Of late I’m impatient with children’s books. Though, thinking back, I remember I read Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish translation to Tallulah as she nursed, two or three months old, soliloquies in Hamlet as lullabies, and Sandra Cisneros’s La Casa en Mango Street before she was two, and she was happy. Lately she revealed an interest in The Odyssey, and sobbed uncontrollably when Beowulf died, and requested repeated chapters of The Sun Also Rises, intrigued by the fishing and the bullfighting and the drinking. (She knows from drunk mans.) She began to invent games featuring Lady Brett Ashley. Hemingway wrote some nice, simple, prose—like a kids’ book, kind of, yet so much more satisfying. (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”) The Odyssey and Beowulf, though—they were meant to be spoken. The emotions and motivations emerge stark and spare, like hillsides of granite.

I took a walk to the ferry dock at an unaccustomed hour. It had gone dark. I passed the usual detritus, the plastic bags and go cups and empty Medallas shining under the streetlights. The wind was coming from the sea on the other side of the hill as I listened to the sound of the coquís, and one of the men playing dominoes outside the bar lifted his plastic cup of liquor and called out Hi, loudly in English.
Is it tristes tropiques, whatever those are, exactly? (I look up Levi-Strauss on the internet.) Are tristes tropiques like cruisebummers—that haunted sense of something missing, a void to be filled in paradise? I passed the house of a woman we’d known. She had died of cancer two days ago. She’d gone up to her old home in Vermont to die and because I never saw her leave I couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t. I walked past the empty restaurant where a young chef we’d met had started working, when the tourists didn’t come to her restaurant up the hill.
Then I understood that melancholy was something I was looking out of, into the night--displacing it to this other world presumptuously from the world in my own head. The feeling that I don’t belong here, and I can tell, somehow, that I never will. And the places I’ve loved—are they closed to me, indefinitely? That’s the thing about wandering, for me, the intensified awareness that things are always changing and temporary, the craving for difference alternating with the need for certainty, some place that is safe and unchanging. Some place that I now know, and always will, does not exist and yet—like those beautiful archetypes—it is, it must be.

Since turning forty, some things have become clear to me. For example, that bachata music is beautifully overwrought, like the kind of poetry you can write in Spanish—like this one, for example, from a book of poetry for Puerto Rican schoolchildren :

Madre mía, hoy es tu día
y yo te doy mi alegría,
que es lo que te puedo dar.
Madre mía, yo quisiera,
que tu pena fuese mía.
Qué más puedo desear?

“My dear mother, this is your day, and I give you my happiness—for that's what I have to give. Oh my mother, I wish your sadness were mine. What more could I desire?”

Or this, from “Itinerario para náufragos”—náufragos meaning “the shipwrecked”:

Vivir el movimiento que habita las palabras,
conocer la apariencia, amar la soledad
de los frutos caídos y que, ahora,
con la luz de la tarde
desvelan el pasado en las ruinas del tiempo.

A sorry translation: “To live in the movement that inhabits words, to understand the meaning of surfaces, to embrace the solitude of fruit that has fallen—and now, with the afternoon light, they keep the past from sleeping among the ruins of time.”

This translation is lame partly because I’m not sure how the infinitives in the first two lines fit with the third person plural in the last. But who cares! What is this about? I have no idea. I just find it strangely stupendous. I’m moved by poetry in Spanish more than any poetry in English except maybe Walt Whitman, because he, too, gives voice to the most vague, exalted sentiments in unrestrained, unapologetic flights that sometimes choose not to return, leaving you high.

On the other hand, I’ve been clued in to the value of balance. Such an ordinary thought--banal even. I was wondering the other day why I intermittently fantasize about a totally different life in which I’m one of those people who search out props and necessary items for movies, or scientific operations. In a book I read I learned that this job has a name. It isn’t “procuring.” Anyway, it boils down to hunting for interesting things in a new place and then buying them with someone else’s money. Perfect for me. In my other life, I participate in a floating household that tries to maintain a high degree of self-sufficiency, give voice to its creative longings, earn money, and raise a small child far from most of our friends and family. And things break. Like, relatively important things. Or someone gets sick. Someone gets in a snit. What is wrong? I used to blame it on the boat, lack of money, bad food, isolation, whatever. Now I realize those are just excuses. Deepak Chopra spoke to me in a dream. He said, This moment is perfect. And I said, I like that better than This Moment Bites. And I said, When we feel crazy, let’s shout—silently, if necessary—OM! And he said, Do whatever you need to do. And I said, Deepak, it actually works!

Plus ça change, they say in French, plus c’est la même chose. That line makes sense to me on and off. Sometimes it sounds like something that’s supposed to be clever. Last week it seemed like the unvarnished truth. We set off from Culebra, reached St. Croix—did things there now vague to memory—and prepared to journey on. We were careful, of course, because as any sailor knows, particularly one as half-assed as myself, you do not mess around with the weather. So we had our weather relay and we had our diesel and food that probably would not induce seasickness and our wits about us, as much as you can hope for at any given point in time. The only problem was that a few things went wrong. One of them was: While lying low, keeping my nausea tuned to a manageable level, riding it out, I looked up and saw smoke eagerly billowing from the closed door of the engine room. Look! I shouted. Smoke!

Leaping up from where he was nursing his own juice-induced nausea (it’s an art as well as a science, figuring out what to eat underway, and in each new port it seems I’m tempted by something that soon proves deadly), Adam dove into the smoke. Long and short, there wasn’t an actual fire, but the engine had gone dead.

Sailing engineless is nothing new for us, of course. We hadn’t even been using the engine. Later, though, the port side sailtrack ripped out of the deck. Adam jerry rigged something or other—I have no idea what it was because I was trying not to be sick while reading some kids’ book aloud down below or getting food for Tallulah, who seems to recover from her own little flares of seasickness with stunning speed. But no engine and a compromised rig in someone else’s boat in unfamiliar waters during hurricane season adds up to Not OK. You have to be able to get away from the storm. I used to be kind of blasé, but after evacuating New Orleans at dusk with the electric bite in the air of pressure dropping, along the empty highways—then, weeks later, driving with a will back into the ruined city to touch things that the storm had left behind, dripping with prisms of mold—I find my cells shudder at the notion.

But at some point after we decided that the safest thing to do was return to Culebra, a thunderhead like a mushroom cloud possessed the horizon. It staged a bloodless coup. It was so big it didn’t need to make a sound and it looked marshmallow soft. Long jagged clouds the color of pewter balanced across it as the sun shot that soft whiteness through with pink gold. When it reached us, it was sheeting warm rain and blowing 45-knot gusts in the darkness while the boat plowed the waves like some Greek’s mythical horse.

We knew this—this Invest 92, this tropical disturbance we’d been watching for days and now, with our change of plan, it was tickling the edge of our westward trajectory with its long white plume. And we prayed, for the first time in years, because sometimes in the dark ocean you hope there really is some kind of benevolent higher power, even if that idea seems unfathomable in the clear light of day. Because sometimes if you’re not calling out to the heavens for mercy you’re singing all chirpy in your head, “The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost…”

It’s a fact of life when sailing that plans are not that relevant. A fact not always pleasant or easy to deal with, sometimes one of the most frustrating axioms for me of life aboard. Because I’m pretty good with uncertainty but not that good and that’s probably why I live on a sailboat, because I have to learn my lesson. Maybe. I’m not really sure. Anyway, we went sailing. And now we’re back.

For me the most mind-bending thing about having a child is that everything I do has a witness. Nothing too small. Nothing lost.
It's taken me awhile to get used to living on a boat. In fact, though I suggested the idea in the first place, I promptly began to resist it. The basic stuff. Like how to tie knots. Adjust the sails. That sort of thing. I'm not sure why I had such a bad attitude. Actually, I am sure. It had to do with the fact that I'd walked straight out of my world, the familiar, well-loved confines of academia, into Adam's.
We have a nice rowing dinghy here in the Caribbean. And Adam's attempts to teach me how to row—I mean, properly—soon met with snarling and sulking. I never meant to act that way. But I did. And this is the result: In Tallulah's mind, I'm still trying to live down the time a couple of friendly cruisers gave us a tow back to the boat.
OK, that happened more than once.
So even though I looked down on a recent afternoon and realized that my biceps had reached an alarming size; and getting back from shore in 25 knots didn't faze me anymore; and I'd rowed the two of them plus 400 pounds of anchor chain a mile back to the boat in one-foot swells and a stiff breeze, as Tallulah and I would get in the dinghy and I'd take hold of the oars, I kept hearing, “We need somebody to tow us.” Or, “I wish daddy was here.”
After awhile it occurred to me that it was no use getting offended. Wasn't that the voice of my deepest subconscious?
“Daddy always knows what to do in the boat, doesn't he?, I said finally.
“Yeah.”
“He always seems so sure, doesn't he? And you know you're safe.”
“Yeah.”
“But mom is learning,” I said.
What I really learned is that I can't fake anything. I have to believe, to embody, to love it. For I have a witness who sees only the truth. And whatever impression I make now—well, it's going to last the rest of my life.