by David Vann
This first charter group was easy, which was good because we didn’t do everything perfectly. I wasn’t really a bartender yet, so Bobby, the man who was paying for the charter and had invited his friends to help him celebrate his fiftieth birthday, made the drinks with great flair. I kept the bottles and ice and glasses coming and watched closely. Captains are expected to be good bartenders.
We also had a rigging problem, and again the guests were gracious. We had a lovely sail one morning across the channel on a beam reach from the Baths to Marina Cay, but when it came time to furl the sail, there was a lot of resistance. During the paint job, we had removed the headstay and let it hang to the side, and apparently this had broken one of the connections. It had been hidden by the sail wrapped around it, so the problem had not been visible, and we hadn’t tested the sail on our way from Trinidad because we had only motored. I couldn’t repair it now, with the sail out, underway, and guests aboard, and I was worried that we wouldn’t get the sail furled or that we might rip it.
As I was distracted by this, standing above the winch to look over the pilothouse at the foil, holding the line in my left hand, a large gust of wind filled the sail, and the line, which I was holding too high above the winch, came free. I grabbed for it, instinctively, but this was not a good instinct, especially while wearing fingerless gloves. The rope burn across four fingers of my left hand was extreme. Only a few patches of skin were completely missing down to bleeding, exposed flesh, but all four fingers looked like deformed wax. They were white, especially after I dunked my hand into a bucket of ice, and the pain was intense. I did get the sail furled, and brought us safely into an anchorage, but that was all I could do. I felt awful for the guests. It was a putzy bit of sailing we had just done.
By the end of the five-day charter, my fingers were healing, despite my fears that they’d be permanently deformed, and the trip was considered a great success. Bobby gave us a $2,000 tip, wrote us a lovely card, and gave glowing reviews to the broker, who sent a note of praise to the clearinghouse, who then passed the note on to other brokers. I was embarrassed about our problems with the roller furling, but we were well on our way to a successful business.
There had been one small conversation with Bobby, however, that I would never forget. It was late in the trip, after he had asked about my business and plans, and he was wishing me well. He was a handsome man, likeable in every way, and he meant only the best, didn’t mean to insult me, certainly, but he said, comparing my desires to succeed in this business to his own desires years before as he was starting his own business, “I know what it’s like. You’re nobody, and you want to become somebody.”
This comment made sense in terms of the business. It was a new business, even if it was my second go. It was true that I hadn’t made a lot of money yet, even to pay off my debts, and that I was new to the brokered charter industry. But he wasn’t talking only about the business, he was talking about me, about who I was, about my worth as a person. And I objected to being limited to this business and this role as captain. I had taught at Stanford and Cornell. I had been published in the Atlantic Monthly.
I didn’t share these thoughts with Bobby, of course. But I realized that even if I succeeded wildly in this business, it still fundamentally wouldn’t mean anything to me except financial freedom. It wasn’t how I measured who I was, and it never would be. I would always feel somewhat alienated in this role of captain or small business owner. I was a writer and a teacher. That’s who I was. I needed to start writing again soon.
The second charter was easy, a fun ten days. I practiced my skills as a bartender, enjoying it, and the kids performed skits at night on the large aft deck area, their parents lounging on the cushioned poop deck. Everyone called me “Captain Dave.” It didn’t feel like a job at all.
Immediately after this charter, however, when we went into the clearinghouse office in Roadtown to pick up our mail and news, we learned that a hurricane was headed our way. It would probably pass south of us, but it could swing north.
This presented an uncomfortable situation. We were too late to run away from it, and we didn’t have good options for weathering a hurricane in the Virgin Islands.
I finally decided to anchor in North Sound on Virgin Gorda. The sound is expansive and almost fully enclosed, like a big lake, most of it forty-five to sixty feet deep. We’d be completely exposed to wind, but we’d be protected from big waves, and we could drag on our anchor all over that bay and not hit anything.
As it turned out, the hurricane tracked far south of us and we never had wind more than thirty knots. We would have been fine anywhere in the Virgin Islands. But the experience drove home the fact that we were exposed up here during hurricane season. Nancy and I talked it over and decided to head south. We would island-hop through the Antilles for a month, spend another month in Trinidad working, then sail back up in time for the November charter shows. We had wanted to take a break and relax in the Virgin Islands for these months, but worrying about hurricanes did not promise to be very relaxing.
We returned to Road Town to make some arrangements and take on food, water, and diesel, then set off for Nevis, our first stop. It would be the longest leg, about eighteen hours. We passed between Peter Island and Dead Chest Island just after sunset and were blasted by thirty knots of wind, heavy rain, and swells about twelve feet, leftovers from the hurricane that had passed farther south. If we continued on to Nevis, we’d be pounding directly into this the entire time.
I decided this suffering was pointless. We weren’t on a schedule. I turned around and anchored for the night in Great Harbour. We left at noon the next day, the conditions much improved, and made Nevis the next morning. A spectacular volcanic mountain rising from the water, its slopes dense jungle. We anchored in light blue water just down from the Four Seasons. Our view was of undeveloped beach, then several miles of palm trees, then jungle leading up to the volcanic cone. It was our honeymoon, finally.
We zipped ashore in our new dinghy and walked a few boardwalks to have ice cream and window shop. Then a driver took Nancy and Stephen and me halfway around the island, showing us landmarks, monkeys, mangoes, and jungle. We stopped at several plantations that are now bed-and-breakfasts. Nancy and I fell in love, at least for the day, with gingerbread architecture.
Late that afternoon, after we had changed at the boat, Stephen dropped us off on the beach with the dinghy and we walked into the Four Seasons. We joined the other honeymooners in the pools and hot tubs and took in the gorgeous sunset. It was one of our favorite things to do, crashing resorts, and this was a coup.
The next day we cruised the western shores of Dominica and Guadeloupe (lovely as long as we didn’t look too closely), and then it was on to Martinique and St. Lucia. Stephen left us to fly home to Trinidad, as planned, and we found out we had a new charter from Ed Hamilton, the most important broker in the market. If we ran a good charter for Ed, we were set. We would fill our twenty weeks every year with no problem. And it was a short, easy charter, for the Young Presidents’ Association. Ed didn’t tell us who the group of ten men were, but we found out, and we felt flattered they had picked us over the seven-million-dollar, eighty-five-foot performance catamaran they had been on the year before. The charter was coming up soon, at the end of October, just before the charter show, and we were looking forward to it.
We were also enjoying our honeymoon on St. Lucia. We spent almost a week there, just taking a break. I began writing, for two hours every morning, for the first time in five years. I started with a pirate novel but quickly set it aside and began this memoir. It would be titled The Afterlife of Ruin, about how everything had worked out after it had seemed all was lost. A story of the American Dream. It would also be about how my father hadn’t been able to see the possibility of continuing on in some new way, and about finally escaping his legacy, after shame, guilt, anger, ten years of insomnia, and more than twenty years of being fairly sure I was doomed to kill myself. It wouldn’t get
bogged down in too much about my father, and it would be fundamentally hopeful and cheery, unlike my previous book, Legend of a Suicide, which every agent had said lacked redemption and was too depressing. This one wouldn’t be fancy, either, just an easy read.
After writing each morning, I had lunch with Nancy and we zipped off in our dinghy to enjoy the beach or snorkeling or hiking, or we’d just kayak from the boat. Nancy went back to her days of floating on air mattresses, a skill she had first perfected along the Turkish Coast. At sunset we’d be on the aft deck with an alcoholic concoction, usually involving ice cream, or in the pool or hot tub of the resort.
We talked a lot about our future together. We were in love, and not just with each other. Our yacht was a spectacular home, a stand-out in every harbor, and the Caribbean is a beautiful place. But what we loved most was our freedom. We would work no more than twenty weeks per year, and we would have the rest of the year to do anything we wanted. Travel was high on our list. We wanted to see most of the world. But we were surprised at the other things.
I wanted to go back to the university, for instance. Being a captain and running a business lacked dignity and engagement, I had realized, even if I made a lot of money. “And we don’t have any friends out here,” I told Nancy. “And it’s not as if there are great literary gatherings on St. Lucia.”
“You should do it,” she said. “Become a medievalist. And keep writing every day, too. It’s all you’ve talked about the whole time I’ve known you, even though you haven’t written a word until now. Mr. Big Mouth.”
“Thanks.”
“If we decide to spend more time back in the Bay Area, I’m going to one of the dance places—maybe the Metronome—to take their instructor series. Or culinary school. I’m not sure. Maybe both.”
“Freedom is what it’s about,” I said. “Eventually hand over the boat to a few crew and not even work the twenty weeks. A Ph.D. or ballroom dance or just cruise around the Med in a little powerboat, go up all the canals through France.”
“Italy,” Nancy said. “More time in Italy.”
“Well, the sun’s down. Off to the hot tub?”
“How about something with Midori first?”
Freedom in the islands always has to come with a warning, however, about the legacies of slavery and colonialism and enduring poverty. Every day at least one or two and sometimes as many as five different local guys came by in their little boats to sell food and trinkets. I finally tried to save one of them the wasted effort. He had a boat that looked like a grass hut, with banana leaves up the side and on the roof. He was the most enterprising.
“I feel bad that you keep spending the gas to come out here,” I told him. I was leaning on the wide, varnished rail that came up about three feet off our aft deck. He was ten feet below me, peering up through the fronds. “Really, we’re never going to buy anything.”
“You never gonna buy?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You got to eat,” he said. “Where you get your food?”
“We’re already fully stocked. We stock up at supermarkets, to save money.”
“You got money to buy a gift for your wife.”
“No, I don’t. I really don’t. I know you’re not going to believe me, because no one here ever believes me once they see the boat, but I really don’t have any extra cash right now.”
“I know you got cash. I know the owner of this big boat give you cash.”
“I’m the owner,” I said. “And I don’t have extra cash. This boat is a business. We’re just starting up. So we had to put a lot of money into it, and we still have more work to do in Trinidad, but we haven’t gotten any money out of it yet.” I was giving this man a ridiculous amount of my personal information, but I was tired of our shitty interactions. I wanted something better.
“You not the owner,” he told me finally.
“I’m the owner.”
“You not the owner.” And then he started his outboard again and turned his boat around to leave. He smiled up at me and waved one finger in the air. “You not the owner. That not your boat.”
I stormed back into the pilothouse, where Nancy was sitting and had been listening.
“There’s no way to get along,” she said. “Unless we just hand them money for nothing every day. That’s the only way we can have peace, and even that’s not peace, because then they want to sell us more.”
“There is the whole history of the slave trade,” I said. “And I guess we look like the latest wave in colonization. And really we are. We’re using their home for our own economic gain through selling charters, and we’re not sharing the profits with them. It’s still the first world taking away their wealth.”
“But it still sucks,” she said, and I had to agree. There is just no way around differences in wealth, even apparent wealth. Money rules us all. I hope someday the islands federalize and claim their resources and make visiting yachts and cruise ships pay, but until then it will still be uneasy in the islands.
On our way down the west coast of St. Lucia the next day, before crossing to St. Vincent, we cruised in close to the Pitons, which are truly magnificent: two very sharp, green, volcanic mountains rising thousands of feet straight from the water’s edge. It’s probably one of the most spectacular views in the world, with a lovely bay at the Pitons’ feet and palm trees all along the shoreline.
Our next stop was Bequia, just south of St. Vincent, the beginning of the Grenadines. Nancy and I loved Bequia. A friendly town with flowers lining the walkways, an abundance of book stores and restaurants, beautiful beaches. It was a place to rest, a perfect place for a honeymoon. We stayed for almost a week.
From Bequia we worked our way through the rest of the Grenadines. Our favorites were the Tobago Cays. An enormous horseshoe-shaped reef several miles long and fifty yards wide protecting three tiny islands with perfect beaches. The snorkeling was by far the best we’d ever experienced, rated as one of the top three sites in the world. Clean, clear water, bright sun, and miles of living coral reef in every color with thousands of fish. We followed whole schools, saw new species, felt the warm water on our skin, the light current and waves rocking us gently. I’ve loved tropical fish all my life, at one point in junior high had eight aquariums spread throughout the house. For years, even in upstate New York, in grad school, I had gazed at fish every night, watched how they fluttered, imagined myself suspended in warm water with them, so this was heaven for me, to spend a little quality time with the fish.
On September 14 we reached Grenada, our jumping-off point for the final passage to Trinidad. We went to an Internet café to check e-mail for the first time in over a week and saw news on Yahoo that was difficult to believe. Terrorists flying passenger planes into the twin towers in New York. We felt extremely disconnected, finding out about this event three days late. On the television in the café, leaders from all the Caribbean countries were condemning the attacks and offering their sadness and support to the U.S.
We sailed early the next morning for Trinidad and arrived just before dark. Back in the ugly industrial port, but this time we wouldn’t have to haul out, and I would take some time to write every day. We wouldn’t repeat the panic of our first visit to Trinidad.
It was good to see Stephen again. He and two friends put another coat of varnish on the exterior wood, polished the hull, sanded the deck, and sanded and varnished every stateroom and the main salon and all the floors throughout the boat. They also sanded and painted the engine room and the two largest bilge areas. They even sanded and painted the insides of my two water tanks, which was an especially tough job. I bought a thick epoxy paint, high in solids, and a big fan to pull out the fumes. The guys wore respirators, but it was still rough.
The most difficult job, however, was repainting all eight guest bathrooms. The white epoxy paint over the steel had started to bubble from moisture. Stephen pointed out that this should never have happened, that the painters in Turkey had not used the corre
ct primer. By now, he had zero respect for the Turks. He and his friends went through each bathroom first sanding down to steel with a big orbital sander and forty-grit paper. Then they worked up through layers of primer and filler and paint and finer sandings to a finish that looked beautiful and would last. But it was a huge amount of work, more than any of us had expected.
“Next summer, someone else can paint your other tanks,” Stephen told me. “I not doing no more inside painting on this boat, boy.”
“You can just supervise next summer,” I told him. “We’ll leave the boat with you, and you can hire others to do the work.”
“I doesn’t mind the outside painting, or the outside varnish,” he said. “Just no more inside, boy.”
I was already leaving most of the work to Stephen’s supervision. He always worked hard, whether I was there or not, and he knew far more about painting and varnishing than I did. I was focusing on the rigging, systems maintenance, my writing, and running the business.
By the time we left Trinidad the second time, we were happy to get out of there. The boat looked perfect inside and out, thanks to Stephen, and we wouldn’t have to return here until next summer.
We cleared customs on Friday, again with the man with long purple nails, who this time could not find any reason to detain us, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening stowing and checking everything. We tightened the standing rigging and checked our electronics and engines and tanks and the weather, and we went to bed early so we’d be well rested, since it would be just the two of us doing alternating ninety-minute watches for three days.
WE LEFT AT 7 A.M., found the seas very light once we were out of the dragon’s mouth, and had an entirely pleasant first day and night, as predicted on the weather report. We napped and ate and read, and I checked the systems after every watch. It was good to be on our way, looking forward to a successful winter in the Virgin Islands.