-Chapter 1-
The keel of the sailboat sliced evenly through the chop, brooding and elongate, a wooden eye into the murky warm depths of the sea. It was all I could do to keep the 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; I thought, as if aware for the first time of the glaring inequality, the way my 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, waiting for the right circumstances hadn't lined up quite right. My ducks no longer in a row, I did the only thing I knew how to do: escape.
The facts were quite simple, really: It was May, 1978, and I was one week away from graduating magna cum laude in geology and geography from Brown. In an LSD-induced euphoria, I’d driven the old station wagon down to the boatyards in Newport at 3 in the morning, and, well, I fucking stole a boat, that's what I did. None seemed overly appealing to me at the time; noble teak and mahogany yachts of the blueblood legions, dirty 2-stroke Boston Whalers and fishing skiffs of the white trash; the gaudy dories and catboats of vacationing nuclear families, freshly painted by Jimmy and his pops. I chose…well, I chose the biggest damn one, wouldn't you? For an act whose premeditated fantasy had cost me 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 has in the world’, I thought. 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. Suddenly I sobered up so intensely and vividly that I cried out in fear over the ebbing dark tide. ‘Holy shit!’ This was real; there was no going back, no telling, no regretting, everything from now on was forward and immediate. The rush of possibility was soon smothered by the sharp salt spray whipping over the whitecaps, however, and I gathered I was now somewhere off Nantucket. The brass compass read North 30 East, which would put me somewhere between Lisbon and Gibraltar, I thought without particular consequence.
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 ice-cream 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 me 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 was such a cruel blessing; comfortable yet somehow intellectually bankrupt, full of opportunities for other people, people with options and abandon.
I 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 my parents clad me in. I used to go sit down at the boatyard docks nearly every day, reading or smoking cheap cig's or just watching the sailboats stutter haphazardly around the bay. Sometimes I'd see schoolmates there. Friends, lovers, rivals, they never asked me what I was doing, intimidated or perhaps just disinterested. I was well liked, tolerated affably, not one of the cashmere sweater 'good-to-meetcha' fraternity sociopaths, but not exactly a math nerd either. I wasn't sure whether he liked boys or girls, cats or dogs, responsibility or escape, so I tried everything just because I could. Took in a spot-eared mutt from the pound, blew the star of the rugby team on the locker room bench; took the prettiest girl in his class to senior formal. I was so tired of everything though, tired of caring, tired of winning without trying, that sailing, which for once I could thank my blueblood lineage for, felt like an extension of my skin and bones right now, as the boat shot out into the night.
In the distance, a horn wailed in eerie harmony into the darkness. Soon I could make out heaving white breakers, cresting upwards over the earth. Nog Ledge, I thought with sudden certainty. 398 miles North by Northeast of Nantucket, and the last bit of land from here to France. I could thank my preparatory school geography teacher for this bit of arcane nautical lore. As the horn faded and the churning green wake burned with the rising sun, the only thing that crystallized in my mind was tomorrow, because in this place, today was only real if you couldn’t see beyond it.
Sometimes tomorrow appears like a shooting star- mysterious 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. The entirety of the experience could cease to be real if you let it bend back into yesterday. Such was this particular morning over the western Atlantic, May 17th 1978. While Jimmy Carter promised peace in Israel and Anita Bryant took rights away from people somewhere to the east, in this place there was only deep blue Ocean. Not the tannin-infused mottling of the estuaries or the filthy oil-slicked yellow of the Tri-State coastline, but such intense blue that it almost burned the eyes if you stared at it too long. I stretched like a cat on his back across 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 I 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 I’d seen since leaving Newport 2 days ago.
I 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 The Old Man and the Sea. I thought better of it though as the cabin was already prodigiously stocked with cans and staples. ‘Thank god…’ as the miasma of LSD had prevented any foresight in bringing such necessities on the night of the escape. I lowered a bucket over the starboard gunnels and filled it with cold briny water. Searching for a brush to clean the remnants of last night's vomit from the sleeping berth downstairs, I 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 begun to pass as well. At times I suppose felt stoic and resolute, a man created from nothing and with infinite potential, or something along those lines.
With a loud glancing blow and a deep shudder, my smug contemplation shattered. I ducked and covered my head as sharp wooden splinters sailed over the deck and the boat stuttered and slammed to a stop. 'Well, this is it’, I thought without particular immediacy or attachment, ‘I'm going to drown alone in the Atlantic'. Just then the yacht lurched forward and a large rectangular metallic object bobbed up in the wake and drifted slowly backwards… a shipping container? I’d heard of these things. I followed the racing magazines loosely and occasionally on those 'around the world' adventure races, one of these giant floating shipping containers would be encountered, fallen off some massive ship in a storm. Just waterlogged enough to float inches below the surface, they were silent deathtraps ready to slice a fiberglass hull in two. Thank god for this ancient wooden ramming rod of a keel…besides a torn off bowsprit and some mangled anchor lines, the craft seemed essentially unharmed. A quick trip below deck confirmed this, as the triple reinforced hull hadn't even been punctured, rather, the thick, cured wood had absorbed and softened the blow, saving the boat. Three days had now elapsed and daily uncertainties seemed slight in comparison to the shipping container incident; I 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 were increasingly replaced by calmer, more certain winds and fairer skies. The escape from the storm-bound and mortal coast last week seemed distant. I relished this newfound freedom of nothing but Ocean- Ocean-with-a-capital-O, goddamnit, and more Ocean beyond it.
I remember 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 young king surveying my kingdom from the window seat of a transatlantic flight. I thought now of this memory warmly and abstractly, a vestige of a distant, carefree childhood. Though I would not have even registered as a dot from above now, the surreal magnetism of the open ocean drew me so intensely and uncharacteristically inward that what lay immediately ahead took a minute to register. Perhaps 2000 yards off the starboard bow a looming, shining wall of metallic gray split the flat blue horizon. It was a massive oceangoing container ship bound for Athens or Dubai- perhaps the very source of my earlier brush with disaster. What was but a whimsical rectangle from 35,000 feet was now perhaps no more a threat to me but undeniably huge and intimidating nonetheless, an anomaly in this seemingly lifeless landscape.
It didn't appear to be going particularly fast. I passed perhaps 500 yards to the north, and a few men on the upper observation deck waved and smiled, tan and trim in white uniforms as I peered at them through his spotting scope. A silver light on the deck flashed and I recalled enough of nautical rules to know this was a friendly 'hello' signal. I sent a return across the channel between them. I 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. I saw them kissing their wives, picking up their children; sitting down to a dinner of deliciously foreign, aromatic things. Suddenly, I longed for a meaning, the regularity of purpose these sailors had, to be employed and accountable, attached to someone else's schedule. I envied their easy contentment, their trust in Allah and the shipping company.
Somehow I knew others could never provide fully for me- I had to sustain myself singularly, absolutely. Food, clothing, shelter, these were all things to be had in times of success. I thought of the cozy investment baking job my uncle had lined up for me in New York this July, the transparency of money when all it meant was a phone call to mom, the dull shame of hundred dollar bar tabs and designer sports coats. The wind kicked up from the east and I paid out the mainsheet dangerously far, the boat shuddering as it took up speed with the sail. The most dangerous point of sail, 'running with the wind', I thought detachedly. The risk of course being an accidental jibe, sending the boom across the deck with the sort of force that cracks skulls and tear’s halyards from their stays. This afternoon's breeze was behaving most agreeably however, and I trimmed the sails to my liking before retiring to the cabin to read a few haphazard pages of my latest obsession, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 'Nog'.
Nog was this sort of disillusioned space cowboy who drifted around a wild, romanticized west, gleaming bits of brilliance between pseudo-psychedelic trips and hazy existential crises. I wanted so badly to meet Nog out here, afloat on some sort of derelict ocean raft, drinking gin out of the bottle and waxing deliriously on the meaning of it all. Nog wasn't created for this world, of course, 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. I missed the days of teaching sailing up in Wiscasset, the "prettiest little village in Maine.' Fairytale clouds would float 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. Goddamn!, what a great equalizer of human strife and worrying.
The fog. That was the best, I knew. That damp, cold Maine fog that would move in for days, leaving everything dark and piney and bathed in ambiguous shadows. There was none of that out here, just the most blinding blue I 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 I stripped naked and, one foot planted high on the great wooden wheel and the other on a bench cushion, cried out in a silly, childish assertion, diving head first into the rolling green waves. It was colder than I’d expected, clear and salty. In a sudden panic, seeing down into the endlessness, I thrashed towards the life ring I’d tied to the stern line, as thoughts of sharks and bumping things crowded my imagination.
As a child I’d been quite terrified of the open ocean. My legs never seemed to settle into a rhythm when swimming- rather they kicked erratically as if deflecting the lurking creatures below, the ones who watched with menacing disinterest. I thought of this spot, this moment- I might be the first human ever to swim here, dangling in an alternate reality 10,000 feet above the floor. That's what really got me, what scared and fascinated me- the fantastic 3-dimensionality of it, the vertical immensity of the unknown. Suddenly I shivered and then, letting go of the life ring, dove down as deep as I could go, perhaps only 5 or 6 meters. I opened his eyes, seeing maybe another 20 meters down into the great green nothing. When I came back up he gulped delicious air and hooted and hollered like I'd won the game single-handed. I’d glimpsed the edge of the void, something we all wish to peer over. I thought I’d seen it before, nature almost tastelessly uninterrupted- like looking through two mirrors till the reflection’s edge fades around an imperceptible bend. I'd seen it in pieces from the tops of desert peaks, dawn light on some distant island, New England forest’s damp and infinite.
This time though, the immediacy of the experience caught me off guard and suddenly I was crying, toweling off and slipping on yesterday’s jeans and cardigan while blubbering helplessly into a dirty handkerchief. They were tears of gratitude though, not sadness, for having left behind the dull functionality of Brown and New York and modern social networking for something trying and beautiful. The sharp sting of salt in the half moon crack in my left palm shook me out this emotion. I wished I hadn't climbed so damn hard on the last trip upstate. My fingers were strong and calloused from caressing sharp quartzite and granite edges. I always looked at people's hands when he first met them, my grandfather taught me that; said you could learn an awful lot about someone just by studying their hands.
I suppose my hands were rough and kind, clean angular lines with neatly trimmed fingernails. I’d always been wary of grownups with soft hands. Everyone should experience fatigue of the body, I thought selfishly. Perhaps not in the fields or the factories but in something purposeful and regular, whether the even creases of a paintbrush trapped for hours beneath thumb and forefinger or the deep calloused grooves worn by fishing line and marlin twine. Gripping the dark oiled wood of the wheel felt timeless and unconstrained. I could have been a captain 400 years ago, I fancied, returning to the old world from an expedition of learning and adventure.
Feeling wonderfully adrift, I shouted commands to imaginary crewmembers and sang out to the terns and the fish. In a place like this, memories had to be paper-thin because they are constantly being rewritten. I thought nostalgically of the hours spent as a child peering into the curving glass expanse of a bedroom fishtank, the contents always shifting and ethereal. I saw quite suddenly that now the glass was the sky and he was just a fish in the ocean, studied by god and no one. I wondered what the French authorities would think.
-Chapter 2-
Like the northern lights appear, with sudden and disorienting brightness, so did this particular dawn over a cold, cloud swept patch of the Eastern Atlantic- May 26th, 1978. 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. Out here in the sterile expanse of the ocean, laws and guilt were not things to be considered with any great thought, I told myself. There were some things I missed already- a nice hot shower when I felt sweaty and salty, a restaurant meal, the wind through the trees, a car rolling aimlessly down the street. Oddly yet with perceptible satisfaction, people were not on this list of continental longings. I felt quite content for now in my own company, the physical divide of a thousand miles of ocean was marginal compared to the social rift I’d begun to feel lately between friends and strangers alike.
To be singular was a gift, to be singular was a gift; I kept reminding himself with blind neurosis. Really it was a curse- a fucking curse, goddamn it. I was not singular is a way that developed over arrogant alienation or misanthropic ideology, but genuinely, undeniably myself. The battle of assertion was constant- to be confident but not cocky, aware yet somehow not transcendent of mortal folly. The simple remedy of course was reckless distraction through things I found sincere and effortless passion in- rock climbing in North Conway on warm fall weekends, digging through old jazz records in the library, and now stealing some retired millionaire's yacht's at 3 in the morning. At this point in the journey or the experience rather, as it had become more sensory than physical, retreat was unthinkable. The only option was to ride the cresting wave of austere ambition I felt, and hope favorable winds and weather brought me somewhere along the South coast of France. Here I felt the authorities would be more understanding of my… situation. ‘The situation, well, the situation is that everything is fucking peachy!’, I said suddenly. The days were to be filled with purpose and spontaneity, the nights terrifying enough to keep me 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 or a year in a small boat, adrift and with a minimum of plans. I’d always been fascinated as a child growing up in New England with the heavily romanticized, mysterious maritime tradition of both yesteryear and today. I recalled the rough-hewn, foul-mouthed swordfish long liner’s I’d seen in Gloucester, my mother trying to shield me from their steady stream of ‘Fuck! Piss! Cunt!’ pouring over the wharves at 100 decibels. I knew even then that their animosity towards the sea was in reality a profound respect. The mountains were imposing and real as well, I thought, but always seemed to offer some sort of comfort, some egress from the storm. Out 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. I 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 me tethered to safety my whole life seemed to guide me eastward. I kept the heading steady across rising swells and horizontal rain: North 30 East.
Thinking of my current existence, a wave of peripheral satisfaction tingled from my toes up to my head, the joy of fleeting freedom, the ability to guide one's life in any desired direction if only for a minute. The hours wasted in bars, in the library, at home doing nothing, I wanted it all back; if only to postpone the endless niceties and trivialities of tomorrow until I could condense some sort of experience out of it. The 6 nights and 5 days at sea had begun to unwind the calculated indifference to discomfort I played too 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. While I still felt strong and immortal, the edges of my tidy world had somehow become ragged and organic. I wondered what it might be like to have a companion, not just on this trip, but someone who made time and boredom irrelevant. I thought of the insecurity that hid under my smug judgment of the complacent, domesticated couples I saw everywhere in my 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 my own refusal to compromise his habits and absurdities I hadn't stopped to consider that perhaps these people had just managed to find something that had eluded me so efficiently.
Recreational sailing is a beautiful sport. Yet much like skiing and rock climbing, it suffers from a misperception in popular culture as a self-fulfilling reckless prophesy for rich white men. While this is essentially true, it did not invalidate the fact that there was something monolithic and singular about traveling in a little boat, and I suspected the urge to do so dwelled in many men. I 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 I now stood, an unwitting subject to everyone else. I 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 I was neither alone nor in bad company, for I considered the sea and its myriad ecosystems to be a benign and familiar accomplice, the ballast and the medium of my journey.
The course and the liquidation of the adventure had begun, and its momentum kept me faithful that safe harbor in Europe would be reached soon. There, I thought, I would disembark, assume a newer, more optimistic identity, and travel on foot across the subcontinent. I’d meet fresh, vibrant people along the way-future friends and lovers. The snide smirks of the drones that made up most of the world, there to toil away at some dull bit of functionality all their lives, burnt off like the morning fog. I imagined the highlights of their lives, mere afterthoughts in the rear view mirror of my existence. Suddenly, amidst this self-assuring facade of superiority, I though of my best friend at Brown, how we were so unpretentious and natural in each other’s company, the warmth of proximity to someone who knew your ticks and cherished your shortcomings. Again I started to cry. On land I would have stopped this foolish show of emotion at once. Yet in the spirit of solitude and the experience, I 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 as weary as the soul. I didn't know if he loved Tucker; not that kind of love, well, whatever, it’s all the same really. Tucker Lindquist. I found an old pen in the cabin and, the boat on a long tack sailing itself, wrote his name on my hand. I looked at it, and then shook a little more. The world wasn't fair, it wasn't even close to just; the people who loved you most made you hurt so bad, out in the windy, cold expanse on the North Atlantic. The world was so strange, so fabulously incomprehensible, all I could do was love nature and my own shortcomings: the two things that seemed to point east to salvation. Steady as the dawn, they burned with sincerity.
Memories began to seem tepid and abstract, the anxious present and looming future clouding my reason as I 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 now nourishing me. How violent and cyclical nature was: apologetic to no one, focused only on survival and perpetuation. I looked wild and oddly 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 half-assed masculinity amongst the dull curves of the ocean. Perhaps I'd go for another swim, 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 I could see down into the teal water fading into 2 vertical miles of liquid nothingness. This inner universe was comforting in its scale and uniformity yet I couldn't help but see the distractions that fouled my social interactions on land suspended at even intervals in the blue tomb, taunting me even here.
I thought with affectionate 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 unlikable. This is what I 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. I’d invent new cultural impressions, pseudonyms and alter egos when I pleased- the truth was always secondary to the experience. Besides, when the right person came along, the truth always found its way back into things. I hadn't drunk or done drugs in 7 days, and to be honest, I felt like shit. The worst of it had passed, but to emerge unscathed from the voluntary haze of narcotics and lies was both painful and a thing of beauty. A lone Arctic tern passed overhead en route to the north for the summer and I marveled at its sleek design, the effortless way it glided forward, propelled by instinct.
-Chapter 3-
The sun ascended slowly over the cascading chalk and limestone cliffs north of Marseilles, and I steadied the wheel with newfound resolve to make landfall meaningful and prophetic. It was to be the fulfillment of a month's drifting in the north Atlantic; identities swirled amongst floating rubbish and seaweed. This was not to say I hadn't been to shore yet- many times had my feet had touched terra firma in the fast 2 weeks since I’d passed through the steely, gray straights of Gibraltar, the poverty and mistreatment of Africa filling the southern horizon across a scant ten miles of water. My first stop had been in Spain in the little fishing village of Tarifa. It sat just around the corner from the imposing stone monolith of Gibraltar Rock and the stoic, resolute control of the damn British, content with their hawkish eye into affairs of the third world to the south. I was not concerned with business or politics though- I was just bent on experiencing. Whether viscerally or subtly, anything worthwhile now days had to be felt, I thought. The simplicity struck me and I reeled with the impact, laying face up on the uneven, polished deck boards.
After stocking up on fresh water and produce in Tarifa [the customs agent seemed satisfied with my explanation of personal adventure and cruising in broken, stuttering Spanish] I set off along the northern Mediterranean coast, the fabled Cote D'Azure promising with a wink to be full of Hollywood-like apparitions and summer daydreams. It proved even more phantasmagoric and bright than the movies predicted. It was largely populated with tan, accented young men and women who seemed dubiously employed, spending most of their time around the beach or driving zippy little cars along narrow roads that careened over precipices into the expanse of the Mediterranean. The French were smart and inquisitive, free from the snobbery and pretense I’d been led to expect by the so often zealous American populace. They wanted to know my purpose, my origin, and when I pleaded guilty to neither, they seemed content with me, the tanned creases round my smile and weather-beaten oxford shirts evidence of some noble desire I must have here, so far from home. I loved the food, the wine, the easy camaraderie of the young people, bred of discontent for authority or the government, plans and the future.
On this particular morning, August 20th 1978, my parents and friends had taken me for dead. The immediate grief, the anguish of loss unseen and unforgiving, had begun to fade as their busy lives clouded the memory of the young man they thought they’d lost. The arrogant recklessness of my actions were of no consequence to me now- the future loomed so immediate and tangible that the occasional fits of regret I had alone on the boat faded quickly, like a child's tantrum over candy or television. I had been alone before, and I was alone now; pleased with the grandeur and romantic perfection of the coastline- it never disappointed or exacted anything in return. I missed the planned spontaneity of day-to-day existence at school. Whatever excitement this had generated was always a dead end though, safe and predictable, adoration or lust of a stranger not always reciprocal or wanted. The present excitement was terrifying and had consequences of life and loss. Emotional attachment had no room here, I decided.
I thought of the couple nights I’d spent on the beaches of La Coudouliere outside Toulon earlier in the week. I’d dropped anchor suddenly in the shallow water of a little sandy cove, the sun beating down relentlessly on the patchwork of summer cottage roofs by the water. A young man had appeared out of the corner of my eye in a little wooden dory. It was of the type the old fisherman used to cast their humble little nets into the maw of the sea, and I had waved enthusiastically and shouted hello in half-coherent French. The young man, Guillaume was his name it turned out, was lean and tan. A sunburnt shock of fading blonde hair and ratty cutoff shorts speckled in little bits of white paint framed him, both endearing and indifferent. With the beautiful forwardness of the French, he asked what a handsome young man like myself was doing in Coudouliere, and 20 minutes later we were tearing at worn edges of cloth and buttons in Guillaume's little whitewashed cottage on the dunes, breathing the heavy summer air that pressed down on sweaty flesh.
Guillaume said he had a girlfriend. "Mes Parents habite en Paris", he stated beseechingly into the warm creased of the pillow, as if that explained it all. I understood though; summer fun was heady and spontaneous, about feeling hot and restless, not pleasing relatives or establishing a future. Even one's own psyche was irrelevant amongst the pale white sand and green vines. Addresses and phone numbers, in a comically sad display of post-sexual connectivity, were exchanged on yellowed bits of a phonebook. I ran down the fading wooden dock to the little skiff to row back out to the sailboat. As I steeled myself for the emotional drain of disconnection I heard quick, nervous footsteps behind me and felt a steady hand on my shoulder. "Wait!" said Guillaume, the Parisian with the girlfriend, and my eyes lit with such childish conviction I couldn't say no to another 2 days amidst the hazy sun and shiny static of our lust.
I left Coudouliere with the distinct apprehension of an opportunity spent and dwindled; the awkward slowness of parting with Guillaume still fresh in my mind. The net accumulation of the experience had taken over at this point though, at least outwardly, and I shied away from commitment. The sun along the Cote D'Azure was vicious and luxurious in August, and the steep white limestone cliffs cascaded angular fragments of light down into the ragged, hollow sea. I imagined the boat suspended amongst my thoughts and the 3-dimensional miasma of the past, the stale water parting before me like Moses at the Red Sea. I thought with pained affection of the quizzical glance Guillaume had given me as they parted on the humble, rotting edge of the dock, a glance that betrayed the hurt of having let a stranger love me.
Everyone was a stranger, in the context of the experience; even if you had been inside someone, you hadn't really known them; you hadn’t wound the tight gears of their soul with your own hands. Lying in the neat little wooden bed beside whitewashed walls in a geometric corner of the house, Guillaume had said he was a writer. This was to say he had family money and after an education from a good university in Paris, could afford to pursue writing free of the harsh bourgeois struggle for bread and happiness. The daily grind of a commute and deadlines was replaced by living comfortably on the edges of boredom, inspiration coming in childish bouts of creative thrashing. I’d happened on such a moment, an opening amongst the tedium of being aesthetic and pleasing people. This was precisely the kind of spontaneity I’d hoped for, yet somehow I still longed for the scary push and pull of nature. The glimpse into the endless teal abyss of the ocean; a collision with a rogue shipping container 1,000 miles from land. I wondered what had become of the smiling Arab seamen I’d exchanged greetings with across the water 600 miles northwest of the Azores, their crisp white clothing radiant in the sun, their trust in Allah and the shipping company bringing them modest immortality.
I felt so vulnerable to those who seemed to eye me curiously on land, wondered if I was the real deal; energy worth reciprocating. I pulled the anchor up with taunt, lean muscle and heaved the dripping iron rake onto the foredeck, the boat lurching forward on kind western breezes under full sail. The craft heeled hard and bottles of cheap rum and Pinot Grigio rolled around below deck as I trimmed the main and we rounded the arrogant little stone precipice of the cape. It was not a terminus of land but rather a reluctant finger into the sea, an abstraction between the next point of land upcoast. On this sinuous and rounded coastline, it was hard to tell which way was forward and which was back, which led to Morocco and which to the aromatic, ancient ports of Sardinia and Sicily, where broken volcano's dripped into the sea.
From the vantage point of a good sailboat, the world presented itself just as it ought to. Mountains announced their presence far off on the horizon; cities glowed contently in hazy amber fog over the calm black water at night. I set the wheel and trimmed the sails to my liking, making a long, confident tack southeast away from the raucous green coast and out into the warm, shallow gulf. The gulls and shorebirds were silent and curious. Rummaging about in a little wooden compartment behind the helm [at this point all things had a rightful place, and the workings of the yacht were of my own flesh, it seemed] I found a bottle of gin. I bit off the end of a lime and poured a little tonic water, preferring to take alternating shots of each rather than mix the three. It tasted acrid and delicious, the bitter summer remembrance. Suddenly I was so thirsty I could only drink more and more and more, crying over Guillaume and the future between squeezes of lime and gin. The tears were salty and old, running into pale stubble and the faded ends of a Brook's Brother's collar which drooped downward dejectedly from the assault of all this unpredictable running about.
Evening crept slowly past the little green palm trees and red stucco villas on the horizon. I’d become quite drunk at this point, but managed to set a reasonable course towards a little sandy mirage whose smooth shores barely perturbed the crimson skyline to the south. The island must have had a name, an identity, but at this point all that was peripheral and unimportant. I just wanted to stop moving so that the simultaneous urges to give up and throw up might cease for a bit- until things steadied enough to start the next binge on newness. Sure enough, fortune smiled, or at least creased its lips. Just as the sun died to the west, a sheltered weakness in the northern coast of the isle presented itself. I settled in with the familiar comfort of home- sound anchorage and piece of mind, at least for tonight.
-Chapter 4-
I awoke with an uneasy familiarity, déjà vu for a place gathered like a ragged mirage above the flat blue Mediterranean. The island had a name; it must! Names were irrelevant in this part of the experience though, so instead I fixed a drawn-out, lazy Sunday breakfast. Eggs and fennel and toast with bacon, gin from the bottle he hadn't quite done away with last night. The bitter drops clung to the green insides of the glass, opalescent in the sun. I put on faded khaki cut offs and rowed the little dingy into shore, the beach a million souls of crushed sea creatures, their hollow homes baking in the warm air. I’d never seen a beach made only of shells, and bent down close to the bleached, gritty surface so that my face was inches from it, studying the myriad shapes and histories of them.
The island was only 15 or 20 kilometers from the mainland, and I could see the craggy white hills east of Cannes protruding above the earthy horizon to the north. It was shrouded in a strange atmosphere, I felt. A tepid stillness focused the omniscient sun into little corners between the sand dunes. Palm trees, whose fronds hung limp and quiet as if admitting defeat, had been planted behind the dunes. The isle doubtlessly had a long and convoluted history, but I chose to let this be, to soak in the existential beauty of the harsh silver light and teal water. The harbor was a fine respite from the sea, and I imagined it in times of fierce storm, sitting stoic and permanent between the rising swells.
At one end of the little cove was a rocky protrusion out into the sea, gray limestone butting up against the azure water ten or fifteen meters high. At the top of this precipice, suspended on rough wooden stilts, was a small red house. It had neat yellow trim around the windows and door, suggesting the summer home of a modest family- a tax accountant in Marseille or café owner in Nice. I approached it at a modest clip, feet always about to catch a forward fall, the boyish anticipation of the next step too much for gravity to counter. At the northernmost edge of the rock, right before it tumbled down into the sea, stood Guillaume. 'Oh, Guillaume!" I thought with abstract joy, and ran full sprint down the remaining 50 meters of the white shells, arms foolishly aside me.
It was not Guillaume. The man's features changed and became more angular, a trim mustache turned downward at the creased edges of his lips and an elaborately styled pouf of straight brown hair jutting over his forehead like the cliffs over the sea. The man was still; he said nothing at first. His expression was smug and content, a gambler who just played his best hand to the bewilderment of his opponents. As I speculated in panicked urgency on how to best introduce myself, an uninvited guest on a private island, the man took off toward him like a derailed freight train. His smirk was replaced by a gaping, manic smile, and before I knew it I was being wrestled into the soft sand, the dead sea creatures brushing uncomfortably on the day old sunburn on my thighs. I made no effort towards resistance; rather I let my body go limp the way a kitten might innately understand when its mother picks it up by the scruff. I knew somehow this too was an integral part of it, being wrestled with in the sand by a French madman on an island in the strangely untamed Cote D'Azure.
I felt the imperceptible pull of gravity, downwards and into the mushy, salty ground, feeling resigned to my fate even before I knew the outcome. The man's name was Julian, and he said he was sorry, but visitor's were not expected or necessarily welcomed. He said he might make an exception for me though, and with this he led me up an old wooden staircase in a shallow cleft in the precipice, his steps bounding upwards like a small child climbing a lookout tower. Julian was fucking crazy; this I had gathered quite sensibly from our first encounter. The rigid rules of society, even along the hedonistic Cote D'Azure did him no justice, and yet he ostensibly refrained from drugs or alcohol, I thought in amazement, walking around the barren cabin. By barren of course, I meant there were no substances to partake in. Rather it was covered, from the prim whitewashed walls to the bare beams of the ceiling, with art of the most obscene and gratuitous kind, photographs. Big ones, small ones, giant phantasmagoric pinhole apparitions on glossy matte: they were everywhere.
As Julian prepared jus d'orange avec ouellettes in the neat, rectangular kitchen, I broke the silence with the logical question of whether he was a photographer [he looked a few years too old to be an art student still?]. In broken English, fragmented bits of thought that were abstractly honest, he said he’d studied photography and painting in Geneva. His family came from some obscurity of the old establishment, with lineage dating back to the suppression of the bourgeois in the Revolution. He quickly followed this with the fact that by living on the island alone, painting and photographing nature and himself, he was slowly atoning for the sins of past lives, the inexcusable high-brow tedium he’d come from, and was on his way to becoming pure, or at least aware. This sounded awfully pretentious and scary, I thought, and our breakfast on the little yellow wooden veranda seemed much more rewarding.
I told Julian we didn't have to talk if he didn't want to, which seemed to relieve him immensely. He communicated now in nervous, anticipatory smiles and quick glances over his shoulder, as if aware of the judgment of the seagulls and silent island creatures. The isle was bigger than I thought, Julian informed me in matter-of-fact pride: 5 kilometers long and 2 wide. It had been a trading outpost during the Roman Empire and later a small fishing community was built on the stone ruins of the Roman fort. It had ended up in the personal estate of a Jacques de Marquee, one of the most powerful and tyrannical land barons of the old world, his summer respite from the growing demands of the peasants in the late 18th century. The sun here was hot and luxuriant, radiant in a way that justified the excess of spending and accumulation. Suddenly Julian's 30-something ineptness and half-staged life out on the island seemed more appropriate.
I thought he ought to tell Julian about Guillaume, not that he would care: just to air my thoughts in the stiff morning breeze before someone similarly misplaced. Julian was someone who might laugh and point yet might also feel compassion- jealously even, I hoped in secret awfulness. He listened intently and then did precisely as I’d expected; laughed and gesticulated in wild incoherent French and almost fell over in his chair, saying something to the effect that I was an American dealing with the French and this was so typical it wasn't even worth noting. This made me angry, yet also sympathetic- Julian was similarly lost after all, and I ought not to forget that, cultural differences aside. I liked how he was vulnerable and insecure, yet also resolutely angular and filled with exploding, loud ideas. We both seemed tired of being watched, thinking we were being watched, forgetting to be watched; Goddamn it! By myself more than anyone, I thought pointlessly. Still though, Julian, like Guillaume of recent times, was intrigued, because I’d presented an interruption to a life that was already partly resigned to predictability, the flat spots in my collective experience sometimes their high points. To be bored by nothing more than your own potential, was this the fate of 20th Century man? To live in an age of both privilege and slavery, enthralled by the latest media holograph, hollow and immediate, to turn away from that of substance- was this the brave new culture, the modular petri-dish everyone spoke of? It was all too difficult to think about now, and I withdrew into my own mind, postponing the unnecessary search for answers that seemed arcane to begin with.
I recalled sitting in the library at Brown earlier this past semester, last January it was, the wet snow coming down in heavy, globular thwacks on the old wooden roof. Across a table sat a black, curvaceous girl lost in the internal struggle of committing to reading or listlessly watching boys, and I’d noted with possibly malevolent content that Brown was doing a great job creating a more diverse student body. Thoughts of how exotic she seemed compared to my blinded, bubbled childhood distracted me and when I’d looked up again at her, I’d discovered she was in fact not black, just an awful, orange tan, the drooping edges of her lips hiding a lingering unhappiness. This was it though; I had this dreadful ability to look at people and stare right through them, the unchanging geometry of a brick wall or hedgerow more appealing or tolerable than a stranger's face.
She’d watched me too though, with nervous fascination, I’d been wearing a Kashmiri crewel coat adorned with bright swirls of color and faded gray Levi's two sizes too small, garish red thrift store penny loafers slid over green argyle socks. A bastardized hippy prepster, I must have seemed, worse than those pretty blonde SDS girls in their Tibetan dresses and long scarves, hiding under layer after layer of cultural appropriation. To what extent were we both right? Entitled to be young and make unnecessary mistakes, to appropriate without intent to harm, only searching for a flat, stable place amongst all this college placelessness.
Julian could tell I was distracted, and led me arm in arm the way the French sometimes do, down to the beach on the other side of the precipice. It miraculously was made of sand and not shells, the texture more pleasing to me bare, increasingly calloused feet. He had his camera with him, a heavy black Leica with expensive looked attachments. A long rounded lens jutted forward like a telescope against his boney hips. At the end of the little sand cove some smooth, flat ledges faded humbly into the shallow green water. He sharply instructed me to lay down there, facing him with one arm propping my head up, 'like a fucking mermaid', I thought, yet I complied without hesitation.
Julian took photographs as if he'd heard he might be charged for them one day; each click of the shutter confident, yet apprehensive of the consequences of light or misdirected intent. I followed his instructions silently, the shallow, repetitive waves and distant gulls framing things just right now in the absence of words. Julian never specified what anything was for; rather it was inherently understood that I was in the midst of some sort of biopic; a hurried trip forward that needed no explanation. Suddenly sex seemed so sterile and mechanical to me that my relationship with this new stranger became unburdened and platonic…still beautiful, yet free of the expectations of physical love. This wasn't to say that attachment wouldn't occur. Indeed, I prayed in his now hollow mind, filled with the blinding reflection of the sun- that I might know the fullness of spirit that came with truly selfless affection, attracted or not to him.
The physics of love though, the material presence was so greedy and consuming, it gnawed away at me until I cried out in pain. The pain was actually due to a jellyfish that had appeared to be dead and benign beside me. As I recalled from childhood seaside mishaps, it was never safe to assume such, and I recoiled from the sting of a few long, red tentacles that had inadvertently brushed against me while lost in Julian’s posturing. I complained like a small child to him, protesting because I felt I could, and I smiled when he decided a swim was the solution to all the various stresses of the day we’d encapsulated.
Julian was done for the moment with all the endearingly French gesticulating, and he relieved me of my mermaid duties, abandoning the prized Leica in the pale sand and bounding half-clothed into the sea. I was hot and itchy from the sun, the sand and the smooth rocks, and joined him in the surreal green ether. It seemed to wrap up all the unconsolidated stuff in the world, bound it tight like the heavy wool blankets my mother had tucked me under on family ski vacations as a boy. Cozy and safe in this little cove on the Roman Isle; Jacques de Marquee. What a strange turn of events, as usual. The visions of past sin and excess came to me like the long, even sets of breakers against the gray limestone, and I longed for the pencil-thin memories of childhood, which waited only to be replaced. Julian had swum out a good ways, to a little black ledge rising humbly out of the water some 300 meters distant. He stood atop it naked, proclaiming the sea as his whole kingdom. Like the small boy who first stands atop a mountain peak, he knew no slightness.
Even submerged in the August Sea, the sun was hot and uncaring, I thought. I found myself longing for the long northern twilight of my youth, the salty Maine coast that numbed the extremities even at midsummer's crest. Breathing laboriously and doing my best to disguise a frantic doggy paddle as an indifferent backstroke, I coasted up onto the little ledge, joining Julian. Hands together and thrust triumphantly overhead, we sang absurd, lewd melodies of our own creation, Julian ad hoc improvising in poor English. The yacht, The Stranger [its given name, the 'Evening Star', was dull and unapologetic, I’d decided] sat contently on its mooring in 5 fathoms good standing, as the old timers might say. I glanced around the little point at her, smiling knowingly. She was beautiful and demanding; forged in the humble good character all sailboats ought to be, I thought. I wondered, like the boat, how much longer I might get away with this minimal upkeep, the lack of plans both terrifying and liberating. 'Everyone is so fucking predictable anyways', I thought with sudden irritability, though I knew this was completely untrue.
Julian had become part of the decor of the island, it seemed; like a crystal or fossil, he could be shelved and catalogued in my mind- form to be admired later, now that I knew nothing was going to happen. His aesthetics, his angular, arrogant jawline, the piercing blue eyes that were only evident in light of the mathematics of the situation, had become symmetry duly noted without pretense. That was exactly it though- I’d judge people with such merciless precision that there was no compassion left over, only a soggy, half-formed opinion. The world, however unfairly stylized by me, was perfect and round when viewed from the sea. All the lookers and assholes and even the nice people were earth-bound and stationary, seen at my leisure from the circular vantage of the ocean. The things that pleased me now were grand and austere; their presence never betrayed my trust or shifted. I laughed at the irony most people seemed to find in my steadfast trust in the raw, unpolished elements of nature- the gulls and the wind. I suppose most people don't want to deal with it all, to truly deal, well, 'there were so many fucking layers to digest', and they left for easier subjects.
Some memories, not even memories in the sense of boxed, dusty experiences, but living, animate things; well, they seemed so sensory and perfect that all I had to do was channel this and everything fell into place. The warmness of truly relating to someone, the extension of one's own skin was alien at the moment, yet I found some solace in nature’s permanence. I swam back to shore in a clouded, hazy paranoia; the heightened awareness of the past a bit disorienting. Julian led me by the hand back up the dull wooden steps to the house, and yet my distraction still blurred things indecently. When we were bare and sweaty under the thin crescent moon, whose edges reluctantly lit the windowpanes, only then did I exhale and smile without effort. I decided to stay for some time- the trip never had an August deadline anyways, I rationalized, and this seemed like as good an excuse as any not to go somewhere else aimless.
I was wrong about Julian, and the next few weeks on the island passed in uneventful bliss. The ineptness and luxuriant time wasting of the supposedly privileged classes wore on me though, and soon I longed for simultaneous unrest and even rhythm of the open ocean again. Italy was somewhere off to the east, with green olive and citrus trees on steep hillsides. The continuity of the island became too much to deal with, so one night in fidgety sleeplessness I got up and left. I’d felt awful doing it, physically twisted in knots of regret and doubt as I left Julian child-like under the covers, unaware that he would wake up alone. What it really came down to was a basic intellectual inequity, a rift from which I didn't think we could recover. Julian was organic and emotional, prone to wild gesticulating and waving his hands over life's unsolved woes, and I was alienated by his infallible idealism and tepid logic. The idea that his ‘logic’ only made sense to him never seemed to enter into the equation. This stirred up too many other difficult points, and I was content to spurn Julian silently, such that I might move on.
