Charting the Unknown

by Kim Petersen

  “Really?” she said with what seemed to be feigned curiosity. She looked away again, her gaze scanning the rest of the furniture in the driveway. Shaking her head she whispered, “What a shame.”

  I flashed back to several years prior, just after my great Aunt had passed away. My grandma, mother, aunt, and I were sorting through the basement of her house and came upon a large, metal cupboard full of hundreds of empty margarine and yogurt containers complete with lids. Upon my muttering inquiry as to why on earth she would bother to keep so many, my grandma, rising in sisterly defense, said that had I grown up in the Great Depression and lived through a war I would understand the craving to save things. “This generation hasn't had to work hard enough for their possessions. Things are far too disposable these days. There is no sense of value anymore.”

  There was a ring of truth to her words, but what I wanted to tell my grandma and the woman who now owned my pine chest, was that as each box and piece of furniture left the property I began to feel lighter. As the day progressed, it became a sort of game for me. With each sale, I would tell myself, “That's one less dresser to dust or refinish.” And minutes later: “One less box of dishes I never used that took up space in my cupboard.” “There goes that area rug. I'll never have to vacuum it again or worry about the spaghetti sauce stain in the corner.” By the time the hedge trimmers and lawn mower left the premises I was practically giddy. Around four o'clock in the afternoon, everything but a few boxes had been sold. Mike pronounced his first garage sale a cleansing “household enema.” I couldn't have agreed more. Nothing like getting rid of the crap. My soul felt light and clean as if it had just been scrubbed with a scouring pad.

  Over pizza, sitting with our lawn chair friends, we raised our glasses and said in unison, “To household enemas!”

  16

  We arrived in Florida at the end of May and our frigid Canadian bodies initially relished the higher temperatures. We found a small townhouse to rent until we could move onto Chrysalis. The place seemed cramped, but I told myself and the kids it was nothing compared to what it would be like living aboard. We went over to the boatyard the day we arrived and toured Chrysalis for the first time as a family. Lauren and Stefan claimed a stateroom each in different hulls. We discussed plans to build a small desk area in their rooms where they could do their school work. Chrysalis seemed even bigger than I remembered. I thought with some chagrin that this was likely due to the creeping realization of how much work we had ahead of us.

  Chrysalis measured just under 65 feet long, including the added six foot swim platforms at the stern, and 25 feet wide. While the kids crawled happily through the empty engine rooms, Mike and I determined there was roughly 900 square feet of living space, and that didn't include the cockpit (back porch) or the flybridge (steerage upstairs and outside). Preliminary plans were discussed: where to put a galley table, appliances, settees. As we walked through, I made notes and rough sketches of our ideas.

  The four of us climbed around and through Chrysalis, exploring as if she were a jungle gym. As we did, we had to keep reminding each other to speak in nauticalese. The “wing decks” were the side pathways you used to walk the length of the boat. If you were walking toward the bow, you'd holler: “I'm walking forward!” If you were going to the stern you'd say, “I'm heading aft!” The oblong metal thingy you attached a line to, not a rope, by the way, was called a “cleat,” and from it you shoved the line through the “hawsepipe,” an oblong hole in the hull well above the waterline. Onboard and facing the bow, the right side of the boat was known as the “starboard” and the left as the “port.”

  I would ask a kid, “What do you think of your bedroom?”

  “It's not a bedroom, it's a stateroom,” Lauren said.

  “Yes, yes, a stateroom,” I would say nodding, committing the new word to memory yet again.

  Later on, someone else would say, “So this is where the toilet will be?”

  “It's not a toilet, it's a head,” I would remind them.

  “Oh yeah right. A ‘head.’”

  By the end of the afternoon I told Stefan, “Check it out, your starboard shoe is untied.”

  At the time, Chrysalis had four empty staterooms, one of which we would turn into an office. There were four heads, three with showers. The main living area, or pilothouse, was on the top level. Here we planned to set up a television and a wraparound settee. The helm station with watch berth was directly opposite that. A few steps below that, toward the stern, we would craft a galley with enough room for a full size fridge, oven, and microwave. Outside, on the top level, or flybridge, there was another helm station so we could steer al fresco. There were numerous holes cut out of the fiberglass where navigational instruments had yet to be installed. The cockpit was large enough for a small table and chairs and had a large, 36 cubic foot freezer and a barbeque already roughed in.

  “What do you think of Chrysalis now?” I asked Lauren, when we tried to pass each other on narrow staircase leading from the galley to the pilothouse.

  “Amazing. I love it!” she said happily. The prospect of life on a boat overshadowing, at least for the time being, the gut-wrenching goodbye to friends back in Canada.

  “You, too?” I asked Stefan who was following her.

  “Oh yeah. It's the bomb,” he said. “When can we move in?”

  Work commenced the following day, just when the South Florida heat was starting to rev its engines. Mike and I set up a large work area underneath Chrysalis, in between her two hulls. While organizing space for tools and hauling lumber into organized piles, I looked up at the curving arches and was grateful for the shade she supplied. It seemed a maternal gesture.

  After purchasing Chrysalis in New Zealand, we had met with her designer, Malcolm Tennant, who had been a wealth of information. “In order for a catamaran to perform well, she needs to be lightweight. When you build her, keep her as light as you can,” he told us. “This will be tricky, as catamarans seem spacious and you will be tempted to fill her up. Check yourselves.”

  Armed with this information, we used a corrugated wood product made by Tri-Cell, which was light and easy to work with. In 99 degree heat with about as much in humidity, Mike and I reverted back to our kindergarten days. We cut up 4 × 8 pieces of cored board and glued them into all sorts of pre-measured shapes and sizes. After the glue dried, I would pick up a section of galley settee or cupboards, and looking like Atlas, carry it up the wobbly metal staircase, into the cockpit, and through the galley door. Like fitting a piece into a giant 3D puzzle, Mike and I would place it into its designated spot. All of the cupboards, helm, settees, office desk, and bedroom furniture were made with the same wood. Rather than tackle the building of all the cupboard doors, we built the boxes ourselves and ordered all of the doors from a kitchen cabinet company. The same company sold us the cherry wood veneer we used to cover the corrugated wood, and also the stain they used for the doors so that we could match everything. Although it took time and effort on our part to do the work ourselves, we saved a considerable amount of money.

  At every turn, the cost of materials used for boat construction and the hiring of anyone in the boating industry confounded us. I would find identical parts, one in a home store and the other in a boating store, and always the price was double, sometimes triple in the boating store. You had only to mention to any salesperson anywhere that you were building a boat and in place of their eyes two big dollar signs would appear and suddenly they had all sorts of parts you needed because your life depended on it. Once, Mike hired a guy over the phone to help us with some general lightweight construction, nothing out of the ordinary, and when he arrived and saw it was a boat he told us in no uncertain terms that the hourly rate he quoted us would have to double. “But this work is normal construction, just like a house,” Mike argued. “Doesn't matter, a boat costs more,” he said with confidence.

  Our knowledge of home construction proved beneficial, but boat construction differed greatly in the
amount of work that needed to be custom designed. There were quirky corners and rounded edges. Sloped ceilings. The weight on the inside needed to be evenly distributed so that Chrysalis would sit level on the water. Consideration needed to be made for the rough salt water environment and the fact that things might shift underway. Every system, including plumbing, electrical, and fuel, had to be painstakingly designed by us.

  Many mornings would find the four of us up early. I packed a cooler with cold water and electrolyte injected drinks, sandwiches, and snacks. We would arrive at the boatyard while temperatures were yet bearable. Mike would give Lauren and Stefan a task: staining wood or gluing wood pieces together under the shade of Chrysalis’ hull. Sometimes he would have them cut out marked pieces of wood with the table saw. When the engines arrived and were in place, one in each hull, they helped Mike align them using string and a level. They both helped Mike set up the generator and while doing so, got a lesson in how it worked.

  When the kids were busy off on their own, Mike and I would run electrical wire, plumbing tubes, or hang cupboard boxes. While handing Mike a hammer one afternoon, I thought that it had been a long time since we had worked together toward a common goal. Certain relational embers, long dormant, were being stoked and it felt good. I had a renewed appreciation for Mike's work ethic and knowledge. The easy going way he taught the kids how to use epoxy, reminding them to use a mask. At lunchtime, the four of us sat together, sweaty and dirty, under the hull of Chrysalis, eating our sandwiches. Mike would say, “See that big bucket over there? A dollar to the first person who can throw a pebble into it.” The game was on and suddenly we all felt a lot less tired.

  17

  When we weren't working, we spent a fair bit of time at the beach which, having grown up in landlocked Colorado, was a novelty to me. Every morning I climbed over a pillowy dune to access the nearby stretch of Florida shoreline and wondered what would pop up. One day the tide would be low and I would walk easily across hard-packed wet sand. Sometimes the tide was high and I was forced to make my way through small soft dunes into which I sank. Not more than a hundred feet of walking in such conditions and I would began to huff. If there had been a large surf the night before, the sand would be carpeted with shells and I would walk across them in bare feet like an amateur walking over fiery coals saying, “Ow, ow, ow.”

  One afternoon, I sat on a beach chair, grimacing, while watching Stefan learn to skim board. He had just come to sit beside me on a towel to rest, and I was checking out several foot-long red sand scrapes that were forming on his back when a lifeguard, a young guy in red shorts, white t-shirt, and a whistle around his neck, came over and said to Stefan, “Hey, you're getting pretty good there, dude. Just wanted to let you know the sand is really great about a hundred yards that way. Surf tends to be a bit better down there, too.”

  Stefan thanked him, picked up his board, and went over to give it a try.

  On impulse, I asked our new lifeguard friend, “Hey, I'm just curious. How often do you actually have to swim out and rescue someone?”

  As if answering a routine question, he replied, “Three, maybe four times a week. More in peak season.”

  Who knew there were so many of us near to drowning all the time? Since reading Marvel Comics back in grade school, I had wondered if superheroes existed, and here was one now. I told him this in all sincerity, but like a true hero, he shrugged and said, “That's my job.”

  Occasionally, he told me, he was required to swim to an area where he had recently, sometime minutes, sometimes hours earlier, seen sharks. He mentioned casually that there were hundreds of sharks in these waters, and he saw them all the time.

  “Once,” he said, shaking his head and smiling, “my buddy was keeping an eye on a heavyset guy lying on a raft a long way off the beach. He handed the binoculars to me and said ‘take a look at this.’ I held up the binoculars and could see a large shark fin heading straight for the guy. The fin disappeared underneath him only to resurface on the other side and continue on its way.”

  “You didn't try to warn him?” I asked, surprised and unnerved at the thought.

  “At the time we made the split second decision not to,” he said. “When we do warn people in a situation like that, they tend to panic. They get off the raft, thrash around and try to swim for shore. It makes them more of a target.”

  The phrase “ignorance is bliss” came to mind.

  Our lifeguard friend told me he should get back to work, but it had been great chatting. The funny thing was, he didn't really leave, he just stood up, moved a few yards away and started watching the water. His eyes scanned the area for a fin or a head going under. Children playing oblivious. He wore the look of a man on serious business. I got the feeling he barely tolerated my chit chat. His brows pursed together. He blew his whistle and yelled to some young boys playing too far out, near a rip current. He told them to come in closer to shore. They grudgingly obliged. This, I thought, is what he does for a living: watch.

  Later that evening I wrote in my journal, a recently revived habit: “Imagine an occupation where your sole responsibility is to be aware of what is going on around you? Like a CIA agent or a Navy Seal. Is such a thing possible in normal, domestic life? If I paid close attention for the next few years, recording my findings, could I become adept at being alert? Then maybe, down the road, if I happened to find myself in a seedy café, sitting across the table from Robert Ludlum's spy character Jason Bourne, and he asked me to describe the details around me without looking, I could give him a ten minute rendition of things even he had missed. He would be forced to throw up his hands and say, ‘Well, damn! You've got me beat!’

  In such training, it would be fairly easy for me to pick up on dangers and escape routes. I have a natural propensity to notice those things anyway. But could I learn to use such powers of observation for good? Instead of noticing all the perils, could I look beyond and pick up on the possibilities for growth? For joy?

  I hadn't spent so much concentrated time with the kids since they were infants. It was easy with Stefan. He was ten years old. He asked little of the world, and it asked little of him. While he seemed to thrive in our new southeastern surroundings by taking up skim boarding, fishing, and body surfing, a cloudy sullenness gradually descended on Lauren. I waited in dread for the moment.

  What happens relationally between Lauren and me is similar to what happens when Mike and I go on a date after an extended period of disconnectedness. There is the initial joking around and laughter, which starts with appetizers and flows into the main course. By dessert, talk has turned to politics and then dangerously close to stuff we're reading or philosophical and theological issues, which can quickly lead to all of the deeper annoyances and grievances we have been harboring against ourselves, each other, and the world and it isn't long before we're headed home and the date is ending in grudging silence.

  Lauren was cloaked in being a teenager. She wore it like the “Coat of Many Colors.” She was unmindful of its presence, but it was shockingly obvious to me. There were unalienable rights, she subconsciously believed, to being fourteen. The right to choose how she lived her life and with whom she chose to live it especially when she was out of our presence. Our love complicated these rights. One day about a year before, she said in frustration, “Why do you guys have to love me so much anyway?” Assumed was that if we didn't love her she could do what she wanted. Maybe smoke pot with her pals back home. Return home however late at night she pleased. Wear a bikini to school.

  “Did you ever think,” I asked her once, “that your love for us complicates things too?”

  “Yes!” she said with enlightenment. “Totally! How come love has to complicate everything?”

  About three months after moving to Florida, Lauren and I spread our towels on the sand at the beach one afternoon. I had spent that time attempting to bridge the gap between us. It helped that I was the only female friend she had in close physical proximity. Strides had been made, but t
he bridge was still a rickety connection, and tended to sway in small relational breezes.

  The day had been pleasant so far. I had been wondering aloud how sand could manage to get into the very center of my ham on rye. I had just said, “Maybe that's why they call it a sand-wich,” and we had laughed. Right after that, I asked her, “Hey, how come you hardly ever go out into the water with your brother?” The atmosphere grew frail between us. Her eyes glazed and she stared out into the waves.

  “I don't know,” she said flatly.

  We watched a guy in a black speedo pack up his chair and head up over the dune toward the parking lot. I felt hot lava bubbling to the surface.

  “Mom?” she said, “it's just that….this isn't working for me anymore. I mean…what kind of loser am I? I have no friends. I hang out all day with my PARENTS who have this dumb idea of building a boat and for WHAT? Honestly, for what mom? To poke around some islands? Okay maybe cross the ocean, but that's like, how many thousands of days from now and in the meantime, I'm missing out on life! All my friends are going to parties and shopping and I'm stuck here on this stupid beach!”

  Up until now her words had been angry, but here she switched tactics and attempted to appeal to my sympathetic instincts. Her tone became soft, conciliatory. She even touched my arm and looked directly into my eyes.

  “Look, I've been thinking about this. It's not too late to change our minds. Dad can finish the boat and we can just sell it. Then we can pack up and move back. It's not such a big deal. We could easily do it, and I could start school back up in January.”

  I was quiet for a long time. I looked out into the waves for a magic message in a bottle. Finally, I told her softly, “Laur, there is no way we can go back.”

  She pulled away and scowled.

  “BUT…” I paused for a few moments before continuing, “I do understand what you are saying. It has been a hard spring and summer with moving and saying goodbye to your friends, which I know was difficult, and then all this working on the boat in the heat hasn't exactly been the adventure Dad and I advertised.”