Today I went to a lot of trouble to get home from the marina in Hilton Head where Irish Hurricane is docked. To pick up a few things, clean out the refrigerator, and see the cardiologist. As I went about my day, I wondered about the meaning of “home”.
*
The doctor said, “You’re fine,” though noted my blood pressure was higher than it should be despite the medicine he’s prescribed.
I said I drove from Hilton Head in a rental car for two hours at 80 mph to make the appointment in time. “Maybe it’s stress,” I offered.
“Where’s your home?” he said. I pointed to my phone photo, of IH lying serenely at anchor. “Yes, but where’s your home?”
I said our stuff is in our house in town but we’re not there that much.
“So, you live on the boat?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have a blood pressure cuff on your boat?”
I said no, it’s at home.
“You mean on your boat?”
I shook my head. He looked at the photo, raised an eyebrow, and said it looked like we had room carry it along.
*
At the house, I found the cuff and put it in with other Important Items we’d forgotten. A shirt, some files, a tube of Voltran arthritis relief gel, face wash, and the Nutri Bullet, which we use as a food processor when we’re home on the boat, to make pesto and hummus.
*
Home might be where you know the back roads, like the ones I took home when I left home this afternoon. Google showed I-95 as a long orange and red stripe between Savannah and the Hilton Head exit. Back roads seemed a good idea.
I missed a turn, though, because it’s now an off-ramp instead of a stoplight. I ended up in Port Wentworth where they’ve replaced acres and acres of wetland with massive container yards. I got straightened out when I recognized U.S. Sugar, which has been there forever.
I turned into the Low Country, drove through Bluffton, and on into Hilton Head on roads I know, though there’s a lot more traffic than I remember.
*
When I got home, Pete and Katie were there to help unload stuff I’d cleaned out of the refrigerator back home. The thunderstorms that had caused the accidents which turned I-95 red had moved offshore.
The inky dark clouds made the sun seem brighter and fresher. Lightning still zigged and zagged across the sky, but far away, out at sea.
*
I said hello to the man in the sailboat opposite, which is an oceangoing catamaran named Hokey Pokey, homeported in London. I asked if he’d sailed from there. He laughed. No, he’d been in the Bahamas all winter and is now heading north to the Chesapeake where she’ll be put on the hard until next winter drives him away from home, in England, and back to the islands.
*
It’s complex, this notion of home. Complex to come and go, like I did today. Like Hokey Pokey does. Like we all do.
I’m glad to be home. As I chilled on the bridge, another sailboat’s lovely symmetry caught my eye. The tall mast, the standing wire rigging, the stays — the things which anchor the mast to the hull like branches to roots. Like wanderer to home.
Without the rigging, the stuff in between, the boat would lose stability. It couldn’t withstand the forces the wind brings to bear under sail. Which might serve as a comment about home, which is not a place but rather the living we do in between homes, the stabilizing things which allow us to withstand the world’s pressures, no matter how mundane.
The symmetry we can find in our lives despite traffic jams at 80 miles an hour. Dirty refrigerators. Ubers and rental cars and thunderstorms.
Irish Hurricane 