Seeker

by Rita Pomade

  SEEKER

  A SEA ODYSSEY

  A memoir

  MIROLAND IMPRINT 19

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  SEEKER

  A SEA ODYSSEY

  A memoir

  Rita Pomade

  MIROLAND (GUERNICA)

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2019

  Copyright © 2019, Rita Pomade and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Series editor by Connie McParland

  Cover design by Rafael Chimicatti

  Interior design by David Moratto

  Photos by Bernard Pomade

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  1569 Heritage Way, Oakville, ON L6M 2Z7

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  www.guernicaeditions.com

  Distributors:

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit — First Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2018962090

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pomade, Rita, author

  Seeker : a sea odyssey : a memoir / Rita Pomade.

  (MiroLand imprint ; 19)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77183-351-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-352-3 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77183-353-0 (Kindle)

  1. Pomade, Rita--Travel. 2. Ocean travel. 3. Seafaring life.

  4. Autobiographies. I. Title. II. Series: MiroLand imprint ; 19

  G540.P66 2019910.4’5092C2018-906117-0C2018-906118-9

  For Silvia Luna,

  my beautiful, intrepid granddaughter

  In memoriam:

  Gladys Muriel Karolak

  A childhood friend who preserved and returned every letter I sent her throughout the journey

  Tennessee 2014

  “You know your mother,” my sister

  says, “a bit irresponsible.”

  “My mother isn’t irresponsible,”

  my son replies.

  “What would you call her?”

  “A seeker.”

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: THE PHONE CALL

  1SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE OF

  2GOING FOR GOLD

  3WEST MEETS EAST

  4GETTING OUR FEET WET

  5THE DIE IS CAST

  6OUR NEW REALITY

  7PERILS OF THE FORMOSA STRAIT

  8HONG KONG: AN ISLAND LIKE NO OTHER

  9SETTLING IN

  10MACAO AND BACK

  11ANCHORS AWEIGH

  12BRIBES AND ARMS

  13IN NATURE’S OWN CATHEDRAL

  14FROM BORNEO TO SINGAPORE

  15HINDU MIRACLES, BUDDHIST SNAKES AND A BROKEN MAST

  16PIT STOPS IN SABANG AND PHUKET

  17EN ROUTE TO SRI LANKA

  18VISITORS FROM HELL

  19TERROR ON THE HIGH SEAS

  20SINGAPORE REDUX

  21FROM DOLPHINS TO DHAL

  22STORMS BREWING ON THE HORIZON

  23UNDER THE GUN IN EGYPT

  24UNHOLY IN THE HOLY LAND

  25THE PLAN IS NOT TO GET ANYWHERE

  26CROSSING THE GREAT EAST/WEST DIVIDE

  27WESTWARD HO!

  28SENSUAL PLEASURES

  29RESETTING MY COMPASS

  30SETTING A NEW COURSE

  31HOMEWARD BOUND

  EPILOGUE: COMING FULL CIRCLE

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Oceans

  I have a feeling that my boat

  has struck, down then in the depths,

  against a great thing.

  And nothing

  happens! Nothing ... Silence ... Waves ...

  — Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

  And are we standing now, quietly, in this new life?

  — JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ 1881–1958

  Translation Robert Bly

  Prologue

  THE PHONE CALL

  November 2015: Montreal

  Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

  — H. JACKSON BROWN JR.

  “Hey Bernard, Roland phoned a short while ago. Something about a friend of his with a yacht in Tunisia that he wants you to sell. He says to get in touch with him.”

  We’re talking by Skype. Bernard, my ex-husband, lives in Mexico. I’m in Montreal. We talk almost every day. Skype collapses distances and there’s no sense that he’s away — just a feeling of expanded space around me. It’s a good feeling. I show him the cats, go for a coffee, and take a short phone call. He leaves the computer to grab a snack while he waits for me to get off the phone. We have an easy relationship, though it wasn’t always that way.

  “Are you interested?” I continue when he’s back in his seat.

  “I’m thinking about it,” he replies. “Roland’s already sent me an email. The guy really wants to get rid of his yacht. She’s a 50-foot ketch and well-equipped. He’s offering a big commission, but there’s no market in Tunisia. Tahiti is the place. If the owner is willing, I’m in. Are you coming with me? We can do it again. Better this time. Rita?”

  I feel the excitement in the way he says my name. Years ago we sold the ketch he named Santa Rita, but he never lost his love of the sea, and I am woven into the threads of that love.

  I’m intrigued by the idea, thrilled he wants to go on another voyage with me. In the eighties we sailed from Southeast Asia to Europe. Now I’d have a chance to explore the Pacific. The offer is tempting. But I’m not sure. Back then we were dreamers, free-spirited and totally selfsufficient — or so we thought. The rawness of sea life brought out our strengths, but it also heightened our weaknesses. In the end, I had to go off on my own. He had to do the same. But those six years at sea were the most extraordinary and influential years of my life, and I could never have made the journey without Bernard. Together we discovered a world we never knew existed.

  I think about my creature comforts. How my stomach no longer turns when I see a squall line move across the sky. How I don’t jerk awake every two hours for my turn at the helm. How I don’t have to hustle for work from port to port or wonder if Bernard could ever love me as much as the Santa Rita. I’m happy with my space. Sometimes I lay awake at night and think about my good fortune. Yet — to sail again — to relive that adventure from a more stable and aware place ...

  My heart wants to say yes, but —

  “I don’t know,” I tell Bernard. “Let me think about it.”

  I write my childhood friend Gladys about Bernard’s proposal. She’s been living in Belgium since her twenties, but we’ve kept in touch. She writes back saying: “Maybe this will help.” In the packet she’s sent me are the letters I mailed her through the six years of our adventure. I open the letters, touch the postmarks, finger the stamps — each gesture a touchstone to memory.

  Chapter 1

  SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS A
RE MADE OF ...

  October 1969: Mexico City

  I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling.

  — FREYA STARK

  Agreat sense of adventure and curiosity about other cultures brought Bernard and me to Mexico in the mid-sixties from different parts of the world. He was a French geologist hired to find water for the Mexican government. I was a ceramicist in a potter’s studio, a freelance reporter for a magazine called Mexico/This Month, and part-time English as a Foreign Language teacher. On weekends, I read palms — a skill I had learned through reading books. Having walked away from an abusive marriage, I was trying to support my two young sons in a foreign country. Both of us were dreamers and open to new experiences. It was inevitable that our meeting would spark unexpected possibilities.

  We met at the home of Leonora Carrington, a well-known surrealist painter who was as famous for helping to smuggle her ex-lover, Max Ernst, out of Nazi Germany as she was for her artwork. Leonora had a weakness for handsome young men, and Bernard filled the criteria with his rugged features, alert green eyes, and irreverently coifed head of thick, dark auburn hair. He was tall and lithe — the perfect escort for the parties Leonora used to attend at Diego Rivera’s home. They weren’t lovers, but it pleased her that others thought they were, since he was a good thirty years younger. Bernard, a young underpaid Cooperant (the French equivalent of a Peace Corp worker), took full advantage of the arty parties, replete with free food and flowing booze. I viewed him as a lightweight rake, and made a point of ignoring his overtures of friendship during Leonora’s ‘by invitation only’ Sunday salons.

  But all that changed one afternoon when we bumped into each other at the La Merced Market in downtown Mexico City on a miserably hot day.

  “Feel like a beer?” he asked, after the obligatory cliché of “fancy meeting you here.”

  He sat, looking cool and relaxed, at one of the many food stalls inside the market. I slumped, overheated and tired, onto an empty stool beside him. “Why not?”

  Over a generous plate of sopes — thick rounds of corn masa slathered with beans, cream, and salsa — and cold bottles of San Miguel beer, we talked about Mexico. We discovered a shared love for this vibrant country with its diverse indigenous cultures still intact, its extraordinary shifts of landscape, and its warm and gracious people. Suddenly, my mood changed. I started to talk about how Mexico’s heart had been ripped out the year before.

  “When I arrived in the summer of 1966,” I said, “Mexico City was the best place in the world to live. Many writers and artists from Latin and South America made the city their home — some in exile from their own countries, others by choice. Their presence brought interesting people from around the globe, attracted by the creative ferment that had exploded in the country. I came on vacation with my two young sons, but couldn’t bring myself to leave. I sublet my apartment in New York, and believed I’d live in Mexico forever.” My chest tightened. “That was before the massacre.”

  Bernard shifted in his seat, giving me his full attention. He had come at the end of 1968, almost two months after the government’s brutal crackdown on students demonstrating in the Plaza of the Three Cultures. He had heard what happened, but didn’t know the city as I had known it. It was now 1969, but the repressive measures of the Diaz Ordaz government had not abated. Many in the foreign community, accused of instigating the students, were still being deported; the less lucky ones, jailed and tortured. Others left the country of their own accord. The dynamic euphoria that had marked the city evaporated overnight.

  “For weeks after the crackdown,” I said, “I saw kids taken from their homes. The secret police roamed the streets with walkie-talkies to report any sightings of suspicious young people. Several teenagers hid in my home until they were able to procure forged passports to leave the country.”

  Wanting to help the students, I remained in Mexico. After, I couldn’t muster the energy to leave. I hadn’t realized the extent of my trauma until I started relating my story to Bernard. I was grateful that he listened without interrupting.

  “I was in the Plaza the night the students were killed,” I said. “A journalist I’d met at a party recognized me. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down an alley. While we were running, we heard the first gunshots and the tanks rolling in. I learned the next day about the hundreds of students slaughtered, their bodies never found.”

  Bernard looked stunned. He hadn’t known the full story. The government had covered its tracks well for those who arrived in the country after the carnage.

  “I believed as a child,” I said, “I could make anything I wanted come true. But I’ve lost that spark.”

  Our conversation veered toward childhood dreams. Bernard related a half-buried boyhood dream that began on the Loire in France. He had built a raft to sail the river, but couldn’t rig it so that the sail turned. His makeshift vessel raced downriver with no control until it crashed into the river bank. “I told myself I’d have a real sailboat one day.”

  The idea caught my interest. I had no sailing experience, but an early desire to explore. My family spent summers in a small cottage colony beside the Hudson River in upstate New York. Left to my own devices, I had wandered with no restraints, exploring every cranny of my limited world. I scooped-up frogs from hidden springs; walked in step with the fishermen who brought up buckets of striped bass and catfish from the nearby river; forced down oily eel grilled over an open pit that a fisherman offered me, refusing to deny myself any new experience. I dared myself to befriend an old bull tied up and alone in an open field, though I was warned he had a bad temper. I trailed after the local handyman — a tall, angular fellow who made me think of the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. He told me he came from far away, but wouldn’t say from where, though I asked many times.

  Learning at five years old that China lay at the other side of the world, I tried to dig my way there with a toy shovel; only to abandon the project two feet down and two summers later, when an underground spring flooded my port of departure. The China memory lay dormant until my conversation with Bernard. It resurfaced with a new-born energy that manifested itself in the form of a yacht and a desire to sail. What better way to see the world than from our own boat. No hotels. No limited stays. No heavy backpacks ...

  I fell in love with the idea, and shortly after, I fell in love with Bernard. His raw sensuality awakened my senses. His wry humour kept me endlessly entertained. He even listened with interest when I related my dreams, and he let me interpret his. Most important, his rapport with my sons Stefan and Jonah filled me with gratitude. When Stefan needed an antibiotic shot, and I couldn’t bear poking a hole into my son’s tender skin, Bernard took over with a deft hand. When Jonah broke a favourite toy, Bernard was there to repair it for him. When Bernard moved in with me, it cemented the reality of our one day sailing the world. We shared our vision with the boys, who were then four and six years old, and eager for the adventure.

  Over the years, my housekeeper, Laura, and her boyfriend, Benjamin, had become my friends. “We’ll find an island and come for you,” I promised her. “Benjamin can build us a house, and you’ll tend the garden.” It was Laura’s dream to have her own garden, and I envisioned us eating home-grown produce around a large, rough-hewn table that Benjamin would build. They’d settle there permanently. For us, it would be a refuge after long journeys.

  The two of them were as excited as we were to start this new life. Laura, who had been raised on a farm, didn’t feel at home in the city. Work brought her north from a small village in Oaxaca, but every vacation she went back and took my boys with her. “They need the fresh air,” she said. “And some good armadillo tamales that only mi abuela can prepare.” Benjamin was a construction worker, but work was hard to find. When he did find employment, there was never any security or protection. I wanted to share what I thought was a better life with them — perhaps as a way o
f coping with all the injustices I had seen.

  We remained in Mexico three more years trying to save the money for our adventure, while the government continued its propaganda against foreigners. When someone wrote “Gringo go home” in the dust of Bernard’s car, we knew it was time to leave. We also knew by then that the pesos we were earning weren’t sufficient to support our goal towards building the boat.

  Bernard and I opened an atlas on the kitchen table and looked for a suitable country where we could prepare to start our project. With Bernard’s background as a geologist and my years of teaching, we had the good fortune of being able to pick our country. It was the early seventies. Life was full of opportunity. Borders were easier to cross, and work was abundant everywhere.

  The pencil came down on Canada — sane, democratic, stable, a high standard of living. Bernard had spent time there in 1966 and 1968 mapping the unexplored North for the Quebec government and was excited to return. He liked the fact that he could speak French in the province. I was happy that I could speak English. We would work hard and earn good money. We promised Laura and Benjamin we’d return for them when we were ready.

  Chapter 2

  GOING FOR GOLD

  1973: Montreal

  Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become actions. Your actions become habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.

  — GANDHI

  Bernard and I arrived in Quebec with nothing more than an assortment of skills, two young children, and a vision to build a boat. Through a girlfriend living in Guam, we learned that Taiwan was the place to build a first-class yacht with a fibreglass hull, beautifully worked interior, solid teak deck, and most important, cheap labour. She’d seen many boats coming into the Guam harbour, and the Taiwanese-built ones were always the best and most elegant.