Maiden Voyage (20 page)

Snorkeling in Tahuata and paddling around an outcropping of rocks to look for shells, I remember becoming mesmerized by the majestic underwater flutterings of a sea eagle—
fafahua
in Marquesan. The animal was gorgeous, with its great flowing pair of flipper wings and smooth gray body almost resembling that of a mini-dolphin. Remaining suspended, I watched as two manta rays in a mating dance soared by, their enormous wingspans ruffling the water in a captivating demonstration of synchronized swimming. I wondered what these graceful creatures made of me with my gangly limbs and a tube of bubbles coming from my mouth.

In Hanavavé we made friends with some natives and found something of value we could share with them. Preferring the modern methods of hunting over spearing and wrestling the wild boar and goats to the ground, they said they needed gun ammunition. Luc had some cartridges and gladly gave them away and, in return, both our
boats were loaded to the bulwarks with papayas, limes, mangoes, oranges, enormous bunches of bananas, tomatos and sweet grapefruit the size of footballs.

But all of the joys had been overshadowed by a sense of urgency. Ahead were still 750 miles through the mine field of coral atolls separating us from Luc's waiting job and family in Tahiti and my flight home. With a last regretful glance back,
Varuna
, Dinghy and I sailed out of Hanavavé, the Bay of Virgins, alone again.

The Marquesas, Tuamotus and Societies, all archipelagoes of French Polynesia, tell the stories of time. As
Varuna
wove her way through, past and around them, their differing features revealed the geographical evolution of most of the islands in the South Pacific. As the volcanos erupted from the ocean floor and surged their way upward, the more aggressive peaks emerged above the ocean surface. The youngest of these volcanic islands are the Marquesas, which appeared most recently in evolutionary time. The Society Islands to the southwest are older, slightly eroded versions of the Marquesas, but there is a difference. Over millions of years, the sediment and coral reefs accumulated and formed shelves and barrier reefs around them.

The atolls of the Tuamotus are thickly clustered together and stood directly in my path between the Marquesas, and Tahiti in the Society Islands. They are the oldest of the three different clans and the erosion process is even more advanced. The peaks of the islands have been swallowed completely back below the sea from whence they came, leaving behind only the fringing reef. Where there once was a volcano there is now a deep lagoon with a ring of coral reefs around it. This last stage is called an atoll and it is the most dangerous for a sailboat. On an atoll, the only things of any significant height above sea level are the coconut palms. Assuming that a palm would be a hundred feet tall, on the best of days, with the clearest of views, from the deck of
Varuna
an atoll could only be seen from about 12 miles. This range of visibility decreased with any bad weather, and at night was nonexistent.

If I had had to sail through the archipelago by myself, relying on dead reckoning and celestial navigation, plus no engine, prudence would have dictated skirting the entire group. I didn't have a thirst for thrills and by no means any desire to pass through 5- to 11-mile-wide channels between the atolls, seeing nothing and knowing that humongous waves were crashing against the reefs on both sides of me. If my navigation faltered one step, I could end up in the same
position as many other sailors had already found themselves: shipless, homeless and wet. The problem with skirting the obstacle course was that it added 200 miles onto the trip and there was a plane to catch. I decided to sail the shortest route, directly through the Tuamotus Archipelago to Tahiti, behind
Thea
and her SatNav.

Luc lent me an extra battery that we had charged along with my two so there would be enough electricity for the radio. The trip was timed perfectly with the advance of the full moon, and the lunar light helped keep our boats within sight of each other during the nights. We set up a radio schedule for every three hours to compare notes and course changes. The conditions were mild and the boats moved at about the same speed. There wasn't enough wind to move
Thea's
heavy bulk too fast, but just enough to make
Varuna
skip along, which balanced everything perfectly.

The eight days were spent eking out as much speed as possible from
Varuna
, altering and trimming the sails, reading, and eating the provisions of fruit, trying to keep a step ahead of the rotting ones. We threaded our way around the atolls, following each other through the fluky wind and squalls.

Day by day, more often than not we stormed our way like two angry children over the calm waters between the atolls of Manihi and Takaroa, then a day later, between Rangiroa and Arutua. As we crawled closer to Tahiti, the walls of depression around Luc and me built and steepened, and we finally began to take it out on each other. I couldn't know exactly how he felt about resuming his role as a family man; all I knew was that I was heartbroken about the way things had turned out, and as we got closer to Tahiti most of our radio contact ended up being aggressive and antagonistic. Even though he was dealing with his own confusion, I was still angry at Luc, who seemed angry at life. On December 2, I wrote in my log, “It's finally beginning to sink in. A whole long leg of my trip and a crucial chapter in my life is ending. Like Luc once quoted, ‘To leave is to die a little.' It is difficult to accept it all. I feel out of control.”

When I had told my father, from the telecabine in Hiva Oa, that I wanted to come home to New York to see my mother, he only added to my inner turmoil by urging against it. “Listen, Tania,” he said. “When you left New York, you knew it would be over. We talked about it. You knew that this door would be closed behind you. If I were you, I wouldn't come back now. You'll just make it harder on yourself.”

But I was incapable of coming around to his way of thinking, and
he found himself incapable of dealing with it at all. My father's way of confronting the death of my mother was by leaving the country altogether. His letters and our phone conversations over the past couple of months had conspicuously avoided the touchy subject of her deteriorating health. Instead they had been full of his plans to enter the Paris-Dakar, a grueling car race from France crossing the Sahara through Algeria, Niger, Mali, then through Guinea and Senegal in northwestern Africa. The race, plus the preparations, would take him away from New York for several months. I felt a certain relief that he would be out of the country and occupied with his own adventures when I returned, and probably so did Tony and Jade, who would be left with Christian, Jeri and my mother.

Technically, ever since Panama I had been making Pacific passages in the wrong season and was never able to take full advantage of the strong southeast trades. With the dying winds, it was an excruciatingly slow passage to Tahiti, where after each day of disappointing progress I had to refigure and push back my ETA, which threatened to overlap with the day of my flight. For eight days, our sails flapped in the meager baby breath as we inched along, and as the time dragged by, I never stopped thinking about my mother, praying that I would arrive before it was too late. The sands of the hourglass were draining fast.

At 8:00
P.M
. on the fifth of December, the horizon ahead was aglow with lights but we were still 40 miles from Papeete, Tahiti, our destination. My airplane was due to leave midday on the sixth and, helplessly, I watched the already feeble wind die again. The lighthouse of Point Venus flashed its beacon over the oily waters, lighting the dark every few seconds, increasing my agitation. Fishing boats zoomed across all four points of the compass as the gloomy night painfully shuffled through and morning dawned ugly and gray.

Squabbling over the radio and fighting our way toward the harbor, with the only wind coming from pesky squalls, Luc and I took in and then shook out reefs as they came and went. Ten miles from Papeete, the wind finally gave out altogether. I peeled a grapefruit, threw the peels overboard, and one hour later, they were still there. Overhead, my airplane thundered through the sky.

•   •   •

Now, feeling as if another lifetime had gone by since then, I sat in the airport listening to the rain pummeling the thin tropical roof, rushing through the gutters and coursing in waterfalls to the street. For the hundredth time, I looked up to see if Luc was heading my
way. Except for a small group of rowdy taxi drivers and the echoing footsteps of the occasional lost soul, the airport was empty. If Luc had received my message and planned to pick me up, this discounted even a broken alarm clock. I had been waiting for two hours. Walking over to the taxi drivers, I asked one of the more talkative men for a ride into town, warning him, “But we may have to turn around and come right back.”

“Pas de problème,”
he said, “get in.” We loaded my two duffel bags, boxes and plastic bags into the car, and set off on the French-built highway toward town. In the tropics, in every language, it seemed that the answer to everything was just that. No problem.

In New York, everybody had looked pallid compared to the beautiful and suntanned Tahitians I had left behind. The population of this island is spread out along the shoreline, while the savage interior of mountains, gorges, cliffs and ravines remains largely devoid of people, except for the occasional hermit. The cosmopolitan Tahitian capital of Papeete is the center of French Polynesian government and industry, and it was as flashy as rumored on the sailor's grapevine, a sort of mini-Paris with a tropical overlay. Before going home, I had left
Varuna
tied up to
Thea
on Papeete's quay.

The city's expensive jewelry and clothing shops, terrace restaurants, galleries, supermarkets, churches and post office, separated from the quayside by a tree-lined highway, were quiet and dark at this hour, almost 4:00
A.M
., but before long, the streets would be hives of action. Women at their stands, surrounded by friends and family, would be selling shell ornaments, ashtrays and jewelry to tourists debarking from cruise ships. The crowds of people would mill in the marketplace near their favorite vendors, choosing the luscious vegetables sold on one side; on the other, flies would chime in with the activity of weighing, cleaning and distribution of the vast variety of seafood. Chinese fabric shops, hardware stores, appliance centers and eateries framed the bustling market. To add to the confusion, the Tahitian buses, called
le truck
, would blast out Polynesian ditties pumped up to full volume.

When I first arrived from the more quiet ways of life in the Marquesas, it was all quite confusing, but as with any unfamiliar town, one finds the main squares, then works out from the nucleus; in Papeete, it was the market. Above the city, the peak of Mont Orohena towered, with a small ridge below forming a queen's tiara. It was only four hours into the stillness of a new morning, the time when even the late-nighters have finally succumbed to sleep. All the bustle
of the city and the beauty of Mont Orohena were still slumbering in the last stolen moments of night.

My taxi and I arrived on the waterfront in the rainy darkness. I wanted badly to get into my little home, see Dinghy, be surrounded by my belongings and disappear from the world. I looked for
Thea's
familiar hull. During the week before I left for New York, Luc and I had tied our boats together in front of a white church, our backs to the harbor's entry pass through the reefs. He had promised to watch over
Varuna
and take care of Dinghy while I was gone.

The taxi driver pulled over and waited while I walked to the embankment to see
Varuna
in between two unfamiliar boats. She was anchored from astern, tied bow to the shore with long lines about 20 feet away over the water, and there was no
Thea
. Someone had flipped over my inflatable dinghy to prevent the rain from filling it like a bathtub. I had to wait until a civil hour in the morning before asking one of the neighbors to give me a lift. That was nearly three hours away and I couldn't wait in the pouring rain for someone to wake up.

Wearily, I turned around and shrugged at my driver. “I'm sorry. There's nobody around. I guess I have to go back to the airport and wait until morning.”

“Pas de problème,”
he said and we sped back out, doubling his fare. Lugging my things to a bench, I arranged my duffels to make a lumpy bed and fell to thinking about my mother and the home I'd left behind again.

•   •   •

The closed window smell of sickness that had overpowered me when Christian opened the door to my mother's apartment two weeks before had been a jolt, but nothing compared to the sight of her physical deterioration over the previous six and a half months. Shocked beyond belief, I immediately hoped that she hadn't noticed my look of horror. Half seated on her bed, she was skeletal and jaundiced.

She opened her sunken eyes and smiled slowly in recognition. “Tania, you have come.” I rushed to her and held her close, worrying that I would break her fragile ribs, and tried to hide my tears in her flannel nightgown. It was one I remembered giving her in Switzerland two years before. She was the size of a child. She had been smaller than I ever since I had started sprouting out in all directions, but now the contrast between us was almost grotesque.

Over the next few days, she wanted to hear all about my trip and I told her stories about the animals of the sea, about the magical phosphorescence, about how pretty
Varuna
was as she flew downwind in the trade winds. I told her about the flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles that flew directly above the Tuamotus and how, from my seat, you could see the perfectly rounded shapes of the atolls. They had looked like a bunch of doughnuts, I told her, thrown onto a sea-blue baking sheet. She listened to my stories and smiled and then asked me to do some Christmas shopping for Nina, Tony and Jade. Nina came down from college, we bought a Christmas tree and decorated it in the living area of the studio. Every day, her nurse did her hair, and she insisted on sitting up for every guest, always intent on being a lady.