The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  We take a walk. Like young colts we kick up our heels in the soft, sweet-smelling grass. It’s the best, the greenest, the most fragrant grass ever. “Can I roll down the hill, Mom?” asks Jon. Christopher is jumping up and down, skipping and leaping like an impala, saying over and over, “I’m supercharged!”

  Oh, look - a convenience store! We make a beeline for it. It’s only a small corner store, but better than what passes for a supermarket in most of the countries we’ve seen. Oh joy! Look! Bits ’n Bites! Caramilk bars! Fudgee-Os! Oh - Cherry Blossoms! I haven’t given a single thought to Cherry Blossom chocolates for four years, but the minute I see those familiar little square yellow boxes, containing a miniature volcano oozing thick cherry syrup, I absolutely must have one, can’t wait another minute. Bliss!

  Jonathan and I discover a wonderful nature trail through a swamp and find that it’s an exotic wonderland. Perfectly formed balsam trees with fresh green branch-tips. Glossy yellow buttercups, looking good enough to eat. Maple trees, actual maple trees. Cheeky red squirrels, chittering and chattering to us from the treetops. Cattails. A bubbling, burbling stream. Oh, look at the chickadee! And a robin! Oh, a loon, a loon! All of these things familiar yet strangely exotic. All of them Canada.

  Friendly people. People who look just like us, who watch the same TV shows, laugh at the same jokes. We no longer stand out. The bank machines work. The grocery store aisles are unbelievably wide and open and clean and well stocked. Oh - blueberries! Beef-a-roni! Eggo waffles! Butter tarts! The check-out girls smile! A young man is actually bagging our groceries for us and wheeling our cart outside. This is efficiency! This is great!

  For breakfast we eat Eggo waffles with real Aunt Jemima Syrup. The best Eggos ever. We drive to a Walmart! It’s the best Walmart ever! Cherry Blossom chocolates, four to a pack! And they have Wheat Thins, and Breton Crackers, and Cheez Whiz and … and …

  We find a payphone and make a call. Miracle! The phone works! Hey, there’s even a telephone book. This is the best payphone ever!

  We find a Tim Hortons. Christopher chooses a chocolate-covered doughnut, something he’s had before but has no memory of. I savour the best, absolutely the best maple-flavoured doughnut I’ve ever had.

  Isn’t this country great?

  We had now left all three of the world’s great oceans in our wake. Soon the rising and falling of the restless surface of the sea, our constant companion over the past four years, would be only a dim memory. We said our goodbyes to the Atlantic with a mixture of nostalgia and satisfaction. Then we turned our eyes ahead, to the St. Lawrence, the great river that would take us almost all the rest of the way home.

  The mouth of the St. Lawrence was a wonderland of sealife. Funny, curious seals, harbour porpoises, herring gulls, graceful, long-winged gannets, stubby little dovekies, long-necked black cormorants, all diving from the air or from the water and coming up with fish. Often they bobbed on the water in contented little groups, taking off in flight only at the last minute, just as we were upon them, their webbed feet churning hard on top of the water as they approached lift-off.

  But we reserved our greatest enthusiasm for the whales. Fin whales, minke whales, smiling white beluga whales by the dozen, we loved them all. We could see the fin whales spouting from far away, their blows reaching up into the sky in a tall, long-lasting plume of what looked like white smoke. At first we all craned our necks and shouted with excitement when some far away black shape emerged out of the water like a giant floating rock. Soon, however, these sightings became so common-place we would pay attention only if the whale surfaced right by our boat. We saw more whales in one day on the St. Lawrence than we’d seen on the entire circumnavigation.

  The sky was blue, a warm breeze ruffled our hair, and we were all exclaiming in delight and rushing from one part of the deck to another as various seals and whales made their appearances. For months, we had found it so hard not to think about getting back home. It had been almost a year since we had left Kenya, and since then we’d been travelling hard, mostly against hostile seas and contrary winds. Long gone were those peaceful days in the South Pacific when the wind was always at our backs and we never had to check a weather report. While crossing the Atlantic, we had actually posted a picture of our house on a bulletin board in our salon, to inspire us and remind us what of was waiting for us, just ahead.

  But here, surrounded by nature at her most bountiful, I was thinking not about what was at home, but about the things we were soon to lose. Here on our little boat we had found adventure, new experiences, a better understanding of the world and our place in it, closeness as a family, personal growth, warm friendships, and the chance to appreciate the wonder of our glorious Earth. Somehow, on this trip, we found the freedom to reinvent ourselves, to laugh more, to become more the people we would like to be.

  As much as I looked forward to the comforts of home, it was hard, and more than a little scary, to give this up. Watching the whales swimming free in the St. Lawrence River, all of a sudden I was jealous of them. I realized, with more than a touch of sadness, that our own golden days of freedom were rapidly coming to an end.

  We continued pressing onwards, forty or fifty miles each day, timing our trips to coincide with the rising tide. As we approached the spot at Sorel where the Richelieu River branched off the St. Lawrence, where we had turned off towards New York four years before, another great swell of emotion filled my throat. This constant crying of mine was getting tire-some. But I had good reason: this was it. Even though it was not the end of our trip, this was the end of our circumnavigation.

  We had always had faith that we would circle the globe, no matter what. And here we were, at a simple river branching off another - and for us it was the culmination of a dream, a dream so powerful it had let nothing stand in our way. As Herbert led a countdown to the moment when we would cross our path, I couldn’t help but think back over the crazy year of preparation in which we had cast aside our land life and begun turning ourselves into sailors, with no experience, nothing but a grand vision to sustain us. I thought of the storms in the Pacific, the waterspout in Indonesia, the endless mechanical failures, of seventeen days of fearful sailing through pirate-filled waters off Somalia, the misery of sickness in Sudan, of fighting our way across the North Atlantic. I thought of the endless days at sea we’d spent, pushing, pushing, pushing always westward. We’d had far more wonderful experiences on our trip than bad ones - but at that moment, all I could think of were the struggles we’d overcome to reach this milestone. Now, no matter what happened to us in future, this achievement could never be taken away. We were circumnavigators.

  The next day we continued on to Montreal with the flags of all thirty-four countries we had visited waving proudly from our rigging. We had worked hard for every one of those flags: thirty-four countries, twenty-two languages, one by one we had sailed through the world’s time zones until now we were back where we started. Every time a ship passed us, someone in the pilothouse would scrutinize us with binoculars. Then, invariably, a small uniformed figure would appear on the upper deck and wave down at us. The captains of these mighty ships understood exactly what those flags meant. Rarely had our insignificant presence been acknowledged by one of these floating behemoths, but now our own captain stood proudly at the helm as passing ships saluted his achievement.

  We stopped in Montreal, and for two days Herbert worked hard, with the help of our boys and crews from other boats, to take down our masts. They wouldn’t fit under the bridges ahead. The walkways on Northern Magic were now filled with wooden booms, displaced bicycles, and other clutter. Two large aluminum masts and all the associated tangle of rigging now bisected our cockpit, making it very difficult to move or see. As we worked, both Herbert and I got lumps in our throat. The dismantling of our proud and beautiful ship made it only too obvious that the end of our trip was just around the corner. Even Michael, who was so enthusiastic about getting home, was saddened. “I hate Northern Magic this way,�
� he complained. “She doesn’t look right at all.” More than once did the thought cross our minds that maybe we should just put those masts back where they belonged and turn ourselves around.

  We navigated carefully through the shallow waters on the way to the lock at Ste Anne de Bellevue. A few people were waiting there to see us. We were also pleased to meet the same helpful lockmaster who had so kindly driven us to buy groceries and radio parts when we had passed through four years before. He had been only the first of hundreds of people we had met during our travels who had offered their help.

  We continued to our last lock, at Carillon. There were more people, sixteen of them in fact, waiting for us with gifts at the lock as we arrived. (“There are giggling girls!” exclaimed Michael, a sly grin on his face.)

  The next day we continued on. Every now and then we would notice people waving, honking, and flashing lights at us on the shore. Seeing these little welcoming committees never failed to surprise and delight us. We were slowly discovering that we had a lot more friends waiting for us to return home than we had when we left.

  Yet the closer we were coming to home, the more our hearts - Herbert’s and mine at least - were feeling wrenched with nostalgia over the ending of our trip. There were a hundred things about home we had missed - our waterbed always came first on the list, but also long, hot showers, the washer and dryer, our own car, TV news, Christmas Eve with friends, and big rooms you could whirl around in. There were plenty of times, especially on difficult passages, that we had practically obsessed about those missing comforts and couldn’t wait to be back.

  But as Christopher, my sunshine boy, came up onto the deck to snuggle in my arms, as he still did at least a dozen times a day, tears rose up in my eyes. This was happening to me with increasing frequency the closer we got to home.

  It was not the loss of the adventures I was grieving, nor even the loss of our freedom to go wherever and do whatever we wanted. It was the prospect of losing the tremendous closeness we had developed as a family that seemed, in the end, to be the most bitter pill to swallow. To have had all this time together, enjoying each other’s company, laughing at silly jokes, playing card games together in the evenings, holding each other when we were queasy or scared, working together, suffering together, talking about life and love under bright stars in the middle of the ocean - the loss of these simple but profound moments was what saddened me most.

  Once we were home we would all begin moving our separate ways. It was good and right that we should do so; our boys were growing up. But for four precious years we had held our children close and watched them develop, selfishly enjoying them and having them all to ourselves. We had lived as fully and as well as we knew how, and had shown them, we hoped, something about the meaning of life and of love. The boys - the confident and capable young men - we were bringing back home were a source of such pride and joy to us that it was looking at them, not at the oceans and adventures and wonderful experiences receding behind us, that brought the biggest lump to my throat as we covered those last few miles.

  The penultimate stop on our voyage was at the tiny town of Papineauville, Quebec, just about twenty miles from Ottawa. There was a friendly marina there with a small crane to help us put our masts back up. We wanted to arrive back home with our heads held high and flags flying.

  On the last evening of our trip, Herbert, Michael, Jonathan, Christopher, and I sat together in Northern Magic’s tiny, crowded salon - where we had shared so many close times, so many frustrations, so many discussions, jokes, laughs, and tears. The air was charged with a strange and potent mixture of excitement, joy, pride, nervousness, and fear. Our new life was about to start, a life in which we had to invent brand-new roles for ourselves, as people, as members of a close-knit family, as public figures, and as citizens of the world.

  As I prepared to go to bed, I stopped and looked at a small card on our bulletin board, a card from Dad that seemed so perfectly to sum up how we had actually managed, against all odds, to make it around the world. The card said:

  NEVER

  NEVER

  NEVER

  GIVE

  UP

  The next morning we left on the final twenty miles of our 35,000-mile, 1,445-day journey. Fern Beauvais, the kind marina manager who’d taken us under his wing, wept almost as much as I did as we hugged goodbye. On board with us were reporter Bev Wake and photographer Wayne Cuddington from the Ottawa Citizen, both of whom had by now become our friends. (Wayne was developing a bald spot on the top of his head from all the noogies the kids were giving him.) CBC-TV journalist Steve Fischer rounded out our crew, bringing with him a gourmet lunch for all. “I just knew if I didn’t bring this,” he said, “you wouldn’t eat today at all.”

  As we made our way upriver, accompanied by two escort vessels from the Navy League of Canada, we began to see people, hundreds of people, lining the shores. They were honking and waving at us and holding up giant banners saying, “Welcome Home Northern Magic.” Even today, many months later, my eyes fill up and my throat chokes at the memory of all those beautiful hand-painted signs, held up for us so bravely as a heavy rain began to fall. Small boats began joining us, some falling away to be replaced by others, but many of them staying on and on. Soon we had a flotilla of three dozen boats following in our wake. Sailboats, motor cruisers, dinghies, and even kayaks joined us in the rain.

  As we saw all these people, my eyes, already well primed and practised, filled yet again with tears. We’d been hugged and loved and protected and helped by so many people for so long, there was just no place left for all that swelling emotion to stay inside. I was not the only person on board Northern Magic with moist eyes.

  We didn’t know exactly what might have been planned for our actual arrival - Diane King, who, along with her husband, Paul Couch, had established the Northern Magic Web site three years before, had been working on some kind of homecoming party, but she had been evasive about the details. As the skies opened up and began to pour with rain at noon, an hour before our scheduled arrival time, I became worried the torrential rainfall would have wrecked her plans. We sped up, not knowing what might await us ahead.

  Long, long before, Michael had made a vow that he was going to abandon ship and jump into the water as soon as we approached Petrie Island, where our trip had begun. Wayne Cuddington had gotten wind of this, and was determined to capture the event on film. This became a bit of a contest, because Michael was just as determined to foil Wayne’s attempts to photograph him. We’d shared the plan with my father, and had told him where to wait for Michael ashore with a towel and a change of clothes. Michael had decided to dive from the boat while we were still moving. He figured Wayne wouldn’t be expecting it until we were anchored.

  “Go! Go!” Herbert said, at a moment when Wayne had his camera down.

  Michael did a beautiful dive over the lifelines from the cabin top, but somehow Wayne nonetheless managed to capture it in three frames, shooting from the hip even before he pulled the camera up to his face. Virtually no one in the flotilla, or ashore, noticed Michael’s small figure pulling smoothly through the water, leaving Northern Magic behind. It was Michael’s final act of the voyage, his symbolic gesture of independence.

  Meanwhile, on the highway above, there was a traffic jam as cars slowed down or stopped to watch our arrival. The air was filled with honking. But what was most amazing was what lay ahead, on the sandy banks of Petrie Island. Waiting for us - for us! - was a sea of people. Twenty-five hundred people were there, standing in the rain, covering the sandy beach and the hill above, pressing towards the shore to catch a glimpse of our arrival. “In your wildest fantasies, if you would dream about the perfect homecoming,” I said to Steve Fischer, my face crumpling up with emotion, “it would look like this.”

  We anchored Northern Magic and, taking a deep breath, stepped into our dinghy and headed off ashore.

  As we bumped up against the sandy shore of Petrie Island, a solid wall of people pres
sed forward. One by one, we jumped into a forest of waiting arms. Television cameras and radio microphones were pushed in front of us. People pressed in to touch us.

  The instant they landed, Jonathan and Christopher were completely swallowed by the crowd. I lost sight of them. Luckily, my Mom had grabbed them and began propelling them through the cheering people to the stage. Michael had arrived from his swim ten minutes ahead of the rest of us and was already towelled dry, shaking hands and signing auto-graphs like a real celebrity.

  Now Herbert, Michael, and I began a long, slow walk I will never forget - never want to forget. In a thousand lifetimes, I could never duplicate the feeling. I’m not even capable of describing what it was like to be the recipient of a giant group hug, 2,500-people strong. As I made my way through the throng, my wad of Kleenex got larger and larger - helped by kindly ladies with tears in their own eyes, who added their spare tissues to mine. It was like a beautiful slow-motion dream. We’ll still be feasting on that memory when we’re ninety years old. Look at me - I’m crying again even now.

  We went up on the stage, which was lined by RCMP officers in crimson red dress uniform. Hearing the national anthem just about broke me apart. Christopher stood by my side and hugged me. We were even given the flag off the top of Parliament Hill. The Hershey Factory had sent the Hershey Kissmobile, which showered us with chocolate and Gummi Bears. (“Next time you do a circumnavigation, you should tell everyone how much you love diamonds,” whispered Paul Couch in my ear.)

  The whole crowd sang a song to us, the story of our voyage put to the tune of Gilligan’s Island. We were presented with a huge cake. Then we descended from the stage to meet once again the hundreds of people who wanted to speak to us. Dozens of volunteers were there, selling Northern Magic T-shirts and food donated by local merchants, all the proceeds going towards our special projects in Indonesia and Kenya.