Virgins 2001

There was a time when I was certain in my belief that giving up on a dream meant giving up on yourself. Since I was a boy growing up on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific horizon, I dreamed of living on the ocean. I had wanted a boat like Jody Tiflin in The Red Pony wanted a horse, so he could ride into the Gabilan Mountains and explore beyond the trappings of his known existence. Unlike Jody, I was denied any taste of my dream until adulthood, when, in my 31st year, I sailed a boat I had built under the Verrazano Bridge and out into the Atlantic Ocean one dusk in early November with no expectation of seeing land again for ten or more days. A very dear friend had just died in the attack on the World Trade Center, the stinking ruin of which we smelled for days at sea, but I felt at peace heading into the large Fall swell. The collapse of the towers, the trauma of mourning for Blake, the simultaneous shock to everyone we knew, none of these things could deny me a vision that had been brewing in my mind for all of my life, nor in any way alter it from being exactly the thing I had built it up to be in all of these years. After a series of detours to avoid a late season hurricane, we reached the Caribbean in fourteen days, throughout which the sublime of the natural world so fully dominated my experience I scarcely recollected the horrific events and aftershocks of the past eight weeks. It seemed I had constructed an escape vehicle that nothing from shore could track or follow, and my dream was more real to me than ever.