'A Private Greatness' Chapter 3

-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.