar before anything else. We had to turn down birthday parties, baby showers, babysitting jobs, and sometimes even church meetings. But as we made it a priority, the kids looked forward to it. They would rather have their parents’ full attention than earn a few dollars or go to a party. Our friends started to catch on too. They’d preface their invitations with, “If it’s not Family Day . . . ”
Erik and I regularly evaluated but couldn’t always control what to add to or subtract from our lives. Shortly before our Toms River family sail, we discovered a tiny addition—the size of a microscopic chromosome. That one extra chromosome explained why Lily didn’t hold up her head and why she slept so much. I’d spent six months researching and worrying, even though her pediatrician had assured me she was fine. I told God that if Lily needed something extra then I needed to be a more substantial person. I felt spiritual ballast enter my soul. Lily was diagnosed with Down syndrome. Erik wrapped me in his arms as we sat on the steps outside Columbia hospital.
