I longed not only for different earth beneath my feet but, perhaps most of all, for the blue water and bracing shores of the Atlantic. Where it meets the upper Texas coast, the Gulf of Mexico is a gray, tepid backwater, not an ocean. But whatever the reason for my malaise, having young children who stood most to benefit from living closer to extended family made me feel this sense of isolation all the more acutely. We resolved to move back east.
A woman and her husband took over the reins of my law practice in Houston, and my wife and I left on a twelve-hundred-mile road trip in a weary Volvo with a weary baby girl crying in the backseat. Her animated big brother in the front would occasionally offer cheerful reassurances (which she was not buying) that this would all be “fun.” It most certainly was.
I had a modest stake from the sale of my law practice with which to buy a small house in New Bern and start what I thought would be a bold new venture in the sailboat charter business. I knew that I would be eligible to receive a North Carolina law license after a six-month waiting period, but it didn’t occur to me that returning to the practice of law would be at all necessary. The coast guard had given me an examination and a license as a boat captain. We lived simply, and for a short while, I plied my new trade to adventurous hotel guests and romantic couples aboard a twenty-eight-foot sloop that I had trucked up from Texas along with our furniture and other belongings.
Even at a speed of four knots, I sailed very quickly into the stern face of reality. Within a month my error was clear. North Carolina was not Maryland, and New Bern was not Annapolis in the making. The sailing tradition that I had known in my youth was not deep in the culture there. In the Old South, rivers were places where people dumped used tires, dead bodies, and everything else they were either ashamed of or didn’t know what to do with. When I arrived, it had not been that long since the timely intervention of some farsighted citizens had spared New Bern’s now elegant and valuable riverfront from becoming the premises of the city jail.
Most boats in farming country, I found, were used for water-skiing and fishing, not quiet reveries. Many of the sailboats in New Bern were brought in by transplanted Yankees who were lured by cheap home prices to retire in the area. Some of these folks, judging by how often their boats left their slips, had grown too retired to sail them.
In my little sloop Intrepid, I was always, it seemed, alone on the river. The scenery was inviting. The estuaries that make up the North Carolina coast are more forested and their shorelines more secluded, even today, than those on the Chesapeake Bay to the north. A gentle wind blows across these wide lowlands with a constancy welcomed by sailors. Passengers from the North who chartered with me would marvel at miles and miles of open water without seeing a single sailboat underway. Eastern Carolina tobacco farmers came aboard with their wives to be stunned by the silence of a vessel that moved by wind (only to leave disgruntled that I would not let them smoke cigarettes, with ashes flying like bullets in the breeze through yards of expensive sailcloth).
I didn’t make much money, but I did acquire the only real suntan this pale Irish skin has ever known. I also became a better sailor, though I retained a mystified ignorance of the sailboat diesel engine. I was then as I am today at the mercy of that holiest of high priests, the diesel mechanic, to exorcise the demons that seem so easily and regularly to possess that poor iron beast. For those services I have tithed generously at his altar.
By February 1993, I had been admitted and sworn into the North Carolina Bar. Within two months of opening a one-room rented office, I once again had a small stable of paying clients and cases needing my attention. All of this happened just in time to salvage my family’s finances from an impoverished income in the charter business that was not destined to improve.
In all honesty, I felt the fool and as though I had let my young family down by having given up a lucrative law practice in Houston for something that was, in hindsight, so seemingly adolescent as a one-man sailboat charter business. I did have bigger dreams, for what they were worth. I had actually imagined a little fleet of day sailors that would one day grow to include a retail import business. Someday, I thought, I might even have a three-masted schooner that traveled between the Carolinas and the Caribbean in the winter months, in a kind of a low-tech reprise of the West Indies spice trade that would also carry well-heeled American tourists as passengers. Instead, I found myself far from the West Indies, circling in the usual cul-de-sacs where ambition so often ends. I was reminded that it takes money to make money, that skill at running a law practice is not directly convertible into skill at running a business, and that the value of a dream to the dreamer and its value to others are different things. Not many members of the general public thought as I did. Most preferred lying on a beach over sailing to one. Others wanted to be on a fast boat or water-skiing behind it. Seasickness warded off all but a hardy few of the rest. In one year of effort I counted only 181 paying passengers.
Yet these were not hard times. In these years as in every year, no matter how little or great my income, no one in my family knew a moment of want. As for how this could be possible, “consider the lilies,” we are told, and as simple as that sounds, it is wonderfully if not almost eerily true. This parable was the story of my own family’s journey, but the lessons of that experience apply to everyone. We are often timid and doubtful, reluctant to follow our dreams in so many areas of our lives. Looking back, I see that my plan to feed a family of four from a one-boat sailboat charter business was never a recipe for success, but I also see that there was nothing to fear in trying, nor any shame in failing.
The world has a way of working itself out, in my experience. There are things unseen. Life is not always easy or pleasant, and it is often unfair, but it seems to unfold according to some plan of which we are only peripherally aware—like a dream, the details of which are vivid only when we are sleeping. We cannot remember—much less comprehend—that dreamworld with the powers of a rational mind.
There are many who would bitterly object to any suggestion that “the world has a way of working itself out” as a simple-minded, romantic delusion. As one who has led a simple, romantic, and mostly charmed (if not deluded) life, I don’t presume to question the validity of anyone’s objection or insist that others join me in some sort of cheerful oblivion. But when people ask why, if God is truly in charge, their lives can go so badly awry or why horribly tragic things can happen to innocent people, I am reluctant to accept the premise of the question. At times when I might otherwise want to rail against God for His failure to intervene to prevent what I perceive as the gross injustice of this world, I am reminded of the plight of an infant at birth.
Within the limits of the infant’s awareness, the birth pangs that are occasions of such joy to unseen others are to him a senseless crisis of unimagined proportions. His uterine world is literally collapsing around him. He has no capacity to understand that he is being delivered to a life of incalculably greater meaning, in a new world that expectantly awaits his arrival and already knows his name. He screams with anxiety and is slapped ignominiously, but his present pain is only a temporary hardship, destined soon to be utterly forgotten.
I believe that the heartache we experience in our journey in this world is much the same. I have sensed this truth many times in my own life. Others express it routinely in the idea that things happen—even things that seem senseless at the moment—for a reason. The existence of reason implies the existence of a reasoner.
I recall once hearing a television talk show host not best known for his humility and reticence say that he dismissed the whole notion of redemptive theology because it simply made no sense to him that God would need to bleed and die on a cross for our sins. Frankly, I share his incredulity. Even the church acknowledges that our faith is an inscrutable mystery (“Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again”); yet faith tells me that it is true. Humility allows me to accept by faith what I cannot know by reason or intelligence. What a small church
it must be whose altar spans only the verities of the rational mind. The world is so very much bigger than that, and so likewise must be its creator.
It was good to be home, in Beaufort, when the Gypsy Moon glided to those docks in the gathering darkness of an August night in 2009. It was good to be back in North Carolina. It was good to be near New Bern, which held so many memories, both bitter and sweet. I had smiled inside, in those lonely hours spent ghosting down the coast in the darkness off Cape Hatteras, to hear US Coast Guardsmen pass the baton—their broadcasts changing from the clipped elocution of big northern cities to the relaxed drawl of little southern towns. The South is my home.
Though a child of Baltimore and an early admirer of certain refinements of northern life that forever eluded me—namely a well-placed shot in lacrosse and the rigors of piano lessons at the Peabody Institute—I had never much warmed to northern culture. Since my first visit to rural Tennessee, at the age of fourteen, I had recognized in southern folk a genuine sense of friendship and community—often mistaken for mere politeness—that was like mother’s milk to me.
Yes, I like it here. That being so, it was not immediately clear, nor was it ever clear for very long, why I should leave on a half-baked sailing voyage for someplace else.
Chapter 10
An Unlikely Adventurer
The matters of my departure from Beaufort and my ultimate destination were decisions yet to be made. I knew this in my heart to be true, even though I admitted it to no one and had set out from Annapolis amid great fanfare, with news to all that I was “bound for Nassau.” Telling people you are sailing to Nassau—especially people who would never attempt such a trip themselves but are sure to be impressed that you would—is easy to do. It evokes an air of adventure, derring-do, sophistication, and romance. James Bond seduced beautiful women, danced at Junkanoo, and foiled diabolical plans for nuclear blackmail in Nassau. Telling people that you are sailing to Nassau when you are as yet in a harbor a thousand miles away is much like telling people that you are writing a bestselling novel or running for president. It is a thing much easier imagined than realized.
Actually sailing to Nassau, I would come to understand, is hard to do—not just in terms of time and distance but, for me, psychologically. The wind and the waves are not the only forces that must be overcome or even the most worrisome. The whole idea evoked in me assorted feelings of anticipation and dread, elation and dejection, self-satisfaction and self-doubt, resolution and regret.
Many people—perhaps you among them—have made voyages in comfort and safety to the Bahamas from the northeastern part of the United States in small boats sailing out of sight of land, without expecting a medal from the Seven Seas Cruising Association for their efforts. I know this. I don’t mean to make a moon shot out of a mud puddle by my somewhat overwrought narrative. I do wish, though, to come clean and admit something: despite any pretentions to the contrary in the letters you now hold in your hands, I am not, nor have I ever been, a Salty Dog.
True Salty Dogs—those self-sufficient Lords of the Deep who write books on navigation and the finer points of sail trim and boat mechanics—have long been a source of intimidation and annoyance to me. As best I can tell, there is not a poet among them. They are math-science folk and engineering types all. For them a clogged fuel line, battery overload, or electrical malfunction is a thing of rapture, and they set about solving the problem with the kind of Yankee ingenuity and determination “that built this country, by jiminy.” For me, however, these malfunctions are all signs from a benevolent God that man was meant to sail across oceans by the light of oil lamps, not motor across them with enough spare amps to power a refrigerator and a satellite weather station.
Yet the Salty Dogs are the men women long for, who, given only an axe and a pack of matches, could build them a shopping mall. Give me an axe and a pack of matches, and I’ll build a woman a campfire around which to sing her a love song, neither of which will serve its intended purpose once it starts raining.
For starters, I am afraid of the ocean, although on this point any true sailor would readily concur. I have imagined an unmarked grave for myself beneath the waves many times, often out of a macabre boredom on long watches, but more often for the purpose of planning ways to avoid it. I am almost never sick at sea, thank God, but because my loved ones sometimes are, I have chosen to sail some of the rougher, longer passages alone. When I do, I often suffer bouts of loneliness and melancholy, although this comes with the benefit of encouraging sleep on long passages, perchance to dream of those whom I love and miss.
Once I settle into a voyage that takes me away from work and family, I continually question my judgment in having begun it and the wisdom, not to mention the expense, of continuing it. There has not been an extended voyage in memory in which I did not firmly resolve at some point to sell or give away the infernal boat at the nearest port and fade into a sensible life of gardening and bridge.
Yet despite my disconsolate temperament, ever have I heard the still, small voice that says “go.” I cannot tell you why. I do not know. But I do understand what the message means. It is not an invitation or a compulsion to “go have fun.” I know whose voice that would be: the same fifty-three-year-old lawyer who often tells me to go for that extra slice of birthday cake, or to settle into a DVD-induced haze on a couch in a dark, cozy room instead of riding a bike or picking up a book or writing this memoir to you.
People for whom sailing is a way to have fun, rather than a way of life, don’t long for the horizon. What they seek can be found in a weekend club race or a day trip that ends back at the marina. People do not sail out of sight of land and endure the monotony of an unchanging sea for days on end, punctuated occasionally by the heart-thumping anxiety of storms and the uncertain contours of a distant landfall, far from aid, because it is fun. (Though to be fair, in many moments it is precisely that.) They sail because they know that the journey is its own reward, that it leads someplace beyond a mere geographical destination, and because they hear the call of Thoreau’s different drummer to go wherever that might be.
The call to go is a yearning to peer behind the curtain that encircles and confines our world to the close, the familiar, and the safe. It is a call to strip life bare of its clutter and distractions and to reencounter the primal interest in the unknown that first led us to explore the other end of the crib. Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped exploring. Some of us did not. Some of us cannot.
One day this voice telling me to “go” will perhaps be diagnosed as a form of mental illness that I have suffered unawares, but for now it serves me well as an excuse to go sailing. It was, after all, no less a madman than Mark Twain who gave us these words:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Chapter 11
What Dean Martin Knew
I have gotten somewhat ahead of myself in the story of this voyage. Before the moment of decision at Beaufort in the fall of 2009, there was another longing, and another unfinished voyage awaiting the order to set sail.
Gary Chapman has written a wonderful book, The Five Love Languages, in which he makes the case that each of us is hardwired to recognize and appreciate love in one or more well-defined ways. I have been, since my earliest memory, a person with a need for love in the languages that Chapman describes as “words of affirmation” and “physical touch,” in that order. In less clinical terms, that means that I am rather insecure and need lots of attaboys and hugs. Despite this, I have had an unfailing instinct for cultivating relationships certain never to meet those needs.
Sooner or later, we all have to come face to face with the people we truly are, and so did I—albeit rather late in the game and amid the financial and emotional wreckage of a bruising divorce. What I learned in the process was invaluable to me in trying to
repair my life. Little did I know that the Rolling Stones had figured all this out before, if only I’d been listening.
Yes, it’s true. You can’t always get what you want. We all need to accept that, and grown-ups generally do. But you darn well better get what you need, or you may find that your needs are being met in unhealthy ways in other parts of your life. That certainly happened to me, and with disastrous and painful consequences.
But as surely as winter leads to spring, pain is followed by healing and growth. I came to realize several truths, not all of them in step with the pop psychology of the day, as I set out on a quest to find love and happiness. I was looking for “the one.”
First, I considered and rejected the current self-help orthodoxy that holds that it is unhealthy to need anything or anyone outside ourselves in order to feel emotionally whole. Only after we achieve a sublime indifference to the affections of others, this theory goes, will true love alight (or not) like a butterfly on our shoulders while we’re busy finding fulfillment in pottery or poetry, meditation or mountain climbing, whale-saving or what-have-you. I generally didn’t agree with this school of thought, mostly because the dull fellow it describes doesn’t sound like someone I would ever want to be. (I also wasn’t happy with the whole butterfly thing. If I’m choosing metaphors in the animal kingdom for an on-time arrival with my heart’s desire, I’m going with a chicken hawk, not a butterfly.) And as for being perfectly content to be alone, I had always thought the Paul Simon song “I Am a Rock,” was a lament, not a model of emotional wellness.
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.
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