Outbound

Her docs called me two days later and said she'd opted to have the abortion. It was done, they'd tried to stop her but she left and had it done elsewhere.

And so was I. Done, I mean.

With her, anyway.

Not with sailing, as it turned out. Not by a long shot.

There were a couple of guys down in Costa Mesa working on a new 38 footer, and I drove down to see them, and the boat they were working on. They called it the Alajuela, named after a city in Costa Rica, and work was well underway on their second hull when I showed up on their doorstep. By the time I left later that afternoon I'd bought the next available boat, and would have her in a little less than a year, so I went home and retreated to the studio.

Jenn, of course, started calling as soon as she got back to Newport.

I, of course, changed my number.

She started coming up to the house.

I asked her to leave, and never return. After the third return I called my lawyer, had her serve Jenn with a restraining order -- and out came the razor blades. I heard that anecdotally, of course. Her father didn't call me. He called my lawyer, who told me. Another near miss, of course, but this time they put her away for a couple of years and in the end I didn't see her for almost ten years.

She made her way into my music, however. The love I felt that day for her was as real as it ever was, and that was hard to reconcile. As hard as it was to reconcile the kid she so carelessly killed.

+++++

I wrapped up the album about a month before Troubadour launched, and the studio had released Idyll as a single a few months before. Well received, too, but not like Electric Karma's albums, so when the new album shot up the charts two weeks after release I was as surprised as I was happy.

But I wasn't into it anymore. I had moved on, was already planning for my life with Troubadour. Everything about her was planned for one thing, and one thing only. I was going to take her around the world, and I'd probably be going solo, too.

Refrigeration was built in, roller furling headsails too. A more robust self-steering vane was a must, and light air sails a must, too. I wanted teak decks again, and they relented, laid them for me, and by the time Troubadour hit Newport Harbor she was mine, purpose built and ready to roll. I moved her to a friend's slip at the Balboa Bay Club and fitted her out, packed her to the gills -- in less than a week, then I went home for a few days -- to say goodbye.

I decided to rent Pop's house to a friend of mine, a musician, and in the end left the house in the care of my lawyer. I drove down to Newport, handed my car over to the guys at the boatyard and in the middle of a foggy March night I cast off her lines and slipped out the jetty, pointed her bow to the southwest -- bound for the Marquesas.

Part II

The first morning out, sitting on a windless sea maybe thirty miles north of La Jolla, I watched the stars and took inventory of my life. There was nothing else to do, you see. In my rush to leave I realized I'd not put a single book on board, and the only music I had on board, other that my little guitar, came from a shortwave radio. Only then did I realize I'd have to stop in San Diego to fix these nagging omissions, or turn around and return to Newport -- something I really did not want to do.

When Troubadour and I cast our lines off the night before, when we motored past Lido Isle, then Harbor and Linda Islands, then, finally, Little Balboa Island, I couldn't help but think of Jenn.

Jenn, locked away in her madness.

Jenn -- and her razor blades.

And when I passed her father's house I had seen him standing in his living room looking at me as I passed.

Did he know Troubadour was mine? Did he realize who was passing by just in front of his house? Did he understand his role in our little drama? In my little corner of the universe he was my Nixon, I a kind of McGovern by proxy. He hated me not least of all because I'd voted for McGovern, while he was a staunch Nixonian, and I'd liked to chide him about Watergate and all that told us about modern Republicans. He'd counter with endless jibes about Democrats being socialists, or worse, while I referred to Goldwater Republicans, like him, as fascist John Birchers. Which he was. When he told me once he thought the free speech protestors at Berkeley should have been rounded up and shot, and that Edwin Meese had privately agreed with him, I saw a smug pride in the man's eyes that haunted me for years. He was a Nazi and didn't even seem to realize, or even care what that meant.

Jenn, of course, struggled with the dichotomy presented to her. She loved her father but the longer she remained in school, the longer she studied philosophy the more she understood what her father really was. And pretty soon her father realized he was spending his money to turn his daughter against his own ideals, and I think that set up the final conflict between them. Rather that let her grow, I think he began to undermine her -- at first in intellectual arguments, and then, when that didn't work, through emotional attacks.

Jenn, I think, fell into that trap. And it was a trap. There was no way to win, for her, anyway, and the only way he could win was to destroy her. And he did, but you'd have to be sick to call that a victory -- by any measure. I've thought about them over the years and saw in their struggle nothing less than the struggle between generations that flared in the 60s. The results were as debilitating for all of us.

About halfway through that first night out of Newport Beach I realized I couldn't break free of all this toxicity by myself. I needed other people around me in this endeavor, and I'd need to find those voices in books, and in music. I'd need to be able to pull into a new anchorage and get ashore, find local music and listen, really listen to voices of anger and love, of resistance and submission. Yet if this trip turned into a series of angry flights the time would be pointlessly spent. If, on the other hand, I tuned in and really listened with my musician's heart there was a chance I could learn something valuable, and quite possibly share what I learned with people who might listen. Maybe that was ego speaking, but isn't all artistic creation an act of ego?

The wind fell away then the sea took a deep sigh and was still, leaving a black mirror alive with dancing starlight. We, Troubadour and I, drifted by a massive kelp bed and I saw a sea lion poke it's head out of the tangled mass of starlight and stare at me as we drifted by. I wanted to dive in and play with it, to live in it's world for a minute or two, understand what concerned him or her as it went about it's business in the darkness. Find dinner, I reckoned, without becoming something bigger's dinner. Elemental exigencies. Kill or be killed. That was life, wasn't it? That's what civilization had tried to tame. All our laws, all our frail moralities...those things kept nature away, because nature, true nature, has always been all about the most basic kind of survival. Find food and keep from being killed in the process, live long enough to procreate then get out of the way as the next generation comes along.

That seal was hiding in the kelp because something bigger than it was out there in the darkness, circling, waiting for the opportunity to sprint in and eat him. Just like me, I thought. Out here on Troubadour, running, hiding, trying to turn this into a noble mission to enlighten civilization while I ran from Jenn and her razor blades. While I tried to hide from images of Deni as she fluttered down to the dark embrace of Lake Erie.

It's funny, the things that run through your mind in the last minutes of darkness, just before the sun rises, even a few miles offshore. You can see houses on bluffs above beaches, sleeping people just coming to the sun while you look at the processes of civilization from afar. When you cut the cord and sail away you begin to distance yourself from all those routines, from all those laws and moral constructs that define your shoreside existence. When you sail along the elemental periphery you really feel that 'apartness.' You feel it in your bones, like you've set yourself adrift and whatever purpose exists may or may not be revealed to you. In the end, you're just along for the ride.

And then I really realized this was 'my first time' out on the water -- by myself.

And I didn't like this being alone thing.

So I turned on the motor and advanced the throttle, made for the entrance channel to San Diego harbor. By mid-morning I was tied up on Shelter Island; a half hour later I was eating eggs Benedict on a deck overlooking the water, so deep inside the gut of civilization it made me giddy. I walked to a yard after brunch and asked about radios, maybe one with a cassette deck? No problem, they told me. They could have it in by evening.

That, too, is civilization. Ask and ye shall receive. Just hand over the gold and run to the bookstore. We'll take care of the details while you go spend some more money.

So...I went to all the bookstores I could in five hours, came back to Troubadour with piles of books and tapes, and I stowed them while workmen rounded out the radio installation, then I went back out for dinner, and I made my way down to an upscale steak place a few hundred yards away.

"So, what could I get you to drink?" my cheery waitress asked.

"Something strong, something with rum."

"How about a Mai-Tai," she said. As long as it's strong, says I. "Not some watered down girly drink."

She looked at my shorts and boat shoes then.

"Coming, or going?" she asked.

"Pardon?"

"You just coming in from a trip, or about to head out?"

"A little of both," I said, then I explained.

"Where's your boat?"

"Right down there," I pointed, and I could indeed just see Troubadour's mast jutting up across the way, "the one with the blue hull."

"Troubadour?" she asked. "I was looking at her earlier. She looks sweet."

"Oh?"

"I'd love to just sail away someday."

"And where would you go?"

She put her hands over her eyes and pointed in some random direction: "That way!" she said, grinning, and I laughed with her before she took off and brought my medicinal strength rum and some bread. After she took my order, she pointed me in the direction of a truly colossal salad bar and disappeared, but a minute later she dropped by again.

"So, where are you headed?" she asked.

"Nuku Hiva."

"When you leavin'?"

"In the morning."

"Want some company?" she joked.

"Have a passport?" I joked right back at her.

"Yes." A little more serious this time. A little more eye contact.

"Maybe you ought to drop by after you get off tonight." I watched her reaction then.

"Okay," she said, parrying my thrust.

Surreal? Yes, I know.

Stupid? Probably.

Random, almost to the point of silliness? Oh yeah.

Ah, but her name was Jennifer. Of course. It had to be.

Jennifer -- of Appleton, Wisconsin. Jennifer -- she of the bright smile and long legged Jennifers of the world. Jennifer, who would in a matter of days become the love of my life, who would spend the next twenty one years glued to my side. There are chance encounters, random permutations of luck and timing, and then there was Jennifer. Jennifer 'Do you have a passport' Clemens. 'Okay' became a standing joke between us, the simplest word imaginable to set in motion an endless series of adventures.

"There's a volcano! Wanna race to the top?"

-- "Okay!"

If Jennifer of Newport Beach was a morphine drip fed scowl, Jennifer of Appleton was a serene smile, an imperturbable, old world smile grounded in mid-western common sense. She was JFKs glass half full, she was two years in the Peace Corps after earning her RN. Best of all, she'd never heard of Electric Karma, and neither did she know who I was, or what I did -- and it never once mattered to her after she figured it out. She'd wanted to see the world, and in the beginning I was simply going her way. Her ticket to ride.

She'd been out on the bay a few times since she'd moved to San Diego the year before, ostensibly to get her Master's in nursing, but she'd fallen into a different vibe after she settled in with a group of nurses -- and she'd decided to 'go back to school' to learn other things. She didn't know what she wanted to learn, only that learning was an imperative she couldn't shake. She went to school days, worked tables at night, and spent weekends working at a free clinic -- because that gave her the time and resources to do what she wanted. And what she wanted seemed to change from course to course -- until what she really wanted was to break away and get out there. Travel. See the world. Learn. And love.

And maybe there was something mercenary in our coming together. She'd planted her feet in a place and at a time where sailors gathered before jumping off to the South Seas. Maybe her questions about where was I headed, and when was I leaving weren't without purposes, or maybe now that she knew what she wanted she'd simply put herself in a position to get there. Maybe she would have been like an autumn leaf, blowing any way the wind blows -- but for whatever reason she found her way -- to me.

Because I'd forgotten to pack a few books. Because I couldn't listen to music on my boat.

Sometimes life turns on the silliest, most inconsequential things. Sometimes love comes to you, and you're damned if you turn away.

We put off leaving a day, only because that's how long it took her to cut all the ties that bound her to life on shore, and when we slipped away that following morning I did so knowing this was almost a case of the blind leading the blind. I was not yet a deeply experienced sailor, and she was a neophyte -- so we went slow. We sailed down to Ensenada, anchored out and rowed ashore, went to Hussong's because that's what everyone else did, then we made a longer trip south, to Guadelupe Island, about a third of the way down Baja, and after watching researchers diving with Great Whites we decided against swimming ashore. We baked out first loaves of bread together, learned how to move around the boat together, and we started listening to our hearts -- with our minds. Not as simple as it sounds, too.

We hemmed and hawed, debated whether we should go to Cabo San Lucas and top off the water tanks or just strike out, head for the Marquesas, but as I'd stowed dozens of bottles of water to go with what Troubadour carried in her tanks we opted for the latter. So, setting a course of 210 degrees, we stared ahead at 3000 miles of open water -- and what do you suppose happened?

I'd have, at one point, called it wedded bliss, but for the time being I called it Jennifer Clemens.

Okay?

+++++

We'd set the wind vane and let it steer for hours on end, and the most joyous moments came when dolphins joined us from time to time. They came up from behind one morning and zinged alongside, playing in Troubadour's bow wave and, as she has a tremendous bow-sprit Jennie lay up there, her hand outstretched, waiting. And every now and then one would spring up, let her take a touch on the fly, and those close encounters seemed to energize our little universe. She'd come back to the cockpit with this look in her eyes and I'd wrap myself within her arms and legs for a few hours. The second time that happened I looked up, saw we had an audience and I wondered what they thought of us. Were we really so different?

A great Atlantic storm entered the Caribbean, then crossed Panama and Nicaragua and made it's way into the Pacific, and though it tracked north of us the remnants hit us, and hit us hard. It was my first real storm at sea without Jenn, yet Troubadour was built, like the Westsail, to handle these conditions -- and she did, with ease. After the storm's passage we both felt a surge of confidence, yet we knew it hadn't been a real hurricane. Even so, we felt like we were becoming a team, that we worked well together.

The net result? We began to talk about 'what comes next?' Both for this voyage, and for us. I felt bonded to Jennie after that first storm, like she had become a part of me. Like that otherworldly loneliness I'd felt off the coast of La Jolla was truly a thing of my past, and now Jennie was my future. And I told her that, in no uncertain terms.

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

"Spend my life with you."

"You do?"

"I do."

"Okay."

"Does that mean what I hope it means?"

"Yes."

So, right out there in the middle of nowhere, with only God standing as our lone, mute witness, we said what words we remembered and pledged to take care of one another 'til death do us part. It was really that simple. Even if marriage is a civilizational construct, I felt comfort after that -- knowing she had my back, and that I had her's, too. Yes, that's odd, but yes, that's called being human. We weren't meant to make this journey alone, yet the most staggering thing was how I knew she was 'the one' within minutes of meeting her. Does that seem strange -- after Jenn and her razor blades?

When Jennie first came down to Troubadour that night she was still in her uniform, a short little dress with black tights under, a white blouse with a red vest over, and while she looked the boat over I looked her over. We talked for a few hours about the road she'd taken to San Diego, and where she hoped it would lead next, and the more she talked the more comfortable I grew with her voice. She might have looked flakey on first glance but really, she was anything but. She was as grounded as anyone I'd ever known, yet grounded to the beat of a different drummer.

I fell asleep with my head on her lap, and she was still with me when I woke up six hours later. When I slipped up and fixed coffee she woke and looked at me.

"So, you really want to do this?" she asked.

"Yup. Can't imagine doing it without you."

Yes. Life really can be that simple. You just have to open your heart and let it in.

Three thousand miles at a hundred and forty miles a day is 21 days, and my celestial nav was spot on so we nailed it, sailed into Taioha'e and cleared customs, then anchored out in an unexpectedly easygoing euphoria.

"We did it," we sighed. We had, too.

She snuggled in and didn't move for an hour, and then I heard her easy breathing, her gentle sleeping, and I settled in beside her for the duration.

+++++

I know this marks a departure from the flow of things, but we walked ashore a day later and found a small Catholic church, Jennifer being an Episcopalian and all, and we asked the guy with the white collar to do the whole marriage thing for real. No paperwork, mind you, just say the words before God I think you'd have to say, and he did and for some reason we felt for real after that. She took my name, a nice German-Jewish name, and jettisoned her Wasp-British name and she called her folks back home -- who had no idea she'd left San Diego, mind you -- and told them the news.

Major freak-outs ensued, by the way, and her folks told us they'd like to come to Tahiti to meet me, and to let them know when. Then we took off to do some grocery shopping.

Yeah. Surreal.

Just like grocery shopping in the Marquesas was surreal.

No supermarkets, especially not in the early seventies, and very few tourists to get in your way. Want a new alternator belt for your Volvo Penta diesel engine? Say the words 'fat chance' three times as fast as you can. Then try backwards. Yup, it was about that easy. Fed Ex hadn't quite figured out how to spell Marquesas back in 73-74, which meant an alternator belt would come by sea. Like maybe by copra schooner out of Papeete. I had a spare, of course, but what if that one cut loose? I needed a spare to replace my spare, and it looked like that would have to wait a few thousand miles, but I did find a mechanic savvy enough to locate the alignment issue causing the belt to wear prematurely. Problem solved, lesson learned and filed away on a 3x5 card -- with notes and drawings attached.