• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 898 0

fact, a surprising number of the yachties here were families who had anchored their boats in the safe confines of Savusavu harbor to ride out the cyclone season. In the mornings, they home-schooled, or boat-schooled, their kids. In the afternoon, the children, who ranged from the ages of about five up to thirteen, were free to race one another up and down the harbor in dinghies. This was deeply unfair, I thought, recalling that when I was a youngster in Canada, I’d had to get up well before dawn to deliver newspapers by sled through the cold, cold darkness.

The bar looked out over the harbor, and as I watched the yachtie kids playing with the Fijian kids—a little tableau of multiracial harmony—I was suddenly seized with a deep pang of longing for my little one. How excellent it must be, sailing across the expanse of the Pacific with your family, spending a few months or a few years on an island and moving on as whim determined. “Not with this wife,” Sylvia had said when I’d expressed my longing for a life at sea back in Port Vila. A fantasy, then, it would likely remain.

“Hey, man,” said one of the patrons. “You’re Steve, right? You play the trombone.”

“No, sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.”

“You’re not Steve?” he said, giving me a bleary-eyed look. “Well, who are you, man?”

It was like meeting the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now. He called himself John.

“It’s about the solitude, man,” he replied when I asked him about his boat. “If you can deal with solitude, you can deal with anything. You don’t need no $200-an-hour psychoanalyst, man. Just sail a boat for forty days and forty nights and you deal with all kinds of shit. HA HA HA.”

It had been a long, strange trip for John.

“Yeah, I was in Vietnam, man. How could you tell? HA HA HA. It’s ’cause we’re all fucked up, right? I did underwater demolitions, but I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t want to talk about that, man. HA HA.”

John had been sailing for eight years. I couldn’t imagine how he’d endured it. He was a bundle of loose nerves, trembling in a way that suggested a man off his meds. Most of the yachties I had met were calm and cerebral, the kind of people who happily spend an entire day methodically sanding an oar so that it moves through the water with perfect efficiency. John just twitched. He was a lone sailor. It had taken him forty days to sail from Panama to the Marquesas.

“Solitude, man. It makes you stronger. I spent three years in Alaska, man. I lived in the fucking woods. Only went into town once a month. HA HA.”

I asked him where he’d been in the Pacific.

“Everywhere, man. Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cooks. They charge $15 a day to dock in the Cooks, man. I was out of there in nine days.”

I wondered how he lived. “Do you do charters?” I asked. For cash, many of the yachties chartered their boats.

“Charters,” John sputtered. “Oh, no. Then you got to take care of them, give them drinks, have a license. HA HA. No.”

The sun had set, leaving a blue twilight.

“I got married, man,” John said. “Fijian woman. Having a baby. HA HA.”

“So are you settling in Savusavu?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Yeah, sure. Who fucking cares? You might say I’ve dropped out of society.”

I had a sense that John would keep moving, that he would keep looking for something, unsure of what precisely he was looking for. I understood the feeling. It wasn’t long ago that I too had felt the twitching restlessness. Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but somehow you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

IT’S FUNNY HOW TIME PASSES WHEN YOU HAVE A CHILD. Before Lukas arrived, I had always been able to press the pause button on life. I’d find a nice place somewhere between jobs and rest there for a while, a still life in a moving picture. But there was no pausing with Lukas. Just as I’d grown accustomed to his ability to sit upright on his own, he went ahead and started crawling.