A Farewell to Elpis

It has taken a long time to write this short post, partly because grad school is inconveniently time consuming, but mostly because I wasn’t sure how to write the ending of my part of the boat trip.

Cruising life is hard because it means constantly saying goodbye. We meet people, we go fun places, and then we leave people, people leave us, and we’re never all in the same place at the same time under the same circumstances again. I had to say goodbye at the end of the Oswego Canal because my current adventure had run over its time limit and I was being pulled into my next stage of life. The morning I left the boat felt surreal. I remember lying in my sleeping bag, looking up through the front hatch, trying to preserve the image of the sky in my mind. One last boat memory. August-blue sky with pancake clouds (if I had read Chapman's more closely I could probably tell you what kind of clouds they were; alas, I am still useless at weather).

Driving away from Grace and Elpis that morning was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done. I was afraid that by leaving the boat, I’d lose the parts of myself I’d gained on the boat trip. There is a chapter of my favorite book Tiny Beautiful Things where Cheryl Strayed says “we are here to build the house.” The context of that story is very different from the boat trip, but she meant that we have to live with ourselves, so it’s important to be a version of yourself that is good. I liked the idea of building my good home and so I carried that idea with me throughout my year on Elpis. Every experience that Grace and I had, every beautiful and kind person who shared a meal or a boat part with us, every time I had to use a stupid bucket instead of a regular toilet, every bit of weather from the time it snowed on us in Mobile, AL to the two weeks of crazy wind in the Bahamas to the time it was 107 degrees on the Chesapeake, every color seen from the red-gold trees of the river system to the clear blues Bahamian water, all of those experiences built my home, and at the end of the boat trip, I felt like I was a better version of myself than before. I think that is the most that I could have asked for out of this experience.

I am so grateful for all of these things. I am incredibly thankful and lucky to have learned so much in such a unique way. As Nina told me when I returned, I live a charmed life. I am also especially thankful to the Pytell family for trusting us with Elpis for a year, and for Grace, who is the very best friend anyone could ask for in the whole world and who is basically an extension of myself at this point. I think about the boat trip every single day, particularly one day in George Town last February when I was hammocking on the foredeck, knowing at that moment that I was the happiest a human could possibly be. When I think about this memory, I resolve to myself that I’ll be back on a boat someday soon, living on my own terms again. A return to boat life (although probably not a return to this blog) is inevitable.

Saying thank you, Elpis!

Sad Emily and Grace

Muahaha it has come to my attention that Grace always writes in her blog posts that I am sleeping. While this not factually incorrect, I made a collage to show that Grace sleeps too :-)

One last pic of our favorite things: Elpis in George Town, Exuma, at sunset

Last selfie on the ipad :'(