Crossing the Line: Wynne's first post

1519 EST
Brooklyn, NY

For the last month, Kristian and I have been busy. I’ve dragged him up and down the east coast, visiting friends and family. In between the landscaping projects at the farm, long drives to and around the Northeast, siblings’ graduation ceremonies, and visiting with friends we won’t see again until we’ve passed through more than a few time zones, Kristian and I have been trying to prepare for our circumnavigation. One strange law of traveling is that when preparing for a trip, you always come up with something else you need. The list seems to grow tauntingly ahead of us as we near the end. Perhaps this has something to do with a constant redefinition of the word “need.” We should be happy we didn’t have more time to prepare, or our careful over-thinking of this word would have had us packing way more than will fit into our combined 150 L of backpack space. The truth about what is necessary and what isn’t will only be clear in Nuku Hiva, I suppose.

It’s difficult to prepare to travel to somewhere like Nuku Hiva. There is little information about it on the Internet, at least in English. When we describe our plans to family, friends, acquaintances, and people we awkwardly meet at siblings' graduations, almost no one knows where Nuku Hiva is. You can tell by the look on their face and their shifting eyes that many people are just pretending to know where French Polynesia is, or the Marquesas. This is nothing to be ashamed of; I didn’t know where it was either until I decided to go there. I am convinced that about all that comes to mind for most people when they hear place names like Tahiti, Tonga, Antigua, Barbados, Canaries, Azores, Sechelles, or Maldives, is warmth, palm trees, coconuts, white beaches, cerulean bays. Like I was, they may not even be sure which waters these islands are in—Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian. All that exists in the mind’s eye is the mythical Tropical Island, more a fiction than a place.

To get to the particular island of Nuku Hiva, we must cross the Equator, which also possesses a mythical aura. For hundreds of years, mariners from many countries, on everything from naval submarines to cruise ships, have commemorated individuals’ first equatorial crossing with elaborate “line crossing” ceremonies. As Wikipedia, mother of all wisdom, tells us, these ceremonies were often quite brutal, even resulting in occasional deaths. Today, mellower versions are popular among various mariners. I myself have enviously heard stories of my friends on tall ships undergoing mild hazing at the hands of a crew member wearing old oakum on his head and pretending to be the god Neptune, in order to earn a certificate which officially declares their induction into the order of Shellbacks.

I doubt there will be any fraternity-style hazing involved in our line crossing on Le Pelican with the Gillot family, but I’m still giddy, as if it were my first day in college, or the first time I had a beer, or my first night sleeping on a sailboat. The Equator is a line beyond which our Tropical Island lies. Beyond the Equator, things like the seasons are upside-down, and even the sky is unfamiliar.

I won’t pretend that the world isn’t so small these days that what we’re doing is unheard of, that no one travels to the emeralds scattered through the warm southern Pacific. It’s safe to say that almost everyone has heard of Tahiti, and many go there regularly. However, most of them probably travel by airplane, and are therefore not entitled to Shellback certificates. Even among those cruisers who sail there, few have the pleasure of being as delightfully unprepared as Kristian and I. We have no boat, and not much money. We won’t be able to afford a flight out of Nuku Hiva, so we’d better use our charisma to hitch another ride, or become exceptional swimmers. Kristian insists that purchasing food at a grocery store is out of the question, and that we’ve got to perfect surf fishing and the slaughter of wild goats, or sleep with growling bellies. It’s hard to picture my immediate future consisting of a month surrounded by blue sea and blue sky, followed by days spent fishing with a stick I found on the beach, trying to speak pidgin French, and sleeping under a foreign sky—yet this is the only image I have to help me prepare myself.

Now that we’ve started a blog, and even got a sponsor (thank you, Back Country Ski and Sports), I feel like I need to be able to verbalize why I’m doing this, what I hope to gain from it, and the attitude in which I approach it. First of all, I would like to say that I’m somewhat of a coward and a worrier, and that it is not easy or comfortable for me to undertake something like this. It’s not as if I’m going grocery shopping, or brushing my teeth. There is something terrifying about stepping toward a place that is a myth, a fiction, crossing the line into an unfamiliar and hence unimaginable way of life, and hoping that there will be something under your foot when it lands. Preparing for it makes me anxious and cranky sometimes. I worry about student loans, vaccines, visas, and language barriers; what books, electronics, musical instruments, fishhooks, and sunblock we ought to bring for our indefinite vacation to anywhere. I stress over how to efficiently box up and store my whole life, cars, clothes, friends, family, everything that doesn’t fit into 50 L of backpack space. I hope that practice will help me overcome my fear of traveling in the same way that exposure helps people overcome their fear of spiders or heights. May it be so simple.

I mean this to be encouraging. When people say, “Oh, what you’re doing sounds so amazing, I wish I could do something like that,” I would like to remind them that no law of physics is preventing them from doing whatever they want. It’s not as if Kristian and I somehow learned how to fall up, and everyone else is still constrained by the law of gravity. Preparation, sacrifice, and perhaps a bit of self-overcoming are required, but even travel-shy people like me can make these things happen. We hope that this blog will provide an informative resource to help other people transform their vague, half-baked travel dreams into realities.

Posted by Wynne