December 15, 2007 By Tania Aebi
Last Letter From Vermont
This is it. My next letter to you, dear reader, will be sent out from the boat I’ll be calling home. The boys and my father will be with me, and we’ll be preparing for our first hop from Curacao to Colombia. All the anticipation, all the talking, all the question answering, all the second guessing, all the worrying will be over, at least in our world up here. The smells, the sounds, the sights, the temperatures will all be different. As the frosty leaves start turning the colors that lure flatland rubberneckers to these hills every year, we’re down to the wire and ready to go, and the last dangling question is: Why?
The other day, Kathy, my neighbor, best friend, and mother to Nicholas’ best friend and classmate since kindergarten, asked me why I’d made this decision in the first place. She knows this has been entirely my bailiwick,
 Tania, just before flying down to the boat with her boys. |
It sounds stupid, martyr-like, but it’s what I had to do. After my parents divorced, my mother always said they were still married, and for as long as they had children together, they’d be married. She was right. I am not my boys’ only parent and until they are long gone and leading their own adult lives, the other will have to be accounted for.
 Behind our house, through the woods, is Kathy’s studio. |
So, every last little step of the way, and especially in these past couple of months, while he thinks about what wood to use for the cutting board between lodging the complaints over drinks with mutual friends in this small town who’ve reported back to me, I’ve had to make the smaller decisions, with all the justifications, research, rationales, from how to find and purchase an engine manual, to how many courtesy flags to buy, to which charts to choose, to how many boxers the boys should pack. Standing in Kathy’s kitchen, I’d been telling her about Sam’s reluctance, the anxious knot in my belly, saying how tired I was of getting over-tired too often, which always makes room for doubts. Why, she then asked? Why are you doing this?
 Olivier and Tania, the day she returned to New York, the youngest woman to have sailed solo around the world. |
Sometimes, this is a good question; sometimes, it’s no question. I immediately remembered back to when I was eighteen, preparing to leave everything I knew to sail off and around the world for the next two-and-a-half years. Back then, my father was helping with every last decision and implementation, and none of my other friends were asking me why I was doing it. We were all young, on the brink of adulthood, making choices, figuring out what we wanted, where to go with our lives, and I guess it was obvious to them. My father had given me a choice that would take me away, not to college, but out to sea. Why not? We knew other friends who’d committed suicide, were homeless,
 Kathy’s garden – an oasis in the woods. |
My mother, who knew she was dying from cancer, and who had never agreed on anything with my father up until then, was completely supportive. She knew all about the Big Limitation and until facing that one, she said, I owed it to myself to live life to the fullest. Friends of the family also took it in stride. My father was unusual, and offering to pay for me to sail alone around the world instead of college — which ended up being cheaper for him than my sisters’ Ivy League educations — was perhaps a little loony, but not absurd, not in our world. Everyone around him knew how passionately he believed, and had already been able to prove for himself, that anything is
 Tania, at 18 years old, on Varuna, her 27-foot sloop. |
It was the other adults, the press, complete strangers who came dockside as I was about to push off and word had gotten out, that started asking me the big Why? Why on earth would I board that little boat and sail out past Ambrose Light and into the future that seemed so risky? I couldn’t understand the question, didn’t have an answer. It was obvious to me. Why not? So young, I couldn’t understand then how settled we become in our lives, our routines, friendships, jobs, and careers, how perplexing it might be to others when someone can just leave all that behind to head into
 Tania, at 19, in Varuna’s cockpit in the South Pacific. |
You know how every once in a while you find the answer to something and it seems so clear you can’t believe you never saw it before? Like, finding your glasses were on top of your head all along? I don’t wear glasses, but here’s my latest epiphany. There is no way, absolutely no way, to predict the outcome, or the future, of any endeavor without actually giving it a shot. Given the desire and a goal within the realm of possibility, anything is achievable, until proven otherwise, though more often than not, once you get going, the universe will fall in cahoots with you. It will help you along. Once you get the momentum, the laws of inertia take over. A mass in motion stays in motion and it’s hard to hit a moving target.
But you have to keep moving. As an eighteen-year-old, for those two and a half years my constant goal was to head west, get back home — then be normal, get married, have kids,
 Tania, at 19, playing with the children on a remote South Pacific island. |
If I hadn’t taken my father up on his offer, if I hadn’t sailed around the world by myself
 Tania, at 21, and her father Ernst. Tania is wearing the Cruising World Medal for Outstanding Seamanship, which she was awarded the year after her epic voyage. |
No. And I don’t really believe there will be an answer until we can reflect on the way this trip plays out. It won’t be nearly as dramatic as my first Big One, but it’ll be an adventure. I am the same age my mother was when she died, my kids are the same age I was when I was first introduced to boats and the ocean, my best teachers ever. With all the groundwork laid and preparations made, we are ready to go, to move beyond the philosophical and theoretical. I’ve started really looking forward to ending all the anticipation, answering all the questions, to living the actual and practical reality of our Shangri-La. We have only one life to live. Why not? It’s time to go and I hope Kathy understands. If not, I’ll be better able to explain when we get back.
The world map pinned over the family’s kitchen table.
