Thanksgiving Questions
Originally published in the St. John Sun Times
We are now hoping to arrive by Thanksgiving.
The boat is ready. After spending two months in the yard in Maine, the 70-foot Sonny is docked in Newport, Rhode Island, freshly painted and one of a dwindling number of stately sailboats still bobbing in the biting air that cuts across the harbor. She is the only vessel on her dock on Goat Island.
A quintessential New England scene, it is starkly beautiful, despite the cold. Bright blue sky, a few puffy white clouds, and a stubborn November sun, almost strong enough to warm things up mid-day, belie the storm that is brewing far off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean. We will wait for the weather to pass before departing for the Caribbean, even if it means passing another night at the Celtica Irish Pub, watching Law and Order SVU on the 10 flat-screen, high-definition TVs with Kelly, the bartender, who had only us for customers on Tuesday.
The holiday had seemed far off, as we had originally hoped to sail days ago and arrive in the Virgin Islands mid-month, but suddenly it feels imminent, the start of the season, and all the excitement and anticipation that goes with it. Maybe, we think, we will arrive in St. John just in time to sail right into the Coral Bay Yacht Club’s Thanksgiving Regatta.
It has been four years since I have sat down to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with family in Philadelphia, which is a long time when your family is small, and the presence or absence of each member is especially noted. Three years ago, as a newcomer to Coral Bay, so many locals wanted to be welcoming, I was invited to and attended several island parties, missed the turkey at all of them, but hardly noticed because I was too intoxicated by the idea of my first sailing experience, scheduled for the next day.
Two years later, in the middle of a 2800-mile trans-Atlantic sail, I missed the turkey again by spending Thanksgiving in Cape Verde, an island chain off the coast of Africa, where the locals never even heard of the American holiday. The captain and I celebrated successfully completing the first leg of our journey and observed the fourth Thursday in November by drinking copious amounts of Super Bock beer. There may have been some grilled chicken and seasoned rice involved, although there is no evidence of it in the one “holiday photo” of us sitting at the bar at Club Nautico.
Poised to return to tradition this year, it all fell apart the last week of October when…plans changed. Something, which, frankly, should have surprised no one.
In this space earlier this year, I wrote about the question frequently asked of me after my first year living on St. John: So, what are your plans now? I didn’t often have a plan beyond—lunch, maybe, or a work commitment the next day. Why did people keep asking me this? Did I need a plan? There was no plan for this past summer, and activities turned out to be racing classic sailboats in the Mediterranean, running with the bulls in Pamplona, and watching the America’s Cup in Valencia, Spain, although, admittedly, doing the aforementioned without pre-planning means you’re likely to end up running out of money as well, which I did, necessitating a return home to Philadelphia in August to work.
Some great jobs found me: Producing long-format television stories on history and art for the local NBC station; profiling influential Hispanics for a national TV show; hosting some high-tech concert broadcasts for the Philadelphia Orchestra; and babysitting a friend’s 7-month-old little boy so his new Mom could return to work one day a week. It was all work I cared about, all freelance and on my own time, my own terms, each new opportunity a little reminder not to be afraid to take a risk.
In between my patchwork of jobs, I caught up with friends and colleagues, one of whom, after probing for details of my extended adventures asked: Did it change your DNA? It is an interesting question, and one still to be pondered, because of my pre-occupation with another mystifying, more ubiquitous, question, the one everyone invariably asked:
So, you’re back?
The question was baffling. Somewhere along the way, I don’t remember when, but probably quite a while ago, residency in the Virgin Islands, working on sailboats, living abroad, had ceased to be a sabbatical or a vacation or time off and had become, simply, life. There was no back. It was all forward. Blissful, challenging, terrifying, liberating, forward motion. Which reminds me, we were talking about the boat.
After living on various boats most of the spring and summer, I found myself too far from the water most of the fall, save for some time on the beach at the Jersey shore, and two fleeting weekends sailing on the Chesapeake that only whetted my appetite for… more.
With a break in “real work” until January, I signed on for a short-term charter boat job in the Caribbean and was online looking for cheap flights to the islands when the best question of all popped up in my e-mail.
Hey Margie, You want to sail South?
So now I am in Newport, waiting to do something I have over the past three years discovered—thankfully—that I truly love: Being out on the ocean.
While we wait for our weather window, each day cheating us out of a little more daylight, the rest of the crew and I are busying ourselves with last-minute errands, shopping, mostly, for warmer gloves, or an extra sweater.
We are stockpiling books from thrift stores and The Armchair Sailor on Lower Thames Street in downtown Newport, historical fiction and sailing classics and a book of essays by E.B. White, whose grandson owns the Maine boatyard where our vessel, Sonny, was built. We have also procured an imposing stack of almanacs, charts and plotting paper, having collectively decided to tackle celestial navigation on this voyage. The moon will be full on Thanksgiving, but it is a new moon now, perfect for stargazing.
It is marvelous, this transition time, like a transcontinental flight, or an extended train ride, when, neither here nor there, you are just—suspended—in time. Work finished in Philadelphia, travel to the tropics not yet underway, what remains is a gift of days, two or three or five days of freedom in a year already bursting with so many extraordinary days, that when the request comes from The St. John Sun Times, looking for a few hundred words on Thanks, the assignment, appropriate given the time of year, suddenly seems, for me, required.
For what are you thankful?
A warm bunk, with all its heat-generating adornments, guarding against the frigid New England night: the plush red blanket, new pink-striped socks, the indiscriminately loyal yellow dog snuggled in the curve of my legs.
One more day to talk to loved ones, to share some news, or hear their prayers for a safe journey. Another chance to say thank you… for the job, the meal, the place to sleep, the moral or financial support, the love, the understanding.
A hefty, borrowed favorite novel to pass the time while waiting for the weather to break. The gift of a slender volume of poetry that will wrap around my heart on a lonely evening.
The thrill of being on the cusp of going to sea, with its endless bounty of brilliant sky and salt air and dolphins and fish and a power so majestic, even now, well secured on the dock in a cold but calm harbor, our boat still rocks ever so slightly, hinting at what’s to come.
An accomplished captain, skilled to guide his ship through rough passage in the North Atlantic to the bluer waters and longer days of the Caribbean; the humor and companionship of good crew on a long, shared voyage, brimming with possibility.
Thanksgiving Days past, vivid with memories, whether a treasured moment spent in the company of family and closest friends, or an exotic day in a foreign land.
Life’s unexpected turn of events that take you to places you hadn’t ever planned on going, but leave you rich with experience, and maybe even change your DNA.
Wind that carries us from one destination to the next, sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly and forcefully than we’d like, but always urging us forward, challenging us to find our balance.
Hours of sheer joy on the water where the sense of freedom is absolute.
The knowledge that homecoming, wherever and whenever it is, will always be sweet.
Happy Thanksgiving
November 10, 2007
