Excerpt: The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water

May 29, 2007 — -- At 40, Mary South seemed to have it all: a beautiful home in Pennsylvania, a group of close friends, and a successful career in book publishing.

But shuttling between the conference room at work and her couch in front of the TV at home, South felt more and more empty and unfulfilled. She decided to give up everything to live aboard a 40-foot, 30-ton steel trawler and navigate a 1,500 mile journey up the eastern seaboard.

"The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water" traces South's voyage from the charming Americana of Florida's Intracoastal Waterway out into the often stormy waters of the Atlantic. As the trip progresses, South grapples not only with whatever Poseidon throws her way but also with the ghosts of family and loves lost. For anyone with a secret dream that's gone unfulfilled, the book is a reckoning -- both funny and poignant -- of what's really involved in casting off an old life and making a new one.

Chapter One

It's never too late to be who you might have been.

--George Eliot

Not long ago, I was probably a lot like you. I had a successful career, a pretty home, two dogs and a fairly normal life.

All I kept were the dogs.

Then one day in October 2003, I quit my good job and put my sweet little house on the market. I packed a duffel bag of clothes and everything else I owned went into storage. Within weeks I was the proud owner of an empty bank account and a 40 foot, 30 ton steel trawler that I had no idea how to run. I enrolled in nine weeks of seamanship school and two weeks after my course ended, I pulled away from the dock on my very first trip: a 1500 mile journey through the Atlantic from Florida to Maine.

My transformation from regular person to unhinged mariner started casually enough. Lured to Pennsylvania a few years ago by one more step up the book publishing career ladder, I had accepted a job that was editorial, managerial and very dull. I was busy enough at the office but, after work, I didn't know what to do with myself. I cooked, took guitar lessons, went to the gym, drank Manhattans, watched movies at home and read books and magazines. But still I faced an abundance of excruciatingly quiet free time. On business trips to the city, I'd stock up on magazines. At first, I read a predictable assortment for a girl in exile from the big city: The New Yorker, New York, New York Review of Books.

OK, it wasn't all about New York. There was House and Garden, Dwell, Utne Reader, Cote Ouest, Vogue, Gourmet. I'd read just about anything--which is probably how an occasional Yachting started to find it's way into my stockpiles. When I saw Motorboating, Sail, and Powerboating at the local supermarket, peeking out from behind the overwhelming number of firearm and bride publications (a combination that captured the flavor of the area all too well), I thought "why not?" Soon, I had completely given up on literature, current events, even home decor. I started subscriptions to Passagemaker and Soundings, full year-long commitments. From there, it was a scary slide down the slippery slope to more extreme, niche titles (Professional Mariner Magazine, Workboat Magazine, American Tugboat Review) that I just had to have. I was becoming a trawler junky and I wasn't sure why.

But let's backtrack for a moment. I'd better start by admitting I am an optimist--not just your run-of-the-mill, happy-face, Pollyanna-type. I'm Old School--an extreme optimist of the sort that went out of style around the time of Don Quixote.

And like most optimists who regularly suffer the crushing defeats of a world less wonderful than they had imagined, I'm sure I have developed some finely honed coping strategies. (Or denial issues, if you prefer to call the glass half empty--as I obviously do not.) For instance, although I had just arrived at a new job in rural Pennsylvania full of vim and vigor, the deeply repressed realist within me knew almost immediately that I had made a terrible mistake. But there was no way I could admit that--even to myself.

The vocal Optimist in me said: Hey, this is pretty cool. They have an organic cafe at work and the food's really inexpensive.

But the mute Realist in me knew: Almost all of the food, no matter what it was, tasted weirdly the same, which -- let's face it -- was not good. At any price.

The Optimist said: Wow. It's so rural out here that you'd never know you were only 100 miles from New York City.

The Realist knew: I did not want to live in a place where the Wednesday Bob Evan's special was All the Possum You Can Eat for $3.99.

The Optimist said: What a gorgeous stone house I have found for a bargain price!

The Realist knew: I was going to ruin the rustic exposed stone walls (and drastically lower the resale value) when I splattered my brains all over them after a slow decline into loneliness and alcoholism.

My point is, maybe I wasn't able to admit to myself that I wanted out of that place in the worst possible way but nothing could have been less appropriate to my rural, landlocked situation than a sudden obsession with the boating lifestyle. So, perhaps my newfound passion was just a strangled cry for help, issued from the lonely wilds of scenic nowhere.

Every day, I'd put on a suit and drive to the office. I'd organize my editors, read submissions, review manuscripts, return phone calls from agents, do some editing, write and rewrite copy. I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in "brainstorming meetings" where a group of us, pulled away from whatever we'd been working on by a prearranged ding on our Outlook calendars, sat in a windowless, florescent meeting room and tried to come up with just the right title for a health book. (It had to be prescriptive, it had to hold out a promise to the reader, it had to have punch. Using numbers was good. Dangling a plan was ideal. Thirty Day Plans were...well...we were on fire.)

Once a week, the staff gathered for editorial meetings to decide which manuscripts we should buy. The sales director would weigh in with her department's assessment on the latest submissions and it was uncanny how often they seemed to vote with one mind: hers--which was, sadly, as wide as a stream in Death Valley. As long as the author was a celebrity or had at least a well-established marketing platform, there was a possibility we could buy the book. Of course, there were other hurdles to clear. We wouldn't want to take any risks: the topic had to be fresh but not too fresh. In other words, someone needed to have published a book on the same subject, and sold enough copies to prove there was an audience but not so many to suggest a been-there, done-that readership. Exactly what this number was varied with how much pressure the sales director was under from above, how things were going at home, how long her morning commute had taken and whether mercury was out of retrograde.

And she wasn't the worst of it. My boss was a micromanager with an imagination that was significantly smaller than the stick up her butt. She was the classic corporate type: she put in long, long hours of memo writing in a clever sleight that substituted ambition for talent. When she wasn't busy with that, she was making sure she got every ounce of credit for other people's work. But that's why they paid her the big bucks.

Anyway, the point is that innovation, new ideas, anything provocative or controversial was pretty much out of the question. There was a lot of talk about thinking outside the box but at heart ours was an organization that liked a flow chart, a win-win, a net-net, everybody on the same page. In other words, I felt I had little to bring to the table. Don't get me wrong: I was a team player. But we didn't appear to have a team, just a cheerleading squad for the worst benchwarmers in the league.

I knew it wasn't really as bad as it seemed. It was corporate life. Not thrilling but a necessary evil. However, I was finding it increasingly intolerable. I felt, dully, that my soul was being quietly asphyxiated. And when I was released to the relative freedom of my tiny stone house each evening, all I could do was pour myself another Manhattan, fire up the big screen and wish I was anywhere else. I knew it wasn't just the job. It was everything.

To be fair, I had always been a little of what my brother Hamilton disapprovingly called "a thrillseeker." Nothing major: I backpacked through Europe, joined the Peace Corps, tried skydiving, sold my car and bought a motorcycle. Maybe my middle age life and career were merely making me wistful for a sense of freedom that had become buried-alive in a routine of dwindling satisfaction. As my office walls slowly disappeared behind a fleet of fishing boat photos, nautical charts, and boat brochures, my wishes became increasingly specific: I wanted to be there, on that boat, or that one, and wherever they were going made absolutely no difference.

My first Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, as my family in New York began the annual rite of passive-aggressive maneuvering to determine where we would all go for the feast day, I decided to opt out. (In the South family, we are allowed to skip the odd Thanksgiving without fear of reprisals, as long as we show up for Christmas.) Instead, I decided to test my fantasies by spending a small chunk of my new salary on a boating experience. I flew to Fort Myers and took a five-day, one-on-one course, learning the basics of how to operate a trawler. At the time, it seemed absurd--pointlessly fun: like taking a cooking class when you can't boil water, or going to car racing school when you normally take the bus.

I was learning (and staying) alone that week on a single engine 32' Grand Banks trawler from the mid-seventies. Even with my limited experience, I could tell it had seen better days. But I loved playing house on it the first night, bringing groceries aboard and cooking, enjoying a drink on the bridge while the sun went down, listening to the murmurs from other nearby boaters enjoying their cocktails. So far, this boating stuff was great, everything I hoped for. Maybe I could get a trawler, live on it and never even leave the dock!

My instructor arrived the next morning and explained the course objectives: I would have five days to learn the basics of the engine and electrical systems, navigation, safety, docking and maneuvering. I'd have to be able to plan an overnight trip, plot it, take us there, anchor in the harbor, bring us back and dock. Yeah, sure. Or then again, maybe I could get a boat, live on it and never even leave the dock!

I learned a lot that week and though I was very nearly overwhelmed by how much there still was to learn, I gathered a vague sense that I could do this. I had gone from reading magazines and picturing myself on a boat to actually running a boat very badly--nervously watching my stern drift out of the channel between markers, messing up running time calculations, forgetting port and starboard repeatedly. Still, here I was at the helm, soaking it all in, slowly but surely improving and, most of all, feeling utterly thrilled to be in over my head.

Toward the end of my week in Florida, on what seemed to a Yankee an oddly sunny Thanksgiving, I remember sitting alone in perfect contentment, washing down my dry store-bought turkey dinner with a Seabreeze and staring at the sun sparkling on the water. And of course, I thought what we all think at some point on a great vacation: This is the life for me.

But a few days later, my tan and I were back in the dark and dreary Pennsylvania slouch-toward-winter, editing books, writing flap copy, sitting in florescent-lit meeting rooms, drinking too much in the evenings and watching a lot of bad television. (A combination I highly recommend for those wishing to bulk up rapidly. I had already gained 10 pounds in Pennsylvania Dutch country and I hadn't even touched the baked goods!)

Each morning I would find myself sitting at the computer for hours before going to the office, ordering boating books from Amazon.com, looking at Dutch steel trawlers, at French barges, at sailor's web pages and online nautical magazines--at any number of internet sites that suggested a very different life in a very different place. I've always had wanderlust, a short attention span, a completely unrealistic and fickle sense of what I want. I have contented myself with frequent trips, with elaborate fantasies, with a grand view of what the future could hold...I exasperate my very driven oldest brother. My endless interest in the lives I might have lead even amuses me. I admit it: I've never been normal.

And yet...I had recently seen a toothpaste ad that made me cry. What I really wanted -- like most everybody else--was to climb into bed with the same wonderful person every night and know that my world, wherever I was in it, could happily be reduced to the sound of another's breath, rising and falling....The nice life I had competently constructed for myself was starting to mock me with what it wasn't. It wasn't challenging, it wasn't satisfying, it wasn't even important to someone else, let alone me!

My last serious relationship had ended more than two years ago, and even though I had made a real effort to move on, it still haunted me. We remained close friends with an oddly intimate connection to each other. That's probably why I felt a little sad every time we got together -- it was a friendship built on the wreckage of love and it subtly taunted me with how much could be right about something that still didn't work out. All my subsequent stabs at dating or relationships seemed, in retrospect, half-hearted. I didn't mind being alone -- in fact, I liked it -- but the lingering broken heart had the effect of making me feel lonely and I did not like that.

So, there was no doubt that I was just one of those people who craved home, family, a place in the world whose vector is love. But for whatever reason -- choices made too quickly, a naive belief that things can always be worked out, a tendency to lose myself a little in my desire to adore someone else -- love continued to elude me. Sometimes I wondered if being gay made a difference. You do the math: if 10% of the population is gay, and let's generously say that means only 5% are lesbians, how many of those are beautiful, funny, smart and available? My results are not scientific, of course, but I'd guess somewhere around six -- worldwide -- and I had already dated four of them.

So, perhaps it was natural for me to consider taking my solitude on the road, to hope that the sensation of movement would create an illusion of meaningful destination. It wasn't exactly running away because I knew all too well that wherever you go, there you are. But I thought an adventure might at least distract me from the tiny universe of two that had eluded me. OK, I admit it. I was a little depressed. And much, much more than that, I was disappointed with myself.

At my friend Holley's apartment one night, I flipped through the album of daguerreotype portraits from the late 1800s that she keeps on her coffee table--something I had often done absent-mindedly while we talked and drank wine before her cozy fireplace. Buried between blue velvet covers were sixty or seventy people, mostly young at the time, immortalized in the dour expressions that must have been all the rage back then. To my lazy modern eyes, so caught up in the vividness of my own reality, I had always thought these people resembled each other in their creepiness. But on this night, for the first time, I saw that they didn't. Each one of these faces had been animated, had expressed the joy and grief, contentment and longing, peace and frustration of being alive. They had made their own families, had their own love affairs, heartaches, dreams, plans, and disappointments--just minutes ago! It took my breath away.

From then on, the fleetingness of everything we are -- blood, bones, brains, dreams, hopes, loves -- would haunt me in little gusts--sometimes when I was laughing about a moment that seemed to have happened yesterday but was really 25 years ago. Once when I recalled a classmate who died at 12 and then counted the years I had lived beyond him. And I was completely slammed upside the head by it when my grandmother died and The Farm, the only true home I had known in my peripatetic childhood, was emptied and on the market within a week--its old farmhouse and weathered barns no doubt destined to be torn down and replaced with a development of vinyl-clad colonials; its beautiful, rolling acreage probably on the way to being subdivided into tiny, tacky parcels and renamed something unintentionally ironic like The Estates at Bear Trap Farm.

Was I having a mid-life crisis? The timing was right. But to me, it seemed more like a reckoning--a complicated concoction of ennui and despair that was nothing more than appropriate. I think most people face this at some point. Some, like myself, have dragged it around like an albatross for years. It can be disguised as depression. It can be subdued by drink. It can be pushed back into the corners of our minds by great vacations, by fantasies, by love affairs. But I was no longer able to fend it off.

I suppose I wanted to see if I could resolve my crisis of meaning by living out a wild dream, by challenging myself to cast off the lines that had held my nose to a perfectly pleasant grindstone--keeping my mortgage and car payments current but demanding little from my heart or soul.

So many of us have a secret dream, something we set aside for another day -- when the timing is better, when the kids are grown, when there's money in the bank. For me, there was an actual moment, a tipping point, when I stood at the edge of a chasm, just another daydreamer, like you -- then threw caution into the teeth of a gale, closed my eyes and jumped.

I was in a New York hotel conference room at a company "offsite" where the main topic of the meeting was the phenomenal success of a book I had slaved over. The heads of sales, publicity, marketing -- everyone but the mailroom and food service departments -- were all up on the dais, participating in an orchestrated frenzy of congratulation and self-congratulation that was almost as comical as it was icky. It was a little like being forced to watch your colleagues in a very unsexy orgy. Ok, you do me, then I'll do you and you do him, then he'll do her… As much as I wanted someone to acknowledge my many months of hard work, I felt even more keenly the need for a very hot shower, Silkwood-style. I was in a contamination zone and felt panicky about getting out.

During the next coffee break, I calmly pushed through the ballroom exit doors as though I was going to the restroom with everyone else, walked past the banquet tables piled with spring waters and caffeinated beverages, through the densely carpeted lobby with it's obscenely expensive floral spray and softly piped music, and out onto the hard and dirty midtown sidewalk. I remember standing still, looking up at the blank grey sky and buttoning my jacket against the fall wind. My heart was racing and I felt a prickly, intense flash of recognition. This was the same sensation I'd known in dreams, when I was being followed or chased...I wasn't just skipping a boring late afternoon meeting. I was escaping. I stood on the sidewalk and felt my soul slipping into the crowd, walking fast, faster and finally sprinting away. And that's when I realized I had just quit, that I wasn't going back, I was done and utterly free...

This is the most honest explanation I can give for why I woke up one day, a forty year old book editor with virtually no nautical skills, and decided to throw away my old life, buy a boat and go to sea. Fortes fortuna adiuvat was our family motto. And Fortune does favor the brave but--let's face it--I also had nothing to lose.

Excerpted with permission from "The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water," by Mary South. Published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2007 Mary South.