"Snailing" Aboard Escargot de Mer

Wynne Hedlesky
Nov. 24 2011
1338 local time 
Mackay, Queensland, Australia

            Kristian and I have been ashore for about a month, and we have yet to blog about our longest sea voyage yet. Not only have we been very busy here in Australia, we have also not been particularly eager to drag up recollections that would put a damper on our enjoyment of our time here. But you learn from everything that doesn’t kill you, I guess, and anyway, some of the events are actually pretty entertaining, retrospectively.

Our voyage from Raiatea, in French Polynesia, to Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, would try the patience of a very saintly person. With the trade winds becoming weak and irregular in the South Pacific as cyclone season approached, what was supposed to be a two-week trip became more than twice as long. We were twenty-seven days at sea between landfalls, and the entire voyage took thirty-one days. Even if we’d been having a blast aboard Escargot de Mer (“Snail of the Sea,” in French), as we not-particularly-fondly called the under-maintained catamaran our captain was delivering from Raiatea to Australia, this would have been too much of a good thing. It turned out to be way too much of a bad thing.

I sometimes remember with amazement my jubilation on the day that Joe, the captain who was hired to deliver Escargot from Raiatea to Australia, asked us if we wanted to come on board as crew. Perhaps the challenges of merely getting underway should have foreshadowed our later problems. Our departure from Raiatea had only come after about a month of frustrating delays. The boat was scheduled to get hauled out to repair the starboard sail drive (which, it turns out, is a rather important part of the engine), and a crack in the aluminum mast (which, it turns out, is a rather important part of the rig), but the date for the haul out was rescheduled several times. In the mean time, there were numerous other minor issues.

I noticed during the month that we spent on board waiting to finish our repairs, that our captain had a rather extreme way of reacting to crises. It didn’t matter if the crisis was as minor as a glitch raising the main or as major as a fire on board, he responded by stringing together expletives. No explanation to his crew of what was going on, no instructions. Just a veritable Korean War of F-bombs. These were directed at everything—the f*&king engine, the f*&king ocean, this f*&king piece of s*&t boat, the f*&king idiot owner, or the f*&king screwdriver that’s gone missing. If you had anything to do with the crisis at hand, even if your participation was as minor as simply being in the vicinity, he would sometimes inquire, “What the f*&k do you think you’re doing?” The best you could do was to stand by ready to assist in solving the problem, and hope that the river of expletives would just flow around you, leaving you relatively unscathed, like a strong tree during a flood. Be a strong tree. Be a strong tree.

Kristian and I also noticed that he had become gradually less friendly toward us. As the maintenance dragged on and on, he practically stopped talking to us. Even when we tried to be polite, to say good morning, to offer him dinner, all we got were glares. Kristian, optimistic as usual, hypothesized that he was just frustrated about being stuck there for so long. That it wasn’t anything personal toward us. I hoped that was the case, but it eventually proved to be false.

Our departure was a culmination of Joe’s general frustration, and the gradual buildup of his negativity towards me and Kristian. On the day of our departure, we couldn’t get the port engine (the one we thought had been working correctly), the dinghy outboard, or the anchor windlass to work. This caused yet a few more hours of delay. Joe was cranky, to say the least. Our crewmate, who had never before crewed on a yacht and spoke primarily French, “nearly cut off the captain’s f*&king hand” while performing a task that Joe had ordered him to do, but whose execution and function he had never explained. Despite all this, Joe eventually fixed the engine and the windlass, decided to say “screw it” to the outboard, and we got underway.

As we were leaving the lagoon, we started trying to raise the mainsail. With a new crew, it usually doesn’t happen perfectly the first time. Things weren’t going particularly badly. We had plenty of space, the winds weren’t high, and there was no real hurry. We were all trying to get coordinated, learning where the lines were, figuring out what needs to happen when. We had set the genoa first, and though there weren’t high winds, it was flogging obnoxiously in the face of the person at the main halyard winch (who happened to me be). As we raised the sail, the batons kept getting stuck in the lazy jacks. No big deal. Usually, someone (oh, for example, the captain, who’s at the helm and doesn’t have the genoa obnoxiously flogging in his face) keeps an eye out for it, and lets the person on the winch know to slow down while someone unfouls them. Our captain, on the other hand, must have figured, as usual, that “f*&k” was the only real instruction we needed, and that any further communication, if there were any, was certainly aided by the addition of that word.

After we all managed to bungle through the setting of the main, Joe threw a fit worthy of reality television. With his little monkey face looking like it was going to boil off his skull, he shouted that Kristian and I were arrogant idiots, that all we’d done since we got on the f*&king boat was brag about what great sailors we were, and that we couldn’t even raise a f*&king mainsail. He’d sure learned his lesson about taking on crew. This was going to be a great f*&king trip, all right. I managed to agree with him on that point.

This was only the first of many such instances of horrendously poor communication, extreme overreaction, and hatred directed towards us. Except when he’d really screwed up, our other crewmate usually got off relatively un-cussed-at. Kristian and I, on the other hand, suffered through the “you arrogant, ungrateful assholes” rant several more times. Since I don’t really think of myself as an arrogant person, this insult stung the first time I heard it. We had, in fact, told him that though we had experience on tall ships, we were relatively new to yachts, and happy to learn from him. Perhaps sharing stories of our experiences on tall ships counted as bragging, in his mind. In that case, he was as guilty as us. We’d heard all of his sea stories twice or three times.

For the first couple weeks, we tried very hard, through our actions and willingness to help, to change Joe’s opinion of us. But eventually we realized there was no pleasing him. He was able to interpret even our efforts to help as arrogance. Any sign of competence or knowledge, such as how to tie basic knots, was a form of bragging. He himself couldn’t even tie a bowline properly. I suspect that insecurity about his poor seamanship made him constantly suspicious that we were criticizing his decisions and trying to suggest that we knew better, when we had no such intention whatsoever.

As a captain and a leader, Joe was an utter failure. He did not clearly state his expectations of crewmembers, or provide adequate instruction on how he wanted things done. It was impossible even to infer his wishes from his reactions to our attempts to help, because his standards simply weren’t consistent. One day, he’d cuss us out for not going ahead and shaking the reef in the main when the wind died (even though doing so would have lead to serious technical difficulties because he had earlier solved a chafing problem in the reefline by wrapping it in several layers of duct tape. A highly professional solution.) The message we got from this cussing was, be aware of what’s going on, and be more proactive. One night a few days later, when Kristian and I decided to be proactive and furl the genoa by ourselves so that the captain could keep sleeping, he came out on deck in a rage, took over the relatively simple operation from us, claimed we were doing it entirely wrong, and said, “I know how you arrogant kids think. Think you can do everything yourself.”

Joe’s lack of communication and leadership skills, combined with his dodgy seamanship, on one occasion actually had the potential to put his crew in considerable danger. During our twenty-seven straight days at sea, when Escargot wasn’t completely becalmed or damn near, she was dodging or not-quite-dodging thunderstorms. We hit a couple of relatively serious storms, with winds up to forty knots. During one of these, while Kristian and I were sleeping off-watch, we woke up to the sound of Joe stomping around in the salon, shouting, “What the f*&k! What the f*&k!” This sounded more serious than his usual mumble-cussing to himself. We jumped out of our berth and ran up to the salon to find smoke pouring up out of the starboard hull. There was a fire on board the vessel.

A fire, during a storm—wow, I thought, could this possibly get any less awesome? I did not want it to. As crew on tall ships, I had done many drills for such an emergency, and was surprised to find myself relatively calm and able to think through what to do next. I located the nearest fire extinguisher—which I immediately dropped. Luckily, it didn’t go off.  Kristian picked it up. Apparently my calm was not perfect. Around this time, our third crewmate woke up and came into the salon to see what all the commotion was about. After realizing there was a fire, Joe had never even gone into the port hull to wake up his crew or issue instructions. Unlike us, our other crewmate had not drilled for emergencies such as this, and I suppose some calmly-delivered instructions and an explanation of what was happening would have eased his mind, especially since he didn’t speak great English and probably had no clue what was going on. But, as usual, Joe just handled the crisis by stomping around and cussing.

Joe was shouting for someone to go see if they could find the source of the smoke. All three of us headed for the starboard hull. I suggested that at least one of us should stay up in the salon, in case the person down in the smoke lost consciousness or needed help. I went down into the hull to try to locate the source of the smoke, trying to breathe in as little as possible. I did not yet open any windows, in case that would increase airflow to the fire.

There was not as much smoke in the hull as I had thought. The fire was clearly not actually in the living area; the smoke must be leaking in from somewhere else. Under the aft berth, the bulkhead that separated that storage compartment from the engine bay was quite warm. Joe had apparently guessed where the fire was, and had gone out on deck to the engine bay hatch and thrown it wide open. If I were a fire in that engine bay, I would have been like, “Sweet! Thanks for all that air, man! I’m totally gonna burn down your boat now!” As a fire, when I saw that he didn’t even have a fire extinguisher with him, I would have even tried to give him a high-five.

Luckily, the fire was all sound and fury. Though it filled the starboard hull with acrid, burnt-plastic smoke, it was only a small electrical fire, and had already put itself out by the time Joe thoughtlessly threw open the engine bay hatch. The little box that regulated the electricity flow from the solar panels was now a melted glob of plastic. A bummer, sure, but an ignited sailboat would have been a slightly bigger bummer.

The significance of Joe’s behavior during this crisis took a while to sink in. At the time, I didn’t realize how irresponsible his actions were. As Kristian and I later discussed the events of that night, we realized that Joe’s lack of communication and improper response to the emergency could have put our lives in danger. This probably sounds pretty scary to my parents. However, it has taught us that before we get on another boat, it is essential to discuss with the captain exactly what his protocol is in the case of shipboard emergencies, and make sure he has onboard, and knows how to use, essential safety equipment.

Joe’s behavior towards us continued to be erratic, at best. Some days, he was relatively pleasant. When he was in a talking mood, we had the occasional privilege of hearing his views on politics and other issues, which were generally self-contradictory and not very well thought-out. His racism was so shocking that your jaw hit the floor and you had to get your friend to come scrape it up. His time in Australia had taught him that the Aborigines were all kleptomaniac drunks who didn’t really have language or culture before Europeans showed up. He was also the only person I’ve ever actually encountered who believed that the world would be a better place if Hitler had just finished what he’d started with the Jews.

On other days, he was in a bad mood, or perhaps we did something to piss him off—the way we chewed our food, our efforts at being proactive and trying to handle sail by ourselves, questions about what people wanted for lunch. On these days, he basically ignored us. Any question we asked him, whether about meal preferences, sail trim, ship’s systems, whatever, was answered rudely at best, or, just as often, was completely ignored. Eventually, I gave up trying to be polite. I no longer thanked him when he cooked a meal. I no longer said good morning or good night. I tried to stay out of his way, and hoped the wind would pick up so we would get there already.

We eventually realized that, in addition to our arrogance, our lack of gratitude was the other quality about us that annoyed him most. This was linked to food. His “you arrogant, ungrateful kids” rant started including references to how he’d fed us for two months, even while we were on shore, and all we did was complain and screw things up. This was a clue to another possible source of his dislike for us.

When he had asked if we wanted to be his crew, he’d said we could come on board and stay during the maintenance period. He was generously willing to pay for our food during the voyage, and we said we would provide for our own food while we were still in Raiatea waiting for the haul out. We made what I now see as a serious mistake by using some of his spices and condiments. Apparently, in his mind, this amounted to “feeding us” for the month that we were with him on Raiatea. Someone with reasonably developed communication skills would simply have asked us to stop using his condiments. We would have said sorry, and changed our ways. Or, if he found us so difficult to live with, he should have asked us not to come on the trip with him. Instead, he formed a powerful grudge against us, refused to engage us in any productive discussions about how we could get along together, and got in the habit of interpreting all of our behavior, even our attempts to help, in a way that further fortified his negative opinion of us. By the end of the trip, he had stopped even letting us help. He would literally take lines out of our hands. He would rather do a job himself, or call our other crewmate out of the salon, than ask or even permit us to help.

As our long, dull voyage dragged on, we ended up a couple hundred miles north of our original course, and Joe decided we would make landfall at Lifou, a smaller island in the country of New Caledonia. Hopefully we could go through immigration there, re-provision, and head directly to Australia. A couple days out from Lifou, Kristian and I decided we couldn’t take any more of Escargot de Mer. We would get off at Lifou, despite our original commitment to continue on to Australia. We even suspected that our captain would be happy to be rid of us. The day before we made landfall, we broke the news. He was visibly flustered, but remained relatively calm.

My mood had improved greatly when we decided to get off the boat. My bubble of good humor deflated somewhat when we arrived at Lifou. We discovered that we could not complete immigration procedures there, but had to go all the way to Noumea, a couple hundred miles away on a different island, in order to legally enter the country. Someone could either take the ferry to Noumea with all of our passports, do the paperwork, and come back, or we could all just sail there. We decided to sail. But knowing our luck, what was supposed to be a two-day voyage from Lifou to Noumea would surely take longer. Since Kristian and I were eager to get off the boat, and we wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be stuck on it for another week, Kristian asked Joe if we could motor if we found ourselves becalmed, and Joe suggested we could.

We got underway, and, of course, after about twelve hours the wind died. We bobbed around for another day. On day three, Kristian brought up the possibility of motoring. Kristian had even used the charts on our computer to plot the shortest route to Noumea. Although Joe had seemed willing to at least consider motoring before, when Kristian approached him about it he threw another epic fit, declaring he had never f*&king motored before, and he wasn’t going to now. He’d been generous enough to pay for our food for two f*&king months, and all we do now is bitch about how slow we’re going. If we’re in such a f*&king hurry to get there, we can pay for the fuel ourselves. So Kristian offered to pay for the fuel.

This did not calm him. He raged some more and eventually declared there was no f*&king way we were motoring. End of discussion. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of the engine starting. He also eventually decided to use the channel inside the reef, as Kristian had suggested, rather than taking the long way around outside. We were in the bay just outside the city at five in the morning.

The next ten hours were very long. Joe didn’t know where to take the boat, and spent an hour on the VHF butchering the vessel’s French name, trying to get someone at the port to give him instructions. We started heading for the port, and although someone did try to tell us where to go, the directions were unclear. On top of this, the one day we didn’t need any wind, it was blowing twenty knots, which didn’t help in our attempt to anchor. We dropped the hook successfully in one location, but the harbor police came and told us we couldn’t anchor there. But fifth time’s a charm, right? After a last-minute anchor swap, we finally got it to hold in a legal anchorage. Now we just had to get to shore.

You may remember the day of our departure in Raiatea, and the several technical issues we experienced as we tried to get underway. That non-functional dinghy outboard I mentioned continued to be non-functional on the day of our arrival in Noumea. Joe declared there was no f*&king way we were going to row to shore in this wind, and spent about an hour trying to fix it, with the wind kicking up seas even in the harbor, sending water into the engine and slamming the dinghy against the boat. We stood by to hand him tools and help out if we could. Eventually he gave up, and went into the salon. I had no idea what the plan was now, since he had said that we couldn’t row in this. We’d been in the region of Noumea for seven hours, and still hadn’t managed to get ashore. I dug deep and pulled up the last dregs of my stoicism. I resigned myself to waiting, and leaned back against our gear, which was on deck and ready to go whenever we figured out how. Joe came out of the salon, saw me kicked back against my backpack, and said, “So are you going to get the oars out, or what?”

“Are we rowing?” I responded, getting up.

“How the f*&k did you think we were getting to shore?”

Since he had earlier said quite forcefully that there was no f*&king way we were rowing in this, I honestly wasn’t sure how he planned to get to shore. Hence my position of resignation. The last and most impressive of all his tantrums then ensued. His face turned red, and his eyes burned like he wanted to smash something. He screamed that we were lazy, arrogant complainers; that I was “pissing on thirty,” and Kristian was “pissing on forty,” and we still behaved like f*&king fifteen-year-olds, arrogant and full of ourselves, going around moping and whining about how long the trip was taking. I didn’t point out that he was really the only one verbally complaining, daily cussing at the weather. He didn’t forget to add, as usual, that we were  rude, ungrateful a*&holes. At this point, I finally couldn’t help myself, and tried to interrupt in order to point out that the word “rude” must certainly also apply to the person who cussed out his crew fifty times, while they stood silently and took it, and even continued to say “thank you,” “good morning,” and “what would you like for lunch?” Of course, Joe shouted right over me before I could manage to squeak more than, “You’re calling us rude?”

Though I wouldn’t have been too upset if a freak giant squid burst forth out of the harbor, tentacled his face, and dragged him overboard, I kept my cool and got out the oars. We loaded all of our stuff into the dinghy, which, in addition to having no functional outboard, was half-deflated and handled in the water about like a soggy plastic grocery bag. Joe wouldn’t let me and Kristian help row. We made it to shore, and, after a long, sweaty wander about town with all our gear during which we managed to get separated from Joe and our other crewmate, Kristian and I arrived at immigration when it opened after lunch. Eating on Escargot had become so awkward that Kristian and I had not eaten since the night before, and very little the previous day. We sat and stood in various offices for a couple hours. I had no idea what exactly was happening; people kept taking my passport, giving it back; I just stood around, hoping no other unfortunate delays would pop up.

Someone handed me back my passport. We all left an office. Joe said, with a nasty, sarcastic note in his voice, “Good luck,” and walked away, not looking either of us in the eyes. We’re done already? I thought. The first moment of freedom. As a very large smile was growing in my heart, Joe turned back to us from across the street and asked, “Umm, do you guys want to get a beer or something?” Kristian and I were more than a little surprised. I figured that our other crew member had suggested that he ask, since Joe didn’t sound very excited about the idea himself. “No, that’s all right,” I replied. “But thanks for asking.” Apparently Kristian couldn’t keep up the politeness in this last exchange, and simply grimaced in disbelief.

            And so unceremoniously ended our time aboard Escargot de Mer. It is sometimes tempting to see the two months spent aboard that vessel as an unpleasant waste of time. We could have been lounging on a beach somewhere; we could have been sailing with someone who wasn’t a racist, bipolar basket case. But a journey around the world should be about learning, and there that experience was certainly educational.

            Kristian and I have thought a lot about how we will choose a boat in the future. We will always make sure to get to know the captain and crew before getting underway. If, in that “getting to know you” period, we see any signs that we won’t be able to get along with each other, we will not travel with them, no matter how inconvenient it may be to give up a ride once we’ve found it. It’s far more inconvenient to be stuck in the middle of an ocean with someone who hates your guts for over a month. We will also make sure our future captains are up to our standards in terms of seamanship. We will explicitly discuss emergency situations and protocol before we get under way.

            In addition to teaching us about how to be safer, happier hitchboaters, being on Escargot also made me a better sailor. To some extent, being on the ocean for that long in a sailboat is bound to teach me something new about sailing. But, in a roundabout way, our captain’s lack of leadership skills actually forced me to improve my seamanship faster than I perhaps would have otherwise. Having to predict the thoughts and decisions of a guy with a short fuse and the communication skills of a piece of roadkill forced me to think independently about how a sailboat interacts with wind and sea, and what I would do in different situations, rather than relying on the captain to just tell me.

Surprisingly, the trip also strengthened my love of the sea. As always, we saw wonders. I was awoken from a nap by the song of a humpback whale; I was involved in the capture of my first large pelagic fish, and experienced the strangeness of its death; I saw the green flash for the first time. I can think of so many moments where I thought to myself that if only I were on my own boat, the sights, the sounds, the joy of interacting with the sea through the sail boat would have been exhilarating, calming, or meditative, depending upon the ocean’s face that day. I would make this decision, that decision; everything would be all right, and I’d never cuss. I’m quite convinced that I could find happiness on my own boat, free from trying to please someone else, making decisions based on the mood of the sea and not that of another person.

But boat ownership is still a long way off. Even the next volunteer gig is a few months away. For now, Kristian and I live on land, waiting out the cyclone season. But I’m proud to have accomplished a goal that I’ve held for years—to sail across an ocean. Perhaps I haven’t enjoyed every second, but it has been pretty much as life-changing as I expected it to be, so in that respect I’m not disappointed. And there are still a couple more oceans to go. Come April or May, hopefully we’ll find a sturdy boat and a sane captain and set off across the Indian Ocean. I can’t wait.

Journey to the Clouds

Wynne Hedlesky
Ra'iatea, Society Islands, French Polynesia
2004 local time, 0704 GMT

I hope that in retrospect, I will be able to say that on August 14, 2011, I became a mountain climber. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and spent plenty of time romping about on forest trails. Despite this, or perhaps because of it—maybe due to some alpine misadventure of my youth which is now lodged deep in my subconscious—I have for many years had a mild phobia of steep slopes. Not heights; I don’t mind being on the edge of a cliff looking into deep gorges, or climbing up the shrouds of a hundred-foot mast. But I’ve had nightmares about scrambling up crumbling, impossibly huge mountains of gravelly earth, or trying to force my sputtering vehicle up a mountain road that magically increases in steepness until the car hangs still, pedal to the floor; up is impossible, and down is certain death.

            In Mo’orea, Kristian and I met a Frenchman, Philippe, who was willing to take us to a nearby island, Ra’iatea. He wasn’t leaving for a few days, and before we left he proposed that we all go for a hike. In addition to being an experienced sailor, he had also been a mountain guide in his younger days. He’d not only sailed around the world a couple times, but had climbed the highest mountains in the Andes. So we knew that for him, a “hike” wasn’t a stroll along a well-cleared path designed for pudgy, panting tourists. Considering his history, I suspected he wouldn’t be interested in a trail unless it at least got his heart rate up for a few hours. We would be climbing Mt. Rotui, a mere 899 meters compared to the 7000 thousand meter Andean giants Philippe had conquered in his youth. Kristian hadn’t hiked up a mountain in quite a few years, but it was a pastime he’d enjoyed often in his childhood on vacations with his parents in the Alps, and he was excited for a challenging hike. As Philippe and Kristian shared mountaineering stories, I stared up at the north face of Mt. Rotui, which loomed over the beach where we were camped. The near-vertical slope blotted out a third of the sky. As I studied the mountain, whose ferns and small trees defiantly took advantage of what little horizontality they could find, I foresaw trouble. But I didn’t want to be a wussy girl, so I gave the plan my enthusiastic consent.

             On the appointed morning of the hike, we bought a baguette for lunch, and set out to find the trailhead. Starting in someone’s front yard, we hiked up behind their small house to a trail that ran along a dry ridgeline populated by scrawny saplings. As we wound through this forest of tiny trees, I thought, hey, this isn’t so bad. I mean, it’s exercise, but not impossible.

            Soon enough we were scrambling up our first rocky slope. I carefully sought sturdy holds for my hands and feet, places where the crumbly, red earth lodged between the rocks wouldn’t betray me. I dared wonder what it would be like if it got more difficult, and suppressed the thought, telling myself that my body would find a way. It simply had to be so.

            We passed a spot where our ascent was made possible entirely by the tangled roots of wind-deformed pine trees. Climbing through the patch of pines was exactly like ascending an irregular, maze-like ladder. After that, the path continued along the narrow ridgeline, and it was like walking along the edge of an enormous serrated knife. The trail ascended steeply, requiring one to climb near-vertically for several meters, often relying on the roots and branches of flimsy vegetation for hand holds. Even Philippe said the hike would be difficult or impossible without the help of the vegetation. The periods of steep ascent would alternate with level, nearly level, or even occasionally dropping stretches of trail. I use the word “trail” rather generously to refer, at best, to six inches of cleared ground nearly hidden beneath ferns and small trees. The ground at times became spongy underfoot, and you knew that all that was keeping you from a dizzying and, if not fatal, then at least rather unpleasant descent down the near-vertical slopes on either side of the ridge were the roots of the mountain ferns.

            When we came to a resting place, I would allow myself to look around. It was hard to understand that I was really seeing the world from the mountain’s perspective. I could see clearly the underwater geography of the island—the midnight blue of the deep bay, the glowing turquoise of the shallows, and the inlets through the reef that let in the sailboats, which freckled the postcard-perfect lagoon. It was beautiful and familiar. Oceans, sailboats, beaches; that was my habitat. Down there was home.

When I looked at the mountain, above, below, and to each side of me, I became disoriented and afraid. How had I gotten here? The trail was invisible under the foliage even a few meters ahead or behind us. The knife-edge ridge by which I’d reached this spot seemed such an improbable place for human footsteps. Although, up to this point, my body had indeed found a way to proceed, I’d had to constantly repeat to myself the clichéd advice that characters in the movies always give to those afraid of heights—“don’t look down.” In fact, I didn’t let myself look left or right, either, but paid attention only to which rock was the next home for my right foot, and which clump of ferns I would hang onto with my left hand. I was afraid if I looked around, I’d experience vertigo, forget which way was up, and tumble right off the mountain.

Our destination was not the mountain’s true summit, but a peak a few meters shy of the mountain’s full elevation of 899 meters. As we approached, we entered the cloud that almost always rubs its belly on the jagged peaks of Pacific islands. I’d often been drawn by a desire to enter that cloud, like a child wants to enter a forbidden room, without really knowing what I thought I would find there. The power of this urge made me understand why the ancient Greeks placed the home of their gods atop Mt. Olympus, and what might have inspired Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Inside the cloud is anything you want, whatever is precious to you, too precious to wander among mortals in the lower altitudes.

            We were hoping to enjoy a god’s-eye view of Mo’orea and nearby Tahiti from the peak of the mountain, but instead, when we finally reached our destination, we found ourselves isolated in a place beyond time or physical location, inside the secret. It was a lot like being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was an impossible place, built up in my mind to contain something profound and life-changing. In reality, standing there as a human being, it was simultaneously overwhelming, and boring. Whereas perhaps the Olympian deities had marvelous palaces and storerooms of nectar and ambrosia hidden in Olympus’ clouds, and the opacity provided privacy where they could carry out their divine dramas more or less unmolested by the presence of mortals, there was nothing on this peak to interest a human being, just a few square meters of rocky red earth, rimmed by scrubby vegetation dripping with the cloud’s drizzly moisture.

            Inside the cloud, I also had to confront the fear I’d been struggling against for the entire three hour climb. Beside the exertion of the ascent and my fear that my body would suddenly fail me and I would go tumbling to my death, I was terrified at the thought of having to do it all again, in the other direction. Just thinking of the descent almost ruined my ability to enjoy the views we had of the lagoon, and the sense of accomplishment I had when I finally reached the summit. In fact, hesitant to add even twenty minutes to the descent back down the mountain, I had almost decided to stay behind at our last resting place, but, unwilling to admit defeat even in front of my boyfriend and our gentle and supportive guide, I pushed myself up a few more vertical scrambles. At the top, we all congratulated each other on our day’s accomplishment. Philippe said that I had climbed well, even if I was a bit cautious at times, and asked if I would like to do it again some time. Thinking back to the points where I was nearly in tears, and the prospect of a grueling descent, I’m sure I was a little more hesitant than Philippe would have hoped with my, “Yeah…probably.”

            To my delight and relief, I found the way down to be far less mentally and physically exhausting than the way up. I basically scooted down the mountain on my bum, and only my filthy shorts and my somewhat cramped toes had any reason to complain about the much-feared descent. Just as it had on the way up, the trail, invisible at a distance, appeared in front of my feet. This time, its tricks were familiar. I knew to expect the patches of spongy, fern-rooty fake earth and the rocky, near-vertical scrambles which were defeated like plastic soldiers before my invincible strategy of bum-scooting. By the time we reached the ladder of pine roots, I’d begun to confidently descend even the steep parts of the trail with the dignified upright posture appropriate to a human being, and by the bottom I’d decided I wanted to be a bona fide mountain climber.

            Standing, proud but afraid, awe-struck yet bored, at the peak of Mt. Rotui, it occurred to me that perhaps climbing mountains is very much like crossing oceans. Drawn as I am to crossing oceans, I feel almost obligated to become a mountain climber as well. I love being on the ocean. I love it for its unfathomable ability to be simultaneously fascinating and painfully dull, to show infinite variation and yet be the definition of eternal sameness. And I even appreciate it for its occasional fits of temper. Unlike Kristian, I’d never say, “I like it gnarly.” Such hubristic statements seem, to me, to warrant a swift triple knock on the nearest wooden object. But I feel boldly alive by having a relationship with something I know could take my life with no provocation, and without the slightest emotion passing over its eternal face. On a boat, days away from land, you are living in an element normally fatal to human beings. All that is between you and certain death is a little piece of buoyant fiberglass or metal or wood—the boat, offspring of the ingenuity and recklessness of human beings.

            Clinging like a bug to the side of a mountain, your relationship to your surroundings is quite similar. Your body tells you, “I don’t belong here,” and you ignore it. Compared to the Andes, the Alps, or the Himalayas, Mt. Rotui is a gentle green giant, sleeping in the tropical warmth, nestled in a blue lagoon, lower slopes blanketed with pineapples and bananas. But even this gentle mountain’s peak is still just an uninviting patch of rocks surrounded by deadly, or at least very, very painful, drops. But just as people willingly send themselves into the middle of the watery desert, people want to climb these mountains, want to put themselves in a place where humans cannot normally survive, and surround themselves with the constant threat of death. They may as well want to visit the Mariana Trench, or the moon. And, in fact, people try to do these things as well.

Whether you’re a sailor, a mountaineer, a diver, or an astronaut, your situation is the same. It is through courage, strength, and human technology that you bring your relationship to nature into a new dimension, overcoming the limitations of the body, as well as fears rooted in our instinctive desire for security and comfort. As a reward for your exertions, you get to see the parts of the world normally off-limits to human beings. In these remote places, you experience nature’s near-complete power over each individual human, a power that is easy to forget when we huddle in environments specially designed to isolate us from the effects of storms and seas and wild beasts. But you also learn that human beings have secret reserves of strength and ingenuity that are rarely called upon because we rarely allow ourselves to confront a worthy adversary.

I’m not saying that I, personally, have survived hurricanes at sea or nearly frozen to death on airless mountains. It’ll be a while before I’m ready for the Andes, or Cape Horn. But how can I suppress the urge to go up into the cloud?

Frogs and assholes

Kristian Isringhaus
Mooring off the north west coast of Ra’iatea
Local time: 08252011, 1620/GMT: 08262011, 0320

We sailed from Nuku Hiva to Tahiti on a 47 foot sloop being the only ones aboard except the captain, a 62-year-old Australian. He needed some help with a few projects and proposed to give us board, in addition to taking us to Tahiti, if we would hang out a while there to help him.

When we got to the marina close to Pape’ete on the north coast of Tahiti, they didn’t have a slip available for us so they had us tie up on the VIP dock between the super yachts of the even superer rich. Next to us was a beautiful 50-year-old German schooner, 110 feet, all wood and varnish. On the other side were two sloops that would probably have measured in at about the same length as the schooner, with the height of their single masts significantly exceeding the two master’s main.

The super rich tend to employ decent sized crews that rarely do anything more exciting than clean the boat all day long and get drunk all night long. When the owner is not around—which is the case most of the time—they live a fairly mellow life.

Now, those two super sloops on our port side were one boat away. In between them and us was a vessel that was pretty big, maybe 70 feet, but far away from being a super yacht. A bunch of French people were on it fixing it up. We couldn’t really figure out what their deal was, how many of them there were, or what their plans were, because they stuck to themselves and every attempt on our side to start a conversation was ended rather quickly and awkwardly on their side. But they never did anything wrong and were pleasant and quiet neighbors.

One afternoon, the crew of the super yacht neighboring the French boat started getting drunk rather early and by 9 PM they were trashed. This is when the fun started.

The dude that we had decided was the captain or at least a boss-like figure on the French boat politely asked the captain of the super yacht if it were possible to turn the music down a little. That was too much to ask, apparently, because the other captain started yelling at him instantly. I was on deck blatantly watching the scene. This was better than Hollywood and I was not gonna miss a bit.

The arguments the drunken captain had lined up were undeniable, well thought through, and of great persuasive power. First, he complained about the French people smoking on their boat all day long, forcing his crew to inhale second hand smoke. Obviously a loud-music related argument. Next he went off about the French people sticking to themselves, never trying to socialize with his crew, and not responding to invitations for barbeques, making him, the captain, look like an asshole. An argument that would have made Cato the Elder look like a debating novice had the two been contemporaries. He also didn’t forget to compare the two boats—a super yacht vs. a ‘piece of shit’—which I thought was probably the strongest of his arguments. And finally, he mentioned that one of the French people had once urinated off the bow at night while the owner of the German schooner was present. His concern for other boats’ owners filled my heart with happiness.

The boss-like figure on the French boat responded that they had sick people on board who needed rest and asked if it were possible to maybe turn the music down a little. What a weak come back. I was thoroughly disappointed in him. This show down was not going to last long if he couldn’t come up with anything stronger. This feeble attempt, however, just got the American captain even more agitated, and he kept repeating over and over again his few but strong arguments for why the music was not to be turned down—an ingenious strategy if you ask me—, diligently interrupting any attempt of the Frenchman to explain his request.

Obviously, the exhalation of smoke 20 feet away in an outdoors environment is a horrible deed that must be punished with noise. So the drunken captain had a good point there. More interesting, though, is the fact that he complained about the French people not coming to his barbeque, not eating his food, drinking his drinks. He said that made him look like an asshole. I kind of understood the asshole part as I was listening to him go. He at least seemed to have a pretty accurate self-conception. And finally, someone urinating in front of the owner of another boat was considered a mortal sin as well. Apparently boat owners, especially rich ones, are saints and not to be molested in any way. Except with loud music, maybe, which seems to be acceptable.

At this point the French maybe-captain-boss-dude didn’t even push his request for quiet any longer but just tried to understand the ranting captain’s arguments and calm him down. Soon enough more people showed up on the decks of both boats involved, and other boats nearby. At one point, our captain, came on deck and yelled at the French that he’d had enough of them ‘frogs’ not talking to anyone, and just doing their own thing. How dare they? He was pretty quickly quieted down by a French girl, though, who yelled back that they didn’t appreciate his drunken noisiness in the middle of the night, either, shouting at the top of his lungs.

Our captain blushed and asked me quietly if that was true. I nodded. What did I yell, he asked? Weird imitations of bird cries, I replied. Oh—that thing, he muttered. Must be a regular thing for him, I suppose, even though I didn’t hear him do it the night he was so drunk he forgot the transparent box with his weed on the dock where I found it in the morning in bright sun shine.

Anyhow, it took but a minute for one of the super yacht’s crew members to come by to give our captain the thumbs-up for his support. Apparently they didn’t mind his bird cries as much as the French, even though the night he made them the owner of the German schooner was on board his ship. As opposed to the French, our captain had been out with the drunken crew before, buying them drinks all night, and I guess that’s more important than matters concerning the peace of other boat owners.

The debate between the two boats was soon relocated to the dock, where the drunken captain kept yelling his complaints. At this point the urination issue and the second hand smoke were forgotten—it was all about the barbeque and the French making him look like an asshole for not responding to the invitation. In other words, it was all about vanity.

Another American who had lived in Tahiti for some 20 years and joined the party on the super yacht chimed in, claiming that people like those French ‘destroyed places like this marina’. Everyone would be peaceful and happy if it weren’t for people like them, quietly minding their own business. He asked the French boss-type to ‘have a go’, but they didn’t. Other people intervened, which sucked. I would have liked to see it—partly because I had my money on the American asshole getting a second hole kicked in his ass.

Anyways. The mellower crew members of the super yacht turned off the music and dragged the aggressive ones to a bar. Our captain went with them.

The interesting thing is that I actually want to say the drunken American captain had a little bit of a point. Of course, all his arguments were entirely unrelated to the music and to French crew members being sick. But the way the French were isolating themselves from any social contact with other crews was weird and awkward. Wynne and I knew people on all the nearby boats and had had some superficial but friendly conversation with most everyone we ever saw. Had it been us who felt molested by loud music, we could have talked to people we already knew, addressed them by their names, and asked for some courtesy. It indeed is impolite to simply ignore an invitation without at least excusing oneself and giving a made-up reason.

Apparently the French crew realized that, too, that night, because they were much nicer and more open to us ever after. We found out that they had chartered the boat and were getting it ready to sail it all the way to Chile. The day we left our boat to continue our travels, they saw us at the bus stop with our big backpacks, as they were going by in a rental car, and picked us up to give us a ride.

So, on the one side, there were people who just wanted to stick to themselves in an environment where a tiny bit of openness is required, and on the other hand there were drunken assholes with offended vanity. Maybe it was more of a coincidence that heated debates had not risen before.

Now, what does that tell me about world peace? I don’t know and I decided to not think too much of it. I’ll just take it for what it really was. Good entertainment. Better and cheaper than any Hollywood movie, anyways.

Being at Sea

Wynne Hedlesky
Taioha'e, Nuku Hiva, French Polynesia
1125 local time, 0855 GMT

            After twenty days at sea, we arrived in Taioha’e Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva at around midnight. Smelly, salt-encrusted, and longing for a night’s rest without our beds pitching and rolling, we still had to navigate around jagged rocks at the mouth of the harbor, hoping that we had correctly interpreted the navigational aids. Thankfully, in a harbor as small as Taioha’e, they weren’t very complicated—one set of flashing red range markers, and one green buoy marking a dangerous rock half way down the bay (on the right, unlike in the United States). Slightly more challenging was finding an anchorage. There were several dozen sailboats and motor yachts scattered throughout the harbor, some stupidly without anchor lights. We kept our tired eyes peeled, and managed to successfully drop the hook on the second attempt. Frederic, the owner of Le Pelican, stayed awake to take bearings and make sure our anchorage was solid, and Kristian and I gratefully slept, this time without rolling onto each other or being packed like sardines against the wall of our cabin as the boat heeled.

            We awoke to a dramatically drizzly morning in Paradise. Being a high volcanic island, Nuku Hiva creates its own weather, and the heavy, gray clouds semi-permanently cloaking the peaks of the steep, verdant mountains dropped occasional cool showers. Aside from the overwhelming beauty of the mile-wide, bowl-shaped valley, I immediately and unexpectedly appreciated two things.

First, smells. Land has smells—earth, vegetation, decomposition, car exhaust, food cooking far away. The ocean doesn’t smell like much. Second, and of immense psychological importance, the boat was still. Well, relatively; the occasional ocean swell would still sneak in to the sheltered harbor. But compared to being on the open ocean, the anchorage was a long-awaited relief from the constant, harrowing fluctuation in local apparent down. On a boat on the open ocean, the laws of gravity are different. In order to even move around, one is compelled to follow the climber’s rule—three surfaces of contact at all times. Two feet on the ground will simply not suffice to keep you upright without a hand gripping a counter edge, or a bum pressed against a vertical. For instance, when I needed to use the head (that’s what we call a bathroom on a boat), I had to use both hands, and have my bum un-pressed against anything in order to pull down my pants. During this time I either had to endure a few desperate seconds where I risked face-planting the wall of the head if a big wave hit, or I had to wedge my shoulder against the head door for stability. Unlike in the normal world, where things generally stay where you put them, on a boat they tend to maliciously hurl themselves across the room when you least expect it. Beverages, playing cards, and small children seem especially prone to this.

This brings us to one of the other major psychological strains of my three-week, trans-Pacific adventure—children. As much as the unpredictable motion of, well, everything, and the stuffiness down below when we couldn’t open the hatches because of the spray, and the  inability to have a proper shower for three weeks, and the difficulty in sleeping while the boat was moving and heeling, and the various stress-inducing technical difficulties (such as the dysfunctional roller furling system, the rudder shaft leak, the diesel leak, the raw water cooling system leak, and the shortage of fresh water, to name the major ones), the main source of stress for those on board Le Pelican was the children, particularly the very young one. I believe I speak for all on board when I make this statement.

The Gillot family consists of a mother, Isabelle, a father, Frederic, and two quite wonderful children, Hakan, who is eight, and Charles, who is two. One lesson we all took from this experience is that two-year-olds and long sailing voyages are not necessarily a good mix. Charles spent about 70% of his time crying. I don’t blame him; being on a boat is scary, even for grown-ups. Who wants to be stuck on a tiny speck of fiberglass, thrown around twenty-four hours a day, surrounded by certain death? Due to the limited space of a sailboat, it’s also difficult to find ways to entertain young children. And due to the dangers inherent in life on a boat, young children also require constant attention. Between his frequent bouts of crying and his constant, unwitting attempts to throw himself into the path of danger, Charles had us all pretty worn out by the end of the trip.

I am a bit ashamed, but I must confess that thinking about the difficulties and discomforts of life at sea took up a good bit of my time. On June 20, four days before we reached the Marquesas, I wrote in my journal, “I’m ashamed of my current cowardice, my softness. I hate that I find myself grumbling, wishing for showers and beds and coffee and worrying about made-up (or even real) diseases while I’m in the middle of the greatest adventure of my life to date. I should be in awe of the sea every moment, overwhelmed by the sky, studying the subtleties of the sails and wind…If I expected this experience would instantly change my life, I guess I was wrong. If I thought I’d find God, fall deeply in love with the sea, or magically become a super sailor, I was wrong.”  And then, to compound it all, I was disappointed that I was disappointed.

This is what happens when you have expectations, when you undertake a project or a journey partially because of its narrative value for your life, because it makes a good story. Perhaps I expected, as I stated in the same journal entry, “to spend my days swooning in wonder, staring out over the sea, hair blowing in the wind.” I then noted, “In fact, your hair doesn’t blow because it’s a hideous matt of scalp oil and sunscreen, and, though the breeze is distressingly powerful and unceasing on deck, it never seems to have any interest in going through the tiny window and blowing around anything in your suffocating little cabin.”

Ok, I’ve said it; I’ve confessed that by some standards, three weeks at sea sucks. However, it is also sublimely beautiful, and at times beautifully something else.

The sublimely beautiful moments are what we all would expect from a life-changing, trans-Pacific sailing adventure. There was Getting Underway with Dolphins Playing at the Bow, there was The Most Beautiful Full Moon in the World Night, there was The Bioluminescent Plankton that Look like Stars Night. When the sun shone, the water was a freakish blue the color of the sky as seen at 30,000 feet, and you knew it was four miles deep because that’s what the chart says, even though that number is incomprehensible. Every night near the Equator the great Pacific Ocean put on its evening light show, with heaping cumulus clouds pink and glowing, and the orange sun, perpetually serene regardless of the chaotic sea state, burning its way down to the horizon. There were the infinite expressions of the sea, the subtle interactions of wind, water, and light. Some days it looked like a delicate, mirrored meringue, and other days, when the wind was high, climbing and descending the 20 foot seas was like traversing miniature mountain ranges, complete with snow-like, sea-foam peaks, and looking down into miniature glacial valleys. At night, the moon duplicated itself a million times on the surface of the sea and made a living, dancing carpet of light all the way to the horizon. The ocean rages and shines and writhes with life out there, whether anyone is around to see it or not. I was often shocked by this fact, that the vast Pacific plays almost every day for an empty theatre, and only the occasional reckless, half-mad human ventures far enough out of his element to witness it. In my journal, every day, I spilled ink trying to verbalize what is for the ocean as natural as breathing is to us.

That something is beautiful is relatively easy to comprehend. What is even more amazing is that the ocean is often something else—something not beautiful, but powerful in some other way. For example, the ocean is often very boring. Powerfully boring. So boring I could go for hours, reading a book, not even noticing it was there. I think that perhaps boredom is the only reaction one can have about the ocean sometimes. When it isn’t particularly beautiful or trying to kill you, it’s just big, and your mind is largely protected from the shock of realizing just how frighteningly big it is by its inability to fully, or even partially, comprehend the ocean’s vastness. You look out over it, to the horizon, and it’s like two dumb, brutish creatures indifferently occupying the same space; like an ant crawling on the back of a lion.

At other times, it does feel like the ocean is trying to kill you, and then it’s just scary. My night watches were frightening for the first few days. We were sailing more or less down wind, in relatively high seas, constantly under the threat of an accidental jibe. Sitting at the helm, alone, with the bimini and dodger up, I couldn’t see much of the sky, the sails, or what was in front of me. The stern light right next to me more or less ruined my night vision, so I was effectively deprived of my sense of sight and relied primarily on the anemometer and compass to stick to the correct heading. I could feel the boat unpredictably tossing in the waves, and I could hear the water washing everywhere. In the middle of the ocean, I was actually experiencing claustrophobia. It took some effort to convince myself we weren’t just spinning in circles in the dark, or about to capsize. As Kristian pointed out to me, it’s not often that you just plow ahead without being able to see where we you’re going. A person would never do that anywhere else. Cars don’t have autopilot; it would be dangerous even to walk blind. But there’s not a lot to hit on the open ocean, and even if something were there, if it didn’t have navigation lights it would be almost impossible to see anyway.

There was also the much-anticipated equatorial crossing. We crossed the line on my watch, at exactly 2324 PST on June 19. It was a dark, cloudy night, and I was reading a book on the not-yet-defunct Kindle in order to distract myself form the combination of boredom and anxiety that was my usual mental state during night watches. As we neared, Kristian and I went down below and loitered around the GPS display, waiting excitedly for the moment. Kristian practiced taking photos of the display so that when the time came, our money shot wasn’t obscured by an odd reflection on the display or something like that. All the excitement woke up Frederic, whose cabin is right next to the chart table. He didn’t seem to mind, and even got into the spirit of the moment with us a bit. All together, it was like a very mellow New Year’s Eve countdown. Kristian’s picture came out perfectly—photographic evidence that we were in fact there, at the magic line, entering the other side of the world. Afterwards, I went back up on deck and continued to read my book.

The next day, little had changed; we were still surrounded by water. The Pacific still put on its daily show. But now that we’re in Nuku Hiva, I realize we have entered a different world, and the miles of ocean crossed are proportional to the difference between this place and the United States. One of the things our new friends here on Nuku Hiva taught us was how to find the Southern Cross, and that, along with learning to eat raw crabs and roast breadfruit, is helping me start to feel the anticipated sensation of embracing the unfamiliar. I look forward to many more passages, difficult or easy, and many more unfamiliar shores materializing out of the haze on the horizon.

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