Authors: Tania Aebi
Roland was a stately and distinguished patriarch of a man, his bushy gray hair combed perfectly into place, his serene grace lending normality to the conversations that were to follow. His antithesis, Roberto, was slightly fat, small and bald with a potato of a nose and ears that jutted out like a koala bear's. We played a game of Petanque together and invited them back to the boats.
At this point, I was in a position where I had to speak French all the time, and my language problem often gave me throbbing headaches. My previous hard-won comprehension level had been improving by leaps and bounds with the different colloquialisms of my three friends. However, with Roberto, it was like making a beeline back toward the dead zone. He came from southern France, where people have a penchant for adding extra syllables to the ends of words and I listened for a cadence to grab on to, without luck.
On
Saskia
, René parted with a couple of the best of his close family of wines and Luc opened up a new bottle of Calvados to lubricate the conversation. Roberto really was one of the last true adventurers, con artists and pirates. Preparing his speech as if he were onstage in Carnegie Hall, he began entertaining us with his escapades.
“I am here visiting with Rolando and shall return to France in a couple of weeks to find sponsors and funding to go out to Cocos Island in search of Captain Henry Morgan's treasure,” he began broadly. “You see, I know where it is.”
“You do?” said Luc. “Give us a hint. We've been thinking of going there.”
In Colón, I had heard about Cocos, the tiny island belonging to
Costa Rica, 450 miles offshore, out of the Bay of Panama, and ideally situated for a sailor on the way south to Cape Horn or north on the way to California and Mexico. There, you could reprovision with water, coconuts and meat from the wild pigs and goats that overran the place. Hundreds of years ago, all the marauding European seafaring bandits would ransack the Incas, Aztecs or whomever they felt like bothering and would unload in Cocos when they felt threatened. According to logbooks and historical records, sometimes they never returned. Roberto fired up our imaginations, telling of his previous trips and the wily ways he took in getting there.
“I find a sailboat with an unsuspecting crew,” he chuckled, “and tell them I know exactly where the treasure is buried. A fire burns in their eyes and I am offered passage. Always on my previous trip there, I would bury an old frying pan and when my companions and I arrive, I tell them that was where the treasure is. Off they run with shovels and metal detectors. Ping, ping, ping. “We've found it!' they scream, and proceed to dig away. Meanwhile, I am off on the other side of the island, conducting my own research.” He gulped down some more Calvados and continued with other stories, one more outrageous than the next. Every once in a while, the conversation would halt for my sake while Luc patiently translated a French pun that had sonic-boomed over my head.
We never decided whether to believe a thing Roberto told us, and I never made it to Cocos, but none of that seemed too important at the time. After a week, we bid these two characters farewell. René's wife was waiting for him in Costa Rica, and it was time to head west. We sailed to San José, the last island of the Perlas, and there we said goodbye to René. It was sad to think that the first group of people with whom I had formed a bond was beginning to disperse and head its separate ways.
“Adieu, mes amis
, we will meet again,” said René on August 31, as
Saskia
pulled out. “Tania,
bon chance!”
he called before turning away. I waved, wished him well in his new life and watched as his brown bottom disappeared like a roe deer over the horizon.
The next day,
Varuna
and
Thea
prepared to follow. Ahead was about a four-day passage to Cocos. For an early brunch, Luc dived for our last Panamanian langoustes while I made a drawing of a rainbow for him and a cassette to open after 300 miles at sea. We lingered aboard
Thea
, savoring the moments before raising the anchors and heading out to sea. Finally, Luc and Jean Marie were ready. The boats were ready. I was ready.
“Tania,” said Luc, “you have the charts in order, you have the detailed drawings for the anchorage in Cocos, right? You have everything you need. All you have to do is find it,” he taunted, “and Jean Marie and I will be waiting with some smoked ham for you.”
“Yeah, I'm all right,” I said. “I'll be talking to you on the radio, right?”
“We'll be there,” said Luc and kissed me goodbye. They watched me pull up the anchor in a very weepy frame of mind. Jean Marie hollered,
“Courage, petite
Tania!” and they pulled away.
Levering the windlass handle, gathering the chain foot by foot, I thought about the forthcoming trip. If everything went as it should, I would arrive in Cocos in a mere four days. That wasn't much of a trip. I'd spent a lot longer at sea over the past three months. So what was I so upset about? Maybe I sensed that I was pulling up the anchor and heading out, all alone again, into the biggest ocean on the planet and still wasn't all that sure about my navigation. It would be eighteen days, not four, before I stepped ashore again.
I had been so caught up with the vagaries of the Atlantic Ocean up until this point, that the Pacific was like a blind date. For the first time, I pulled out the pilot chart and examined it to see what was in store. The Humboldt Current swings up along the coast of South America from Chile until just north of the equator where it veers west, helping to form the counterequatorial currents. This meant we would have at least 1-, and sometimes up to 3-knot, currents against us. Not only that, but the prevailing winds in the area during September headed straight from the west and southwest, the direction in which we wanted to go, hitting us right on the nose.
Varuna
, Dinghy and I would have to beat into the wind the whole way to Cocosâa dreary prospect, especially because I had been so sure the rest of the world would be downwind.
As we motored out on the windless Bay of Panama,
Thea
came up alongside for a moment and Luc and I arranged to communicate on the top of every hour by VHF until the distance between the boats prevented it. We would be able to stay within VHF range, which was about 20 miles, for a day or two anyway. I watched
Thea
pull away and admired her strong lines. Nearly twice the size and volume of
Varuna
, she could be out of sight in no time as soon as we were both under sail, but Luc, sensing my sadness, slowed down his engine in order to prolong our time together. Wind meant separation and, for once, I was glad for the flat calm.
The sea was a mirror in the brilliant sunshine and
Varuna's
hull
sliced through it like a blade. Thunderclouds that had seemed threatening earlier in the morning veered off toward the continent, and our skies were of the clearest blue. Setting the autopilot, I went below to get some shade and tried to read.
During moments like this, I often lost myself in a daydream of what I might be doing if I had stayed in New York. Would I still be a bicycle messenger? Probably. Or would I be traveling? Maybe. One thing was certain, I'd be dreaming of alternative lifestyles to messengering. As many as the hardships were proving to be with this particular mode of travel, I liked knowing that I was doing something special, something off the beaten track.
Other people may dream all their lives of doing a trip like this, but for me it stemmed from something much less romantic. It was a dramatic plan of my father's to upheave me from the rut that I had fallen into as a teenager. Upheavals had been common in my family long before this one, and I thought about the particular set of circumstances that had landed me here alone in the Pacific on the way to a treasure island.
When I was twelve, after the troubles, Tony, Nina, Jade and I were uprooted from the rural New Jersey country and parochial schools we had always known and transplanted to Manhattan, a whole new world. The thousands of students at I.S. 70, the public school I attended in Chelsea, were divided up socially into so many gangs, cliques and ethnic groups that the school seemed, at first, like a vast city entirely made up of children. Kids seemed to be waiting for a reason to fight, and I had quite a mouth in defending myself against the more menacing characters, considering myself lucky to get off with some mild harassment, kissy noises, derrière squeezes and the occasional slap. Other kids asked for a lot more trouble and it was always worst when two girls fought. Once a girl actually bit a nipple off an opponent. At I.S. 70, you needed a tough skin to survive, and I had spent my life developing a very tough one.
By the time I was thirteen, I had made several friends, some of whom were a couple of years older than I and went out a lot at night. These excursions were innocent at first, until I started lying to my father about babysitting or sleeping over at someone's house. My band of friends and I roamed the streets or hung out at McDonald's. At concerts, sometimes we went up to people in line and asked, “Wanna hear a song for fifty cents?” Whenever anyone would flip us the two quarters, we'd burst into a medley of TV themes from “The Brady Bunch” to “Gilligan's Island.” We were just having fun.
I was getting decent grades at the time, so my father didn't ask too many questions. But almost every time I asked for permission to go to a concert or to hang out, he refused. I began to use the babysitting alibi regularly. It was easier to lie than to hear a long-winded lecture, and I became indifferent, not caring very much about anything except my friends and my lifestyle. I liked being a street kid.
The first two years of high school are a bleary memory of lying, sneaking out of the house at night, hanging out on the streets, going to clubs and following bands with names like The Bad Brains, The Mad and The Stimulators. I bought all my clothes at the Salvation Army and thrift shops, arranging outfits to make them look as strange as possible. We all wore construction boots with skirts, lots of makeup and black eyeliner and teased our hair. We painted badges and pins with slogans and statements that we stuck all over our oversized men's vests. My favorite was “Who Killed Bambi?” It was easy to get into clubs; the doormen knew that once inside, we'd start dancing like crazy and the place would start to hop. We'd ask men to buy us rum and Cokes, say thanks and beat it. We were little creeps, but we were good for business.
My father was convinced that all my friends were drug addicts, duds and scum, so I brought them home as rarely as possible. Our relationship deteriorated to lectures and accusations that would end in my bursting into tears and running to my room. One day I got home and found he had made a collage devoted to me. Poring over
The Village Voice
, he had cut out pictures of the most grotesque and bizarre punks he could find, plus the names of punk bands, pasted them all together, thrust it at me and asked what was the point of all this. I couldn't answer.
Eventually, the only way I could communicate with my father was through letters. Only through letters could I organize my thoughts and attempt to tell him how I felt about anything. I wanted him to know that I wasn't doing anything wrong; I didn't do drugs. He didn't believe me. I tried to explain that these were my first real friends and the only people I had ever known who accepted me for who I was. He didn't understand.
Things went from bad to worse. After a while in Brooklyn Tech, a high school that I loathed, I started to take five-period-long lunch breaks and my grades nosedived. Because grades were the only ticket to freedom with my father, I found somebody who sold blank report cards, bought one for ten dollars and made an honor student out of myself.
One gloomy afternoon, when my mother had returned to the United States from Switzerland for an operation, she took it upon herself to visit all our teachers to see how we were doing in school. Afterward, she called my father and asked him to meet her at a café across the street. He had vowed never to allow her in the door of our house for fear that that she would cause some kind of troublesome scene, or worse, that she wouldn't leave. He met her and returned a few minutes later with a white face. When he asked me how I was really doing in school, it was clear he knew. He ranted and raved, screamed profanities and then he and Jeri ransacked my room for drugs, thinking that could be the only explanation for my devious behavior.
It wasn't drugs, I tried to tell him, I just hated the school that looked like a prison, where the six-thousand students were anonymous numbers and all I had ever accomplished was to make a wrench and two nuts and bolts. Time and time again, I had begged him to help me transfer, but he had been steadfast. “No. In life, one has to learn to cope with those things that one does not like. One has to learn self-discipline.”
He and Jeri took me to a restaurant to try to talk things over in as civil a manner as possible, but my father kept yelling, “Why? Why?” and I kept staring straight ahead until he slapped me across the face and I stormed out.
After that, he started checking my every move and double checking the alibis. Before I realized what he was doing, he almost caught me sneaking out in the middle of the night to an all-night club; luckily, I saw him before he saw me and gave him the slip.
In January of 1982, my father took Jeri to Europe for a Christmas present and left Christian to take care of us. I started cutting entire days of school, giving Christian lame excuses. One night, I was sitting with two friends at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes. Christian stormed in and accused me of smoking marijuana. He threw my friends out and I followed. When my father got home a few days later, Christian spilled his version of the story to him. My father had no reason to doubt his account. It was the last straw. He yanked me around by the hair in a rage, tore the lock off my door and said that from then on he was going to set his alarm clock for every two hours to check to see if I was in bed all night.