Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (6 page)

So it was,
I realized, as I strove to follow the advice of Streisand, Martin, Carmichael, Loggins and Messina, et al., that I was kicking against the goad. The problem is no longer that the glass slipper does not fit. It is that glass slippers have gone out of style, and Cinderella is likely to call the cops when the prince shows up.

I did not want to become anyone’s side salad or fashion accessory, the missing piece of an already completed puzzle, or the consolation prize in someone’s otherwise disappointed life. I met some wonderful women and even nearly lost my heart a time or two, but after three years of earnest effort I had found no one with whom I shared a dream of the future. As the close of hurricane season approached in the fall of 2009, I was a ship in irons, rolling around the sea in light airs and lacking a heading.

The Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving was a melancholy gray. It was growing dark and chilly by the time I left Raleigh for the three-hour drive to Beaufort. A call came in on my cell phone from a friend. She invited me to have Thanksgiving dinner at her home with her family. With no small difficulty, I declined. She insisted. I reconsidered.

The weather was downright depressing. Accepting an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner would have been a welcome excuse to put off the overnight sail offshore to Masonboro Inlet that I had planned. The next day’s long trip was due to take me down the waterway to Southport, where I expected to dock the boat before jumping off for Nassau a week later. I was also afraid to set sail, to be honest.

It was not the dreary weather, or being alone, or the sixty-mile stretch of ocean from Beaufort to Masonboro Inlet that concerned me. On the open sea at night, the
Gypsy Moon
is as cozy as a warm fire and rocks like a baby’s cradle as she rises and falls over the waves. It was the unknown that troubled me, and the worry that I was about to do something rather foolish (again) and potentially very expensive (again) that I would regret (again).

My life was hardly a pillar of constancy. I had been through some rough times. Money was an issue. I had a towering bill from my divorce lawyer that would take years to pay off and an eye-watering alimony payment to go with it that I would be making each month until my old age. My law practice was running smoothly enough, and I had carved out the time in my schedule to go, but if I stayed behind and worked I would make more money. There were a million reasons not to slip the lines and sail away from what seemed, then, a relatively safe harbor in my life.

To make my decision no easier, I had gotten a call from my old pals at Northwest Creek Marina, near New Bern, the week before. After I’d given up my slip in that idyllic spot two years earlier, when leaving on my first trip to the Bahamas, I’d returned to find that I was at the bottom of a waiting list of a hundred people hoping to put their boats where mine had been. The other marinas where I was forced to keep the boat instead, when I returned, charged more than twice as much. Now my old berth was open again. Bringing the boat back there would have seemed the logical thing to do. It was just a two-hour drive from my home in Raleigh, over good roads in a well-sheltered harbor with first-class repair facilities nearby, on a river I knew well—too well, in fact.

Harbors where every mark holds a memory and every face is an old friend are places best saved for old men and little children. “Not yet,” I thought.

I arrived at the boat slip in Beaufort and went aboard. I found the
Gypsy Moon
as always, floating cheerfully high on her lines and listing ever so slightly to port, with dry bilges, clear decks, and everything in its place. Three teak hatch boards, varnished to a high gloss, enclosed the companionway. Removing them, I saw that all was in good order in the cabin below. There was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. The
Gypsy Moon
was not in Bristol fashion, by yachting standards. (She is, after all, a working boat, with all the attendant scuffs and scrapes.) But I would not have been embarrassed to serve the governor tea in my galley, had she been aboard.

I bent the genoa onto the forestay and ran the sheets aft, port, and starboard, through the running blocks. The mainsail was furled on the boom and ready. I examined the route I would take through the narrow channel that leads from the marina to the bascule bridge and past the town of Beaufort, established in the year 1709. Along the town’s older streets, by the waterfront, a few brightly painted homes from those early years stand where they have witnessed the storms and worries of more than two centuries. But outside of a few historic avenues, little is left of the old places. Out on the main road, on my way into the marina, I passed a well-lighted orange Hardee’s sign—an emblem of the New South that has overtaken the legacy of Colonial fishermen, merchants, and planters.

When all the work had been done to make ready for sea, I paused. All of the questions and objections that I had kept waiting at the bar these past few months now demanded a hearing and a decision. Would I go? Should I go?

The harbor master’s office and chandlery at Town Creek Marina are encircled by a wide covered porch on which the staff has thoughtfully placed a number of high-backed rocking chairs. I found one of these and took my place, looking out over the water to the south. I was alone. The harbor was dark. The intermittent light rain of the day had eased. I could see the lights of the low bridge, not a quarter mile away, and the now-thinning automobile traffic that rumbled across it. No one and nothing stirred in the marina. All was quiet and still, as though the assembled instruments of the harbor’s orchestra had come to order, awaiting the rise of a conductor’s baton.

I am not what most religious people would call a praying man, which is not to say that I do not often pray. I readily give thanks for all that has been given to me, which is mountainous, and beg forgiveness for my lack of faith, which is cavernous. It is rather that I feel a strong impulse toward formality, humility, and decorum when presuming to importune the Almighty.

Part of this attitude, I suppose, comes from my earliest years in the Episcopal Church, where purse-lipped communicants rarely break into spasms of ecclesiastical joy for all the world to see. Part of this also comes from my life in the law, where a lawyer’s remarks to a judge are brief, to the point, made from a posture of respect, and mindful that the court’s considerable power must not be invoked unadvisedly or for any trivial purpose. Most of my reticence in prayer, though, is owed to the knowledge that the winds that bear aloft my petitions carry with them the prayers of some poor soul with malarial fever, a father keeping vigil over a sick child, or a wife on the eve of a battle from which her husband may not return. I am a well-fed lawyer playing about on a pleasure yacht, a stranger to illness and hardship, and a free man living in the most affluent nation on Earth. I am ashamed to be a supplicant in their company.

And yet I pray, because that is what children do. Well do I know that whatever I truly need, my Heavenly Father will grant, and that the burden of what I truly deserve has been lifted through no merit of my own.

I prayed that night, on the porch, for guidance in making a decision whether to go. I knew that I was committing myself to a journey that would take not weeks or months to complete, but years, and from which I or my boat might not return. I knew that it would cost money—not an inordinate amount (the boat is paid for, and the wind is free), but not an insignificant amount, either. I wanted to go and felt that I should, but I knew from long experience that I have wanted many things that I should not want, and that my judgment has not always served me. My self-esteem and self-confidence were not at a high ebb in that hour of my life. I wanted guidance. I wanted fatherly advice.

There are some who say God speaks to them. I am not so sure. He has spoken through the prophets, according to my creed, but He has never spoken directly to me. I have, however, felt the presence of God. And from the perspective of the higher altitudes that the passage of time affords, I have seen the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life. All the same, I can’t say that I saw, heard, or felt anything of the kind, in the half hour I spent rocking and praying on the porch at Town Creek Marina. It seemed that God was leaving this call up to me, and so I made the best one I knew how to make.

If I was looking for a sign that I had made the wrong call, it would not be long in coming. It was dark in the marina, for sure, but not nearly so inky black as it was out in the creek. The markers in the spur channel leading through the mud flats from the marina to the main waterway were not lighted. I should have laid out a compass course to follow, but it seemed too short a distance to bother. It had been easy enough three months earlier, when I had arrived there in daylight.

Not one minute away from the dock, as I was making way under engine power toward the bascule bridge, I lost my bearings in the channel while looking down at a handheld GPS unit. I was having trouble finding my boat’s position on the blasted display. When I looked up, I noticed the bottom shoaling quickly on the depth sounder. Thinking I must be to starboard of the channel, I swerved to port, then felt a sudden downward lurch at the bow and an unwelcome firmness at the stern that signaled I was aground.

I had nosed into the mud of Town Creek, having strayed out of the narrow and unforgiving channel in my eagerness to get underway. It must have been eight or nine o’clock when this happened, and on the eve of Thanksgiving, no less.

Emblematic of the efficiency of the American maritime industry that I was sure I would miss wherever I was headed, a towboat was on my location in twenty minutes. In ten minutes more, the tow had turned the nose of the
Gypsy Moon
a few yards in the right direction, and not fifteen minutes after that, I was gliding through the channel, talking on the ship’s radio and saying thanks and good night to the bridge tender. There was nothing between me and the open sea.

The seas at
the entrance to Morehead City remind me of the inside of a washing machine most any day. Tide and season merely determine whether you're going to get the wash or the spin cycle. On this night, though, the waves rolled in long and slow, and the
Gypsy Moon
made her way gently out to sea. I chose a distant marker before making the turn to the south that would put me on a heading for Masonboro Inlet, at Wilmington. The winds were light from the northwest, and with her big drifter set out to port, the boat dipped her shoulder slightly and began the familiar jog that meant she was making good time on a broad reach.

Out on the ocean, there was not another ship as far as my eyes could see. The quarter moon was gone and so was the rain, but the clouds obscured the stars. I set the autopilot and kept up a watch in the cockpit until the lights from Atlantic Beach, just south of Morehead City, began to fade astern. With the bow pointed out to sea, all sheets running fair, and the sail pulling well, I set the egg timer above my bunk in the pilot berth to ninety minutes and closed my eyes.

There is something inherently holy about wandering, and that holiness enriches the wanderer so much that the voyage itself becomes the destination. In that first sacred hour of silence at sea, my thoughts collected around the decision I had just made, where I had been, and where I was going. It was hard not to notice that I was alone on a holiday set aside for families to gather around one another and give thanks. Although my solitude was self-imposed, it ran deeper than the mere proximity of people with whom I might have shared a meal and a laugh. It was impossible to overlook that I had come to a point in my life when I was, whether on land or at sea, truly, truly alone.

I had wanted my children to be with their mother and hadn't bothered to insist on a formal visitation schedule because they were already in high school when my marriage ended. But I wasn't prepared for how rarely I would see them. Although it was hard to determine how much of this was due to the alienation of divorce and how much was simply the norm, as teenagers with cars and friends and plans of their own begin to pull away from parents, the effect was the same.

I no longer had a job, it seemed, as a husband or a father. The powerful motivation those vocations supplied had accounted for virtually every success I had achieved since the age of twenty-three. They were jobs I had once done very well, but I was now unemployed in the most abject sense of the word. I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to “work” again.

My mind wandered to a church in Aspen, Colorado, where I had spent a chilly Saturday afternoon nearly three years before. It had been snowing all day in one of the snowiest seasons on record in Aspen. Some twenty-one feet had already fallen by late February of that year. I was due to fly home the next day. I am guessing that the pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church on Main Street thought he had a free hour on his hands when he trudged through the drifts to the church to keep his appointment for five o'clock confession, but there were three of us waiting for him that day. I was the last in line.

Having been married in the Catholic Church, taken instruction in the faith, and been confirmed some years later, I had been a practicing Catholic for eighteen years when my marriage ended. During that time I had served in various positions as chairman of the parish council, youth group director, CCD teacher, and a third-degree member of the Knights of Columbus. I felt a strong kinship to the Catholic faith, and after my divorce I wanted the reassurance of my church that I might one day remarry and still have a home there.

I made my confession to the priest about the affair that had ended my marriage. It was no accident that I had waited to do this in Aspen, Colorado. I was too ashamed to face anyone in my hometown. The sordid details would be made public not long thereafter in my divorce trial, but at the time I still felt like a man with a dark secret. My infidelity had its origins in the church.

The woman involved was the lay administrator of our parish. In a twist of irony that was not lost on anyone, her affair with me ended the affair she had been having with our parish priest, who then renounced his vows and left the priesthood, only later to renew those same vows and return to serve a different parish. The woman resigned her job at our church, began attending a different parish, and stayed married to her husband. My marriage fell apart. It was a scandal and the greatest failure of my life.

The young pastor at St. Mary's in Aspen was very kind, almost apologetic, but firm. He made it clear to me that I had two options to remain in communion with the church. One was to stay single and celibate for the rest of my life and let my solitude be a testament to my piety. That certainly wasn't ringing any bells with me. I knew who I was, and I also knew that fifty years of solitude and celibacy would make my life a testament to nothing so much as the prolonged effects of clinical depression.

The other option, the priest explained, was for me to seek an annulment by proving to a tribunal in the church, through the testimony of family and friends, that my marriage of twenty-five years had never occurred in a heavenly sense, despite the two angels it had produced here on Earth.

Catholic guilt is a powerful thing, and I would later go so far as to meet with a diocesan counselor—a nun who was wonderfully kind and forgiving—to learn more about the grounds for annulment. After hearing the story of the fever of immaturity in which my marriage had begun at the age of twenty-two, this good nun appeared certain that an annulment would sail through, and I have no doubt she was right. But the more certain she appeared, the less interested I became.

There grew in me a sense of something self-righteous, sanctimonious, and even bullying about the whole idea of putting two impulsive kids—who were all wrong for each other but who couldn't see that twenty-five years ago—on trial. Great goodness came of their decision to marry, but so did great sorrow. Isn't that just a part of life? Isn't every marriage and every life a mixed bag? Can we really funnel everything in that bag into a decision by a tribunal of strangers that what occurred more than two decades ago was holy or unholy?

Some marriages work and some do not. Some marriages that once soared heavenward fall to Earth, because the people in them fail, as humans are wont to do. Some marriages that are devoid of intimacy and would qualify for annulment by acclamation if they were ever put on trial inexplicably endure, yet the church does not shun such couples because they continue to live together in “unholy” matrimony. These variations are not explained by a miscarriage of grace at the time these unions were conceived. They are simply an expression of the human condition.

I am no theologian, but I do take to heart the advice of St. Paul to “test everything, and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5: 21). I tested these questions for years, and I could never reconcile the Christ who offered living water at Jacob's Well to a woman with five husbands (John 4:18) with the church that was now offering me a choice between a show trial and a life of abject loneliness. Of all the qualities that describe Christ's life and mission on Earth, legalism and a preference for form over substance are not among them.

On this night at sea, in the sixty miles that separate Beaufort and Masonboro Inlet, I pondered these questions again as I had many times before and came to the same conclusion: I believe that the blood of Christ is sufficient to atone not just for some of our weaknesses and failures, but for all of them, and that the mercy of Christ is sufficient to allow us—all of us—to try again when we fail to imitate Him.