There's this popular theme here, "A book that changed my life." So, reading a book actually changed the course of your life? Sounds a little, uh, hyperbolic to me. Well, I'm the last guy in the world who gets to complain about hyperbole, but I'll tell you a book that changed my life. And very nearly ended it.
That book is "Sailing Alone Around the World", by Joshua Slocum, the first man to circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat; a man who boasted that if stranded alone on a desert isle with nothing but a tree and a clasp knife, he would sail away from it. And I believe him.
Oh. And. He writes as well as he sails.
I read the book in January 1969, dropped out of UT Austin grad school, and used all my money to buy a 26-foot sailboat hull complete with sails and rigging. I had it shipped to a boatyard in Corpus Christi, where I put three thousand pounds of lead into the keel, and built in a cabin with a galley and head, with the plan of sailing it seven hundred miles straight across the Gulf to Isla Mujeres, Mexico. There was this girl there. You know.
Keep in mind that this was long before the days of GPS. For me, navigation was a thirty-dollar plastic sextant, a star chart, a shortwave (receiver only) for accurate time, and a copy of the current navigation tables.
I sit huddled near the tiller under my canvas sun hat, crusted with salt from the sea and me, and strip the lid from a tin of sardines, ignoring the sweat trickling from my chin into my lunch. I toss the tin lid over the side into the flat, lifeless sea, and innocently stick my neck out to see what becomes of it. It’s sinking. No. It's falling. Slowly, fishtailing and tumbling like an autumn leaf, flashing once in the sun, growing smaller and smaller, falling through the water. It’s gone: it is not obscured, just too small to see. It will fall about three thousand meters, say the charts. I’m never more than two miles from land, Mom. Straight down. A human body, after the air cavities are filled with water, would fall, I muse. Would it tumble? It would fall much slower, taking hours or days to fall two thousand fathoms. Unless it were inside the sinking shell of a lead-keeled boat, then it would fall much faster, I guess. In a tic my world makes an ugly metamorphosis. From a point on the surface of the planet I am transported two miles above it, tenuously supported by a clear, black, deadly, liquid atmosphere. Surface no more. My breath comes with difficulty: I’ve never been good with heights.
It doesn’t get any flatter than the Gulf of Mexico in this dead-August calm. Well, that’s not perfectly true. Subliminal wavelets arrive from some faraway, days-ago activity, just enough to set the sails, shrouds, spars, banging and clattering. I leave up all the useless sailing machinery lest I miss some lost waif of wind taking me a few feet nearer Yucatan.
I find most people have never been alone, without sight or sound of others, for more than a day or so. I call myself a loner, but being alone at sea is telling. Not mirrored by companions, my identity is moot. Without the anchor of community, reality drifts: things inanimate or abstract begin to converse with me. Those who sail around the world alone, all, all alone, must be made of more stable elements than I.
When a ship approaches at sea, she rises like a celestial object: first only the top of her mast is visible, then her superstructure, her deck, her hull, climbing up toward me. Departing, she falls down, away. No. Not down. Back around the other side. The world undergoes a second wrenching metamorphosis. My two-dimensional Flatland world, my infinite mental grid, pops itself into a child's toy ball. No line is straight. There is no flat. A cold sickness settles in my stomach.
Night comes.
Again, the sky is clear. Last night I took sextant sights on Venus and Aldebaran, worked up the data on the calculator, and determined my position. Same as the night before. And the night before that. I sit out here on deck watching the dim memento of day fade away. I sit out here because a breeze might come, because a tanker might bear down on me at twenty knots with none aboard looking ahead or watching the radar, in which case I would … shine my flashlight at the tanker's bridge? Shout? Jump in the water? I sit on deck because if I take myself below with a book and a flashlight, my little boat won't hide me from this sky.
There, glimmers the dust mote we call Venus, there the reddish one called Mars, yonder is flyspeck Jupiter, and sit I on a fourth. Beyond, forever nothing. Stars, tiny ripples of light from suns that once existed. I take shallow breaths to make no sound; she whose metaphor is Death must not feel me struggle in her web. The improbable red-hearted Scorpion, poisonous stinger poised, struts the surface of the sky. In this phrase, “surface of the sky,” I find the most absurd and pitiful self-contradiction: a surface of any kind being so astronomically rare in time and space, that for practical purposes we can say there exists no such thing as surface where a soul might find position. I hug my hands to stop them shaking. Now tears and mucus flow, not sweat. My eyes are squeezed shut, too late. Too late. I know everything. The meaning of life. The sin that Jesus can’t forgive, I know. I know the Name of God and Satan and the Worm that shall not die. I know when the world will end. The cold absolute black of outer space seeps into every pore to quench my soul.
The third, ultimate transformation comes. Reality refuted, emptiness collapses on itself. I will fall forever. Lord God Satan, take my soul. Just send some wind to get me out of here.
After finishing the last of the cooking wine, I fumble through the emergency medical kit. “Talwin. Take one capsule every four hours as needed for pain.” Sounds like just the ticket. I’ll start out with two.
The pain pills ran out hours ago, and reality is starting to show its ugly face. With a Levantine spite. I fumble to switch on the shortwave, for the first time in days. “… with maximum sustained winds of one-hundred-fifteen knots, Camille is on a north-northwesterly course, heading toward the Yucatan Channel at a speed of fifteen knots.” There are high clouds in the Southeast.
The length of a wave is a function of its height. As waves get higher, they are spread farther apart, maintaining a nice gradual slope. Thus the normal wave, no matter what its height, presents no danger. The wave that sweeps a boat along, rolling her over and over in a dead tangled mess of broken rigging, is the rare freak wave, the thirty-footer jammed into the same space as its normal fifteen-foot marching comrades. Such a behemoth grows much too steep and breaks, turning into a snarling, thundering, charging predator. Like the one coming at me right now. I turn her upwind and punch the bowsprit square into the onrushing wall of water, throwing my arms around the mizzenmast in a death grip. My world turns jade green. She stops, shakes herself, then breaks out through the vertical backside of the wave, falling a good fifteen feet into the following trough. It feels like landing on concrete. Dazed, I climb up out of the cockpit. I seem to have no broken bones. She is not taking on water. Everything seems to be working. Thank God for thick glass fiber matting and polyester resin.
The water that flows northward around Isla Mujeres, coming as it does from the open Caribbean, is of astonishing clarity. Underwater visibility often far exceeds one hundred feet. Anchoring here is a revelation. I lower the anchor to the white sand bottom, thirty feet below me, and see it sitting there upright. Drifting down with the current and paying out the anchor rode, I apply a little tension and the anchor falls over, sending up a little puff of sand. After drifting down a little farther, I tie off the rode and watch the anchor dig in its flukes and burrow into the sand like a great iron shellfish.
Sitting with Ximena in the moonlight on the bluff above El Garrafon reef and looking down on her, anchored in the still lee of the island, I cannot see the water at all. She seems to be floating in the air above a white sand beach.
Oh, Ximena La Chilena, La Urraca, flying fast low wild and fearless, lost to me now forty years, do you still live? Surely not, thinking of all the scary scrapes you led me into. What the hell did a woman like you ever see in a half-deaf tongue-tied Texas farm boy, a nerdy kid who slides by on looks alone? Maybe you figured that I would handle the physical world, while your golden tongue and angel face could turn a lynchmob into a welcoming party. Was that your plan? No. You had only contempt for plans.
We take her south: Cozumel, Xel Ha. We anchor at Tulum, swim in, make love on the beach and in the ruins. In '69, not a soul is there. Maybe they're all at that big Woodstock deal. Shit. I miss out on everything. We decide to continue southward, and check out Belice.
On the second night, I leave X with the tiller and a safe southerly heading, and go below to catch a couple hours of sleep. Some time later, I am awakened by a loud crash, am thrown from my bunk to the floor as the boat heels wildly over. and the pots and frying pans from the galley land on me.
That crazy woman has turned her West and run her right up onto the God-damned beach.
Next morning, I uneasily leave X with the rifle to guard the boat and start walking, looking for some help. A few miles up the coast, I find a path, and head west, through the jungle. There is an Indian village, but they speak no Spanish, and I speak no Mayan. There is not a road, not a town, not a motor vehicle. There is not shit.
After hiking back, I stand there looking at my boat. At low tide, she is sitting on dry sand. her bow pointed inland. She sits level, her keel buried in the sand. It looks as if she is floating in sand. Floating a little high, but then, sand is heavier than water. How did her keel get buried in hard sand? Then, as I stand, scratching my head, a dying wave washes up the beach past me, and my feet suddenly sink down a few inches. That's it!!! waves coming up the beach fluidize the sand and, for just an instant, the boat can move a tiny bit.
I walk an anchor out into the surf, as far as I can still catch air in the wave troughs, and set it deep in the sand. I make the anchor rode fast to the bow cleat, and set it up bar-taut. Then I put up all sail. So you can sail through sand, can you? Well, we'll just sail you right out of here.
The tide comes in, and waves wash up past the hull. Checking the compass heading, I can see that she is, ever so slowly, coming around. By the next day,she is pointed out to sea. On the next high tide, she is out far enough that a big wave lifts her clear, and she sails a foot. Next wave, she makes a yard. Next wave, with a bump, she is free. We are gone. Thank God that was not a rocky shore.
When we reach open water, I turn her northward. This crazy woman can come back to Austin with me. Or not.
Oh, here's a boat just like her:
http://www.privateer26.org/
Kenner Privateer. A cute little boat, but very solid.
Now that was a book that changed my life.