A Mile Down (25 page)

We were also enjoying our honeymoon on St. Lucia. We spent almost a week there, just taking a break. I began writing, for two hours every morning, for the first time in five years. I started with a pirate novel but quickly set it aside and began this memoir. It would be titled
The Afterlife of Ruin,
about how everything had worked out after it had seemed all was lost. A story of the American Dream. It would also be about how my father hadn't been able to see the possibility of continuing on in some new way, and about finally escaping his legacy, after shame, guilt, anger, ten years of insomnia, and more than twenty years of being fairly sure I was doomed to kill myself. It wouldn't get bogged down in too much about my father, and it would be fundamentally hopeful and cheery, unlike my previous book,
Legend of a Suicide
, which every agent had said lacked redemption and was too depressing. This one wouldn't be fancy, either, just an easy read.

After writing each morning, I had lunch with Nancy and we zipped off in our dinghy to enjoy the beach or snorkeling or hiking, or we'd just kayak from the boat. Nancy went back to her days of floating on air mattresses, a skill she had first perfected along the Turkish Coast. At sunset we'd be on the aft deck with an alcoholic concoction, usually involving ice cream, or in the pool or hot tub of the resort.

We talked a lot about our future together. We were in love, and not just with each other. Our yacht was a spectacular home, a stand-out in every harbor, and the Caribbean is a beautiful place. But what we loved most was our freedom. We would work no more than twenty weeks per year, and we would have the rest of the year to do anything we wanted. Travel was high on our list. We wanted to see most of the world. But we were surprised at the other things.

I wanted to go back to the university, for instance. Being a captain and running a business lacked dignity and engagement, I had realized, even if I made a lot of money. “And we don't have any friends out here,” I told Nancy. “And it's not as if there are great literary gatherings on St. Lucia.”

“You should do it,” she said. “Become a medievalist. And keep writing every day, too. It's all you've talked about the whole time I've known you, even though you haven't written a word until now. Mr. Big Mouth.”

“Thanks.”

“If we decide to spend more time back in the Bay Area, I'm going to one of the dance places—maybe the Metronome—to take their instructor series. Or culinary school. I'm not sure. Maybe both.”

“Freedom is what it's about,” I said. “Eventually hand over the boat to a few crew and not even work the twenty weeks. A Ph.D. or ballroom dance or just cruise around the Med in a little powerboat, go up all the canals through France.”

“Italy,” Nancy said. “More time in Italy.”

“Well, the sun's down. Off to the hot tub?”

“How about something with Midori first?”

Freedom in the islands always has to come with a warning, however, about the legacies of slavery and colonialism and enduring poverty. Every day at least one or two and sometimes as many as five different local guys came by in their little boats to sell food and trinkets. I finally tried to save one of them the wasted effort. He had a boat that looked like a grass hut, with banana leaves up the side and on the roof. He was the most enterprising.

“I feel bad that you keep spending the gas to come out here,” I told him. I was leaning on the wide, varnished rail that came up about three feet off our aft deck. He was ten feet below me, peering up through the fronds. “Really, we're never going to buy anything.”

“You never gonna buy?”

“That's right,” I said.

“You got to eat,” he said. “Where you get your food?”

“We're already fully stocked. We stock up at supermarkets, to save money.”

“You got money to buy a gift for your wife.”

“No, I don't. I really don't. I know you're not going to believe me, because no one here ever believes me once they see the boat, but I really don't have any extra cash right now.”

“I know you got cash. I know the owner of this big boat give you cash.”

“I'm the owner,” I said. “And I don't have extra cash. This boat is a business. We're just starting up. So we had to put a lot of money into it, and we still have more work to do in Trinidad, but we haven't gotten any money out of it yet.” I was giving this man a ridiculous amount of my personal information, but I was tired of our shitty interactions. I wanted something better.

“You not the owner,” he told me finally.

“I'm the owner.”

“You not the owner.” And then he started his outboard again and turned his boat around to leave. He smiled up at me and waved one finger in the air. “You not the owner. That not your boat.”

I stormed back into the pilothouse, where Nancy was sitting and had been listening.

“There's no way to get along,” she said. “Unless we just hand them money for nothing every day. That's the only way we can have peace, and even that's not peace, because then they want to sell us more.”

“There is the whole history of the slave trade,” I said. “And I guess we look like the latest wave in colonization. And really we are. We're using their home for our own economic gain through selling charters, and we're not sharing the profits with them. It's still the first world taking away their wealth.”

“But it still sucks,” she said, and I had to agree. There is just no way around differences in wealth, even apparent wealth. Money rules us all. I hope someday the islands federalize and claim their resources and make visiting yachts and cruise ships pay, but until then it will still be uneasy in the islands.

On our way down the west coast of St. Lucia the next day, before crossing to St. Vincent, we cruised in close to the Pitons, which are truly magnificent: two very sharp, green, volcanic mountains rising thousands of feet straight from the water's edge. It's probably one of the most spectacular views in the world, with a lovely bay at the Pitons' feet and palm trees all along the shoreline.

Our next stop was Bequia, just south of St. Vincent, the beginning of the Grenadines. Nancy and I loved Bequia. A friendly town with flowers lining the walkways, an abundance of book stores and restaurants, beautiful beaches. It was a place to rest, a perfect place for a honeymoon. We stayed for almost a week.

From Bequia we worked our way through the rest of the Grenadines. Our favorites were the Tobago Cays. An enormous horseshoe-shaped reef several miles long and fifty yards wide protecting three tiny islands with perfect beaches. The snorkeling was by far the best we'd ever experienced, rated as one of the top three sites in the world. Clean, clear water, bright sun, and miles of living coral reef in every color with thousands of fish. We followed whole schools, saw new species, felt the warm water on our skin, the light current and waves rocking us gently. I've loved tropical fish all my life, at one point in junior high had eight aquariums spread throughout the house. For years, even in upstate New York, in grad school, I had gazed at fish every night, watched how they fluttered, imagined myself suspended in warm water with them, so this was heaven for me, to spend a little quality time with the fish.

On September 14 we reached Grenada, our jumping-off point for the final passage to Trinidad. We went to an Internet café to check e-mail for the first time in over a week and saw news on Yahoo that was difficult to believe. Terrorists flying passenger planes into the twin towers in New York. We felt extremely disconnected, finding out about this event three days late. On the television in the café, leaders from all the Caribbean countries were condemning the attacks and offering their sadness and support to the U.S.

We sailed early the next morning for Trinidad and arrived just before dark. Back in the ugly industrial port, but this time we wouldn't have to haul out, and I would take some time to write every day. We wouldn't repeat the panic of our first visit to Trinidad.

It was good to see Stephen again. He and two friends put another coat of varnish on the exterior wood, polished the hull, sanded the deck, and sanded and varnished every stateroom and the main salon and all the floors throughout the boat. They also sanded and painted the engine room and the two largest bilge areas. They even sanded and painted the insides of my two water tanks, which was an especially tough job. I bought a thick epoxy paint, high in solids, and a big fan to pull out the fumes. The guys wore respirators, but it was still rough.

The most difficult job, however, was repainting all eight guest bathrooms. The white epoxy paint over the steel had started to bubble from moisture. Stephen pointed out that this should never have happened, that the painters in Turkey had not used the correct primer. By now, he had zero respect for the Turks. He and his friends went through each bathroom first sanding down to steel with a big orbital sander and forty-grit paper. Then they worked up through layers of primer and filler and paint and finer sandings to a finish that looked beautiful and would last. But it was a huge amount of work, more than any of us had expected.

“Next summer, someone else can paint your other tanks,” Stephen told me. “I not doing no more inside painting on this boat, boy.”

“You can just supervise next summer,” I told him. “We'll leave the boat with you, and you can hire others to do the work.”

“I doesn't mind the outside painting, or the outside varnish,” he said. “Just no more inside, boy.”

I was already leaving most of the work to Stephen's supervision. He always worked hard, whether I was there or not, and he knew far more about painting and varnishing than I did. I was focusing on the rigging, systems maintenance, my writing, and running the business.

By the time we left Trinidad the second time, we were happy to get out of there. The boat looked perfect inside and out, thanks to Stephen, and we wouldn't have to return here until next summer.

We cleared customs on Friday, again with the man with long purple nails, who this time could not find any reason to detain us, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening stowing and checking everything. We tightened the standing rigging and checked our electronics and engines and tanks and the weather, and we went to bed early so we'd be well rested, since it would be just the two of us doing alternating ninety-minute watches for three days.

WE LEFT AT 7
A.M.
, found the seas very light once we were out of the dragon's mouth, and had an entirely pleasant first day and night, as predicted on the weather report. We napped and ate and read, and I checked the systems after every watch. It was good to be on our way, looking forward to a successful winter in the Virgin Islands.

The next day, Sunday, the waves were two- to three-feet high but glassy and reflective. The surface, untouched by any wind, made the ocean seem solid rather than liquid, a bright metal sheet crumpling without sound. This was unusual, and I stood at the aft of the pilothouse wondering at it. In the distance ahead we could see a small squall, a cloud with dark rain beneath it and the waters roughened. Nancy was happy to see this. It would dump a little rain and cool us off a bit. Then the sky would brighten again and the sun would steam the water off the deck.

But this squall didn't pass so quickly. For almost an hour, we had thick rain and gusty winds, the seas increasing. I was listening to music on a Walkman and enjoying the occasional spray and the feel of powering through the waves. I liked this, the raw animal nature of the boat. The growling of the big Perkins diesels.

It was late afternoon, less than an hour before dark, and within just a few minutes the spray was coming over the deck with every wave, and then I could hear howling in the rigging and my wind instruments showed thirty to thirty-five knots. I took the headphones off and listened more carefully to the wind, the engines, and the other sounds of the boat, the various things shifting as we hit a bigger wave and rolled about twenty-five degrees.

In only another couple of minutes, the sea changed yet again, building far too quickly into forty-knot winds pushing up larger swells, and the wind was coming from too close to north. We weren't in gusty tradewinds or squall winds anymore. We were in something with a counterclockwise, cyclonic movement. There had been nothing at all on the Inmarsat-C weather forecast.

I called on the radio for weather info. “U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel
Bird of Paradise
.”

No response. We were a hundred miles from any land except Aves Island, which is only a small rock sticking up absurdly in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

“Calling all stations,” I repeated three times, and again no response.

Only a few minutes had passed, but the swells had become streaky white with foam and were breaking and confused, coming from two different headings, the newer storm waves from the north colliding with swells from the east. Our heading was impossible, since it put us in the trough of swells that were big enough now to make us roll fifty degrees on our side. I changed our heading to go into them and throttled down because the bow was hitting so hard as we raised up over one wave and slammed into the next.

The acceleration of conditions was astounding. Fifty knots on the wind gauge, and in the dim light, the white of waves breaking. Waves five times the size of what we'd had only an hour earlier—steep, close together, not in long organized lines from one direction but hunching up in individual hills and peaks. I throttled down again, making only five knots and still slamming hard, solid water coming over our bow, the bowsprit buried each time.

The light was dying, and I had to lean forward to read my wind gauge. It showed fifty-eight knots, which is storm force eleven, right before a hurricane. I didn't know what I was going into. If it were a hurricane, running would be the only option because the winds could be anything, 100 or 160 miles per hour or even higher. If it was a low pressure storm that had come from north of us, however, or a white squall kicked up suddenly from colliding weather systems, it would be wiser to cut straight through, exposing us to risk for a shorter time and keeping our defensive position of bow first, so we wouldn't roll over in a trough.