CHAPTER ONE

Home in France

I

t was 3 p.m. on a warm August afternoon in 1982 when we literally and metaphorically cast off the ties that bound us, slipping out to sea across the Bay of Biscay—the Golfe de Gascogne—in France, never to look back. We were jubilant and hopeful about the prospect of taking on new unknown adventures, but we were also nervous. This was our new life. But by creating a new normal of our own design, would we be doing the right thing by our children?

I had lived in France for seven years at that point. My life had already considerably changed from my Southern Californian, American middle-class, suburban upbringing. Born in 1954, I was part of the post-war baby boom and the new prosperity of the rising middle class. My father was a WWII veteran and the first in his family to earn a college degree, having grown up in the Depression Era. My parents met at Northrop Corporation in Los Angeles. My mother was a secretary, and my father was going places as a project and contracts manager in the early "go-go" days of a burgeoning aerospace industry that would soon give birth to manned space flight.

Young couples were able to easily purchase homes and cars then, and my parents established their tidy cocoon in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. They were moving up in this new society: sun-bathed new neighborhoods, kids on new bicycles riding along the new sidewalks, new shopping centers, country clubs, and lawns hewn from tumbleweed-dotted empty lots. It seemed as though it could all have been a part of Disneyland, which, by the way, was only a few miles down the road in Anaheim, and also very new.

The turbulent 60s burst upon my high school scene, but they didn't chafe me too much. I was affected more heavily by my college experiences in the 1970s at the University of California at Berkeley, the seat of the "free speech movement" and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. Somewhere along the line, I discovered that a life in suburbia didn't figure in my future plans anymore.

I liked the idea of backpacking around Europe, as was the fad in those years, but I had no idea how to prepare or organize such a trip. Since I was determined to learn to speak French fluently, spending a school year abroad seemed like an easier way to undertake a European trip while staying within the structure of a school year. I wouldn’t fall behind in credits, and that would be my safety net.

Meeting a Frenchman, marrying, and living in France right out of college definitely helped me off the suburban track from the get-go. Michel and I lived in the Medoc wine region of Bordeaux, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. We were immersed in the aristocratic wine and food culture of this storied area. Here, Michel garnered architectural contracts with some of the chateaux (wineries), and I began a tentative journalism career in the Bordeaux wine public relations arena. While we were thrilled with our European situation as a new couple, we still craved more. We mulled over many ideas, but eventually, we were introduced to the one solution that would become our unconventional and wonderfully adventurous future.

One summer a friend invited us to go on with him on a sailboat for a small trip. We would go from the port of Arcachon, France, across the Bay of Biscay to San Sebastián, Spain. Oh my word! Such an eye opener that trip turned out to be. It was the hallmark event that inspired us—a seismic, monumental experience. It was our first experience boating at sea for multiple days, and after two nights, we had overcome (at least it seemed to us) some formidable elements to get from point A to point B. First, we successfully skirted breaking waves on a sandbar that bordered the channel passage out to the ocean, and Michel unfortunately lost his glasses overboard. Our second night was punctuated by some heady winds and agitated seas; we felt as if we’d really survived something.

We were equally seduced by the magic of starting in one country and waking up in another, having arrived under our own power harnessed from nature. We each had to take our turns standing watch at night—also a new experience. To make it even sweeter, neither Michel nor I got seasick. It was sunrise on the third morning of that trip, while we were savoring our coffee that we promised each other we would buy a sailboat and travel. To this day, over 40 years later, we can both turn to each other and note the time and date that we made that promise.

We were rather sure we wouldn’t always live in France, but we didn’t have any immediate plans on where we would go or how, until then. Having come under the spell of sailing, the only thing we knew for certain was that we had found the perfect solution to accomplish our dream of traveling as a family. Now we could start to plan for children!

I became pregnant with Sean, our first child, and Michel began fine tuning his sailing skills. He took some weekend sailing courses and participated in outings on the Gironde River through an accredited sailing organization. Aside from that week at sea from France to Spain, both of us only had minimal sailing experience dating back to our high school days. While we planned and learned, we also discovered that deciding to buy a boat, finding one, and affording one are all different things.

It was during one of Michel's sailing lessons that he met a man with a forty-two-foot ketch for sale in Port Grimaud, on the French Riviera. The size and description seemed to fit what we would be looking for, and possibly the price. Seizing the opportunity for a road trip, we took a few days and drove to the Cote d'Azur to check out the boat. Recognizing that we were novices and not really savvy on what constituted a viable one, Michel had contacted a boat appraiser and expert to meet us at the dock to render his professional opinion of the value, quality, and sturdiness of the vessel. While the boat needed a lot of TLC and would have to undergo substantial interior renovation to fit the lifestyle we envisioned, the hull and structure of the boat were deemed solid and in good shape by the expert, and well worth the asking price.

Michel thrived at the architectural firm he owned, and several lucrative jobs had come along about this time. Consequently, we were able to purchase the boat due to the anticipation of several promising projects. Getting the boat back to Bordeaux proved to be a separate hurdle. There were really only two options: sailing it back via the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar and to the port of Le Verdon, very near the Medoc wine region where we lived; or the more direct inland route, through the Canal du Midi by way of Toulouse and eventually Bordeaux itself. Since it was winter and we were short on time, we opted for the Canal route, which was not as easy as we projected.

Cowabunga, as we had already decided to name her, had a rather deep draft with a six-foot keel. The keel is a large, weighted, fin-like structure underneath the boat, which stabilizes the vessel and keeps it in balance, avoiding a capsize (thus the expression to be "on an even keel"). Due to our particularly long keel, the Canal wasn't quite deep enough in some places to accommodate us. Consequently, the boat scraped along in the narrower places but was able to make it through. Michel cobbled together a relay team of friends who helped us deliver the boat back in stages—weekends and short vacations—since neither no one was available to do the job in a single trip. A new team picked up Cowabunga where the last team left her along the canal, making headway in short spurts.

Starting from Port Grimaud, a team sailed Cowabunga east along the Mediterranean coast as far as the port of Agde, an entry-point for the Canal du Midi. Here, the masts were taken down and lashed lengthwise to the deck for the remainder of the canal trip since the boat couldn't fit under bridges fully rigged. For the next two weeks, the relay crew glided along postcard-worthy, serene, pastoral landscapes. Soft, grassy berms lined the waterways framed by arched, foliage-laden trees worthy of Monet's canvases. Our new home passed through such noteworthy places as the medieval fortified city of Carcassonne, and the Ville Rose (the "Pink City") of Toulouse—so named for its unique terracotta brick architecture. Our relay crews also enjoyed some incongruous moments like gliding in a viaduct suspended high above the Garonne river.

I didn't participate in this phase, being pregnant and not willing to face the rudimentary living conditions on board that existed at that early stage. Michel participated in as many of the relay stages as he could, and kept in constant contact with the current crew as to her daily whereabouts. He was onboard for the final stage, guiding Cowabunga to her new home with the onset of winter in 1978. I was elated as I spied Cowabunga rounding the final harbor breakwater and nearly gave out a cry of joy, just like her name implies. She was docked there for three years as we diligently set to scraping, painting, hammering, and transforming her.

For our first phase of renovation, we hauled the boat out of the water for some major work on the hull. It needed to be completely stripped down to the bare wood, refinished, and have new anti-fouling paint applied below the waterline. The two wooden masts were taken down as well and stripped of all the rigging for a new paint job. The stanchions (the upright deck perimeter support poles) and all other hardware on the deck were completely removed, thoroughly inspected, kept, or replaced with custom items. Michel gutted the inside, exposing the original structure and framing, rendering it a bare slate to reconfigure.

I wasn't much help at this early stage, becoming more ungainly by the day as my pregnancy with Sean progressed. I assisted in scraping off as much of the old exterior paint as I could from the least acrobatic position possible, which was simply standing. Michel transformed into a shipyard worker on weekends, holidays, and occasionally an abbreviated workday. The project overtook our budget, our birthday and Christmas lists, our dreams, our conversations. It was omnipresent in our lives. We even had wonderful friends come out of the woodwork to help us during these busy months so that we could meet our “first stage” goal of having the boat in the water by summer.

Michou, our local fisherman friend, often dropped by after an all-night fishing trip to extend a hand. He also lent tools and supplied us with buckets of fish and crabs for sustenance. Joel, a plumber whom Michel often employed on his construction sites, became a fast friend as well. He often dropped by the wharf with plumbing materials and strong-armed wrenching techniques. Then Philippe, who would become a very close friend of Michel’s, also assisted when he could. But most importantly, he was perhaps the only other person besides me who understood Michel’s passion for this adventure. He gave us his treasured 19th century antique barograph as a gift, and it held an honored place inside Cowabunga for the 10 years it was our home. Today that same barograph continues to give us the daily weather in our landlocked living room, 30 years after our departure. It also serves as a daily memorial to our friendship with Phillipe, since his passing several years ago.

Amidst all this, we had our first baby, Sean, in April of 1979. From day one, he was surrounded by and incorporated into our project. I would visit the job site as often as possible with our newborn, and Michel's mother was often thrilled to step in for nanny duty so I could pitch in for an afternoon. She was a godsend. While we avidly worked to make the boat a sound vessel with a comfortable living space, we were also hoping to charter the boat on weekends that summer for tourist outings. We hoped it would bring in supplementary income to help defray some of our renovation costs. Since it would have been a bit much for us to lead the outings with a baby on board, Gilbert, our competent sailor friend, agreed to be our charter captain. Many a weekend, while we continued land-based work at home, Cowabunga weaved in and out of our local harbor, ferrying summer passersby along the immediate coast. We didn't earn a fortune from it, but it was helpful in keeping our budget afloat.

In between those tourist trips, we continued devoting weekends, holidays, and vacation time to working on the boat and taking short sailing trips for the three of us. By the next springtime, Sean was a year old, and we had more or less worked out the kinks of having a young child on board, "baby proofing" as best we could (i.e., attaching netting around the deck between the stanchions, adding a high sideboard for his bed, using a harness when necessary on deck).

With summer just around the corner, we decided to put our words into action and try living on the boat full time. What better time to start than in the warm weather? So by July of 1980, we moved onto the boat while docked in our homeport of Le Verdon. On weekends, we sailed. During the workweek, Michel tended to architecture projects at his office. The summer living experiment went so well that we decided to take things to the next step and move onto the boat for the remainder of the year. Could we make it through a winter?

We worked out a lot of the daily living details over the summer: the logistics of hauling the groceries and a toddler from the car to the dock to the boat, storing provisions, cooking with only a select few pots and pans in a doll-sized kitchen, rationing water, resizing some sheets to fit the trapezoidal form of our bed.

We acquired a kerosene heater for cold winter nights, took care not to slip on the icy deck in the mornings, and dealt with accumulated condensation from our breathing while sleeping in our very small aft cabin. Providing enough time for Sean to stretch out on land, most often at his grandparents’ place, was another priority. Oblivious to his circumstances of a more constrained living space than most children, Sean easily learned how to walk both on the boat and on land.

Despite the constraints of living in such small quarters, Sean took quite naturally to living on Cowabunga. His easygoing and curious nature was a good fit for the lifestyle. Like all toddlers, Sean constantly asked questions, of course favoring the eternal "why." He always wanted to know what project Michel was working on and if he could help. Sean was also (and still is) a talker—a very social animal. He never hesitated to tell anyone in earshot that he lived on a boat, and that her name was Cowabunga. Since "playdates" didn't exist in those days in France, and there weren't a lot of other toddlers around at the time, Sean experienced a fairly concentrated dose of our boat life. This, along with his bilingual ability to bounce between English and French, were both molding factors for his future.

By the time our third summer on the boat came around, Sean was two years old and we began thinking about baby number two. We had a daily living routine worked out by then, and the renovation and maintenance work had become a way of life. Sean was ready for preschool in the fall. It was time he mixed with other children on a regular basis, and be exposed to people, routines, and events outside of our close family sphere. We hoped this would prepare him for a change in his world. I felt ready to face the challenge of being pregnant on board. Throughout the next winter, my midsection expanded and physically managing Sean while walking through the narrow passageways onboard was becoming laborious. Eventually, at about 8 ½ months, I plainly couldn’t fit down the main hatch anymore. We decided to stay at my in-laws’ place in nearby Montalivet, about a half hour from our dock in Le Verdon. Two weeks later, in March 1982, Brendan appeared on the scene true to his due date.

After a week at the hospital (as was customary in France at the time), we brought Brendan directly home to Cowabunga, the only home he was to know until we arrived in California eight years later. In the eternal debate of what is nurture versus nature, it's hard to know how much of life on Cowabunga influenced Brendan later in his life, or how much of who he is now is innate. Brendan is fiercely independent and has always been his own person—not easily influenced or won over. He is very pensive, and I can’t help but think that his first eight years deeply reflect his novel start in life and is integral to his spirit today.

Soon after Brendan was born, Michel was approached by an architect who was interested in buying his firm. We decided the moment had come to leave, ready or not (it was more "not" than ready). We would never be completely prepared. There would always be something more to do, something else to finish, always more money that could be put away. But at some point, one has to make a leap of faith.

We used every waking moment of that summer to get ready to go. Since some of the interior renovations proved not as workable as we thought, Michel pulled out his tools once again for some last-minute adjustments and refinements. We had sails and equipment to buy. We had shopping to do and a storage space to wring out of thin air. How much food and water would we need? Would we use all those baby bottles? Where could I store more diapers? Which toys should we keep? We had to sell our cars, give up the apartment, dispose of the washing machine, pare down our wardrobes, buy some proper foul weather gear… Our to-do list continued to expand. During the final week, we had an actual pallet of food and goods delivered to my in-law’s house, and drove carload after carload up to the boat, storing each load properly before retrieving the next. I only bought the final fresh fruit and vegetables at the last minute, the day before our departure.

Eventually, the months whittled down to weeks, then days. Our friends and family had witnessed our commitment to the project over the previous three years, and their reactions ran the gamut of emotions. Some never believed we would really go, most were sad, others were proud. Michel’s father was perhaps the most bewildered of all by this folly. His son had become an architect—a "someone." Papy, as we called him, was proud of his son, and for the life of him he could not understand why Michel was "throwing it all away." Mamie, Michel's mother, was distraught. She was close to our boys, and we to her. Although she knew our departure was imminent when the pallet of goods was delivered to their door, we avoided telling her the exact date and time we planned to leave. Michel thought it better to tell her we had left once we were out at sea, via the marine radio.

My parents were a bit more accepting of our folly, especially my dad who tended to be attracted to bold endeavors. They never criticized our choice or passed judgement. I am fairly certain, however, that they assumed sailing would be a passing fancy, and that we would soon settle down as most young families do, or should.

Despite all our parents' misgivings, all four were proud of our adventure and willingly recounted our whereabouts and experiences to their friends. Michel's father even kept a map of the world taped to the wall in his den, which he updated with push pins marking our destinations.

On August 29, 1982, we were ready to sail with the high tide at 3 p.m. At 2 p.m., friends gathered on the dock. Michou hovered with his fishing trawler, ready to escort us out of the harbor. Sean knew we were getting ready to sail, but he couldn't understand the magnitude of what we were about to undertake. We shared hugs, kisses, and goodbyes with our small crowd, promising to meet again farther south, or on the other side of the Atlantic. Some of our friends boarded Michou’s boat. We dawdled as long as we dared, and then finally fired up the engine, threw off the lines, and angled the bow out of the harbor.

The first entry of our ship’s log was begun by Michel that evening: "...calm night, light breeze, not cold—perfect send off." My journal says: "One dream, one sailboat, 3 1/2 years, two children later, we left today."