“It follows that the best way to defeat cruising depression is never to run from it. You must face into it, enter it when it comes, just be gloomy and enjoy the gloominess while it lasts. You can be sure that the same mechanism that makes depression unavoidable also makes future elation unavoidable. Each hour or day you remain depressed you become more and more adjusted to it until in time there is no possible way to avoid an upturn in feelings. The days you put in depressed are like money in the bank. They make the elated days possible by their contrast. You cannot have mountains without valleys and you cannot have elation without depression. Without their combined upswings and downswings, existence would be just one long tedious plateau.”
What’s that? We’ve stopped? Ooh, watch out now. Harmony and me, we gonna get ou’selves a rhythm.
We’ve been in Boca Chica for almost two weeks (as of the beginnings of this post), but judging from our totally dwindled cache of supplies, I’d say it feels like we just got here. We’ve experienced a period of reacquaintance, of feeling it out and extending our reach. We’re still toying with pretty much all the options that have ever been on the table, and we are still inventing new ones.
From the point we reached Panama City, the long season begun in October of last year had caught up with us. Every frozen bolt, frayed line, and failed outboard start caused an eruption of, “Get me off this boat!” Wind and waves that before had been merely inconvenient were now an active waste of our lives. During that long, horrible, uphill last leg from the Perlas to the city, Tack tucked himself so deeply and miserably into my lap [he is not a lap cat] that I could not stand to move a muscle and take away his last sanctuary. Our canary in the coal mine had croaked.
The fun-to-suck ratio seemed overwhelmingly not in our favor, so much so that Harmony and I braved the blasphemy of admitting it to each other out loud. We decided in the city on a desperate act of dance floor therapy, hitting a club with friends until the late hours and shaking it all out to electronic music with wild abandon. We had reunited with our sailing companion Colin, and it was clear for him to see how little perspective was left in my tank. He put his arm around me encouragingly and shouted over the BMM-TSS BMM-TSS in the air, “You guys just need a break! Everyone gets tired at the end of the season! Don’t worry, you’ll feel the love for it again!” I took in his words, but I wasn’t confident that they would apply.
Throughout the past couple months, we’ve had to ask ourselves this question: Were our feelings of exhaustion and impatience for the endemic setbacks of our sailing lifestyle representative of merely the low point in a renewing seasonal cycle, as Colin suggested, or were we like a glider that in the sum of its swoops and climbs was inevitably losing altitude?
When my friend Michael came to visit in May (a wonderful, restorative, relaxing period of time that he still owes us a blog post about, MICHAEL!) he astutely pointed out that if we just made a final, no-take-backsies decision, we’d save ourselves a long stretch of anxiety and agony. So we did. We made a decision. We call that “The Truck and Camper Fiasco”, because we almost dove headlong into another barrel of bureaucracy and complication we had not yet begun to scrape through. We’d have been hosed. Now we’ve slowed down again, talked ourselves down off the ledge, and we wait for a soberness of mind, possessing all the facts and with a name for all our feelings, before making large moves. The secret of my survival thus far in life has been to do bold things carefully. No sense to stray now.
Hurricane season in Mexico has essentially cut off our retreat until November, and in the meantime we have experienced a new life shift. From a certain perspective, we’ve upgraded from vagabonds to the traveling carnival that parks outside of town between state fair seasons. Thankfully, squatters’ rights are a long-held tradition in Panama, so believe it or not we may actually find a way to blend in.
We now live outside a 100-person village that is in the early stages of a transformation into a tourist destination and services provider. We are surrounded by beautiful small-scale paradise resorts, each a kingdom with its own fashion and culture. They all have their attractions and are generally welcoming of our kind, if a little uncertain what that will ultimately mean for them. I get the sense this place doesn’t quite know what to do with its boat folk yet, or maybe we’re just unaware of the legacy from those who came before and whose habits left a foundational and generalizable mark on the social fabric before leaving on the breeze. Regardless, the downside of selecting this as our hurricane season home is that certain conveniences are more of a struggle than in less remote, more developed ports.
For instance, the anchorage (in which we are one of two occupied boats) is one of the most protected and scenic we’ve found in western Panama, yet the town has no dock for their water taxis or the lanchas of visitors and everyone has to sidle up to a concrete ramp whose height and length fluctuate throughout the day. It’s also a half-mile dinghy ride away, either with or against a ripping current, depending on the tides and the time of day. The outboard, when it works, which currently it does not, is too low in horsepower to fight the peak flow in the opposite direction. Thus, our options for leaving our little personal island have limits, and we find ourselves planning life at the mercy of the tide.
Once we’re off the boat, we’re still a half hour away by collectivo van through the countryside — the breathtaking, looks like it came from The Land Before Time countryside — to a Chinese-run General Store outpost located at El Cruce, or “The crossroads”, a dusty patch where two highways meet, remarkable only for its colorful political signs from the bygone national election. If we need a little more selection, we have to take the bus from El Cruce to David, which is another hour away. The last bus home leaves at 5:30 pm. It is always full, often including the standing room. Our backpack full of groceries is a frequent source of complication and apology to the other passengers. The whole ordeal costs the two of us $16 round-trip, so more and more we tend to just buy veggies from the veggie man who comes to Boca Chica in his truck a couple times a week.
This environment will require new adjustment. It helps that we’ve been in and out of here a lot. We’re starting to get to know the place, and that feels good for a variety of reasons. We may even find a niche to belong in, despite our relatively short stay. Reputation is one of our few assets, so we do our best to invest wisely.
In our quest for altitude recovery, we are thirsty for internet and electricity. We’ve reconnected with that part of our minds that we left behind to wither online while we were away. We spend embarrassingly large portions of our day trying to get a response from the intermittent open broadcast wifi signal from one of the hotels overlooking the bay. We watch the battery monitor hungrily. The water tanks too. Thank the heavens it’s rainy season and we can catch water on our decks, or else our stack of dirty clothes would have kept us jailed onboard in shame. These are the kind of lifestyle challenges that if left unaddressed can grow to become a threat to survival, but with time to work out stable systems to address them, a little help from above, and the starting threads of a little social safety net, on the whole we are once again feeling our spirits rise.
We are also beginning to get a handle on all the little annoyances and clutter that had begun to plague us and the temporary fixes that promised to betray us again one day. Would I lie and say that this burst of labor wasn’t motivated by the stealthy creation of a pull-the-ripcord boat ad? Could the creation of this unconfirmed ad be ironically responsible for a growing sense of rediscovery of what we love about our home? I admit nothing. Could people perhaps draw an allegorical conclusion that an effective way to fall in love with something again is to try to sell it off for less than it’s worth?* Let’s not get crazy.
But there’s an even bigger question at hand, a glorious dilemma, a magnificent surprise, one we thought would never come: What are we going to do with all this free time?
Step one? Dig ourselves a homey little rut. I’ll never take a routine for granted again. (This is a lie.)
Step two: Feel for the updrafts.
*You guys know me well enough to spot the jokes when you see ’em, right? Fake baby notwithstanding.