Free Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley Page B

pie. Had I not saved one hand for the ship, I likely would have fallen overboard in my amazement.
    The woman on the dock grinned at my excitement. I insisted that she let me snap her picture with plate in hand, and she snapped one of me with the unopened can of ravioli. She and her husband were retired and cruising the waterway between Georgia and New Jersey. She asked me where I was bound. When I said the words “Nassau” and “solo,” I got the by-then expected reaction of admiration mixed with envy and concern. In truth, though, I was the envious one.
    The woman left me to my feast. I knew she would be returning to a well-fed and well-loved man who would share with her across a pillow, that night, the details of the day—including the story of the strange ravioli lover on the boat next door—as they drifted off to sleep together. I wanted that. I wanted that more than the meal I was starving to eat. I wanted that more than anything.
    Late that night, after dishes had been returned with profuse thanks to my hosts, I opened my laptop and went online. I had a mission in mind.
    It had been almost a year and a half since I’d ventured into the online dating world. My earlier travels in this strange land of ritualized head-hunting had run mostly in circles, but the road I was on was clearly a bridge to nowhere. My profile wistfully described a “sailor seeking pearl.” I paused awhile to consider whether I really wanted to take this journey in addition to the one I had just begun, but the answer had already come to me in the middle of a delicious meal. For my safe passage, for that meal, and for all that it signified to me, I truly gave thanks. Then I hit the button marked “send” and lay down for a deep and dreamless sleep.

LATITUDE 32.77.90 N
LONGITUDE 79.95.15 W
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

Chapter 16
A Cold Rain
    What I have so long disliked about being a Yankee sailor is the cold. Not just the cold, but the cloying frigidity of cold air mixed with the mist and rain of brooding, sunless days. I shudder as I write these words. Lo these many years I have spent in the South, yet I have not escaped it. Well do I recall winter mornings even on the gulf coast of Texas that warranted every stitch of my wool socks and every inch of my leather boots—the same armor I once wore atop leafless Tennessee hills in pursuit of phantom deer. (The deer were much warmer than I, and therefore content to wait in stillness, unseen, until the oddly shivering archer departed their woods for easier quarry at the nearest hamburger stand.) Ever thus has been the source of my attraction to distant tropic islands. Ever thus has been my longing and my aim.
    The cold is worse for sailors, because the lower temperatures cling to water and linger there well after the rest of nature has given up the grudge of winter. Yet a man’s addiction to boats and the sea usually cannot abide the slow arrival of spring, and so the hapless sailor returns to open the shuttered cabin of his sleeping vessel and ask her again to dance, to relieve his wintering despair. When he does so and leads her out onto the steps of a chilled morning, in a harbor empty of other vessels, the scene unfolds with all the awkwardness of a couple arriving at a party that no one else has chosen to attend. Still, the dance goes on, however briefly and regrettably in the freezing rain, until the captain—his haste by then to all apparent—leads his ever-willing partner back to her berth to await a warmer afternoon.
    So was the scene in December 2009 when I arrived at the marina in Southport, North Carolina, with the intention of departing for the open sea. It was, naturally, a gray day with a fresh breeze a bit too cool for comfort. The sky seemed low enough to touch and filled with what would surely become a lingering rain. It was, in other words, another signature beginning in the logbook of the Gypsy Moon .
    As usual, more than a few logistical contortions preceded my departure.