Remaking the Future

"K2T Wisata"

November 30: Remaking the Future

“They sail these across the ocean.” Jim said as he eased his Precision 165 up to the dock. He didn’t say who ‘they’ were or how often they did it, but it seemed plausible so I took him at his word overlooking the fact that he was a sailor.

Later I ran a Google search for “micro-cruisers” and found that ‘they’ take even smaller boats all the way ‘round sometimes – real ‘they’s with names and occasionally blogs – I booked-marked the sites in my “adventure travel” folder.

A dozen years ago on a windy Saturday in Western Washington, I spent the morning on a sailboat that I was thinking of buying, A dream of travel and solitude had followed me for years and I was searching for direction. Later that afternoon I leaned forward and fell from a plane with a large Russian strapped to my back and the sailboat disappeared into laughter and joy and the first of more than a thousand skydives.

Within six months I had quit the best  paying job of my life and was joyfully living in a tent at a skydiving center in Arizona. In the years that followed I often thought about the afternoon when I made that first jump and the path I set out on when I decided to make the second – the events of the morning slipped away like fog burning off in the noonday sun.

Fog has a way of coming back though, comfortable and familiar. And sometimes when two paths diverge, they twist and tarry far, far away from each other only meet up again further down the line.

Sometimes, choices can be remade.

Today’s POTD is a 16.5 foot long sailboat. I’ve heard that people sail them across the ocean.