Once Upon a Gypsy Moon: An Improbable Voyage and One Man's Yearning for Redemption

by Michael Hurley

  I much preferred the wisdom of Barbra Streisand that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” followed by no lesser light than Dean Martin, who told us that “you’re nobody till somebody loves you.” (Dino was exaggerating, admittedly, but we all still got the point.) The pop psychologists would have a field day with the codependency suggested by those lines, but I bet their songs would sell fewer records.

  Hoagy Carmichael wasn’t fooling anyone when he wrote “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and that really wasn’t his plan. We are made for community, both romantically and socially, and we know it. In case I have offended anyone’s musical tastes, there’s always Loggins and Messina, with their advice in “Danny’s Song” that “if you find she helps your mind, better take her home…” There you have it: the Gospel according to Casey Kasem.

  In truth, almost no one agreed with me in these ideas—least of all the women. After three years of separation and divorce, I found myself adrift in bachelorhood, no closer to shore than when I’d started, and beginning to feel the effects of the sun. I had perused hundreds of online dating profiles and begun to notice a pattern in what (usually divorced) women now in their forties and fifties are seeking in a man. It is more of a side salad than an entrée.

  Most women described themselves as well satisfied and living a full and busy single life. They would pointedly warn that they were not looking for Mr. Right, but should he carelessly stumble across their path, he must be prepared to defer to what they would ominously warn would “always be” their “first priority.” This was usually children, although in some cases it was extended family or a particular passion in life. The invitation to the hapless Lothario was clear: “If you hitch your wagon to my star, our relationship will never be at the center of my galaxy. We will spin in orbit around some other planet.” I didn’t want that, and I didn’t agree with that.

  These cheerfully written profiles were like billboards along a highway, intended to entice the weary traveler to take the next exit into someone’s private world, but they read to me more like the warning sign to the Cowardly Lion in the Haunted Forest: I’D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU.

  Lest I be accused of stealing candy from babies, I hasten to add what a Catholic priest once told me. Couples going through the church’s pre-Cana program to discern their readiness to marry, he said, invariably answer this question incorrectly: What should be your first priority, your relationship with your children or your relationship with your spouse?

  The most common answer of prospective mothers and fathers is that their relationship with their children would certainly come first. In a way, this answer makes perfect sense. Children need love and nurturing to develop properly, and for a time during their development, their needs are so great and so constant that they must take precedence over the needs of husband and wife. Husbands and wives gladly make that sacrifice. I did. Very likely you did. There is no contest here.

  It is also a fact of life that romantic love can fade and marriages can end, while the bond between a parent and child endures forever. Yet even the Catholic Church recognizes that when children revolve in orbit around their parents’ relationship, they (and their parents) lead healthier lives than when children are made the center of their parents’ universe.

  An example from my boyhood better illustrates the point that millions of parents in my generation—and now the many divorced mothers among them—seem to be missing: I lettered in three sports in high school and played varsity lacrosse on a championship team in college, in the 1970s, and yet I cannot recall a single practice and no more than a handful of games that my mother ever attended. In fact, almost no one’s mom or dad was ever at practice, and none of us minded—or noticed. We got there on our bikes or we walked, and if there was an away game, our parents took us only if we couldn’t find a ride with a friend. My mother worked hard, and though I didn’t give it much thought at the time, I’m sure she had better things to do than to spend what blessed free hours she had on a Saturday morning cheering wildly as though I had done something remarkable by catching a pass or running fast on twelve-year-old legs. Playing sports was, for me, all the reward I needed, and as a result I was self-motivated to play with a dedication that took me as far as my abilities allowed. No one ever handed me a juice box or a brownie at halftime, but the team had a bucket and (one) ladle with all the ice water we needed.

  Years later, by the time I was coaching my son’s middle school lacrosse team and his sister was participating in soccer and gymnastics, the world had dramatically changed. The players’ parents—nearly all of them—were lined up like opposing armies along the sidelines for hours on end. Parking lots were choked with minivans. Parents were there not just for championship matches but for every game and most practices. The majority were there not just on a few weekends but every weekend. Some families sheepishly escaped during school breaks to go on vacation together, but many stayed home to attend practices as a sign of their “commitment to the team.” Rotund mothers anxiously shouted strategic advice to their tiny daughters on balance beams. Brigades of parents descended on fields at halftime with a veritable banquet of delights. Although the majority of these kids would never play beyond the middle school level, hundreds of dollars were spent on high-end equipment, elite training camps, and private leagues that involved overnight travel, hotels, and a total commitment of the parents’ time.

  Something seems very wrong with this picture. But needless to say, I didn’t try hard to win this argument in my own family, and our family was no different than most. I gave up and happily joined the throng. Kids naturally want to do what other kids are doing, and the same is true of parents. There is enormous social pressure not merely to conform to, but to excel at, generational norms of parenting. The baby boomers, my generation, have been the most hovering parents in history. This shows in the way it has shaped our children and our relationships.

  Admit it: most kids today don’t show nearly the same level of initiative and independence that you did at the same age. Adolescence, I am told, has been officially extended to age thirty. When husbands and wives make children the center of their lives and their marriage, either they become invested in the children’s never really leaving (hence the phenomenon of lengthening adolescence) or, when the children do leave, the marriage withers like a hollow tree. It may stand, petrified, but only until a strong wind blows.

  Chapter 12

  A Moment of Indecision

  So it was, I realized, as I strove to follow the advice of Streisand, Martin, Carmichael, Loggins and Messina, et al., that I was kicking against the goad. The problem is no longer that the glass slipper does not fit. It is that glass slippers have gone out of style, and Cinderella is likely to call the cops when the prince shows up.

  I did not want to become anyone’s side salad or fashion accessory, the missing piece of an already completed puzzle, or the consolation prize in someone’s otherwise disappointed life. I met some wonderful women and even nearly lost my heart a time or two, but after three years of earnest effort I had found no one with whom I shared a dream of the future. As the close of hurricane season approached in the fall of 2009, I was a ship in irons, rolling around the sea in light airs and lacking a heading.

  The Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving was a melancholy gray. It was growing dark and chilly by the time I left Raleigh for the three-hour drive to Beaufort. A call came in on my cell phone from a friend. She invited me to have Thanksgiving dinner at her home with her family. With no small difficulty, I declined. She insisted. I reconsidered.

  The weather was downright depressing. Accepting an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner would have been a welcome excuse to put off the overnight sail offshore to Masonboro Inlet that I had planned. The next day’s long trip was due to take me down the waterway to Southport, where I expected to dock the boat before jumping off for Nassau a week later. I was also afraid to set sail, to be honest.

  It was not the dreary weather, or being
alone, or the sixty-mile stretch of ocean from Beaufort to Masonboro Inlet that concerned me. On the open sea at night, the Gypsy Moon is as cozy as a warm fire and rocks like a baby’s cradle as she rises and falls over the waves. It was the unknown that troubled me, and the worry that I was about to do something rather foolish (again) and potentially very expensive (again) that I would regret (again).

  My life was hardly a pillar of constancy. I had been through some rough times. Money was an issue. I had a towering bill from my divorce lawyer that would take years to pay off and an eye-watering alimony payment to go with it that I would be making each month until my old age. My law practice was running smoothly enough, and I had carved out the time in my schedule to go, but if I stayed behind and worked I would make more money. There were a million reasons not to slip the lines and sail away from what seemed, then, a relatively safe harbor in my life.

  To make my decision no easier, I had gotten a call from my old pals at Northwest Creek Marina, near New Bern, the week before. After I’d given up my slip in that idyllic spot two years earlier, when leaving on my first trip to the Bahamas, I’d returned to find that I was at the bottom of a waiting list of a hundred people hoping to put their boats where mine had been. The other marinas where I was forced to keep the boat instead, when I returned, charged more than twice as much. Now my old berth was open again. Bringing the boat back there would have seemed the logical thing to do. It was just a two-hour drive from my home in Raleigh, over good roads in a well-sheltered harbor with first-class repair facilities nearby, on a river I knew well—too well, in fact.

  Harbors where every mark holds a memory and every face is an old friend are places best saved for old men and little children. “Not yet,” I thought.

  I arrived at the boat slip in Beaufort and went aboard. I found the Gypsy Moon as always, floating cheerfully high on her lines and listing ever so slightly to port, with dry bilges, clear decks, and everything in its place. Three teak hatch boards, varnished to a high gloss, enclosed the companionway. Removing them, I saw that all was in good order in the cabin below. There was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. The Gypsy Moon was not in Bristol fashion, by yachting standards. (She is, after all, a working boat, with all the attendant scuffs and scrapes.) But I would not have been embarrassed to serve the governor tea in my galley, had she been aboard.

  I bent the genoa onto the forestay and ran the sheets aft, port, and starboard, through the running blocks. The mainsail was furled on the boom and ready. I examined the route I would take through the narrow channel that leads from the marina to the bascule bridge and past the town of Beaufort, established in the year 1709. Along the town’s older streets, by the waterfront, a few brightly painted homes from those early years stand where they have witnessed the storms and worries of more than two centuries. But outside of a few historic avenues, little is left of the old places. Out on the main road, on my way into the marina, I passed a well-lighted orange Hardee’s sign—an emblem of the New South that has overtaken the legacy of Colonial fishermen, merchants, and planters.

  When all the work had been done to make ready for sea, I paused. All of the questions and objections that I had kept waiting at the bar these past few months now demanded a hearing and a decision. Would I go? Should I go?

  The harbor master’s office and chandlery at Town Creek Marina are encircled by a wide covered porch on which the staff has thoughtfully placed a number of high-backed rocking chairs. I found one of these and took my place, looking out over the water to the south. I was alone. The harbor was dark. The intermittent light rain of the day had eased. I could see the lights of the low bridge, not a quarter mile away, and the now-thinning automobile traffic that rumbled across it. No one and nothing stirred in the marina. All was quiet and still, as though the assembled instruments of the harbor’s orchestra had come to order, awaiting the rise of a conductor’s baton.

  I am not what most religious people would call a praying man, which is not to say that I do not often pray. I readily give thanks for all that has been given to me, which is mountainous, and beg forgiveness for my lack of faith, which is cavernous. It is rather that I feel a strong impulse toward formality, humility, and decorum when presuming to importune the Almighty.

  Part of this attitude, I suppose, comes from my earliest years in the Episcopal Church, where purse-lipped communicants rarely break into spasms of ecclesiastical joy for all the world to see. Part of this also comes from my life in the law, where a lawyer’s remarks to a judge are brief, to the point, made from a posture of respect, and mindful that the court’s considerable power must not be invoked unadvisedly or for any trivial purpose. Most of my reticence in prayer, though, is owed to the knowledge that the winds that bear aloft my petitions carry with them the prayers of some poor soul with malarial fever, a father keeping vigil over a sick child, or a wife on the eve of a battle from which her husband may not return. I am a well-fed lawyer playing about on a pleasure yacht, a stranger to illness and hardship, and a free man living in the most affluent nation on Earth. I am ashamed to be a supplicant in their company.

  And yet I pray, because that is what children do. Well do I know that whatever I truly need, my Heavenly Father will grant, and that the burden of what I truly deserve has been lifted through no merit of my own.

  I prayed that night, on the porch, for guidance in making a decision whether to go. I knew that I was committing myself to a journey that would take not weeks or months to complete, but years, and from which I or my boat might not return. I knew that it would cost money—not an inordinate amount (the boat is paid for, and the wind is free), but not an insignificant amount, either. I wanted to go and felt that I should, but I knew from long experience that I have wanted many things that I should not want, and that my judgment has not always served me. My self-esteem and self-confidence were not at a high ebb in that hour of my life. I wanted guidance. I wanted fatherly advice.

  There are some who say God speaks to them. I am not so sure. He has spoken through the prophets, according to my creed, but He has never spoken directly to me. I have, however, felt the presence of God. And from the perspective of the higher altitudes that the passage of time affords, I have seen the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life. All the same, I can’t say that I saw, heard, or felt anything of the kind, in the half hour I spent rocking and praying on the porch at Town Creek Marina. It seemed that God was leaving this call up to me, and so I made the best one I knew how to make.

  If I was looking for a sign that I had made the wrong call, it would not be long in coming. It was dark in the marina, for sure, but not nearly so inky black as it was out in the creek. The markers in the spur channel leading through the mud flats from the marina to the main waterway were not lighted. I should have laid out a compass course to follow, but it seemed too short a distance to bother. It had been easy enough three months earlier, when I had arrived there in daylight.

  Not one minute away from the dock, as I was making way under engine power toward the bascule bridge, I lost my bearings in the channel while looking down at a handheld GPS unit. I was having trouble finding my boat’s position on the blasted display. When I looked up, I noticed the bottom shoaling quickly on the depth sounder. Thinking I must be to starboard of the channel, I swerved to port, then felt a sudden downward lurch at the bow and an unwelcome firmness at the stern that signaled I was aground.

  I had nosed into the mud of Town Creek, having strayed out of the narrow and unforgiving channel in my eagerness to get underway. It must have been eight or nine o’clock when this happened, and on the eve of Thanksgiving, no less.

  Emblematic of the efficiency of the American maritime industry that I was sure I would miss wherever I was headed, a towboat was on my location in twenty minutes. In ten minutes more, the tow had turned the nose of the Gypsy Moon a few yards in the right direction, and not fifteen minutes after that, I was gliding through the channel, talking on the ship’s radio and saying thanks and
good night to the bridge tender. There was nothing between me and the open sea.

  Chapter 13

  A Wanderer’s Vigil

  The seas at the entrance to Morehead City remind me of the inside of a washing machine most any day. Tide and season merely determine whether you’re going to get the wash or the spin cycle. On this night, though, the waves rolled in long and slow, and the Gypsy Moon made her way gently out to sea. I chose a distant marker before making the turn to the south that would put me on a heading for Masonboro Inlet, at Wilmington. The winds were light from the northwest, and with her big drifter set out to port, the boat dipped her shoulder slightly and began the familiar jog that meant she was making good time on a broad reach.

  Out on the ocean, there was not another ship as far as my eyes could see. The quarter moon was gone and so was the rain, but the clouds obscured the stars. I set the autopilot and kept up a watch in the cockpit until the lights from Atlantic Beach, just south of Morehead City, began to fade astern. With the bow pointed out to sea, all sheets running fair, and the sail pulling well, I set the egg timer above my bunk in the pilot berth to ninety minutes and closed my eyes.

  There is something inherently holy about wandering, and that holiness enriches the wanderer so much that the voyage itself becomes the destination. In that first sacred hour of silence at sea, my thoughts collected around the decision I had just made, where I had been, and where I was going. It was hard not to notice that I was alone on a holiday set aside for families to gather around one another and give thanks. Although my solitude was self-imposed, it ran deeper than the mere proximity of people with whom I might have shared a meal and a laugh. It was impossible to overlook that I had come to a point in my life when I was, whether on land or at sea, truly, truly alone.