WOOD AND I flew to Miami. Our taxi pulled off the causeway onto a dock, maneuvered through a maze of stacked shipping containers before parking in front of a stained white-hulled, three-hundred-and-eighty-foot, four-masted barque, once christened the Sea Cloud, now called the Antarna. The ship had been built as a luxury yacht for Marjorie Merriweather Post when her husband Admiral Davies was US Ambassador to Russia, and now sailed under the Panamanian flag. As we climbed out of the taxi, what we saw when we looked up at the ship were long-haired hippie kids in ripped jeans on deck, in the rigging, and on the gangplank coming down to welcome us aboard.
These were American high school students, age fourteen to nineteen, thirty boys and five girls. Some had been kicked out of the best prep schools, others out of local high schools—a seventeen-year-old pathological liar who convinced us he’d served a tour of duty in Vietnam, sons of famous TV and theater actresses, wealthy corporate kids, naïve Midwestern kids, serious druggy kids, and scholarship kids. I was the school librarian along with six American teachers, a crew of Norwegian mates, a Swedish captain, an American radio officer, and Mexican cooks and engineers.
This was the Oceanics School, offering an education of a lifetime aboard a sail training ship, where our father had sent us away to shape up and be worked hard. My mother had been suspicious and questioning of the school from the very start, but she had had no word in the decision. Standing on the dock, my brother and I looked at each other and practiced our hippie expletives: “Fuckin’ amazing!”
WHEN MY BROTHER climbed the steep gangway onto the ship, he was shown to a steep metal ship’s ladder. With his duffle strapped to his back, he descended into the bow bulkhead, a steamy room where thirty teenaged boys slept in bunks that climbed the painted metal walls. They each had a clanking metal locker for stowing gear. Some already had posters on the wall, and others had put up Indian bedspreads like curtains for privacy.
My brother had long been a realist. Subjected to our father’s continual criticism, he had found refuge in the talk at the Corner. He developed an X-ray vision that saw through the white lie of Glendale. He was a young man who remembered what he’d lived through. He found the boys on the ship who would compare notes on how bad their old man was, and soon they could laugh about how much they hated them, the old bastards. He set out to erase the pain. He joined the boys who discovered the Coast Guard bar on the next dock, smoky and dark with pounding music, pool, and cheap beer on tap. The bartender never carded the young kids that paraded in from the sailing ship and left hours later, tripping and giggling as they swayed up the gangplank, holding onto the strung ropes.
As school librarian, I joined the five girl students, and was ushered to the carpeted maid’s quarters at the stern of the ship. Besides working in the rigging and being students, it was planned that we would wait on wealthy visitors who would stay in the staterooms, fitted out with elaborate wood paneling, chandeliers and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. It was our Director’s vision that donors would see up close what an opportunity this was for kids and contribute to the school, once we got the school up and running and the boat shipshape.
The Captain called all the students to attention with a silver boatswain’s whistle. We had to get the boat in order before we could head for sea. For now, classes were temporarily suspended. Once at sea, classes would resume. We were all ordered to wear blue jeans, with blue shirts tucked in, our hair tied back. We started the day scrubbing the teak decks with brooms and salt water while learning Norwegian sea chanteys. We rubbed the brass until we could see our reflections. We served dinner in the mess halls. We stood watch, signing everyone in and out at the gang plank.
On deck we all learned to use marlin spikes to splice ratlines with tar-soaked jute lines. We memorized the names of every mast, yardarm and sail, quizzing each other constantly.
“Which is the foretopgallant yard?”
“Good. Okay, name the running rigging.”
“Halyard, sheets, and braces.”
“Which line is made fast to this belaying pin?”
“Shit, man, I have no idea.”
“Don’t freak out. Just think about it.” We helped each other follow the lines up the yards to where the sails would one day be attached.
My brother Wood joined the small troupe of students who volunteered to descend the clanking metal steps into the engine room. With its three-story maze of walkways, it was like a drawing by Escher. There were tangles of electrical lines, water lines, tanks, and bilges surrounding a 3,000 horsepower engine. Joining the Mexican engineers, they wore their blue jumpsuits proudly, becoming known as the “grease monkeys,” who served their chief with unswerving loyalty.
On a dock off the MacArthur Causeway, between the towers of Miami and Miami Beach, an abandoned square-rigged ship started coming back to life under the strong direction of our fine captain and first mate. Living on the ship was strangely similar to the glass-walled house I’d left, with the oiled walnut cabinets. On the ship with varnished teak cabins, we lived and slept on deck, open to the weather, exposed and visible to anyone watching from the darkened shore. Here was another glowing white Olympus, floating above the mundane world. I felt completely at home on the ship, a place so beautiful I couldn’t stop watching the curve of the hull, the bow sprint stretching far over the water, the masts rising gracefully above us.
AS I JOINED the crowd of students and teachers on the fantail to tell stories about our lives, amnesia took me by surprise. I became the shy girl who lost her voice and watched the others. When everyone began to share about where they were from, my recollections were like a child’s. “I live in a beautiful old village in Ohio. We live in a really awesome glass house my dad designed. We grow our own food and my mom makes bread.”
The young girl I re-inhabited was Daddy’s girl. Amnesia wiped the slate clean of the terrible memories from the last few years, for a while. I entered as Woodie’s daughter talking about art and architecture. On the fantail deck of the square-rigged sailing ship, I told about my dad driving me in the Jag with the top down after a snowfall. Or the Kandinsky lithographs he’d bought when he was poor and living in New York. When I was a baby, he raced cars on weekends, rally-racing on dirt roads across country. I said we had photograph of him airborne on a curve in a XK 140 Jag. “That’s my dad.”
“Wow,” they said. “He’s so cool.”
When I called home from the pay phone on the dock, my mother was worried about us and the school, but my dad was excited. After a month on the ship, I told him, “We don’t have any shelves or places to put the library,” and he was inspired.
“I can pack up the VW with my saw and tools. I can make you all the shelves and storage places you need. I can’t wait.”
“Me, too, Daddy. That will be so great. I can’t wait to see you.” I really was excited, completely hopeful I would get the dad of my childhood, completely forgetting the dad of my teens. Certain I would get the father I hoped for.
“Me too, Lilibet,” his voice warm and loving, as he called me my girlhood name.
When I told my brother, he looked at me like I was crazy and walked away, shaking his head.
AFTER HOURS OF splicing lines and scrubbing decks, I was still loyal to my job as school librarian, organizing boxes in the crowded storage area where they were stacked and pulling out books for students to read. I welcomed my dad’s offer to build shelves for the library. After my first month away from home, I was suddenly homesick. When I saw the familiar green and white VW bus drive up to the dock and my father behind the wheel, I felt a surge of love and happiness. This was Home. This was Dad.
He called out, “Hey, Sugar. Show me the ropes on this ship.”
I hugged him and gave him the tour from one end of the ship to the other, while my brother watched warily and kept his distance. My father instantly felt needed. He had a job to do and a crew of volunteers who were quick learners. We had assessed where bookshelves could be built up the bulkhead wall in the mess hall.
He calculated the curve of the wall and how much of a lip the shelves needed so the books wouldn’t crash down in high seas. Soon the saw was whining through fresh pine boards at his impromptu shop on the dock to the left of the gangway.
My brother disappeared into the engine room. From the rigging I observed the progress of the carpentry crew. My dad was at his best, teaching enthusiastic students, and a new friend, Pogo, lingered long after the day’s work to talk about architecture. The library was a success, with fresh pine shelves holding the books I’d labeled and classified all summer. Students lingered in the mess hall after meals, pulling down books and passing them around. In the hot afternoons on break, before dinner, before bed, above and below decks, students were reading: Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Call of the Wild. Older students and teachers devoured books by Alan Watt on Buddhism, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Hesse’s novels: Siddhartha, Demian, Steppenwolf, and my new favorite, Narcissus and Goldmund. My new friends Kimble, Pogo, Brendan, and Ted pondered whether we should be like the pure monk Narcissus or follow the path of Goldmund, going out into the world of sex and experience. We asked each other, “Who ultimately lived a better life?”
My father discovered more projects, bunks to build. When the dynamic young school director, Stephanie Gallagher, thanked him profusely, she added casually, “We could keep you busy for a while!” He took this for a full invitation. He was growing more demanding with my brother and me, ordering us out to dinner with him. There he launched into his old lectures on our behavior, our attitudes and our work habits. In the busy dining room he kept his voice low but we knew he was accelerating, the pressure was building.
A few days later, he told us to meet him on the starboard deck on the bench outside the radio operator’s door. When we reluctantly slouched onto the bench, he faced us on a chair he’d brought on deck. He was strangely elated as he gazed at the series of lines knotted around the rail of belaying pins, out to the harbor traffic and the sea in the distance. He set the stage to his speech. “You know, I’ve wanted to spend a year at sea my whole life.” He turned and his eyes insisted we nod in agreement. Yes, we nodded warily, yes, we knew.
He built his case. “When I saw the article about this school, I thought, I could give this gift to my children.” His tone sounded so magnanimous, as if he were the kindest man in the world to have given his children this gift. We looked down, murmuring, “Yes, this is great to be on the ship,” but we glanced at each other. We also knew we were here because he deemed my brother such a failure he had to be sent away to learn a thing or two and I had to be kept away from Alvin. Our father noticed our slouching, and his voice amped up. “Sit up straight when I’m talking to you! Don’t you appreciate going to this school? This is a chance of a lifetime and you bloody well better appreciate it.”
We sat up straighter, immediately saying, “Of course we do. We love it on the ship.” But we were bracing for something. Other students strolled by, glancing at us, raising their eyebrows when they passed behind our dad’s head—mouthing to us silently, “Are you okay?” When our dad looked away for a moment, we raised our eyes and shrugged, before our dad turned back to continue delivering his speech.
He announced with pride, “I’ve decided I will stay on board for the rest of the year. I think Stephanie’s made it pretty clear that I have a lot to offer to the school.”
His words stunned us. My brother and I both sat bolt upright, leaning against each other. We were instantly absolutely clear and spoke with one voice. “You can’t stay. This is our school year. You can not stay. You have to leave.”
Now it was our father’s turn to be stunned. “What do you mean, you ungrateful children. Don’t you know I’ve done everything in my life for you and your mother? This is what I want to do more than anything in my life. You mean to deny me this?” His face got red and he started to spit as he lashed out at us.
My brother and I were fearless and clear, repeating the simple words. “You cannot stay. We will leave if you stay.”
Our father repeated his attack. “I’ve sacrificed my whole life for you and you deny me this trip of a lifetime? You are spoiled rotten kids. I’m ashamed to be your father.” He glowered at us, as if he despised the sight of us. We watched as a thought struck him.
Inspired, he leapt up, roaring at us. “You are no children of mine. As of this moment, I disown you both. I will have nothing to do with you for the rest of your lives. You won’t ever get another red cent from me.” He paced in front of us, peppering us with his final lines. “Don’t think you can ever come home again. You have no home!” He stalked off down the deck, turning toward the gangway.
We sat there, stunned, looking at the thicket of lines, made fast, wrapped and orderly in front of us. Students who had been hovering in earshot yet hidden from view came up to us. “You guys okay?”
Wood and I looked at each other. We were fifteen and eighteen. Our father had just disowned us and told us we could never come home. We looked at each other, wondering, “Are we okay?”
Then we grinned. The year ahead gleamed with promise. We were liberated.
Wood said to me, “I think this deserves a celebration. And you haven’t had a drink yet to celebrate your birthday.”
Our father left without another word to us, but said good-bye with great warmth, hugs, and claps on the backs of his “favorites” who had worked with him. He packed up the VW and was gone in a few hours, leaving only tracings of sawdust on the dock for a few weeks, until rains washed them away.
I went with my brother that night over to the Coast Guard bar with a group of friends who toasted us. After one beer, I felt wobbly, sobered and tired. I leaned over to Wood, “Oh, no. I just remembered. I’ve got to call Jo and warn her.”
He nodded grimly, “Good idea,” and then turned back to laugh with his friends. In the solitary light of a pay phone looking up at the gleaming white ship, I felt like I was standing on a stage set.
While our father had spent less than a month on the ship, we had no idea what life at home was like when Hubbard and Jo were not locked into roles under our father’s tight rein. Every day after school, they starting going places and doing fun things. “The most amazing thing,” Hubbard told us the next summer, “We weren’t scared all the time. We broke the rules!” Our father had forbidden us to ever to have junk food. Hubbard bragged that they went to McDonald’s to try it out. They were not impressed with the burgers, but liked the milkshakes and fries and laughed all the way home. Hubbard began to pray his father would never come home. He’d say over and over as he fell asleep, “Don’t come back. Don’t ever come back.”
My call warned them. Paradise was over. Once I got off the phone and was caught up with life on the ship, I forgot to imagine his homecoming and how my mother and brother would have to hear lectures about us. But those weeks with Woodie away had changed everything at home. Our mother, seeing what life could be like, began to make a plan to save herself and her children.
Wood and I thought we were free of our father’s heavy hand, but we were still living an extension of our father’s dream. He had chosen a risky, poorly organized school on an unseaworthy ship, fueled on inflated visions, much like something he would imagine.
With the naïveté of the young, we didn’t worry about being disowned at all. We occasionally wondered how we were going to support ourselves when we left the ship. But we didn’t think about life after the ship. We knew our mother would always welcome us home, and that home was wherever she was.
When the rigging was completed, the boat shipshape, the huge engine started and we left Miami for the Bahamas, and then motored towards Vera Cruz, Mexico, for the hull to be scraped and painted in dry dock. Everyone had to leave the ship while the work of sandblasting and toxic painting was underway. The students and teachers were given $2.50 a day to explore Mexico and told to come back in three weeks. Our instructions for returning were to look for the masts, so we could find where the ship would be moored.<
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As we left the ship, Stephanie said, “Don’t do any drugs. We can’t get you out of jail.”
My group of friends divided up, one girl per team, for a hitchhiking race to Mexico City, meeting at a particular cheap hotel in the next few days. My hitchhiking partner, the patrician Brendan, with windswept blond hair, was one of the Exeter students, kicked out for having beer in his room the week before graduation. I wore a skirt, he a white button-down shirt. In minutes we got a ride with a German industrialist who had just picked up a new Mercedes off the dock. We arrived at our hotel faster than we calculated was humanly possible to get to Mexico City.
My brother Wood and another long-haired fifteen-year-old were left without a girl to help with hitching rides. They rode in the back of an oily truck through the mountains. Later their packs were ransacked, their cameras stolen. Left on the side of the road in the mountains, cold wind slicing through their clothes, they walked down the road toward the only light they saw. When they reached a peasant family’s home, they were welcomed, put in front of the fire, fed spicy soup and tortillas, and invited to sleep on their floor in front of the fire. It took them three days to reach Mexico City. I was terrified something might have happened to my little brother. When he regaled us with their escapades, I stopped worrying about him. Our adventures continued for three weeks.
Back on the ship, we motored out into the fresh breezes of the Gulf as we hauled, hand over hand, the heavy canvas sails into the rigging and lashed them to the yardarms. Mainsail, lower and upper topsail, topgallant, royal, and one skysail. From the foremast to the mizzen mast, sail by sail, we hauled them up to the yards, and finally to the stern, the jigger mast, rigged fore and aft, with staysails between the masts. A few days out of Vera Cruz, we had twenty-seven out of the thirty sails lashed into place.
We sailed around the Yucatan, passing the misty blue shores of Cuba off to port, where fishermen in wooden boats waved hello. We rounded the mountainous emerald island of Jamaica before setting sail for Panama. Out of sight of land, I began to doubt the existence of earth, thinking maybe there was only this gentle riding of swells, with sails unfurled. I loved this life, falling asleep at night under the filled sails high above, waking on deck with the dawn. We traveled in a dream of wind—white canvas whipping overhead, lines hauled around brass capstans—in a dream of ships, in a dream of silvery water as we lay on the bow deck watching dolphins leap endlessly in the swells off the hull. We climbed the bowsprit, far out beyond the ship, and watched her sail towards us. We watched every sunset for the green flash as the sun was extinguished in the waves, and we awakened in time for sunrise to turn the sails pink with dawn. We cheered when the west horizon grew solid, increasing into a shoreline of harbors as we re-entered the world of shipping lanes and harbor masters.
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