Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (4 page)

Diamond Shoals was
my biggest worry. I don’t know why, exactly. I had never been there before. It marks an area just off Hatteras Island where, spreading south along the Eastern Seaboard, the ocean floor suddenly rises up in sandy shoals to ensnare and swallow the keels of passing ships. Of the many ghost stories about the banks, one from Diamond Shoals had stuck with me. It told of a young woman aboard a passenger freighter that had run aground at night there in the nineteenth century. Terrified, she stood by the rail holding her infant child as the pounding surf rapidly broke the ship apart. One giant wave overtook them and, in an instant, swept the baby from her arms into the churning chaos of the night sea.

It was night when I arrived at Diamond Shoals, and the ocean was what any writer would feel compelled to describe as eerily calm—eerie like a murderer’s smile. This is a place so long associated with violence and death that even in placidity, it cannot escape its legend.

Legend or not, I could plainly see the hazard on the chart: an area of shallow water, now clearly marked by a buoy with a flashing red light that had replaced various earlier lightships and structures used to mark the shoals. Most of these had sunk or been swept away in storms over the years. It seems as if it should be child’s play to avoid the shoals in our GPS age, with a bright blinking light out in the darkness telling us where not to go. In fact, one sailor who read a newspaper account of my voyage asked me whether all that was needed to safely navigate the shoals was not simply to “go around it”—true, but not so simple.

What makes Diamond Shoals and all of the Outer Banks the Graveyard of the Atlantic is the Gulf Stream. The stream comes close inshore as it passes the banks and collides with colder waters from New England. Moving at a constant speed of two to four knots, the stream kicks up big seas most of the time, and enormous seas whenever waves carried by the current are opposed by a north wind. In fair weather, the combination of the current and the waves impedes a sailing vessel from making headway to the south within the stream—like trying to go up a down escalator. In foul weather, the issue is not making headway, but surviving.

There are two ways to avoid the Gulf Stream. One is to sail directly across it at something less than a right angle until you’re a hundred miles or so out into the open Atlantic, then turn south. That’s a fine plan if you’re headed to the West Indies and don’t need to cross the stream again to make port. If you’re headed anywhere on the East Coast, you will prefer to sail right down the coastline, inshore of the western edge of the stream. In most places from Maine to northern Florida, you’ll have anywhere from fifteen to forty miles of sea room in which to travel between the current of the stream and the shallows onshore. At Diamond Shoals, that margin thins to fewer than three miles in some places—a veritable bowling alley where rolling a gutter ball can be deadly.

I didn’t fully understand all the foregoing particulars until my night alone on Diamond Shoals that August. I was happy to be cruising well out to sea, far from the storied dangers of the banks, with the wave-swept young woman ever in my mind’s eye. But as I came farther south from Virginia, I felt the boat making slower and slower progress. At first, I assumed the wind had died, but when it became apparent that it had not, I realized that I was being carried northward by the western wall of the Gulf Stream. I found it necessary to tack farther and farther inshore, until it seemed I could almost read by the light of the Diamond Shoals marker. I marveled at just how close to the shoals I had to come to escape the effects of the current. Here, I learned, is where the devil and Diamond Shoals must be given their due.

Run aground on these banks at night in a storm, and help will be far from you. Your boat will lie on its side while the surf steadily pounds it to a wreck. That is why I love the open ocean: there is nothing to run into and no place to run aground. In fact, there are few things more frightening to a sailor in the dark than the sound of a clanging bell on a channel buoy or ocean waves hitting a beach, because both signal an unseen impending disaster. (Incomprehensibly, these are two of the “soothing” sounds programmed by the manufacturer into a clock radio that I own, along with thunderstorms and a babbling brook, presumably to help people sleep. I turn them on whenever I want to stay absolutely awake.)

I had not made much distance by the following morning. Looking back over the starboard rail, I could see the now-abandoned platform of an old light station rising from the ocean, atop Diamond Shoals. Like a haunted house in the daytime, it looked less frightening—though perhaps only because I was sailing safely away from it.

Distances at sea
can be deceiving. Although I was back in North Carolina waters, I was, on the morning after my passage around Diamond Shoals, still far from port. Beaufort, North Carolina, was where I planned to lay the
Gypsy Moon
over in a slip for what remained of hurricane season until she and I could be off again, by Thanksgiving.

Diamond Shoals was not the only mudbank of concern in these parts. It was nightfall before I approached the northern end of Cape Lookout, which protects Beaufort from the sea. Unlike the nightmares told of Cape Hatteras, the stories I associate with Cape Lookout are more familiar to me and more ordinary. More than once have I sailed into the bight at Cape Lookout and enjoyed a peaceful summer afternoon with dozens of anchored boats and hordes of tourists who come by land to see the old checkered lighthouse that stands there. But I had never approached Cape Lookout from offshore.

There would be no hazard for me at Cape Lookout, but I must confess I was unprepared to witness the wall of green water that I saw curling in one milelong wave after another, marching ashore on the ocean side of the cape. I mentioned it to friends later and was informed that Cape Lookout is prized by surfers. I can well understand why. From the
Gypsy Moon
’s position at sea, beyond the shoals, the waves seemed more like rolling fields than water. The “bigness” of that place in the ocean impressed me, and I should think I would almost rather be skirting Diamond Shoals than trying to round that cape in a storm. Thanks, though, to the wonders of modern weather forecasting, I had occasion to do neither.

Upon spotting the outer markers of Beaufort channel from my position at sea, I felt a little like the Tin Man running through poppies to the Emerald City. It was seemingly just over the rainbow, but after hours of sailing, the shore remained elusively distant. By the slow application of wind to canvas, I eventually found the harbor, but not until nightfall.

A kind voice over the radio at Town Creek Marina, in Beaufort, gave me careful directions through the serpentine channel, as I would be arriving in the dark—long after the marina staff had gone home. The channel is bordered in some areas by water not more than inches deep, and great care is needed to avoid running hard aground. Feeling every inch a Down Easter, I found my way to the fuel dock at Town Creek and came alongside for the night. By the next morning, I was back in my office in Raleigh, in the world of suits and ties, lawyers and judges, deadlines and discovery, and other duties too numerous to mention. But I was better for the voyage, and I planned to continue at the first opportunity that work and weather might permit.

There is a
God. Of this I was sure when I was a child, and this I know to be true today. The knowledge of Him is written in our hearts. Our every breath, our every joy and sorrow, and every element of the physical world, from its otherwise inexplicable existence to its well-ordered symmetry, fairly shout His name. That we have ears with which to hear this sound and minds with which to conceive that it is God who speaks to us is yet a further call to belief. But this belief, however certain, brings us only to the edge of a vast sea. From there, all else we yearn to know of God lies hidden and awaiting our discovery, on a voyage that each of us must make through the forbidding latitudes of faith and doubt, history and myth, hope and despair.

It is a strange journey that one begins by heading home, but that precisely describes the first leg of this voyage. The early spring of 2008, more than a year before this voyage began, was for me a time of emotional drift. It was then that I had brought the
Gypsy Moon
from North Carolina to Maryland at the reassuring invitation of family and old friends. My boat found a snug resting place in Annapolis Harbor. Those waters became an anchorage during the storms raging in my personal life at the time, and a distant refuge to which I often escaped. But Maryland was no longer my home.

From that northern offing, the voyage that is the subject of this memoir began. Thus it was that after sailing the first three hundred miles, I found myself in the fall of 2009 closer to home than when I’d started. Beaufort, North Carolina, where the
Gypsy Moon
came to rest after the first leg, is a mere day’s sail from the sheltered harbor of New Bern, near the mouth of the Neuse River. New Bern is the first place in North Carolina where I had chosen to live, in April 1992. How I got there is the story of another epic journey in the small contours of my own life.

In 1984, at age twenty-six—newly minted by a Jesuit law school that had taught me more questions than answers—I struck out for Texas to find fortune and glory in the burgeoning litigation mills of Houston. Fortune, however modest by the standards of my peers, I did indeed find. But eight years into a legal career, with the birth of my second child, my notions of glory shifted, and the bloom fell off the Texas yellow rose.

With two babies in my charge, I woke up one morning in Houston to the realization that I was far from family and out on the frontier of a place very different from the one I had known growing up. I longed for the smell of balsam and spruce; for fiery red maples on crisp fall days; for city sidewalks and stone cathedrals; for green mountains; for old neighborhoods filled with two- and three-story houses; and for cohesive communities with roots as deep as the American Revolution. All of that may sound a bit odd to some, but when you have been reared an arm’s length from taverns and meeting halls where the Founding Fathers knit together the fabric of our freedom, everywhere else has a temporary air. I felt the interloper in Texas. The scrub-brush savannahs and desolate coastlines just didn’t seem permanent to me.

I longed not only for different earth beneath my feet but, perhaps most of all, for the blue water and bracing shores of the Atlantic. Where it meets the upper Texas coast, the Gulf of Mexico is a gray, tepid backwater, not an ocean. But whatever the reason for my malaise, having young children who stood most to benefit from living closer to extended family made me feel this sense of isolation all the more acutely. We resolved to move back east.

A woman and her husband took over the reins of my law practice in Houston, and my wife and I left on a twelve-hundred-mile road trip in a weary Volvo with a weary baby girl crying in the backseat. Her animated big brother in the front would occasionally offer cheerful reassurances (which she was not buying) that this would all be “fun.” It most certainly was.

I had a modest stake from the sale of my law practice with which to buy a small house in New Bern and start what I thought would be a bold new venture in the sailboat charter business. I knew that I would be eligible to receive a North Carolina law license after a six-month waiting period, but it didn’t occur to me that returning to the practice of law would be at all necessary. The coast guard had given me an examination and a license as a boat captain. We lived simply, and for a short while, I plied my new trade to adventurous hotel guests and romantic couples aboard a twenty-eight-foot sloop that I had trucked up from Texas along with our furniture and other belongings.

Even at a speed of four knots, I sailed very quickly into the stern face of reality. Within a month my error was clear. North Carolina was not Maryland, and New Bern was not Annapolis in the making. The sailing tradition that I had known in my youth was not deep in the culture there. In the Old South, rivers were places where people dumped used tires, dead bodies, and everything else they were either ashamed of or didn’t know what to do with. When I arrived, it had not been that long since the timely intervention of some farsighted citizens had spared New Bern’s now elegant and valuable riverfront from becoming the premises of the city jail.

Most boats in farming country, I found, were used for water-skiing and fishing, not quiet reveries. Many of the sailboats in New Bern were brought in by transplanted Yankees who were lured by cheap home prices to retire in the area. Some of these folks, judging by how often their boats left their slips, had grown too retired to sail them.

In my little sloop
Intrepid
, I was always, it seemed, alone on the river. The scenery was inviting. The estuaries that make up the North Carolina coast are more forested and their shorelines more secluded, even today, than those on the Chesapeake Bay to the north. A gentle wind blows across these wide lowlands with a constancy welcomed by sailors. Passengers from the North who chartered with me would marvel at miles and miles of open water without seeing a single sailboat underway. Eastern Carolina tobacco farmers came aboard with their wives to be stunned by the silence of a vessel that moved by wind (only to leave disgruntled that I would not let them smoke cigarettes, with ashes flying like bullets in the breeze through yards of expensive sailcloth).

I didn’t make much money, but I did acquire the only real suntan this pale Irish skin has ever known. I also became a better sailor, though I retained a mystified ignorance of the sailboat diesel engine. I was then as I am today at the mercy of that holiest of high priests, the diesel mechanic, to exorcise the demons that seem so easily and regularly to possess that poor iron beast. For those services I have tithed generously at his altar.

By February 1993, I had been admitted and sworn into the North Carolina Bar. Within two months of opening a one-room rented office, I once again had a small stable of paying clients and cases needing my attention. All of this happened just in time to salvage my family’s finances from an impoverished income in the charter business that was not destined to improve.

In all honesty, I felt the fool and as though I had let my young family down by having given up a lucrative law practice in Houston for something that was, in hindsight, so seemingly adolescent as a one-man sailboat charter business. I did have bigger dreams, for what they were worth. I had actually imagined a little fleet of day sailors that would one day grow to include a retail import business. Someday, I thought, I might even have a three-masted schooner that traveled between the Carolinas and the Caribbean in the winter months, in a kind of a low-tech reprise of the West Indies spice trade that would also carry well-heeled American tourists as passengers. Instead, I found myself far from the West Indies, circling in the usual cul-de-sacs where ambition so often ends. I was reminded that it takes money to make money, that skill at running a law practice is not directly convertible into skill at running a business, and that the value of a dream to the dreamer and its value to others are different things. Not many members of the general public thought as I did. Most preferred lying on a beach over sailing to one. Others wanted to be on a fast boat or water-skiing behind it. Seasickness warded off all but a hardy few of the rest. In one year of effort I counted only 181 paying passengers.

Yet these were not hard times. In these years as in every year, no matter how little or great my income, no one in my family knew a moment of want. As for how this could be possible, “consider the lilies,” we are told, and as simple as that sounds, it is wonderfully if not almost eerily true. This parable was the story of my own family’s journey, but the lessons of that experience apply to everyone. We are often timid and doubtful, reluctant to follow our dreams in so many areas of our lives. Looking back, I see that my plan to feed a family of four from a one-boat sailboat charter business was never a recipe for success, but I also see that there was nothing to fear in trying, nor any shame in failing.

The world has a way of working itself out, in my experience. There are things unseen. Life is not always easy or pleasant, and it is often unfair, but it seems to unfold according to some plan of which we are only peripherally aware—like a dream, the details of which are vivid only when we are sleeping. We cannot remember—much less comprehend—that dreamworld with the powers of a rational mind.

There are many who would bitterly object to any suggestion that “the world has a way of working itself out” as a simple-minded, romantic delusion. As one who has led a simple, romantic, and mostly charmed (if not deluded) life, I don’t presume to question the validity of anyone’s objection or insist that others join me in some sort of cheerful oblivion. But when people ask why, if God is truly in charge, their lives can go so badly awry or why horribly tragic things can happen to innocent people, I am reluctant to accept the premise of the question. At times when I might otherwise want to rail against God for His failure to intervene to prevent what I perceive as the gross injustice of this world, I am reminded of the plight of an infant at birth.

Within the limits of the infant’s awareness, the birth pangs that are occasions of such joy to unseen others are to him a senseless crisis of unimagined proportions. His uterine world is literally collapsing around him. He has no capacity to understand that he is being delivered to a life of incalculably greater meaning, in a new world that expectantly awaits his arrival and already knows his name. He screams with anxiety and is slapped ignominiously, but his present pain is only a temporary hardship, destined soon to be utterly forgotten.

I believe that the heartache we experience in our journey in this world is much the same. I have sensed this truth many times in my own life. Others express it routinely in the idea that things happen—even things that seem senseless at the moment—for a reason. The existence of reason implies the existence of a reasoner.

I recall once hearing a television talk show host not best known for his humility and reticence say that he dismissed the whole notion of redemptive theology because it simply made no sense to him that God would need to bleed and die on a cross for our sins. Frankly, I share his incredulity. Even the church acknowledges that our faith is an inscrutable mystery (“Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again”); yet faith tells me that it is true. Humility allows me to accept by faith what I cannot know by reason or intelligence. What a small church it must be whose altar spans only the verities of the rational mind. The world is so very much bigger than that, and so likewise must be its creator.

It was good to be home, in Beaufort, when the
Gypsy Moon
glided to those docks in the gathering darkness of an August night in 2009. It was good to be back in North Carolina. It was good to be near New Bern, which held so many memories, both bitter and sweet. I had smiled inside, in those lonely hours spent ghosting down the coast in the darkness off Cape Hatteras, to hear US Coast Guardsmen pass the baton—their broadcasts changing from the clipped elocution of big northern cities to the relaxed drawl of little southern towns. The South is my home.

Though a child of Baltimore and an early admirer of certain refinements of northern life that forever eluded me—namely a well-placed shot in lacrosse and the rigors of piano lessons at the Peabody Institute—I had never much warmed to northern culture. Since my first visit to rural Tennessee, at the age of fourteen, I had recognized in southern folk a genuine sense of friendship and community—often mistaken for mere politeness—that was like mother’s milk to me.

Yes, I like it here. That being so, it was not immediately clear, nor was it ever clear for very long, why I should leave on a half-baked sailing voyage for someplace else.