An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  It’s only then that I realize the price isn’t for a dozen—our usual consumption—but for an entire bushel basket. I’d be up all night steaming and picking the meat out of seventy or eighty crabs. And even Steve, whose lean build belies his near-legendary appetite, can’t see devouring that many. “Can we buy just a dozen?” Nope, it’s all or none. We politely decline and wade on.

  Maybe it’s a good thing. Friends had recounted the difficulty of steaming crabs in the small galley of a cruising boat; one of theirs had escaped on its way to the pot and disappeared behind the stove. “When we finally rooted him out, he had a death grip on our propane line,” Wayne had told us.

  A woman stands on her front porch, hands on hips, watching the egret that has abandoned the marshes to fish the main street. “Excuse me, is there a restaurant in town?”

  She points down the street. “Ruke’s Store, ’cept it’s closed. He went home to have dinner.”

  That doesn’t sound promising. “It’s the only place; he’ll be back ’fore long to open up.”

  We splash around the village some more, until we spot a wind-hardened man unlocking the store, then wander in behind him. As we slide into one of the old-fashioned booths that fill a corner of the general store, he tells us we still can’t get dinner: The cook is trapped at home by the exceptionally high water.

  “Happens three times a year or so now,” he explains. “You have to wait ’til a nor’wester blows through and ends it.” Some people blame global warming—as the sea warms, it is rising and nibbling away at the land—others say the island is sinking. Whichever, Smith is now just a foot above sea level, and the island’s graveyard has been so badly flooded at times that coffins have been sent floating down the main street.

  “There is little doubt that Smith Island is the champion of the Chesapeake in soft crab production,” Beautiful Swimmers had informed us. To be here and not try one would be for Steve like being in Burgundy and not trying the local wine.

  The joy of a softshell is eating the entire fried-crisp thing. But there’s only about a one-day window between when a crab discards its old shell and when the new shell has hardened too much to eat, so the harvest has necessarily evolved into a precise science. With practiced eyes, the watermen cull the “busters,” which have begun to shed, and the “peelers,” which are just about to. And then they wait. The moment the crabs molt, they are put on ice and rushed to market.

  The ones that arrive in front of Steve, once the tide turns and the cook arrives, are so perfect he has no intention of sharing more than one measly bite with me: dredged in flour and panfried gloriously crisp on the outside, yet soft and melting inside, with no trace of hardness from the start of a new shell. We end up ordering a platter of three additional softshells, and demolish every last buttery-sweet bite. Meanwhile, I have first inhaled my own crabcake dinner, giving up only the one requisite taste to Steve that fair trade requires. The cake is almost pure crab inside its golden exterior, held together by a bit of mayo, a wisp of seafood seasoning, and not much else. I’m determined to buy some crabmeat—already steamed and out of the shell—before Receta leaves the Chesapeake and replicate them onboard myself.

  The ducks are gone when we walk back to the boat, and the wind is up. The nor’wester is on its way.

  In one corner: The security of a job, a steady income, a home, a daily routine—comfortable, safe, predictable.

  In the other corner: Escape from work, winter, and daily routine; the excitement and risk of the unknown—tempting, and more than a little scary.

  The five years of the Five-Year Plan were ticking down. The mortgage was smaller, the work rut deeper. The stream of boating catalogs and books coming into the house had grown to a torrent. (Steve’s economizing for the Five-Year Plan did not extend to cutbacks on “educational materials.”) He was soaking up information like a bilge pad under a leaky diesel: on oceangoing sailboats, sailing gear, maintenance and repairs, passage-making strategies. By now he had also put numbers on how much sailing to and through the Caribbean would cost: $1,000 to $1,500 per month. “That’s only $18,000 a year, max,” he said jubilantly. “Staying here would cost us way more.”

  Yeah, and he’d better build in a big cushion for when we came back and didn’t have any work. Did we—particularly I—really have the nerve to put our careers on hold? If we dropped out now, in our forties, how would we get back in the market and earn a living when we returned?

  And there were other concerns. We don’t have any children, but we do have aging parents—mine were approaching their eighties; Steve’s their seventies. How could we think about placing ourselves out of easy reach?

  Even as I raised objections, I knew I was moving closer to needing a change. I had been editing the same magazine for seven years, and it had become all-consuming. My whole identity was defined by what I did to make a living, and I didn’t like that. Steve was focused on the fact that we were growing older; he watched friends put things off until “later” when, they said, they’d have more money and fewer responsibilities; by the time “later” came, they were no longer in good health and and no longer able. “I never want to find ourselves in that position,” Steve said. “I never want to say, ‘If only . . .’ ”

  Four years into the Five-Year Plan, we decide to start shopping for a larger boat. This still doesn’t mean you’ve agreed to sail off into the sunset, I tell myself. It’s not like you’ve set a date to quit your job and leave town.

  We find her in Maine, an aging 42-foot sailboat with classic lines and a fine pedigree. She appears out of the gloom of a boatyard shed, her varnish gleaming despite a patina of dust, her graceful hull proclaiming speed and elegance and calling our names. She is the first boat we look at, and the one that six months and many boatyards later becomes ours.

  Not even sure exactly what to inspect when shopping for a boat, I lie down on one of the dust-covered, teak-slatted seats in the cockpit and stretch out to my full length (admittedly, only five feet, two inches). I know little about evaluating sail plans and hull condition, but I do know the importance of being comfy for a nap. Steve, meanwhile, examines under the other seat, checking storage capacity; he lounges on the coaming beside the wheel, to judge the comfort factor while steering; he inspects the stainless-steel fittings and—on his hands and knees—the condition of the nonskid surface on the deck. People fall in love in different ways.

  Inside, we go through her with flashlights. The oiled teak that lines her cabins gives her a richness and warmth. So what if the upholstery is a nubby weave in early-eighties-rec-room turquoise-and-orange stripes? Cushions can be replaced. Traditional glass prisms are set into her deck to refract sunlight into the cabins, a bit of boat-building finesse missing on newer sailboats. So what if her electronics are out of date? A bonus, says Steve: He can buy the new ones he wants, without guilt. Her sleekness—and Steve’s notebooks full of research—suggest she will sail extremely well. She is a sloop, with the bonus of a removable inner forestay, Steve explains, so she can fly three sails—a mainsail, a jib or headsail, and a staysail—giving us several options, an advantage in heavier winds. She will be fast, as befits a design based on an old racing hull, but also comfortable. So what if she doesn’t have the space of a more modern cruising boat? We can create more storage by taking out the second toilet (two toilets on a boat, when we don’t even have two toilets at home?) and an extra berth. Surely we will never need to sleep seven.

  The list of changes grows long enough to make our wallets quiver, but we both feel a powerful affinity for this boat. For Steve, the graphic designer, to be happy, the form of something must be as pleasing, as perfect, as the way it functions. “Just look at those lines,” he says longingly, returning for one last lingering glance as we get ready to leave the shed. I can picture myself cooking in her snug little galley; entertaining at her varnished table, which can easily seat eight (I’ve already counted); and curling up with Steve in the berth in her aft cabin. The usual practice of refer
ring to boats in the feminine has always grated on me, and I’ve always made a point of saying “it.” But this lovely boat demands to be personified. She is sleek and elegant, but also strong and heavy, built for the ocean. She inexplicably gives me confidence—a word previously nonexistent in any sentence that also contained the words “Ann” and “sailboat.”

  I am still nervous in any wind much stronger than a zephyr, have never handled any boat larger than a dinghy by myself, have never spent more than two consecutive weeks living on a sailboat—and have never ever sailed at night. All of which makes me an extremely unlikely candidate for a two-person, two-year sailing trip. But here we are in Maine, soon to make an offer on a sailboat to do exactly that.

  The Tartan Marine Company produced thirty-four 42-foot sailboats between 1980 and 1984; the one in Maine is hull number 14, and the name emblazoned on her narrow transom is Diara J. Sailing lore is unequivocal in the matter of boat names: It’s bad luck to change them. But we have no connection with Diara J—a conflation of the names of the first owner’s children, the boat broker told us. The J is an ugly visual afterthought—a child who must have arrived after the boat—and particularly offensive to Steve. Perhaps we would have stuck with the name anyway, though, had we not heard the guys around the boatyard talking. “That pretty boat,” they’d say as they climbed the ladder before the sale to add yet another coat of varnish to the gleaming woodwork, “that pretty boat with a name that looks like ‘diarrhea.’ ”

  Receta—pronounced with two short e’s—means recipe in Spanish. “Because she has all the right ingredients,” I tell everyone who asks. But there’s more to it than that: I love to cook. Even after—or especially after—my most grueling days at work, I make dinner from scratch, to relax. I’m always playing in the kitchen, trying new recipes, experimenting, and Steve is a willing subject. We both love to eat.

  When Receta arrives in Toronto on a truck from Maine, we add two more years to the Five-Year Plan. After all, we need time to get to know each other. And make (and pay for) all those easy changes.

  The first 844 miles of our trip to the Caribbean—from Toronto to the southern end of Chesapeake Bay—are a relentless barrage of new places, new people, and new problems. Every day, in fact, brings a new situation to be tackled, something that didn’t previously exist in my limited repertoire of boating skills. “How about a day that qualifies as quiet and uneventful?” I complain to my journal. We seem to have merely replaced our work pressures with a new set of stresses. Still, something is changing: My daily coffee intake has plummeted to one small cup before we get underway each morning instead of the maybe eight hefty mugs I used to consume each day. The stimulation of the new is replacing caffeine.

  We’re not only expending huge amounts of mental energy, but also doing much more physical, burn-the-calories type work. Two weeks after we started out, I had stepped on the scales at a yacht club where we stopped and discovered that without even trying I weighed less—by a good five pounds—than I had at any time in my adult life. Skinny-to-start-with Steve has had to punch another hole in his belt to hold his slumping jeans around his narrowing waist.

  Maneuvering the boat through the twenty-nine locks of the New York State Canal System and the one federal lock connecting Lake Ontario to the Hudson River was the first new-to-both-of-us challenge, complicated by a 65-foot-long battering ram overhanging Receta by 10 feet at the bow and stern: Since sailboats can’t go through the canal with their masts up, we are carrying it on deck. The trick is to avoid shish-kebabing other boats while keeping clear of the rough lock walls. “I guess you want me to do the driving,” Steve says, knowing full well what my response will be. I’ve yet to maneuver Receta in close quarters, and I figure a crowded, concrete chamber coated in black-green slime is no place to start. We pick up only one small scratch before being spit out into the Hudson six days after we pulled into the first lock. Next up is what has historically been one of the world’s busiest harbors, and with the mast in its proper place once again, we sail under the George Washington Bridge and into New York City, tacking back and forth across the river until the Statue of Liberty, her torch thrust into the air, comes into view ahead, welcoming two more new arrivals.

  For me, it’s a thrilling homecoming. I was born and raised in New Jersey; my family still lives here. Docked on the Jersey side of the river overlooking the Manhattan skyline, we uncork champagne to celebrate with Mom and Dad and family friends. “You’ll see and hear from us as frequently as ever,” I had promised when Mom and Dad had worried about our heading off, imagining us far away and out of reach. I hope that by delivering on that promise so quickly, by having made it, seemingly effortlessly, all the way to their home turf by boat, they will be more relaxed about our trip.

  I’m careful, though, to hide my nervousness about the next phase: my first passages on the Atlantic Ocean, necessary to get us down the New Jersey coast. “I’m getting tired of the word ‘exhilarating,’ ” I tell Steve after we complete an intense little stretch of ocean around the very bottom of the state. The recommended route here, through a maze of shallow, shifting sandbars, takes us nerve-wrackingly close to the rocky coast at Cape May—so close that from Receta’s cockpit we can smell the bacon and eggs cooking in the resort town’s kitchens.

  Your parents think this is all my idea,” Steve said after we broke the news to the family. “They think I’m trying to kill you.” I’m not sure what horrified them most: my taking up a lifestyle that seemed fraught with danger, my no longer being at the other end of a phone any minute of the day, or my giving up a good job. Steve’s parents are more sanguine: They ask if they can come visit.

  Staying had begun to seem as terrifying as leaving. Better to take the risk and go, we decided, than forever regret not going. There would never be a time that would be absolutely right, and if we waited for it, we would wait forever. Now, when we—and our parents—were healthy was as good a time as any.

  Despite my fears, I had slowly come around to the idea that a boat, which combines the means of getting to a destination with the place to stay when you arrive, would make it possible to travel for an extended stretch. And one aspect of traveling this way was particularly appealing: It would mean having a kitchen with us wherever we went. We’d no longer have to limit our food purchases in exotic destinations to what we could chill in a hotel ice bucket, prepare with a Swiss Army knife, and consume with our fingers.

  The Five-Year—now Seven-Year—Plan had worked. We had no debts. The mortgage was paid off, so we could rent our house for a source of income. We were completing new editions of two of Steve’s guidebooks, which would be on the market while we were gone, for another source of income. We’d even built up a small cash cushion. But we’d also increased our guesstimate of what the trip would cost: $1,500 to $2,000 a month—not including the equipment we still needed to buy for Receta along the way. On top of that, I’d padded on a lavish security blanket to allow for lots of phone calls home and occasional flights to visit parents.

  The word drifted out to colleagues, and the endless stream of questions began. How could we give up two highly coveted jobs and just sail over the horizon? How would we survive when we returned, jobless and out of the loop? What would we do? It was both unnerving and enlightening that so many concerns revolved around our work. I heard whiffs of words like “reckless.” I caught wind of a betting pool on how long it would be—how soon, actually—before we turned back.

  I hedged when people asked how long we’d be gone. “One year, maybe two,” I said. I didn’t want anyone to think I’d failed if I chickened out and we returned after one year.

  Item in Day-Timer: Reduce contents of house owned by two packrats to a pile of useful possessions that will fit into a 42-foot sailboat that is only 12 feet, 3 inches across at her widest point. Most of Receta, in fact, beyond her bulging midsection, is much narrower.

  “How many T-shirts do you think I’ll need?”

  I was ready to throttle hi
m. “How the hell would I know? Have I ever done this?” If I was stressed out before, now I was strung so tightly you could pluck chords in my neck. The last guidebook still wasn’t finished (Steve and his deadlines), and the property manager we’d hired had already rented our house. The first couple who walked through the door snapped it up, so there was no leeway in our timetable: We had to be completely moved onto Receta in three weeks.

  While Steve wrestled with paring down his T-shirt collection on breaks from his computer, I packed up the rest of the house. Which cookbooks should I take? Could I live with just one frying pan? Would my wineglasses survive onboard? Each item required a decision before it went into a box: Was it destined for the storage locker we’d rented, the yard sale planned at Steve’s parents’ house, the recycling depot, the garbage, or Receta?

  The smallest pile was the one for Receta.

  As I gamely tried to consolidate a whole pantry’s worth of condiments and spices into a row that would fit on one tiny shelf, it suddenly hit me: For the next two years, I would be cooking three meals a day in a space barely four feet square. No dishwasher, no food processor, no microwave, no electric coffeemaker; just a three-burner propane stove with a Lilliputian oven and a top-opening fridge and freezer with one-fifth the capacity of the one at home.

  While Steve continued to mouse around at his Mac, I gradually moved our downsized possessions aboard. I had everything tidily stowed by the time he finally started packing and moving his own stuff. “That locker was for my tools,” he said, swinging open a cupboard door in Receta’s aft cabin. It was neatly piled with wine bottles, each one carefully swathed in bubble wrap and labeled. He tried another, less-accessible spot. More wine. “I was gonna put my engine spares there,” he said with dismay. He lifted the cushions on the forward berth to get at the locker there. It was filled with nonperishable food, and more wine. Surely he didn’t expect me to leave good food and our (admittedly mediocre) wine cellar behind? The snarling that ensued did not bode well for the two years to come.