by Kim Petersen
There are nine islands that make up the Azores archipelago which lie about 750 NM west of Portugal, 1800 NM east of Bermuda. The islands themselves make up an autonomous region of Portugal. Mike and I briefly discussed landing first on the small island of Flores, but decided in the end to push for Faial and the main town of Horta. Once there we would need to decide if we wanted to explore the Azores. All reports from fellow cruisers were that the Azores were pristine and well worth a few weeks stay. We tentatively decided to spend time on the island of Sao Miguel and Madeira before making our way to Gibraltar.
We called Forecaster Bill who confirmed our thoughts on the weather window, saying, “It looks like that Azores High is beginning to settle into the area. Things look calm in the west. I think you could go for it.”
We decided to leave the following day.
38
The next morning, the skies were overcast and spitting rain; the tail end of a fast moving low pressure system. Once again, our plans were to follow it east. In order to allow it to pass further ahead of us, we waited until around noon to haul up our anchor. The waiting was painful. Everything was tied down and we were ready to go around 9 a.m. We had a leisurely breakfast of French toast and sausage, then wandered around Chrysalis checking and rechecking everything. Every five minutes or so one of the kids would ask if it was time to leave yet. In regards to time, I told them they were worse than I was back in the Bahamas.
“Relax,” I told them, smiling, “We're on island time, mon!” For both Lauren and Stefan, waiting for this day had been a little like waiting for the end of school and the first day of summer vacation. Even more than the idea of nine days on the water, they anticipated our arrival on a different continent and the ability to say, “I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean on my own boat.”
Mike seemed more skittish than usual. I thought this might be due to the fact that the weather was not going to be great for the first few hours after our departure. I asked him about it and he said, “This is the first time I have been a little nervous. I think all the problems we had on the crossing to Bermuda sort of opened to my eyes to all of the unforeseen things that can go wrong. I am trying to go over all the scenarios in my head and account for everything, but there is this nagging feeling that I'm forgetting something.” I told him we had been over everything again and again and that we would be fine. He looked at me with raised eyebrows, then wandered around, displaced, for most of the morning.
For myself, I was resigned. It was the feeling you get when you have prepared and studied for the exam, and now you are sitting in the classroom at your desk, and you know that, although you have prayed for just such a thing, nothing but an earthquake or a tornado is going to keep you from having to follow through with the taking of this test, so you might as well just relax and get it over with. Do your best. Lauren, privy to my dealings with fear, had told me earlier in the morning that I was practically bordering on cheerful.
Around 11:30 a.m., we prayed together, hauled up the anchor, made our way out the Cut, and into choppy five to seven foot waves coming off the stern quarter. We even experienced some drenching rain, wind, and lightening. I would have been a little anxious about this had I not known the weather forecast. As expected, things were bumpy for the first four or five hours, but by evening, the waves began to settle down.
I awoke the second morning to sunny skies and fat, gentle, three-foot rollers coming by every now and again to remind us we are actually in the ocean and not on a lake in Northern Ontario. As I ate breakfast, Mike whacked his forehead with an open palm and said, “Oh! I wish I would have thought to bring an inner tube. The kids would have loved being able to say they tubed across the Atlantic!”
Then, once again, there was water for as far as I could see. The horizon was hypnotizing. Just when I would start to slip into the oblivion of nothingness, I would see what appeared to be the water spout of a whale, which would smack me awake again. After flowing in and out of consciousness for an hour or maybe a day, I would crave a diversion and go inside to play MarioKart with Stefan and, even though I won several races, he beat me overall for about the hundredth time. Seeking to sooth my wounded ego, I took my lunch, tabbouleh salad with hummus, and a book up to the bow and fell asleep listening to the sloshing of the water under Chrysalis. It was all very mundane and peaceful and helped soothe the occasional thoughts that tip-toed across my brain like, “What if…”
We had entered the Azores High. This semi-permanent high pressure zone forms across the expanse between Bermuda and the Azores, and in the summer brings hot, dry weather to the area. Once established, it can hover there for several months. I was hopeful that the weather forecast would prove accurate; fair seas and fair skies for the next four days. All our systems had been performing well. We were making better than anticipated fuel mileage and at two miles to the gallon, I jokingly told Mike that if we wanted, we could just bypass the Azores all together and go straight to Gibraltar.
“Is that a challenge?” he asked, smiling.
“Definitely not,” I told him.
In the afternoon, with Stefan at the helm on watch and reading a comic book, I went toward the stern and found Mike sleeping peacefully in the cockpit. I was glad he was enjoying the fruits of his generator labor. I leaned up against the side of the barbeque and watched him for awhile. He had been reading a book on stock trading and it lay open, face down, on his chest. His beard was coming in and threads of grey were starting to erupt on his chin. Recently, I had told him I liked the stubble. His brown hair was a little tousled. Seeing him there and thinking about this journey we were on, stirred something in my soul just then.
I wondered how it was that after so many years, there were still times when he would offer a surprising response, and I would question if I really knew him at all. More often, though, the great amount of time spent in his company enabled me to predict his reactions. Well beyond finishing each other sentences, we were so familiar with the subtleties of each other's personalities, it was difficult for me to discern where the patterns of my own original thoughts ceased and Mike's began.
We were so young when we were married, with so much of our adult selves yet to be formed. When I thought back on it, I understood the caution more seasoned marriage veterans had offered when we decided to marry. Over the course of almost twenty years Mike had changed. He was not the person I imagined he would be, but then, he had said as much of me. Perhaps the greatest traits we both retained through all those years was a commitment to our friendship and the ability to change with each other's best interest in mind.
I had friends who asked me with incredulity, “How could you have only been with one man all your life? Don't you get bored?”
One dear friend, divorced years previous, had said more profoundly, “It isn't that I would get bored spending my life with one person, I would be get tired or annoyed with all the quirks. You know, like on Seinfeld, the way someone ate their peas, or the fact that they had man-hands, or were a close talker. I mean, think about this for a minute: years and years of someone calling you schmoopy. No thanks.” To complete the thought, she said, “You know what it really boils down to? It is trying to keep your marriage alive over the course of all those years, when there are so many distractions. Not just outwards ones, either, but all the inward issues we carry with us. Don't you wish there was a manual? If you do A, B, and C you will accomplish marriage nirvana?”
All this I considered. In regards to quirks, Mike was full of them. Lucky for him, I had none, or thereabouts. Right. But quirks, I thought, were negotiable and had been in our relationship. In order to save our sanity, let alone marriage, ceasing to eat peas one by one was easy enough to change. There was, however, the question of boredom, of keeping a marriage alive. If I was honest, building and living aboard Chrysalis had gone a long way toward reigniting our friendship at a pivotal time in our marriage. It had connected us with our dream list and with those feelings we had when we were just beginning our journey togeth
er. Working so hard toward a shared goal, watching each other change and grow through the process, had increased our passion for life and each other. When the days got rough, when selfishness and pettiness threatened to undo us, there were all of the years of shared experiences and inside jokes hanging on the counter balance that had kept divorce at bay. We had no illusions of invincibility in this regard, which kept us on our toes, tossing the football back and forth to each other as we inched our way down the field toward the goal line. A finer teammate I could not have imagined. In many ways, in light of all the changes over the years, Mike was every bit a different partner with all the benefits of mutual history.
In the cockpit, Mike stirred, opened his eyes, and saw me watching him. He instinctively offered me a sleepy grin and stretched.
“Hey beautiful,” he said in that groggy, soft voice I recognized so well. “I was just thinking. We could make our own mile high club right here. After all, we may not be a mile up in the air, but floating here, we are more than a mile above the surface of the earth.”
I smiled back. Some things, I thought, never changed.
Nights on board were seductive. With Chrysalis on autopilot, the four of us donned inflatable lifejackets, and with a sleeping bag, went to lie down for awhile on the roof of the pilothouse. The evening was clear. The moon, full. Since we were over three hundred miles from land, there was no residual city light. After checking to see if there were any ships in the area, we turned off all our lights, including the running lights.
The sky was spattered with stars. It was as if the Divine Artist had taken a paintbrush, dipped it into white paint, and flung it onto a black canvas. Obviously the artist had gotten a little carried away. There were so many stars visible that the constellations themselves were a jumble and we struggled to identify them. After some effort and minor disagreement, we managed to find the location of the Big Dipper, which, I told them, makes up part of the Great Bear. “We know, Mom,” Lauren said. After that it wasn't too difficult to find Polaris, or the North Star, and from there we could make our way to the “W” shape of Cassiopeia. As it tends to when looking at the night sky, the conversation centered for awhile on how small we were, and how in light of vastness of the universe, we could ever imagine to fully comprehend who God was. Mike mentioned that earlier in the day he had noticed we were cruising over water that was almost three miles deep. Who knew how many miles of space existed above us?
We were feeling pretty giddy and connected to each other and I figured that it was as good a time as any to ask Lauren, who had turned seventeen a month before, a question that had been on my mind for awhile. After two years living on Chrysalis, and at least one more yet to come in the Mediterranean, I wondered what her thoughts were.
“Laur,” I asked her softly, “do you have any regrets?”
Mike and Stefan were off in their own little world joking about Uranus and some bodily function, so Lauren turned to face me. She propped her head up on her hand, became serious, and said, “You know, I feel much better than I did a year ago. And being able to get a job and have friends when we were in Florida went a long way toward satisfying the social part of me. I know there are several things I would have enjoyed about being in a typical high school, attending classes and sports activities, but I am looking forward to university because I think I will be able to experience a lot of what I missed while I'm there, so I feel good about that. When I get regretful, I think how I would have missed out on all of this,” here she waved her hands at the sky before continuing, “and I have come to the realization that this is so good too. It is always a struggle in my brain.”
I reached out my hand to touch her cheek and she simultaneously brought her own hand up to grasp mine, and then she pressed it against her face. Her tender reaction made tears come to my eyes because I knew that living on a boat had not always been easy for her. For any of us. And I started to say something, but before I could choke it out, she continued, “and I think I understand why you and Dad decided to do this. I understand you wanting to reconnect with us and with the world in a deliberate way. I think it was a good thing, for the most part. And I am so excited to get to the Med, you can't even imagine. And, Mom, I am so proud of us for crossing the ocean and for pushing through the fear.” Then she smiled at me, patted and released my hand, and we turned to lie on our backs. It grew quiet, and for awhile the four of us lay looking up at the stars in silence and feeling the rise and fall of Chrysalis.
“I love you three knuckleheads,” I said out loud.
“Love you, too,” Mike and Lauren said at the same time.
After a slight pause, Stefan gave a dramatic sigh and said, “I love you, too, Mom, even though you SUCK at MarioKart.”
39
Alone, alone, oh! all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide, sea
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
-Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The smallest known sailboat to cross the Atlantic was the 5 foot, 4 inch, Fathers Day. In 1993, her captain, Hugo Vihlen, a former airline pilot in his sixties, traveled all the way from the East Coast of the United States, to Falmouth, England, passing through the often treacherous North Atlantic. The trip took him 105 days and earned him a spot in the Guiness Book of World Records. Packed in tiny quarters, he brought along enough food for 85 days: 65 MRE's (meals ready to eat), two gallons of M & M's, 34 gallons of fresh water, a gallon of dried fruit, and 100 cans of Hawaiian Punch. This, he was able to stretch to accommodate his extra time on the water. In his bathtub-sized craft, he routinely traveled through waves 12-15 feet, and once over what he thought to be a wave 30-feet high. When asked what he did all day for 105 days, he told reporters he read several books including the world almanac, the dictionary, and a sailing book. More than just a boating adventure, he took the journey because of the mental challenge it proposed.
The third day out found us roughly four hundred miles east of Bermuda. It was as close to madness as I had yet come in my life, and I wasn't the only one. I passed Lauren in the galley and asked her how she was. I noticed she had a wide-eyed, crazy look, the kind Jack Nicholson's character had in the movie The Shining just before he chased his family around a vacant hotel and tried to murder them with an ax. Her hair was frazzled and there were stains on her shirt.
When she responded to my question, her voice was high pitched and running in fast forward. “Oh I'm fine. Why do you ask? Do I not look fine to you? Because I am fine. Really fine. Everything is just fine. Did I mention how fine I am?”
Geez, I thought. I watched her get a magazine and stretch out on the settee. She didn't seem to be actually reading it, but stared straight ahead. Every once in awhile she mechanically turned a page.
I tracked down Stefan who was playing a video game in his stateroom. I had to snap my fingers in front of his face at least three times before he slowly turned in my direction. His hair was sticking up and he was wearing the same blue t-shirt and baggie black shorts he had on the day before. There were several dishes piled up on his bed with a couple of left over bread crusts scattered on top. When our eyes met, I thought he had a glazed-over zombie look and he seemed to be staring straight through me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Are we there yet?” he asked, his mouth forming the words slowly, his speech almost inaudible.
“No, there is still five and half more days to go,” I said.
He let out a sort of primal groan, and resumed his playing. Studying him, I thought I noticed a small facial tic.
Then I went up to the pilothouse. Mike was sitting in the captain's chair, feet propped up on the helm, his head buried in a novel. He grunted at my hello. I asked him if he wanted to play cribbage, but he said he was tired of games. He was into his book. He asked to please just be left alone. It appeared that everyone was tired of playing games. Tired of traveling. Tired of trying to occupy themselves with menial labor.
So I went up to
the flybridge. Seas were calm. I should have been happy about that, but all I could think of was how much water there was. For hundreds and hundreds of miles there was nothing but water and no way off this boat. Even though there was all this open space around me, I was engulfed in a wave of claustrophobia. I suddenly felt penned in, trapped. It seemed I had been floating forever and that I had never known anything else. The sun dallied, meandering from one horizon to the other. We had seeped well into boredom, past congeniality, and we weren't even half way through the journey yet. Hugo Vihlen, who somehow survived 105 days alone on the ocean, would no doubt shake his head at our unimpressive mental capacity a mere three days into our crossing.
As I considered the length of 105 days, Stefan's head erupted from the hatch in front of me.
“I'm bored,” he said, “is there anything to do?”
Boredom is a state of existence that I have long been trained to avoid: idle hands are the devil's plaything. The Protestant work ethic had pulsed blood proficiently through my veins for as long as I could remember. On land, I positioned myself alongside a culture that abhors boredom of any kind and will go to great lengths to avoid it using any number of debased and profitable methods. Blaise Pascale, that seventeenth-century mathematician and scientist, believed we hate boredom because it causes us to face our own mortality. “[This] is why gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular. It is not that they really bring happiness, nor that anyone imagines true bliss comes from possessing the money to be won at gaming…what people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition…but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. When I set to thinking about the various activities of men, I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Here, in the middle of the Atlantic, four people were trying to “stay quietly in their own rooms” without going mad. Of course, we fought against it, but we were quickly running out of ammunition. I decided that instead of fighting it, I would rest in it.