Happy Ours

Portland equals family. That is what I’ve come to know over the past decade and a half. I’m really talking about Rick’s family here, but over time they have of course become mine. One way or another, all of the far-flung members of the tribe make their way to this city in Maine for a short period of time in the summer. It’s kind of like the monarch butterflies who migrate down to a tiny village in Mexico every year. We’re just as colorful, though perhaps not in the same way…

As always, there are big plans for outdoor adventures. This year we will be hiking, canoeing, and otherwise raising Cain in nearby New Hampshire. Our ranks have swollen recently with the addition of a few significant others among the younger generation, so we are a rather unwieldy crowd.

Typical Boothby hike planning, with maps on the hood of a car

Unfortunately, on these outings we are missing our most intrepid soldier. Dick, the patriarch of the Boothby clan, has been laid up in a rehabilitation facility, recovering from a stroke he suffered a couple of months ago.  Always the energetic and active senior, the loss of mobility and independence due to this stroke has been a tough pill to swallow for Dick. His perseverance during this difficult recovery period is truly an inspiration to us all. I think he enjoyed his numerous visitors, even if we rather overwhelmed the nursing staff. 

Rick and I have parked the boat on a mooring ball at the Portland Yacht Club, and plan to keep it there for a good week and a half. After family filled days, we return each night to sleep aboard, and each morning begins with a leisurely cup of tea in the cockpit. Gazing out at all of the neighboring boats, I can’t help but be amused by some of the names people have chosen for their vessels.

Puns are very big in the boating community. Of course there’s the ever-present and over-obvious play on the word “sea”: “Seafari” or “Fantasea”. Plenty of other, even worse puns abound – “Happy Ours”, “Nauti Girl”, and the ironic “Knot Too Bad” are prime examples. When Rick first bought one of his previous boats and was searching around for a name, my ex-husband, aware of Rick’s academic interest in psychoanalysis, suggested “Freudian Sloop”. Thankfully, a non-punny name was ultimately chosen.

Another theme among boaters is to poke fun at the amount of time and money that ends up being showered on these floating cash eaters. I’ve seen more than one named “Daddy’s Paycheck”.  I’ve even seen the idea stated more baldly with “Money Pit”.

One boat near us  –– “Go Dog Go!” –– is obviously owned by a fan of early readers. On the other side of the anchorage, a less imaginative owner kept it simple: “Steve”. My particular favorite is the boat named W.T.F. (What The F---?!!!) Upon closer inspection, the acronym really stands for “Waterborne Transportation Facilitator”. Doubly funny.

Before leaving Portland and heading south, we tried to get the family out on Valkyrie. Sad to say, once everyone was loaded on board and we had managed to set the sails, a terrific downpour ensued. This made for a very short sail, along with some pretty soggy Italian sandwiches. A more extensive “Seafari” will have to wait until next year.

P(arty)-town

Five days in Provincetown. What a luxury. Actually, five days of leisure anywhere would feel luxurious, but I’m especially happy to be spending them in P-town. This place has it’s own special charm, a happy blend of artsy, bohemian beach town and LGBT inclusiveness, with a healthy dose of ubiquitous camp. I wrote about this place in a previous blog post, and everything I said then still applies. You can read that post here.

There is virtually no wind predicted for the next few days, and this gives us a golden opportunity to stay in one place for a while, testing out a routine we might follow on our year-long sabbatical in the Caribbean. Rick gets busy, reading Hegel, Zizek and Lacan, and working on his current writing project. He also is having an intense email discussion with his friend and fellow Lacanian Todd McGowan, and he plays hooky from his real work to obsess about that.

 

That's our boat! (with the Pilgrim's Tower)

With all of our mornings taken up with Rick’s academia, I spend a great deal of time at my own computer. I write blog entries, look at sewing sites on the web, and read. At the moment I seem to be focusing on food, reading Crescent Dragonwagon’s entertaining cookbook, Bean by Bean, and a wonderful set of food essays by Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal. One might ask why I would torture myself so, reading and salivating on a boat with very limited galley capabilities. I guess virtual satisfaction is better than none at all.

The mornings pass pleasantly enough, but when we have time to spend in one place, the afternoons are really where it’s at, baby. We up anchor and motor over to the beach, taking the dinghy in for a stroll on the pebbly sand. Although P-town is known for its beaches, we have never had the time to visit any of them in the previous years that we’ve been here. And what a pleasure!

Seals!

More Seals!

My best Katherine Hepburn imitation

Party Float - Only in Provincetown!

The weather is not perfect all week though. We get spitting rain on a couple of days, making beach visits fairly uninviting. But this gives us the perfect excuse to have our favorite Smokey Fish Chowder at “The Squealing Pig” pub.

We also find a great little movie theater in town, and I have my heart set on popcorn – the main reason to go to the movies in my opinion – but Rick is worried about a squall that he sees approaching and doesn’t want to leave the boat on anchor unattended. So, we strike a compromise. If he insists on going back to babysit the boat, he’ll allow for a breaking of our no-movies-on-the-boat rule. Even on the way back, we break another rule by buying Campari in a glass bottle. We make popcorn and negronis in the cabin and watch the first episode of True Detective on Rick’s computer. Total decadence.

At the end of our stay we rent bikes and go for a toot around the end of the Cape Cod Peninsula. Part of the National Park system, the Cape Cod National Seashore includes a beautiful and well maintained bike path that winds through scrub pine forests and sandy terrain, ending up at Herring Cove, a broad sandy beach.

I’m not sure if we’ve answered our questions about our ability to live and work together for a year on a small boat in the Caribbean. Rick got lots of work done and we’ve both had a marvelous time, but we also totally cheated. Over the course of five days in Provincetown, we took in two movies at the local theater, ate three dinners in town, and watched five episodes of True Detective (which, in our defense, is completely addictive). We also used up ALL of our Internet data allowance.  I think this behavior should be allowed anytime, especially on a year long voyage, it’s just that we may not have the luxury of such artificial entertainment for much of the time down there in the islands.

The wind is predicted to be up tomorrow, enough to send us all the way to Portland where Rick’s family awaits. And plenty of Internet access…

Dream On

A year on a sailboat. What would that be like? Could we, a slightly absent-minded college professor and a musician prone to sea-sickness, attempt such a thing?

The allure of taking a year off from daily pursuits to do something totally different probably appeals to everybody at some time in their lives. I suspect, however, that most people never get any further along in their plans than a fleeting thought of escape on a particularly bad day.

Rick and I have dreamed about an extended voyage for some time. Rick has long had a fascination with sea adventure stories, beginning in boyhood with Treasure Island, later eating up the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin series, and more recently graduating to non-fiction accounts of the 18^th century ship Bounty, and explorers like Cook and Shackleton. When I first met him, Rick would occasionally muse about sailing around the world. I come a bit late to the party, especially with my little problem of getting desperately seasick, but I too, have had my dreams of adventure. My ideas were always more in the direction of traveling on land, say on a bicycle, or in an RV, but pretty much the same, right? Ok, minus the water.

Rick has a sabbatical year coming up in the fall of 2016, and both of us have been dreaming of spending that year sailing to the Caribbean. Gone are the ‘round-the-world fantasies due to lack of time, money, and my mal de mer, but a year-long coastal sailing trip to the Virgin Islands and back should be doable for us. I'm gunning for Trinidad and Tobago! I’ve bought Caribbean guidebooks, found a book on fishing from a sailboat, and dreamed of beautiful blue water and white sandy beaches, with no violin in sight.

We both thought that my job in the symphony would put the kibosh on any Caribbean dream. It would be a rare employer who would let one of their workers go for a year, and guarantee their job upon return. Even though the Caribbean idea had been hatched some years ago, I was reticent to ask my boss, even casually, about a possible year off. What if the answer was a resounding no?

When I finally got up the courage a few months ago to ask if maybe, just possibly, could I pretty please…? the answer, to my amazement, was an unhesitating, “Of course!" 

Uh-oh… Holy-moly, what have we done? 

All of this time we have been dreaming away, not actually believing that our trip could be a real possibility. Now that the largest impediment has been removed, the whole idea suddenly seems completely unworkable. Rick is mostly concerned about his ability to do scholarly work aboard the boat. He needs access to materials that he might only realize he needs after we are far away from his library. Also, the boat and the business of sailing from place to place take up a great deal of his time and energy. Will there be any mental space left for his research and writing? If Rick were to decide to stay home where his books and study materials are close at hand, I would have to give up my year off altogether because we couldn’t afford for me to be without a paycheck.

I have my own concerns about a year in a small moving space; what will I do while Rick is working at his computer? I already find myself bored a great deal of the time. I end up doing a lot of web surfing (which truth be told, is probably how I would be wasting my time at home anyway), but the internet connections are spotty even off the coast of the U.S. Who knows what to expect once we leave the coast of Florida. Beautiful sunny days are marvelous, but wet, soggy, rainy days can be just miserable on the boat. There’s also my ever-present issue with sea sickness. And we both worry about what all that time on a boat might do to our relationship. Pretty hard to have a fight when there’s nowhere to get away. I haven’t yet felt the need to banish Rick to the dinghy for the night (or felt the need to go there myself), but that might seem pretty tempting after eight months or so.

Then there’s the question of what happens if something goes wrong with the boat, or with my son who will be in graduate school, or what if we want to change our minds midway through? My leave of absence is of course unpaid, so we will need to live off of Rick’s reduced sabbatical pay for the year. We can only continue to pay our mortgage if we rent out our house for the year, which also means that if things don’t go the way we planned and we need to bail, we will have no place else to go until the year is up. Pretty scary stuff.

On the other hand, this would be the adventure of a lifetime, the memories of which we would likely treasure for the rest of our lives. The water down in the Caribbean is blue, and the sand white, but there would also be the challenge and enjoyment of getting there and back. What a shame it would be to give up this opportunity, mainly due to fear of the unknown.

This summer has been turning into an experiment with which to try out some scenarios and see if a year-long trip might actually be workable. Our summer voyages to Maine and back have always been time-pressured and, as a consequence, we tend to stay in each place for only a day or two before pushing on. We’re both anxious to see what staying in one port for a week at a time might feel like; Rick for his ability to work, and me for my boredom factor. We’re headed for Provincetown today, and the wind is predicted to be virtually nonexistent for the next week. It looks like we’ll get a real test…

This is Me and Rick in the Caribbean (ok, still dreaming...)