Sailing in Another World

It’s late morning on Thursday and we’re about 18 miles out from Bermuda. We left Simpson Bay on St. Maarten in the Caribbean four days and a few minutes ago, and we should be into port by early afternoon. It’s been a wonderful trip with beautiful weather, some great sailing and fabulous nighttime skies. But one thing it hasn’t been is a sailing trip.

A sailing trip is one wherein the journey is the destination. The trip we’re on is a delivery, wherein the destination is the destination. It’s like being in another world from the one in which I reside: it’s a world where money is no object.

For starters, the speed with which we’ve made the journey is due in no small part to the 600-horsepower diesel engine down below, and the gigantic fuel tanks this yacht carries. We sailed for the first two days of the trip, to be sure, with solid winds and a nice following current carrying us northward into the Atlantic proper. But once conditions got to the point where the wind wasn’t lining up perfectly and we couldn’t keep our course exactly where we wanted it, on came the engine to manufacture a more appropriate apparent wind and keep us rolling at more than nine knots (and oftentimes more than 10). And when the wind faded last night, the engine kept our speed up quite well, thank you very much.

In some ways, it’s nice to have that option. In fact, it’s nice in two ways. First, because if you are focused entirely on your destination it’s nice to be able to get there as quickly as possible. But that’s not why I sail, why I go to sea. For me, the journey is very much part and parcel of the destination. Being at the whim of wind and wave is one of the joys of heading out on a trip over the ocean. If I wanted to just get to a new place I’d hop on a plane. No, I couldn’t carry all my toys with me and I wouldn’t have a bed waiting for me when I got there — which is apparently all the owners of this vessel, not here on the journey, want in a boat — but I’d still BE in the new place. I suppose it makes sense, in that world that is foreign to me.

The other way it’s nice to have that internal-combustion option isn’t related to sailing: it’s that if you can afford such a luxury, well, life in general would be a hell of a lot easier.

But it’s not sailing. And it’s why I’ve come to realize that this is likely my last such trip. I’ve enjoyed my time (more on that in a later post) and I’ve learned some new things (as I do every trip with my friends, Boogie and Marlies), but it’s not why I go to sea. Yes, it’s a (relatively) cheap way to see some new places, learn some new skills and build some time at sea, but it’s still too expensive in terms of time and money, and skills and experience not gained, to be worthwhile. It’s a shame to realize this because I’ve had some good times on these trips, but I do believe this is my final delivery (unless a point comes where someone is paying me to do one, but that’s a long ways off).

I had a glimpse of this other world in Antigua in February. And this additional view has made it clear that I’m happy in my plain, old, money-is-an-object world, and I look forward to embracing life there. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind winning the lottery…

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Untold Stories

Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story doesn’t get told?

I ask all of these questions because one of the great regrets I will take to my grave is that I never got my mother’s stories down on paper. Mom, who lived an amazing, interesting life shaping a field that is the coin of the realm in modern-day America, had stories so riveting that award-winning authors and screenwriters offered to help her get them published. Mom always declined, saying that such privacies and privileges had been entrusted to her by her clients, by her place in her industry, and that she wouldn’t betray that trust. I picked up where those writers left off, telling her that just letting people know what it was like to have worked with these famous people on such high-profile movies would suffice, that she wouldn’t have to divulge any secrets and insider scoop.

In recent years, Mom had begun to lighten up a bit. I bought Dragon Dictate transcription software and we created her profile on this laptop. The plan was we’d talk for an hour or two and after a few months I’d have a pile of notes and quotes that I could edit into the book many had hoped she’d one day write.

We did one brief session where she recounted her early days in Brooklyn and Malverne, New York, but then she put me off a few times and I didn’t press her. Months later, she warmed up a bit again and asked if we were going to resume talking but it never happened, not before she took her fall in October and the chance for us to ever talk again disappeared.

I find myself wracked with guilt over having let Mom take those stories with her. Many people have said I could talk to those my mother worked with and get a similar book, but it really wouldn’t be the same. Who can I ask about what it was like to walk down Park Avenue with Marilyn Monroe for a photographer? Countless other similar tales are now gone, and though there are photos to illustrate the events, the faces on the film are mute and they keep their secrets to themselves.

And now I find myself once again facing the similar loss of equally amazing stories. As has been chronicled in this space, my father and I are currently on the outs, not talking, not really getting along at all. We are, to stay with Springsteen quotes, “too much of the same kind,” it seems. But I’ve written before of my father’s World War II service and how I believe it affected everything in his life to this day. Of how he is still in the Ardennes, almost 70 years later. I’ve written that seeing what he’s gone through, what he’s missed out on, is too high a price for anyone or any country to pay. And make no mistake about it: he saw some serious shit at a way-too-young age not to have suffered.

The tales of those experiences, and those of others like my father, shouldn’t be lost to the mists of time. They should be enshrined so that hopefully we as a society can stop making the same mistake over and over and over again. And on a personal level, getting him to share those stories would hopefully give our family something we’re still seeking: an answer to the question, “why?,” that has pervaded the entirety of half a century.

My father also has some amazing stories to share that aren’t focused on war. There aren’t many people left of whom I can ask, “What was it like to drink with Hemingway in Cuba?,” but my father is one such person. I’ve heard the story many times, but to get it on paper would preserve the tale for my nieces and their children and on down the line.

Maybe, as it turns out, I never was a very good journalist, because I don’t know how to break through the wall to get to the great stories. I let Mom’s stories get away and I don’t know how to reach my father to save his stories. And that’s a shame. Because we as human beings think in language, in words, in stories. And we as societies live in the exchange of that language, of those words, of those stories. If our stories don’t get told and shared and passed down, do we really live?

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The Other Side of St. Martin/Maarten

Not a bad office, eh?

For the second time in just a couple of months, I find myself on the island of St. Martin. I use “Martin” as opposed to “Maarten” because for the first time in four visits I am staying on the French side of this split-in-two Caribbean jewel. I usually stay aboard a boat over on the Dutch side, the Sint Maarten side, with friends, and I will join them again shortly, but I wanted to experience a different side of this island. And by “side,” I don’t just mean nationality.

Over here, I’m staying in a small, comfortable home befitting the tropics: stucco walls; high, framed ceilings; a veranda surrounded by a bushes exploding in red flowers, a few coconut palms, and a cactus or two thrown in for good measure. There’s a breeze blowing from the sea below as I sit on that veranda, shirtless and wearing only shorts, typing and taking in a view from Tintamare to St. Barth over the colorful roofs of the village below. If I close my eyes and imagine having talent, a big barrel chest and a good, stiff drink in front me, this could almost be Cuba and I could almost be Hemingway in my own version of Finca Vigia. Alas, it’s not and I’m not. But it’s a damn good substitute.

A finch-sized version of a meadowlark just alighted on the bush beside me. It pains me to be so uninfor

When I’m staying in the marina on the Dutch side, it’s somewhat like being in a border town in Mexico: garish lights, lots of Americans and a whole lot more hustle and bustle. Over here, things slow way down, and not just because my school-level French is so atrocious. It’s a resort over here as opposed to a town, so even the locals making a living on this side are doing so within the context of vacationland. Over in St. Maarten, it’s business as usual in a town that just happens to be on a Caribbean island so there are scores of tourists wandering around. That, and I’m usually working with my friends on whatever yacht they’re running at the time.

No surprises, then, that I prefer the vibe over here. Hard to believe I’d prefer sitting in the breeze looking out over where the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea meet to scrubbing the grime and barnacles off the bottom of an inflatable dinghy or sweating in the interior of the boat as I wipe antibacterial solution over all the walls.

This, too, shall pass. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. I’ll check out of this sleepy, hillside community with a view and taxi back over to the Dutch side of things. But no complaints. It will still be paradise and I’ll still be tan and we’ll still be preparing for a passage to Bermuda in a few days. La vie est belle.
med on the local flora and fauna, but that comes with time, I suppose. And it’s time that seems to have been created just by taking a taxi over to this side of the island.

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