The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea

by Mary South

  When I was 13, my parents sold all their belongings and moved us to the west coast of Ireland. Dad was an artist who had been teaching studio art and college-level art history for years. Mom was a poet and sometime medical researcher. They both wanted a chance to do what they loved for a few years, so off we went on the grand adventure.

  We lived in a big house called Walker's Lodge, an austere place way out on its own small peninsula, with no running water or electricity. Every day my brother Hamilton and I would walk a mile around the bay to the bottom of a paved road, where we'd change into our school shoes and hide our Wellingtons in the blackberry bushes. At the top of the road, we caught a city bus into Sligo, where Hamilton attended the Christian Brothers' Summerhill School and I went to the Ursuline convent school.

  About halfway through my first term there, I was moved up a year, and into an honors class. I was getting an amazing education at the Ursuline: I took classes in Irish, Shakespeare, French, religion, poetry, but the move from one year to the next was disastrous for my future in math. I jumped suddenly from beginning algebra into the middle of trigonometry. It was like being hit on the head with a frying pan, and my mathematical faculties never recovered. In fact, I developed a kind of math amnesia; my head still hurts when called upon to perform anything more than simple subtraction or multiplication.

  After a year and a half in Walker's Lodge, my mother decided to go to graduate school at the London School of Economics, so off we went to London. My brother and I were now enrolled together, at the Holland Park Comprehensive School, which was as different from our Irish Catholic schools as you can imagine. HPC was (and still is) somewhat notorious for its liberal curriculum and multinational, educationally egalitarian approach. Immigrants from every nation on earth, with wildly different language skills and educational foundations, shared classrooms where each student was supposed to learn at his own pace. It was unstructured and chaotic, but my creative impulses flourished at Holland Park. I played the flute in a jazz band. I started writing funny short stories. I also narrowly avoided getting knifed in the schoolyard by a tough Nigerian girl who heard I thought I could beat her up. (It turns out my younger brother had told her younger sister that this was so. Fabulous.)

  At 15, when I returned from these two years abroad, I found myself at an upstate New York high school where my fellow tenth graders were (I kid you not) reading a book about a raccoon named Ricky. Luckily, my English teacher noticed me slipping into a coma at the back of the room and sent me to the library for the rest of the year to write a paper on James Joyce. (On the other hand, I was the only person in my class who almost failed geometry.)

  The following year I was a Rotary International exchange student in Brazil, and when I returned, I skipped my senior year of high school and commuted to a local college. I wound up at three colleges before I enrolled at the last one, Manhattanville College, where I had an academic scholarship. In a desperate attempt to make up for some credits that didn't transfer from an Irish college, I carried thirty-two credits my last semester. It wasn't an easy spring, but I couldn't afford another semester. Somehow I managed to get through it without dragging my grade-point average down too much.

  While I may have gone into Chapman with a certain academic nonchalance that bordered on cockiness, it quickly became apparent that I was not going to coast through these nine weeks. I was no longer in the domain of the humanities, where years of being a fanatic reader prepared me for anything. All the material I studied was completely unfamiliar and was presented at a breakneck pace. The days were incredibly taxing. I'd struggle valiantly with set and drift calculations for two hours in Chart Navigation only to find myself completely baffled by the process of heat exchange in the next hour of Marine Engines. I usually finished a day feeling overwhelmed and dispirited-I knew that if I didn't stay on top of reviewing each day's lessons as well as the homework, I wouldn't make it.

  I was not alone. Most of our class quickly realized that this course was something we just had to soldier through. It was a shame, really, because there was nothing intrinsically boring about most of our subjects.

  There was an enormous emphasis placed on preparing us to pass our Coast Guard licensing exams. These are the same exams that students at merchant marine academies take, so in essence, we were cramming four years' work into nine weeks. Also, the nature of what the Coast Guard wanted us to know and what competent boaters need to know are not one and the same. The exams themselves are fiendish, riddled with information designed to point you toward the wrong answer, and the entire process seems more like running a gauntlet designed to test your endurance, memory and masochistic tendencies than it is meant to measure your maritime knowledge. And that was galling because, deep down, as lazy as I am, I like learning new things and I had hoped I'd exit Chapman a wizened old salt, replete with a parrot grafted to my shoulder and a tendency to sprinkle "Avast, ye hearties" throughout my conversations.

  While passing the Coast Guard tests was important for anyone who needed a captain's license, the core of the older students' frustration existed because we had come to Chapman to learn, not just to pass a test. It was also pretty obvious that we Professional Mainer Training students were not the school's top priority. The electronics lab, which had a big Raytheon sign overhead, was full of equipment that was twenty years old. Those components that did function were completely obsolete. It was like going to business school and being asked to calculate profit-and-loss reports on an abacus.

  The Chapman fleet of practice boats consisted of about a dozen fiberglass sailboats and trawlers, most in the 30-foot range and comically decrepit. They had all been donated, of course; as one instructor noted, there was no sense letting the students beat up good boats. It was a fair point, though the teachers were alert and agile enough to help avert even the softest collisions between boat and dock before they happened.

  Any complaints we students made about the inadequate facilities and equipment were met with a routine volley about the nonprofit status of Chapman, as well as expressions of incredulity. I think we were the first class that had been dissatisfied and very vocal about it. But from our standpoint, $6,000 should have offered us experience on at least one boat in good condition with up-to-date electronics. Chapman may have been nonprofit, but our tuition was not-it equaled a year's education at a maritime academy or a semester at many excellent universities. All of us worried about graduating from a supposedly first-rate seamanship school without really knowing how to work a global positioning system, for instance. It was great that we'd understand dead reckoning and how to take a three-point bearing, but out in the real world, a GPS was standard equipment that we'd use day in and day out.

  On top of the frustrations of school, I was still mired in the process of buying the boat, an experience that is a lot like buying a house in terms of hassle and paperwork. The survey of Shady Lady revealed some shallow pitting in the steel below the water line, and that necessitated a reading by sound gauge, which meant paying to have the surveyor come back, blasting all the paint and primer off the bottom, taking the reading and then repainting-a hideously expensive process that devoured the last of my small boat-improvement fund.

  Just to dramatically heighten my already soaring anxiety level, I very confidently rear-ended my convertible in the third week of classes. I had missed a turn and was doing an impatient and exasperated three-point turn in a completely empty parking lot. I looked at the emptiness over my right shoulder, threw the car into reverse and hit the gas, slamming into a concrete lamppost that was invisible on my far left. The trunk buckled, the bumper collapsed, the rear quarter-panel had to be replaced. The garage estimated it would take three weeks to repair the car and cost my insurer about $5,000. I would be punished for my carelessness by a huge rate increase and the indignity of having to drive a royal blue Chevy Cavalier in the meantime. The cosmetic work actually took more than five weeks. Hard to believe, but there were no Saab quarter-panels in the whole country. One had to be sh
ipped all the way from Sweden. After week four, when I pointed out that I could have swum to Sweden and back by now, they gave up and just repaired the piece instead of replacing it. Oy vey.

  And then I had to make a quick trip home.

  A LOW, LOW POINT -NOT just in my year, but in my entire life-was my grandmother's funeral in May. I took two days off from school, flew into New York City, and rode to upstate New York with my brother, who had a car and driver. He rolled business calls on his cell phone the whole way up-not because he wasn't sad and anxious, too, but because everyone has different ways of disguising it.

  We all gathered on a hillside, in a tiny cemetery not far from The Farm. Amazingly, everyone was there, not that ours is a particularly large family. But my aunts and uncles and cousins and parents and brothers had come from far and wide on that beautiful day to say good-bye, at last, to Ros.

  She had died in January, less than three months after finally agreeing to go to a nursing home at the age of 85. I went to visit her there at Thanksgiving. She was being a good sport about it, but Ros was way too much of a snob to ever make friends in a place like that. Her small room was pretty awful, clean but sterile, and devoid of any personal effects, save a couple of cards, some flowers, and several tins of wintergreen Life Savers, which she consumed voraciously-a pale stand in for easy access to liquor and cigarettes, I suspected.

  Ros had had one hairstyle my whole life: long white tresses pulled back in a loose bun. It was all gone now, chopped into an artless bob that alarmed me and seemed like the physical iteration of her statement that "a priest told me there was nothing sinful about praying to die." This was the hairstyle, the room, the good-bye of someone who wasn't planning to stay much longer, and I remembered with a pang what Ros would often say, back when she was young enough for it to seem funny: "Old age is a shipwreck."

  In my youth, The Farm was the center of the universe. It is still one of the prettiest places I've ever seen-a colonial farmhouse with a wraparound porch, perched on 125 acres of stunning land and surrounded by a spattering of barns and outbuildings painted in the flat and faded blood reds of a Wyeth farm scene. The worn brick floor in the kitchen undulated like the surface of the ancient chopping block; copper pots, old baskets, ship models, books, art, the constant sound of many old pendulum clocks swinging time away and into eternity-good-bye, good-bye, good-bye-and across it all a swathe of summer sunlight, the liquid amber that surrounds my childhood memories.

  My parents were very young then, as were my aunts and uncles-even my grandmother was still in her fifties. The grown-ups would drink vodka-and-tonics in the early summer evenings and we kids would play outside well past dark. Once in a while, they seemed to forget all about dinner, bedtime, us. They'd roll up the fragile zebra- and lion-skin rugs and dance until the wee hours of the morning. My parents were great dancers, and it felt like something illicit for us to peer through the windows at them, to spy on their sexy, secret life of getting down to Motown. They were just a little more than half the age that I am now.

  We were a real family in those days, together for every holiday. But everything changed, of course. Over the years, after my grandfather's complicated and painfully drawn-out passing, my grandmother's drinking increased, just as her own spirits sharply decreased. She was manipulative, lonely, irrational. Her children quarreled among themselves about responsibilities and money, and everyone drifted apart. Now we stood on a thawed hillside in May ("the month of Mary," as Ros would say, coming through the kitchen door with an armful of daisies and lilacs). My middle brother, Padraic, was driving up from Long Island with his family, but he hadn't arrived yet. We all stood a little awkwardly on the breezy green slope and waited, catching up with each other- veritable strangers after more than a dozen years of distance.

  I only have five cousins, but I barely recognized them now. One was a lawyer. One was a landscape architect. Another was married with two kids, living in the Adirondacks and teaching school. The baby of the family, who was eternally 6 in my mind, was now a beautiful young woman in her late twenties, getting a Ph.D. in marine biology. It was hard to believe how old we all were and how little we knew each other.

  Yet I felt a strong sense of family, of blood being thicker than money, quarrels, time. Whether I saw these people or not anymore, they were mine, part of me, and loving them seemed as involuntary as breathing.

  It was hard to accept that it was larger-than-life Ros, with her throaty voice, Bacall-like glamour and naughty stories, packed in a small cardboard box before a deep square of space in the ground. A clergyman stepped forward and said the Lord's Prayer, and I almost beat Ros into the grave when he concluded with "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever." Ros was a devoted though reprobate Catholic and I simply could not believe we were listening to the Protestant version of the prayer. Ros was the kind of old-fashioned Catholic who was appalled by folk guitar services, who got misty-eyed remembering the good old days of Latin mass and the Inquisition. She liked her priests to be like her God: stern, distant, absolute. None of this touchy-feely, street-clothes stuff. It seemed like a slap across the face that she was being commanded to heaven in a language her God couldn't hear.

  And that was that. No one had prepared anything special for the day. There were no spontaneous recollections, no carefully selected poems, no music, no reception, not even a pretty urn to disguise the flimsy container. After the ten-minute ceremony, we all got in our cars and went home. I was horribly depressed. I thought Ros deserved better, no matter how much she had hurt her children in her waning years. Perhaps they, too, were unprepared, caught off guard by the finality of the moment and the fact that this small cardboard box was what their domineering mother had been reduced to. I felt like my beautiful childhood had been cremated and scattered in the wind.

  T H E R E WAS M O R E T H A N one moment in that nine-week

  period at Chapman when I was stretched so thin emotionally, physically, spiritually and financially that I really thought I might have a nervous breakdown. I didn't feel my usual optimistic, resilient self. It was a massive understatement to say I was not yet enjoying the new life I'd embarked upon. I felt that I was barely keeping my head above water at Chapman. I had no free time to relax or read or do anything else. I was absolutely broke and, added to that, I now felt that my last tie to a physical place on this planet had been severed. The Farm was gone. I missed my friends and family. I was a destitute, rootless wanderer and it was all my own fault.

  One sunny spot on the horizon was my boat purchase. All that stood between me and the closing on the Shady Lady was getting marine insurance. I went to Boat U.S. first, where they quickly turned me down for two reasons. One, they would not insure a first-time boater on anything larger than 30 feet. And two, they didn't insure anyone on a boat that was more than 10 feet bigger than the last boat they owned. The second denial seemed like overkill, but I guess if you considered my previous boat to be zero feet, since it was nonexistent, then their reasoning made perfect sense.

  Next, I tried a marine insurance specialist. I once again ran up against a steel boat prejudice. Many insurers just flat out won't insure a custom-built steel boat for the same reasons that lenders don't finance them. This broker did find me one quote, but it was astronomical. I'd done a lot of asking around and had been expecting to pay something in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $1,500 for the year. This quote was for $3,200, and that included a discount for the professional mariner training program.

  It was now two days before my boat closing. Desperate, I turned to one of my Chapman classmates who I knew had been a hard-charging insurance executive before she and her husband decided to retire early.

  I approached Carol at the end of class. She was wearing her bright red Mount Gay Rum Bermuda Races baseball cap and her hair swung behind it in a high ponytail. She had a green Converse sneaker on her right foot and a red one on her left foot, to help her remember starboard and port. Now, she unfolded a pair of incongruous
ly traditional half-glasses and peered over the quote with a frown. "I hate to be discouraging when you're having so much trouble getting a quote but I just wouldn't do business with this company," she said in her honeyed Alabama drawl. "I'm not sayin' they're bad, but I've never heard of them. You want to be sure that you get a company that is actually going to pay out if you have an accident, and I just don't feel good about this one."

  Being the take-charge kind of gal she was, Carol got on the phone with an old colleague and explained the situation. It was Thursday. Could he find me a better quote, with a better company, before the close of business on Friday? He didn't make any promises, but he said he'd try. In the meantime, after an exhausting day of classes, Carol sat with me and helped fill out the paperwork so that we could turn it around quickly and give him what he needed to, maybe, make it happen. I was worried, I was tired and I was so grateful for Carol's assistance I could have wept.

  I got a quote-it was just as much but from a great insurer-and the next morning, when I drove 35 miles south with the top down and the radio on, singing at the top of my lungs, I felt the psychic sunshine breaking through my clouds of anxiety. I was on my way to buy my boat. In a small, nondescript office in an unremarkable strip mall, I signed the papers and relinquished my tiny fortune to become the proud owner of a boat that was extraordinary. I couldn't quite believe I had pulled it off.

  From this moment forward, the Chapman experience started to improve. I had a home-a small, floating, tuggy-looking home, but a home nonetheless. Although I was tied to a dock and not yet willing to take the newly renamed Bossanova out, I was utterly in love with my ship. I was at the Hinckley boat yard in Stuart, which was not a marina and lacked the luxuries of, for instance, Pirate's Cove just across the Manatee Pocket. There were no phone or television hookups, no laundry facilities, no broadband Internet access, no restaurant or bar or swimming pool. On the other hand, there was also no loud reggae music or obnoxious drunks staggering around on weekends, no constant in and out of charter sport fishermen at all hours of the day and night. In fact, there were only three or four other boats with people aboard in the Hinckley yard at any given time. Most of the vessels were in for service or long-term dockage. At night, it was completely deserted and eerily quiet.