Landing in Seattle after the visit with Sam, I’d wheeled my carry-on past a woman wrestling with a toddler. He was trying to climb atop a bench, then atop a trash can; she was putting on a brave face while he went on thrashing. I smiled to myself, remembering nightmare flights with the boys at that age. There was the time a woman approached me at baggage claim and said, “I heard you all on the plane and just wanted to tell you, it gets better.” She was right. It does get better! So much better. There’s a darn good reason most women don’t have kids in their fifties.
My mind was awhirl with images: James’s lacrosse team winning the state championship his senior year after beating its longtime rivals; the screaming fans, the trophy cup, the team party at our house afterward, which Sam skillfully orchestrated on the fly when the cops busted the first party and the kids had nowhere to go. Senior prom, with the guys in their tuxes, the girls in their clingy, thigh-skimming, sherbet-colored dresses. James’s graduation, where he had played the guitar and sung a duet, the song “Falling Slowly” from the film Once, in front of hundreds of people. Although James spent hours in his room composing lyrics and belting out songs that he recorded on an 8-track, when he’d auditioned for graduation and been chosen to perform at the main event, we were stunned. This would be the first time he’d played in front of more than a handful of people. As he stepped up to the front of the gym in his long blue gown, placed his guitar across his knees, and looked out at the bleachers to find his older brother, his longtime confidant, for encouragement, I prayed silently that he’d just get through the song. But he did more than that—he played it beautifully.
I thought now about the chorus:
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time…
Now, as we neared the boat on that August day when we set out, I was once again a bundle of nerves, apprehensive and anxious. My lifelong wanderlust had, for years, carried me off on writing assignments around the globe. But this felt different somehow, more like a permanent departure, since one of my favorite parts of traveling—the coming home—would be different. Sam and James would be gone. Jeff and I would return, eventually, to an empty house. My worst fears about myself—among them, that I just wasn’t ready to handle domestic life à deux—might soon prove true.
I had wanted to sail north, I now realized, to take time to move slowly from the life we were leaving toward the new life we knew nothing about. But as we turned into the parking lot next to the docks at Elliott Bay and went off in search of a handcart to wheel our duffel bags down to the boat, half of me wanted desperately to say: Um, you know what, guys? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all. How about we go grab some breakfast and call it a day? But I couldn’t let myself go there. Jeff and James knew me too well. We’d been planning this trip for months now. They’d hear the hesitation and uncertainty in my voice. They’d sense I had no idea what I’d gotten us into. And I didn’t. But the more I stewed over all this as we unpacked our final provisions, the more I came to see how failure in this endeavor was not an option. This was a turning point and I knew it.
TAKING THE HELM
“Want to back her out?” my husband asked the instant we had the boat packed, bounding back aboard from the dock where he’d fast-walked toward the stern and, in a second, unplugged Heron’s shore power.
“What?” I said, horrified. “Are you kidding me?”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” he replied, leaping down to the cockpit and landing with a little sinking motion that he steadied with a hand on the wheel.
James and I exchanged meaningful glances, the three of us now standing in the mighty blue sailboat’s teak-and-fiberglass cockpit. “Go for it, Mom,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, considering. Tentatively, I stepped up to the helm. Am I really going to do this? I faced the three-foot-wide wheel and panel of instruments alongside it, not at all sure this was a good idea.
Jeff stood beside me and went through the gears while James watched intently, no doubt hoping someday he’d be next: neutral, forward, reverse. We reviewed how the bow thruster works. (A bow thruster is a propulsion device built into the bow to make a boat more maneuverable.)
“Mom, this is big,” James said encouragingly, at my right shoulder.
“I know,” I replied, giving him a sidelong glance.
“Okay—ready, honey? Let’s do it!” Jeff called from the dock. Without any warning or ceremony whatsoever, he’d jumped back off the boat and was crouched beside the forward cleat, ready to untie our bowline. It all happened really fast.
Imagine that you are learning to back out of a parking spot for the first time, but your car is fifty-four feet long and leaves no room for error: screw up a foot to the right, and you’ll inflict thousands of dollars’ worth of damage; back out six inches too far, and you’ll ram the big boys moored behind you. I was petrified but also knew this was a test of sorts—and that I had to rise to the occasion if I was ever going to be an equal partner in this boating thing. I’d also heard that women are inherently better than men at the finer points of helmsmanship—although docking is something almost every woman I’ve met on the water says was initially way beyond her comfort zone.
Without time to think about what was actually happening, I turned and gave James a quick hug.
“James, get the stern line!” Jeff called.
“Got it,” James said, scrambling over the lifelines to the dock. Alone on the boat, I put Heron in reverse and began inching all twenty-four tons of her back out of the slip. At what seemed like the last possible second, Jeff clambered back aboard while I was waving with one hand to James standing on the long finger dock, my other hand on the wheel. I called out, “Bye, James! Bye!”
“Don’t look at him—watch your bow!” barked Skipper Jeff. “Turn the wheel hard to the right. Now!”
And with that we barely cleared the boat tied to our right, the wooden dock inches to our left, the power cruisers parked a few feet behind us. And then we were gliding out alongside the long rock jetty, which pointed like a crooked finger into Puget Sound.
“Not bad, Mom!” James yelled after us.
I looked over my shoulder and grinned, then unpeeled my fingers from the wheel and glanced back for a final little victory wave as James turned and traipsed up the dock, pulling an empty handcart behind him.
“Nicely done. I knew you could do it,” Jeff said.
“Um, that was stressful,” I said, gripping the wheel again.
“It was perfect!” Jeff countered, delighted with himself. “I planned it weeks ago as a distraction, realizing we’d be leaving our son behind.”
“Really?” I said, feeling humbled but also empowered at the helm, steering the big boat around the jetty’s final turn.
“Look, the heron!” Jeff cried. And sure enough, the great blue heron that sometimes stands sentry at the tip of the rock jetty was there, with his taut long legs and hefty gray-blue girth and prehistoric resilience. We swung the boat to the northwest and sped out into the lead-blue sea.
* * *
We motored out of Elliott Bay, the body of water that fronts the city, the Seattle skyline receding behind us. Low gray clouds blanketed the sky. The water was still as glass, the wind a whisper at just three and a half knots. I pointed the boat upwind to a heading of 349° north, my left hand resting lightly on the wheel and my right hand on the throttle. I pushed the throttle forward until we reached a speed of seven knots. There would be no use putting the sails up until we had more wind. Behind us in Seattle the Space Needle stood to the left of and slightly apart from the city, its flying-saucer-shaped dome piercing the clouds. Bainbridge Island stretched long and low before us, pressed between the gleam of the silvery bay and the gloom of an overcast sky. Along the island’s spine, a fringe of evergreens brushed low clouds as soft as fleece.
While Jeff went below to mark our bearings and chart a course, I took one last look at the city and everything we were leaving behind, then turned and studied t
he panel of electronic instruments arrayed across the top of Heron’s companionway, about eight feet in front of me.
Our plan was to head north, threading through Washington State’s San Juan Islands and British Columbia’s Gulf Islands up the Inside Passage through the many archipelagos, then sail past the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and on up around Cape Caution to the wild, exposed Spider Islands. We would sail farther still to the seldom-visited native settlements of Bella Bella and Klemtu, then continue to the native village of Hartley Bay and neighboring Gribbell Island. The latter was one of the homes of the elusive spirit bear. We’d circumnavigate Gribbell Island, about a hundred miles south of the Alaska border, then point Heron south and head home again, another five hundred nautical miles, in mid-September. We’d be one of the last cruising boats that far north come fall. The days would be turning colder and growing shorter, the Pacific Northwest Coast’s fog settling into the long sinuous fjords, making navigation in an area notorious for challenging navigation even trickier.
These electronic instruments would be our touchstones. At least, as a nontechnical person, that’s how I thought of them. I knew I had to become as familiar with them, as comfortable, say, as with the apps on my iPhone.
I studied them from left to right: first came the wind indicator, which showed the apparent wind angle and wind speed (in sailing, the apparent wind is the wind direction and speed you feel while a boat is moving; it differs from true wind, which is the wind direction and speed you feel when your vessel is standing still). Next came the compass (with a sliding digital bar across the bottom, representing the rudder’s position); then, the GPS: the Garmin Marine Autopilot, which lets you set and maintain a specific course without having to steer manually; and finally, my favorite: digital readouts for boat speed (in knots), water temperature (a chilly 56.9 degrees Fahrenheit, that August morning), and water depth (an astounding 591 feet).
Right then they made my head throb. But I knew that by the end of the summer they’d be as familiar as the dashboard of my SUV, or at least I hoped they’d be. Plus, they were exciting; they represented something fiercely real, something we’re increasingly insulated from in our modern climate-controlled lives: the elements. Wind. Water. The boat’s physical location on the water, and the wind’s force on Heron’s sails, propelling the boat. For the next two months navigating this hazard-strewn coast, our survival would depend on the physical elements. We would need to pay attention, and that in itself was thrilling.
Peering out over the canvas bimini, past Heron’s bow toward the water, I had the feeling that we were forgetting something. I gazed out at all the gray-blueness, our watery new world, and felt lighter. I sipped some coffee from the metal cup I’d brought up from below and began to feel a tingling between my shoulders. And suddenly I was smiling. It was the first time I remembered smiling since we’d begun working through our long departure list weeks before.
I blinked and squinted, staring out at the cold blue eye of the water. It stared straight back, riffled only slightly by the morning’s breath of wind. Something was missing: fear. The fear I’d carried around for years, lodged like ballast deep in my chest, was suddenly gone. The fear I never admitted to, though it had been my center of gravity since the boys were young; the anxiety that Jeff and I would somehow get something wrong, screw things up, not keep them safe—the fear that had been with me since the day each of them was born—had momentarily vanished. I hadn’t known it was there until it was gone.
The lightness in my chest blossomed and grew. Soon my entire body felt as if it were humming. I felt stronger—and at the same time lighter, as though I could simply lift my arms above my head and will my toes to rise off the boat. I took a deep breath and tilted my head back at the sky.
Keep them safe, keep them safe, keep all my boys safe, I intoned silently to the clouds. Of all the things that had convinced me that Jeff and I should undertake this journey, the fact of our boys leaving was the thing that made me believe most deeply in our quest: There was nothing more we could do for them. They were now part of the larger world, soon to be launched on their own life journeys.
Jeff climbed back up to take over the helm, and I gave him a Mona Lisa smile before switching places and stepping down to the nav station to check our GPS position. A screen above the wooden desk showed where we were in relation to every inch of the mapped coastline. Using the system, we could chart our course from waypoint to waypoint. We still carried paper charts for navigating the intricate coast, but we were growing spoiled by modern electronics—and so we used the charts less and less. Our position as we cruised out of Elliott Bay was latitude 47.80° north by longitude 122.46° west.
I went back up to the cockpit, thinking about latitude and longitude. When was the last time we’d had to remember which was which—grade school? I stared at the compass, a relic from the distant past, with its 360 degrees, the four cardinal directions and the ninety degrees between each of them: north corresponding to 0 degrees, east to 90 degrees, south to 180, and west to 270. After years of navigating family life and professional life, I was shocked to think that in all that time we’d never needed to navigate where we were, literally, on the planet. But now we did. Exhilarated, I gave Jeff a hug, and he turned to kiss me before I could sit down to shelter out of the wind.
Jeff and I took our positions on either side of the cockpit. After weeks of provisioning, boat chores, the long hours at work, goodbyes to friends, not to mention managing the shifting logistics of our eighteen- and twenty-one-year-olds’ lives, we were exhausted. We fought the urge to check our digital devices. Instead, we sat adjusting to the cool Pacific Northwest air—not quite sixty degrees on the water—and took in our new world.
Gazing past the instruments, I let my eyes rest on the bow of the boat, our front-porch view for the next eight weeks: teak, water, sky. Heron’s teak decks had weathered to a soft silver-gray. At the point where the port and starboard decks met like a pair of ribs at the bow, they were the color of driftwood and bleached as bone. Beyond the bow, water stretched on until it met the dome of the sky.
The stillness was almost shocking. I closed my eyes and listened. I could hear the wind dimpling the water. I could hear the water dancing off Heron’s hull. I could hear the low drone of the motor.
It’s surprising how the human ear responds to man-made sounds: speech, traffic, telephones. I suppose an absence of those is what we call silence. Maybe in the suburbs it really is quiet once all the leaf blowers stop. But in that particular moment on the water, I was struck by how full a silence could be—and we didn’t even have enough wind yet to raise the sails and turn off the motor.
“We’re riding the tide now,” Jeff said. “We’re moving nine and a half knots over the bottom with a two-knot current.”
This was a good thing—we’d hoped to catch one of the Northwest’s strong tides that first day. Our goal was to make it to San Juan Island’s Friday Harbor (about sixty miles) by dusk, but that wouldn’t happen battling a current. It felt wonderful to be riding the tide together, the Mighty Heron coasting up Puget Sound, leaving behind the busy world with its incessant demands.
Jeff went below to unpack, and I sat on watch, thinking how sailing is like meditation during an age of distraction: 24/7 instantaneous news, Facebook updates, Instagram pics, tweets, texts, email; how the more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug—and how, like teenagers, we’ve gone from knowing little about the world to knowing too much overnight, to feeling full and empty at the same time. Boat travel feels deep and elemental, in part, I suspect, because boats are among the most ancient forms of human transport, in there with traveling on foot. Archaeologists have found fragments of boats estimated to be eight thousand years old.
The month before we’d departed, while I was working on a Microsoft project involving digital identity, I’d heard the average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. And the average American teenager
sends or receives seventy-five text messages a day. Should I check my texts to make sure James made it home okay? I thought.
But there wasn’t time.
An eight-hundred-foot-long Evergreen container ship was approaching in the distance. I reached for the binoculars: EVERGREEN emblazoned in Jolly Green Giant–sized block letters across a forest-green hull as long as two football fields. The waters of Puget Sound contain some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Nearly five thousand oceangoing ships enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca every year; now one of them was passing us to port, and it was close enough that I could see the rust stains dripping down its looming bow. This was no big deal: Pleasure boats and tankers share the shipping lanes, but since a sailboat (which normally has right of way) gives way to a megavessel, I veered off to starboard to give the big boy plenty of room. It wasn’t any larger than any other behemoth container ship, but for some reason it threw up a mammoth wake—maybe eight to ten feet high…
“Holy crap, look at those waves!” Jeff cried out, dashing up on deck from below.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t do anything but “look.”
We each reached for a winch and hung on tight as a wave of murky green water crashed over the bow, and Heron dove into the trough behind the huge wake.
“Watch out!” Jeff yelled.
A poolful of seawater washed toward us over the foredeck, slammed into the windscreen, and sloshed back, funneling down the deck drains. We braced ourselves, in shock. It was all over in seconds.
“That was intense!” I said. “Was I too close?”
“No, you were fine. If we’d had more time, we could have tried to steer away—, that was a monster wake…”
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