Seven at Sea

by Erik Orton

  “It was fun to be back, but it was hard,” Karina started. “Nobody understood. They would say, ‘So how was the boat?’ and unless they wanted to sit down for six hours and talk, there was no way to explain it. What am I supposed to say? ‘Great’?” Her sisters nodded.

  “They would hold the fridge door open forever,” Jane added. “They would let the water run and run and run.”

  “They mostly wanted to talk about TV shows and Tumblr posts,” Alison said.

  “They complained about really basic stuff. Like how life was so hard and uncomfortable when they really had it pretty good,” Jane said.

  “You can say ‘Great,’” I said. “If they really want to know, it will come out in conversations over time.” It would be a while before I started unpacking this experience and figuring out what it meant to me. We were still in it.

  “I wrote a song about it,” Ali said. “It’s called, ‘I Went to Mars.’”

  “It’s like how we all watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, but Dad never did so he doesn’t get our jokes. Nobody really understands us,” SJ said.

  “But we understand each other,” I said.

  “I wanna hear your song,” Erik said. Alison got her guitar and sang it for us. The chorus went like this:

  It’s like I went to Mars and you weren’t there.

  It was an experience we didn’t share.

  But oh how I wish you’d been there

  But I’m glad you’re here right now.

  “When you’re out on the water, people’s barriers are down. They’re friendly and willing to engage. On land, people are more closed and have their guard up,” Alison said.

  “It was nice to shower at Grandma’s, and have ice, but it wasn’t better,” Jane said.

  “Out on the water you meet all kinds of interesting, quirky people,” Alison said. “I think that’s partly because you’ve got to have something kind of off to be out here.”

  “I guess that means there’s something kind of off about us?” Erik said.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” Alison smiled.

  On shore the French Quarter was close, so we walked into town and strolled past the historic houses with antebellum side porches and cobblestone streets. We walked through the College of Charleston campus. We split up to run some errands. We’d reconvene at the library. Shocker.

  Erik went with the big kids to check prices on tours of Fort Sumter. I pushed Lily’s stroller through a mile and a half of Southern humidity to a U-Haul store. The guy at the counter looked like he’d never seen a woman pushing a baby stroller with a propane tank hanging from the handles, but there wasn’t a line for propane, so we were on our way pretty quick.

  This was the biggest library I’d seen in a long time—a sweeping, three-story structure with symmetrical ramps up both sides leading to a vaulted-ceiling lobby. It was as gorgeous on the inside. There were paintings and sculptures and advertising for cultural events. And stacks and stacks of books full of stories, wisdom, and information I don’t have yet. I love libraries and their promise of more to learn. I found Erik on the third floor, and he looked down at the bulging Ikea bag.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought a ten-pound can of propane into the public library?” I guessed the meaning of his look. There was a sign that said, “No Food,” but there wasn’t anything about explosive fuel. We weren’t on Mars anymore.

  Cristobal did head out to sea. The next morning we pulled anchor and left with good wind, a full crew, and a full propane tank.

  * * *

  1.ICW: Intracoastal Waterway. If I’m going to keep mentioning this thing, I should explain. The history’s pretty fascinating: after World War I and II it was clear ships needed to be free to move up and down the U.S. coasts without fear of attacks from U-boats and other submarines. You could move a lot of bulk on land, but you could move even more by sea. Standardized depths and widths were established by the Army Corps of Engineers, and existing channels, bays, inlets, and coves were connected through man-made canals to create one long continuous ribbon of protected water. It is now possible to sail from Brownsville, Texas, on the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico, all the way up to the Manasquan Inlet in northern New Jersey—without ever sailing in open ocean. That’s basically from Mexico to New York City. Pretty impressive, if you ask me.

  Chapter 19

  Connecting the Dots

  Atlantic Ocean, East of the Carolinas, USA

  6 Months, 21 Days aboard Fezywig

  ERIK

  Morehead City was on the southern edge of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It was a 200-mile jump that would keep us out at sea for two nights and up to forty miles offshore, but with the girls back aboard, we could rotate through watches. It was a bit of an abrupt start for them, but they were good sports.

  After all our inland sailing, it was refreshing to be back on the ocean. After two days, we closed in on Morehead. Suddenly we found ourselves sailing headlong into a stampede of boats coming out through the pass.

  I stayed on course and let them swerve and weave around us. A sailboat under sail always has the right of way. Fishing boat after fishing boat zipped past us. As the morning progressed, we entered the channel. The stampede continued, but now it was twice as thick and the boats were half the size. It felt like we were in a chase scene heading into oncoming traffic. At one point I counted eleven boats coming directly toward me like a cavalry charge.

  We took our sails down and turned on our engines. I held steady and let the smaller boats zip around us. We made it back into a small inlet. As we looked along the shore, lawn chairs and coolers were strewn everywhere. BBQ pits, beer, and umbrellas filled in the rest of the scene. We motored to the far end of the inlet and dropped anchor. After three days at sea and the mob scene coming in, I was grateful to be out of the fray. “What in the world is going on here?” I asked out loud. I’d never heard of Morehead City, but it seemed like the rest of the world had.

  It wasn’t until the next day that it dawned us. It was Labor Day weekend. We were still on Mars.

  After the jostling and bustle of Morehead, our nightly anchorages consisted of pulling off to the shallow side of a bend in the river, everyone taking a swim, and eating dinner while the sun set. Open marshes expanded for miles in every direction, and elegant egrets and darting swallows moved across the silent, cloudless skies.

  We sailed up Adam’s Creek, the Neuse River, and Bay River. We skirted the open Pamlico Sound and continued to cut up through the salty ICW. The Pungo River and Alligator River were connected by a seemingly endless canal that ran almost perfectly straight for twenty miles. I read a lot of chapters in Harry Truman that day.

  The pastoral beauty of the marsh lands gave way to rusty bridges and industrial warehouses. The water thickened and the weather turned gray and broody. A storm was churning. Skies turned gunship gray and lightning flickered in the distance. We passed through the Great Lock, which brought us back to sea level and ultimately into Norfolk, Virginia. We entered through the massively tall bridge that frames the southern entrance to the U.S. Naval Shipyard. We moved slowly and reverently past the towering warships that lined both sides of the river and dwarfed Fezywig many times over.

  It was like sailing through a canyon with metal walls. The darkening sky beyond continued to create an almost enclosed feeling of dread. The condensed space was packed with massive firepower. Lightning began to shoot down. I was grateful we weren’t the tallest piece of metal anymore. We prepped the boat and got everyone and everything inside. Once the rain started, I decided we should lower the dinghy to keep it from filling with rainwater and buckling.1

  I should have brought the big boat to a stop, and not tried some Knight Rider/Evel Knievel launch while underway. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to stop the boat right in front of the navy police boat floating nearby. One doesn’t want to look suspicious, righ
t? Sometimes I am an idiot. The dinghy flipped on its side and started spilling its contents—fuel canister line, oars, bench—into the water. Emily grabbed the fuel line and saved it, but one oar went into the water. We stopped the boat, leveled the dinghy, got it properly lowered, and tethered for a tow. We then looped around and picked up the oar that had drifted lazily away. Nothing suspicious there.

  It’s kind of like parallel parking. Plenty of people screw up parallel parking, but it’s another matter to do it while the police are sitting across the street watching. They’re not going to give you a ticket, but it’s embarrassing.

  Sorted out, we were on our way. All the kids went below deck so they wouldn’t be seen with us. I wanted to go below deck too, but Emily wouldn’t let me. I waved to the police as we sailed past.

  Two months earlier we had been sitting on the eastern edge of the Virgin Islands. We’d asked our kids if they wanted to go to Anegada or head home. They voted for home. Then we scrawled a short timeline for getting to Virginia. It was almost like some mystical magic that we were now actually in Virginia. All the day sails and overnight passages, sketchy anchorages and overpriced marinas, open sounds and constrained canals strung together, and now we had arrived.

  EMILY

  When we originally discussed living on a sailboat, I asked Erik, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  He said, “We could be financially ruined, never recover, have to send our kids to live with relatives, and all our friends will think we’re idiots.”

  “How likely is that scenario?” I asked. We agreed it wasn’t likely and we’d still be young enough to make a comeback if it happened.

  We’d spent a day with the Andersons, who lived nearby. We loved them, and they loved Fezywig. It felt like a perfect fit. Erik checked email. His former employer had given him definitive word that he was being hired back on. He would start in two months. I’d wanted him to quit that “soul-numbing” (his words) job for years. We were practicing taking life one day at a time and letting it emerge. Now that Erik knew how we were going to pay rent and buy groceries, he was visibly relieved. It didn’t seem right for him to return to the same gray graveyard-shift cubicle after living at sea. But if it put his heart at ease, I was on board. Our savings were practically depleted, so our hourglass was almost empty, but we now had an exit strategy.

  We could have ended the trip right there in Virginia. We technically didn’t need to sail home. The Andersons, who would lease Fezywig from us, lived in Virginia. All our stuff in storage was in Virginia. Our minivan was in Virginia. Why sail Fezywig all the way up to New York City?

  “I want to connect the dots,” I said. “I want to travel all the way from Saint Martin to the Dyckman Marina at five miles per hour. I want to see it with my own eyes.” Erik liked the idea of sailing under the George Washington Bridge. Our kids were game for anything. The Andersons were willing to come north to get Fezywig. So home would be our finish line. Home had been a moving target. It was where we were together. It was where we had friends. It was where we’d been before. But there was no arguing that the two-bedroom apartment where we had lived, loved, struggled and raised our family for fifteen years—where Lily was born in the bathtub—was definitely home. It was our beginning, and it would be the end.

  We still had 300 nautical miles to go, sixty hours of nonstop sailing if the conditions were good and we stayed on the outside; longer if we used the ICW or anchored at night. We needed provisions, a charge cord for the phone, and a new line for the dinghy. The old line was small and frayed and brittle from baking in the sun, like our topping lift. It was falling apart. Erik borrowed a car from the Andersons so we could run some errands.

  I was gathering the kids to join him when a dinghy pulled up to our stern. It was a family of four. Eli saw the two boys in their dinghy and made his way down the starboard steps to grab their line and cleat it off.

  “Hi, my name is Eli and I’d like to play,” Eli said, and he proceeded to introduce all of us and ask about our guests. Was all this time in the South turning him into a gentleman? This boy had some manners. The Rabin family was from a large catamaran called Little Wing, and their two boys invited Eli to play Legos on their boat. I knew he wouldn’t have any fun running errands, so I let him go. The rest of us hopped in our dinghy and met Erik at a parking garage.

  “So where’s Eli?” Erik asked.

  “He’s having a playdate with the boys on the kid boat that pulled in,” I answered.

  “Cool. What are their names?”

  I gave him their first names, “Marina and Joseph.” I didn’t know their last names.

  “Do they have a way to reach us if something comes up?”

  “I dropped my phone in the ocean a while back,” I said. That’s when I realized I could’ve given them Erik’s number. I wasn’t in the habit of using a phone.

  “You guys talked for about five minutes?” Erik asked.

  “Maybe three,” I said. “Do you think we should go back?”

  “It’s okay,” Erik said as I shrugged. “I was just wondering.” Erik smiled and squeezed my hand. We were used to being in a small, safe community where trust was high and goodwill was plentiful. We knew we would have to say goodbye to that soon.

  It was weird being so far away from Fezywig, zipping around in a car running to Target and Home Depot. I felt like we were playing in somebody else’s life. It wouldn’t be this convenient even in New York City. Parking was never this easy. We got a lot done quickly. We got the food, the charger, and the new dinghy line. It was made out of material that was stronger and would float. It was a glossy black and silky, which didn’t matter, I guess. The main point was we wouldn’t have to worry anymore about losing our dinghy or snagging the line under the boat.

  After unloading the groceries and ferrying them back to Fezywig, Erik and I rode over to Little Wing to check on Eli. He was having a grand time making Lego movies with the other boys. Their dad was a filmmaker. He said he would take the boys out for ice cream on shore and drop Eli off later. It was an easy yes. We got a lot of points with Eli.

  ERIK

  That evening our family was all gathered on Fezywig. We went to bed safe and secure. I wrote in my journal:

  “So what do I make of all this? Is it too good to be true? Does the Universe really want good things to come my way? I’m a little stunned how things seem to be working out. We seem to have our boat going into the hands of wonderful family, who I’m confident will do their best to take care of it. I seem to have a job that will allow me to take care of my family. Things can go wrong. What I meant was, turn out differently than we want or expect. But right now they’re turning out the way I’d hoped. That makes me feel lucky. I suppose this is the moment where I look back at my journey of buying this boat. I think about that email to my dad, the one where I talk about buying my VW Rabbit, and maybe I’d made a mistake. Well, I don’t think I did. It’s been hard. It’s been different than I’d expected. But that’s okay. It’s not over yet. I still have to sail up the coast to NYC. But I think I’m excited to do that. For now, we’re here. We’ve made new friends. We have food. And transportation. And communication. And our kids are happy. And we’re happy. We have a home to go back to. We continue to meet lovely people. Our kids continue to make friends. I guess what I’m saying is things feel good. We’re in a good spot.”

  EMILY

  The next morning we joined Little Wing for brunch. We had a common friend: Day Dreamer. They’d ridden out a hurricane together a few years back. Day Dreamer had given us their Swedish pancake recipe, so Karina and Alison made a batch in honor of them. I turned a large can of dried apples into a spicy warm filling. It was an amazing meal and even more amazing conversation. Cruisers have the flexibility to make a new friend and visit for hours at a stretch. That’s how new friends become life friends so quickly. Nobody had to be somewhere by a certain time. And if th
ey did, you’d go together and help out. On this particular morning we sat and talked.

  Joseph was a successful cinematographer who was represented by a huge global agency. Name any big-time rock star and he had shot their music video. At the time, he was getting more and more offers to work on feature films. He’d taken the work, but it was taking its toll on his family. After a while, he asked his agent a direct question: “How many of your feature film cinematographers are still married?”

  The answer: none.

  That’s when he stopped doing feature films. They sold their house on the north shore of Long Island, bought Little Wing, and focused on strengthening their marriage and family.

  The boys were in the main salon working on a stop-motion movie on the table. It was like a little miniature film studio made out of Legos. They were completely absorbed. The boys played, we grown-ups talked, and the Bigs listened as they helped clean up the kitchen.

  Marina and Joseph were seekers. They shared their journey from one faith to another, one philosophy to another, their exploration of manhood and womanhood and the roles each played in their marriage and family. They ended up where they were now.

  We all liked music, so we sang hymns together. It was unusual for us. We loved to play music, but we usually played Jack White or the Decemberists, or our own tunes. We didn’t play church music together often.

  Joseph taught us the Southern spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” We sang it a cappella. Then we sang it a cappella in a round. Joseph and Erik sang the bass call and the ladies sang the soprano response. We repeated the final phrase over and over. Quieter and quieter, and then we stopped. After a moment, we all smiled big and applauded. I would miss all this.