by Tania Aebi
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOR MY MOTHER
1
October 23, 1987, another dawn—my thirty-seventh alone on the North Atlantic. Around me, the sea is a liquid mountain range of heaving swells, and I’m really scared. The winds and waves have been steadily increasing since yesterday, when they veered from southeast to northeast. Varuna has been knocked mast-down to the water countless times during the night and I haven’t been able to relax, sleep, eat or think about anything other than staying alive. Following now are the biggest waves I’ve ever seen—probably 25 feet. It’s almost winter and I’ve pushed my luck. The weather can only get worse.
“Four feet above, avalanches of white water crash across Varuna’s back, swamping the cockpit. In the cabin, everything that hasn’t been battened down has been thrown off the shelves. Pots, pans, cans and tools clatter together in the lockers. I’m wedged into my bunk, my foot stretched across to the sink to stop me from being thrown around the cabin. There are still 880 miles to go until home. I want to see the Statue of Liberty. I want to take a hot bath and eat something good. I want to see my family. . . .”
I stuffed my logbook onto the shelf behind my head, struggled out of limp long johns and stripped down before beginning the contortions of getting into foul-weather gear—first the overalls, then the jacket. It was useless wearing anything beneath the gear because it would have been stupid to jeopardize the precious dry clothes by wearing them outside, where they’d be soaked in seconds. I fastened the hood around my salty head, which was matted into itchy, sticky clumps of hair and crying out to be washed. Practically the only kind of shower I had been able to provide myself during the last month at sea was the occasional unexpected wave that crashed over me, increasing the sodium level on my skin. There was not a drop of fresh water on board to spare for the luxury of a wash. Even though I sprinkled myself liberally with talcum powder, my skin pinched up from the salt and my bottom was covered with sores from sitting on damp cushions for so many weeks. The cold, salt-encrusted lining of the foul-weather gear rubbed against my naked skin like broken glass, and I had to step into it at least ten times a day.
Crouched on all fours and peering out through the dark blue Plexiglas slats that sealed the companionway, I choreographed my next move and waited for the null moment between waves to lurch into action. OK . . . almost ready . . . ready . . . NOW! Quickly removing the slats, I clambered out to the cockpit and added one more bruise to the scars covering my legs.
“Come on, Tarzoon,” I coaxed my feline buddy, “if you want to come out, now’s your chance.” He blinked up at me from the safety of his corner in the bunk, looking for assurance. Varuna leveled for a moment and Tarzoon leapt through the companionway, sniffing the air and sticking close. “It’s kind of ugly out here,” I confided, snapping the umbilical cord of my safety harness onto the lifelines of the boat and looking up the mast to the sky. No change from yesterday. If anything, it was worse. The wind velocity was gale force and holding between 40 to 50 knots. Rain pocked the water around Varuna, and low-hanging, dark masses canopied us. The last piece of land that these black clouds had shadowed was America, “maybe even New York,” I said aloud, and the thought made the gloom seem almost friendly.
“We are so close, Tarzoon, and I have these feelings, New York feelings.” If we continued on at this speed, we would have about eight more days left; if we dropped back to our average speed until now, it could take another fourteen.
Already I could feel the pulse of New York and could almost smell civilization in the air. I sensed the vibration of the subway and as the ocean mimicked the noise of rattling tracks, imagined being on the Lexington line #6 heading uptown. Soon, God willing, I’d be home. Home, after two and a half years of seeing the four corners of the world from the deck of this little 26-foot sailboat. The gray horizon to the west was full of promise.
Landfalls were not alien to me. I had emerged from the ocean void to stand in awe of the jagged cliffs of the Galápagos, the verdant dream world of South Pacific islands, the cities carved from the rock of Malta. Varuna had shown me a world of physical challenge and jaw-dropping beauty; of ancient cultures; of generosity in the face of unspeakable poverty; a world where a smile is the greatest gift you can give or receive. Out of the past two and a half years, I had spent 360 days alone at sea, pressing ever westward, ever homeward. This final landfall would close the circle, end the dream and begin the most daunting unknown yet.
I squinted into the howling winds, hypnotized, watching every wall of water catch up, lift Varuna’s stern and take us surfing down its crest. With just enough time for me to crouch and hang on, the crest of another thousand-gallon mountain broke and engulfed us. Water rushed up my pants legs and leaked into my hood and down my neck, and slowly the cockpit began to drain as Varuna lurched drunkenly onward. Making the adjustments to the windvane, I took a 360-degree scan of the barren seascape. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing—nothing but angry graybeards marching toward an eternal horizon.
Tarzoon meowed by the companionway, wet and matted, desperate to get inside to safety before the next drenching. Following him below, I peeled off the wet rain gear and turned on the radio. The BBC announced that things were going better in New York since Black Monday, four days before. We had been at 50 degrees longitude then, in the midst of a flat calm, almost two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic. As the announcer described the Wall Street crash, I had been studying my chart, staring at the place where we were now, wondering how it would feel to be here. Now I knew.
Tuning in to Radio France and clutching onto handholds, I stumbled the two steps toward the toilet, which was out of commission. It was always closed up at sea, where I was surrounded by the biggest toilet on earth. I didn’t need the little white pot and transformed its closet into a hanging locker with lines holding everything in. I wrapped the gear over one line as it dripped down on the floor, threw a dirty mop-up rag over the new puddles in the cabin and rearranged the kerosene heater and bottled water. The heater fell over again with the bucking motion, dribbling some fuel, stinking up the small confines and making me dizzy. “More than enough kerosene,” I thought. “Wish it were water. I have only five bottles left. I hope it’ll last.”
Putting my thermal underwear back on, I saw Tarzoon chewing away at the coral fan Olivier had given me to bring home. “Stop it, you little monster!” I reprimanded, taking it away from him for the fiftieth time. It refused to stay in its lashings on the wall and kept tumbling down to my bunk and Tarzoon’s teeth. Picking it up, once again I admired the intricacy of its lacy white fronds, thinking about Olivier and remembering how much he loved to dive in search of shells and underwater life. The fan had come from the San Bias Islands between Colombia and Panama and I remembered that it was one of the first things that I had remarked on in Akka, Olivier’s boat. Here on Varuna with Tarzoon, after nearly circumnavigating the planet, it was disintegrating.
“I wonder what he is doing now,” I said aloud. “If he was able to come to the U
nited States, perhaps he’s at the American consulate, applying for a visa. If he wasn’t able to come . . .” My emotions and energy were already stretched to their limits and I knew better than to risk the torture of negative thoughts. But it was no use. Although I tucked the fan away in the toilet closet, safe from harm, everywhere I looked were reminders of Olivier, the quiet man who had become a part of my life in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Without him, I knew, I would not be here today.
We were both crying when we kissed each other goodbye and I finally broke away from the little island of Malta, not knowing when or if we’d ever see each other again. Ahead of Varuna was the Mediterranean and then the North Atlantic. Olivier was headed back to his home in Switzerland. Our lives, which had been so closely aligned for so many months as we voyaged together around half the world—he aboard Akka and I aboard Varuna—now seemed filled with uncertainty. Only time would tell.
• • •
At sea, the crashing, banging and moaning sounds of a sailboat battling through a storm, however discordant, come together in a symphony of chaos. Any unusual sound or movement that disrupts it immediately stands out—like now. There was a slight knocking noise against Varuna’s hull at the bow and I turned toward the sound. The big jib, saved for lighter winds, was lashed down up forward and was working itself loose with the metal eye at the foot of the sail beginning to bang against the hull with each wave. It had to be retied before it was dragged overboard.
Pulling my gear back on, I crawled outside and clipped the harness onto a jack line as Varuna buried her bow in every wave. “I might as well get this over with right now!” I yelled and barreled forward, splashing through the water on deck, grabbing the rails and the lifelines along the way and viciously stubbing my foot against a chain plate.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I screamed, as another wall of water threw Varuna over on her side and drenched me. My hood blew off and my hair whipped about my face as I reached the pitching foredeck. I held on and began to work free the waterlogged knots in the line, gathered the sail, rolled it up into a wad and relashed it, quickly navigating my way back to the cockpit. At the spray hood, I took a quick check of the horizon, the deck, the rigging and the frothing ocean one last time before dashing inside. When I replaced the slats, the howling din diminished as the radio welcomed me back with Bob Marley’s “Coming In from the Cold.” I sat in a heap on my bunk and glanced at my watch. It was only 9:00 A.M.
The wind continued to cry through the rigging, the same sound as when it keened through the pine trees behind my family’s house when we lived in Vernon. My thoughts drifted back to the days of my childhood, to my parents and to our lives of such confusion that the fury of today’s ocean almost paled by comparison.
Looking at my hands, I smiled to see that they were now more callused than my father’s had ever been during his years of eking out a living doing construction work. The day-to-day dampness at sea had soaked so deeply into the skin that the calluses now peeled off in shriveled white hunks. I thought of how proud my father was going to be; I had finally finished something other than a meal. My father, the collector of experiences, the gifted Swiss artist of boundless energies, had almost sent me to my doom. Although I might have set off on the voyage of his dreams, somewhere along the way, I had created my own.
For better or worse, my life was now woven from a different thread than that of the loved ones to whom I was returning. Very soon, I’d see the differences I had only read about in letters. I’d see my best friend from high school, Rebecca, whose first baby, my goddaughter Kendra, was one and a half years old already and whom I’d never seen. Many of my friends had gone away to college. Three had become heroes in the music world whom I had read and heard about in Newsweek and on the BBC.
Tony, my brother, wasn’t in tenth grade anymore, but in college at Stonybrook. My sister Nina was in her third year at Cornell; and Jade, the youngest, was in her senior year of high school. We had all done our best to correspond and keep in touch by means of tapes and phone calls over the past two and a half years, but as the months passed and as the landfalls became more distant from home, I sensed in the letters and in the rare static-free telephone calls that our lives had diverged more radically than I ever dreamed possible. Did they feel it, too? I wondered if I would ever fit in again.
My life had been a mixed package of wild circumstances until the day Varuna carried me out of New York Harbor at age eighteen. I thought back to that day and recalled the frightened girl I had been, filled with such unbridled visions of the future. Today, I found myself envying her innocence. Now that she had learned the perils of the game, I wondered if she would ever again be brave enough to pay the price for a dream of such dimensions.
My bony knees were outlined through the thin long-john fabric.
Although I was not as skinny as I had been in the Red Sea, I still hadn’t accumulated any insulation. The Red Sea, which separates like a forked serpent’s tongue the continent of Africa from the countries of Asia, had almost finished me with its searing heat and relentless headwinds. Unable to sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time for twenty days as a result of the weather, the sea conditions and a continuously breaking engine, I was overcome with dizziness and fever spells, and my normally 120-pound frame had shrunken to a skeletal 105 by the time Varuna arrived in Egypt. I hadn’t regained enough strength before setting out through the Mediterranean, and had paid the price by almost losing my boat and my life 200 miles off the coast of Spain, with only a brief respite in Gibraltar before heading across the Atlantic. I had no choice. The deadline was bearing down like a grizzly after a field mouse and I had to carry on.
The New York I was coming home to could never be the same as the one I had left at eighteen, but the names still felt as alive as nerve endings, and the sounds of them on my lips as we got closer were like a soothing mantra. Greenwich Village. TriBeCa. SoHo. Memories of home became clearer as the final miles ticked into Varuna’s trailing taffrail log. I envisioned the West Village, its cobblestone streets lined with little brownstones adorned with balustrades and gargoyles, surrounded by carriage houses, gardens, churches and parks. I remembered the artists popping out of the woodwork on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends for the Village art show, and homosexuals with their erotic shops and bars, with names like The Pink Pussycat Boutique, the Ramrod or The Anvil.
My family lives in SoHo, three blocks down from Washington Square Park and, to my adolescent mind, the center of what was important on the planet. I pictured the East Village, run down and abused by generations of social movements, drug addicts, gangs, bohemians and people outdoing each other in outrageousness. There were always freaks like the Sadomasochist with safety pins pinning his nipples and bottles through his ears and the Candyman, an eerie giant on roller skates with bushy carrot-red hair and a black top hat, always surrounded by young girls receiving his free hallucinogenic candies. There was the Purple Man riding around on his old rusty purple bicycle, making his own personal statement against capitalism by handing out newsletters with the telephone credit card numbers of major corporations. There were the Hare Krishnas, floating by in an orange cloud, crashing their cymbals, jingling and chanting. Young Puerto Rican gangs, dressed to kill, prowled the streets. Pimps slapped their whores around and drunks lay in heaps across the street, snoring and clutching onto their ever-present bottles of Thunderbird. There were musicians crooning on one corner and jugglers on the next. On the remaining corners were junkies, hippies and dreads whispering: “Smokes, ’ludes, trips, anything you need,” and sometimes, “I’ll take checks and credit cards.”
The East Village was a tangled chain of tenements, squats, soup kitchens, correctional facilities and graffiti. Dark thrift shops, murky check-cashing joints, head shops, off-the-wall clothing shops, pawnshops and herb gates were monitored by the silent old people who had already lived through it all.
And, finally, haunting the bars and the clubs of the concrete jungle were the punks and st
reet kids, the group to which I belonged as a teenager. In the East Village, everyone had a label; everyone fit in somewhere, no questions asked. I had a label then. What would it be now?
• • •
Tarzoon rubbed his nose against my face and I was brought quickly back to the present as Varuna canted downwind. “How’s my little buddy?” I asked, taking him in my arms and scratching his belly. His purrs warmed my heart. I reached up to the swinging net over my head and pulled out the bags of pumpkin seeds and cat treats. The little hammock, a present given to me in Bermuda, my very first landfall, contained vegetables, snacks, odds and ends. When I first hung it across the cabin, it had been a brilliant white, but now it was gray, hanging by its last threads as if waiting for me to get home before retiring.
My mind was spinning, more from the pressure of homecoming and new beginnings than from fear of the surrounding storm. For thirty months and 27,000 miles, there had been no uncertainty about the future. Every day, my objective had been clear—to head westward, to return home. For every storm, every calm, every emotional low and high, the one thing I could always count on was that eventually it would become a memory. Today, my mind was riveted on the future. The most daunting landfall of all lay ahead, on that horizon to the west. I was returning to a home that could never be the same as the one to which I said goodbye a lifetime ago.
2
There have always been people who called my father crazy. We never thought so. Why walk when you can run? he’d say. Why be inside when you could be out? Why stay home balancing your checkbook when you could be off riding a camel to Timbuktu, or climbing Mont Blanc, or driving a Land Rover across Africa? His dreams for himself and for us were all we wanted to hear when we were growing up. The world through his eyes was full of excitement and promise, of taking risks and landing on your feet, always with another great story to tell.