Our sons were leaving the nest, the economy was in free fall, our jobs were stagnant, and it seemed my husband and I had come to the edge of something: We could live safe, small lives or try something totally new by launching into the unknown. And so, the year before our second son left for college, we bought a gently worn sailboat that we named Heron.
The boat that turned out to be the best deal at the time was an enormous, 54-foot, cutter-rigged sailboat – a ridiculous amount of boat for two people with no prior sailing experience together to learn how to sail. Our friends all thought we were nuts.
But our plan didn’t seem all that far-fetched to me. Until then, my husband and I had spent the majority of our lives together as many couples do: trying to be decent parents and engaged and informed citizens, all while making a living. Now, with our boys leaving home, we had an opening. Here, we told ourselves, was where we would begin again. We figured a sailing expedition would allow us the time and distance to sort out our lives at this juncture, and we looked forward to the quiet and solitude of sailboat living over the modern world’s noise and clamor. If you want to create a larger life, I reasoned, you expand the size of your universe. That is, you come to the edge and step (or sail) over.
Queen Charlotte Strait, despite all the warnings about its being a lengthy crossing that exposes mariners to the full fury of the open Pacific, was still and calm; the wind was a murmur at 4.4 knots, the water glassy, spreading into gentle ovoids the size of hula hoops. The sky and strait extending behind us were a vast pale blue, round as an eye. Off Heron’s stern, gray and white bands of clouds stretched over the sea. One small cloud, cast out by the herd, drifted off to the west. Before us, the sky was darker, but more dramatic too. To the sides the Coast Range’s dark brown peaks, some glazed with icy-white snow patches, were silhouettes against the darkening sky. We passed a few fishing boats headed in the opposite direction. Then, no one.
“There aren’t any other boats,” Jeff said.
“I know. It’ll be okay,” I said.
We texted Sam, reminded him we were heading north and would be out of cell range for a while. We also called my dad, Bart, in California. As we spoke, he pulled out his iPad and linked to Google Maps, zooming in on Queen Charlotte Strait.
“We just found out we probably won’t have any cell service until Alaska!” I shouted. “So if the boys need anything, or someone needs to reach us in an emergency, well …” My voice trailed off as I imagined worst-case scenarios. “Can you be the boys’ first point of contact if they need anything?” I finally managed.
“Of course I will,” my dad agreed, always a dad.
“Okay, thanks!” I yelled into the phone, feeling slightly less panicked. “Thanks, Dad! We really appreciate it — I love you!” Then I unexpectedly teared up. My father is exceptional, the sort of man who stays steady and calm. I adored him.
Who does this? I thought. I remembered an amusing newspaper article I’d read before the Big Drop-Off; it advised parents not to worry if their college-aged kids didn’t return their texts. It described real-life helicopter parents telephoning the dean’s office in a panic when they were unable to reach their kids.
But what if the situation was reversed: What if your kids can’t reach you? I wondered. What if they need to reach you but can’t because you’re out of cell range? What if they can’t reach you for, say, seven or ten or twelve days? This hadn’t come up in the article. It hadn’t come up in the article because no responsible 21st-century parent would drop their kid off at college and then float off the face of the earth the very next day.
But the dilemma could not be helped. As with any true expedition, isolation came with the territory. Ahead in the distance were low-lying rock islands with wistful names: Wishart Island, Deserters Island, McLeod Island, Ghost Island. I peered at them through the binoculars. They looked like brown skipping stones scattered on an endless, impenetrable sea. Eventually, we neared and then threaded our way between them. The strait was vast and tidal. It seemed to stretch forever to the northwest, rising and falling like a breathing thing. I watched strands of languid kelp lift with the swells. I shot one last quick text to the boys while we could: “Grandpa Bart says to text him if u need anything! We love you, have fun! Xo Mom”
Well, that’s one way to cut the cord, I thought.
Jeff was down below, refining our course. I was up at the helm alone, surrounded by vastness: water and sky rimmed on the distant edges by dark mountains. Except before me there were no mountains, only a thin horizon line where silver water met a sky piled with gray clouds. So much space. So much seeming emptiness when all we had now was silence and each other’s company. Was it nothing or was it everything? I stared and listened. There was only the sound of water riffling off the hull and the drone of the engine. I lifted my chin skyward and looked up, and after a long while heard the buzz of a floatplane stuttering across the sky.
We passed the last small rocky island.
We passed the point where the last bar on my cellphone shrank and disappeared.
I peered out beyond the wheel. I’m glad to be alone, I thought. Sitting and listening and staring. I felt drained. Emptied. As if all the energy and effort of the past 20-some years of raising kids had seeped out of me. I zipped my coat tighter and sank deep inside myself; a small, hard nut, willing my heart not to hurt. But it did.
I thought of my girlfriends. Their doubt. Why would you leave for eight weeks alone with your husband? they’d questioned, incredulous. Maybe they were right. I missed my sister. I wished I’d called her before we left Port McNeill, but it was too late now.
Why are we doing this? I wondered. I let my doubt carry me up and out of the boat until I was utterly disassociated, mind wandering, lost, not even paying attention to the compass, the wheel, our GPS heading. I felt like the physical embodiment of absence. I missed the boys. The missing throbbed; a dull ache in my heart. I resented the ache, and I resented the fact that I couldn’t seem to lift myself above it. I turned and watched Heron’s wake. The water spooled behind us like something the boat was secreting, yards and yards of blue ribbon. The distance between us and the boys lengthened, and as it did, separated us from that life as if it were time.
Why are we doing this? I wondered again.
Suddenly, as if in response, I heard — coming from the seemingly limitless space — a breath. A single exhalation so loud I could hear it, the air and force and timbre of it, floating across the water and landing on my head.
Huh?
Phhhuuuuuphhhhh. There it was again: Phhhuuuuuphhhhh. I glanced up, the sound pulling me from my uneasy interior world. Oh! There, hanging less than 200 yards off the starboard bow, was a plume of white mist — a whale spout — rising up. The air vibrated. Thrummed! I watched the mist hang in the air, suspended for a moment.
Then out of nowhere, maybe 50 feet from the whale spout, an enormous thing as big as a bus shot straight up out of the water — its titanic bulk a rocket, a jumbo jet fuselage, a building, impossibly vertical — then came crashing back down with a boom loud as a cannon blast, sending up a violent explosion of water.
“Jeff! Jeff!” I shouted toward the companionway. “Jeff, whales!”
And they came again. Two of them off the starboard bow, closer this time. A pair of gray giants exploded out of the sea, defied gravity for the briefest moment, then came crashing down, sending up a splash so massive I could feel its salty spray all over my upturned face. It was like I could feel the sea and the sky and the whales and the bracing air we were all breathing, the whole world of it on my skin.
“Jeff!” I yelled, laughing, incredulous. “Jeff, get up here — humpbacks!” By the time he heard me and rushed up, he caught only their tails. They were good ones, though: shiny-wet black and big as steam shovels, surprisingly graceful, disappearing with a pair of slow-motion waves, and remarkably fluid for something so epic. As the humpbacks’ mammoth gray girths went down, diving deep into the ancient ocean, their tails rose in a final salute, water streaming off.
Jeff and I watched together: surveyors of a newfound world. The whales, the wonder of them, cracked open my chest.
“Oh my god! Oh my god!” I kept saying, over and over.
Sometimes I think you are able to keep going because you aren’t really yourself anymore. Something shakes you to your core, an instant so charged, so astounding, you open yourself to every atom of it — as if you’ve escaped your own skin and let your soul spread forth. That is what the whales were like for me. They took my breath, grabbed me and shook me, startling me awake with a jolt so mighty I could feel my listless interior world shatter and something immediate and mysterious and vital usher me into the present one.
“Everything is so alive here,” I whispered to Jeff.
And in that instant, with the pair of humpbacks breaching right beside me, I also knew that Sam and James were fine. It’s as if the two whales had signaled: We are here! We are with you! You might feel lost, but everything is with you, by the way: the sea, and the birds moving fluidly across it, and the whales swimming silently beneath it, and hundreds and thousands of miles away, your boys, Sam and James. We are all with you, but we are also free. And in between there are hundreds of millions of other living things — all connected. That is the wonder of the world — how you can know it, and as much of it as your heart can handle, both intimately and broadly.
And I do believe I met my boys there somehow in that instant. Not their souls but some greater portion of themselves, boundlessly present. Their spirit. It’s like Einstein’s theory that the only real time is that of the observer, who carries his or her own time and space. Or the ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is simply energy. On the boat that day I think the boys must’ve lent me some of their spirit because the hope and energy I felt then was as big as the sky. It was like a fiery blue space opening up inside you that makes you want to breathe in everything deep. I didn’t tell Jeff about this; I didn’t see how I could even begin to explain it, so all I said was, “Get the camera!”
He rushed down to grab the good Canon, but by the time he returned the whales were gone.
“Well, that was a game changer,” I said. “Humpbacks! Humpbacks right off the bow!”
“That was insanely cool,” Jeff replied. “Did you read that guy’s story in Cruising World? The one about the humpback that breached and came down on the deck of his sailboat, crushing his mast?”
“No,” I laughed. “But if those humpbacks had landed and taken me out? Well, it would be hard to think of a cooler way to go. Crushed by a humpback!” I grinned jauntily.
“That would be a horrible death,” Skipper Jeff said, always the realist. “But I can see you’re back in the game.”
Then, even though my phone showed no bars, a text chimed through: James, 2:25 p.m.: “Just hung out with the Ultimate Lax Bro! Haha but ok call me when you get service, love you”
“You did?? We just saw two HUGE humpbacks breach out of the water. Xo Mom” I typed and hit Send, thumbs flying.
It sent!
“Haha cool! Talk to you soon.”
But of course we wouldn’t talk soon since our phones didn’t work, and they wouldn’t for a long time.
But not talking felt okay. There was a northwest wind blowing 9.7 knots off the starboard beam, and a sky filled with scrolled white clouds, so Jeff and I got to it and raised the main.
Excerpted from Uncharted: A Couple’s Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another by Kim Brown Seely. Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission, Sasquatch Books.
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