Maiden Voyage (2 page)

“Oh, for Christ's sake!” I screamed, as another wall of water threw
Varuna
over on her side and drenched me. My hood blew off and my hair whipped about my face as I reached the pitching foredeck. I held on and began to work free the waterlogged knots in the line, gathered the sail, rolled it up into a wad and relashed it, quickly navigating my way back to the cockpit. At the spray hood, I took a quick check of the horizon, the deck, the rigging and the frothing ocean one last time before dashing inside. When I replaced the slats, the howling din diminished as the radio welcomed me back with Bob Marley's “Coming In from the Cold.” I sat in a heap on my bunk and glanced at my watch. It was only 9:00
A.M
.

The wind continued to cry through the rigging, the same sound as when it keened through the pine trees behind my family's house when we lived in Vernon. My thoughts drifted back to the days of my childhood, to my parents and to our lives of such confusion that the fury of today's ocean almost paled by comparison.

Looking at my hands, I smiled to see that they were now more callused than my father's had ever been during his years of eking out a living doing construction work. The day-to-day dampness at sea had soaked so deeply into the skin that the calluses now peeled off in shriveled white hunks. I thought of how proud my father was going to be; I had finally finished something other than a meal. My father, the collector of experiences, the gifted Swiss artist of boundless energies, had almost sent me to my doom. Although I might have set off on the voyage of his dreams, somewhere along the way, I had created my own.

For better or worse, my life was now woven from a different thread than that of the loved ones to whom I was returning. Very soon, I'd see the differences I had only read about in letters. I'd see my best friend from high school, Rebecca, whose first baby, my goddaughter Kendra, was one and a half years old already and whom I'd never seen. Many of my friends had gone away to college. Three had become heroes in the music world whom I had read and heard about in
Newsweek
and on the BBC.

Tony, my brother, wasn't in tenth grade anymore, but in college at Stonybrook. My sister Nina was in her third year at Cornell; and
Jade, the youngest, was in her senior year of high school. We had all done our best to correspond and keep in touch by means of tapes and phone calls over the past two and a half years, but as the months passed and as the landfalls became more distant from home, I sensed in the letters and in the rare static-free telephone calls that our lives had diverged more radically than I ever dreamed possible. Did they feel it, too? I wondered if I would ever fit in again.

My life had been a mixed package of wild circumstances until the day
Varuna
carried me out of New York Harbor at age eighteen. I thought back to that day and recalled the frightened girl I had been, filled with such unbridled visions of the future. Today, I found myself envying her innocence. Now that she had learned the perils of the game, I wondered if she would ever again be brave enough to pay the price for a dream of such dimensions.

My bony knees were outlined through the thin long-john fabric.

Although I was not as skinny as I had been in the Red Sea, I still hadn't accumulated any insulation. The Red Sea, which separates like a forked serpent's tongue the continent of Africa from the countries of Asia, had almost finished me with its searing heat and relentless headwinds. Unable to sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time for twenty days as a result of the weather, the sea conditions and a continuously breaking engine, I was overcome with dizziness and fever spells, and my normally 120-pound frame had shrunken to a skeletal 105 by the time
Varuna
arrived in Egypt. I hadn't regained enough strength before setting out through the Mediterranean, and had paid the price by almost losing my boat and my life 200 miles off the coast of Spain, with only a brief respite in Gibraltar before heading across the Atlantic. I had no choice. The deadline was bearing down like a grizzly after a field mouse and I had to carry on.

The New York I was coming home to could never be the same as the one I had left at eighteen, but the names still felt as alive as nerve endings, and the sounds of them on my lips as we got closer were like a soothing mantra. Greenwich Village. TriBeCa. SoHo. Memories of home became clearer as the final miles ticked into
Varuna's
trailing taffrail log. I envisioned the West Village, its cobblestone streets lined with little brownstones adorned with balustrades and gargoyles, surrounded by carriage houses, gardens, churches and parks. I remembered the artists popping out of the woodwork on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends for the Village art show, and homosexuals with their erotic shops and bars, with names like The Pink Pussycat Boutique, the Ramrod or The Anvil.

My family lives in SoHo, three blocks down from Washington
Square Park and, to my adolescent mind, the center of what was important on the planet. I pictured the East Village, run down and abused by generations of social movements, drug addicts, gangs, bohemians and people outdoing each other in outrageousness. There were always freaks like the Sadomasochist with safety pins pinning his nipples and bottles through his ears and the Candyman, an eerie giant on roller skates with bushy carrot-red hair and a black top hat, always surrounded by young girls receiving his free hallucinogenic candies. There was the Purple Man riding around on his old rusty purple bicycle, making his own personal statement against capitalism by handing out newsletters with the telephone credit card numbers of major corporations. There were the Hare Krishnas, floating by in an orange cloud, crashing their cymbals, jingling and chanting. Young Puerto Rican gangs, dressed to kill, prowled the streets. Pimps slapped their whores around and drunks lay in heaps across the street, snoring and clutching onto their ever-present bottles of Thunderbird. There were musicians crooning on one corner and jugglers on the next. On the remaining corners were junkies, hippies and dreads whispering: “Smokes, 'ludes, trips, anything you need,” and sometimes, “I'll take checks and credit cards.”

The East Village was a tangled chain of tenements, squats, soup kitchens, correctional facilities and graffiti. Dark thrift shops, murky check-cashing joints, head shops, off-the-wall clothing shops, pawnshops and herb gates were monitored by the silent old people who had already lived through it all.

And, finally, haunting the bars and the clubs of the concrete jungle were the punks and street kids, the group to which I belonged as a teenager. In the East Village, everyone had a label; everyone fit in somewhere, no questions asked. I had a label then. What would it be now?

•   •   •

Tarzoon rubbed his nose against my face and I was brought quickly back to the present as
Varuna
canted downwind. “How's my little buddy?” I asked, taking him in my arms and scratching his belly. His purrs warmed my heart. I reached up to the swinging net over my head and pulled out the bags of pumpkin seeds and cat treats. The little hammock, a present given to me in Bermuda, my very first landfall, contained vegetables, snacks, odds and ends. When I first hung it across the cabin, it had been a brilliant white, but now it was gray, hanging by its last threads as if waiting for me to get home before retiring.

My mind was spinning, more from the pressure of homecoming
and new beginnings than from fear of the surrounding storm. For thirty months and 27,000 miles, there had been no uncertainty about the future. Every day, my objective had been clear—to head westward, to return home. For every storm, every calm, every emotional low and high, the one thing I could always count on was that eventually it would become a memory. Today, my mind was riveted on the future. The most daunting landfall of all lay ahead, on that horizon to the west. I was returning to a home that could never be the same as the one to which I said goodbye a lifetime ago.

T
here have always been people who called my father crazy. We never thought so. Why walk when you can run? he'd say. Why be inside when you could be out? Why stay home balancing your checkbook when you could be off riding a camel to Timbuktu, or climbing Mont Blanc, or driving a Land Rover across Africa? His dreams for himself and for us were all we wanted to hear when we were growing up. The world through his eyes was full of excitement and promise, of taking risks and landing on your feet, always with another great story to tell.

I remember one cold winter day, when I was eight, just before my mother entered the sanitarium in Switzerland, my father took us on one of his walks across the pastures near our house in Vernon, New Jersey. You need fresh air to
think
, he'd say with his Swiss-German accent, flinging wide the front door and barreling down the walkway. “I have to
breathe.”

Usually, we would have to run to keep up as he pondered and pontificated, waving his arms through the air like a mad conductor as he tried to sort out the chaos that was our lives in those days. With his blue eyes ablaze, his dark hair firing madly out of his head and the cold air turning his breath into clouds of steam as he plowed along, he was raw energy personified.

“Tania,” he said, stopping to study a wire fence in our path, “come here, please, and grab this fence.”

I obeyed and grabbed the fence, receiving a jolt to the chest that almost knocked me off my feet. My father laughed so hard that he had to sit down. It was an electric cow fence.

“Schnibel-puff,” he said, calling me by his favorite nickname as I glared at him, “sometimes, you only learn things in this world the hard way.”

Not long after that day, events took a turn and, it seemed, nothing was ever the same again. It would take ten years, until I was eighteen years old and about to set off alone around the world on
Varuna
, before I would begin to know just how right my father was.

•   •   •

The wind was blowing up a stink across the docks of the South Street Seaport beneath the towering glass monoliths of Wall Street in Manhattan. I tried to take a last glimpse of my family and etch their faces and this moment into my memory. It was four o'clock, May 28, 1985, and my adventure was about to begin.

“Are you ready?” my brother Tony and my father hollered in unison from the dock.

On
Varuna
, I hunched up in my foul-weather gear, squinting through the drizzle, and tried to hide my tears.

“Tania,
are you ready?”
my father called again. My head was spinning and words were lodged in my throat.

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm ready,” I finally called back.

The dock lines thumped on deck as Tony pushed the boat clear and screamed, “Have fun, little sister! And be careful.”

Varuna's
engine putted away. I pushed the tiller and maneuvered, without mishap, out of the Seaport, where I had spent my last precious minutes at home. Peering through the mist, I looked for the boat that my father had chartered to lead me out of the Seaport to Sandy Hook, 20 miles away. Yes, I could see it ahead and altered to its course. Also, there was another boat following,
UBS
, a big Swiss racing sailboat, which had taken a bunch of people on board to wish me bon voyage. Waving from the deck were my mother; Tony; my sisters, Nina and Jade, and all my friends. They stayed close by for about a mile and then, for the last time, we called good byes and I Love You's back and forth, and
UBS
slowed and turned away. Trembling, I watched through streams of tears as the distance between us grew and they disappeared in the fog. Oh God. This is real. I began to shake violently. “What the hell am I doing?” I screamed at the water. “I don't want to go. I want to go back home. Oh my God!”

My father's voice crackled in over my little VHF hand-held
radio. “How are you doing?” he asked from the fishing boat just ahead.

“I'm wet and cold,” I blubbered into the radio, unwilling to admit that I had never been so scared in my life.

“You're going to be fine,” he said. “Hang in there.”

•   •   •

That morning, I had awakened with Nina on
Varuna
to be picked up by a limousine and whisked off to the NBC studios to talk to Jane Pauley on the “Today” show, one of the five or six TV shows and newspapers that my father had called to tell of my departure. Between the bright lights in my eyes and the worry about my impending trip, I had been a nervous wreck.

Later that morning, I watched my television debut on a friend's VCR and cringed when I saw myself squinting into the lights; my gestures appeared epileptic. And those answers! I sounded like a stupid child parroting the reasoning of her father. It was no wonder Jane Pauley had tried to talk me out of going.

•   •   •

Everywhere I looked—the sky, the water, the air—was a sooty gray. The dampness was piercing and I pulled the sleeves of my jacket down over my hands as rain poured out of the sky in buckets. “Tania, look. Even New York is crying because you are leaving,” a friend had said as I pulled away from the Seaport dock. I looked at the chart of the harbor inside the oversized Ziploc plastic bag in front of me, but had no idea of my position in relation to it. I concentrated on the vague form of the boat ahead. On both sides,
Varuna
was crossing paths with the immense rumbling hulks of all the liners, tugs and tankers traveling through and anchored in the harbor. As the fog thickened, every so often one of their horns would blast its
Morse signal to warn the passing boats. Suddenly, through the patter of the rain, I heard
Varuna's
engine cough and falter. Put, put, put . . . put . . . put. . . . Our speed decreased by half. I watched with a growing panic as the boat carrying my father was swallowed into the mist ahead.