I no longer had a job, it seemed, as a husband or a father. The powerful motivation those vocations supplied had accounted for virtually every success I had achieved since the age of twenty-three. They were jobs I had once done very well, but I was now unemployed in the most abject sense of the word. I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to “work” again.
My mind wandered to a church in Aspen, Colorado, where I had spent a chilly Saturday afternoon nearly three years before. It had been snowing all day in one of the snowiest seasons on record in Aspen. Some twenty-one feet had already fallen by late February of that year. I was due to fly home the next day. I am guessing that the pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church on Main Street thought he had a free hour on his hands when he trudged through the drifts to the church to keep his appointment for five o’clock confession, but there were three of us waiting for him that day. I was the last in line.
Having been married in the Catholic Church, taken instruction in the faith, and been confirmed some years later, I had been a practicing Catholic for eighteen years when my marriage ended. During that time I had served in various positions as chairman of the parish council, youth group director, CCD teacher, and a third-degree member of the Knights of Columbus. I felt a strong kinship to the Catholic faith, and after my divorce I wanted the reassurance of my church that I might one day remarry and still have a home there.
I made my confession to the priest about the affair that had ended my marriage. It was no accident that I had waited to do this in Aspen, Colorado. I was too ashamed to face anyone in my hometown. The sordid details would be made public not long thereafter in my divorce trial, but at the time I still felt like a man with a dark secret. My infidelity had its origins in the church.
The woman involved was the lay administrator of our parish. In a twist of irony that was not lost on anyone, her affair with me ended the affair she had been having with our parish priest, who then renounced his vows and left the priesthood, only later to renew those same vows and return to serve a different parish. The woman resigned her job at our church, began attending a different parish, and stayed married to her husband. My marriage fell apart. It was a scandal and the greatest failure of my life.
The young pastor at St. Mary’s in Aspen was very kind, almost apologetic, but firm. He made it clear to me that I had two options to remain in communion with the church. One was to stay single and celibate for the rest of my life and let my solitude be a testament to my piety. That certainly wasn’t ringing any bells with me. I knew who I was, and I also knew that fifty years of solitude and celibacy would make my life a testament to nothing so much as the prolonged effects of clinical depression.
The other option, the priest explained, was for me to seek an annulment by proving to a tribunal in the church, through the testimony of family and friends, that my marriage of twenty-five years had never occurred in a heavenly sense, despite the two angels it had produced here on Earth.
Catholic guilt is a powerful thing, and I would later go so far as to meet with a diocesan counselor—a nun who was wonderfully kind and forgiving—to learn more about the grounds for annulment. After hearing the story of the fever of immaturity in which my marriage had begun at the age of twenty-two, this good nun appeared certain that an annulment would sail through, and I have no doubt she was right. But the more certain she appeared, the less interested I became.
There grew in me a sense of something self-righteous, sanctimonious, and even bullying about the whole idea of putting two impulsive kids—who were all wrong for each other but who couldn’t see that twenty-five years ago—on trial. Great goodness came of their decision to marry, but so did great sorrow. Isn’t that just a part of life? Isn’t every marriage and every life a mixed bag? Can we really funnel everything in that bag into a decision by a tribunal of strangers that what occurred more than two decades ago was holy or unholy?
Some marriages work and some do not. Some marriages that once soared heavenward fall to Earth, because the people in them fail, as humans are wont to do. Some marriages that are devoid of intimacy and would qualify for annulment by acclamation if they were ever put on trial inexplicably endure, yet the church does not shun such couples because they continue to live together in “unholy” matrimony. These variations are not explained by a miscarriage of grace at the time these unions were conceived. They are simply an expression of the human condition.
I am no theologian, but I do take to heart the advice of St. Paul to “test everything, and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5: 21). I tested these questions for years, and I could never reconcile the Christ who offered living water at Jacob’s Well to a woman with five husbands (John 4:18) with the church that was now offering me a choice between a show trial and a life of abject loneliness. Of all the qualities that describe Christ’s life and mission on Earth, legalism and a preference for form over substance are not among them.
On this night at sea, in the sixty miles that separate Beaufort and Masonboro Inlet, I pondered these questions again as I had many times before and came to the same conclusion: I believe that the blood of Christ is sufficient to atone not just for some of our weaknesses and failures, but for all of them, and that the mercy of Christ is sufficient to allow us—all of us—to try again when we fail to imitate Him.
Chapter 14
A Voice in the Darkness
I arrived off Masonboro Inlet on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, happy to be alive and marveling again at how the slow accretion of wind and time can move an 11,700-pound vessel such a distance so easily. I was anxious to make the docks at Southport, some twenty-five miles away, because of the difficulty in navigating the shallows of Snow’s Cut in the Intracoastal Waterway at night.
One has to go through the waterway on the route from Masonboro Inlet to Southport to avoid Frying Pan Shoals off Bald Head Island. Bald Head is the thorn-shaped southeastern tip of North Carolina that juts out into the Atlantic. The seas heap up here where the ocean rises from deep water onto the shoals.
The shoals extend far out to sea, near the western edge of the Gulf Stream. To sail south, offshore, and get safely around them, you would have to enter the Gulf Stream and fight your way against a current pushing north at three knots. It is easier and safer to motor the shorter distance down the Intracoastal Waterway and come out at Southport, where the offshore route all the way to Florida is deep water well west of the stream.
I had made the inland passage through Snow’s Cut a half dozen times at night by necessity. Each one was as nerve-wracking as the last, but one in particular stood out in my memory.
It was January 2007, and three men had sailed with me to take the Gypsy Moon from New Bern to Bald Head Island. After a windless night on the offshore run from Beaufort, a brisk southwest breeze arrived at midmorning off Masonboro Inlet, and we could not resist riding it well offshore, just to let the boat stretch her legs. That worthwhile diversion cost us daylight, however, and we found ourselves crawling through Snow’s Cut after dark.
The cut is wide and deep where it passes under the highway bridge, but farther south, in the Cape Fear River, the distances between markers in the channel grow longer, and the water outside the channel shoals to inches thin. To avoid running aground, I had one man on the bow using a spotlight to find the next channel marker, one man on the helm, and one man below, calling out depths from the chart. I was watching the depth sounder and the three of them. The helmsman was following a compass course based on the chart when depth soundings that had been steadily above twenty-two feet started to fall. The boat needed close to five feet of water to float. The channel depth was not uniform, though, and there were some places within the channel proper that had shoaled. It was not immediately clear that we were off course.
As the number on the depth sounder continued to drop and passed sixteen, I asked the chart man what our depth should be at that part of the channel. “Twenty-two,” he shouted back. Fearing we were only a few seconds away from knee-deep mud, I grabbed the whe
el from the helmsman and whirled the boat around 180 degrees to retrace the course over which we had just come, back to safe water. At that moment, a calm voice clearly spoke over channel 16 on the ship’s radio.
The voice was addressing the crew of a boat heading through Snow’s Cut between markers that he numbered correctly, for our location, and he called for us to answer. He did not identify himself or ask us, as the coast guard would certainly do, to switch to a working channel. He simply instructed us what compass course to steer from our present location to return to the channel, and where to steer from there. His instructions were dead-on.
When he signed off without further ado, I looked around the water, expecting to spot a shrimper or a workboat at anchor within visual range whose skipper had observed our error and called us on the radio to put us back on our way. The hair on the back of my neck stood up when I realized there was no one on the water that night but us.
I called for the man on the radio to thank him for his assistance, but no one answered. I looked again, far out into the river that leads into Wilmington, and, again, saw not a soul.
The coast guard trains all its radiomen in the same seamanlike elocution. They will hail only—never talk—on channel 16 before insisting that you switch to a working channel, 22 Alpha. This fellow was not coast guard, nor was he anywhere to be seen. We never heard from him again.
As time went by, I surmised that the events of September 11, 2001, had brought many unseen changes to our nation’s borders, including the need to know who and what is riding around our coastlines. Perhaps nowhere was the need for these changes more acutely felt than close to Southport, next door to the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant. I could be wrong about that. What I do know is that the lone wolf who helped us that night had some awfully big eyes, the better to see us with.
Chapter 15
Thanksgiving
On that blessedly fair Thanksgiving Day in 2009, I made good time coming down the waterway and was well past Snow’s Cut, nearly to the docks at Southport Marina, when the light started to fade. I arrived there after hours, tired and feeling more than a little sorry for myself for being alone on this sand spit of the Carolina coast with nothing much to eat on Thanksgiving.
The marina staff had all gone home, so I brought the Gypsy Moon alongside the fuel dock. I planned to spend the night there and get my regular slip assignment in the morning. No sooner had I landed than I had to rodeo the boat around to a new location, because the space close to the fuel pumps had no electrical power—a fire precaution. Finally, I got the old girl all tucked in among some pretty fancy company, including a rather large and well-loved cabin cruiser directly abeam. It felt odd that my boat was no longer moving, as I certainly still was.
After shaking off as much of the sea as I cared to, I set about the doleful task of inspecting the candidates for Thanksgiving dinner from the ship’s larder. A lovely can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli won the prize. With opener in hand, I was just about to do the honors when a knock came on the hull.
I stepped outside and saw a woman standing on the dock beside my port lifelines. She asked me if I would care to have some of the Thanksgiving dinner she had prepared for herself and her husband aboard the shiny cabin cruiser next to me. More than a little astonished and wondering whether she might be the vanguard of an intervention team, I managed an enthusiastic acceptance. I returned Monsieur Boyardee safely to his locker, and my serendipitous host returned with a steaming plate of sliced turkey, homemade gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls, and a side of pumpkin pie. Had I not saved one hand for the ship, I likely would have fallen overboard in my amazement.
The woman on the dock grinned at my excitement. I insisted that she let me snap her picture with plate in hand, and she snapped one of me with the unopened can of ravioli. She and her husband were retired and cruising the waterway between Georgia and New Jersey. She asked me where I was bound. When I said the words “Nassau” and “solo,” I got the by-then expected reaction of admiration mixed with envy and concern. In truth, though, I was the envious one.
The woman left me to my feast. I knew she would be returning to a well-fed and well-loved man who would share with her across a pillow, that night, the details of the day—including the story of the strange ravioli lover on the boat next door—as they drifted off to sleep together. I wanted that. I wanted that more than the meal I was starving to eat. I wanted that more than anything.
Late that night, after dishes had been returned with profuse thanks to my hosts, I opened my laptop and went online. I had a mission in mind.
It had been almost a year and a half since I’d ventured into the online dating world. My earlier travels in this strange land of ritualized head-hunting had run mostly in circles, but the road I was on was clearly a bridge to nowhere. My profile wistfully described a “sailor seeking pearl.” I paused awhile to consider whether I really wanted to take this journey in addition to the one I had just begun, but the answer had already come to me in the middle of a delicious meal. For my safe passage, for that meal, and for all that it signified to me, I truly gave thanks. Then I hit the button marked “send” and lay down for a deep and dreamless sleep.
LATITUDE 32.77.90 N
LONGITUDE 79.95.15 W
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
Chapter 16
A Cold Rain
What I have so long disliked about being a Yankee sailor is the cold. Not just the cold, but the cloying frigidity of cold air mixed with the mist and rain of brooding, sunless days. I shudder as I write these words. Lo these many years I have spent in the South, yet I have not escaped it. Well do I recall winter mornings even on the gulf coast of Texas that warranted every stitch of my wool socks and every inch of my leather boots—the same armor I once wore atop leafless Tennessee hills in pursuit of phantom deer. (The deer were much warmer than I, and therefore content to wait in stillness, unseen, until the oddly shivering archer departed their woods for easier quarry at the nearest hamburger stand.) Ever thus has been the source of my attraction to distant tropic islands. Ever thus has been my longing and my aim.
The cold is worse for sailors, because the lower temperatures cling to water and linger there well after the rest of nature has given up the grudge of winter. Yet a man’s addiction to boats and the sea usually cannot abide the slow arrival of spring, and so the hapless sailor returns to open the shuttered cabin of his sleeping vessel and ask her again to dance, to relieve his wintering despair. When he does so and leads her out onto the steps of a chilled morning, in a harbor empty of other vessels, the scene unfolds with all the awkwardness of a couple arriving at a party that no one else has chosen to attend. Still, the dance goes on, however briefly and regrettably in the freezing rain, until the captain—his haste by then to all apparent—leads his ever-willing partner back to her berth to await a warmer afternoon.
So was the scene in December 2009 when I arrived at the marina in Southport, North Carolina, with the intention of departing for the open sea. It was, naturally, a gray day with a fresh breeze a bit too cool for comfort. The sky seemed low enough to touch and filled with what would surely become a lingering rain. It was, in other words, another signature beginning in the logbook of the Gypsy Moon.
As usual, more than a few logistical contortions preceded my departure. A recalcitrant opposing counsel, renewing for a fourth and unsuccessful time a motion to compel the production of some privileged and impertinent document, had scheduled a hearing with the minimum of notice, requiring a postponement of the voyage. I arrived at the courthouse to argue the point, then continued to the nearest telephone booth for a costume change from corporate lawyer to vagabond sailor. Once matters were finally in order, I came by rented car to Southport with plans to leave aboard the Gypsy Moon, bound for Nassau.
Chapter 17
A Simple Vessel
There is a by-now familiar dynamic in my conversations with strangers onshore while preparing to leave on a voyage
. A sailor planning to go somewhere beyond the outer channel marker is easy to spot amid the general lethargy of life in a marina, so questions inevitably arise about where he is bound. When the answer entails a long voyage on the open ocean, in the listener’s eyes I see quick flashes of worry as images of disaster flicker in the imagination. Such concerns are often obliquely expressed for fear of giving offense. To my stated intention to take the Gypsy Moon to sea on her first voyage to the Bahamas, in 2007, one dockmaster’s only reply was, “In that boat?”
To be fair, the Gypsy Moon’s length, at 32 feet 4 inches overall, has become something of an anomaly among oceangoing vessels in the same way that the 5-foot 10-inch, 165-pound halfback has become an anomaly in professional football. It’s not that the average man can’t play the game well. It’s just that fans are more entertained by seeing the game played by men twice his size.
It was not always so. In an old photo album I have the picture of an old girlfriend standing at the rail of the harbor ferry in Annapolis in 1975. Behind her one can clearly see an assortment of boats in the harbor. The girl having long been forgotten, the first thing I notice in looking at that picture is the wide array of sailboats moored in the same place where today you would find a great predominance of powerboats—further proof, as if any were needed, of the continued general trundling along of things to hell in a handbasket. The second thing I notice is that the largest of the sailboats in the picture appears to be about twenty-eight feet long, among many smaller vessels. Today, most boatbuilders don’t make a sailboat smaller than forty feet long. Americans’ taste in boats has changed in ways no different than their taste in homes, which have tripled in average size since the 1950s, just as the size of the average American family has shrunk by similar proportions.
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