It’s an existential question, the most fundamental sort: can you even be said to be a sailor without a ship? Is it not a ship that makes you a sailor? Why call yourself a sailor, if you don’t sail? Perhaps I am also a millionaire, without a million dollars, but… you know. That’s where my heart is. That’s who I really am.
I am without a ship, a wife, a life… pretty much everything I knew is far away, another world. So am I a sailor still?
And if I am a sailor still, am I then, as Conrad has it, “…of not much more account in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea”?
I have seen plenty of aimless logs adrift. I never thought to count myself among their number. But feeling of no account… that’s as accurate a phrase as I have found to describe myself of late. All aimless logs are good for is sinking.
It’s hard to write about boating when you don’t have a boat, and hard to write about the Sound and the Sea when you are landlocked, fifty miles and a mountain range away from the nearest saltwater. Hard to write about anything, really, when your head is torn apart by thoughts of loss and betrayal, and though those may be the only thoughts in your head, your lawyer tells you that you can’t discuss even that.
Saint Exupery exhorts us to long for the endless immensity of the sea, and that’s no problem: I’ve got longing in spades. The only pleasant things I think of have to do with being out on the water.
But I have nothing from which to build a boat; nowhere to put it, no money to outfit it, just a long, nightmarish limbo to live through for the next year while lawyers and leeches make all my assets evaporate. The cruising kitty is gone, and, at 42, I’m starting over at the bottom again, without the energy or optimism or skills I had when I was starting out. Everything I had saved and worked for is gone, and the reasons I had for saving and working gone with it.
There is nothing but discouragement left where my dreams once lived.
But there’s something redemptive and encouraging about the ocean. Empty horizons speak of limitless possibility. When I think of the people I have met while out sailing, in smaller boats, with fewer resources, with objectively more difficult situations, I can’t recall any misery or dejection: they were seeing the same amazing places that I was, puffing along with the same breeze, sailors all the same.
Even though I know that about the sea, I can’t say I’m optimistic. What I am, if I am anything, is shattered. And it’s hard to say if I’ll ever be back together again. I’m surely no longer the person I was, and that may be what is most painful, because I thought that guy was okay. I can’t say if anyone will ever see him again. Trauma changes each of us, and not always in the best of ways.
But if I can’t see over that horizon out there, at least I can see that it is there, and there is another side to it. I don’t know if it will hold reefs or storms, or golden sunsets. But I cling to the idea that it’s something different than what is here now.