We just signed the closing paperwork on the shape of our future: We bought a sailboat.
Not a dink-around-the-shallows “plastic” white toy boat for weekends. (Not me!—Oh boy, I always leap into the deep end.) No, we bought a 42-foot blue-water cruiser to LIVE in. (A few years down the road, that is—but I do mean ‘few’.)
We want to GO PLACES. On no particular schedule, with no particular itinerary, in no particular hurry.
To the part of me that finds the whole prospect terrifying, I whisper soothing reminders that this mode of travel enables us to keep a comfort zone of home-ness into which we can retreat, when we need a rest from other-ness. And (for the many aspects outside of my control) that God has always had my back, when I remember to ask.
For the part of me that’s out-of-breath exhilarated, I’ve been reading aloud from travel narratives, and cruising guides, and turning the pages of spiral-bound books of charts.
We have a few years: to pay her off, to fix her up, to fit her to US. (Very first thing: Jon’s industrial sewing machine! I’ve already bought fabrics to replace the dark maroon cushions throughout. Turquoises, of course.)
We drove to Seattle, where she’s docked, for the Marine Survey—sort of like a house-inspection on steroids: an 8-hour day in which the surveyor crawled into every impossible space, tapped every surface to hear its sound, hauled the boat entirely out of the water to tap some more, and took her out past the breakwater to put up sails. That day I was having a severe attack of the WTFs (otherwise known as self-doubt)—as in, WTF is wrong with my sanity to think I can DO this?!
The wind was up that afternoon, blowing a steady twenty-three knots and rucking up swells that pitched and tossed us as we rode up them and over and down. I braced my (bare) foot against the side of the cockpit as the wind caught her mainsail and she heeled to the side… and THERE I felt my soul settle. Barefoot at the helm in twenty knots of wind?—apparently that’s where I belong in the world.
Jon has named her, with a bit of wordfun. (In sailing, “reach” describes the boat’s position relative to the wind—you’re on a beam reach, a broad reach, a close reach…) Our prospective home we’ve christened Far Reach.
Boats in the U.S. are required to display a “home port” on the stern, as well as a name—and since that port doesn’t have to correspond with her actual location, it seemed to me a matter more of heart than of geography. She’ll be moored in Tacoma for the time being, but that’s not our base. We’ll stay in Pendleton these few more years, but that’s not her base. And when we take off, she’s going to BE our base. My thoughts turned to Yaquina Head Lighthouse—a place that has always seemed to encapsulate my captivation by all things maritime. (I have this lighthouse tattooed on my arm. ‘Nuff said.) So though it’s not, strictly speaking, a port at all, “Yaquina Head, OR” will be stenciled on our stern. (Well, on the boat’s stern. I suppose that’s a tattoo I don’t need.)
I concluded, on that day of Survey, that if I weren’t scared or overwhelmed by this prospect, I’d be either (1) lying to myself, or (2) too stupid for a boat in the first place. It still may qualify as some form of insanity, but…
What I want to do more than anything else in the world is see the world, from a sailboat. If I had a chance to do that, and turned away from that chance for its scariness, the air would go out of my imagination’s tires forever. That delicious sense, when reading a travel book, of thinking “maybe I will…” would be gone—because I’d know for a cold fact I didn’t have it in me.
So here we are: in the deep end. One of God’s many gifts to me is a husband who’s game for such a leap.
Although… We haven’t yet broken the news to the cats.
Kana's Chronicles 