Gypsy Afloat

“Where do you find these people,” my friend Ann wrote, truly incredulous. I described for her the intricate network of connections. Adriana had sold the Dutch woman, Wil, a house, and Rian was Wil’s friend, who had parked the sailboat in the Caribbean to fly up to Italy to visit Wil and her husband, Maarten. Rian had not gone hiking with us, but Rian’s husband, Herman had gone hiking with us, so Rian and Wil’s husband had met up with all of us, just for dinner, and Rian had wound up sitting across from me at dinner. Quite ordinary circumstances, actually, for one of the most extraordinary encounters of my life: I’d met my living double! I’d met the woman living the life I lived in imagination but she fulfilled it in the world….the life I had intended to live, had in fact dreamed up for myself and tracked through literature, but never actually, yet she did. My unlived life! She was living my unlived life.

I first got wind of my unlived life when I read Ella Maillart’s Gypsy Afloat. It’s the true story of how the Swiss Adventuress first set out on her life's true course, hitchhiking around the world on sailboats. She had been a French teacher in England when the restlessness overcame her. She wanted high sea adventure. I can’t quite remember the turning point, how she got the nerve to just abandon the drudgery and, without a cent to her name, hitch a ride on a sailboat and volunteer as crew. This was back in the 19-teens or twenties, certainly before World War II by which time she was living in India on an Ashram writing about cats as true teachers of Zen. And I don’t know for how many years she was at sea before she then started traveling the Middle East with the photographer Ann Marie Schwarzenbach, one time lover of Carson McCullers and acquaintance of my Grandmother, which is how I came to know about both Ann Marie and, through her, Ella. I read Gypsy Afloat and thought, that’s the life I should be living. I was in graduate school at the time writing a novel called An Open Boat. One night I dreamed of a ship's prow cutting through water and woke up and had to paint it. I decided that, after grad school, I would go to work on an Alaskan fishing vessel. The woman I lived with at time told me such work would kill me. I wasn’t as athletic then as I am now. I knew she was right. Work on a fishing vessel might kill me, but not life as a Gypsy Afloat.

Instead I decided it time that I focus my reading on sea narratives: The Odyssey, of course, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Moby Dick, of course, and Conrad and Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. For about a year I read all 21 of Patrick O’brian’s High Sea Adventure novels and even bought his glossary and book of navigational maps. I tried to understand my passion through Bahktin and the Dialogic Imagination. Sea narratives are really about timeless Time, Chiaros Time. Time is not linear when one travels by sea. There are sudden gusts and hurlings forward and sudden periods of absolute stillness. Yes, I thought! That’s exactly how Time works for me. Getting somewhere is not a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I live at the Mercy of Winds and Gods—in timeless Time, hence this sense that I live on an open boat. I tried to convince myself that my longing for high seas adventure was entirely an imaginative need. Lord knows I didn’t really want to be cast alone out to sea in a small sailboat, victim of The Perfect Storm. It was this imaginative craft of my reading and writing work I wanted to navigate.

But suddenly, Sunday night, the paradigm shifted. I found myself eating a pizza with Rian who has been sailing around the world in a 49 foot boat for the past 5 years and imagines she will keep sailing for at least another decade. From Granada, where the boat is now docked, she will sail to Patagonia and then up the West Coast of South America, then North America, to Alaska. That leg of the journey alone will take—she estimates—seven years. They stop often she reminds me. They want to see everything worth seeing, plus she is an Art Professor and is in demand on the lecture circuit.

I’ve had this feeling of strange cahoots only once before in my life, when I met my sister’s friends Tom and Barbara who were building a luxury sailboat from scratch in the middle of the North Carolina mountains. They, too, planned to sail it around the world and keep sailing. It took them more than a decade to build it. They live in Maine now and do sometimes take the boat out to sea for brief adventures, but have never made it around the world or even to Barbara’s native Estonia.

“Well,” Rian explains to me, after I’ve told her everything I know about our mysterious parallels, about Ella Maillart and about Tom and Barbara’s building project. “There are Builders and there are Sailors. During the decade they were building the boat, I was learning to navigate the sea.”

And what about me? What have I been doing while you all have been out there doing the real work of building and navigating? Suddenly my own work seems specious and unnecessary—the work of fantasy, escapist, unreal. I have to resist the urge to throw myself before this stranger who is not strange. I have to resist the longing to beg her to take me with them. I’ll be the crew. I’ll be the cook. I’ll be the gypsy who’ll sleep on deck and keep the pirates away while they are land lubbing.

I get home from dinner that night later than I ever ever allow myself to stay out, half believing I will go with her...that this encounter was a harbinger of unforeseeable change, a gust, a hurling forward....but toward what, in what mysterious vessel?