The awakening
So we are home, but cannot find our home. We feel so much love for friends and family, but I now feel like an outsider. People we meet think they are meeting the same people that they farewelled five years before as we are welcomed back into our previous niche. Dinner conversations are about the horror of Sydney traffic, real-estate prices, parochial party politics, the latest car models, the state of the economy, holidays they are planning or took last month. They also talk about movies we haven’t seen, new books we haven’t read, wine we haven’t tasted. There’s a faint mist of ambition and acquisition and competitiveness floating in the air above dinner tables. I learn to stay quiet, happiest back on the boat. Have I become a hermit?
For a time we do stay on Blackwattle. We are a threesome and she is part of who we are. When friends ask, ‘What are you going to do now?’ we smile gamely. Ted says, ‘Sail to Thailand.’ But now I know. I smile and shake my head sadly. I know he is tired – not of sailing, but of maintenance, that never-ending chore that architects were not bred for. It occurs to me that the long crossing between the Galapagos and the Marquesas, when all his hard work still left us struggling to make the next port, really broke Ted’s heart. We share these thoughts, travel back to Turkey to enjoy all over again our life there in the flat we haven’t seen for two years, and the friends we have made, and the warm honey of our adopted society, then home to Australia again – four times in the first year. We meant only to go sailing – we didn’t set out to reinvent ourselves. Now we find we have gone through the looking glass, and there is no way back.
I cannot forget the greater beauty that I found in simpler societies, the caring, the gentleness, the feeling of belonging and wholeness. What have we lost in our sophisticated society? Yes, there are good answers: better health, longer lives, more comfort – we are arguably the most spoilt generation ever to live on this earth. But why don’t I see happiness written on the faces around me?
The boat is there, waiting.
But, strangely, I find I have little interest in cruising in the closed quarters that gave me such euphoric pleasure when I first discovered sailing. I find it too painful to be so close, yet not to be out there on my beloved ocean, with the shooting stars and flying fish, and the moon to myself and the squalls that follow to speed me on my way.
In the joy of familiarity born of more than half a century of living, I know that Australia will always be my home, but, like many before me, I have discovered the joy of a much simpler life. We know we will sell our Blackwattle Bay apartment, neither of us has any wish to return to that environment – we have been too spoiled by our brush with a life lived close to the wondrous natural world. In order to have somewhere to sleep on land, we buy a funny old campervan, instead of a car, prolonging our uncertainty ‘just until we decide’, we tell ourselves.
One day, as we are leaving our yacht club, we stop to say hello to an old friend.
‘Well,’ she says, looking our funny old campervan up and down, ‘I guess seeing you have a flat in Istanbul, you don’t have to impress anyone with your car.’
Ted and I talk, and we know there is no way back to the lives that we led before in our home city of Sydney.
My reveries come by themselves, unheralded, the wild and the commonplace together, sharing my dreaming days. When I walk the streets, watch the roaring traffic, I think of the fuel pumped into the atmosphere. When I look up at the city blocks, all air-conditioned, I think of the energy being used. When I look at the blank faces in the street and in the trains, I see the smiling faces of Eritrea. When I hear in conversation the rush, the competitiveness, the materialism that we have all grown to know and accept, I see the old men of Turkey, sitting in the sunny streets, watching over their grandchildren. When I see the blue suits in Bond Street, I remember the easy culture of corruption and acquisitiveness I once took for granted. I know that Ted shares these thoughts.
There’s a noise and I come out of my reverie. It’s Ted talking as he scrubs the seagull poop from the deck, where they had built a nest during our latest visit to Istanbul. It’s a glad day in Pittwater. Fairy penguins are around the boat, mewing and flapping. The occasional cormorant pops from the water, head wagging, and disappears. White cockatoos screech in the foreshore trees.
‘What? Did you say something?’
Sigh. ‘You never listen. I said that two or three horses would be about right.’
‘What? Where?’
‘On the farm.’
‘Which farm?’
‘The one I was talking about.’
‘You weren’t talking about a farm.’
‘I was – remember? When I was on the bow and you asked me if there was anything I wanted.’
‘Six months ago in the middle of the Pacific? Coming into the Marquesas?’
‘That’s the one.’ He’s walking down the deck now, stepping into the cockpit.
‘A farm? You’ve got to be kidding. A farm? You don’t know anything about farms.’
‘Yes I do – my father was a bank manager.’
‘A who? What?’
‘Yup, they used to transfer bank managers all over the place in the country, so you pick up quite a bit.’ He’s reaching for the newspaper – today’s newspaper.
I draw a breath, pause for a minute. Clean fresh air? Birds? Rainforest? I can keep writing?
I say, ‘That’s ridiculous. I can’t ride a horse, and I don’t know anything about farms. I’ve only ever lived in a city. Neither of us know anything about farms. We know about cruising, not farms.’
‘We didn’t know a thing about cruising when we started. Look, here’s one advertised in Tasmania.’ Now he’s pushing a real-estate advertisement in front of my face. ‘You told me you always wanted to ride a horse and never got the chance.’
A horse? On our bicycles again? A wide sky? A simple village? Like . . . like the ones we’ve loved?
I don’t look at the newspaper, I look at Ted. ‘Tasmania! I’m a warm-weather girl, remember? I’m not going to Tasmania!’
Something has slipped already. We are now arguing about where the farm should be.
But that’s another story.