The Memory of Place

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T S Eliot

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There is a tree I think of from time to time. A tree in winter, it's limbs bare. Blackened bark, wet with cold rain. I stand and look at it's limbs fracturing upward into low scudding cloud and I am struck by how these bare shoots reach out like nerves, and I wonder what they feel when winter comes, when all memory is holding fast to a fading summer's light.

And what can you say about a marriage that dies, not quietly in winter but in the harsh light of day? What could I tell you that you haven't seen and heard a hundred times before, perhaps experienced in your own darkest hour? And so, what if I could tell you a tale of broken dreams in darkest night, of betrayals so sudden and unexpected they might make the most hardened heart weep in despair? And even if I could, what would be the point? We all seem to plod-on through life with vacant eyes, ignoring life's lessons until it's far too late to change the patterns of our acquiescence, and so if history does indeed have lessons to teach us, why is it that we all seem so willfully resolute in our ability to ignore them?

My wife had, once upon a time, been my best friend. We dreamed a little, conspired a lot and had, I thought, been completely in love with one another. We'd managed to build a fairly successful restaurant business over the years -- years spent side by side, together -- and then an unexpected opportunity had come along one fine September day. A friend wanted to buy our place, and the opportunity looked like one of those 'once in a lifetime' shots at breaking away from the grind that you always hear -- and dream about.

But was breaking away what we wanted? We were at the top of our game, making good money and enjoying ourselves to boot. Yet I thought we'd both always been vagabonds at heart, and we both loved sailing, and we had been consumed with more than our fair share of wanderlust over the years. We talked about the sailboat we'd bought just a few years before -- even then with distant horizons gleaming in our eyes -- and we talked through that night about dusty plans of sailing to faraway places and exploring distant beaches -- with our bare feet planted firmly in the depths of remembrance.

Remembrance? Why does that word resonate so when I think back on those heady days?

Was the choice really so simple? Was the decision driven by a growing lack of connection we felt to our everyday lives together, and had those weakening bonds pushed us past the memory of place -- and into the beckoning grasp of worlds we'd always dreamed to see? If we held on to the present, if we held on to the dying vines of such questionable common ground -- and by that I mean a withering lack of connection to our past -- how could we hope to hold the future in such high regard? What is the future without the past?

Look at in another way: how could having so much in common lead two people so far astray?

Liz and I read books and magazines on cruising in sailboats for years before we made the leap, but while the journey itself always seemed -- through our mind's eye, anyway -- to be idyllic in and of itself, seeing the world had grown secondary to living the journey, yet in the back of my mind I found myself wondering if we hadn't simply become experience junkies. So yes, I had begun asking myself if the means had grown more important than the ends? So yes, it felt good to think about selling out and moving on; this was heady validation for years of effort, wasn't it?And our success enabled feelings of empowerment that ruled our outlook.

But perhaps now's the time to look back at a few key moments along the way...

We had sailed from our home port of Newport Beach, California to Baja more than once over years, in those years before the big break, so we knew the reality behind the dream. And we knew the reality can be both better -- and worse than the dream.

Our first trip south, we made the 300 mile crossing to Guadelupe Island, off the west coast of Baja California. We made the trip not to see the herds of elephant seals that winter over on the rocky beaches there, but the Great White sharks that come to feed on the seals. Liz was fascinated by sharks, had been since she was a kid, and while I might have taken this as a warning, at the time I just didn't pick up on it. There were three dive boats in our anchorage on the northeast coast, their operators chumming the water and dropping shark cages into the infinitely clear water, and several of the magnificent beasts glided by the side of our boat -- their black eyes regarding us cooly as they slipped by -- and it seems odd to me all these years later that those eyes stand out clearest in my memory. Being regarded as a meal by a super-predator is a lonely experience.

On our third trip south we went all the way to Manzanillo, on the Mexican mainland, and sheltered at the little marina at Las Hadas. You've seen it, too, at least you have if you've seen the movie '10', that is. You remember, that blazing beach with Dudley Moore watching Bo Derek running down the beach in slo-mo? Great place, the hills around the resort are spectacular, too. So spectacular they're lined with Mediterranean-style villas these days, and this rustic corner of paradise looks like Laguna Beach these days. I guess the houses are cheaper.

So, the point I need to make is both Liz and I came to love sailing, especially the challenges it presented, yet in the end we came to know this dream as a calling, and the call grew louder, more insistent with each passing year. And with each trip taken, our desire to cast off the ties that bind grew with shrill insistence to the drumbeats of a primordial lust. The music crescendo came with the offer to buy out our restaurant.

After talking about our choice over dinner, we decided it was time to cut the cord. Time for a new boat, a bigger one of course, with room for our lives. Our first boat was 34 feet small, and living aboard was one step up from camping. Spartan, in other words, yet uncomplicated, and fun. And isn't that the way? Most of our friends had started off that way; make a few bucks and discard small and uncomplicated for big and complex, and so we followed in their footsteps. We traded 34 feet for 43, simple for so complicated the boat came with multiple 3-ring binders for each of it's systems -- and then of course we added even more stuff.

We moved aboard our new aquaTarkus after we sold our house, and we'd actually said we were moving aboard for good, hadn't we? For ever and ever, for better of worse, in sickness and in health -- for good. It was our joint decision to not go quietly into that good night, and we would journey hand in hand, together, beyond the threshold of all our dreams. We would walk those faraway shores.

For good.

Faraway shores, indeed. I smile when I think back on that night, and how blind I was to the reality of the situation.

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So we moved aboard, fitted her out, then sailed south down Baja to Cabo San Lucas. We shopped at a Costco (!), tightened a few nuts and bolts, then jumped off to make the 'coconut run' to French Polynesia.

I remember most the blue water on that crossing. Lots of blue water, a blue so clear and deep and mysterious no words can describe it. And yet even then I think I felt shadows circling in the deep, far below and just out of sight.

And -- no storms. No howling gales. Just an endless expanse of the most startling blue sea and clear sky you've ever seen, day after day of cerulean dreams come true.

Maybe what I really remember most was our first big landfall, in the Marquesas. Kaoha Nui: the words mean Welcome. We were kaohi nui, welcome to dream away among the soaring, pearl-like atolls, anchored under volcanic ridge-lines that sheltered us from a world splintering away far too quickly. Time stopped in Nuku Hiva, in the shadow of the cathedral spires of Hatiheu Bay, and we were only too glad to remain in those shadows -- hiding from a looming truth. Truth -- like a reckoning -- taking shape in the clouds that framed our skies.

And as we lay at anchor, swinging in the currents of our dreams -- and after only a few months -- all our choices seemed vindicated, our future together assured. We were as happy in those shadows as we had ever been, and I didn't think life could get any better.

After a few months in this paradise we sailed south for Tahiti, and when we arrived at Papeete we weathered not storms on our approach to the island, but cruise ships and tourists flooding the town like an errant tide of affluence.

So it was in Tahiti that we first perceived the ghastly contours of a world out of balance with itself; so many people in search of perfect harmony, yet all these people were, in their infinite hordes, destroying all they sought to experience. It was like all of us were on a pilgrimage, seeking out the Holy Self in an ever more profane world, and almost overnight the reality of our explorations began to feel more and more like an act of desecration, and over the next year we ran into the same phenomena over and over again. We found the world had built a six lane freeway right over what had once been 'off the beaten path'; commuter airliners disgorged hundreds of SCUBA divers on atoll after atoll, and in even the most remote anchorages we would always find one or two multi-million dollar mega-yachts at anchor, jet-skis buzzing about and coconut oiled, bikini clad women kicking about on desolate beaches while impoverished natives looked on with wonder, and anger, hovering behind their eyes. We came to believe that we were all in search of something ephemeral out there, all of us seeking some connection to pasts that had grown inaccessible, perhaps lost -- forever. Yet in the end I listened to people, expecting to hear stories of escape from the daily 9 to 5 grind, yet what I heard was a desperate humanity, all of us in search of something missing from life.

I wasn't sure just then what it was we all seemed to be looking for, but I had an idea.

I think it has something to do with that tree.

For we were, I think I understood in those fleeting moments, disillusioned, on a pilgrimage, just like all the other disillusioned travelers through time, and you might say, some were in search of salvation, looking for a way out of the endless drudgery of what had become a meaningless existence and hoping for something more -- out there. And there were people like myself, and to a degree, Liz. We were people who wanted to see this world, all we could, rather than be content to know one town, or one state. We were, we decided, explorers. All of us.

Liz and I had both grown up in a world dominated by the aftermath of war, with the shimmering reality of nuclear holocaust seemingly just over the next horizon. Emaciated bodies of Jews rotting in lime-lined pits were nothing new to our experience of history; we had been schooled in the "realities" of genocide on a daily basis for, well, all our lives, so by the time Vietnam became a household name we were fully charged with righteous zeal. Liz and I met at UC Berkeley just as the anti-war movement was winding down, so we came to know one another in the context of war and resistance, a narrow-gauge world of Hendrix and Dylan and sandalwood scented head shops full of day-glow peace-sign posters. We lived in fantasyland, where the children of privilege protested for better wages -- for migrant farm workers.

And we walked to classes -- more often than not -- with troops on campus, and anti-corporation leaflets fluttered out classroom windows like psychedelic snow. Yeah, I know. Can you believe we actually believed that crap? It's hard to look back on all of it now without feeling a little embarrassed. By the time Watergate flushed the system all we could say was something like "See, we told you so..."

Anyway, what's that old saw? Things fall apart, the center cannot hold? That was the sixties, in a nutshell.

Moving from the heightened sense of the possible we found at rallies and teach-ins to the corporate sensibilities of Orange County was, in retrospect, the beginning of our journey along the hard road to dissolution. More and more, our lives focused on becoming successful, on making money, on buying a house, then a bigger house, then there was that new BMW followed by a boat and a bigger boat -- it was endless, and we knew better. I'm sure we did. I'm sure we all did, stuck in endless traffic on the 405 -- listening to books on tape to take us away from it all.

It's hard to look back on it now -- from the sunken perspective of our unravelling -- as we, like the world around us -- slipped into the quiet dissolution of material excess. It's easy to say that somewhere along the way Liz and I sold out. We joined the Me Generation and never looked back. And it was so fun, all of it -- sorry, but it was. I bet Faust had fun until the bill came due, too.

But, you know something? Devils always have the last laugh. They always have, and I suspect they always will.

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Somewhere in our fourth year of sailing we decided we'd had enough enlightenment and decided to head back to the States. We knew we wanted to 'go home,' we just weren't exactly sure where home was. We decided against California, however, because everything there seemed to have gone wrong, terribly wrong. Too many bogus lawyers chasing the legal lottery, businesses crushed by never-ending greed, prices always either out of control or crashing through the floor. Anyway, that's what we thought at the time, but a lot of people we knew were leaving the coconut highway, headed north to Seattle, so we considered that area -- until we looked at rainfall totals.

I had grown up on a ranch near Durango, Colorado; Liz in Charleston, South Carolina, and as there's not much sailing in Colorado we decided, after many lively nights under the stars talking about our options, to head for the Gulf of Mexico, maybe New Orleans and open a new restaurant. Of course, we were at anchor in the middle of Milford Sound, on the ass end of New Zealand's South Island when we said this. Look at a map sometime if you want to get an idea of just how far off the beaten path you can get. Just how far it can be from where you are to where you want to go.

Searching for a metaphor?

And by that point it felt like we were stuck in the middle of a vast, empty nowhere, dancing on a volcano. Our world was ready to blow, so we opted for the straightest course home, to buck the trade-winds and head straight for Panama.

It was, in retrospect, an interesting choice.

Sailing a small boat hard into the wind across the Pacific Ocean is a treat for the well and truly insane, as both Liz and I could attest when we finally dropped anchor off Balboa, adjacent to Panama City, some forty seven days after leaving Whangarei, on New Zealand's North Island. We were beat up, bruised, tired to the bone, and thought seriously of selling the boat right then and there. Anyway, we secured the boat and grabbed the next flight on American to DFW, changed planes, and about six hours later were in the heat and humidity of the South Carolina lowlands. I'm sorry, but you haven't experienced culture shock until you've tried something as harebrained as sailing a boat almost five thousand miles into gale-driven mountain-sized swells for damn near seven weeks, then hopping off your boat onto a still-lurching dock and into a twenty year old Fiat taxi, and a few hours later sitting inside a waterfront restaurant in the American South with your alcoholic in-laws.

Take my word for it. You ain't been there, and you don't want to go, either.

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Let's get down to the bare basics of the matter -- right here, right now.

If Liz's dad was a pistol, her mom was a tiny thermonuclear warhead -- with the countdown timer whizzing merrily away.

Fritz Strohman had come back from dropping bombs all over Europe in 1945 and within a few years managed a Buick dealership for some of the local rich kids. He made a good name for himself, married the tempestuously wild and beautiful Betsy Cummins, and somewhere along the way managed to have some kids. Betsy was a hard-charging Duke alum, a real 'alpha, go-getter' type that went on to Georgetown Law before returning home to go through all the local boys like a hot knife through buttered grits. But Fritz and Betsy were a team -- if a well-lubed team. Fritz went out on a limb in the early 70s and mortgaged his soul to buy a Japanese car dealership, and, well, the rest is, as they say, History. After two oil embargoes and skyrocketing gasoline prices, by the 80s he bought the Buick dealership out from under the rich kids and never looked back, at least until his right carotid artery got so clogged up from cheese grits and chicken-fried steak that he almost died while banging away on one of his secretaries.

Then he found God. The big time Bible Belt Religion kind of God.

Betsy Strohman? Well, the last time I had seen her she didn't have any use for God, and as far as I could tell she never would. Their marriage had become...interesting.

Betsy was a very impractical woman in an implacably practical world, and Liz was a lot like her mother in so many ways. As I watched mother and daughter at lunch that first afternoon back in Charleston, the parallel contours of their lives became very clear, yet where Betsy was rapacious in her lust for power and control, Liz was demure, or even a little more coarse and manipulative when she wanted something from her daddy, and I felt for the guy. Between the two of them, he'd never had a chance. Of course, you can draw your own conclusions about where that left me.

Charleston isn't quite New Orleans when it come to high livin' and haute cuisine, but, to be fair, some of the restaurants in the old part of town come pretty damn close. So of course Fritz wanted to go in with us and open up a restaurant, a world class place to put the city on the culinary map. Betsy did too, really she did. Wouldn't we move back, she pleaded, perhaps settle in, have some kids -- "before it's too late?" I swear Betsy looked at the Rolex on her wrist as she said that, while Liz, bless her heart, was licking her lips, almost drooling. There was that biological clock tick-ticking away, and now she wanted to come back to Charleston so badly it was palpable all around the table.

Like I said, Liz was a lot like her mom in many ways. Same line line of attack, just a different approach.

So of course, with that fission bomb ticking away you know we never had a chance.

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We returned to Panama on an American 757 a few days later, got aquaTarkus all ship shape and readied her for our first trip through the canal. We rounded up some gringos at the local yacht club to help with lines in the locks, and as soon as the (required) pilot from the Canal Zone was dropped off we shipped anchor and motored off towards Miraflores locks.

You know what I remember most about that day? Of course you do...

The look on the Pilot's face when he saw our boat.

No, no super-tanker for this guy. A forty three foot Hinckley. 'A fucking sailboat,' I could hear him muttering under his breath. The poor guy looked so crestfallen it was almost heartbreaking. We motored across Gatun Lake looking over our shoulder as thousand foot long behemoths slipped silently through the water not a hundred yards off our ass. Our Pilot hid his face so the pilots on the bridges of those tankers -- on those real ships -- wouldn't see him stuck on this lowly gringo yacht trolling along a five knots.

I felt for the guy. Really, I did.