Patti and I sailed alone around the tip of Isabela island for Fernandina island. There was no one around so we took our clothes off. It was very funny the way some porpoises swam over and sort of tilted their heads sideways to take a closer look. They’d probably never seen any naked human before. Patti got most of the looks, perhaps because she is five months pregnant. It’s the tameness of the wildlife that’s so fascinating. The animals don’t seem to have any fear of us. They sort of accept us.
MARCH 13: We’re sailing under the volcanic mountain on Isabela’s northern shore. It’s towering 5,600 feet above us—desolate but beautiful. The lava has trickled down in huge trails to the ocean, and at the mountain’s crest there’s a little crown of clouds. If I hadn’t seen this mountain I couldn’t have even dreamed it up…. Around the next cove and the cliffs are rising hundreds of feet and are streaked bright red as if the rocks are bleeding. The view here is really amazing…. Evening now and we’ve just anchored Dove beyond the surf…. It’s dark now and quite hairy listening to the huge waves pounding against the cliff face.
MARCH 14: Arrived Fernandina—a cruel-looking island with lava rocks streaking down to a shore lined with mangrove trees. Small fiords full of fish cut into the land like slices taken from cake. One lagoon is filled with flightless cormorants. Their wings look like tattered laundry. They waddle up the rocks using their wings to keep their balance. I rowed the dinghy through twisted channels to a small lava hill like a little world on its own. Brilliantly red-colored crabs scuttle over the dark lava rocks. They are called Sally Lightfoots. The sun is right over our heads at the equinox, but the water here is still cool and really refreshing. As we lay on the rocks some penguins waddled over to take a look at us. The penguins came in on the cold Peru current.
MARCH 15: Oh, God, is it true that there are cities somewhere and that people live in concrete egg boxes!
Patti and I are alone now in a wonderland which you can’t really describe. This morning I threw fish scraps over the side and some pelicans flew in to clean them up. One bird had a bad tear in its pouch, and we watched it trying to scoop up food. Everything it took into its bill just floated out again. We saw that it would soon die of starvation. I jumped over the side of Dove and grabbed it while Patti took some pictures. We brought the pelican aboard—it was covered with black bugs. Patti broke open the first-aid equipment. The wound needed about twenty nylon stitches. Then I drilled two holes and wired up the broken bill with stainless steel. The operation took me an hour. Then I threw the pelican back overboard.
MARCH 16: The pelican I fixed up yesterday is back again. We’ve been watching him hold all the fish we throw him. In fact he can outdo all the others in picking up the scraps. It’s great! Fernandina island is the most exciting of them all. The underwater life and colors are fantastic. It’s the most marvelous diving I’ve done anywhere. When we’re tired of swimming around we go ashore and lie naked on the hot rocks, along with a bunch of iguanas, who take us for granted. We feel like we’re part of where it all began—I mean, part of creation and life….
I didn’t record it on the tape, but something quite odd happened here. When I’d been in New Guinea I’d bought a Bible. I don’t know what made me do it except I just had a vague idea that I’d like to read the Bible sometime. I bought a Koran too. In case anyone might think me religious or something I had wrapped the Bible in the lurid jacket of a detective story. I never did get around to reading the Bible—at least not until that evening when we were anchored off Fernandina.
I was waiting for dinner—Patti was cooking some lobster and I was wondering how to fill out the time. On sudden impulse I took the Bible from the shelf and went up on deck. Page one seemed to be the best place to start. When you read the first chapter of Genesis in the light of a stained-glass window it may mean one thing. When you read it by the light of a Galápagos sunset, it surely means another. Prehistoric turtles were swimming around the boat and pelicans were flying above as I read:
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind; and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth….
Patti called me for dinner just as I had reached verse 26:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply….
I went down to the cabin. I patted Patti’s swelling stomach and said, “And God saw that it was good.”
Patti gave me a puzzled look. She thought I was talking about the lobsters and said, “What’s got into you?” I produced the Bible from behind my back and told her, “Genesis sounds a lot better than anything old Darwin wrote.”
Now Patti looked really surprised. “Okay, when we get back to California you can start your anti-Darwinian revolution.” She scooped up some lobster flesh from the shell and added seriously, “I didn’t know you read the Bible.”
“There’re a lot of things you don’t know about me,” I grinned.
The coffeepot began to boil over and we didn’t continue the dialogue—not then.
We moved Dove from cove to cove, and there was always something unexpected turning up. For instance, I was diving around in a patch of blue water when a leopard ray glided into range of my spear gun. I don’t know what the fish thought of me, but it was too beautiful to harm as it circled several times.
In the shallow water our movements disturbed the fine gray lava sand, and murky clouds would roll up and engulf me. I had the feeling of being out in space, weightless like an astronaut and sort of aware of infinity. In another place we spent hours swimming among mangrove roots which reached down into the water like an old man’s fingers. Patti said they looked like an Impressionistic painting.
We ate when we were hungry and our meals were from a gourmet’s cookbook—lobster, wild goat’s meat, clams, baby octopus. We would sit cross-legged in the cockpit and eat off a table I’d slung from the boom.
Sometimes we backtracked Dove, but when we paid a return visit to a cove or beach it never looked as lovely the second time around. We’d find a lagoon that was really beautiful and return to it perhaps two days later, but the water was colder, the colors more subdued, the wildlife less interesting. After this had happened several times we learned not to look over our shoulders. It was the next place that mattered, the view around the next headland, the swim in the next lagoon.
Eventually the time arrived when we had to turn about. We sailed directly back to James Bay, where we found the inter-island fifty-passenger boat, called the Lina-A, anchored offshore. Lina-A was full of tourists, who came over to Dove and played twenty questions with us. It was awful. I found it hard to be patient with these people—especially the women with rasping voices and men with stomachs bulging over plaid Jamaica shorts. Some of these tourists think that they’ve explored the Galápagos when they’ve poked a stick at a turtle or chased an iguana up a rock.
Lina-A had an empty cabin and we fixed it up for Patti to sail to Baltra, from where she would fly to Ecuador and then sail back to California. We were so busy provisioning Dove on that last day together that there was hardly time to think about another separation—the last, I hoped.
Lina-A was due to sail at midnight and at eleven o’clock I rowed Patti across in the dinghy with all her gear. We had spent seven weeks in the Galápagos islands, two weeks longe
r than Darwin had done a century or more earlier. We were unlikely to come up with any new theories on how the world began, but we felt closer to that “mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings upon this earth.”
Patti was looking very pregnant but terrifically healthy, and as we strolled down the deck of Lina-A I mimicked her awkward walk, leaning back on my heels. We roared with laughter.
“You both look fine,” I said, as I put a foot over the rail.
“Sure,” said Patti. “Junior spends his time swimming around like his father. I just hope he’s not born with webbed feet.”
The crew of the Lina-A were preparing to raise the anchor. Patti covered my hands with her own.
“Honey, you’re not afraid any more—I mean of the baby and me?”
“No. that’s all gone,” I said.
Bob Madden, the National Geographic staffman who had been with us in the Galápagos for a while, had told us how he and his wife had just had a baby by the natural method. His story had really excited us. He had told us what an easy time his wife had had and how he had been present at the birth and had actually helped her with breathing techniques and massage—that sort of thing. After we had listened to Bob tell the story of the birth of his child, Patti and I decided that that was the way we wanted our baby to be born. I think it was then that I really lost my fear of what Patti would have to go through.
I still had my leg dangling over the rail of the Lina-A when Patti said, “Now remember, Robin, we’ve made a pact. You’ve promised to be with me. No dilly-dallying on the way.”
“Promise,” I said.
“And our baby will start life as naturally as the baby porpoises,” said Patti.
“And the iguanas.”
“Yes, and the baby iguanas.”
For a while we were silent, then Patti said, “Oh, it’s so exciting, Robin—I mean the thought of you being with me, and I’m not going to have drugs or anything.”
She squeezed my hands on the rail and a crewman passed and said, “Time for you to leave, sir.”
I climbed down into the dinghy and then rowed around the Lina-A. The crazy thing was that I couldn’t remember which side Patti’s cabin was on. I peered up at the portholes but I didn’t see her again—not for another thirty-eight days.
11
Home Is the Sailor
FROM THE DECK of Dove I watched the lights of Lina-A fade and vanish, and then I snatched three hours of sleep. I awakened before sunrise to a weird sight in the northeast sky, a comet with its fishtail streaming out from a hazy focus of light. That’s a good omen, I thought, and by the time the sun rose like a red basketball Dove was on her way under a ballooning main and genoa.
I put my thoughts on the tape recorder:
But there’s something missing. There’s a great big feeling of emptiness inside this boat. I’m twenty-one but it’s hard to fight back the tears. I keep telling myself that this is the last trip and that it’ll go much faster than the others.
Anyway, there was a fresh wind on my beam—very unusual in these windless islands—pushing the boat along at five knots. Kili and Fili came on deck together to sniff the weather and the two skinned goats hanging on the shrouds. Piglet and Pooh were still too small to make it up the companionway. On the second day out I cut the goats into parcels (a job I hated) and filled the freezer.
The good wind continued through the second day and I recorded: Guess someone’s looking after me because my spirits are quite buoyant.
After cleaning the goats’ blood off the deck I spent most of the day poring over charts—one for the seas south of Panama and the other for the northern Pacific, which I’d once known well.
On the third day the winds forsook me and the sails began to flop. I stood the calm for a couple of hours and then decided to use power. Dove had fuel for three hundred miles and I just wanted to get well away from the Galápagos. If I simply sat around in the doldrums I would go crazy. My plan was to sail close to the equator, due west, for four hundred miles and then due north nine hundred miles past the tiny islands of Clipperton and Clarion. I planned no falls before reaching Long Beach, 2,600 miles away.
It was no use trying to kid myself: this was certainly going to be the toughest leg of the voyage. It was the doldrums I dreaded. I’d heard of some yachts taking more than two months sailing from the Galápagos to California. Two months may not sound like a long time when you’re busy. But two months is getting close to forever when you’re sailing to the person you love and to the new life that you’re hoping for. The sun rises very slowly, and just as slowly the shadows shorten as the heat increases. Then you look at the taffrail-log spinner and it’s hanging almost straight down. The afternoon drags by. Then darkness. You sleep. Then you wake up with the sun again and you check your distance. You find you’ve traveled only thirty miles in twenty-four hours. That’s when you think you’ll go crazy.
Before disembarking from the Lina-A, Patti was scheduled to speak to me by radiotelephone. At the time we’d fixed I tried to get her on the air, but after a frustrating half hour of atmospherics I heard her say, “…just can’t hear you, honey. But I love you and I miss you…. Lina-A out.”
I did not hear her voice again for nearly a thousand hours, and I couldn’t bring myself even to tell the tape recorder how much I missed her. Instead I tried to talk myself into a more positive mood:
Whaddya know, I’ve gone three hundred miles in five days! That means I’m only two days behind schedule. Okay, I can survive a thirty-four-day sail. Then home! Oh, man! Just think of that! Then what? It has to be something different—something to do with the earth and animals perhaps. Or what about oceanography? I’ve got a head start here. The main thing I guess is to feed the family. I may have some sort of gift for fixing engines. It might be interesting to study diesels. I always wanted to build houses—not those ugly concrete things, but places where people can really live, houses which smell of timber. A lecture tour? My knees feel like water at the thought of standing up and talking about Fiji or the difference between a halyard and a headstay. It’ll work out somehow. It always does…. There are so many things I want to learn….
At sea I was a man, but when I thought of the business of making a living in a civilized society I knew I was still a child. I’d seen more races and places than 99.9 percent of my peer group. But I could not picture myself in a world of banks and department stores, of elevators and freeways. I’d never even learned to drive a car!
Of course I knew that life amounted to more than sea horizons, more than how to fix a Hassler wind vane or take an LOP. But I felt I had picked up something which might be useful, something which might even make a contribution to the new thinking, the hopes and goals of young people who are sick of the grab and greed of society.
I’d been long away from the campus but sometimes I felt the vibrations of my peer group. I understood some of the reasons for their revolt. Wasn’t my voyage prompted by the same longings for freedom, the same desire to get out of the rut and routine, to prove something to myself—to prove perhaps that a kid doesn’t have to be boxed in until he is a mental and spiritual dummy in a business suit?
Unlike a sailboat on a windless ocean, the mind can travel faster than the speed of light—can hover (in my case) like a hummingbird over the thought of “What’s for breakfast” and stream away to a comet in the predawn sky and ask, “What or who created that and why and where and when?”
Without another living soul in sight, without so much as a smudge on the horizon, I spent hours and hours simply daydreaming, just letting ideas and images float across my mind.
“What do you think about at sea?” is one of the questions people usually ask me. My guess is that I think the same sort of thoughts people think when they walk their dog or take a letter to the mailbox on the corner. The only difference is that at sea you’ve got more space and time in which to think. You haven’t got to return to the office and dig out the pink file on the Jones account or return to
the kitchen and peel potatoes. I guess lone sailors should be better philosophers than the guy in apartment 406. Maybe we do get a little closer to the truths, though I certainly did not feel like the wise old man in the mountains.
But I know something about loneliness: Oh, man, I do! I know it can take you close to hell and sometimes, just sometimes, close to heaven.
When people have asked me about being alone and whether they could take it—in the doldrums especially—I’ve suggested that they should go off by themselves for a couple of days—just two days, say, in a tent out in the sticks. If they like it, if they can keep their own company for forty-eight hours, then they should try being quite alone for a week. That’s a real test. If they are able to take that then they might even be able to take forty days in a small boat with only cats for company.
I warn off anyone who hasn’t first tried being alone for a few days. Some people will return as raving lunatics.
One “sea thought” I might share here is that life has to have tension—the tension of making another port or finding a piece of gear to mend or how to face a squall. I mean, the guy who is really sick is the guy who has no goal, no ambition, nothing to go for. Having no goal would be like sailing in the doldrums forever.
There are pretty clued-up guys who have thought of these things. I just give this idea as it came to me sitting on the cabin roof in the doldrums under slack sails.
On March 28, after a week at sea, I taped: Here I am just glaring at these bloody charts and today I can’t even raise the energy to eat. I’ve made sixty miles from noon to noon. Oh, man!
In the doldrums the very small things became important once again. Playing back the tape recorder you might think I’d struck gold when I reported a big event for Pooh and Piglet. My voice was an octave higher as I shouted: Whaddya know! The kittens have actually crapped in their own sandbox!
Dove Page 17