After we cut the engine the four of us sat there in the silence, numb. The wild, luminous beauty of the place stood in sharp contrast to all the heavy tensions of the day. Before crossing the strait, we’d tied up for gas at a wharf in busy Nanaimo, a harbor city where Captain Jeff, fully grasping for the first time how spectacularly clueless his crew was, had lost his cool when we’d tied the fenders on incorrectly. He’d then lost it again when the boys failed to snap to and leap off the boat quickly enough to secure the dock lines. The odd dynamic was that the boys and I were bonding, forming an eyeball-rolling, wisecracking team in opposition to Jeff the Boat Nazi.
“Mom, you’ve really got to get these fenders down,” James had whispered at the Nanaimo dock, demonstrating the clove hitch again. “Here, like this.”
Sam dutifully trudged into town with me to help with the grocery shopping. Anything to get off the boat…
But back on board, tempers soon grew short again. There was just too much boat, too much to do. Now, sitting in the stillness, our trip seemed utterly overwhelming. Not to mention the fact that my husband and I were planning to spend a lot of time together on this boat without the boys once they moved on in their own lives. How would we manage just the two of us? What on earth were we thinking?
A tear slipped from the corner of my left eye and traced its way down my windblown cheek.
The boys were dumbfounded. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter, Mom?”
“Nobody liiikes me,” I sobbed idiotically, completely undone by the day. Even worse, our first big crossing, and Jeff and I had already turned into a caricature of the clichéd boating couple: out of control, screaming at each other.
My husband was flabbergasted. “Of course we like you!” he said. “We love you, honey. It’s just that, jeez, you know—it’s a lot out here. It’s all new! You’re doing a great job. It’s going to be great. Here, Sam, take a picture of your mom and me.” And he’d handed the camera to Sam.
“Mom, you’re so emo,” Sam had joked, trying to lighten the mood as I brushed away errant tears with the back of my hand. Then he snapped a portrait of Jeff and me standing on Heron’s stern, facing the camera. Jeff has his arm around me. He is wearing a red fleece. I am wearing a white fleece. Behind us is a beautiful, shallow bay, Buccaneer Bay—and behind that, barely visible, the low isthmus of a driftwood-strewn beach connecting the two halves of British Columbia’s Thormanby Island. You can see some of Thormanby’s steep cliffs rising to the left of the frame, and scraggly fir and pine trees in the darkening light. Overhead is a magnificent sky streaked with purple clouds. I am smiling a toothy white grin. Jeff looks rugged and handsome.
It stuns me now to see this portrait: the image, in fact, that graces the leather-bound cover of the book we made in the months after that first trip. You see a smiling couple in a postcard setting. What you don’t see are the invisible currents and blustery seas we’d just waded into. It’s strange, how we capture so many family moments this way: squeeze people into a frame and click the photo. It’s our way of making memories. But what you rarely see in so many family portraits is what’s actually happening. And what a shame! The stuff we lash down—the painful parts, messy as sea slime and scary as eels—is, in retrospect, more real.
It took me years to realize that each of us would eventually find our footing on that big blue boat. To be the capable crew we envisioned: a team, whether two person, or four. To move easily, with skill and intention, across its decks and to understand its many systems. That damn boat would challenge us and push us, throw us and teach us. So many times along the way I would want things to be different than they were! The wanting was an ocean, and even though my husband and I were in it together, I had to find my own way across its blustery seas. It took us years to get there. But I liked the freedom: the thrill of being out on the water, surrounded by vastness and the pure bracing air that was the essence of the North Pacific. I was looking for something but wasn’t sure where I’d find it until I arrived. It was the wildest place I’d ever been. A place called the Great Bear Rainforest.
PART TWO
The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage or careers, was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed…. In bleak honesty it can only be called “the abandoned shell.” Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Gift from the Sea
CASTING OFF
Day one of the big trip, under a milky dawn sky on the first morning of August, James drove us down to the boat.
“Don’t forget to set your alarm. You don’t want to be late for work,” I told my youngest son, who had a job managing a kayak center on Seattle’s Lake Washington before heading east to college in three weeks.
“Okay, got it.” James yawned as he steered my Volvo SUV, crammed with one last load of gear. (His older brother, Sam, who was far more levelheaded than his parents, had an internship in San Francisco and was living there for the summer.)
“He’ll be fine,” Jeff said from the passenger seat, glancing at James. “After all, he’s eighteen.”
“Exactly!” I said from where I sat in the back seat, my mind reeling as I imagined the raging party about to transpire in our living room, word of which had no doubt gone viral on Facebook the second we’d pulled out of the driveway.
But as we sped across the 520 Bridge, which spans Lake Washington and links the suburbs east of the city (where we live) with Seattle, leaving our eighteen-year-old home to fend for himself for a week or so was the least of my worries. That August morning Jeff and I would be casting off for two months alone together aboard Heron. And although the boys would eventually join us for fourteen days, after twenty-some years of married life, spending this much time on the boat, just the two of us, was a first. We’d be moving from a land-based world grounded by kids, friends, and jobs—a world where each of us could jump in the car if needed, or take a walk—to a water-based world. A world where we’d be together twenty-four hours a day in a very small space.
Trying something like this had been the whole goal of buying the boat to begin with, and by god, here we were! This trip—our so-called Empty-Nesting Adventure—was a culmination of sorts. Our sailing trip with the boys the previous summer, our weekends and overnights and day sails up and down Elliott Bay had all been dry runs, or wet runs, as it were. This was it, but the idea of the adventure had somehow grown bigger than the boat itself. I thought back to when we were first considering boating. I’d read a magazine article about a sailor who was on his fifth circumnavigation of the world. He’d summed up centuries of philosophy with his simple life motto: “Live while you’re alive!” And it had seemed to me then that when you find yourself at a particular life juncture, you can allow your hopes and dreams to fade—or you can create new ones.
Damn.
And there had been the cover of National Geographic, with its cover line that leaped out and grabbed me and sold me so thoroughly I’d immediately turned around and sold Jeff.
The Great Bear Rainforest, according to National Geographic, was “the planet’s last large expanse of coastal temperate rain forest.” At eight million acres it was nine times the size of Olympic National Park, five times the size of Banff, twice the size of the Serengeti. This forest possessed the rarest of all environmental qualities: critical mass. It was a place that was still utterly wild and not only out there—but out there, out there. Standing in our family room after showing the article to Jeff, I closed the magazine and gazed at its front cover—a leafy green thicket framing a surreal-looking black bear with vanilla-white fur—then declared with stupefying naïveté that we would sail north! Not just north to the San Juan Islands, or the Canadian Gulf Islands, or to Desolation Sound, but north around Cape Caution and north farther still—north to the Great Bear Rainforest in search of the spirit bear.
The spirit bear wasn’t real to me then. It was an ide
a, ghostlike and vague, rich with strangeness and mystery that resonated perfectly with my hopelessly optimistic and impractical explorer’s gene—handed down, I’m convinced, on both sides of my family (but more on that later). Wanderlust stirred within me as I studied our maps of coastal BC, and plotted out the distances we’d journey—like Jacques Cousteau on the Calypso!—to the Great Bear Rainforest.
To my husband’s credit, he signed on to the quixotic quest immediately: sure, we could go north, even way north, why not? We’d set off in search of the mystical spirit bear, we agreed, just because the idea of it seemed cool. We’d go because spirit bears are revered and rare creatures; they’re what the Gitga’at First Nation, whose traditional territory includes the islands where the bears live, call mooksgm’ol, a walking contradiction—a white black bear. We’d go because searching for a spirit bear would give us something to point ourselves toward and serve as a sort of distraction once the boys left—and it was just the two of us aboard Heron—in the wilds of British Columbia.
Neither albino nor polar bear, the spirit bear is a white variant of the black bear, or American bear. And it’s found almost exclusively in the Great Bear Rainforest, a place as ecologically distinct as the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef, a place so remote you can practically only get there by boat. We’d go because there were maybe only a thousand of these rare white black bears (some estimates put the number closer to between one hundred and four hundred, making them more rare than the giant panda). The bears existed almost entirely on two uninhabited, densely forested islands—Princess Royal Island and Gribbell Island—islands that were about five hundred nautical miles from our home in Seattle. We decided that if we were lucky, and the weather held, we could get there and back in two months’ time, before the Northwest’s bone-chilling cold and damp arrived and the end-of-season fog, known as Arctic sea smoke, swept in, settling down and swaddling the mist-shrouded fjords like a wool blanket.
We’d spent July consumed by trip prep: fitting out our fifty-four-foot, oceangoing cutter rig (a boat with two headsails that can be tacked simultaneously) for two months at sea. I’d devoted the previous weeks to creating lists and more lists, making trips to Trader Joe’s, crossing things off the lists, then remembering other things and making additional trips. We’d stored our dry provisions in piles around our dining room, which began to resemble a food bank. One night I carried all the chicken and pork chops and flank steak I’d procured to the kitchen, and Jeff and I spent the next hour or so dividing it all into smaller portions, wrapping those in plastic, then wrapping the plastic tight in white freezer paper. Each slim white package was taped and labeled with a Sharpie pen. Our freezer was soon stacked with neat white bricks of protein, like a butcher’s.
A week before our departure I filled insulated freezer bags with the frozen food and began hauling those down to the boat. There were bags of Trader Joe’s frozen side dishes—risotto with asparagus tips, garlic potatoes, and country potatoes. There were desserts: pound cake and lemon bars and a cumbersome frozen carrot cake, which I planned to defrost in the middle of nowhere and present as a minor miracle. All this I drove across the 520 Bridge and through the city and out to the dock, unloaded into a handcart, wheeled out to the boat, unloaded onto the boat, eased down the companionway-ladder and into the cabin, unpacked, then repacked in layers in the freezer. There were bags of almonds and walnuts, and salted pistachios, and dried apricots. These were laid in the big, wide drawer that pulls out from beneath the settee and has to be wedged with an orange plastic doorstop in a gale, since the latch is broken and the drawer is so heavy it flies open. There were cans of Diet Coke and cans of Heineken and many bottles of wine. These were all stored either in the hatch beneath the forward bunk or in the boat’s astonishing number of cubbies and hiding spots, such as the single floorboard that pulls up between the main salon and the forward berth and has room beneath it to lay in six bottles. When I was done I collapsed on the settee, knocked out from all my exertions, and then remembered another thing: Coffee! And balsamic vinegar! Time to start another list.
We’d found a young couple to house-sit for our dog and ancient cat. (James would stay behind to finish his last week at work, then fly up on a small floatplane with Sam to meet us on the boat.) We’d put a stop to the newspapers and mail, figured what to do, more or less, with incoming bills. With two boys now in college, it felt like a typhoon of back-to-back tuition waves were rolling at us; somehow these had to be paid. Jeff was selling the remnants of the last company he’d been running; in addition to finalizing the sale, he aimed to rent out the office space, tie up loose ends, and fold up shop in time to leave the dock on August 1. I was a freelance writer; we wouldn’t be scrounging up much tuition from that during our sail, unfortunately, but there were still articles to file, deadlines to meet. Boxes of college supplies for James needed to be packed and shipped. Flights had to be booked.
How had our simple empty-nest adventure grown so complicated? Overwhelmed by the endless logistics, I’d wander into the backyard where the summer garden was in full bloom, pick as much lettuce as I could, then stake the young dahlias so they wouldn’t sprout up, topple over, and crush everything come fall.
* * *
In addition to selling the business, Jeff had been focused on readying the boat. For Jeff, Heron was not only the realization of a lifelong dream but also his reward for selling his first company and, to a lesser extent, surviving the sale of the second. The first company, an online brokerage, provided investors a way to make automatic purchases of stock online. Jeff had built the business from a handful of employees to nearly two hundred when he sold it nine years later. After the sale he’d stepped aside, but he had also earned enough money that for the first time in his life he could afford to slow down a little if he chose. And this was when he learned, three months after selling the company, that he had aggressive prostate cancer. It seemed unbelievably unfair. He signed on to run the second company, a business that needed a new leader at the helm, as it were, while simultaneously navigating and recovering from prostate cancer surgery. “I can’t just sit at home all day having cancer,” he’d rationalized.
But the second business barely survived the recession when it hit. Heron was docked a short drive from Jeff’s office in downtown Seattle, close enough that he could drive to Fisheries Supply at noon, pick up a handful of washers or a bilge pump, whip by the boat, and be back for a meeting before two o’clock in the afternoon. As the economy drifted south and Jeff grew increasingly frustrated trying to turn the business around, the boat by comparison was a tangible entity he could deal with. Where the business was virtual—information and services—the boat was actual, a physical object made of real working parts, parts that could be fixed. It was a beautiful thing, with wood that needed refinishing and canvas that needed cleaning and electronics that needed understanding and a thousand tasks that needed tending. Jeff threw himself into readying the boat, and as the economy worsened, it became a refuge. With the realization that we’d no longer have to be home all the time once James left for college, the prospect of taking the boat on some sort of extended journey grew more and more appealing.
A boat being a boat, there were an infinite number of things to fix. The whole sailboat had been dismantled, everything abovedeck stripped off to truck the boat across the country. So that first season, everything had to be put back on: the winches, the stanchions for the lifelines, the railings, the windshield, the stainless cowl vents and dorade boxes, the davits in the back, the bimini top, and of course, the mast, boom, standing rigging and running rigging (all the lines used to hoist and control the sails). We put in a new generator. We put in a new water pump. We replaced one whole bank of batteries. We stripped, sanded, and varnished the teak. We buffed the navy fiberglass hull, and Jeff had pumped up the dinghy and rigged a system of lines to hang it from the stern. Sweetest of all was the Seely Step: a portable teak step Jeff had designed, with two-inch legs that fit squarely into the teak cock
pit grating behind the wheel. I could easily pull out the step, secure it in place, and actually see over the boat’s canvas dodger when I took the helm. (The makers of the mighty Moody 54 evidently hadn’t taken into account the possibility of a five-foot-four woman at the helm.)
Leaning forward from the back seat while James drove us to the dock for our departure, I stared at the two guys up front—they were talking about surfing. “I don’t want you going down to Westport while we’re gone,” Jeff was saying.
“Why not?” James replied.
“It’s more than a two-hour drive each way, and paddling out in those swells is not an option when we aren’t home. Got it?”
“Yeah. Okay,” James said with a shrug.
We’d allowed our second son to take more physical risks than most parents we knew: driving with a friend down to the Washington coast to surf when he was sixteen and a half. They’d camp on the beach or roll out sleeping bags in the back of James’s ancient Volvo wagon, cook up cans of chili for dinner, wake early, and pull on their wetsuits. The Zen surfing life appealed to James, but now that we were heading off on our own Zen journey, we wanted him safe at home.
As for Sam, I’d just spent a rare mother-son weekend with him in San Francisco. He’d proudly shown me the 1930s streetcar he rode to his summer job each morning, taken me to the Ferry Building farmers market (which he thoughtfully guessed I’d like), then on to vintage-clothes shopping and pawing through vinyl LPs and used books together (which he knew we’d both like) in the Haight. We’d had a wonderful visit, and I realized this exciting thing: knowing your kids as grown-ups is a whole new world. But now that Jeff and I would be setting sail for weeks on end, we’d all be living distant lives.
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