"The keel of the sailboat sliced evenly through the chop, brooding and elongate, a wooden eye into the murky warm depths of the sea, and it was all Clark could do to keep the yearning, groaning mast firmly attached to the deck as the kind of gale the old timers like to talk about whipped the channel into a pudding cake frenzy. It wasn't supposed to have happened like this; he thought, as if aware for the first time of the glaring inequality, the way his grandmother used to call the myriad woes of life "private matters", as if that would somehow make it all better. But, in a roundabout way such that fate met retribution, the niceties of waiting for the right circumstances hadn't lined up quite right, and, his ducks no longer in a row, he did the only thing he knew how to do: escape.
The facts were quite simple, really: It was May, 1978, and he was one week away from graduating magna cum laude in art history and classics from Brown. In an LSD-trip-induced euphoria, he had driven the old station wagon down to the boatyards in Newport at 3 in the morning, and, well, he fucking stole a boat, that's what he did. None seemed overly appealing at the time; noble teak and mahogany yachts of the blueblood legions, dirty 2-stroke Boston Whaler's and fishing skiff's of the white trash, gaudy dories and catboats of the vacationing nuclear families, freshly painted by Jimmy and his pops. He chose.... well, he chose the biggest damn one, wouldn't you? For an act whose premeditated fantasy had cost him so many hours of concentration in class the past few years, it was surprisingly easy.
The massive Honda inboard burbled pleasantly to life with a gentle twist of a key already in the ignition.... god bless the trust the old money had in the world. The 85' sloop slid slowly out of Newport harbor under power as the last bits of exploding neon stars faded over the inky black water with the remnants of the LSD, and suddenly Clark sobered up so intensely and vividly that he cried out in fear over the ebbing dark tide, holy shit! this was real, no going back, no telling, no regretting, everything from now on was forward and immediate. The rush of possibility, however, quickly faded on the sharp salt spray whipping over the whitecaps, somewhere off Nantucket he gathered at this point. Heading of North 30 East, which would put him somewhere between Lisbon and Gibraltar, he mused.
There is something immediate and terrifying about losing sight of all points of land for the first time in the Atlantic. You don't feel small, you feel singular, enigmatic, an oddity in a 2-dimensional landscape of air and water. You long for a lawn, a football game, an icecream sandwich, an identity. Until ,that is, you realize life is now absolved of trivial meddling and preoccupations and heeds only to sun and wind, night and day. For Clark, this was also forgiveness, absolution from the self inflicted sins of LSD and meaningless sex, cheat sheets and stale Christmas's. Life in the gentle womb of blueblood privilege and East Coast aristocracy was such a cruel blessing, he thought, comfortable yet intellectually bankrupt, full of opportunities for other people, people with options and abandon.
He wanted only to be wrapped in the wraithlike form of the sea, naked and vulnerable to everything, for once free of the bullshit safety net from responsibility his parents clad him in. He used to go sit down at the boatyard docks every day almost, reading or smoking cheap cig's or just watching the sailboats stutter haphazardly around the bay. Sometimes he'd see schoolmates there; friends, lovers, rivals, they never asked him what he was doing maybe intimidated but maybe disinterested instead. He was well-liked, not one of the preppy sweater 'good-to-meetcha' fraternity sociopaths, but not exactly a math nerd either. He wasn't sure whether he liked boys or girls, cats or dogs, responsibility or escape, so he tried everything just becuase he could. Took in a spot-eared mutt from the pound, fucked the captain of the football team on the locker room bench,, took the prettiest girl in his class to senior formal. He was so tired of everything though, tired of caring, tired of winning without trying, that sailing, which for once he could thank his blueblood lineage for, felt like an extension of his skin and bones right now, as the boat shot out into the night.
In the distance, a brooding horn wailed in eerie harmony into the black, and soon he could make out the heaving breakers, cresting upwards over the earth. Nog Ledge, he thought with sudden certainty. 398.5 miles North Northeast of Nantucket, and the last bit of land from here to France. He could thank his preparatory school geography teacher for this bit of nautical lore. As the horn faded and the churning green wake burned with the rising sun, the only thing that crystallized in his mind was tomorrow.
-Part II-
Sometimes dawn comes like the northern lights; mysteriously and ethereal at first, then suddenly quite forceful and charismatic and before you know it, the reality of what is happening has to be faced in full. Such was this particular morning over the western Atlantic, May 17th 1978, and while Jimmy Carter promised peace in Isreal and Anita Bryant took rights away from people somewhere to the east, in this place there was only deep blue ocean, not green or brown or filthy oil-slicked yellow of the coastline, but such intense blue that almost burned the eyes if you stared at it too long. Clark stretched out like a cat on his back on the shiny maple boards of the bowsprit as it whipped forward over the water, riding high over the uneven staccato of the swells. A sudden shrill cry rang out in the still air and he jumped with instinctive fright as a small group of gulls, no terns, Arctic terns on their way south for the summer flew near overhead, the first living thing he had seen since he left Newport 2 days ago.
He pondered the idea of rigging up some sort of improvised fishing pole and reeling in a great heaving, monstrous swordfish, battling it for days like Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea, but thought better of it, as the cabin was already prodigiously stocked with cans and staples, thank god, as the miasma of LSD had prevented any foresight in bringing necessities on the night of the escape. He lowered a bucket over the starboard gunnels and filled it with cold briny water, and, searching for a brush to clean the remnants of last night's vomit from the sleeping berth downstairs, he felt for the first time as if the seasickness had finally passed. This was good. The regret, the self-loathing, the fear, this had all passed as well, and he felt stoic and resolute, a man created from nothing and with infinite potential.
With a loud glancing blow and a deep shudder, his smug contemplation shattered, and he ducked and covered his head as sharp wooden splinters sailed over the deck and the boat stuttered and slammed to a stop. 'Well, this is it, he thought without particular immediacy or attachment, I'm going to drown alone in the Atlantic'. Just then the yacht lurched forward and he opened is eyes again to see a large rectangular metallic object bob up in the wake and drift slowly backwards.... a shipping container. He had heard of these things...He followed the racing magazines loosely and occasionally on these 'around the world' adventure races, one of these giant floating shipping containers would be encountered, fallen off some massive ship in a storm and just waterlogged enough to float inches below the surface vertically, silent deathtraps ready to slice a fiberglass hull in two. Thank god for this ancient wooden ramming rod of a keel, he thought, as besides a torn off bowsprit and some mangled anchor lines, the craft seemed basically unharmed. A quick trip below decks confirmed this, as the triple reinforced hull hadn't even been punctured, rather, the thick old wood had absorbed and softened the blow, saving the boat.
Three days elapsed and the tribulations of daily uncertainty seemed slight in comparison to the shipping container incident; Clark rode on an ambivalent high of having escaped imminent disaster somehow. The weather was slowly making a turn for the better, the churning gray swells increasingly replaced by calmer, more certain winds and fair skies. The escape from the storm-bound and mortal coast last week seemed distant, and he relished this new found freedom of nothing but ocean and more ocean.
He recalled as a small child returning to New York from one of the frequent trips to Stockholm and glimpsing out the window of the plane what looked like tiny rectangular dots afloat in an endless blue canvas, a king surveying his kingdom from the window seat of a transatlantic flight. He thought of this distant memory warmly and abstractly, a vestige of a carefree childhood. Though he would not have even registered as a dot from above now, the surreal magnetism of the ocean drew him so intensely and uncharacteristically inward that what lay immediately ahead took a minute to register with him. Perhaps 2000 yards off the starboard bow, the flat blue horizon was split by a looming, shining wall of gray metal, a massive oceangoing container ship bound for Athens or Dubai, perhaps the very source of his earlier brush with disaster, he mused ironically. What was but a whimsical rectangular dot from 35,000 feet was now perhaps no more a threat, but undeniably huge and intimidating nonetheless, an anomaly in this seemingly lifeless landscape.
It didn't appear to be going particularly fast, and as he passed perhaps 500 yards to the north, a few men on the upper observation deck waved and smiled, tan and trim in white uniforms as he peered at them through the spotting scope. A light on the deck flashed and he remembered enough of Nautical rules to recall this was a friendly 'hello' signal, and sent a return across the channel between them. He recognized the blocky white letter on the hull as Arabic, and imagined the sailors returning home sometime next week; their white adobe houses in some nondescript suburb of Medina or Riyadh, kissing their wives, picking up their children, sitting down to a dinner of deliciously foreign, aromatic things. Suddenly, Clark longed for a meaning, a regularity of purpose these sailors had, to be employed and accountable, attached to someone else's schedule. He envied their easy contentment, their trust in Allah and the shipping company.
Somehow he knew he could never be provided for by others, he had to provide for himself singularly, absolutely. Food, clothing, shelter, these were all things to be had in times of success. He thought of the cozy investment baking job his uncle had lined up for him in New York this July, the transparency of money when all it meant was a phone call to mom, the shame of hundred dollar bar taps and designer jeans. The wind kicked up from the east and he paid out the mainsheet dangerously far, the boat shuddering as if took up speed with the sail. The most dangerous point of sail, 'running with the wind', he mused, the risk of course being an accidental jibe, sending the boom across the deck with the sort of force that cracks skulls and tears halyards from their stays. This afternoon's breeze, however, was behaving most agreeably, and he trimmed the sails to his liking before retiring to the cabin to read his latest obsession, Rudolf Wurlizer's 'Nog'.
Nog was this sort of disillusioned space cowboy who drifted around a wild, romanticized west, gleaming bits of brilliance between LSD trips and existential identity crises. He wanted so badly to meet Nog out here, afloat on some sort of derelict ocean raft, drinking gin out of the bottle and waxing poetic on the meaning of it all. nog wasn't created for this world, of course, he thought, but neither was Clark Nilsson for that matter; suburban space alien from planet disenfranchised. The sailing was helping though, it was so pure, so spiritual; he missed the days of teaching sailing up in Wiscasset, the "prettiest little village in Maine.' Fairytale clouds floating over dark green islands and gaudy pastel lobster pots, the little wooden Mackinaw's overcrowded with laughing kids and duffle bags. The comfort of association, a place neither home nor foreign territory, was lost out here on the open ocean, god damn!, what a great equalizer of human strife and worrying.
The fog, that was the best he thought, that damp, cold Maine fog that would move in for days, everything dark and piney and mysterious. There was none of that out here; just the most blinding blue he could have ever imagined, bigger than that sky over the Montana prairies, harsher and more acrid than the cloudless ceiling over the Nevada playa in July. In a sudden inclination, he stripped naked and, one foot planted high on the great wooden wheel and the other on a bench cushion, he cried out in a silly, childish assertion, diving head first into the rolling green waves. It was colder than he had expected, clear and salty, and, in a sudden panic, he thrashed towards the life ring he had tied to the stern line, as thoughts of sharks and sea monsters crowded his imagination.
As a child, he had been quite terrified of the uncertainty of the ocean; his legs never settled into a rhythm or balance; rather they kicked erratically as if deflecting the lurking creatures below, watching. He thought of this spot, this moment; he might be the first human ever to swim here, dangling in a alternate reality 10,000 feet above the floor. That's what really got him, what scared and fascinated him, was the fantastic 3-dimensionality of it, the vertical immensity of the unknown. Suddenly he shivered and then, letting go of the lifering, dove down as deep as he could go, perhaps only 5 or 6 meters, and opened his eyes, seeing maybe 30 meters down into the great green nothing. When he came back up he gulped delicious air and hooted and hollered like he'd won the game single-handed, for he had glimpsed the edge of the void, something we all wish to peer over. He'd seen it before, nature uninterrupted, like looking through two mirrors till the edge fades off around an imperceptible bend, he'd seen it is pieces from the tops of desert peaks, dawnlight on some distant island, forests damp and infinite.
This time though, the immediacy of the experience caught him off guard and suddenly he was crying, toweling off and slipping on yesterdays jeans and cardigan and blubbering into a handkerchief. Tears of gratitude though, not sadness, for having left behind the dull functionality of Brown and New York and social networking for something trying and beautiful. The sharp string of salt in the half moon crack in his left palm shook him out out this emotion though, and he wished he hadn't climbed so damn hard on the last trip upstate; his finger strong and calloused from caressing sharp quartzite and granite edges. He always looked at people's hands when he first met them, his grandfather taught him that; said you could learn an awful lot about someone just by studying their hands.
His hands were rough and kind, clean angular lines with neatly trimmed fingernails. He was always wary of grownups with delicate, child-like hands; everyone should work with their bodies, he though, perhaps not in the fields or the factories but in somthing purposeful and regular, whether the even creases of a paintbrush trapped for hours neath thumb and forefinger, or the deep calloused grooves of fishing line and marlin twine. He gripped the dark, oiled wood of the wheel and felt timeless and unconstrained; he could have been a captain 400 years ago, returning to the old world from an expedition of learning and adventure.
Feeling free and adrift, he shouted commands to imaginary crew members and sang out to the terns and the fish. In a place like this, he thought, memories have to be paper thin because they were constantly being rewritten. He thought nostalgically of the hours spent as a child peering into the curving glass expanse of his bedroom fishtank, the contents always shifting and ethereal. He realized quite suddenly that now the glass was the sky and he was just a fish in the ocean, studied by god and no one. He wondered what the French authorities would think.
Part II
Like the northern lights appear at night, with sudden and disorienting immediacy, so did this particular dawn over a cold, cloud swept patch of the Eastern Atlantic, May 26th, 1978. For Clark, the significance of time had faded and been reborn with a different clarity, one which rode on the even, rhythmic swells of the sea, and the familiar orange fireball which dipped and rose over the vast horizon each day. The terrestrial consequences of having essentially pirated a yacht at 3 in the morning in an LSD-induced euphoric mania were quite terrifying, but out here in the sterile expanse of the ocean, laws and guilt were not things to be considered with any great thought. There were some things he missed, like a nice hot shower whenever he felt sweaty and salty, a restaurant meal, the sound of the birds, the wind through the trees, even a car rolling down the street. Oddly, yet with perceptible satisfaction, people were not on this list of continental longings, and he felt quite content in his own company, as the physical divide of a thousand miles of ocean was marginal compared to the social rift he felt between friends and strangers alike.
To be singular was a gift, to be singular was a gift, he kept reminding himself with blind neurosis, but really it was a curse, a fucking curse, goddamn it. He was not singular is a way that developed over arrogant alienation or misanthropic ideology, but genuinely, undeniably unusual. The battle of assertion of self was constant, to be confident but not cocky, aware yet somehow not transcendent. The simple remedy of course was reckless distraction through things he found sincere and effortless passion in; rock climbing in the Gunks or North Conway on the weekends, digging through old jazz records, stealing some retired millionaire's yacht's at 3 in the morning. At this point in the journey, or the experiencerather, as it had become more sensory than physical, retreat was unthinkable. The only option was to ride the cresting wave of austere ambition he felt, and hope favorable winds and weather brought him somewhere along the South coast of France, where he felt the authorities would be more understanding of his, errr... situation. The situation, well, the situation was that everything was fucking peachy, the days filled with purpose and spontaneity, the nights terrifying enough to keep him grounded to firm reality.
The sterile magnificence of the North Atlantic is completely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent the better part of a week in a small boat, adrift and with a minimum of plans. Clark has always been fascinated as a child growing up in New England with the heavily romanticized, mysterious maritime tradition of yesterday, and today; the rough-hewn, foul-mouthed swordfish longliner's he saw in Gloucester, their animosity towards the sea in reality a profound respect. The mountains were imposing and real as well, but always seemed to offer some sort of comfort, some egress from the storm, on the blindingly 2-dimensional canvas of the sea, there was no cave to hide in during a blizzard, no warm, well-lit hut in the distance. This was truly a place we were not designed to inhabit, or perhaps even understand, and he began to feel like an earth-bound astronaut, exploring some sort of alternate inner space. The old mariners, the sailors, they were always pragmatic and apprehensive, hoping for the best yet expecting the worst. The invisible lifeline that had kept Clark tethered to reality and safety his whole life, or perhaps just his own exceptionalness, seemed to guide him eastward, and he kept the heading steady across rising swells and horizontal rain: North 30 East.
He thought of his current existence, and a wave of peripheral satisfaction tingled from his toes up to his head, the joy of unfettered freedom, the ability to guide one's life in any desired direction without outside concerns. The hours wasted in bars, in the library, at home doing nothing, he wanted it all back, to postpone the endless niceties and trivialities of tomorrow until he could condense some sort of experience out of it. The 6 night and 5 days at sea had begun to unwind his calculated indifference to discomfort and burden he played to well most of the time. Things began to itch, to come undone, to turn bleach white and crack in the mean salt spray and relentless sun, and while he felt strong and youthfully immortal, the edges became ragged and organic. He wondered what it might be like to have a companion, not just on this trip, but someone who made time and boredom irrelevant, and though of the insecurity that hid under his smug judgment of the complacent, domesticated couples he saw everywhere in his early 20's; like cows grazing on mediocrity in the prime time of their lives. Maybe they were happy though, that was the problem, in his own refusal to compromise his idiosyncratic habits and absurd standards, he hadn't stopped to consider that perhaps these people had just managed to find something that eluded him so efficiently all his life.
Sailing is a beautiful sport, yet much like skiing and rock climbing, suffers from a gross misperception in popular culture as a self-fulfilling reckless prophesy for rich white guys. While this was essentially true, that did not invalidate the fact that there was something monolithic and singular about traveling in a little boat, and he suspected the urge to do so dwelled in many men. He was so tired of having to fit everyone into sharp, geometric boxes to understand them, uniformity and stereotypes were necessary to comprehend the skewed plane on which he stood, an unwitting subject to everyone else. He had no dreams of business or conquest, no illusion of empire, only the desire to keep the company of a few good men or none, for as George Washington said, "it is better to be alone than in bad company." Right now he was neither alone nor in bad company, for he considered the sea and it's myriad ecosystems to be a benign and familiar accomplice, the ballast and the medium of his journey.
The course and the liquidation of the adventure had begun, and it's momentum kept him faithful that safe harbor in Europe would be reached soon. There, he would disembark, assume a new, optimistic identity, and travel on foot though Europe, meeting fresh, vibrant young people along the way he hoped, future friends and lovers. The snide smirks of the the drones that make up most of the world, there to toil away at some dull bit of functionality all their lives, well, they burnt off like the morning fog, and he imagined the highlights of their lives, mere afterthoughts in the rear view mirror of his existence. Suddenly, amidst this self-assuring facade of superiority, he though of Tucker Lindquist, his best friend at Brown, how they were so unpretentious and natural in each other's company, the warmth of proximity to someone who knew your ticks and cherishes your shortcomings, and he started to cry. On land, he would have stopped this foolish show of emotion at once, yet in the spirit of solitude and the experience, he just kept on crying, for a good 30 minutes it seemed, the kind of wrenching and sobbing that clears you sinuses and leaves you sore and contorted, the body weary as the soul. He didn't know if he loved Tucker, Tucker Lindquist, he found an old pen in the cabin and, the boat on a long tack sailing itself, wrote his name on his hand. He looked at it, and then blubbered a little more. Goddamn it, the world wasn't fair, it wasn't even close to just; the people who loved you most made you hurt so bad sometimes, out in the windy, cold expanse on the North Atlantic. The world was so strange, so fabulously incomprehensible, all he could do was love nature and himself, two things that pointed north to salvation, steady as the dawn, burning with sincerity.
Memories began to seem warm and abstract; the anxious present and looming future clouding his reason as he reeled in a big, silver fish, no idea what species, but delicious sliced up on the teak deckboards and eaten in reddish marbled cubes, life that 20 minutes ago was writhing in the sun was now nourishing him. How violent and cyclical nature was; apologetic to no one, solely focused on survival and perpetuation. He looked wild and handsome now, lean muscle and sinew taunt and faded to a rugged tan, hair tangled and bleached in the sun, all sharp angular lines of masculinity amongst the organic curves of the ocean. Perhaps he'd go for another swim, he though, the day had too much flexibility already, and some order might bring the coming days into focus. The last swim had been gorgeous and terrifying; the 15 meters of so he could see down into the teal water fading into 2 vertical miles of liquid expanse. This inner universe was comforting in it's scale and uniformity, yet he couldn't help but see the zoo of idiots and distractions that fouled his social interactions on land, suspended at even intervals in the blue tomb, taunting him even here.
Clark thought with affection posterity of the crazy people, not the rich art kids and SDS activists who feigned eccentricity for attention, but the genuine kooks, the marginally functional fringes of society; endearingly strange. This is what he wanted to interact with, to stay fragmented and incoherent until suddenly some bit of indisputable brilliance emerged from the babbling, which it did occasionally; oh it did. He would invent new cultural impressions, pseudonyms and alter existences when he pleased, the truth was always secondary to the experience, and besides, when the right person came along, the truth always found it's way back into things. He hadn't drank or done drugs in 7 days and to be honest he felt like shit. The worst of it had passed, but to emerge unscathed from the voluntary haze of narcotics and lies to myself was both beautiful and painful. A lone Arctic tern passed overhead, en route to the north for the summer, and Clark marveled at his sleek design, the effortless way he glided forward, propelled by instinct and ambition.
