The Memory of Place

We stopped off in the San Blas Islands after we cleared the canal before heading north across the Caribbean. Once these islands were famous, out of the way places, the native folk turning out molas one at a time. Now? The islands were overrun with tourists from a never ending flow of cruise-ships that plied the Caribbean, and hey, everyone was smiling, making money selling Chinese made molas and having a hell of a time.

Me? I'd bought some local rum in Balboa. It was like 150-proof rocket-fuel, so I was set, happy as a clam. I'd even given the pilot a bottle for his troubles, before he hopped off the boat muttering obscenities in an impolite Creole-Spanish.

I think he was crying as he motored away. Almost. They probably give better rum on the cruise ships. Poor guy. I felt for him. Really.

◊◊◊◊◊

Not quite two months later we were sailing past Fort Sumter into Charleston Harbor, bound for a huge marina on the west side of the Battery. I wondered if it was just me, but why did the walls of the fort look like they were coated in old, worn out blood? What memory of place did those walls hold for people who considered the place holy ground? More to the point, would history repeat itself in my little world, the world around these troubled waters? Little histories always seem to repeat, don't they, when families get involved?

Liz and I followed a subtle progression from happiness, after we arrived in Charleston, to a mild, partly cloudy entropy as time wore on. As we drifted within this entropical paradise, we found we were, more often than not, trying to be polite to one another, trying to avoid conflict at all cost. To not rock the boat. Then one day, out of the blue she was talking about selling the boat and buying a house, setting down roots, having kids. Hell, we were almost forty years old and she was talking about kids, plural, not singular, and the longer we stayed tied up at that dock the more insistent this talk grew. It was frankly upsetting, and she took on a wistful, pouty look when she hinted about moving back to the street she had grown up on as a kid; pretty soon it was like she was telling me it was her societal obligation to bring two or three more souls back into that world, and that world only, and well, when contrasted against the life we'd known the past five years her whole performance struck me as delusional, to the point it was ironic, if not downright comedic.

And I told her so. I think I even used the word delusional -- and more than once, too -- which is why I never applied for a position at the State Department, if you know what I mean.

Hell, I don't know, maybe I was looking at Fort Sumter off in the distance while my mouth ran on and on and away. Maybe I was the one who fired the first shots of our little onrushing uncivil war. I don't know anymore, and in the long run I don't imagine it really matters because after that she looked at me like I'd thrown sulphuric acid all over her dreams. I'd never seen so much hate on another human being's face in my life, and I looked at her for a moment -- until she turned and looked away, looked at the old spires and buildings along the Battery looming out of the afternoon smog -- and I shuddered at the feeling of desolation that swept over me. Had I really ever known her? Had we really been on such a different path? Had I really been so clueless -- or had we just 'changed' over the years?

Yeah, I know, probably clueless, but I think paths almost have to diverge when 'middle age crazy' and that tick-ticking biological clock collide. Like matter and anti-matter, I reckon. Instant annihilation.

I think back on our first day back in Carolina from time to time. I found the marina Liz's dad had booked for us, and called the dockmaster on the VHF as we sailed up the Ashley River channel, and they said they'd send a boy out to help us into our new slip. We motored around in circles for a while until the kid bounced down the docks, then I followed his directions and took the boat into the slip he pointed out to us, and Liz and I jumped off to help him get her tied off.

"Where y'all coming from," the kid asked as he helped us with the lines.

"Whagarei," said I, ever the seasoned world traveller.

"Oh, that down in Florida?"

"New Zealand," I tossed back at him in my slowest deadpan. John Wayne didn't have nothin' on this white boy...

"Oh, right," the kid said, "down near Miami, ain't it. Heard of that place."

"Yeah." Me too, kid. Welcome home, sucker.

No one in Charleston, South Carolina could relate to what Liz and I had just done, let alone what we'd been through emotionally. Funny, but maybe I was the only one who couldn't see what was coming, so maybe that kid on the dock wasn't the only dullard out there that sunny afternoon.

It's funny what sticks out in your mind, isn't it?

◊◊◊◊◊

I gave it my best. I tried to like her dad, I tried to like his country club gin & tonics and his brown Rolls Royce with the tan vinyl roof, but the poor guy was always so sauced by noon he never remembered a thing we talked about -- and he was an embarrassing drunk. And so, Betsy? Hell, the first time she slipped her hand under the table and tried to pull down my zipper? Well, I don't know, but things between all of us just seemed to get weird after those first fateful encounters.

Maybe weird isn't the best word to describe those moments, but it's as close as I can get. Things just got weird. In a hurry. We opened the new restaurant down by the river, a pretty upscale low-country place that soon hit the cool zone and was the place to be seen. Liz and I became local celebrities for a while, while the book we penned about our adventures in the Pacific did a brisk business for a week or two, and things were beginning to shape up as, well, maybe predictable would be stretching the point, but things were at least tolerable between Liz and I. We were making money again, so everyone was happy, and...

...she came back from a doctors appointment one day, told me she couldn't have a baby, that we had -- apparently -- waited too long. 'You're off the hook,' she said, sarcastically, but what got me was that she was the one who looked relieved. She had me to blame, I guess, but that was, I saw, merely a convenience. I'd made her wait too long, or so the story went, so it was all my doing and that was that. Lots of knowing nods, lots of scowls -- aimed my way.

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Yet in the end, nobody really seemed to give a damn. Not her mom, not her dad, not the brother or sisters who dropped by the restaurant occasionally for a free meal. Surreal. But Liz DID seem to care about not being able to have a baby, in a convoluted way that felt increasingly surreal -- and manipulative. I guessed there were so many conflicting emotions boiling around in her mind that, well, I thought for a time she was simply starting to come unglued.

But no, she was thinking along different lines. She was plotting a new, very different course.

We still lived on the boat; neither one of us could let go of that, but the space began to feel small. It never had before, not in 12,000 miles and almost five years, but now we just couldn't get out of one another's way fast enough. Everything about 'us' was out of balance, everything seemed confined -- and suddenly way out of place.

Then I came home very late one night and found a Sheriff's Deputy waiting for me on the dock by the boat, and he served divorce papers to me right there in the early morning fog, and gave me notice that the boat -- my home -- was now off limits until the divorce proceedings settled all questions of ownership. He would wait while I got some things off.

True to form, all Liz's things were gone too. The boat looked like a huge, empty tomb, now impossibly large. Had we really taken her half way around the world -- and back? The Deputy came below and looked around, and I talked to him about the journey Liz and I had made. He was impressed. Hell, so was I, because that no longer felt like a part of my life.

Had we really done so much together? Seen so many new places, made so many new friends? Together? And after those miles -- and years -- had we learned so little about one another?

Anyway, the deputy came by weeks later and asked me to autograph his copy of our book. Yeehah.

◊◊◊◊◊

The lawyer I'd found to handle incorporating the restaurant -- a cute gal named Lisa Mullins (and a real tiger by all accounts as she was universally loathed by most of the divorced men in town I'd met) who came to know more about my life than I did by the time all the fractured dust settled. Anyway, I was in for the duration and Mullins told me not to worry about stuff like this, that she'd take care of me. Within a few days I had rented a small loft near the Battery, and a small circle of friends I'd accumulated at the marina began to rally 'round the flag. Lots of rum flowed those days, though I was dicey for a while. Things felt alright one day, kind of like I might live, you know? The next day might be deep fried crud. Hell, stranger things have happened, but when your world gets rattled like this it takes a while to figure out which way is really up. Down, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot easier to find.

I kept to a schedule, walked to a coffee shop up the street every morning, got to the restaurant by nine to get things up and running, hit the office behind the kitchen to get caught up on all the paperwork, then out on the floor to get ready for the lunchtime onslaught. I hardly ever bumped into Liz, and she was cordial when we saw one another.

Mullins the lawyer called a few weeks later. Liz and her family wanted all interest in the restaurant; I could have the boat and some cash. Sounded like a good deal for them, not too bad for me, so I gave Mullins the go-ahead. Liz signed off on it a few days later, so the case went to court uncontested, and after a few more weeks it was a done deal. Seventeen years of marriage. Done. Over. Faithful all the way, reasonably happy with each other, we didn't hit each other, bite each other, tell lies about each other.

We had watched the idealism of our generation take hold and move the world, we had tried to reach out into that world, tried to understand the forces that always seemed to keep people at each other's throats. No matter. In the end we turned on each other just like everyone else. Maybe, like everyone else in our generation, we'd self-destructed when we realized the enormity of what we'd attempted. It's hard to fight the tides of human nature...just ask any salmon fighting upstream -- to spawn.

So, in the end I found myself thinking: was our marriage a mirror of our times? I still don't know, but maybe that's not an altogether unjustified way of looking at things.

We'd sold out once before, embarked down the path of suburban conformity, but then we dropped out, tried to rekindle the spark that defined those years at Berkeley. We moved out into the world, searching for some kind of hair-brained truth, but ultimately we were lost just like everyone else -- and we knew it, too -- even if we were afraid to admit it. Like all of us who sold out, we tried to come back to the reality of what we'd lost, only to find that we'd become anachronisms, our dissolution as a couple -- and as a generation -- complete.

But had we learned anything at all along the way?

Maybe by turning our backs on the choices we made, to the choices that defined a generations need, we repudiated the very meaning and purpose of our lives. In the vacuum that was left, all manner of crazy extremism rushed to fill the void. No running from conformity could take us back to the truth we'd found at Berkeley. No amount of self-deluding existential bullshit could erase the reality of what we'd come to know about ourselves.

We were just like anyone else out there, and now that time was at an end, those days were over. That's what it means to sell out, I reckon.

It was unnerving, moving back on the boat, putting my shirts back into the same old drawers -- drawers that had been Liz's for so many years -- then laying out my navigation instruments again -- like I really knew where I was headed. I did, however, have a ton of boxes up on the dock to move back on-board. That too is life.

Anyway, moving boxes gave me time to think about the options.

Money wasn't a problem, but staying here would be. Charleston's a small town when you get right down to it, and I wasn't a local. That's always a bad mix -- even more so after a divorce -- and there were still lots of places I wanted to see. I'd never considered sailing alone before, but it could be done.

I walked up to the car again and brought another box of books down to the boat, and I saw 'Mullins the man-eating lawyer' waiting by the boat as I walked back down the ramp.

"Hi," she said. "Nice day for a sail. Wanna go out?"

I looked at her, standing there dressed like a freshly-minted yachty right out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. Red shorts, new Topsiders, white Polo shirt. Every fucking cliché in the book. She looked kinda cute, though, in a preppy kind of way. Clean, if you know what I mean. Lawyerly, and clean.

"Yeah, it looks nice out there. I'd love to but I've got stuff all over the place down there, things not stowed yet. Maybe in a week or so?"

"Let's take mine. It's just over there." She pointed across the way to little blue-striped double ender.

"Oh, is that yours? That's a WestSail, isn't it?"

"Yup, an old 32. I picked her up a couple years ago, been cleaning her up."

You know, all of a sudden I felt like going out for a sail. "Yeah, sounds good. Let me get this box out of the way and I'll be there in a minute."

"OK," she said. I heard her walking away down the dock and turned to look at her legs.

"And, Lisa," I said, not really knowing why, "Thanks."

"No problem." Nice smile, too. Funny I'd never noticed that...

◊◊◊◊◊

She came down every Sunday, she said, and took Soliloquy out for a turn on the harbor. No matter; if the weather was foul she came down and sat in her 'saloon' and read books; her affair with the boat was a symbiotic one, she said, they both gained from their time together. She'd come down today, saw me loading boxes on board aquaTarkus and decided to ask me to go out for a sail with her. No pre-arranged agenda at work, just a simple gesture. She had a quiet smile on her face too, kind of an all-knowing, insider's joke kind of smile, but I had no idea where that had come from.

She wasn't a bad seaman either, as it turned out, and I don't know why that surprised me -- other than pure misogynistic simple-mindedness. Still, after Liz and I published that coffee table book about our voyage, we enjoyed a little celebrity within the local sailing community, and maybe that's why Mullins was so nervous. So, I kept out of the way as she backed out her slip, stayed out of her way as much as I could while she hoisted sail, then just watched and enjoyed the day as it unfolded, like any other guest on her boat might. It was a cool Spring day, a freshening breeze was coming out of the northwest and whitecaps already dappling the harbor. Lots of other sailboats were out on the bay, with all those full sails drifting in bold relief against the blustery sky, and after an hour or so found I was letting go, enjoying myself.

"There are a couple of cinnamon rolls down on the chart table," she said as she kept an eye out for traffic coming out the Ashley River channel. "Wanna bring 'em up?"

I dropped down the companionway, picked up the sack and turned to climb back out into the sunshine, but something caught my eye. A little plaque mounted by one of the port-lights; a diploma from an Outward Bound School in Colorado, dated January, 1977. A winter mountaineering program. Now I was impressed; this girl wasn't a pretender.

Lisa sheeted off the genoa and we munched on cinnamon rolls for awhile, as Soliloquy reached across the harbor towards Fort Sumter, and I watched her as she steered with her foot on the tiller, her eyes on the sails. She seemed to be communing with the boat, and though I knew the feeling well it was nice to watch someone else fall into the zone. Or, I soon thought, I used to know that feeling well. Somewhere, somehow, that simple symbiosis had left my life somewhere out there on the sea, probably about the time I started taking all kinds of things for granted.

Like our marriage, for instance.

That failure was easy to see out on the water that afternoon, 20-20 hindsight being what it is; instead of reveling in the audacity of our choice to break away, Liz and I had grown complacent, we'd slipped into that other zone lots of married people do. We'd begun to take for granted the many great things about our life together, and in that quiet complacency the meaning of those things grew vague and obscure, until all the goodness was -- gone.

When you get to that point in a marriage, well, there are no compasses to help you find your way back. There are no obvious courses to steer through the rocks. All you can hope for is that the designer included enough lifeboats...

Yet Lisa Mullins hadn't lost that sense of purpose. Somehow, she held on to life just as she held on to Soliloquy -- firmly, symbiotically, as if her relationship to the boat was a kind of marriage.

"Where are you?" Startled, I heard her voice and looked at Mullins. She was looking ahead, looking at the set of her sails.

"Did you say something?" I asked.

"Yeah, where are you? You look lost."

There it was. My feelings of loss were so obvious even a lawyer could see them.

"Yes, I suppose I am."

She turned to look at me.

"Is it Liz?" -- Or, 'Are you really so lost without her?'

"I don't know. I don't think it's that simple, but who knows? Maybe it is..."

"Maybe you just need some sea time," she laughed as she looked at the genoa.

"Yeah, that's got a be it." I looked at her and smiled. "So, where're we headed, skipper?"

"You up for a little adventure."

"Always."

"Let's head down the ICW a couple of miles, down Stono's Creek. There's a good dive down there on the water. Shrimp and grits kinda place."

"Ah."

"You like shrimp and grits? Oh, I forgot, you be a California boy, dat 'bout right?" She gazed at me for a moment, and a thrill passed through me. I hadn't felt one of those in years. Amazing.

"Is that a Charleston kind of accent?"

"Low country, you poor white boy. You ever read Pat Conroy?"

"Who?"

"Oh, you be a poor, stupid white boy." She laughed, and her eyes sparkled as she tacked the boat through the wind, heading upriver for the Intra-Coastal Waterway.

"Sorry. Man's got to know his limitations."

"Yeah? That must be a guy thing."

So, she wanted to play dirty, huh. "Where'd you go to school?" This could be fun . . .

"School? You mean like high school?"

"College."

"Tulane. Then Yale for law. Why?"

"Just wondered," I said, not wanting to get killed and filing that one away for another day.

"Wondered? You wonderin' about 'lil ole me?" she said in a Carolina accent that seemed a little too thick. She was looking right at me, though, with an intensity I found unsettling, if a little amusing. She was doing the alpha-chick thing, and enjoying herself immensely.

"Yeah, well, it's not everyday I get to go sailing with an Ivy League Lawyer who's into cheese grits, if you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, yo ain't lived 'til you et cheese grits wit yo lawya."

"I hope they have cold beer."

"Shit, white boy, yo sho dumb, yo knowz it? People breast feed on beer 'round these parts." Now she was smiling, truly enjoying the persona she had so easily slipped on. I think she was trying to make me comfortable, me being a foreigner and all, but this really was a world apart from anything I'd ever been around before. But it felt comfortable. She felt comfortable, like an old pair of shoes.