This
morning I found myself in the cold, damp engine room of a rather small
inland freighter made of wood built seventy years ago. I was on my
stomach on the floor, my left side under the engine, my left arm
reaching straight down submerged in the very cold, black, oily,
saltwater of the bilge. When I had the two inch bilge line where I
thought it went, I pulled my arm out of the black sluge; I could not
see my skin. The vital juices of my boat's Caterpillar D 13000 engine,
a four-ton, World-War-II vintage diesel soiled my clothes and maybe my
skin -- forever. It was 40 degrees in there, but my heart was singing;
I could hear it.
Just three years ago I was finishing twenty-five years of college teaching (the last eighteen at Michigan State University). I was entering the phase of a career when one is supposed to notch a stick for a half-dozen more years so "the full-package" would be awarded upon retirement. My second marriage had just flashed in my face. I sat in my three room garage apartment in East Lansing watching a C-Span re-run of some public policy forum. The head of the group was saying that each panel member would be given three minutes to conclude their views on the solutions to our world's economic-poverty-ethnic crisis. So and so from Harvard allowed as how strong democratic central governments should plan the way out, an expert from The University of Chicago argued the only solution was unfettered world-wide markets for goods lead by the multinational corporation, and the M.I.T. professor urged a greater use of technology. The director finally called on a man at the end of the head table whose placard read, "Wendell Berry, Farmer." The farmer took the mike from the M.I.T. expert and mumbled something and handed the mike back. His response was so swift, so brief, so simple, I missed it. So did the director. He asked Berry to repeat what he had just said. Berry reached for the mike and said in a low steady voice, "Want less."
This writing is a brief account of how those words helped to impel me out of a secure, middle-class life into a 6,000 mile odyssey on a 26 ft. sailboat from West Michigan to Maine via Mexico, Belieze and Guatemala, and to cashing in my retirement to buy "Iva W." the sixty foot, thirty-ton Chesapeake Bay Buy Boat in whose belly I found myself this morning.
Berry's words resounded in my psyche. I was 56 then; why notch a stick until 62? I had two storage units of stuff I had not touched or seen for a few years. Did I really need all this stuff? I began to review my book and music collections. I could not decide between Jack London and Sigmund Freud, between Wild Bill Davison and Art Tatum, so I had a massive yard sale and a lifetime of treasures drove away. Family heirlooms went to three daughters, furniture I built went to friends with the implicit understanding that it was theirs forever, maybe.
I read in the school newspaper a back-page announcement that the Provost would give a year's salary to any full professor who would resign. Selling and giving away your stuff is one thing, quitting a lifetime career is another. In a few months, I had found out, however, that nothing was so corrosive to my notions of real freedom than the idea of a secure future. The paper said that candidates should report next Monday to Room 306, Administration Building. Monday morning, I climbed the three flights of stairs and expected to confront a long line of faculty outside of Room 306. When I opened the door from the stairwell the hallway was empty. I poked my head into 306 and asked, "Is this the place where, . . ." "Come right in Professor," said the administrator." So far as I know, out of over 3,000 faculty at MSU, I was the only one to opt for the proffered burlap parachute.
I had no plan of where to go or what to do. I had no grand ideology directing me toward, "the good life." But, I felt confident in my decisions. I think the reason is that I had a spiritual practice that I trusted implicitly. I have meditated off and on for twenty years. The past three years, I have meditated regularly twice a day. I sit for a half-hour. I ask nothing. I expect nothing: I sit, I repeat my mantra, then I get up and go about my life. The common view is that if one lets go of the professional trapeze in mid air, there darn well should be another there when you reach for it. I even had my own internal voices arguing that I could not, should not, do nothing after my last class. It is downright un-American, its not even civilized behavior to want to bo-de-o-doe on with life. The "be productive voice" prevailed over the "want less" voice and I applied to the Peace Corps, and asked for an assignment working with my hands in a warm climate where I could learn another language. They returned my enthusiasm with three offers: would I like to teach business in Russia, Russia or Russia?
Teaching business in cold grey winters had already shrunk my spirit. So I decided to head South and to explore the limits, or, my limits, to the Berry injunction: want less. The future of my life depended on knowing fairly precisely, how little was less.
I sold my truck and moved aboard my small 26-foot sailboat, "Georgia." Her hull was made in Maine twenty years before; her cabin was finished by George Powell of Grand Traverse Yacht Builders in Traverse City Michigan in 1982. A companion, Marilee Ives from Minnesota, joined me and we set sail from Pentwater, Michigan, in June of 1996. We had no objective other than to live simply and see how far we could go. We sailed around Michigan, across Lake Erie, motored out the Erie Canal to the Atlantic, and then South to Florida, and then East to the Bahamas. In the Bahamas, more is definitely more, everything is expensive, the fish and lobster are pretty much gone, the conch hard to find and fresh water is costly. Most boaters there compete to see how much of their household they can cram into their fifty-footers. Whole cocktail discussions focused on broken toasters, water maker capacity, and how many appliances they could run on a twenty-KW generator. We turned around and sailed back along Cuba to Mexico, then South to Belieze. Marilee had to return to Minneapolis so she joined another crew headed North and I single-handed further South to Guatemala.
In the eight months I stayed in Guatemala I did not know I was searching for an answer to the question of how little was less, but hindsight reveals that this knowledge was absolutely crucial to my future. So how little is less -- how much do I need to maintain myself and live the kind of life that suits me? My answer is $100 a week, between five and six thousand dollars a year. Since my own retirement plan could be liquidated to provide for that much and more, and since I knew I could live on Social Security in three years, I knew I need never work again. This was a very important piece of information for me. In Guatemala I found a home base, a spot on the planet where I felt comfortable with endless sunshine, terrific people and with limitless opportunities to contribute and to learn.
Living in Guatemala, as it turns out, might not be my future, but it is from Guatemala that my future would grow. Outside, now, of my own culture, the explicit and implicit "shoulds" and "otta's" fell away. I was only 58, I had another twenty years at least to do whatever my heart sought.
In the first paragraph, I wrote that my heart was singing this morning in the engine room of "Iva W." How did I know it was my heart that I heard? That is, out of the half dozen or so voices and images that crowd my consciousness how did I know which is really my heart, and not, for example, a TV jingle, a conditioned response created by some needful institution, or an implanted image of some sort? Could there be a more important question for me? And, how does one find the answer?
I do not feel that I know for certain how to trace the routes in this territory. But, here is what I did. First, as I said, I have a spiritual practice that I trust. I meditate daily. This practice, I believe, allowed me to feel and then know that my career as a professor was grooving my soul across vital energy lines. So, I quit. I also trusted Wendell Berry's seemingly innocuous advice -- want less. I reduced my living space to about ninety square feet and even this was shared with another. Then I wandered aimlessly for two years. I slowed way down and became very quiet. Dimly at first, then with more confidence, I became aware of what held my attention. In every port and in almost every circumstance old things made of wood drew me to them.
I knew I loved wood, and I knew I loved to travel around. Miscellaneous journal writing and the artifacts of my life channeled my awareness and confirmed my initial intuitions. I came across a packet of photos I took in 1952 when I was 12, my first roll of film. Every last one was of old wooden boats. Every time there were no claims on me in my life, I built a boat. I built three. As I sat at anchor in the rivers of Guatemala my psyche at idle speed, how could I deny the voice that was identifying the subjects of my attention: I would travel around on a boat of wood. I knew I would be good at this.
Marilee joined me again and we left Guatemala in January of 1998, and sailed to Maine via Cuba, where we put Georgia for sale. We were bone tired, this was a rough trip. After this passage, I knew I had surpassed some limit and needed more space and more tonnage beneath my feet. We put Georgia on land near Rockland, Maine, and moved aboard a used pick-up truck. We wanted to reclaim a wooden vessel about to be discarded. We began at Halifax, Nova Scotia and looked at every old wood workboat, sailboat and yacht over 50 years old on the East Coast.
I knew how much I had available to spend because I had found how little was less for me. From my retirement account, I set aside enough to live in Guatemala should my new (surely uninsured) old wooden boat split a seam and join her sisters on the bottom. I took the balance, and this is what I could spend -- in total.
In late September, on the shores of the Chesapeake in Virginia, we met "Iva W." and it was love at first sight. I have learned to be very suspicious of my own emotions when they skyrocket, and just before the vows were to be exchanged I got cold feet. Could I really shake my fist in the face of the conventional wisdom and take a big swipe at my secure future by cashing out my retirement for a big old wooden boat that had been for sale for over three years? I decided to retreat to my meditation, then have a cold beer and decide.
I was enjoying the beer still in a quandary when a fellow painting a house nearby came over. He had lived on a large wooden ketch for 26 years and was odd-jobbing it in Deltaville. "I couldn't live anywhere else," he said when I told him of my indecision. This simple message from the universe was all I needed. I committed myself to "Iva W." and then called Merrill Lynch. My future thus flowed into thirty tons of very old, shaped spruce heart pine, surrounding a mound of steel 10 feet long, 6 feet high and two and half feet wide.
When someone asks how I got from there to here, the answer is somewhat speculative because I am suspicious of conventional notions of cause and effect. I would like to say that the universe put me here in Deltaville and saved "Iva W." so I could love her. Another answer is that I changed myself to allow an alternative future to unfold: one that could not have been predicted given my first 56 years on this planet. This was pretty much of a bootstrap operation -- I meditated, I wanted less and freed myself from the material claims of the past. I sought neutral territory where I could be quiet until I could hear my heart. This voice I confirmed through my journals and knowing some of the bits of my life. I evaluated my resources, guessed I could live OK and then moved on my desire.
As I mend "Iva W." and change her interior space to accept me, my friends and family, I now must face the knowledge that the "want less" directive was just the first half of a paradox. Through wanting less, I have discovered more. One never knows, it seems, when a desire will molt into its shadow; or a shadow into a desire. A year ago, I was a devout "want-lesser." Now I guess that I am not a devout anything. It will all unfold as it was meant to be. I just try to meditate everyday, and to keep quiet. Art Wolfe, P. 0. Box 804, Deltaville, VA. 23043-0804