Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (16 page)

I have a
story to tell you of Nassau. In our shrinking world you hardly have need of my memoir to know something of that story already. Millions come here aboard cruise ships and airplanes, just as hordes now span in a matter of hours all the hard-won miles of Magellan's passage to the Philippines. But what I have to report is something that might have escaped the harried traveler's eye.

In the months over the summer and fall of 2010, Susan and I came by air to the island for a week or two at a time to tend to the
Gypsy Moon
during her layover. Through the wonders of the Internet, I was able to continue my work there as easily as if I had been sitting in my office chair. And when I was not working, I had the privilege of waking up aboard a small boat, just a few feet from the waterline in the harbor, with absolutely nothing to do. I held this important agenda in common with assorted geckos, crabs, and the odd damselfish. With my fair complexion and blue eyes I would never be mistaken for a native, but I had the privilege of lollygagging around town in a way that only a native could afford.

It bears repeating that many of the people I encountered in Nassau and throughout the Bahamas, most without emblems of material wealth or social status, had a conspicuous refinement of manners and a genuine way of kindness. I met one such man on a Sunday morning at Christ Church.

Susan and I usually made an effort to attend services whenever we were on the island. The organist at the cathedral had such a talent as to summon the angels to Earth with every chorus, and had I not even a mustard seed of faith I would have come to that pew just for the music.

On Sunday mornings, Susan would glide out of the marina shower room, smartly dressed in a skirt and sandals, her long blond hair catching the sunlight, looking as if she were headed to a summer fashion show at the British Colonial Hilton. I, on the other hand, in the rumpled sport coat, threadbare trousers, and wrinkled tie I kept aboard the boat, was impervious to the improvements of fashion. Walking with Susan through town on our way to church, I looked like a homeless man stalking a beautiful woman.

Those familiar with the Episcopal liturgy know that its various passages and prayers are hopscotched about in different parts of three sources, these being the Book of Common Prayer, the hymnal, and the missalette that is handed to you at the door. (The number three is important here because it is exactly one more than the number of hands you have.) Before the unwitting visitor has had time to rehearse his steps, the reading of the Mass begins like a heavenly quadrille. The priest at the altar calls the count, and the faithful whirl smartly from one text to the next, in unison and on cue. Rarely are these holy mysteries revealed to the uninitiated by something as banal as a page number announced in advance, out loud, with time given to arrive there before the entire assembly has darted away into yet another secret passage of the Mass, like a school of fish pursued by a shark.

Adding to the complexity of this ritual is the need to rise, sit, or kneel at appointed times, not unlike a game of musical chairs. Thus are the interloper and the infidel revealed—standing rod straight and suddenly alone in the middle of the seated assembly, holding two books while dropping another, thumbing anxiously for the correct page, and running frantically to join the group at the boarding gate but arriving just after the last prayer has left the terminal.

Susan and I found ourselves in this unfortunate condition one morning during Sunday Mass at Christ Church. The cathedral is part of the Anglican Communion, which is the name given to the Church of England in countries outside the United States. Owing to its geography, the Bahamian church has acquired some liturgical oddities uncommon to its American counterpart. We found ourselves anxiously thumbing and flipping and stumbling to follow along that day.

A Bahamian man standing alone a great distance away in the row ahead of us must have noticed our confusion. He calmly walked the length of his empty pew and, leaning toward us, demonstrated the correct page of the text. He waited until we had rejoined the throng and then, smiling in response to our expression of thanks, returned to his distant place in the pew.

On that Sunday in Nassau, the same man found it necessary to rescue and redirect us on three more occasions before the Mass was through. Each time he did so, I marveled at his ability to know the very instant at which we had lost our way, despite my effort to mumble something suitably devotional and otherworldly. Where others might merely have averted their eyes to save us any embarrassment as we muddled through, this man conspicuously offered assistance when it was needed.

It's a simple thing, you might say, to help a fellow parishioner find his place in the prayer book, and it is something I am sure occurs in churches across the world every Sunday. Three things, however, were unusually endearing about this man.

First, he was not seated in the same pew as Susan and me, where it would hardly discomfit anyone to offer assistance if it were needed and could easily be given. I have been in churches my whole life, and never have I been concerned about anyone's need for guidance from fifteen feet away, much less suffered the Lord the interruption of my own important prayers to aid another soul in his.

Secondly, this man was not at all concerned about intruding upon the pageantry of the moment or our pretension to be a part of it, which is no small portion of the Episcopalian experience. That would have counseled against drawing attention to us in any way. But this was no taciturn High Church patrician. This man wanted to ensure that we received the full measure of that for which we had come, which was a meaningful communion with the Almighty. Each time he walked over to us, I had the distinct feeling that Susan and I were straggling sheep who had caught the shepherd's watchful eye and that the shepherd was gently guiding us back into the fold.

The man was not a member of the church vestry, hoping to endear himself to us and to endear us in turn to the annual capital campaign. Hale and hearty, he appeared to be in his thirties. He held no office in the church that I could discern. His plain clothes, in contrast to the fastidious attire of even the poor who attend church in Nassau, suggested to me that he was poorer than most. There was no air of pridefulness in his commendable piety.

This is but one example of many small kindnesses we observed in our travels around Nassau, and it is a memorable one. Although we were the strangers that day in the cathedral, the experience recalled for me the apostle's promise that in those whom we encounter in this life, we sometimes meet “angels unawares.”

I hope my Episcopal friends will take no offense at this admittedly exaggerated bit of fun-poking at our famously formal and erudite tradition. I am foremost among the lovers of old stone cathedrals and the old stone people who fill them every Sunday. After a twenty-year sojourn in the post–Vatican II equanimity of the Catholic Mass, where the pipe organ has been replaced by besandaled guitar players and every hymn seems to be just another formless variation of the same Peter, Paul and Mary tune, I found myself pining for the pomp and circumstance of the Episcopal liturgy and a rousing chorus of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” And having now by turns managed to offend Catholics everywhere, let me repair further by acknowledging what the world already knows, which is that there is nowhere to be found a greater benefactor of the poor and downtrodden than the Catholic Church, and it is after all by our good works—not choirs or Sunday pageantry—that our faith is proved.

New Providence Island
is well traveled and has been for centuries, but it held for me a few notable first impressions that I will attempt here to describe along with some advice to any who might follow in my wake. (You may have guessed from the title of this chapter that I am not quite done railing against the evils of wealth and greed. If you will forgive me this further brief sermon, I promise we will soon set sail again.)

I suggest that in Nassau you avoid the casinos, which you will find not only here but everywhere in the Caribbean. No doubt I am excessively Victorian about the whole matter, but they seem mostly to serve vacationing Americans who have so lost their sense of what really matters in life that they have come to believe they can find it at the bottom of a slot machine, and they pay dearly every night to be proven wrong.

Susan and I often traveled on foot between our marina and the sprawling resort of Atlantis, where, after a certain hour in the evening, we could tour the capacious underground aquarium known as the Dig at no charge. (The glass tunnel through a colony of spiny lobsters was an especially creepy thrill.) Once within the resort, we could obtain, for the price of a tot of rum, a table in one of the hotel bars from which to enjoy a live band. Getting around the resort for these miserly entertainments, though, required us to traverse the long, dark hall of the Atlantis casino.

I have nothing against gambling per se. In fact, I have always considered the chance to see Thoroughbred racehorses run a form of entertainment well worth the price of a losing wager, within reason. Part of the mythology surrounding my father’s life, before he descended into alcoholism, is that he wrote a thesis in statistics at Columbia on his theory for picking winning horses at the track. I have his degree from that institution hanging on my wall, so presumably he received a passing grade on the paper, but my family can attest that his formula had serious flaws in its practical application.

Far removed from the romance of Churchill Downs, casinos evoke (for me, at least) a gauche pseudoelegance that mocks the sophistication they strive so hard to convey—something like Saddam Hussein’s gilded royal toilet. I found the casino in Atlantis thick with cigarette smoke and an air of despair, full of depressed middle-aged tourists hypnotized late into the evening by blinking colored lights and ringing bells. Incredibly, they could not see that their salvation lay just yards away on a beautiful moonlit beach.

Another peculiarity one soon recognizes when traveling the Caribbean is the number of megayachts in the harbors. I’m not talking about a few big boats. I’m talking about a lot of really big boats—private ships, in fact, manned by their own full-time captains, crew, and staff, all smartly turned out in uniform. You will see them pulled alongside the docks in Atlantis and other ultradeluxe resorts, where the owners pay gladly for use of the long piers needed to accommodate these leviathans.

I made a point of chatting up some of the crew of these ships when I spotted them coming or going on deck as I walked around the marina. There is a whole subculture of people who make a living moving from place to place and ship to ship, serving as cooks or crew. I was glad not to be one of them. The sheer size of these vessels affects me with a kind of inverse claustrophobia.

You might as well tie a man to a tree as put him in such a boat. The lure of the sea is its promise of a carefree, adventurous, and romantic life, however illusory that promise may turn out to be for some. Yet there is nothing carefree about a vessel that consumes more diesel fuel in an hour than a sailboat will burn in a decade. The man who buys that boat with dreams of a life of unfettered ease in the warm tropical sunshine is headed for a rude awakening, unless he is traveling with the Sultan of Brunei. This is why many of the great luxury motor yachts that you see steaming around Nassau and other harbors throughout the world will appear sooner than you think in the pages of
Yachting
magazine, offered for sale at an enormous loss by older and wiser men to younger and more foolish ones.

For all the glitz that has become of Robinson Crusoe’s island home, somewhere at this hour in the Caribbean there is a man on a small boat with well-worn sails, secure in an anchorage he has purchased only by the wind and the grace it took to get there, preparing to enjoy for the price of a little rice, a few vegetables, and a fish willing to be fooled, a meal fit for a king served at the best table in the house.

I would love to be able to tell you that I have embodied or at least aspired to that lone sailor’s way of life, never succumbing to the siren song of wealth and conspicuous consumption. But if you have known any part of my story, you know there would be nothing but vanity in such a boast.

My house would be a castle in the sky to the average Dominican child, and my boat might as well be a spaceship to a man in Haiti. I write these very words from the comfort of a gleaming, climate-controlled office tower on dry land. It has been five months since I have seen the
Gypsy Moon
, and two more months will pass before I can return to her.

Too rarely do I have the strength of my own convictions, and whatever wisdom there may be in my words, it is too slowly proved by my actions. I more often aspire to the ideals of Vanderbilt than St. Vincent, and I am more prone to hubris than humility. But hope springs eternal for the prodigal’s return.

Look for him at sundown on the wane of an east wind, carried gently by the tide to a quiet cove where there is sand firm enough to hold an anchor and mountains high enough to provide shelter. There if indeed he is blessed will he come, penniless, to the royal manor that has been prepared for him. Within it he will find a feast to give strength to the weary, the peace that passes all understanding, and riches untold.

Nassau was unscathed
by hurricanes in the summer and fall of 2010. Once the threat of tropical storms had faded, I made preparations to sail again. The days after Christmas would afford the first opportunity. Susan thought to accompany me, but in sailing around New Providence Island over the summer, she had shown a propensity toward seasickness. We thought it best that she wait for a shorter passage to discover whether those symptoms might be persistent.

During a period of up to two weeks, I intended first to head east, well out into deep water, and then south as far as I could go, wind and weather permitting. Past experience had taught me not to promise or plan where I might land. Instead, I loaded enough food and water for a month and hoped to find a friendly landfall in no more than half that time.

There is a great deal written about preferred passages in the Bahamas. As was the case with the crossing of the Gulf Stream at Florida, all manner of disaster is predicted for those who do not follow the conventional wisdom. Most boats heading south from Nassau opt to travel a protected route over the Bahama Banks behind Eleuthera and Cat Islands. Eventually they follow other boats into Georgetown on Long Island, which I am told has acquired, over the years, the nickname Chicken Harbor. The name owes its origin to the fact that the passage south from Georgetown is across open water, and apparently many boaters never summon the courage to attempt it, choosing instead to return north.

The great majority of sailboats making passages anywhere in the Bahamas do so in a series of day trips, mostly under power rather than under sail, anchoring nightly along the way. This practice is explained by the fact that the shallow banks require navigation by sight to avoid unmarked shoals. The relative scarcity of good anchorages and the necessity to make it to one before dark each day require a kind of planning that the vagaries of wind and weather rarely afford. So the next time a friend tells you he is “sailing” in the Bahamas, understand that he is either going in circles or mostly motoring during daylight from harbor to harbor. The
Gypsy Moon
would, by necessity as well as the preference of her captain, take a different tack.

I arrived in Nassau on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. From the airport, my taxi took me through downtown on East Bay Street, where the viewing stands for the annual Junkanoo celebration were still in place. I was sorry to have missed that party but glad to have spent New Year’s Eve in Raleigh, where I could kiss my wife at midnight before embarking on another long passage alone.

I settled up and left the docks at Nassau Yacht Haven on the morning of January 2, 2011. Owing to the unexpected swiftness of the tide, my departure was an unseamanlike affair, aided greatly (again) by Sidney standing on the dock, maneuvering two stern lines like the reins of a show pony. For my part, I was running fore and aft on deck in a disorderly panic, using a long pole to fend off docks, pilings, and other boats, as if the
Gypsy Moon
were being attacked from all sides by a pack of wild dogs. All of 11,700 pounds and equipped with only a single-propeller twenty-horsepower engine, my boat was built for sailing, not maneuvering in tight places under power. She backs out of a marina slip with all the grace of a pig in a poke. I usually pull her out by hand, using lines. This day, however, the tide was too strong and had the best of all of us, which is perfectly why it is said that the tide waits for no one.

Finally, this circus trapeze act succeeded in getting the
Gypsy
’s nose pointed east, and I headed out from the marina to the channel—my feathers slightly ruffled but still in place. No doubt the lunch crowd overlooking the marina from the Poop Deck restaurant wondered why this unpracticed helmsman was taking a vessel out to sea, and I was doing my best to shrug off the same doubts.

I rounded the jetty where the lighthouse stands at the entrance to Nassau Harbor and, against the easterly trades, took a bearing for north by northeast. I had sixty miles to go to get to the passage between Great Abaco and Eleuthera Islands, after which I would tack south on a heading that would keep me in deep water, well clear of land. Once I made this turn, I would be exposed to three thousand miles of uninterrupted swell in the Atlantic Ocean as it sweeps westward from the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. That thrilling prospect is the source of such fear and trepidation in the sailing community that few boats take this course. It was not surprising, then, that after midafternoon of the second day, I saw no other boats for four days.

The offshore, easterly trade winds are regular and strong, and I was happy to depend on them as I pushed southward. I found that my desired heading placed the
Gypsy Moon
on a broad reach—her most favored attitude—which made her exceptionally easy to balance for self-steering. Suddenly, I had very little to do but contemplate the fact that in a few days’ time, I would share with Columbus the experience of seeing the island of San Salvador rise slowly from the Atlantic.

I occupied much of my free time reading
The Sacred Journey
by Charles Foster. Foster is an Oxford fellow who makes a persuasive case, to which I ascribe, that since the time of Cain and Abel, God has had a soft spot in His heart for nomads of all kinds and is most vividly present in their midst. Though it is not a book about sailing per se, its theme that revelation comes to those who journey along the world’s lonely roads applies equally to nomads of the sea.

The old Shaker hymn rightly observes that simplicity is a gift. Wealth and success often rob us of that gift. By necessity, however, those who take the road less traveled must travel light. What the nomad richly receives when he tears down the scaffolding of civilization is a better appreciation for the bulwarks of faith. Foster’s book on this subject was as welcome as an old friend on my own journey, and I returned to it again and again to continue the conversation. I was sorry to come to the end.

Speaking of gifts, I also had occasion on these days spent coasting out to sea far from land, along the length of Eleuthera and Cat Islands, to take stock of my own good fortune. As I stared upward for long hours from the pilot berth, it dawned upon me that I was, against all odds, a happily married man. I had just celebrated the first anniversary of my encounter with the Siren of Charleston. With her I had found a depth of love and intimacy that I had not thought possible, but that was not the only change of the past year. My life at home and at work had been thoroughly transformed.

Susan had brought her considerable skills as an accountant to my law practice and freed me from the bondage of billing and paying bills. I became a better and more successful lawyer as a result. My tiny practice was humming along, with a growing staff over which Susan hovered with the devotion of a mother hen. At home, clean underwear began to appear in my dresser drawer, neatly folded and sorted, as if by magic. For my part, I strove to ensure that Susan never prepared a single meal, washed a dish, or made a single trip to the grocery store. I found new meaning in simple acts of service, and I reveled in Susan’s approval of my culinary efforts, intramural though they were.

Now, coming upon two years together as I write these words, it occurs to me that the secret of our happiness—apart from the love that every successful marriage requires—is time. With rare exception, the table is set each morning for breakfast, often with flowers from our garden, and time is deliberately taken to enjoy that meal together. Each night, dinner is served by candlelight, with time for conversation. We dance everywhere, sleep in, play and tease constantly, and make love in the morning long after we should be getting ready for work.

We sometimes fight like children, but we make up like lovers, and we help each other remember the need we each have to forgive and be forgiven. Living without television, we have taken back whole months of our lives that would otherwise have been lost to the time-sink of sitcoms, reality shows, and political screaming matches. We take the time to read the paper together each morning. Banana pancakes and French toast are weekly staples. We cherish slow walks through the farmers’ market and lazy Sunday afternoons at home, when Susan fusses about the yard, I make meals for the week, and both of us stop to dance to tunes from
A Prairie Home Companion
coming from the clock radio in the kitchen.

We revel in the holidays and throw messy get-togethers for neighbors and friends. We have rediscovered the lost tradition of the dinner party, but we more often spend quiet nights together, just the two of us, watching classic old movies (for me) and syrupy romantic comedies (for her). In short, we devote ourselves to each other as best we know how and promise to keep going, no matter what. We also regularly find our way to church, where I feel compelled to express, along with my thanks, my incredulity at having been blessed so greatly in excess of anything I deserve.

All of this sounds terribly Pollyanna even to me, as one who knows it to be true. I don’t mean to make a caricature of our marriage or marriage in general. Susan and I live as others do, in the real world and not in a fairy tale. She is a woman through and through, and I am a man, with a man’s usual flaws. No man or woman married more than a month needs to read an essay of mine to understand the stubborn differences between men and women. Like life itself, marriage is not always easy, but it is always worth it. And through it all, I have scarcely been able to take my eyes off her. She remains the most beautiful and genuine woman who has ever given me the time of day, and the clock still stops for me when she walks into a room.