Wanderlust (31 page)

“We'll sail from Whangarei in a week,” Ian said. “We leave Auckland tomorrow.”

“I can do that,” was my automatic response. I'd commit now and then figure it out. My thoughts shuttled between my job and Stu. How quickly could I shut down my life? I thought of a plan.

“Can I meet you in Whangarei?”

They said sure. Helen asked if I would like more tea, and with that I saw Stu coming along the pier with his coworker Abel, tiller in hand. I knew I had to think things through quickly, to get my story straight, but my mind got tangled in the contradictions, and I still had nothing to say when he got to the boat. I was being caught. My two narratives were about to collide.

“Oh, we know each other,” I said to Ian when we were about to be introduced. Somehow the word
boyfriend
didn't make it out of my mouth. I felt furtive and guilty. I told myself I hadn't done anything wrong. Tonga was a lark, a trip; I could go and just come back.

Then I thought maybe I'd done something wrong after all. The sure sign was that I couldn't give everyone the same story. I couldn't yet tell Stu what I'd just told Ian and Helen. I'd been snared before I'd been able to talk about it first with him, at home, to gently broach the subject, make it a discussion.

But there was no way around it; everyone was in earshot.

“I'm going to Tonga,” I told Stu.

“You're going to Tonga,” he said. He was calm. Unnaturally calm. Abel looked from Stu to me and back. Helen offered them tea.

When we talked that night, we decided we'd move back to Seattle sooner rather than later. Stu helped me disassemble my life at top speed so that I could leave in just a week. He'd give notice at the boat shop and meet me in Tonga. We bought sailing boots, pants, and a jacket for me, anticipating that it would be cold and wet for my first few days at sea.

There was my job to consider, doing customer service for the shipping firm. I had been there only five months, and my boss liked
me. I couldn't even give a full week's notice because I had to get ready to leave. This seemed to be the real impossibility of my situation. I never played hooky; I was the A student, the model employee. I was about to breach a personal code of responsibility, and it made me feel like I was about to do something illegal. I'm not sure if I felt guilty or just feared getting caught, but I anticipated consequences. Out-of-proportion consequences.

There won't be any consequences,
I argued back to myself. Maybe I'd be too mortified to ever come back to New Zealand, but that would be okay. If you had to pick a country to close the door on, this buoy in the South Seas would do.

After Monday I didn't show up to work. I refused to answer our mobile phone. My boss left messages. He started calling a colleague of mine, Antony, with whom he knew Stu and I were friendly. Antony was forced to come over since we weren't answering the phone.

“What should I tell him?” he asked.

I made up a story. I finally called my boss and told him that my best friend back home had been diagnosed with a terrible disease. Hodgkin's lymphoma, I said. I wasn't even sure what that was, but it sounded bad. I was going home to be with her. I pictured Kristin with a terrible disease, and for a moment believed my story and felt sad.

I wondered why I thought I had to make something up, when I was abandoning the place either way. I'd never see my boss again. But even in the midst of bad behavior I wanted to be seen as good. To my horror, my boss told me that he understood, and then I felt guiltier. But I had to come in and talk to him about it, he said. We had to say good-bye.

I didn't think I could keep up my lie face-to-face, and in any case hated to say good-bye. I told him I would come in the next Monday, by which time I knew that I would be at sea.

Stu drove me to the bus that would take me up to Whangarei, where the thumb of the North Island points to the equator. I'd mailed some boxes and reduced the rest of my life to a backpack. It was amazing how life could just expand and contract like that. We accrue things, and it gives us the illusion of having an anchorage. Laura and Abel came over to say good-bye, as did our two
X-Files
friends. They all planned to go abroad, and no doubt would; they said they'd see me again. I knew it was unlikely, but I assured them it would happen.

The bus dropped me off in Whangarei, and I shouldered my backpack and looked around the well-protected bay. Everything was neatly landscaped, trimmed and aligned in that way that tells you the English were here. The grass was bright green, the footpaths paved, the dock as yet unsplintered. Vacationing families sat in the sun at the outdoor cafés, parents daubing ice cream from their toddlers' mouths. They'd sit on the beach and go placidly back to their bed-and-breakfasts; they'd drive their cars back to Auckland.
All this normality could be yours,
I reminded myself. But once I was on the boat, I was on the boat. I could run now, take the bus back to Stu. I didn't have to go. But I did. It wasn't so much that I didn't want to admit fear to Stu or anyone else. I didn't want to admit fear to myself. Just a few white puffs marred the sky.

The
Copper Lady
was a thirty-four-foot cutter-rigged vessel with dark green sail covers and trim. The cockpit was deep and protected, with benches all around and lockers under each one. I found Ian and Helen detaching everything that couldn't be secured from the deck. They stowed all the creature comforts—seat cushions and
bimini
and tea towels that had been drying on the rail—in the cabin.

We ate an early dinner on deck, and Ian went over the plan while we had oranges for dessert. We would do six-hour watches.
The main task of the person on watch was just to be a lookout. We had an autopilot to help keep us on course, and the reaches would be so long that we wouldn't have to tack very often. The scariest thing to look out for was container ships, the kind for which I was so recently making bookings. The ocean seemed incomprehensibly huge, and yet every cruiser knew a story about a sailboat run over by a ship. They came so fast and the crews couldn't see the water below, and couldn't stop their leviathans in any case. The only thing to do was to spot them from afar and steer clear. Other than big ships, there weren't many foreign objects at sea, but sometimes a container fell into the ocean and bobbed along, and a collision with one of them could sink us. Closer to land, logs and tangled fishing nets were a possibility. As for sea creatures, the only hazards might be whales. The main thing was to stay alert.

We were using a service in Auckland to let friends and family monitor our progress. We would radio every day, Ian said, to report our whereabouts and conditions. Anyone could call the service and find out where we were. I'd given the phone number to Stu and given Stu's number to my parents.

We motored out of the marina at dusk, yellow and orange rays piercing through the building clouds above. “Raise the mainsail,” Ian called, and I pulled hard on the halyard, watching the sail ribbon up and finally grow taut. While I was doing that, Helen unfurled the jib, and it instantly filled out like a vertical blimp. We expected winds from the northwest, but when we got out of the marina they were coming from the northeast. We wanted to go north by northeast, which meant we'd have to sail pretty close hauled, not the fastest point of sail but not a big deal. I zipped and Velcroed myself into my fleece-lined waterproof jacket, which gave me an instant feeling of safety and warmth.

In another half hour, as the sky drew shut like a sack, I was getting cold again. My legs were slick from the waves, and I went below to dry off and get into my waterproof pants. I was sitting on the steps below the hatch when a swell lifted and then dropped the boat, making me stumble. I quelled my alarm by reminding myself that this was open water. Big swells were normal, new to me but not dangerous, and sailboats were designed to ride them out.

The wind picked up and the rain came down. We'd planned to start our watches by now, but instead we crowded the cockpit, Ian standing at the tiller, brow furrowed at the invisible horizon, and Helen and I sitting alert. We each wore a harness and a long, loose line that allowed movement while keeping us attached to the boat. The procedure was that if you had to go forward, you did so with your line attached to the rail.

I was taking my cues from Helen, who'd no doubt seen this all before. The wind rose to thirty, forty, then fifty knots. The sound of one discrete wave at a time rose to a unified bawl, punctuated by whistles and clangs as the wind and water hit the boat. We rode up the face of a wave then down the other side; the first ten or fifteen times the bow pointed down to the bottom of the sea, my throat tightened and I braced my limbs against whatever they could find.

Swells were normal, I kept telling myself. We went up after we went down. What was it Stu had told me? If the distance between the peaks was the same length as the boat, that meant that . . . what? Something bad. I tried to assess the distance. I wanted to go below deck, because now I was afraid. But I'd filled my spot in the cockpit like cement hardening into a mold. Movement seemed hazardous, if not impossible. And I was mesmerized by the sight of the waves and their foamy peaks, each one like the teeth of a maw. I stared as
though I could be sure we were safe only by keeping an eye on them. They billowed above us like dark satin sheets.

As it turned out, this wasn't normal at all. The wind shifted by fifteen degrees so that now we had to sail even closer. Ian shouted directions. I dislodged myself from the cockpit to reef the mainsail a second time, giving us the smallest possible triangle so that the high winds didn't spin us out of control. Having a task on which to focus made me less scared. The mind finds new reserves of discipline when it has to. Onshore, lying in bed at night, you can imaginatively explore the depths of your fear. Here you couldn't go there.

Waves washed over the deck. I thought we were so tiny and weak against the ocean that we might as well have been a cork.

There came a point when there wasn't much more we could do. The sails were reefed, the tiller secured in place, the outboard motor switched on for extra power. “I think we're going to have to change course,” Ian shouted. I didn't like the “I think”—the captain had to know. He had to at least appear to know. I'd rather have felt safe than informed.

We had to fall off a little from the wind, because we were getting beat up and could barely move forward. But changing course by even a few degrees would, over distance, put us far from where we wanted to go. An inch between radians here became a thousand miles over there. Ian decided we would wait and see. He told us we should start our watches now, and that he would take the first one.

Helen climbed down to the cabin and I followed her. As soon as I shimmied into the hatch my nausea rose, and I pointed myself at the galley sink just in time. I was too battered to be embarrassed. Lurching and bracing, Helen procured a bucket, and bungeed it into place below the hatch. Ian was the next to puke, as though in solidarity.

I was sitting and Helen was standing when the big wave came.
It came from the stern, which was all wrong. Storms were supposed to go in one direction, but this one was just churning, crashing violently against itself. The wave came straight through the hatch and into the cabin, and suddenly we were horizontal to the planet. The mast kissed the sea, and I wondered if it would come back up.

At that moment Helen screamed. I sat immobilized against the bunk. There was nothing to do, nowhere to climb to, no way out. I'd been watching Helen for reassurance, and now she was afraid. I pictured the boat from the sky. I imagined how tiny we were in the ocean, how irrelevant, how lost.

“Shut up, shut up,” Ian screamed at Helen from the cockpit, and she did. “Get up here,” he screamed, and we did. The boat righted.

We'd lost three things: the ladder and lifesaver that had been secured to the stern rail—and our radio. During the screaming and crashing, it had fizzed and gone dark. Our link to the world was gone and we were alone.

How likely was this, I wondered. People sailed for years and never hit this kind of storm. I'd gambled and lost. I'd been in close calls in cars a couple of times, but everything had happened so quickly that there was no chance to contemplate death. Now that the drama of the rogue wave had passed, I had time to think. Death loomed as a real possibility for the first time in my life. How long would I survive, floating on a scrap on the seething sea? I feared my fear. Clinging to a board, my terror could go on for days, which would be too awful. I thought I'd rather die quickly. What a shame that would be, I thought, especially considering that I didn't have to be here in the first place.

I stretched out on the leeward side bunk, strapped myself in, and closed my eyes. The boat rose and fell, rose and fell, rocking me into a trance. There was nothing I could do but abdicate. Worry would make no difference.