The house is sold, the storage unit is full of old photo albums and baby books, Salvation Army came last Friday to pick up what was left in the house, the boat’s major systems have all been overhauled and I am exhausted. It has been one year since our successful experiment, a month of living aboard that confirmed that we were ready to make the move. That’s one year of paring everything down to nearly-bare minimum. That’s enough time to sort through things slowly, and to make the move without a lot of extra stress.

It wasn’t like that when the Stuemers moved aboard. About the time that Jay and I were graduating from college and getting married, a young Canadian family who had sailed their little boat on the Ottowa River just a few times decided to buy a cruising sailboat, renovate her, move aboard and sail around the world. Once they made up their minds, Herbert and Diane Stuemer put their plan into place with mind-blowing rapidity, selling a business and renting their house, renovating the boat and planning a shake-down cruise down the Eastern Seaboard. No poking along at a snail’s pace, waiting for everything to be “just right.”

And they made it. It took six years for this intrepid family of five to use the four winds to sail across three oceans and through two canals to make one enormous circumnavigation of our globe. But that is not what makes Diane Stuemer my hero. She was a mother of three lucky boys—boys who left a “normal” life to be homeschooled in the world’s classroom. She was a writer who lovingly documented all of their travels, adventures and mishaps in such a confiding way that she befriends you as you read. She was a wife who supported her husband’s wild dream and went along on the ride of her life. She lived her life to the full.  This is not what makes her my hero, though I do admire her for these things.

More than this, Diane Stuemer was a light in dark places. Northern Magic left in her wake a chain of friendships all over the world, and Diane tried to make a positive impact wherever she went. It is not good enough to simply leave a “clean wake,” in my opinion, to leave a place nice for others or to leave no impact at all. It is one of my life’s goals—and one that I am instilling in my children—that you must leave a place better than you find it.  If we go to the park in the afternoon, we pick up trash we find in the grass. If we play at the pool, we pick up pool toys that other children left lying around. And, on a much grander scale, this is what the Stuemers did. Their compassion for others led them to make choices that positively affected the places they went and the people they met. They made a few mistakes along the way and about those well-intentioned mistakes they were transparent and humble. 

Even if we don’t make it halfway as far as the Northern Magic, I will feel that the journey is a success if my children learn those two simple, but life-transforming lessons: leave the world a better place than you find it. Admit when you make a mistake and learn from it.

About six months after her book, The Voyage of the Northern Magic was published, cancer took Diane’s life. Thankfully, she had made memories with her family to last a lifetime, and she had not wasted her short time on this earth.  I miss her—when I feel lonely for the companionship of another woman who understands the myriad frustrations of living on a boat with rambunctious children and a man who has too many tools, I pick up her book and laugh a little. I wish I could call her up and have her tell me not to worry about the things I worry about, that it will all come out right in the end, and that we’re on the right track. For inspiring us to make the journey that started more than two years ago, and for leaving the world a better place than she found it, Diane Stuemer is my hero.

If you want to read about the adventures of the Stuemer family, join Diane on a trek across the globe in The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey.
 

You know you’re reading a good book if the first sentence chokes you up. Richard Bode’s memoir of his youth spent learning to sail does just that. “When I was a young man I made a solemn vow. I swore I would teach my children to sail. It was a promise I never kept.” So begins First You Have to Row a Little Boat, a series of life lessons recorded by a father to his grown children, his attempt to atone for “sins of omission.” Not only does he pass on the beautiful metaphor of sailing for navigating life to his children, but to the grateful reader as well.

Though an expanded metaphor could become tedious or sentimental, Bode usually avoids this temptation by couching his lessons in stories both honest and poignant. Orphaned at a young age and raised by an aunt and uncle, Bode finds his security in a self-sufficiency learned sailing a boat in a shallow bay. It is to some degree a coming-of-age tale, but also serves as reflection and advice from a seasoned sailor. Chapter titles include “The Shortest Distance Between Two Points is a Zigzag Line,” “Unfounded Fears”, “Fogbound,” and “Like a Boat Without a Rudder”. My favorite chapter was possibly “Of Knots, Loops, Bends, and Hitches” in which knot-tying becomes a metaphor for romantic relationships.

The best part, probably, is that you don’t have to be a sailor or be familiar with sailing terms to enjoy the book. You might learn some of the lingo, but it is not a prerequisite. All of us have to learn how to enter uncharted waters, go with the flow, and stay afloat because life isn’t always smooth sailing.

I’ve been told that sailors have a sick fascination with disaster and survival stories; it’s certainly true in our house. On Jay’s shelf are included Endurance, a story about Shackleton’s harrowing ordeal in Antarctica, Into the Wild, Fastnet Force 10, Adrift, Deep Survival, After the Storm, and Seaworthy: Essential Lessons from Boat U.S.’s 20-Year Case File of Things Gone Wrong. I read Dougal Robertson’s Survive the Savage Sea, about a family whose boat was sunk in ten minutes after being hit by a pod of angry killer whales, and had to live in their dinghy on the open ocean. We bought a boat anyway.

On a recommendation from a friend (thanks, Andy!), we recently read Black Wave: A Family’s Adventure at Sea and the Disaster that Saved Them by John and Jean Silverwood.  It’s a terrifying tale—though excellently told—which I wish had been written several years ago because it’s now a little too close to home. A couple from California with plenty of sailing experience decide to pull their children out of modern American culture and give them a dose of real life and exposure to natural beauty. They set off in a 55’ catamaran with their four children (sound familiar?) and head to islands and waters near and far. It is never as romantic as it seems, of course, and the adventure includes several close calls—a contentious crew, storms, pirates, breakdowns, and a near-mutinous marriage encounter.  I won’t spoil the end for you, but it entails barely surviving a shipwreck.

The book is told in two parts: Jean wastes no time in Book I and gets straight to the “good” part, interspersing a moment-by-moment narrative of their disaster with flashbacks that tell how they got to that fateful night on the reef. She writes not only of the difficulties within her marriage and among the children, but of her own shortcomings that are brought to the surface as the family experiences the shrinking pains of living on a boat. She makes me really look in the mirror—how will I handle the stress of living and working and sailing aboard Take Two?  In Book II, John gets to tell the story of what went wrong from his perspective and what happened afterwards. He combines his story with the tale of a ship that crashed on the same reef a hundred and fifty years prior (another sailor fascinated with disaster). I appreciated getting both male and female perspectives, and thought it was a good choice to write them separately, instead of trying to synthesize their stories.

On being asked why they wanted to take four children on the adventure of a lifetime, Jean might answer, as she intimates in the book, “I suddenly felt that our own kids were captives to a dull and artificial life, while the beauty of the real world was passing them by.”  She wanted them to appreciate the privileges of life in America as they saw how the rest of the world lived. She wanted to slow down enough to really enjoy her children. She shared a dream with her husband and they worked to make it happen. While we are not at the same starting point as their family was in some important ways, they went for some of the same reasons we want to go. And after the disaster, when asked, “Was it worth it?” her answer is stunning: “My husband took me to secluded beaches…My daughter and I raced each other on beautiful horses along the surf…I saw my kids become interesting; I saw two of them grow up. The answer is yes.” For his part, John chose to include perfectly-timed quotes from Melville’s Moby Dick and an old sea-faring hymn. Their journey, as one might expect, was not merely physical, but spiritual as well, and I cannot do it justice by describing it here. Needless to say, I became quite attached to both of them and missed their voices once the book ended.

Whether you are thinking of going on a high seas adventure yourself or not, it is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it to friends who are wondering what our future life might be like. On the other hand, I do not recommend it to family members who are wondering what terrible things could happen to us in our future life!