I'm not sure when it hit me; this was almost the same trip we'd started the year before? Then it occurred to me: when does one journey end, and the next begin?
Then - as now - we'd spruced up the boat, loaded her up with fuel and provisions. Then - as now - we'd left midcoast Maine and sailed south for Massachusetts Bay, bound for the Cape Cod Canal. Then - as now - we'd sailed on into Buzzard's Bay, then west across Long Island Sound to Hell's Gate. Waiting for a good tide, then - as now - I recalled how we'd motored under a vast parade of jets landing at LaGuardia, and eventually, how we ran the slack tide and slipped into the East River. Then - as now - I'd wanted to stop in New York City, but frankly, the place scared Ruth.
And, I realized now, everything scared me. Life, love...all of it, and I was tired of the certainty of all my uncertainties.
A year had passed, and yet this was a different trip. No, trip isn't quite the right word. Journey, perhaps? No, that's not it at all...too open ended, almost too noble sounding. Too many memories to make on a journey, too, and I wasn't sire I liked the idea of making more memories. You run across too many unexamined corners in the darkness on that kind of journey, too many choices best left undisturbed. So not a trip, nor a journey. What the hell do you call running away from memory? From memories of a life cut short.
Pain comes to mind. The pain that comes from memories you can't shove out of your mind. Memories so full of life you can't even breathe without them.
Anyway, with Manhattan behind me I slipped into the Atlantic, made the quick sail down the Jersey coast to Cape May; we cut through the Onion Patch that guards Delaware Bay and Ruth and I fought jig-saw tides to the C&D Canal and sailed into the Chesapeake - passing Baltimore and making our way to Annapolis a few hours later. After a fews days in that cloistered harbor, we sailed up the Potomac to D.C., and all-in-all that part of our trip was just as we had imagined it might be. Full of so many places we had been before, seen now from the radically different perspective of the river-borne. When you approach a place from the water for the first time, even the known becomes a very different place. You can't anything for granted, especially memory.
This year was - in some ways - no different than the year before, but then again everything was different. Life on board was different now, and in so many ways that every little routine felt odd - it was as if I felt out of place - like time was -- now -- somehow an old, foreign land I had been to many times, yet suddenly, now I was a trespasser -- and alone. It wasn't that the boat felt different -- no, this was my world, my unmoved mover. Yet the one constant in my universe was gone, my Polaris had vanished, and I was adrift in a patternless sea of stars. I couldn't find my way through the chaos, because the patterns I saw in this new sky were obscured by memory. I looked at everything and saw nothing, and in the seeing I felt very, very small.
It was, you see, my first trip without Ruth.
We'd made that first voyage together a year ago, finally getting a taste of the life we'd scrimped and saved for all our lives, started a journey years in the making. To sail, to cruise, to explore all those hidden byways we'd always passed by all our lives -- to keep one step ahead of memory for as long as we could. Together.
I'd have to say now, and this is just a guess, all that wasn't meant to be.
We were walking from the Gangplank to the Smithsonian on a hot July morning, walking to stretch our legs, or so I thought, when I heard her say 'oh', and that was it. She fell to the ground. Someone told me a few hours later she'd had a massive stroke. One minute she was alive, holding my hand as cars crawled by, frazzled commuters drumming fingers on steering wheels, and then in an instant she was gone. No goodbyes. No tears. Just a lightning bolt out of the blue, and that was that -- Ruth gone. Gone. Unimaginably gone, a forever gone.
When I left the Potomac later that summer, she had been gone five weeks. I don't know, maybe I should have sold the boat, but it was our dream; I didn't want to turn my back on our dream. I didn't want to let her down. Confused, I returned to Maine, to our little hillside hideaway north of Camden. And I hid. From everything.
Somehow I started again it all again the next summer. The Cape Cod Canal, the East River...all of it. I found it wasn't too hard to sail alone, and that I was lonely. I had, in fact, embraced loneliness. Once I hit New York City I understood if I stayed out to sea I would have to make changes in the way I rested, because I was alone I would have to remain diligently on guard for ship traffic, so as a practical matter I decided to keep to the Intra-Coastal Waterway, to the rivers and canals that lead from the Chesapeake to the Texas-Mexican border. It would, I surmised, be easier to ensure my isolation that way.
The plan I had in mind was simple: I would stop at night in dusky river channels and drop anchor, or pull into small town docks and tie up for the night, where I could eat by myself then sleep. Maybe a marina from time to time, in order to do laundry or make a grocery run, but always alone. Eventually, after the hurricane season ended, I would -- if all went according to this evolving plan -- slip across the Gulf Stream from Florida and head to the Bahamian Out Islands, where isolation was all but guaranteed. Maybe venture further south. Who knew, really, what I'd do, where I might end up? Did anyone besides me care? Hell, did I care?
No, I sure didn't, and it surprised me to realize that I simply didn't give a damn about anything anymore.
+++++
I made my way from Norfolk, Virginia south through the Great Dismal Swamp Canal and arrived in North Carolina just in time for the first cold front of the season. The temperature plummeted from the high 80s to -- perhaps -- the low-40s overnight. As I rubbed the dry white skin on my hands after I tied up to the town dock in Elizabeth City, and swore I'd try to take it easy for a day or three.
Because I'd been running down the coast so very quickly. Why? I asked myself. Why did I feel I needed to run now? There was, after all, no one to run away from. Indeed, the only companion I had now was my shadow, and even he left me from time to time.
So, what was I running from? Why couldn't I enjoy myself, enjoy this precious time? This time that had been, in effect, stolen from Ruth and I. What was the point of making this --
journey?
-- if all I was going to do was fly by the shadows in a blind rush. What was the point if I didn't get out and explore all the hidden creeks and little, out of the way places that had always passed us by? Would I spend the rest of my life in dark corners, because I was so afraid? Could I still accept that their was some purpose in life? To the idea that there was something beyond that which had been given us, to a time beyond what Ruth and I shared?
Looking back now, I realize it's hard to ask these kinds of questions when you tell yourself that the answers don't really matter anymore.
+++++
There was a boat next to mine at the docks, and I heard a man and woman arguing down below as I stood in the cockpit of my boat. I was coiling lines, wiping down teak, filling the water tanks. All the little things Ruth and I used to do together.
"Listen, I don't care anymore! I've had it with you, with you and this silly goddamned boat! I'm going to my sister's; you do what you've always done; you do what you goddamned well want to, because I don't give a flying fuck anymore..."
It sounded a lot like a one-way conversation to me. Mumbled evasions, a life of simple denial, perhaps.
"Tell you what, Hank. I'll have my lawyer call your lawyer. Maybe then you'll say something...and maybe someone will care enough to listen, but I sure don't..."
More rumbling from down below, then I looked on as a suitcase flew up from below and landed in their little cockpit with a sobering thud; this was followed by thundering footsteps and the emergence of a really dreadful looking woman.
"What the fuck are you looking at, you fucking asshole!"
Really, I hadn't been aware I was looking at her. Usually I don't like to look at such profound ugliness, but by that time I noticed I saw there were a few dozen people gathered 'round the docks, looking at her commotion. I gave her a polite smile and looked to my water tanks and she jumped down on the dock and the whole structure shook and thundered from the impact. I ignored her as she wrestled her bag off the boat and stomped off towards the ramp that led to the street.
I think I heard a collective sigh of relief as she walked away and disappeared from our lives.
I heard more sounds from the boat next to mine. "Hallelujah and goddamn it all to hell! Free at last...free at last...God almighty, free at last!"
I heard dancing down over there, and laughter. I swear to God I did.
+++++
After a while a head popped up through the companionway hatch and -- tentatively -- looked around. The head looked just like a turtle's, yet this turtle had on eyeglasses. I stared at the apparition mutely for a moment, in shock really, as this turtle-man scanned the dock for signs of his recently departed -- dare I say -- wife?
"I think she's gone," I finally said. "You can come out now."
