Isn’t paradise just a state of mind?
Fall 2024
By David Roper
What is paradise, really?
Years ago, back in my boat delivery days, a couple of romantic dreamers hired me to help them on the first leg of their dream: sailing around the world. They were an anxious pair, long on romantic visions of escaping to sea, but short on the practical part: sailing. That didn’t stop them, though. They were excellent at severing ties: they had sold their house, sold both their cars, quit both their jobs, and canceled their marina slip. They had read all the escapist literature, and even poked out on the bay a few times, but never too far from shore. Nervous about the first leg, they hired me at the last minute. Forty miles out, on the way to Norfolk, it got rough and unpleasant, the wind brisk and astern. The following seas eyed their vessel hungrily. Strange creaks and groans began to emit from both the vessel and its owners. The missus came up to the cockpit, looked around frantically, and shrieked, “Where’s the land? Oh my God. Where the hell is the goddamn land!?” Anyway, that’s another story, but the short version is I was told to “turn around and take us home.” So, we motored upwind into steep seas for 11 hours, back to the marina where we had started. The owner sat next to me in the cockpit, looking aft and downwind at his vanishing dream. He never let go of his grip on the big cockpit cleat beside him. He said nothing. He didn’t have to; his white knuckles said it all. In less than one 24-hour day, the dream was over.
Robert Pirsig, author of the best seller, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” bought an offshore sailboat with some of the profits from his book, and headed for “The Dream.” Years later, he wrote an essay about it in which he said that all that really happens when one “escapes” the realities of life ashore is simply the substitution of one set of shore-based problems for a new set of ocean-based problems. There is no real escape from problems, pain, pressure, discomfort and worry; only a different set of each, he said. If you understand that, that’s fine. If you understand that you don’t leave your soul or your past behind when you sail away, that they go everywhere with you, that’s fine. Otherwise, to quote Pirsig: “All this is just running away from reality. You never realize how good that friendly old nine-to-five job can be. Just little things – like everyone saying hello each morning or the supervisor stopping by to get your opinion because he really needs it. And seeing old friends and familiar neighbors and streets you’ve lived near all your life. Who wants to escape all that? Perhaps what cruising teaches more than anything else is an appreciation of the real world you might otherwise think of as oppressive.”
In 1980, when I captained a cruise ship on the Mississippi River in St. Paul, I had a friend who owned a barge company. He’d built it up from scratch into a successful business over many years, but he’d always talked of “getting out of here, building his dream boat, heading down the Mississippi and then to the Caribbean.” Finally, he did it. He sold his company and left. Six weeks later he was back. “The islands all started looking the same,” he said. “I’d get up, worry about the anchorage, worry about where I would get water, worry about the next front coming through, and then worry about my next destination, which I wasn’t even particularly interested in going to anyway. One island started to look like the last one. I needed some sort of goal. After a while, the goals I had started to seem empty. I missed my business and all its challenges.” My friend sold his boat, came home and bought back his company.
Tristan Jones, who wrote numerous books of his picaresque life sailing the oceans of the world in low- budget boats, also grew weary of his nomadic lifestyle. Toward the end of his life, he discussed his thoughts about “the dream” and “paradise.” Why, he wondered, was turquoise water and an endless white sand beach considered “paradise”? What do you get with paradise, anyway? Challenge? Nourishment? Intrigue? If you anchored off it or sat on it for, say, several days, wouldn’t “paradise” be eclipsed by boredom? Wouldn’t it then be time to “escape” paradise?
Still, maybe I’ll give it just one try and see for sure. I’ll see you by that fourth sand dune with the palm tree. Bring the brie; I’ve got the wine.
David Roper’s new novel, “The Ghosts of Gadus Island: A Story of Young Love, Loss, and the Order of Nature,” is now available. Dave is the author of the three-time bestseller “Watching for Mermaids,” as well as the sequel “Beyond Mermaids” and the novel “Rounding the Bend.” Buy them at Amazon.com or roperbooks.com.
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