Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (12 page)

It is well
said that we ought not to judge a book by its cover. Once as a child rummaging through my mother’s library, I discovered a volume with an ill-fitting jacket. The jacket described a text of some kind that I must have found interesting, because I opened it. Inside I was surprised to find a different book entirely, entitled
Advice from a Failure
, by Jo Coudert.

I didn’t read it—as a child I certainly had no interest in anyone’s advice—but as an adult I would learn that this was a popular self-help book, first published in 1965 and written by a woman who grew up in an alcoholic family. The fact that my mother felt compelled to hide the title with the jacket of another book speaks volumes about the deep emotional wounds suffered by many who come from such circumstances.

The memory of that book returned to me as I began to write this memoir. The title seems apropos, because what I have learned about marriage and what allowed me to face unafraid the prospect of marrying again did not come from someone else’s good example or kind instruction. I learned those things the hard way—through my own failure.

I had known as a child what it meant to be alone, to be uncertain, and to be vulnerable. I had grown up with those doubts, battled them, and won a decisive victory against them as a young man, only to see them return in my middle age to challenge me again. The trials and errors that had taken me to a moment of truth on the open sea east of Charleston on the morning of December 21, 2009, were painful, but they had restored my confidence in my own ability to choose a new heading.

Looking back, I see now that there probably was no easy passage for me around that Cape of Storms, just as there is likely no book with the title
Advice from an Unqualified Success
. I had to beat against the wind before I could learn to go around it. What I discovered along the way is a metaphor of sorts. A happy marriage and a good life, as it turns out, are one and the same. As you might have guessed in reading any letter of mine, I concluded that the pursuit of each is a thing very much like sailing.

To someone with neither the knowledge nor the patience to learn how helm, sails, wind, and waves work together in a symphony of forward movement, or who lacks the temperament to adapt to the constant, subtle changes in each, a sailboat is an impenetrable mystery and an object of frustration. Let your attention be long distracted from the helm of a boat or your marriage and you will surely run aground in either. But to one who understands the improvements in distance, direction, and speed that can be achieved through frequent small adjustments over time, such a vessel can take him in safety and comfort anywhere in the world, for as long as he lives.

No matter how fierce your ambition to do so, you cannot sail a boat directly into the wind any more than one spouse can vanquish the other in a contest of wills. The boat simply will not go. The sails will luff in disorderly and loud objection to that plan, and despite the illusion of progress amidst all the commotion, the vessel will make no way. But compromise and steer slightly off the wind, a few degrees to one side or the other of your intended mark, and the boat will come alive with purpose and movement. So it is in love.

There are, of course, limits to the metaphor. While every boat may be in need of only a willing captain and a fresh breeze, men and women are not made of timber and rigging. The same man or woman who thrives in one relationship may founder in another. Women in abusive marriages will find little encouragement in romantic allegories. There comes a time, whether on land or at sea, when the only sane course is to run from the storm and take shelter in the nearest port. Mutiny may be for some the most honorable course of action, and only a fool goes down with the ship.

There are men who taste the bitterness of their regret every day and who would tell you that their wives are intolerable shrews—cold, unloving, or indifferent to their dreams. For some poor devils perhaps this is so, but I would guess their bona fide numbers to be fewer than many believe. Some have never learned and others have forgotten that marriage is not a linear equation but a circular one, which is to say that “what goes around comes around.” Marriage is influenced and will be changed by what we do just as the motion of a boat at sea is affected by the actions of her helmsman, who is himself affected by the motion of the boat, and so on. If he lets his ship veer off course, the captain will do himself little good to be shouting at the “damned boat.” Husband and wife, hull and helmsman, are inextricably intertwined and rise or fall together.

I have long
admired the craft of the classical essayist, from Franklin and Thoreau to modern-day polemicists of all stripes, and I have sought in my own writing to emulate the best of them. One of the greats who must not be overlooked, in my opinion, is Colonial governor William Penn. In a collection of essays entitled
Some Fruits of Solitude
, published in 1682, he undertook to instruct a young nation clinging to the rough edges of a forbidding wilderness on, of all things, the finer points of “right marriage.” That he spent far less time writing about the rudiments of farming or frontier living tells us something of the power to be found in the union of man and wife. That the great ships that bore Penn to our shores and the men who sailed them have all gone to dust, yet we today can still benefit from Penn’s advice, tells us something of the power of the written word.

One need read no further than the title of Penn’s essay to grasp the idea that there is such a thing as “wrong marriage.” I once thought that when I had reached a certain age and experience, I, too, would weigh in authoritatively on this subject. I now imagine the angels and the saints, witnessing from above these high-minded intentions of an ignorant young man, and wonder how all of heaven contained the sound of their laughter.

Needless to say, I never qualified for my diploma in the instruction of others on the subject of marriage, right or wrong. But sailing south on a calm sea off the coast of South Carolina in the week before Christmas 2009, I confronted the necessity to apply what I knew.

I had met the woman whom I believed I would sorely regret not marrying, if I was given the chance and failed to seize it. As much as anyone, I could have found ample reason to be skeptical of my own judgment, yet I was certain of my heading. How is that so? I don’t presume to answer that question for you, my friend, but I will tell you how I answered it for myself.

Since Governor Penn’s day, it seems that our pursuit of the happily-ever-after has wandered off into adolescent navel-gazing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in computer matchmaking services, which perform a necessary and age-old function under a newly flawed premise. One such service proposes, for a breathtaking fee, to screen and combine its subscribers with would-be partners according to “29 Dimensions® of Compatibility.” So revolutionary is this concept that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has seen fit to register the phrase by which it is now widely marketed to an eager and growing public.

In my view, the idea that compatibility governs our happiness and should be primary in our efforts to discern and choose a proper mate is self-seeking nonsense. A husband is not a pizza with twenty-nine available toppings. We do not order up a wife in the same way that we call for the daily deep-dish special, with pepperoni but not mushrooms, olives but not anchovies, and wait impatiently for her to be rushed to the altar, still hot and in thirty minutes or less.

The simple truth is that while we may find the perfect match when it comes to choosing a car, a house, or a suit of clothes, there is no such thing as a perfect match when it comes to choosing a mate. Only a narcissist seeks a mate who is a mirror image of himself. He may gaze at her awhile, love-struck, but when he realizes that her image is not his own, he will leave in frustration, only to continue his search for his “true love” in other mirrors. We see this continually in Hollywood, which is our national shrine to narcissism.

So long had I been pining for the perfectly compatible über-bride that it was something of an epiphany for me, in my middle age, to realize that she never existed. Human beings are unique, complex, and constantly changing, and no one is capable of meeting all the needs of another. The sooner we admit that fact, the happier we will be with ourselves and our spouses. Any plan for our happiness that depends upon finding such a person, and any marriage whose survival depends on the ability of that person to save us from the loneliness and want of every unmet need, is doomed to failure. Eventually, one must accept the proverb that “enough is as good as a feast” or be forever hungry. Not only can’t we find someone who is perfectly adapted to every facet of our personality, but that’s really not the point.

Imagine, if you will, walking into a restaurant for the first time. The place seems to be a real find—quaint, attractive, and tucked away in a convenient corner of your own neighborhood. You admire the romantic lighting. The seats are comfortable, and the waitstaff is attentive. Inquiring of the owner, you learn that this restaurant has been doing a brisk business for years and is well loved by the community. You wonder how it is possible you did not know of it until now.

Looking at the menu, you see many of your favorite foods. But then, as your eyes move down the side of the page, you see several more items that, frankly, are not your cup of tea. Mine would be beets. For others it may be creamed spinach. Perhaps for you it is chopped liver. For the sake of this example, let’s say that beets, spinach, and liver are all on the menu, but so are garlic mashed potatoes, which you love. You order and are delighted to be served a delicious and satisfying meal.

Would you leave this restaurant and never return because it serves some dishes that are not to your liking? I think not. Would you circle the parking lot for years, checking reviews and ratings and coming in occasionally to sample another appetizer, before risking that you might be disappointed in a full meal? Or, having become a regular, would you walk out in a huff should the cook burn your favorite lasagna? I rather doubt it. You will be well fed here and you know it. The risk that the service may not always be impeccable or the food always delicious, or that not everything on the menu will be compatible with your taste, doesn’t change that fact.

The comparison of spouses to soufflés is an awkward one, admittedly, but I believe that the choice of a mate can benefit from this example. Demand that nothing offend your sensibilities in any way and you will eat for the rest of your life at the International House of Pancakes. As for me, I prefer more adventurous fare.

Here is what I know: the one whom you would love has led a full life before she met you—which likely is part of what attracts you to her. In that span of time she has developed characteristics, interests, foibles, needs, and preferences dissimilar to your own. The question is not whether she will meet your every need or whether you can foresee and analyze correctly, in advance, every potential dimension of incompatibility. The question is not whether you are certain to be the answer to all her prayers. The question is whether, in each other’s arms, you can find nourishment along with some of the variety that is the spice of life. If so,
bon appétit
.

Alas, though, this analogy has a darker side. While there may be no such thing as a restaurant that serves too little food or none at all, or whose offerings have become not merely dissatisfying but toxic, there are such marriages. You may once have been a devoted patron of such an establishment, and out of a sense of loyalty or charity or shame you may, for a time, pretend that you continue to be well fed there. Sooner or later, however, you must look elsewhere for nourishment or starve.

To these lofty remarks I add this final, grounding reality: If you believe, as I do, that marriage is a holy temple instituted by God, you must also accept, as many do not, that a time comes in some marriages when the money changers must be driven out. To imitate the sacrament of marriage by going through the motions of a relationship is to make a mockery of that sacrament. Divorce is a failure not to be wished upon anyone, but there is honesty in failure.

One should be
careful when listening to Van Morrison songs. Like the carriage that turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, in the blink of an eye “Crazy Love” can turn into just plain crazy.

It would have been easy to dismiss what I was feeling for Susan after just one weekend as I sailed south from Charleston—if not as crazy, then as simply foolish. But to dismiss such feelings is to be dead to the possibility of mystery. I don’t presume necessarily to understand my life as it occurs, but I know that I must experience it in real time, not in hindsight. Grace often comes to us as an angel in strange disguise, and we must have the courage to welcome the stranger.

At six in the evening on my first day at sea, after leaving Charleston, I sat down to write Susan a letter. All was quiet, the new winter sun had already set, and in the soft glow of the cabin where only two days before we had danced and talked long into the night, the sense that my life had just changed greatly for the better covered me like a warm blanket.

“Like a child at Christmas,” I wrote to her, “I may not know all that the future holds, but I have a childlike sense of wonder, awe and excitement, and an innocent faith that what waits for us is something beautiful to behold.” I think this may have been what Mr. Einstein was trying to tell us, and it is definitely what I believe.

As I wrote those words I was already far out of sight of land. An unseen school of fish—perhaps tuna or mahimahi—went rushing under my keel, setting off the depth alarm and reminding me that there were forces busily at work beneath the placid surface of the ocean. The same was true of my thoughts, which raced expectantly beneath my calm exterior. Big changes were on the way, and I was about to make them.

In the hours I had spent trying to evade Charleston two weeks earlier, I had gained a greater understanding of the operation of the Monitor self-steering wind vane. Though the electronic autopilot had since been repaired, I now used the mechanical wind vane for self-steering exclusively. With nothing but wide miles of ocean between me and the Berry Islands, I had unfettered, quiet hours to fill with thoughts and written words.

I made good time, covering 115 miles in the first day. In that distance I saw not one other vessel on the open sea. I also remained out of communication with land. Cell phones and VHF radios cannot receive a clear signal farther than twenty-five miles from shore. There were no VHF weather reports. There was only the sound of my ship moving through the water, her rhythmic creaking and groaning becoming as regular and familiar to me as a heartbeat.

“Were it not for your picture,” I wrote to Susan, “I might be tempted to believe it was all a dream. Perhaps the sea was playing tricks on me, and I have really been on the same long trip the whole time.”

The sea’s tricks would come soon enough. But for now, there was time to write, and I had a lot to say. It was not loneliness that compelled me to dwell on these things, but a quiet resolve.

“Perhaps it is just as well that we have this time,” my letter continued, “to contemplate what it is we are about to begin. In my contemplation…I am struck by how different you are…There is nothing ‘hard’ about you…You have a gentleness, a softness that is so disarming and endearing. There is no sarcasm or bitterness or edge of anger, in your voice. You seem to go lightly through life, and I am eager to follow.”

The sea was like glass on the second night, which turned out to be, as it usually is, a sign that the weather would soon change. By the third day I was off the coast of Florida, and by nightfall I was passing south of Daytona Beach about sixty nautical miles northeast of Cape Canaveral. Here, on December 23, I was finally able to pick up a weather forecast.

“The wind is due to clock to the southwest on Christmas,” I wrote to Susan, “right on time for the crossing.” I had planned to jut across the Gulf Stream at its narrowest point, when I was abeam of West Palm Beach, and glide into the pale blue water of the Bahama Banks on my way to Nassau. “Everything has gone perfectly on the trip thus far, including the very necessary failure of my autopilot, followed promptly by my engine transmission…”

A trio of dolphins swam alongside the
Gypsy Moon
for a long while that afternoon. I also briefly glimpsed what I couldn’t be sure but suspected, due to its size, was a breaching whale. Suddenly the ocean was coming alive, and so was the wind. I felt more keenly the change that was in the air. “Strangely,” I wrote that night, “I don’t wish you were here. The sea has its dangers, and I want to keep you safe by my side…”

With the boat making good time and now in range of cell towers, I sent an all-is-well text message to Susan and my family and friends, predicting that I would cross the Gulf Stream into Bahamian waters the next day. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

By the morning of the fourth day, Christmas Eve, the weather had shifted to the southwest with a vengeance. There would be no letter to Susan or Santa that day, because the motion of the boat in the rising wind and seas was so labored that it was impossible to hold a pen steadily enough to write.

Once again, I found myself crawling forward on deck, preparing to raise the storm trysail that I had thought I’d never use. I well remember the scene. I paused for a moment to marvel at the size of the waves on the same ocean that had been a mirror two days before, and I imagined what I would look like to someone watching me on a television set from the safety of his living room—like a crazy man, I decided.

The trysail had its intended effect, but even with the calming of the motion of the boat, every line and halyard seemed to be as tight as piano wire under the strain. Despite the strength of the wind that should have been driving her forward, with her sails shortened the
Gypsy Moon
was now in a contest of wills with the large rollers coming at her from the south. Our speed slowed to a crawl, and my attention again turned to the weather forecast.

According to the NOAA, I now had one day to make it to my intended turning point at West Palm Beach before the wind shifted to the north and closed the door to any attempt to cross the Gulf Stream. I suddenly had the sensation of déjà vu. This far south, the Gulf Stream runs only a few miles offshore. To avoid it, I was forced to tack back and forth with regularity in the narrow alley that runs between the west wall of the stream on one side and the beaches on the other. While the wind vane could steer the boat without my aid, tacking and resetting the vane after each turn was a hands-on job.

By nightfall on Christmas Eve, I was exhausted from working the helm, to say nothing of how Santa and his reindeer must have felt in that headwind. I was increasingly in need of sleep, but I had less than an hour of time on each tack before I would need to come back out on deck and tack again to avoid being carried off in the Gulf Stream to the east or crashing into the lobby of some beachfront hotel to the west.

Up at the bow, the
Gypsy Moon
continued her fistfight with the waves as one steep rolling punch after another slammed into the hull, slowing our speed made good (the distance over the bottom) to less than three knots. By midnight on Christmas morning, the wind speed was gusting to twenty-six knots and the boat had reached an effective stalemate in her contest with the sea: tall waves kept coming north, and we weren’t moving any farther south.

A change in plans was needed. I fell off the wind and ran five miles out to sea in an effort to get some speed going under the hull before tacking back toward the coast on a wider broad reach. This approach meant I was sailing a less due-southerly angle in exchange for greater boat speed that I hoped would let me make more southward progress against the waves. With the boat on a comfortable heading, I set the egg timer alarm and nodded off in my bunk down below.

Every sailor at some point, if not often, realizes that he has benefitted from the vigilance of an unseen crew. In his book about becoming the first man to sail alone around the world in 1898, Joshua Slocum shared the credit with the long-dead pilot of Christopher Columbus’s ship the
Pinta
, whose ghost Slocum matter-of-factly claimed he saw steer his sloop whenever he was most in need of aid.

I saw no ghost of Christmas past or present that night off the coast of Florida, but I was mighty glad for whatever (or whoever) awakened me well ahead of my alarm. Coming out on deck early, I was startled to see that the depth sounder read only twenty feet instead of sixty. Judging from the glare of the lights onshore and the sound of breaking waves, the beach could not have been far from my bow. On a broad reach in the rising wind, the boat had made much better speed than I had expected. She was racing toward shore, and with a few more minutes of sleep, I would have parked her neatly in some child’s sand castle.

With hands shaking and heart pounding, I quickly spun the wheel around to put the helm on an easterly heading. The rowdy wind sent the boom and mainsail crashing to leeward. I had nearly made a mistake that would have cost me the
Gypsy Moon
and put an end to my dreams for good. “What would Susan have thought of such a blunder?” I wondered.

I took a step back and tried to look objectively at my situation. I was not far enough south yet to attempt a Gulf Stream crossing. Once I entered it, the stream would carry me well north of my position, and at this latitude, wherever I came out on the other side I would miss the Bahama Banks entirely. I needed to make another 125 miles of southing before I could turn, but at the present speed that would take three days. In less than one day the wind was forecast to turn to the north and increase to thirty knots, where it was supposed to remain for a week. In those winds, the Gulf Stream would be an impassable war zone. The mantra I knew best was that no crossing could be attempted in a north wind.

Exhausted again, I hove to the boat on an offshore heading and waited till the dawn of Christmas Day. I was just below the hook of Cape Canaveral, and glancing at the chart book, I saw that there was a full-service marina nearby.

You know for sure that you’re all grown up when you’re motoring alone into a deserted marina on Christmas morning. I had made the choice to be there, it was true, and I would have been just as alone back in my apartment in Raleigh, but there is never a better opportunity to feel sorry for oneself than to be the only one in a shipyard on Christmas. Or so I thought.

I had forgotten that whenever I am around boats and seawater, there will always be someone, somewhere, who suffers my addiction. In this case, the fellow was easy to spot in an ancient wooden Colin Archer sloop that was a throwback to the days of Joshua Slocum I had only recently called to mind. He was sailing for Maine with a rather interesting and odd sort of crew (they are always interesting and odd), but I could not have wished for a nicer bunch to greet me on Christmas morning.

The only unlocked public bathrooms with hot showers at the marina were coin operated, and there was no coin changer within walking distance—not that it would have mattered, as I had nothing less than a ten-dollar bill to change. One of the crew on the Colin Archer took pity on me. Extending an arm tattooed over its entire length, he opened his hand to empty a stack of quarters into mine and then said: “As they say in the Middle East, go with God.”

It was a merciful gift. God and I went straightaway, as directed, and got a wonderfully hot shower.

The next morning, the red and green Christmas lights came on early in the marina store, and I made arrangements for dockage for the
Gypsy Moon
until I could return. After spending five days at sea since leaving Charleston, it seemed impossible that I would be stopped again, short of my destination, but there I was.

The marina hands directed me from the fuel dock where I had tied off the day before to a slip on one of the interior piers. As I secured the
Gypsy Moon
in her temporary home, I noticed that the boat in the slip next to her seemed to be a somewhat more permanent fixture. Looking closely, I saw that this little boat, a day sailor no more than seventeen feet long, with only kneeling headroom, was the homestead of a middle-aged Latina who lived alone. Her grandchildren had come to visit her on the day after Christmas.

When those of us who have lived lives of relative abundance and ease see such scenes, we are often moved. On that morning after Christmas, I was moved not by a sense of anyone’s hardship or despair but by the genuine contentedness of this woman to be living in that place, in what most of us would regard as difficult circumstances, without any evidence of difficulty.

I had a shipful of stores that I was not likely to need anytime soon. One by one, I lifted plastic bags filled with cans of food over the side of the woman’s boat until it could hold no more. She spoke no English. In broken Spanish, I established that she liked
vino rojo
and gave her the few bottles I had left to wash down the ravioli. I explained the troubles of wind and weather that had brought me to that place. She was gracious in acknowledging her need, and I was honored to be able to give someone an unexpected gift in person that Christmas.