The Launch

​​The Launch
 
We have traded in one fantasy for another. In February we sold a rental lake property in Vermont and in September we bought a west coast sailboat. “It’s not practical,” said my husband, referring (actually) to the lake house. I wasn’t able to make the two-hour drive to enter into my world of writing and paddleboarding in the company of our children and dogs. I saw future generations at play—generations as non-existent as my paddling around the lake. In three years, I spent one night. One night was not going to build this future. And those companionable dogs died, and our present dogs too rambunctious for the quiet, crowded lake neighborhood. Our future was on a different course. We sold the house to a family that could do all those things with actual grandchildren. We sold just before the market in Vermont sky-rocketed on account of city quarantines and bought a sailboat just as sailboats became a common Covid strategy. We may have read the market wrong, but we hope we are reading ourselves accurately.
 
My oldest daughter, Susanna works her post-graduation real-life job in DC remotely from our Vermont home.  “Every time I look over at Dad he is on his computer clicking through boat interiors.”
 
It seemed the sailboat idea was always on his mind. Walking in the woods with our dogs in the evening, his question of, what do you think your life will be like in five years, shrank to three years, to one year, until I said, the time is now. My staff is trapped and can’t go anywhere. Before we bank on a five-year plan future, let’s see if it’s more than a fantasy. Let’s see if this vessel holds water--sorry, a poor choice of words.
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Once, as a drove to a work appointment in upper New York state, I listened to a story on the BBC about a man solo-circumnavigating the globe. “I was never idle,” he said. He noted he was always fiddling with lines, checking the sails, noting wind direction.
 
That’s not me. I have no feel for lines nor attention to wind. I am the opposite of sea-worthy. I am grounded. I am claustrophobic, sea-sick, and frightened. The last MRI I had involved only my arm in a tube and yet I still panicked. As soon as the latch sounded on the closing door, my heart raced. The MRI took twice as long because I kept flinching. Trapped without exits, yet there will the constant sight of land along the inland passage, and there is a dingy with an engine aboard.
 
I can’t tell you about the sailboat design or the rigging. I can’t read a chart.  But I do have a glimmer of an idea of life on a sailboat. In 1990, when we were young and first in love and much more agreeable, we lived on a 40’ ketch in San Diego Bay. The sailboat was beauty and respite. I may be landed but I am not a city person. Being on a boat floating on the sea was an experience of nature. The boats in the slips surrounding us rose and fell on soft swells.  The halyards clanked on their mainsail masts. Seagulls sounded in the distance. The ocean offered up a rhythm and an expanse. Young and adventurous I embraced it all, but it wasn’t my element.
 
While the chemical make-up of the sea is one compound removed from blood, that was not a natural setting for me. Each time we left the harbor, I rushed to the bow and attached the sail to the halyard, bobbing up and down as the sea collided with the breakers heaving the boat—and I would puke over the rail. The sea and I do not get along at all but at least the sea has a motion and a life—and a breath. And maybe then I can forge a relationship with it.
 
“Not in my wildest dreams,” more than one friend has noted. Is it the small space with their spouse? The rollicking ocean? The damp and salted air? Or just the idea of sailing?  I don’t ask why, and I don’t ask myself why I do this again, bigger and more. I know this is Kent’s wildest dream. When our world narrows to our small town, our politics divisive, our routines limiting: here is a hint of something expansive. Here is a chance to grow.
 
I am ready for something new and I have the time to pursue it. We are not quite empty nest but there is more independence among our adult children. I have been working at my routines long enough to feel static. Now that our children begin their own quests into adulthood, I challenge the meaning of my work. I contemplate lost opportunities (park ranger in Kenya! Ski guide in Jackson! Great American novel!) and mourn the loss of that unlived life. I seek some jolt to challenge the inertia of my routine.
 
I am able to step away from my work, step away from the relentless pace that I have imposed upon myself. I have retired my competition horses, and have lost enthusiasm for that sport. The scaling back at work, the end of training, the rise of adult-children, has created space. Space that allows new opportunities. I am aging but still with ambition. Aging creates an urgency. I am ready to be in a place that answers only to winds and tides—and not the political variety. Our climate is erupting along caste and class and climate and covid lines. The ground is shifting under my feet.  Who am I within the shifting plates and restructuring? How is it that I want to contribute? So apparently, the trip is really about me, perhaps I need a resurrection. Will it deliver?
 
In a week’s time, I will board a 48’ sailboat in Seattle. I will enter into a small space that floats. There will be no earth under my feet. I will align with moving waters. I will join Kent who will have gone first to fit it with solar and water filtration. I will join Sylvia and her boyfriend who have taken a semester off from college and remote learning.  We will shop for kitchenware and sheets, for non-perishable food, including soymilk and ginger tea. I will stock the freezer. I will reduce myself from the expanse of my grounded, diverse life on a horse farm in Vermont, leave our horses and dogs, to live with a few articles of clothing and in a berth on the expanse of an ocean. Maybe I will finally learn to tie a bowline. I will add a new treatment not available in 1990: edibles.  It’s a shakedown cruise and only a few weeks in the San Juan while we shake and roll, we will see what we are all made of and truly how far this fantasy can get me from port.
 
In other news:

• Susanna stole Graham’s shelving unit, strapped it to the roof of her car, and relocated it to her new basement apartment in DC. She attended vigil at Supreme Court for RBG.
• Sylvia is watching Connor work out in his cyclist-brother’s well-equipped LA gym.  Walks to the beach with stinging eyes and burning lungs reveal it’s better indoors than breathing outdoors. She left her job and rental in Medford, OR five days before much of the town burned.
• Graham plans to come home and take all the free weights now that fall lifts have been cancelled but he still has two -in-person classes in addition to his remote classes.
• I jumped my young horse for the first time at home, on my own, and surprised myself with joy. He’s hard to contain but honest.

Captain’s Log: Boat is hauled being re-painted . Air quality and visibility in Seattle has improved.

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