“Hey, honey, check this out,” he said one night, fingers tapping on his laptop.
“It’s a Moody 54, bank owned.”
I peered at the screen.
“Isn’t it cool?” he continued, tap-tapping.
“Kind of,” I replied. “Where is it?”
“Rhode Island.”
“Hmm…,” I said warily. “Well, that’s convenient.”
Three weeks later my husband flew to Rhode Island to check out the boat. It was snowing, and the temperature was fifteen degrees. His best friend, a college buddy from Boston, drove down to meet him, and they called in a third party, a local boat surveyor.
“I think we should get her,” my husband said, clicking through boat photos on his laptop the night he got home.
Uh-oh. It had already become her.
“I know it takes vision to imagine having cocktails in this frozen cockpit,” he went on, “but…”
“It’s covered in ice!” I protested, interrupting while squinting at the big blue hull. The foredeck was frosted over and the cockpit, even more forlorn, caked with almost a foot of snow. The bilges inside the hull were frozen solid with brown scum water; a riot of mildewed cushions and plastic parts lay strewn around inside the cabin. I peered at an image of Jeff and his compadre, also named Jeff, shivering inside the sad-looking cabin, grinning sheepishly at the camera in their down parkas, ski caps, and leather gloves.
“Trust me, she’s a screaming deal,” my husband said happily. “Plus, at this price, we can afford to move her across the country and put some work into her.”
All I could think was: It’s fifty-four feet! A fifty-four-foot money pit!
And, I don’t even know how to sail!
I looked at my husband, already obsessed with the complexities of this new nautical project.
Had he actually just said, Move her across the country?
I pictured how the boat would look once it got here: the huge hull with its seventy-five-foot mast, a giant flagpole announcing to the entire world that someone on board was having a midlife crisis.
But then I considered all the places we could go: the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands and the Queen Charlotte Islands off the Canadian coast, Alaska…Heck, maybe we’d even learn enough someday to cruise south to Mexico or cross the Pacific. It was thrilling. But it was also 2009, a year when sane people were not out shopping for sailboats, even used ones: The economy was a mess. Daily headlines screamed “Record Layoffs!” “Housing Foreclosures!” “Bankruptcy!” Millions of people were looking for work.
And then a wild idea hit me: If the world turned upside down and everything went under, we could live aboard the boat.
We’d have the ideal survival capsule. This notion, ridiculous as it was, calmed me. And so, caught up in the idea of it all I said, “Okay, in addition to saving for the boys’ college educations, we’d better start an Empty-Nest Fund.” I let myself imagine how it would feel, to have a boat, and all the food we’d need for months on her. To be able to go anywhere we wanted—maybe even sail halfway around the world!
Ever since our friends’ kids had begun heading off, I’d been noticing the ways many of those friends’ lives shape-shifted. It seemed to be a time when fierce, almost biological empty-nesting patterns emerged. Downsizing—putting the family home on the market and moving into a simpler, smaller place—was a familiar refrain. Another common trend was getting a new dog to fill the void. But that wasn’t always a shared project; the wives seemed to do most of the dog walking.
As I watched my friends downsize, simplifying their nests; or stay in their homes but spend the next years refinishing the floors; or troll rescue-dog sites, looking for abandoned canines to love and be loved by and fill those empty rooms, I began to wonder if unknown to ourselves, we each had an image buried somewhere deep inside that was a new chapter, an image that outwardly was of a place or a thing but was actually of ourselves. Maybe it was ourselves, our new selves, that we were attempting to define as we cleaned out our drawers, and repainted our children’s rooms, and adopted yellow Labs and big-eared collies and mixed retrievers.
What does it take to sustain a long-term relationship when the most shared common ground (in our case, the kids) shifts? What do we need to define and continue to define in order to sail ourselves into the unknown? To shape ourselves alongside another person for the duration?
As the idea of our boat grew real, and we began making plans to move her across the country and rename her, and wash the grit from her decks, revealing the weathered weave of her bones beneath—I realized it was ourselves that we were slowly shaping, it was ourselves that we were putting into a kind of order, it was yet another life that we were creating.
TEST FLIGHTS
On a rare warm Saturday afternoon in June, when the white flanks of Mount Rainier were looming above Lake Washington, I drove through downtown Seattle, where everyone was strolling past Pike Place Market carrying bunches of flowers or standing on street corners sipping iced Americanos. I wanted a coffee desperately, but resisted the temptation to join them and continued on toward the marina at Elliott Bay. I had a date with a giant sailboat.
I knew little about boats—not even that cruising boats when they aren’t cruising have unwieldy power cords that must be uncoiled and dragged down the dock and plugged in to shore power. But what I did know thrilled me. Heron had arrived in Seattle a few weeks earlier after her long overland journey from Rhode Island. She’d spent several weeks in a local shipyard on Lake Union being righted and reassembled, and was now—after many frozen months onshore and being trucked across the country—finally ready for a test sail. I’d been down to the shipyard, but it wasn’t until I walked out to her new slip on the bay and saw her lofty mast, as long and thin as a heron’s neck, soaring skyward over a sea of boats, that I realized I was both captivated—and terrified.
We’d been in the market for a smaller boat, something easier to handle. With Heron’s prior owner sadly losing her to a bank, and the bank wanting only to rid itself of the big blue sailboat on its books, she’d cost less than her forty-seven-foot siblings. We learned we could have her for a song if we were willing to put some work into her.
Hesitating at her size, we’d called a friend of a friend who captained a fifty-four-foot sailboat. Sure, his Halberg-Rassy was a lot of boat to maintain, he’d said. Sort of like running a small city, mechanically speaking.
But I hadn’t focused on that. All I’d heard was a deep, melodious voice describing all the adventures he’d had. I was sold. And with fifty-four feet, I thought, you could really get somewhere. With the whole family!
But now that she was here, I realized how casually we’d made our decision. How would we ever dock her, just the two of us? She was a beast.
She was tied stern in, with her new name, Heron, displayed in discreet white lettering across her wide navy-blue transom. Her side rails, spanning sixteen feet across at her ample waist, floated somewhere around my ribs as I stood on the dock. I felt the frailness of my bones, and now that the moment was upon me, upon us all, discovered within myself a shocking depth of naïveté. I’d never been a practical person. I had a way of falling in love with ideas—romantic notions of places, concepts of things. Even worse, I craved contemplation but had never really gotten into the habit of deep introspection; I’d been too busy, and much preferred searching out other people’s motives to examining my own.
Now as I stood there, I felt in my core a blind, nearly comical degree of faith. Faith in what? All I knew was that it was a reflexive, almost genetically predisposed kind of faith, the strain that has doomed legions of seekers and explorers but also driven and saved a few of the lucky ones. Faith in the journey. Faith that we’d somehow figure it out.
Dwarfed, I placed my left foot up on the boat, grabbed the thick metal stanchions on either side of the gate, and swung myself aboard.
Jeff and one of our closest friends, Dave, were already there, readying the lines.
> “I’ve gotta hand it to you, Jeff. Most people would go out and find themselves a thirty-foot boat, maybe test the waters,” Dave was saying, eyeing the towering rig overhead. “But not you. You go out and jump right in. I mean, this is a serious sled.”
“Hey, Dave. Hi, Chet,” I said. “Chet” was the nickname our oldest East Coast friends and I used for Jeff. When several people had volunteered to help take Heron out for the first time, we’d gratefully taken them up on it. First up was Dave, who’d signed on for this spontaneous day sail only hours ago. A fit guy in his late forties, Dave and I had been classmates in college. His wife, Laura, was one of my closest friends. We’d all overlapped for a few years in New York City.
“You don’t have to entertain me,” Dave said and grinned, perhaps calculating he’d be entertained anyway, while Jeff and I sat staring glumly at Heron’s schoonerlike bow. “Let’s just practice docking this thing. Wouldn’t you feel better if you had more hours under your belt getting her in and out of the slip? It’s got to be just like parallel parking.”
So that’s what we did. Jeff eased the capacious Heron out of her slip, her saurian rig at rest with no apparent wind, while Dave and I raced around tying and untying lines to her sturdy cleats, raising and lowering her bulky sausage-shaped fenders, and leaping from Heron’s broad haunches to the dock, where we’d scramble to lash her down before her massive bow bit into the even bigger white-fiberglass yacht beside us.
After an hour or so of this, all of us imagining our fellow dock mates watching the newbies sweat through dock drills, we decided we’d had enough practice.
“Okay, let’s get out of here and put the sails up so you can relax, Jeff,” Dave suggested helpfully.
* * *
It was a golden summer evening. The sun blazed in the sky and the wind, what little there was, felt like a warm sigh. We motored Heron out of the marina and set a course straight across Puget Sound’s Elliott Bay. Looking up, I could see the mast, struts, and halyards slicing the wide blue sky into triangles. Now that we were moving, the boat really did feel like a long-necked seabird, and I was thinking how Heron was the perfect name for our giant avian offspring. (The boat naming had been a family affair—we’d considered constellation names and names of stars; names drawn from Greek myths; music names, Northwest names, indigenous names; all kinds of nature names. But in the end, our boat was stately and blue and long necked—like a great blue heron. So Heron she became.)
It was time to raise the mainsail.
Dave and I cleared the lines and grabbed a winch handle. I don’t remember which of us cranked out the mainsail; it’s a two-person job: one cranking out sail, the other (Jeff in this case), at the helm, where there is a button that simultaneously unfurls the sail from the mast. When the sail was three-quarters of the way out, it jammed in the furler, like a massive cloth caught in a zipper.
“F*ck! How did that happen?!” Jeff cried. The three of us stood with our heads tilted back, staring up at the mast. Heron’s huge white mainsail rippled from it but wouldn’t budge up or down.
“Maybe try pulling it back in some?” Dave suggested. Jeff tried the button for the supposedly self-furling automatic furler again. Grrrr…Grrrr…Grrr…the furler growled audibly. The enormous sail stretched tighter and tighter. It was stuck. We tried letting it out again, pushing the button the other way.
“F*cker!” yelled my husband the captain.
Raised in New Jersey, toughened on Wall Street, my husband was somehow unleashed out on the water, unbound by rules or conventions. Especially as he confronted the physical realities of our stately new bird of a boat, with her confounding mechanical systems.
“Shoot,” I said, trying to get into the swing of things. “What now?!”
Indigo clouds began massing over Bainbridge Island to the west. A bolt of lightning cracked the sky.
We tried tacking to pull the sail loose, a tough order in light wind.
We tried the self-furler again. “Come on! Come on!” Jeff muttered.
“Guys, it’s starting to rain,” I pointed out. We were exposed on the wide plane of water that fronted the city. What if lightning hit the rig?
Finally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, the sail began sliding back in, rolled up, and disappeared inside the mast.
There’s something so infuriatingly temperamental about boats. It’s one of the things that make them almost human—you have to really know a boat, its quirks, ins and outs. And each one is different in its own mechanical way—especially a big sailboat such as ours. But Heron was new to us; indeed, she was the only Moody 54 in the Northwest. We’d never met her prior owners, and we were only beginning to get acquainted with her particular idiosyncrasies.
It was the kind of moment that called for a high-five, but there wasn’t time. With the rain picking up, Jeff and Dave encouraged me to take the helm, which I did, barely avoiding a collision with a 450-foot-long ferry. We motored back toward the marina, thoroughly chastised. Heron was not only a big girl—she had a mind of her own.
FLOATING NEST
“Did you know that seven hundred people die each year from boating accidents in America?” asked James.
“I swear, James just loves that shit,” said his older brother, Sam.
Our boys were up, shuffling their lanky six-foot frames into jeans and fleece a few feet away. They swore a lot on the boat. Too late to do much about that now, I thought, turning a page in my book.
James was seventeen. The kind of kid who would skim the various Worst-Case Scenario handbooks, then quiz me on what to do if we were attacked by a wolf pack, or maybe hit by a tsunami on the way to school. Never mind that when we weren’t sailing we lived in the suburbs of Seattle, where both of these scenarios were highly unlikely. Next he handed me a travel magazine with a story titled: “One Rogue Wave: A Fishing Trip Goes Horribly Wrong.”
“Oh great, just what we need!” said Sam, then nearly twenty and home from college for the summer, with mock exasperation.
“How ‘bout some eggs and hash browns?” my husband asked expectantly. There was a moment of silence, then everyone burst out laughing, and I flung my book across the sailboat’s galley table. “Eggs and hash browns” had become the new definition around our house for the sorry lengths that I would go to as our last child was about to leave the nest.
“Yeah, man, you really missed the boat on the eggs and hash browns,” James said, sitting up straighter.
Sam, famously easygoing, just grinned and said, “Dude? You mean Mom actually gets up and cooks you breakfast before school?”
“Dude, you barely had time to grab a Pop-Tart. It must really suck being the older brother,” my husband teased, a few feet away.
And so it went. The back-and-forth banter of boys and men. I loved it.
And I would miss it.
It’s pathetic, but true: a friend of ours had mentioned that his wife—a woman I admired—was getting up early every morning to cook her son scrambled eggs and a pile of hash browns—and before I could help myself, I’d asked James if he’d like that.
Of course he’d said, “Yes.”
Dang.
So now at home when my alarm went off in the dark at 6:25 a.m., that’s what it was for: time for me to get up, grind the coffee, and start two skillets sizzling. It’s absurd, I know, to pamper your kids like this. But when James shuffled into the kitchen, poured ketchup on a mound of hash browns so professional they could have been fried up by a short-order cook, headed for the door in his hoodie a few minutes later, and actually called out “I love you, Mom!” I fell for it every time. Even the act of cooking had become a way to secure a place in my son’s heart. I was sending him out the door with a piece of me.
After James left, Jeff and I would sit at the kitchen counter and read the New York Times before work.
“He’ll always remember the year his mom made him eggs and hash browns for breakfast,” my husband might say sweetly.
“Thanks, honey,”
I’d reply, wondering what on earth would get us out of bed the next year when both the boys were gone.
* * *
My husband and I were young when we married. I was twenty-six, Jeff thirty-two. The decades since have been busy. When you are fresh faced and in the reproductive years, you have a lot of energy. But still. How did we all do it? Even thinking about it exhausts me. Looking back, I feel time shrinking. It’s as if I can reach out and tap the shoulder of that girl sitting at her desk in Midtown Manhattan and turn her swivel chair away from her Rolodex and sharpened pencils and black leather boots and point her west. I wish I could tell that worker-bee girl with her shoulder pads and daily to-do list that life is long. I wish I could tell her she won’t always be this tired.
Some facts: Jeff and I met at a beach house on the Jersey Shore. We’d fallen for each other the moment we met; were inseparable after a few weeks; spent almost every night together after our first date; married two years later and lived in a rambling apartment on the Upper West Side. Both of our sons were born in Manhattan. It was the eighties. Jeff worked in finance; I worked in publishing. We were obsessed with those jobs. I loved my career as a young editor so much that when my paycheck landed on my desk twice a month, it felt like a surprise every time. We toiled long hours, traveled for business, and on city weekends—even though we employed a nanny during the week—sometimes argued over who would take the kids to the park and who would catch up at the office. We did not have what today is called work-life balance.
But we did have luck. Jeff worked on the sixty-second floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. And on the day of the first bombing, the 1993 truck bombing, he was not in the tower because he was in Vermont. We’d snuck away for a long winter weekend. He was on a pay phone, checking in with his boss, when a twelve-hundred-pound truck-bomb detonated in the parking garage beneath the towers. His boss, who’d been headed down to the garage when Jeff called, heard a muffled thud and said, “Hang on a minute.” No one knew yet what had happened. The call ran late, which spared Jeff’s boss from being in his SUV at that exact moment, as planned. Months later, when they identified pieces of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, they determined it had been less than a hundred feet from the blast.
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