An Embarrassment of Mangoes (3 page)

The ducks are gone when we walk back to the boat, and the wind is up. The nor’wester is on its way.

I
n one corner: The security of a job, a steady income, a home, a daily routine—comfortable, safe, predictable.

In the other corner: Escape from work, winter, and daily routine; the excitement and risk of the unknown—tempting, and more than a little scary.

The five years of the Five-Year Plan were ticking down. The mortgage was smaller, the work rut deeper. The stream of boating catalogs and books coming into the house had grown to a torrent. (Steve’s economizing for the Five-Year Plan did not extend to cutbacks on “educational materials.”) He was soaking up information like a bilge pad under a leaky diesel: on oceangoing sailboats, sailing gear, maintenance and repairs, passage-making strategies. By now he had also put numbers on how much sailing to and through the Caribbean would cost: $1,000 to $1,500 per month. “That’s only $18,000 a year, max,” he said jubilantly. “Staying here would cost us way more.”

Yeah, and he’d better build in a big cushion for when we came back and didn’t have any work. Did we—particularly I—really have the nerve to put our careers on hold? If we dropped out now, in our forties, how would we get back in the market and earn a living when we returned?

And there were other concerns. We don’t have any children, but we do have aging parents—mine were approaching their eighties; Steve’s their seventies. How could we think about placing ourselves out of easy reach?

Even as I raised objections, I knew I was moving closer to needing a change. I had been editing the same magazine for seven years, and it had become all-consuming. My whole identity was defined by what I did to make a living, and I didn’t like that. Steve was focused on the fact that we were growing older; he watched friends put things off until “later” when, they said, they’d have more money and fewer responsibilities; by the time “later” came, they were no longer in good health and and no longer able. “I never want to find ourselves in that position,” Steve said. “I never want to say, ‘If only . . .’ ”

Four years into the Five-Year Plan, we decide to start shopping for a larger boat.
This still doesn’t mean you’ve agreed to sail off into the sunset,
I tell myself.
It’s not like you’ve set a date to quit your job and leave town.

W
e find her in Maine, an aging 42-foot sailboat with classic lines and a fine pedigree. She appears out of the gloom of a boatyard shed, her varnish gleaming despite a patina of dust, her graceful hull proclaiming speed and elegance and calling our names. She is the first boat we look at, and the one that six months and many boatyards later becomes ours.

Not even sure exactly what to inspect when shopping for a boat, I lie down on one of the dust-covered, teak-slatted seats in the cockpit and stretch out to my full length (admittedly, only five feet, two inches). I know little about evaluating sail plans and hull condition, but I do know the importance of being comfy for a nap. Steve, meanwhile, examines
under
the other seat, checking storage capacity; he lounges on the coaming beside the wheel, to judge the comfort factor while steering; he inspects the stainless-steel fittings and—on his hands and knees—the condition of the nonskid surface on the deck. People fall in love in different ways.

Inside, we go through her with flashlights. The oiled teak that lines her cabins gives her a richness and warmth. So what if the upholstery is a nubby weave in early-eighties-rec-room turquoise-and-orange stripes? Cushions can be replaced. Traditional glass prisms are set into her deck to refract sunlight into the cabins, a bit of boat-building finesse missing on newer sailboats. So what if her electronics are out of date? A bonus, says Steve: He can buy the new ones he wants, without guilt. Her sleekness—and Steve’s notebooks full of research—suggest she will sail extremely well. She is a sloop, with the bonus of a removable inner forestay, Steve explains, so she can fly three sails—a mainsail, a jib or headsail, and a staysail—giving us several options, an advantage in heavier winds. She will be fast, as befits a design based on an old racing hull, but also comfortable. So what if she doesn’t have the space of a more modern cruising boat? We can create more storage by taking out the second toilet (two toilets on a
boat
, when we don’t even have two toilets at home?) and an extra berth.
Surely
we will never need to sleep seven.

The list of changes grows long enough to make our wallets quiver, but we both feel a powerful affinity for this boat. For Steve, the graphic designer, to be happy, the form of something must be as pleasing, as perfect, as the way it functions. “Just look at those lines,” he says longingly, returning for one last lingering glance as we get ready to leave the shed. I can picture myself cooking in her snug little galley; entertaining at her varnished table, which can easily seat eight (I’ve already counted); and curling up with Steve in the berth in her aft cabin. The usual practice of referring to boats in the feminine has always grated on me, and I’ve always made a point of saying “it.” But this lovely boat demands to be personified. She is sleek and elegant, but also strong and heavy, built for the ocean. She inexplicably gives me confidence—a word previously nonexistent in any sentence that also contained the words “Ann” and “sailboat.”

I am still nervous in any wind much stronger than a zephyr, have never handled any boat larger than a dinghy by myself, have never spent more than two consecutive weeks living on a sailboat—and have never
ever
sailed at night. All of which makes me an extremely unlikely candidate for a two-person, two-year sailing trip. But here we are in Maine, soon to make an offer on a sailboat to do exactly that.

T
he Tartan Marine Company produced thirty-four 42-foot sailboats between 1980 and 1984; the one in Maine is hull number 14, and the name emblazoned on her narrow transom is
Diara J
. Sailing lore is unequivocal in the matter of boat names: It’s bad luck to change them. But we have no connection with
Diara J
—a conflation of the names of the first owner’s children, the boat broker told us. The J is an ugly visual afterthought—a child who must have arrived after the boat—and particularly offensive to Steve. Perhaps we would have stuck with the name anyway, though, had we not heard the guys around the boatyard talking. “That pretty boat,” they’d say as they climbed the ladder before the sale to add yet another coat of varnish to the gleaming woodwork, “that pretty boat with a name that looks like ‘diarrhea.’ ”

Receta
—pronounced with two short e’s—means recipe in Spanish. “Because she has all the right ingredients,” I tell everyone who asks. But there’s more to it than that: I love to cook. Even after—or especially after—my most grueling days at work, I make dinner from scratch, to relax. I’m always playing in the kitchen, trying new recipes, experimenting, and Steve is a willing subject. We both
love
to eat.

When
Receta
arrives in Toronto on a truck from Maine, we add two more years to the Five-Year Plan. After all, we need time to get to know each other. And make (and pay for) all those easy changes.

T
he first 844 miles of our trip to the Caribbean—from Toronto to the southern end of Chesapeake Bay—are a relentless barrage of new places, new people, and new problems. Every day, in fact, brings a new situation to be tackled, something that didn’t previously exist in my limited repertoire of boating skills. “How about a day that qualifies as quiet and uneventful?” I complain to my journal. We seem to have merely replaced our work pressures with a new set of stresses. Still, something is changing: My daily coffee intake has plummeted to one small cup before we get underway each morning instead of the maybe eight hefty mugs I used to consume each day. The stimulation of the new is replacing caffeine.

We’re not only expending huge amounts of mental energy, but also doing
much
more physical, burn-the-calories type work. Two weeks after we started out, I had stepped on the scales at a yacht club where we stopped and discovered that without even trying I weighed less—by a good five pounds—than I had at any time in my adult life. Skinny-to-start-with Steve has had to punch another hole in his belt to hold his slumping jeans around his narrowing waist.

Maneuvering the boat through the twenty-nine locks of the New York State Canal System and the one federal lock connecting Lake Ontario to the Hudson River was the first new-to-both-of-us challenge, complicated by a 65-foot-long battering ram overhanging
Receta
by 10 feet at the bow and stern: Since sailboats can’t go through the canal with their masts up, we are carrying it on deck. The trick is to avoid shish-kebabing other boats while keeping clear of the rough lock walls. “I guess you want me to do the driving,” Steve says, knowing full well what my response will be. I’ve yet to maneuver
Receta
in close quarters, and I figure a crowded, concrete chamber coated in black-green slime is no place to start. We pick up only one small scratch before being spit out into the Hudson six days after we pulled into the first lock. Next up is what has historically been one of the world’s busiest harbors, and with the mast in its proper place once again, we sail under the George Washington Bridge and into New York City, tacking back and forth across the river until the Statue of Liberty, her torch thrust into the air, comes into view ahead, welcoming two more new arrivals.

For me, it’s a thrilling homecoming. I was born and raised in New Jersey; my family still lives here. Docked on the Jersey side of the river overlooking the Manhattan skyline, we uncork champagne to celebrate with Mom and Dad and family friends. “You’ll see and hear from us as frequently as ever,” I had promised when Mom and Dad had worried about our heading off, imagining us far away and out of reach. I hope that by delivering on that promise so quickly, by having made it, seemingly effortlessly, all the way to their home turf by boat, they will be more relaxed about our trip.

I’m careful, though, to hide my nervousness about the next phase: my first passages on the Atlantic Ocean, necessary to get us down the New Jersey coast. “I’m getting tired of the word ‘exhilarating,’ ” I tell Steve after we complete an intense little stretch of ocean around the very bottom of the state. The recommended route here, through a maze of shallow, shifting sandbars, takes us nerve-wrackingly close to the rocky coast at Cape May—so close that from
Receta
’s cockpit we can smell the bacon and eggs cooking in the resort town’s kitchens.

Y
our parents think this is all my idea,” Steve said after we broke the news to the family. “They think I’m trying to kill you.” I’m not sure what horrified them most: my taking up a lifestyle that seemed fraught with danger, my no longer being at the other end of a phone any minute of the day, or my giving up a good job. Steve’s parents are more sanguine: They ask if they can come visit.

Staying had begun to seem as terrifying as leaving. Better to take the risk and go, we decided, than forever regret not going. There would never be a time that would be absolutely right, and if we waited for it, we would wait forever. Now, when we—and our parents—were healthy was as good a time as any.

Despite my fears, I had slowly come around to the idea that a boat, which combines the means of getting to a destination with the place to stay when you arrive, would make it possible to travel for an extended stretch. And one aspect of traveling this way was particularly appealing: It would mean having a kitchen with us wherever we went. We’d no longer have to limit our food purchases in exotic destinations to what we could chill in a hotel ice bucket, prepare with a Swiss Army knife, and consume with our fingers.

The Five-Year—now Seven-Year—Plan had worked. We had no debts. The mortgage was paid off, so we could rent our house for a source of income. We were completing new editions of two of Steve’s guidebooks, which would be on the market while we were gone, for another source of income. We’d even built up a small cash cushion. But we’d also increased our guesstimate of what the trip would cost: $1,500 to $2,000 a month—not including the equipment we still needed to buy for
Receta
along the way. On top of that, I’d padded on a lavish security blanket to allow for lots of phone calls home and occasional flights to visit parents.

The word drifted out to colleagues, and the endless stream of questions began. How could we give up two highly coveted jobs and just sail over the horizon? How would we survive when we returned, jobless and out of the loop?
What would we do
? It was both unnerving and enlightening that so many concerns revolved around our
work
. I heard whiffs of words like “reckless.” I caught wind of a betting pool on how long it would be—how soon, actually—before we turned back.

I hedged when people asked how long we’d be gone. “One year, maybe two,” I said. I didn’t want anyone to think I’d failed if I chickened out and we returned after one year.

I
tem in Day-Timer: Reduce contents of house owned by two packrats to a pile of useful possessions that will fit into a 42-foot sailboat that is only 12 feet, 3 inches across at her widest point. Most of
Receta
, in fact, beyond her bulging midsection, is
much
narrower.

“How many T-shirts do you think I’ll need?”

I was ready to throttle him. “How the hell would I know? Have I ever done this?” If I was stressed out before, now I was strung so tightly you could pluck chords in my neck. The last guidebook still wasn’t finished (Steve and his deadlines), and the property manager we’d hired had already rented our house. The first couple who walked through the door snapped it up, so there was no leeway in our timetable: We had to be completely moved onto
Receta
in three weeks.