By Dark Stars

It was the first day of school, and I wasn’t going. As our sensible minivan crunched down the gravel and straightened for the road, I flailed like one of those inflatable tube men, blowing kisses and miming hugs to Genny and the girls as they waved back. Then they were gone.

For a minute, my highly structured teacher-dad-husband brain swirled with frantic energy, spinning up a smoothie of domestic concerns and renegade emotions: Did they pack enough to eat? Will they make new friends? Could my students forget me? Am I a selfish fool?

The gray Atlantic horizon offered no answers, but its ruler-straight line drew my eye and slowed my breath. One hundred twenty-six years earlier, a bald 51-year-old man in a three-piece suit would have been a speck on that line, a lone sailor turning east on the sailboat he built himself, the lights of Halifax Harbour the last North American beacons he’d see for three full years. Joshua Slocum, Nova Scotia’s saltiest son and the world’s greatest sailor. My dude. I could almost sense him out there, all alone, knifing through the chop.

And here’s where I should ratchet up my reason for stepping away from teaching to undertake some midlife transformation—the more radical, the better. I’m 44 years old, the perfect age to embody a cliché. Ripe for all kinds of crises. But I can’t fudge it. My marriage is rock solid, I love my kids, I like my job, and I live within walking distance of a headland that can, on occasion, produce clean waves that serve up almond-shaped slots to slip through. On the surface, I’m as conflicted as a cat curled up next to a woodstove.

Problem is, I have an obsession, an itch I’ve been meticulously planning to scratch for the same duration as Slocum’s unthinkable odyssey. Moments after I closed Sailing Alone Around the World, his classic book, my mind hatched its own quest. A stunt, really. A no-phone, no-tech, leg-powered lark. This was my vision: I would stuff my cargo bike with camping gear and pedal solo from my driveway in Cow Bay to distant Brier Island, Nova Scotia’s most southwesterly point and Joshua Slocum’s boyhood home. Why? Three burning reasons: to surf uncharted waves, to experience deep solitude, and to crack a mystery no seabound scholar has ever solved—what happened to Joshua Slocum when he disappeared nine years after circumnavigating the globe?

As the first drops of sky spittle found my face, I knew I had to snap out of it and start moving. I was about to do what only a sailing virgin would do: leave in a storm. A Hurricane Ida–strength gale, to be exact.

In my mind, this departure date was immovable. When else would a teacher get to embark on a September voyage of adventure that didn’t involve emailing, photocopying, laminating, border stapling, and seating-plan creation?

So when Hurricane Ida crossed the Bay of Fundy after testing the dikes of New Orleans a week earlier and tracked, against my fervid prayers, toward Nova Scotia, I kept my schedule inked. If I’d known what awaited me, I would have been a smart sailor and held off a day.

My cargo bike looked ready, though. I circled it in the mist, checking for snugness. I had everything I would need: borrowed waterproof front panniers with clothes, tools, bags of nuts and dried mango. Dry-bag backpack with sleeping bag, poncho, and wetsuit. A newly acquired, and soon-to-be nemesis, hammock tent, locked and loaded on the bench seat. Front handlebar box with notebook, camera, Grandpa’s pipe, ripped-out road maps, and a topped-up flask of Teacher’s malt whisky. Four-liter bottle of water and snorkel kit, lashed on either side of the back wheel frame. Essential weird stuff, like Chicken Tender (my red Penny skateboard), a black awooga trumpet horn with wine-cork mute, and a stone-dead 1950s Westclox clock zip-tied to the handlebars, of course.

To max out the weirdness, I had my Conjuring Kit. Joshua Slocum had been gone for a century, so I reckoned I’d have to find other ways to reach him. There was my Magic 8 Ball, cradled to the frame in a homemade bicycle tube sling; a Death tarot card, tucked away in my notebook; and the wooden staff I’d borrowed from the abandoned birth house of Slocum himself, in Mount Hanley, an object I believe he may once have touched.

Then there were the books. I’d packed Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound, Helen Creighton’s Bluenose Ghosts, and a pocket edition of Slocum’s magnum opus—2 inches by 3—so it would literally never leave my side.

And just one more thing: the kit’s topper, my most crucial piece of cargo, a black 5’2″ twin-fin Mini Simmons surfboard shaped by a friend for the journey, a wave-riding slab we dubbed “the Tombstone.” There it was, lashed tight by two bungees, its shark fins flanking the seat, giving the whole setup a slapdash Batmobile effect.

If the dark stars aligned, these talismans would come together, Voltron-like, to produce… well, if not an answer, then at least a wild story. 

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Excerpted from Captain Solitude
Goose Lane Editions
232 pages
gooselane.com

[Feature image by Marcus Paladino]