by Kim Petersen
She frowned again.
“Here's the thing. Dad and I really believe that this is going to be a great experience. You did, too, when you agreed to go. So we are going to push through it, at least until we have a year of living on the boat under our belts. That was the agreement. Then we can discuss the idea of moving back on land again. You may feel like you are missing out on life, but what you are doing here is not an absence of life, just a different kind of life. Maybe more real, maybe not. In life, whether on land or sea, you are going to be faced with all sorts of crap and doors slamming and lemons…And I know it sounds cheap and cliché but we've got to find ways, here and now, in the middle of the crap, of opening windows and making lemonade.
“Dad and I were talking the other day and we wondered two things: first, we found a theater day camp for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer and thought you might like to go. It's here in town, and we could sign you up if you wanted. We also wondered if you might want to take some of the money you've been saving up and go halfsies with us in buying a ticket for Emma to fly down for a week.”
It was comical how her face instantly changed from grief to joy. She began to chat animatedly about all the things she could do with Emma, her best friend. And the theater camp was a great idea, she said. I could tell she was relieved. There was something to look forward to. I felt like I had temporarily dodged a bullet.
While packing up our towels to walk back, she said, “You know why I never go in the water, Mom?”
“Why?”
“Because ever since I watched the movie Jaws I have been so afraid of sharks. I hear the music in my head and everything.”
“Does it bug you, being scared of going in the water?”
She looked at me in surprise. “Yeah…it sort of does. You too?”
“Oh yeah. I have BIG issues with fear, and it really bugs me,” I said.
“I never knew that,” she replied thoughtfully.
Attempting to juggle my beach chair and the umbrella, I realized that there were many other fears inherent in what we had been talking about. For Lauren, there was the fear of being alone, of being different, or missing out. For me, just now, there was the fear that I hoped we were doing the right thing.
“Then why are we going to live on a boat?” she asked.
With my free arm, I reached over to hug her and said, “To confront these fears. To change.”
We walked amicably over a dune and stopped for an ice cream. She told me to smell the butter pecan mound on top of my cone, and when I did, she pushed the cone into my face and laughed. I feigned shock and flicked a clump of ice cream in her direction.
Apparently, ice cream went a long way toward building bridges.
18
Fall ebbed away and we set a move-in date for mid January. It had been eight months and we were antsy to get on with it already. We got kind of crabby and thought that we'd had enough of this journey, even though it hadn't begun. Or maybe it had, who was to say?
On launch day, a large travel lift showed up and they placed huge blue straps under Chrys’ (as we had nicknamed her) bow, midship, and stern. Gradually they winched the straps tight and she rose off her jacks and swung slightly back and forth making a formidable “swoosh…swoosh” sound. The lift slowly wheeled her through the boatyard toward the ramp and the water. The four of us followed along, as did a few of the work crew who had helped with the painting, electrical, engines. Some of the boatyard personnel we had gotten to know through the months tagged along. Stefan had made friends with a boy who lived at our townhouse complex, and he and his family had come, so the whole event felt celebratory. Chrysalis was lowered into the water and, to my surprise, actually floated. In fact, she was above the waterline for weight, which greatly pleased both Mike and me.
We all gathered at the bow and Mike attempted to break a bottle of champagne across her, but it kept bouncing off the hull without breaking. One of the guys who helped install the engines, an old captain with a weather worn craggly face, came up to inspect the bottle.
He broke into a wide grin, looked at Mike, and said, “You guys bought a real bottle of champagne?”
“Yeah…?” Mike said.
“There are bottles that you can get specifically for breaking over hulls that will actually break. Real bottles won't.”
Add it to the list of things we didn't know.
“It's okay,” Mike said and he gave the bottle a shake, popped the cork, and baptized Chrysalis by spraying the foaming liquid over the hull. Everyone cheered and we climbed into the cockpit for our own champagne and snacks.
Baptism is an outward sign of an inward reality. After the well-wishers had left, I sat down on the galley settee to survey the inward reality of Chrysalis. In our impatience to “get on with it already,” we had moved aboard with things less complete than I anticipated. The cupboards were in place, but there were no cupboard doors. No galley table. No cushions or upholstery on any sitting area. No wall covering which meant that in many places along interior walls, wires and plumbing were exposed. The pilothouse helm was roughed in, but unfinished. About a third of the woodworking had yet to be completed. Tools were strewn about and boxes piled in whatever free space remained. Just walking across the room required the agility of a ballerina.
The carpeting and hardwood cherry flooring had been installed, though, and the plumbing and electrical fixtures were in and working, as were the appliances. We had mounted a television in the pilothouse with a DVD player in the cupboard next to it. With no satellite or cable television, our only options regarding the TV and DVD player would be the numerous videos we had been collecting. The day before, Mike and I had shoved our mattresses aboard and I made up the beds with freshly laundered sheets because I figured after moving day we would be exhausted and there is nothing quite like crawling into bed after a day of hauling boxes around in the Florida heat.
Sitting there in the galley, I wondered how I got to such a place, so far from my normal environment. Not only did we need to unpack all our boxes, we had construction to finish and a new lifestyle to figure out, one whose ropes were not even vaguely familiar. Right then and there, I considered mounting a plank on the bow and voluntarily walking off it. The cold water would have done me a world of good, but I was saved for the moment by duty in the form of a kid yelling from the head, “Someone PLEASE find the toilet paper and bring me a roll! SOMEONE? HELLO?” I smiled, stood up, and began rummaging through boxes. As a parent, when you are presented with such dependency, you take advantage of it. I intended to eek out a few bucks, maybe even a chore or two, from this bailout.
While I was unpacking silverware in the galley, Lauren came in with some towels and said, “Check out the backyard, Mom.” I looked out over the sink, beyond the gangway, into an expanse of bluish grey, rippling, water. In the busyness of moving aboard I hadn't even noticed I was walking on water. The rest of the afternoon, every time I looked out a porthole or walked out onto the decks, I looked into its murky depths.
Up until that point in my life, sea water and I had been loosely acquainted. I took the occasional dip, stuck my toes in while sitting at a dock, or dropped a fishing line into its wetness. Wiped its stinging drops from of my eyes. Living on water elevated my status from tryst to cohabitation. If we were to be inexorably linked, I figured I better have more than a cursory hunch as to what I would be dealing with. I consulted my Ocean Almanac, a seagoing bible of sorts, and thus began a more intimate relationship.
Water covers seventy percent of the earth's surface. Three hundred and fifty million cubic miles give or take. In a universe where water has yet to be found, it is a hearty portion. Of that, a measly 2.5 percent is drinkable. Fourteen million cubic miles of all water on earth is ice. If you melted that ice the oceans would rise 1.7 percent or about 180 feet, enough to immerse 20 stories of the Empire State Building. No wonder folks are concerned about global warming.
The average depth of the oceans is an astounding 12,200 feet, well
over two miles. I can imagine what might inhabit the bottom of such an environment. I read once that the oldest creatures on earth live there, which makes sense as they have learned to withstand the enormous pressure and darkness living on our planet so often demands. Thinking of the vast breadth and depth, it doesn't come as a surprise to learn that less than ten percent of the earth's waters have been explored by humans.
Further on, I read that a mathematician, one who obviously has a lot of time on his hands, figured out that if Christopher Columbus spilled a glass of drinking water into the ocean in 1492, by today all 1,700,000,000,000,000,000 molecules would now be thoroughly mixed into the oceans and rivers so that every glass of water drawn from every faucet in the world would contain as many as 250 molecules from the original water Columbus spilled from his glass. The next time I poured Mike and me a glass of good ole H2O, I held mine up and said, “To Christopher Columbus and exploration.” Mike, unaware of my recent discovery, smiled and clinked my glass anyway.
If you are interested in striking it rich, you might consider inventing a cost efficient apparatus that could extract the nine million tons of gold that has dissolved in the world's oceans, roughly 180 tons more than have ever been mined on the earth. While you are at it, you might as well extract the salt. There is enough salt in all the oceans to cover the continents in a layer 500 feet thick.
Next time you happen to inadvertently swallow a gulpful of seawater while swimming, consider this: not only have you just ingested salt, trace elements of gold, and about forty-six other elements, but millions of bacterial cells, hundreds of thousands of phytoplankton and tens of thousands of zooplankton. Yummy. I had done this just the other day, so I figured there had been a consummation of sorts, and water and I were officially introduced.
As I climbed into my berth on the eve of my first night to ever sleep on water's bulk, I thought about how water was holding up thirty-five tons of power catamaran, my son, daughter, husband, my whole world. It was my life support. Briefly, I also thought that if we sprung a leak sometime in the night and our bilge pumps failed, water would pour into the holds, the cabins, and the very same water that was sustaining our lives could snuff it out in a matter of minutes.
I laid back on clean smelling sheets and thought, ‘Here I am. This is the day I have dreaded and looked forward to for such a long time. I am on the water and I am still alive.’ I took a long, drawn out, cleansing breath. I was a little nervous, but strangely unafraid. I admit this was partly due to the fact that I was exhausted. That and the gentle rocking of the boat seemed to placate my imagination. Just before nodding off, I looked directly above me through a hatch, roughly two feet square, and was surprised to see a dark sky full of stars.
19
For the next week, every morning I would wake up and think, “Well wonder of wonders, I made it through another day and another night. The boat is still floating. I haven't drowned, yet. Mike and the kids aren't dead. It's going to be a good day.”
Thus would begin a bombardment of sensory perceptions unlike any I had experienced. While having coffee I would look out the window and both sense and see that I was in motion. The horizon, forever stable and stationary in my previous life, now continuously moved up and down. Sometimes a boat would go by and the wash would bounce around my universe. This, I imagined, was what it felt like to be a bobblehead.
The sheer amount of auditory signals being chucked in my direction made me, on more than one occasion, want to sit in a dark stateroom, put my hands over my ears, squeeze my eyes shut, and say, “Na, na, na, na.” At any given moment, several machines could be counted on to whirr, thump, or growl when you least expected it: generator, watermaker, bilge pumps, freezer compressor, twin 330 Cummins engines. The first few times I ran the water at the galley sink, I would simultaneously hear a strange noise, sort of a combination between a hum and a distant reoccurring thumping. I froze and asked, “What was that?” Had we been holed? Was it time to abandon ship? A scavenger hunt ensued until one of us yelled up, “Oh, it's just the watermaker!”
Around 2 a.m. on the second night aboard, I awakened to an eerie intermittent moaning. I opened the pilothouse door and looked around half expecting to see the ghostly crew of the Black Pearl marauding through the marina. I was all set to tell some grubby pirate, “Parlay,” when I determined it was the air flowing past the large mast of the sailboat next to us, the resulting sound similar to someone blowing into a plastic two-liter pop jug. Back in bed, I listened to our lines groan and the fenders creak as we moved on and off the dock. I hoped the lines would hold us.
As I scrubbed the galley floor the next morning, I heard an odd “rubbing” noise coming from underneath the hull. I got the rest of the crew to come into the room and we all stood together, with our eyeballs rolled up and off to the side, our brows furrowed as if trying to guess the final question on Jeopardy. The four of us trooped en masse to the pilothouse to listen some more. The sound was faint. It seemed to be coming from the cockpit. Back we went, through the galley, outside, where we looked down over the starboard swim platform to see a manatee rubbing its belly on the bottom of our starboard hull. What next, I thought.
When tasting wine, oenophiles credit the nose with as much importance as the tongue. This is why, when I want to impress the sommelier at my favorite gourmet restaurant, I nod at the bottle he's presented, the label of which means about as much to me as reading a menu in Klingon. I then bring the minnow portion of wine swirling in the glass up to my nose and take a deep breath in. Of course, whether it does or not, I always say “It smells delicious.” On impulse I might add, “Like after a fresh rain in California wine country.” This will impress the sommelier, even more so if the bottle is actually from California. Then the sommelier might enthusiastically ask me, “Have you been to California wine country?”
“No,” I would be forced to say.
This was where it got tricky.
The nose is a finely tuned instrument and plays a large part in our interpretation of life. I have a particularly acute sense of smell and routinely use this fact as an excuse as to why I love to eat. My nose gets going with my tongue making eating chicken curry like riding the careening teacups at an amusement park. This gift became a betrayal when, during the first forty-eight hours of living aboard, the starboard head malfunctioned twice, resulting in stench more putrid than anything I had smelled before in an outhouse. I mopped up, then disinfected, with a clothespin uncomfortably pinching my nostrils shut. Afterwards, I went outside to cleanse the palate of my nose. I breathed in the fresh smell of salt air for several minutes, only to come back into the galley to be confronted by the smell of diesel. Mike was testing the engines.
For days I walked around like a bloodhound, my nose in the air, sniffing for potentially harmful fumes or smoke. Learning to decipher the difference between smoke resulting from my botched attempt at Moroccan Chicken on the BBQ and the electrical smoke I smelled later that night became a survival lesson in discernment. Faulty wiring in the davit solenoid, the crane used to haul the dinghy up and down, had released a smell around 4 a.m. strong enough to wake only me up. After sniffing around I found the exposed wiring in the galley and noticed with some apprehension that the area around it had been scorched. Even then, a wisp of smoke was wafting toward me. Since we had yet to install our fire alarms, had I not caught it, the whole boat might have gone up in flames before sinking while we were snug in our beds. As if the perils of water weren't enough, now there was a new adversary to worry about: fire. I installed the fire alarms the next day.
The davit incident aside, I lived for the day when I would be able to sort through all the sounds, smells, and other sensory perceptions into a mental manila file folder, their repetition causing them to be automatically filed under “Just a Normal Day.”
~~~
Back on land, I had a large walk-in closet. I have heard it said that “perceived needs rise to meet an income,” and I can tell you the same is true of closets. As soo
n as we moved into that house and I realized my wardrobe only filled half of it, I instantly had the desire to fill it. After five years, I had succeeded and then some. When we decided to live on Chrysalis, I knew I had to simplify this area of my life, as there would not be room for all the stuff I had accumulated. I gave a lot away. I was feeling pretty charitable and pious about all the giving and simplifying I was doing right up until the day I sat on the bed in our stateroom on Chrysalis, surrounded by boxes of my clothes and shoes, and realized it was going to be impossible to cram it all into my assigned 4 ft. by 2 ft. “locker,” one small cupboard, and four six inch by three foot drawers.
And another thing, I had been so proud of myself for paring down my shoe collection to only twenty pairs, including flip flops and sneakers, but it was clear there was no way they were all going to fit in that locker. I tried stacking them with an ingenuity that would have impressed the ancient Egyptians, but every time I opened the locker doors, five or six pairs would come tumbling out. With some dismay, I realized I was going to have to increase my ruthlessness which, months ago when initially packing, I thought would be impossible. While stuffing a garbage bag with items I had previously considered as “necessary” including a favorite red sweater, I hesitated. I opened Mike's locker and tried to sneak the sweater and a few shoes in, but he later found them and said “forget it.” By the end of the second day aboard I had a box and a bag to give away, most of which I never missed. Except that red sweater. When I am supremely frustrated with having nothing to wear, I am certain that red sweater would magically cure all my fashion woes.