Alone Together: Sailing Solo to Hawaii and Beyond

by Christian Williams

When I got home I informed Tracy that I had bought a Sailomat self-steering gear. Marriage is like a clock. The cogs may be hidden, but one glance at the hands tells all. “What took so long?” she said without looking up. “You’ve been talking about it constantly for months.”

GPS, a free gift to the world by the taxpayers of the United States that everyone takes for granted, gives our position at a glance, without a sextant sight or laborious calculation.

It’s no fun to stare at a moving compass, so pick something on the horizon to steer for. A cloud will serve. The lifespan of a cloud is 20 minutes, so after a while just choose another one.

If this is being alone, it doesn’t feel like it. The cabin seems more crowded every day. Every opened book spills out new companions in the full flush of their lives and eager to fill the silence. They slap an arm around your shoulder and draw you with them as if they’ve waited hundreds of years for the chance, and maybe they have. Not that joining them is always easy, because a book here, held in the circle of light from a single LED lamp, doesn’t hold still. It moves as if alive, and following the print with your eyes is like straining to hear a conversation in a noisy room. But even that focuses the attention.

Today is my birthday. Thank you, I’m 71. You would think I could tell you how that feels, but I can’t. It feels the same as ever. You need less sleep, they say, and that seems true. Otherwise, my age just doesn’t have much to say. The date you’re born matters if the kid soccer team says you have to be eight by January first, or for that first bartender job, or to run for Congress or collect Social Security. Most birthdays, though, don’t measure anything you need to know.

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet and philosopher, told of a kingdom in which cartography was so advanced that, in a quest for perfect accuracy, a map of the scale 1:1 was eventually produced. It was the same size as the world, and of no use to anybody.

Sleep is good stuff, but I wonder how much we really need. Not too much and not too little, of course, but the amount seems to vary with people and age. Teenagers sleep forever, and we all know successful adults who rise with the sun but conk out at 9 p.m. Others need only four hours a night, among them Michelangelo, Winston Churchill and Madonna.

Diesels always start if they get fuel. They won’t start if there’s air in the lines.

To encourage thoughtful digestion, or any digestion at all, I like Marian McPartland. For years she had a show on public radio. She would invite her peers to sit at the piano, discuss their style with disarming accuracy, and then say, “Shall we play something together?” The result was some of the best off-hand jazz collaborations. She could imitate any style and satirize it, too. Her own style was brilliance without guile. At a club in Washington, D.C., I used to watch her go through a pack of cigarettes every set, crushing them out on the piano-top ashtray with the same unselfconscious ease she crushed the standard repertory.

Every voyage promises known unknowns, and every sailor accepts them. When a problem becomes known it’s almost a relief.

Outcomes get spit out of chaos like watermelon seeds.

Lord Russell on Thales, the first philosopher, who got so fed up with people saying he lived in another world that one winter he quietly bought up all the olive presses in Greece. When the olive harvest came he rented them out at a high rate, just to prove to his tormentors that a philosopher could get rich anytime he felt like it.

A wheel not only makes for a clutter-free yachting environment, but places the owner in a commanding position aft, from which he gazes upon boat and crew like the guy who wrote the check.

But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.”

I know that many people can’t stand Moby Dick, which I have read every five years since I was 25, each time to find more in it, or maybe more in me.

Most nights have two or three squalls, and at midnight the breeze dies and by dawn we lie becalmed, drifting. It is if I have always been here, on this boat, in this placid ocean. The sameness of the days, and especially the gentleness of the sailing, gives uninterrupted time to remember everyone I know, even those not present for many years, and sometimes it seems the boat is full of people. Some have to introduce themselves we’ve been so long apart, so many years without our thoughts touching.

In military school I learned to sew by attaching my new corporal stripes, and then how to rip stitches out by taking them off every time I got busted back to private. Odysseus sewed, so did Robinson Crusoe and Joshua Slocum. My grandmother had a sewing machine, and I wish I had paid more attention. Over the years I came to realize that a sailboat has canvas in many forms, from the sails to the cushions to the hat on your head. So before setting out upon the fabric of the sea, I sat down to teach myself to sew.

Sailrite, an Internet supplier which gives away every trade secret of the canvas-workers craft in hundreds of free instruction videos.

I call it the departure of the provisional self. The provisional self is alert to others, conditioned for approval and judgement. It’s provisional because it’s always changing, adapting to the moment and the people and the situation. One single self wouldn’t do, really. The provisional self makes us good citizens, parents and friends. It’s on offense or defense according to situation, it’s wary and brave, and in some people is highly tuned to the nuance of others. We’re different selves at a funeral, when flying a kite, when buying a car. We have to be. There’s a provisional self for giving birth or playing a video game. I hope there’s one for dying well.

Years ago I was becalmed three days there, and lay on the deck in a torpor, pulling sargasso weed on board with a boat hook.

Perhaps the best lubricant for any friction, physical or emotional, is simply doing, and rest is overrated as a cure.

The web of responsibility proved a release from complexity. Even alone, I discovered, we live for others.

A year has passed now, and I understand better where Thelonious and I have been. It is a place not unlike where all of us are now, this moment, every moment. If something breaks we must try to fix it. If a different course is required, we must take it. The past is finished, the future is unknown. Here is where we are. The world is in the moment.

“Alone is impossible. To be is to be us all. Even the dead live on, extending a hand to those not yet born.” —Christian Williams in Alone Together