With no crew other than my own two hands to help me remain on a southerly course, I was dependent on the herculean efforts of my electronic autopilot. The wind vane is a marvelous device with a single limitation: it cannot with any effectiveness keep a vessel on a due-south heading in a north wind with following seas. Only an electronic mind that knows its heading (and has a gear ratio strong enough to hold it) can do that job. So far, the wheel autopilot had been whirring, clacking, and grinding at that task in the cold rain with greater determination than I could have summoned from myself or any human helmsman.
I lay down for a few winks of sleep as the ship settled in for the long slog. Not long after I had closed my eyes, I heard the sound of breaking plastic and stripping gears as the electronic autopilot entered its death throes. The machine had yielded at last to the relentless power of nature. Control of the helm was lost. The robotic arm of the autopilot frantically whirred its warning that the boat was off course, but that warning now went unheeded. I jumped up and ran out on deck.
As soon as her electronic taskmaster had breathed his last, the Gypsy Moon followed her heart’s desire to turn and face the weather. She was now headed northeast, shoulder down and hard on the wind on what would have been a wonderful course for Ireland, had it been my intention to visit the Auld Sod.
Out in the open cockpit, the chilling rain and blustery wind that had been a mere spectacle from the vantage point of a dry cabin were now a considerable annoyance to me as I made preparations to implement Plan B. I would deploy the Monitor Windvane, I decided, on a mission to do something as close as possible to what it could not, which was to sail due south. Setting the vane for a course just east of south, I adjusted the lines and hoped for the best. When the boat finally kept a manageable heading to the southeast, my spirits rose.
I could zig south by southeast for several miles, I thought, until I felt the whips and lashes of the Gulf Stream, at which point I could zag back west toward the calmer waters of the coast. But ere that thought was through, the boat overcame the correction of the vane and began backsliding into her old vices. She was now offering to compromise on a due-easterly heading in response to my demand that she head south, pleading like an insolent teenager that I should let her go to Africa if not to Ireland. This would not do.
Again and again I tinkered with rudder line tension, vane angle, sail trim, and supplications to the self-steering gods as I sat in the tossing, rain-slicked cockpit, miles south of Charleston, well offshore, loosely draped in a leaking ten-dollar raincoat that was more symbolic than actual shelter against the elements.
Finally, the vane held the boat on a southeasterly course for more than a few moments. I waited expectantly for her to veer off again, but she did not. It appeared that I had found that magic “groove” in which sails, hull, and rudder work in a cacophony of cross-purposes that drive the vessel in a single intended direction. Contented with this effort and congratulating myself for not giving in to the weather gods, I retired again to the warmth and shelter of the cabin against the cold night.
I was exhausted. Sleep, when it does come in periods of rough weather, is fitful at best. As I lay down to rest that night in the belly of the whale that was my little ship, I became accustomed, as I usually do, to the motion of the boat on her heading. Lying prone in the six-foot four-inch pilot berth that runs along the port side on the ship’s stern quarter, I was below the waterline. My body rose and fell and swayed from side to side—more gently because I was low in the ship’s center of gravity—in unison with the hull moving through the waves. On this broad reach, with the wind coming over her port quarter and her sails set to starboard, the ship plunged forward with a regularity that recalled the nodding head of a child’s rocking horse. By the repetition of this motion I was lulled once again to sleep. Two hours later, by the unmistakable interruption of that motion, I was shaken rudely awake.
It was sometime near four in the morning, I can only guess. I had long since abandoned the niceties of log-keeping in these troublesome hours. I awoke to find that the wind and seas had risen a notch higher. Together these forces had broken the will of the self-steering vane, and the Gypsy Moon had returned to an easterly imperative. It was Africa or nothing, my headstrong ship was telling me. There would be no southerly heading that night.
I was not prepared for a fistfight with the Gulf Stream, where I was clearly headed. Nor would such a contest have been to any purpose, for I would only be stopped still by that current, if not carried slowly backward to the place from whence I had come. Time and again, I tinkered with the wind vane, collapsing for a while in the pilot berth until the flapping of sails and increasing angle of heel signaled the ship’s renewed objection to my command.
This battle of wills continued until dawn, when I finally hove to the boat under a gray sky. Taking my position, I saw that I had come some twenty miles south of Charleston. I knew I had to return there to seek shelter, and a wave of regret overcame me that I had not turned back many miles earlier, when the autopilot had first failed.
I remember the feeling of defeat in that moment. I had no delusions of grandeur or heroic fate, but I had harbored the private conceit that my voyage in some small way enjoyed the protection of God’s providence and mercy. It seemed contrary to His plans and mine that I should be foiled in my effort to reach Nassau, headed as I was on a mission of charity to the church there. Perhaps in that regard God had taken my altruistic intentions no more seriously than I had taken them myself.
Who, after all, was I really fooling? I had only to look in the mirror to see a spoiled, self-involved, middle-aged man in the throes of a midlife crisis, running from an adulterous affair, a failed marriage, and a failed career. But I could also look in the mirror and see a hopeful eleven-year-old boy, finally realizing after forty years the dream of that day when an unbroken horizon would meet a stalwart ship and a man with the freedom and the will to take her there. I did not judge the man or the boy, and I prayed that God would not judge either.
In that hour I prayed, too, in a way that I had not before. Lying in my bunk, stymied in my efforts and feeling quite annoyed with the whole situation, I lifted to the heavens a prayer of a single word: “Why?” It was the second petition of that passage.
I knew not to wait out there on the open ocean for an answer. God sometimes seems in no more of a hurry to read my letters to Him than I am to read His letters to me. But as St. Paul teaches, we see the contours of God’s plans now only as through a glass, darkly. What my eyes could not see, and what I did not know, was that my prayers had a single answer, and that answer was already at hand.
Chapter 21
A Harbor Homecoming
Charleston is a harbor well familiar to me. I had gone there in 2003 to acquire the Gypsy Moon from her former owner. Her name then was Moonlighter, formerly The Gypsy in Me. In a nod to seagoing superstition against renaming boats, I incorporated both names into Gypsy Moon. Neptune, so far as I can tell, has been pleased.
I had intentionally come back to Charleston once before, in 2007, when the Gypsy Moon was en route to the Bahamas with a crew of four men. In that more modest undertaking, I had arranged to sail to the Abaco Islands in a series of 120-mile legs over six weekends, coastwise down the Eastern Seaboard, with each leg manned by enough crew to keep a twenty-four-hour watch. However loftier my ambitions had been for this second expedition to be nonstop, it appeared that I was following much the same herky-jerky heading as before, only without the crew.
It was a bracing upwind sail for the twenty miles back to the channel at Charleston. Had I been headed to the open sea it would have been thrilling, but knowing that my destination was a marina and an admission of defeat, the voyage had all the excitement of a cab ride. In the interminable hours it took me to fetch the Fort Sumter Range again, I came to appreciate just how far and long my battle with the wind vane the previous night had gone on.
By midday I was finally in the channel, and the Gypsy Moon’s two-cylinder di
esel engine rumbled once more to life in the shadow of a large container ship coming to port beside her. It is a long, tedious way through the Fort Sumter Range, and the absence of any significant hazard to navigation for all but the most foolhardy makes for mind-numbing boredom on a slow-going sailboat under power. My mind was already miles away and busy with plans for my return to Raleigh when boredom was banished. The engine transmission suddenly refused to answer, and I could make no way.
I let the helm fly free and ran up on the cabin top to raise the sails. The Gypsy Moon, now leaderless, dodged and veered of her own accord across the channel. Finally catching the wind and the ability to steer, I maneuvered into a protected anchorage amid the shallows and dropped anchor with sails still flying. The plough dug into the sand and snubbed up the anchor rode smartly in the bow chocks, whipping my little boat around to attention like a mother grabbing a wayward child by the nose. I lay there in the shadows of Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and wondered who, exactly, had decided to shoot out both my autopilot and my engine transmission on this voyage. There would be no leaving Charleston anytime soon, while repairs were made.
A likable towboat captain (they are uniformly likable fellows, I have found) was quickly on the scene. He threw me a bridle to pull the Gypsy Moon against the swift tide that flows in the Ashley River up to Charleston City Marina, where I had first made my boat’s acquaintance nearly seven years before.
The Charleston City Marina is staffed by platoons of mannerly and officious southern boys in starched uniforms who no doubt come from what in an earlier day might have been called the “better families.” They gave no appearance in the least of needing my business or my money, but they required a considerable sum of the latter for the privilege of taking on the Gypsy Moon until repairs could be completed.
I spent the next four hours maneuvering a wheelbarrow up and down the ramps of the marina, offloading a mountain of supplies and provisions from the Gypsy Moon into a rented compact car. I wasn’t altogether sure how extensive the needed engine repairs would be or whether I could afford them. I was also, in my heart of hearts, less enamored of the idea of continuing the voyage than I had been two days earlier. What had once seemed so exciting and adventurous in the telling was turning out to be damned lonely and expensive in the doing. Feverish thoughts again came of selling the boat. I knew that would be rash, but I decided to strip her of anything of added value before I drove back to Raleigh. I wanted to be ready to let her go, if it came to that.
This experience of remorse and others like it, as the voyage continued, taught me something about myself. I know that I come too quickly to these overreactions of despair. I know but often fail to learn that I must give time and temperament their due. At that particular moment, I was greatly discouraged and more than a little embarrassed, frankly, that my once-grand adventure had come to naught. I didn’t know it then, but that fog was about to clear.
Chapter 22
The Siren’s Song
After returning to Raleigh, I received welcome news from the mechanic: my transmission problem was merely a parted cable that would be easily replaced, and the cost of a new drive unit on the autopilot would come in well south of my worst fears. The voyage was suddenly back on, my melancholy woes were just as quickly forgotten, and Nassau loomed even closer than it had before. With any luck, I thought, I’d be there by Christmas and just in time for Junkanoo—the Bahamian answer to Mardi Gras. I made plans to meet the boat on Friday, December 18, and set sail the following morning.
Not long after this happy news, another cheerful message came my way. It was a message of the most profound consequence for my life, though I surely didn’t know it at the time. A woman named Susan, in South Carolina of all places, shared with me this intriguing prayer in an e-mail: “God, I wish I lived closer.” It seemed then that God’s in-box did runneth over.
She was responding to the online dating profile that I, carried away in a gush of hope and narcissism that spring eternal from the same well, had posted on Thanksgiving Day. On that day, after arriving alone again at another forlorn marina, I had resolved to cast my fate once more to the winds of the Internet. For all I knew and truly for all I had expected, my fate had been carried only briefly aloft on those winds before getting stuck in an unseen tree, there forever to remain. The early returns had not been promising. But this message from a lovely lady in South Carolina most certainly was.
Looking at her picture, what I noticed as soon as I recovered from the initial distraction of her impossibly long legs, rapturous hips, and flowing blond hair, and the careless typographical error concerning her age (only one year younger than I), was something about her face, and specifically her eyes. I don’t mean her beauty, though beautiful she certainly is. It was something else. It was something new. It was something important.
The human mind, with its power to perceive the finest nuances of emotion, character, and intention in the face of another, is a wondrous thing. A child need only glance at his mother to know affection, approbation, or anxiety. What I saw in Susan’s photograph that day eluded my powers of description, and for a while I remained unable to find words for it—even after I met her in person. I knew that I was seeing something very different from what I had seen in others, but I didn’t know why or how that was so. I knew only that I wanted God to answer her prayer and mine, and I sensed that He already had. I wanted her to be closer, and I wanted to be closer to her.
Her address was listed as Ridgeville, South Carolina—a place unfamiliar to me. I knew it was nowhere near my home in Raleigh. I feared it might be far out of reach on the western end of the state, but I was delighted to learn that it was right outside Charleston, to which I planned very shortly to return. “What are the chances of that?” I thought.
We exchanged banal pleasantries and polite compliments by e-mail at first, as all participants in the modern Kabuki dance of online dating are obliged to do. I learned that she had skipped a grade in high school and graduated with a business degree from the College of Charleston a year earlier than I had stumbled out of the University of Maryland, skipping over no one. She had two teenagers and so did I, all spaced within four years of age. When I discovered that she had risen from payroll clerk to comptroller of a hospital before holding, for twenty-one years, her current position as director of accounting for Charleston’s public works authority, I rejoiced that my radar for finding bitter, unemployed alimony mavens had malfunctioned at last.
Soon our correspondence crossed a kind of line. It became real. I noticed—or better to say I was astonished—that this woman was capable of the true intimacy of self-revelation. That is no small thing. We are all, to some degree, reluctant to allow others into our inner world. Women who have given their hearts to others, only to have them badly broken, are the most prone to this fear—the fear of getting close, of letting go, of being mocked, of being rejected, of being truly known, of surrendering control, of trusting men to catch them when they fall and risking that they won’t. My sojourn through singlehood has been a fascinating study in human nature. Despite the recent discoveries concerning the planet Venus, I have met many women who are card-carrying citizens of Mars, some of whom are quite incapable of true intimacy. Their guard is up to stay.
There was something else about Susan, too. A capacity for intimacy is important, but it is not all we need to be lucky in love. Two people can be emotionally intimate yet want very different things in life. What I wanted and sorely needed was a partner, ready for marriage, who could commit to a life in which our relationship would be the first priority—the constant star around which the demands of our families, our careers, and every other aspect of our lives would find its orbit and fall into place. I made no apology because I refused to orbit some other star in some outer galaxy, and Susan expected no apology. She wanted the same thing. That was a first. Here, I thought, was not only a woman whom I could easily love and adore, but one who was capable of loving me back.
I told her I was coming to Charleston on Friday, December 18, to spend the night aboard the boat in the marina and get ready to sail the next day. Following The Boyfriend Handbook to a tee, I proposed that we meet for coffee at a local shop near where she worked, in downtown Charleston. Coffee would be brief, giving both of us an easy out if the meeting didn’t live up to our expectations.
Our expectations kept rising with each letter we shared, back and forth in the ether of e-mail. Soon the e-mail started coming with family photos attached. I marveled at my good fortune that she could actually be that gorgeous, a grown-up, and normal to boot. Coffee, it was quickly apparent, would hardly do. I had this one chance to impress her, and I needed more time. It would have to be dinner. She agreed.
Chapter 23
The Promised Land
It was not just raining but flooding in Charleston when I arrived for our date at the Peninsula Grill that Friday night. Recalling the winds that had crippled my ship and driven her ashore, and seeing the biblical rains that now threatened to bar my way back there, I began to suspect I might be starring unawares in some Cecil B. DeMille epic. Could a plague of locusts be far off?
Knowing that I would one day write this chapter, I have long wondered how I would find the words to describe the moment when I first met Susan. I can certainly report that a woman of remarkable beauty with a confident, winning smile and kind eyes strode into the foyer of the restaurant, wearing a black dress and carrying the world on a string. Those are the facts. But I must admit that beyond this, my skill for expositional narrative falls well short of the task. I can only hope that readers can give aid to my failing prose with the recollection of just such a moment in their own lives and know what I mean when I tell you that when I saw her, I just knew.
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