Stories in the Wind

“ I discovered the ocean in my imagination,”

Peter Freuchen, Polar Explorer, Author, Raconteur

Unlike my hero Peter Freuchen, I discovered the ocean in books. It was a kid's obsession that began in a library in the Detroit suburbs. Maybe I am still a kid, at least at heart, because I keep making literary discoveries 40 years and 400,000 sailing miles later.

The echoes of western literature blow across the south seas. As Quetzal presses ever westward, riding and occasionally confronting the strong willed breezes of the austral hemisphere, we keep encountering the ghosts of legendary writers. Often self appointed exiles, these authors were inspired by the romantic ideal of unspoiled tropical paradises populated by people uncorrupted by civilization's excesses. It’s a powerful if chimerical sentiment but I’d wager that a slice of this core myth continues to make up a big part of every voyaging sailor’s conception dream.

There were almost always personal reasons for escaping to the Pacific islands. Some writers were searching for elusive cures and some for equally elusive privacy from a lifestyle not condoned by the civilized folks back home. Some were running from the law or despotic captains and others were looking for fame or trying to escape its shackles. Some were just searching for a version of themselves that they could tolerate. History is always messy and one should be wary of sanitized folktales, but stories, good stories, have a way of cutting through the fog revealing a lasting truth. My late mother, a wise woman, a voracious reader and my dear friend, who sailed around the world in her Jeanneau sloop in the 1980s, insisted that truth resided in stories, where writers can be brutally honest. She was suspicious of nonfiction narratives where the author manipulates the facts and massages egos of his real life characters, you know, those dreadful kinds of books her son writes. Hang in there Mom, I am working on a novel, I swear.