Once Upon a Gypsy Moon

by Michael Hurley

  As soon as my children were old enough, in the mid-1990s, I started taking them on wilderness canoe trips and writing about those trips for publication. As they grew in age and experience, our maps became more distant and our destinations more daring, stretching into Canada and the Great North. I was a boy escaping into the woodlot again, but now I had the wherewithal to show my own children the far-flung adventures I had only dreamed of having as a child. Over an eight-year period, one or both of my children usually accompanied me on monthly wilderness expeditions, some lasting a week at a time, spanning more than fifty rivers and lakes all across America and two Canadian provinces. Those halcyon days for my children would change as all childhoods do, though in ways that neither they nor I could have imagined at the time.

  In 1998, I left small-town life on the North Carolina coast and moved the family to Raleigh at the invitation of a large defense firm that needed an experienced litigator. Suddenly I was back in a fast-paced, corporate world after a ten-year sabbatical in my own small practice. During our first few years in Raleigh, I continued taking paddling trips with my children while also working full-time as a lawyer. By 2004, however, my children were becoming teenagers whose time and interests were naturally more inclined toward friends and sports teams than camping trips with Dad. It was just as well, as my own attention was increasingly drawn to the demands of the law firm. I left the wilderness and stopped writing. My practice exploded in size. The pace of life began to accelerate, and details of the passing daily scene seemed to blur as they went whizzing by. On the other side of that blur, I came to the end of a twenty-five-year marriage.

  Chapter 4

  A Voyage Lost

  I was determined not to write even obliquely about the failure of my marriage, and I strove in various fits and starts, over months, to find an honest way not to do so. After all, a marriage is a two-sided story told differently by two people and clearly understood in all its particulars by neither.

  I write of these things now because the end of my marriage is the crucible out of which this voyage and this memoir have come. It is my hope that by exploring the insights gained from this new perspective, I will have something important to say. Others will be the judge of my efforts, but it is important (to me) that I try.

  William Maxwell once wrote, “When we talk about the past, we lie with every breath we take.” If nothing else, I wish to prove him wrong in what I have to say now. While the problems in my marriage—as in all marriages—were a shared responsibility, the blame for the failure of my marriage is mine alone. I had an affair.

  It is, somehow, too easy to write those words. Words cannot convey the enormity of what occurred. Worse, there is a self-congratulatory air to public confession and a false piety that comes from making a show of one’s contrition. I don’t have any illusions about my own piety, nor do I feel an impulse to congratulate myself for anything. Quite the contrary.

  I have long been haunted by the words I wrote in an essay about marriage that was published in the fall of 1998:

  Over the long haul, there will come a cold, sober moment when all that separates us from the abyss of self-indulgence is the power of the promise we have made to each other. From our commitment to obey the promise in that moment—if for no better reason than because it is a promise—comes a wife’s trust and the sound sleep of little children. From that trust comes the freedom to celebrate each other’s differences without fear of being divided by them. And in that freedom abide the peace, joy and contentment we have been searching for all along.

  I received more mail about that essay than almost any other. As powerful as those words were, I recognize in them now a warning to myself as much as an exhortation to others. At the time, the differences in my marriage had increasingly become, for me, a source of tension rather than celebration. Yet as a latchkey child of divorce, I had always promised myself that I would never put my own children through that hardship. In an effort to constrain my unease that our differences would one day divide us, I decided to “double down” on my promise to my wife by writing boldly about it to thousands of people. By those words, which I knew then to be true and still believe today, I had hoped to shame myself into commitment.

  But I discovered that I had no shame. On a warm November day in 2005, I ignored every warning I had given to myself and others, and I leaped headlong into the abyss.

  Like a drunken tourist racing to board a flaming, sinking ship bound for Disneyland, I convinced myself that I had found bliss in stolen moments with a married woman who shared my love of the outdoors and my impaired sense of judgment. It was a lie, of course, as all affairs are. It was also an act of unfathomable cruelty to the people affected most by my actions.

  I have no intention, in writing this, that friends should lift me up and say, “There, now. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” I am quite capable of doing that on my own. I well know that infidelity is not as rare as we might think or hope. The idea—now so prevalent in law and politics—that there are “good” people and “bad” people and that “good” people always do the right thing is a fiction of the childish mind. The wisdom of country songs notwithstanding, every one of us, since the Fall of Man, has been the “cheating kind” in whatever area of life holds for us the greatest temptation. Humility requires that we understand this, but it is more important to know that we are not defined by our mistakes. A ship’s wake tells you where she has been, not where she is going.

  I have often considered that Christ, who surely knew that Peter would one day deny and betray him, gave him the keys to the kingdom anyway. He did not define Peter by his weakness, nor should we so define ourselves. Indeed, to wallow in self-opprobrium is arrogance worse than the sin because it values self-esteem and the esteem of others—which we often seek but so rarely find—more highly than God’s forgiveness, which we rarely seek but already possess.

  I am a firm believer in the power of grace, and even in the darkest of those days, when I had completely lost my way, I felt that God was near. Over the course of several weeks, I experienced the patient teaching of a nun who, though never married, had remarkable skills as a marriage counselor. At first begrudgingly and in the end very thankfully, I came to understand that affairs are not flights of romance between two soul mates but tragedies of self-delusion between two addicts. That understanding, however, for all its healing power in my own life, could not undo the damage I had done.

  The affair finally ended, but my wife had the clarity of mind to see the obvious as well as the courage I lacked to admit it. In September 2006 she asked me to go, and by the next month I was gone. I returned to her door a year later, after rushing into dating and a string of failed relationships, to ask for her forgiveness and reconciliation. Both were refused, and none would say without good reason.

  I did not linger. I learned, as the song says, that “everybody’s got to leave the darkness sometime.” After a year of separation, I found a divorce support group I wished I’d found on day one. I joined a men’s Bible study group. I talked to someone older and wiser than I who convinced me to stop dating long enough to recognize my self-destructive pattern of seeking emotionally unavailable partners. I read books about boundaries. I found humility, yes, but also the courage to stand up for myself. I struggled, fell backward, tried again, and made slow progress.

  It had been almost three years since I had left my marriage when I stepped off that airplane in Baltimore to find the Gypsy Moon and take her to sea. In that time I could be proud of one thing—I had not returned to the woman with whom I’d had the affair. But other than this one small triumph, my life had been altered in ways unforeseeable to me three years before. I battled loneliness, feelings of failure, my children’s loss of trust, and the absence of friends once dear to me. My billable hours declined at work. Less than a year after my divorce was final, I suffered a second divorce when I was unanimously voted out of the partnership in the law firm where I’d spent the past eleven years. I found myself, at the age of fif
ty-one, back in solo practice, struggling to get a business loan in the worst credit market since the Great Depression.

  When I lost my job, my income went to zero and then slowly recovered—as my new practice got underway—to less than half of what it had been before. I was one of the lucky ones who found work, but to ensure that I could meet alimony, child support, and tuition payments, I sold my house, my car, and whatever else anyone would buy. I moved into an apartment and found myself washing clothes in a communal laundry next to college kids in backward baseball caps and flip-flops, with the smell of marijuana wafting down the hall. There was a kind of gallows humor to it all. It wasn’t poverty or hardship by any means, but it was transformational to me.

  Even as the chips fell steadily lower, the Gypsy Moon—an aging sloop badly in need of major repairs and new sails—remained. Aside from the fact that no one would buy her in a down economy, her worth to me was measured more in dreams than dollars. She was a magic carpet, with a hull still “as hard as a New York sidewalk” in the estimation of one surveyor, and well equipped for flights of fancy. She was my partner in the continuing quest I had begun as a boy on Chesapeake Bay. She was a tangible reminder that despite all that had occurred to make my life so much smaller, there was still a reason to dream big dreams and a means to attain them.

  The fire we endure has a way of refining us and giving us a kind of rebirth. In time, new parts of my life eventually bloomed. As you read this memoir, you will learn of these blossoms and blessings, none of which would ever have appeared but for the fire in my life.

  It was once famously said that Italy produced the Renaissance despite thirty years of war and struggle, while Switzerland had only the cuckoo clock to show for its many centuries of peace and harmony. Despite the struggles I faced, I well know that whatever comes of my efforts now is likely to be much closer to a cuckoo clock than to Da Vinci, but perhaps it will be a better clock than I might otherwise have made, or at least one that can tell the time. Time will tell.

  So you see, August 2009 was a place of pause in my life. A moment of slack tide—that quiet hour right after something huge and once inexorable has been spent and just before something altogether new begins to move in another direction entirely. Whether such a time is the calm before the storm or that darkest hour before the dawn is a thing we can know only after we are carried off in it, as the tide waits for no man. But whatever it was, and wherever it was going, on that sunny afternoon near Annapolis, Maryland, I was not about to miss it.

  Chapter 5

  Preparations for Sea

  The Gypsy Moon had undergone various repairs and improvements in preparation for the contingencies of an extended voyage, the need for some of which I had come to appreciate the hard way. Two years earlier, during her maiden voyage to the Bahamas, she had brushed shoulders with Tropical Storm Barry as it moved across Florida on the second of June—the first time a cyclone had come so close to those islands so early in the season in four decades. Wandering in the Abacos, far from VHF weather-radio broadcasts, I was caught unaware by remnants of the passing storm. As I made a run across fifty miles of open water from Great Sale Cay for the harbor at West End, my headsail shredded in high winds, and the sheets fouled the roller furling. Unable to make sail or lower sail, I learned then the value of old-fashioned hank-on jibs that go up when you pull the halyard and come down the same way. So one of the first changes made to the Gypsy Moon in preparation for this solo voyage was the removal of the roller furling and the replacement of the head stay.

  The decision to take down a $2,000 roller furling system and switch to hanked-on headsails was a nod toward the reliability of a simple nineteenth-century design over the convenience of modern technology. Roller furling became common in the early 1980s. It allows a helmsman, while seated in the comfort of the cockpit, to deploy or stow the headsail merely by pulling a line wrapped around a drum at the base of the forestay. The line spins the drum, the drum spins the forestay, and the jib—tucked into a groove in the forestay like a window shade—furls or unfurls as the forestay swivels, depending on the direction in which you pull the line.

  On a pleasant day’s sail on the bay, roller furling is a convenient thing to have. It eliminates the need to put down your gin and tonic to travel to the foredeck to raise or lower the headsail. In a rising wind on the open ocean, however, with the risk of the line fouling in a rat’s nest in the drum and the helmsman unable to retrieve or lower a flogging headsail, it is (in my opinion) of little convenience at all. Moreover, the thin fabric of sails appropriate for light winds is nothing like the cardboard-thick storm jib needed for heavy weather. You can’t accomplish that sail change with roller furling. You’ve got to get your fanny on a pitching, wet foredeck, pull one sail down, and replace it with the other. Roller furling makes that process harder because it requires the sail to be fully unfurled before it can be lowered. Unfurl a three-hundred-square-foot sail in a thirty-knot squall and you’re not likely to see it again soon. As a result, skippers on boats with roller furling often succumb to laziness in making sail changes too late, too infrequently, or not at all. They usually end up flying too much or too little canvas in high winds, which may explain why so many boats with roller furling that venture offshore are reported to suffer dismastings. And yet the pressures of modern marketing have done so much to make these and other “improvements” standard on new boats that seem more like floating RVs than seagoing vessels.

  Another modification on the Gypsy Moon that went against the grain was the installation of a Monitor Windvane. This is a Rube Goldberg contraption that steers a boat on a constant heading relative to the wind, without benefit of electricity or fuel or human effort. It operates by means of a wind vane mounted on the transom. The vane is attached to a servo-pendulum rudder that pulls one of two lines running to the ship’s wheel. As the boat veers off course, the vane backs against the wind, pushing the servo-pendulum rudder, which pulls the line, which turns the wheel, which alters the course of the boat until the vane is headed dead into the wind again. Monitor Windvanes are expensive to install and difficult to learn to operate correctly, but once mastered they can sail a boat on a straight course indefinitely. First perfected in the 1950s by some British “yotties” who were trying to race each other solo “across the pond,” some form of this device has been a trusted ally on sailing circumnavigations ever since.

  Push-button electronic navigation systems that operate by battery power are more commonly seen, and the Gypsy Moon is fitted with one. They are convenient and simple to operate, but they cannot handle the strain of heavy seas or high winds or constant use over a long span of time. The motors burn out or the gears strip. Simpler is better, most of the time.

  High on the list of improvements was a newly inspected and repacked four-man inflatable life raft, which I nicknamed Lucky Jack after the hero of Patrick O’Brian’s novels. It is stored in a sealed canister and strapped into a steel cradle that is bolted to the deck just ahead of the mast. The raft (I am instructed) deploys automatically when the canister, secured by its tether to a strong fitting on deck, is thrown overboard. The tug of the tether pulls a pin inside the canister that fires a CO2 cartridge, which inflates the raft. The covered raft is designed for survival in all sea states, until help arrives. Lucky Jack is well named because he has never been needed, and I for one am hoping his luck holds.

  Other doomsday devices that I keep aboard include two Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs), which, with the flip of a switch in a moment of need, will transmit an electronic signal embedded with the Gypsy Moon’s unique data signature and GPS coordinates to satellites in space from any ocean in the world. The satellites relay the SOS signal and the boat’s exact position to the US Coast Guard and international rescue agencies.

  Chapter 6

  A Time to Go

  So much for preparation and visions of disaster. This is, after all, a sailing voyage and not a moon launch. It is easy to get so carried away with the
logistics of planning that we lose sight of what remains, which is simply “to go.” On this subject Joshua Slocum, who in 1898 at the age of fifty-four became the first man to sail alone around the world, had this to say in the closing paragraphs of the book he wrote about his famous voyage:

  To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go. The tales of rough usage are for the most part exaggerations, as also are the stories of sea danger…Dangers there are, to be sure, on the sea as well as on the land, but the intelligence and skill God gives to man reduce these to a minimum. And here comes in again the skillfully modeled ship worthy to sail the seas. To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.

  I eased the Gypsy Moon away from the dock where she had been laid to after launching. The diesel engine kept up a low, steady rumble until I reached the last marker on the Magothy River. When I could feel the wind of Chesapeake Bay on my face, I pulled the kill switch on the engine and raised the headsail, as the world returned to silence. I was off, though only briefly, for the short sail to the mouth of the Severn River, where I would turn into Annapolis for the night.

  As I glided into Spa Creek by the naval academy, my anchor found the bottom with plenty of sea room. I made the rode snug on the bow chocks. The boat turned smartly to the wind and luffed sail. Within minutes, all sheets and canvas were made fast. I was looking at Annapolis from the same place where Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington had viewed the town. They came here under sail, and so did I. Whatever poetry there was in that, I savored it only briefly before the heavens opened with a warm summer rain.