Going home?

Almost a double rainbow at our anchorage off Cape Santa Maria at the north end of Long Island in the Bahamas.

Möbius has made it to the Bahamas, and we are currently anchored off Black Point in the Exumas. On our passage to the Exumas, we crossed over the 7,000 nautical mile mark in our voyage since leaving our boat’s birth place in Turkey.

This afternoon, Wayne and I are relaxing and not moving the boat from point A to point B. If you could be a fly on the wall in our boat, you would see us both sitting at the main salon table working on our computers, our two dogs sleeping on the bench seats beside us. I’ve been researching the weather for the upcoming crossing to the Abacos, and Wayne has been doing the mid-month financial research and account management that keeps the cruising kitty replenished. If you were not able to look out the window at the stunning pale turquoise water around us, you would not know which of the 10-12 countries we’ve visited in the six months was our location.

Recently, I posted on Facebook this darkly funny sign I had found nailed to a light pole on Long Island.

One of my friends, noticing our location, responded with the comment, “You’re almost home.”

I responded with “Not sure home is a place for me anymore.” I mean, looking at us today sitting here at the table, we could be any place. But in the days since I wrote that, I have been thinking more and more about what home is, what that word means to me.

It is true that I spent more of my adult years in South Florida than in any other place. My son was born there, I went back to college and finished two degrees there, I owned several properties over the years, and wrote a series of novels about a woman tugboat captain deeply rooted in the Fort Lauderdale area.

This is a photo of me taken 20 years ago with the New River tug HERO (inspiration for my character’s boat) passing in the background. I’ve always had a thing for unpainted aluminum boats.

But I left Florida and have not really lived there for about ten years now. When I go back, it doesn’t feel like home.

In fact, I have lived in France, Mexico, New Zealand, Hawaii, Portugal and Turkey. And while I lived there, I considered those places home in the sense of where you live, but not in the sense of where you are from.

For some people, home is where they grew up, and for me, that is Southern California. My family moved there when I was four years old, and I attended school there from kindergarten through two years of university. I left in 1975 and flew to Hawaii looking to get a crewing job on a boat headed to the South Pacific. I found that boat (the Kathi II was an Islander 44 Jim had built from a bare hull) and the captain (Jim Kling) became my husband of 20 years.

We returned from the South Pacific and built a boat in Oxnard. After we left in 1981 to sail to the Caribbean, I never returned to live in California, and these days when I visit, it certainly doesn’t feel like home.

We are friends with the Alonso family who have been living abroad boats now for more than ten years, and I helped their daughter Jaci with college entry essay about being raised as a boat kid and being asked the awkward question, “Where are you from?” Even as a 16-year-old, she had come to realize how difficult it was to answer that simple question that nearly always makes its way into conversations with new people.

I’m with you Jaci, I can’t answer it either.

For some people, where they are from is a distinct part of their identity. They root for the home teams and have special names for the people from that town or that state. I guess that goes back to Maslow hierarchy of needs where that sense of belonging is so important to humans.

I suppose I do identify to a certain degree with the nomadic lifestyle and in particular, traveling by boat. Is calling myself a cruiser that much different than my mom who once called herself a Hoosier?

I get it that in our language, we refer to the structures we live in as homes. But the word home has multiple meanings beyond just a habitat. Since so many people today have lived in many different houses or apartments, I know that the person who commented on my Facebook post did not think I was returning to some building in Florida. For the moment, the structure I live in is Möbius, and I do call her home.

Möbius anchored out off Salinas, Puerto Rico last week. Approaching the boat in the dinghy like this, I do always feel like I am going home.

And yet, there are certain smells or tastes or memories that can in an instant take me back to some moment in time, especially my childhood. The smell of freshly mowed grass almost always makes me want to go outside and play in Southern California’s sunshine. In that moment, when you first have that reaction to a smell or taste and you are taken back to another place and time, it does sort of feel like home.

Perhaps in the end, home is just that, a feeling. When a smell takes me back to my childhood, it is the feeling of being there with my parents and my siblings, my family. When I return to Southern California now, it doesn’t feel like home because the family I am a part of isn’t there.

South Florida used to feel like home when I lived there with my son and Jim, and we were a family, but Jim is gone, and my son is grown up with a son and family of his own.

When I answered that Facebook comment with the statement, “Not sure home is a place for me anymore,” I wasn’t exactly accurate. I don’t think home has ever been a place for me.

If you zoom in really close you can Möbius just above Wayne’s right shoulder.

For now, Möbius is home for me because that is where Wayne and our puppy dogs are. They are my family, and home is wherever they are.

Where do you call home? Let me know in the comments.

Fair winds!

Christine