Posted by 
The ransom of a man’s life are his riches – Proverbs 13:8
Rules for running away to sea:
Rule #1: Sell the house first! Having broken rule #1 we’ve been hard at work over the past four weeks making amends. The good news? The house is now sold.
Rule #2: Cast off your terrestrial possessions. For the last month we’ve been selling decades of stuff. Just stuff. Stuff that’s gathered in our basement, our offices, our bedroom. Clothes, furniture, old LPs, everything that you accumulate along the way.
Two days ago I walked into a record store and got my LPs appraised. I said to Justin (the fellow behind the counter – we’d introduced ourselves) that some of these records had been following me around for 40 years, ever since high school. In my collection were first releases of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, The Eagles‘ Hotel California, Joe Walsh’s But Seriously Folks, not to mention several Firesign Theaters and a bunch of Jethro Tull.
And while at one point the music was important enough for me to transport those LPs across the Atlantic and back, by now my entire music library is either duplicated on CDs (which we’ve stored) or in iTunes, all 350 gigabytes of it. Turns out my relationship wasn’t with the vinyl, but the tunes. And while digital music is certainly more brittle than analogue, to fully appreciate it on a sailboat requires a record player and gimbal that would have made John Harrison proud.
Over a beer my buddy Steve asked me, ‘What are you keeping?” It’s a good question. Fortunately, it was an easy one to answer. Atavistically, we’re keeping our books, photos, pictures, and a few other, emotionally vestigial artefacts. Paperwork is digital these days, preserved in Adobe Acrobat files either from original sources or scanned. What we didn’t scan we shredded.
If you haven’t done this recently, sit down and leaf through your files, assuming you have some. In our case it was 30 or 40 years’ worth. We found pay stubs and wondered why things have gotten so expensive. Old medical reports reminded us of our mortality; injuries and operations that, although the pain is long forgotten, nonetheless left us wondering if we would have survived without modern medicine.
Then there were letters from lovers who could still catch your breath. Notes in longhand that even now have the power to impart a frisson intense enough to raise goosebumps, quickly followed by an exhalation of relief. One of so many memories that’s long since faded to sepia.
A few years ago I did the math on moving. Turns out that unless you’re really, really emotionally attached to your objets, don’t move them beyond the next town. Shipping a bunch of stuff across country in this day and age simply doesn’t make sense, even if you’re U-Hauling it. You’re better off selling your old stuff, hitching a lift and buying replacements when you get there.
If you are irrepressibly wedded to your stuff, then understand that you’ll pay more in rent than their market value while they’re stored and probably dump them at Goodwill once you’ve finally decided to move on. It’s just how things work. Our storage locker also has a couple of pieces of cherished furniture, some electronic gear for no good reason, and several boxes earmarked for Aleta that we’ll pick up in June.
Thus, for these past four weeks we have been showering Craigslist with a surfeit of riches otherwise totally valueless on a sailboat. Each major piece of furniture that’s sold truly makes our lives a little lighter and we become a little more free.
Now there’s no mortgage, no property taxes, no monthly utility bills. It’s almost levitating. The adventure feels more real. And despite the best efforts of one ex who continues to live down to expectations, we are better prepared than ever as a couple to take on whatever comes next. On all fronts. As that extant philosopher Steve Harley once said, “if this is love, give me more!”
