The Wanderer's Song

Up, up and North we drove...

Jon and myself and the kids, in our trusty green Subaru, with the roof rack packed to the gills with the things we never used on board.

The Baja stretched out her crumbly deserts and swallowed us whole.

From the highest hills we spied ...the seas on either side.

To our right, the inland waters, the ones we've called home for the past year .

The islands where we swam and fished, the long empty beaches we combed for treasure.

To our Left, the Great Pacific rolled and roared,

A Golden Dragon, under a setting sun.

Jon and I caught our breath and looked at one another.

Were we really going to take that on?

It looks so awfully big when you see it like that.

But then, Jon was smiling at me,

So, I smiled back.

It was almost one year ago, exactly.

We spent our first nights at sea, seventy miles off this same coast.

Tossing and pitching in the blackness.

No one to save us.

Too late to turn back.

We were novice sailors. New cruisers,  

Wondering if we would make it safely, and what we would find if we did.

Mexico was a foreign land to us, then.

We didn't know we would go to the Sea of Cortes.

We thought we were going to Cabo-and then Hawaii.

But we decided to turn left.

And we fell in love.

and now, we were headed North to sell the car.

Because, these days, looking out at that crazy, huge ocean...

Just makes us want to sail across it.

I always liked the Subaru.

We bought it in anticipation of Kai's birth.

A station wagon. Because that's what people do.

And it was big enough to fit the dog, too.

Then there actually was a baby...

Not just the idea of one.

And everything changed.

We changed.

We took him for a hike one day, Jon carrying him against his chest, in a little sling.

Kai was screaming, because he had a colic, to end all colics.

That was our first lesson in learning how to weather a storm.

It was good training

When people ask me;

"How will you deal with two hour watches, for a month, at sea?"

I look at them and say;

"Colic".

Kai didn't sleep for more than an hour, for two years straight.

A month...is nothing.

Believe me.

We climbed to the top of Runyun canyon that day, looking down at the city we had been trying to storm.

Both of us, for years, even before we met each other and fell in love.

We had come with our dreams and even a little talent but that didn't matter anymore.

What mattered was this angry, fabulous, bundle in our arms.

and what kind of parents we would be and what kind of world we would show him.

And we realized, becoming a movie star may or may not happen.

It would be cool if it did...

But being closer to the clouds mattered, too.

And seeing the stars at night, and learning how to be brave and depend on yourself.

And being together.

And that's how we ended up here.

Everything, this adventure, is about making each day as full of possibility as it can be. 

So, we went North with our heads down.

And kept a low profile.

Saw our family, bought charts for the South Pacific and found some used dive gear.

It was an odd time.

A limbo...

to be ghosts in your old town.

I know we both thought a lot about our "other" path.

Much of our lives have been devoted to that thing-both of us still love so much.

But watching our children grow up on an ocean is another dream.

One that unfolded before us-whether we earned or deserved it... or not.

We lay our hearts and our hopes before Hollywood but it was the Ocean who roared in and swept us off our feet.

I look at the twenty-two year old starlet gleaming from the cover of Vanity fair magazine,

and to me, her destiny is obvious.

Ours, perhaps, not so much.

Maybe, this is what makes one a wanderer.

That...and colic.

We went for a hike up the same canyon as we did with Kai all those years ago and discovered these Ladies and their little bundles..I can't help but wonder what changes they will bring to their unsuspecting parents!

A very serious Bocce dude

In your face, Grandma!

A Lil' Pippen love...

A twenty six hour bus ride...

Dropped off a mile and a half to our boat...without a car!

Another adventure begins...

"The dawn it went before us, through a shining lane of skies,

and the dream was at our heartstrings,

and the light was in our eyes,

And we made no boasts of glory and we made no boast of birth,

on the road to vagabondia that lies across the earth."

                                                                                  -Dana Brunet