Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (2 page)

It was 1976.
I was eighteen, and my brother was away on his honeymoon. “Borrowing” Jay’s boat for a day of sailing seemed the perfect way to impress a girl on a first date, but my plans ended abruptly when a gust of wind reached the mainsail more quickly than my hand reached the mainsheet. In an instant, all that once had been proud and skyward was scandalized and submerged. The girl swam ashore. Perched like an indignant wet bird on top of the floating, overturned hull, I stoically waited for the coast guard to arrive. They eventually came and, with more horsepower than horse sense, dragged the capsized sloop to shallow water without righting her first, and snapped off the mast in the process.

This inauspicious beginning on the Magothy was followed, years later, by lessons better learned in my twenties on Galveston Bay aboard
Itledoo
. She was the first boat that was all my own—a little sloop seventeen feet from stem to stern, wide as a bathtub in the middle, with an outboard motor no bigger than a blender hung off the transom. Then a junior associate at a large law firm in Houston, I would arrive at the office each Monday to face questions from a senior partner who kept a thirty-seven-foot luxury sailboat at the most prestigious yacht club on the bay. “Get out on the water this weekend, Hurley?” he would ask. The answer was invariably yes, followed by tales of hopscotch voyages north and south aboard
Itledoo
, wave-rocked anchorages, mishaps, and storms. All of this seemed the utmost in derring-do compared to his own weekend, usually spent in the slip and never far from the ice machine, where most big yachts remain most of the time. A legendary long-distance sailor and favorite author of mine, Hal Roth, described such boats, nodding ever at their docks, as “distant Tarzan yells” attesting to the virility of their A-type owners who toil in faraway office towers and dream of the South Seas, where they never go. I had such dreams, too.

On my way home from another utterly forgettable deposition in Beaumont, Texas, in 1986, on one of those interminably long, flat stretches of East Texas highway punctuated by the occasional Stuckey’s restaurant, an idea occurred to me. My wife and I were in our twenties, with no children. We had law school finally behind us and student loan payments we could easily defer. I was content but not wedded to the idea of toiling to make partner at my firm. I had by then learned enough about sailing on our 1981 Cape Dory 30 cutter,
Anne Arundel
, to keep her right side up. It would be the perfect opportunity, I thought, to sell up and sail, stretch our legs, spend some time in the islands, and do what-have-you.

I don’t recall exactly why we didn’t go or whose idea it was to stay, but that’s not important anymore. What is important is that we didn’t go. We chose instead to make a home and rise in the ranks of our profession. It was the right choice. Far greater blessings followed—namely, two: a son, and then, eighteen months later, a daughter. I reveled in my return to Toyland, once banished forever, but now led in again by the hand of my own child. We moved back east to be closer to family. I began a new law practice in a small town in North Carolina and a new life as a father.

As soon as my children were old enough, in the mid-1990s, I started taking them on wilderness canoe trips and writing about those trips for publication. As they grew in age and experience, our maps became more distant and our destinations more daring, stretching into Canada and the Great North. I was a boy escaping into the woodlot again, but now I had the wherewithal to show my own children the far-flung adventures I had only dreamed of having as a child. Over an eight-year period, one or both of my children usually accompanied me on monthly wilderness expeditions, some lasting a week at a time, spanning more than fifty rivers and lakes all across America and two Canadian provinces. Those halcyon days for my children would change as all childhoods do, though in ways that neither they nor I could have imagined at the time.

In 1998, I left small-town life on the North Carolina coast and moved the family to Raleigh at the invitation of a large defense firm that needed an experienced litigator. Suddenly I was back in a fast-paced, corporate world after a ten-year sabbatical in my own small practice. During our first few years in Raleigh, I continued taking paddling trips with my children while also working full-time as a lawyer. By 2004, however, my children were becoming teenagers whose time and interests were naturally more inclined toward friends and sports teams than camping trips with Dad. It was just as well, as my own attention was increasingly drawn to the demands of the law firm. I left the wilderness and stopped writing. My practice exploded in size. The pace of life began to accelerate, and details of the passing daily scene seemed to blur as they went whizzing by. On the other side of that blur, I came to the end of a twenty-five-year marriage.

I was determined
not to write even obliquely about the failure of my marriage, and I strove in various fits and starts, over months, to find an honest way not to do so. After all, a marriage is a two-sided story told differently by two people and clearly understood in all its particulars by neither.

I write of these things now because the end of my marriage is the crucible out of which this voyage and this memoir have come. It is my hope that by exploring the insights gained from this new perspective, I will have something important to say. Others will be the judge of my efforts, but it is important (to me) that I try.

William Maxwell once wrote, “When we talk about the past, we lie with every breath we take.” If nothing else, I wish to prove him wrong in what I have to say now. While the problems in my marriage—as in all marriages—were a shared responsibility, the blame for the failure of my marriage is mine alone. I had an affair.

It is, somehow, too easy to write those words. Words cannot convey the enormity of what occurred. Worse, there is a self-congratulatory air to public confession and a false piety that comes from making a show of one’s contrition. I don’t have any illusions about my own piety, nor do I feel an impulse to congratulate myself for anything. Quite the contrary.

I have long been haunted by the words I wrote in an essay about marriage that was published in the fall of 1998:

I received more mail about that essay than almost any other. As powerful as those words were, I recognize in them now a warning to myself as much as an exhortation to others. At the time, the differences in my marriage had increasingly become, for me, a source of tension rather than celebration. Yet as a latchkey child of divorce, I had always promised myself that I would never put my own children through that hardship. In an effort to constrain my unease that our differences would one day divide us, I decided to “double down” on my promise to my wife by writing boldly about it to thousands of people. By those words, which I knew then to be true and still believe today, I had hoped to shame myself into commitment.

But I discovered that I had no shame. On a warm November day in 2005, I ignored every warning I had given to myself and others, and I leaped headlong into the abyss.

Like a drunken tourist racing to board a flaming, sinking ship bound for Disneyland, I convinced myself that I had found bliss in stolen moments with a married woman who shared my love of the outdoors and my impaired sense of judgment. It was a lie, of course, as all affairs are. It was also an act of unfathomable cruelty to the people affected most by my actions.

I have no intention, in writing this, that friends should lift me up and say, “There, now. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” I am quite capable of doing that on my own. I well know that infidelity is not as rare as we might think or hope. The idea—now so prevalent in law and politics—that there are “good” people and “bad” people and that “good” people always do the right thing is a fiction of the childish mind. The wisdom of country songs notwithstanding, every one of us, since the Fall of Man, has been the “cheating kind” in whatever area of life holds for us the greatest temptation. Humility requires that we understand this, but it is more important to know that we are not defined by our mistakes. A ship’s wake tells you where she has been, not where she is going.

I have often considered that Christ, who surely knew that Peter would one day deny and betray him, gave him the keys to the kingdom anyway. He did not define Peter by his weakness, nor should we so define ourselves. Indeed, to wallow in self-opprobrium is arrogance worse than the sin because it values self-esteem and the esteem of others—which we often seek but so rarely find—more highly than God’s forgiveness, which we rarely seek but already possess.

I am a firm believer in the power of grace, and even in the darkest of those days, when I had completely lost my way, I felt that God was near. Over the course of several weeks, I experienced the patient teaching of a nun who, though never married, had remarkable skills as a marriage counselor. At first begrudgingly and in the end very thankfully, I came to understand that affairs are not flights of romance between two soul mates but tragedies of self-delusion between two addicts. That understanding, however, for all its healing power in my own life, could not undo the damage I had done.

The affair finally ended, but my wife had the clarity of mind to see the obvious as well as the courage I lacked to admit it. In September 2006 she asked me to go, and by the next month I was gone. I returned to her door a year later, after rushing into dating and a string of failed relationships, to ask for her forgiveness and reconciliation. Both were refused, and none would say without good reason.

I did not linger. I learned, as the song says, that “everybody’s got to leave the darkness sometime.” After a year of separation, I found a divorce support group I wished I’d found on day one. I joined a men’s Bible study group. I talked to someone older and wiser than I who convinced me to stop dating long enough to recognize my self-destructive pattern of seeking emotionally unavailable partners. I read books about boundaries. I found humility, yes, but also the courage to stand up for myself. I struggled, fell backward, tried again, and made slow progress.

It had been almost three years since I had left my marriage when I stepped off that airplane in Baltimore to find the
Gypsy Moon
and take her to sea. In that time I could be proud of one thing—I had not returned to the woman with whom I’d had the affair. But other than this one small triumph, my life had been altered in ways unforeseeable to me three years before. I battled loneliness, feelings of failure, my children’s loss of trust, and the absence of friends once dear to me. My billable hours declined at work. Less than a year after my divorce was final, I suffered a second divorce when I was unanimously voted out of the partnership in the law firm where I’d spent the past eleven years. I found myself, at the age of fifty-one, back in solo practice, struggling to get a business loan in the worst credit market since the Great Depression.

When I lost my job, my income went to zero and then slowly recovered—as my new practice got underway—to less than half of what it had been before. I was one of the lucky ones who found work, but to ensure that I could meet alimony, child support, and tuition payments, I sold my house, my car, and whatever else anyone would buy. I moved into an apartment and found myself washing clothes in a communal laundry next to college kids in backward baseball caps and flip-flops, with the smell of marijuana wafting down the hall. There was a kind of gallows humor to it all. It wasn’t poverty or hardship by any means, but it was transformational to me.

Even as the chips fell steadily lower, the
Gypsy Moon
—an aging sloop badly in need of major repairs and new sails—remained. Aside from the fact that no one would buy her in a down economy, her worth to me was measured more in dreams than dollars. She was a magic carpet, with a hull still “as hard as a New York sidewalk” in the estimation of one surveyor, and well equipped for flights of fancy. She was my partner in the continuing quest I had begun as a boy on Chesapeake Bay. She was a tangible reminder that despite all that had occurred to make my life so much smaller, there was still a reason to dream big dreams and a means to attain them.

The fire we endure has a way of refining us and giving us a kind of rebirth. In time, new parts of my life eventually bloomed. As you read this memoir, you will learn of these blossoms and blessings, none of which would ever have appeared but for the fire in my life.

It was once famously said that Italy produced the Renaissance despite thirty years of war and struggle, while Switzerland had only the cuckoo clock to show for its many centuries of peace and harmony. Despite the struggles I faced, I well know that whatever comes of my efforts now is likely to be much closer to a cuckoo clock than to Da Vinci, but perhaps it will be a better clock than I might otherwise have made, or at least one that can tell the time. Time will tell.

So you see, August 2009 was a place of pause in my life. A moment of slack tide—that quiet hour right after something huge and once inexorable has been spent and just before something altogether new begins to move in another direction entirely. Whether such a time is the calm before the storm or that darkest hour before the dawn is a thing we can know only after we are carried off in it, as the tide waits for no man. But whatever it was, and wherever it was going, on that sunny afternoon near Annapolis, Maryland, I was not about to miss it.