Nirvana

Our boat
f loats.

T
h er e is so much her e . There is the concrete reality of
the joy Meg and I felt seeing Nirvana, our new home, being
slowly lowered into St. Martin’s Simpson Bay Lagoon after six
weeks of sweaty work in a steamy, mosquito-infested boatyard,
and having her actually float. Nirvana had been sitting in a sandy hole
for two years in a corner of the boatyard when we found her, slowly
rotting in the fierce Caribbean sun. She was like a nautical Humpty
Dumpty, having fallen from her watery perch, and now she sat cracked
and broken on the hard land. But we were determined to disprove the
old nursery rhyme and put her back together again. We had fixed cracks
in the hull, replaced chainplates (the metal tangs that hold the stays that
hold up the mast), installed new instruments and done a thousand other
small and not-so-small repairs, but most importantly we had replaced
all the thru-hull f ittings, seacocks, hoses, cutlass bearing, propel-
ler shaft, depth sounder transponder—basically everything below the

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waterline—and we were keeping our fingers crossed that nothing would

leak. Meg smashed the traditional bottle of champagne against the bow,
and as the hoist lowered Nirvana and she settled into the water we threw
ourselves below, pulling up floorboards, listening for the sound of run-
ning water, looking for any telltale signs of the ocean entering the hull.
Fortunately we heard nothing. Everything held.
Then there is the abstract reality, the realization that true nirvana
is just enjoying being alive, a state of peace and bliss unencumbered by
day-to-day worries and cares. A state in which our personal boat—our
body, life and soul—floats freely.
I was exhausted from all the work in the boatyard, and there were
times when my damaged brain had seemingly shut down, and I would
be confused and forgetful, but not as much as I had feared, and not so
much that other people would really notice anything other than a mild
spaciness. We were behind schedule, which is not unusual in a project
like this, but I’m sure the delay also had something to do with my not
being nearly as productive as I had been before my accident.
The boat had been named Prima Donna when we found her. She
had been owned by a German couple—a former German naval officer
and his younger wife—and they had lived on board while plying the
charter trade in the islands. The captain had died unexpectedly of a
heart attack, and his wife had walked away from the boat, putting her
up on the hard in the boatyard and returning to Germany.
We had planned to have several months to work on Prima Donna/
Nirvana before relaunching her, but it turned out the boat’s ownership
was tied up in German probate court. By the time we got all the legal
hassles straightened out (thanks to the former captain’s German sister-
in-law who had been raised by missionaries in New Guinea and who
spoke perfect English), several months had passed and we only had six
weeks until hurricane season. Our insurance company insisted we be
in the water and on our way north, out of the hurricane belt, by June
1. This left us little time, and it meant we would be forced to hire local
help to do much of the work I had planned to do myself. It also meant
that finding the right local help would be a challenge; most of the bet-
ter yard workers were already employed on other projects and would
not be available until it was too late. On May fourth I got on a plane to
St. Martin, fairly certain that the boat would be ours in a day or two,

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but still apprehensive that something could go wrong at the last minute
after all the hassles with getting the boat out of German registry. As
soon as I received word from our lawyer on May ninth saying the boat
was finally ours, I put the word out that we were looking for qualified
mechanics, electricians, fiberglass repair people, woodworkers, paint-
ers and general help. In the next few days, as I began ripping out old
hoses and rotting wood, filling black plastic garbage bags with mil-
dewed curtains and old clothes left behind in drawers, and piling it all
in a growing garbage heap beside the boat, a small but steady stream of
people came by, looking for work.
There was Hartmut, an ex-Stasi (East German secret police) agent
who once protected Mother Theresa and who now lived on his own
sailboat with his Brazilian girlfriend and a pet monkey and two small
dogs, and who became our diesel mechanic. He was tall, muscular
and blond, with a heavy German accent, and had the typical German
love of all things mechanical. There was Ralf, a wiry, white, former
crack addict South African, who had sailed all the way from Cape
Town on a replica of Joshua Slocum’s famous sloop Spray, and who
was known around the island as a skillful electrician, but also a will-
ful eccentric. He claimed to have been on the bow of the Spray in the
middle of the Atlantic and seen a fish that was really his father, which
somehow caused him to become a devotee of Shinto with its emphasis
on animism, although his drug-addled version of Shinto varied greatly
from the traditional Japanese variety. Ralf was always in a constant
state of manic motion and would show up, work for a few hours, then
disappear, then materialize hours later… or not. Sometimes he didn’t
reappear until days later.
One morning after I’d been working on the boat for a few days a
huge young black man walked up to the base of the ladder.
“I hear you’re looking for help,” he said.
“Yes, what can you do?” I asked, wiping dirt, motor oil and sweat
off my bare arms.
“Well, I’ve worked on some other yachts; I sailed here from Trini-
dad, and now I’m living on St. Martin.”
He didn’t offer any particular skills, such as diesel mechanic or elec-
trician, but he looked like he could lift the entire thirty-ton boat out of
the hole she rested in by himself. His name was Dominic. I had no idea

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exactly how I was going to use him, but I knew there would be a lot of
heavy lifting.
“You’re hired,” I said, “when can you start?”
“I’ve got a few things I need to finish up, and then I can be here
tomorrow morning.”
The next day, and every day after that, he was the first one on the
boat, often arriving before I did, bringing with him some morning
coffee for both of us. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I discovered
he was living in an abandoned shipping container in a far corner of the
boatyard, unknown even to the boatyard owner, where he had created
a small, organized home with a mattress on the floor, milk crates for
storage, and a rope strung across the container as a clothesline.
In another corner of the boatyard, an old wooden Portuguese fish-
ing schooner, the Saudade, was being completely rebuilt. The new
owners had hired a crew of experienced local boatwrights, mostly
carpenters, and they were completely tearing the boat apart and then
rebuilding her, replacing rotten ribs and hull planks and decking. Their
project made ours look like child’s play. It was obvious their time frame
and budget was much different from ours; the boat looked like it would
be at least a year away from getting back in the water. I spoke to the
foreman, explained my deadline problem to him and asked if he had
any extra workers he could spare for a couple weeks. He said he needed
his guys forty hours a week, but if they wanted to work overtime in the
evenings and weekends, he’d send them my way. That afternoon a wiry
black man covered with sawdust climbed up the ladder.
“I hear you lookin’ for some help,” he said with big, yellow-toothed
grin, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, big silver
chains dangling around his neck and a white rag wrapped around his
head to keep off the sun.
“My name’s ‘Eyes.’ Everyone calls me Eyes on account of my eye.”
One eye looked straight at me with a wisdom and smarts that came
from years of surviving on the margins of society, the other stared
straight ahead, not moving. Weeks later, when I had gotten to know
him better, he explained that his father used to beat him when he was
younger. “He broke my eye,” he said.
But there was no time for small talk now. “We need to get her in
the water before hurricane season, and we have a lot of work to do.”

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“How much you payin’?”

“We’ll pay the going rate, but we’re not rich. I’m more concerned
that we get good, quick, efficient work for what we pay. We can’t afford
the work to go on forever like it sometimes does in the islands.”
“I got a hardworking crew, we can all work for a few hours every
day after we finish with Saudade.”
And so the next day we gained four new workers: Eyes, Biggie,
Rufus and Shaun. Eyes also lived in a corner of the boatyard, although
he had a veritable palace compared to Dominic: an old sailboat he had
bought for almost nothing, surrounded by weeds and other abandoned
boats. Eyes did all the talking, but Rufus was really in charge. A big,
taciturn man, he was a skilled carpenter and started right in repairing
our teak decks, giving instructions to Biggie and Shaun, who were
the junior members of the crew. He had a real home somewhere up in
the hills and drove an old, small green pickup truck to work every day,
bringing Biggie and Shaun with him.
In the evenings, as we were finishing our twelve-hour days, a car-
load of young black women would pull up, friends and girlfriends of
Biggie and Shaun, and watch us work, waiting for their men to finish,
clean up, and go out on the town.
At some point we were joined by Rakeesh, a young Guyanese
of Indian descent who did all manner of boatyard work. Along with
Rakeesh came his cousin Ian, who had never worked on a boat before
but made his living as a carpenter. They were invaluable. Ian would
crawl into dark corners of the engine compartment, cleaning, paint-
ing and installing new sound insulation. Rakeesh and Dominic started
tearing out parts of Nirvana’s interior and unbolting the chainplates,
which were old and cracked and needed to be replaced, from the hull.
We also had one woman in this ragtag boatyard crew besides Meg.
Liana was a young Brazilian who worked as a waitress at night, but
also had extensive experience working on boats in the islands. She
was small, energetic and strong, and I’ll never forget the sight of this
pretty, stylish, exotic woman with her hair pulled up in a bun, cov-
ered with oil and grease as she cleaned out the deepest parts of the
bilge with a shop vac and oily rags..
We rigged blue tarps as awnings to keep out the scorching sun,
making it easier to work in the heat, and the boat was soon crawling

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with workers sawing, scraping, sanding, painting, fixing, and generally

making a huge, filthy, chaotic, exuberant mess.
Into this pandemonium parachuted first Meg, then my old high
school friend Neil, then my Australian friend Russell, and finally my
old sailing friend since childhood, Peter. They were almost as varied
a group of characters as the ones I found in the boatyard and had all
flown down from the States to help get Nirvana in the water and sail
her north. They all knew the travails of my life the past few years, and
were determined to help however they could. Meg is a writer from
eastern Long Island who teaches writing to college freshman. Neil is
an acupuncturist and Tai chi teacher who lives in Steamboat, Colorado.
Russell is an award-winning winemaker and vineyard owner from
Eastern Long Island, and Peter owns a marine insurance agency that is
one of the largest on the Great Lakes.
Peter’s arrival in St. Martin was a welcome opportunity for celebra-
tion. He appeared in the boatyard one evening at quitting time, straight
from the airport, with a present for one of our hardest workers; Domi-
nic had implored us to ask one of our northern crew to find him a used
guitar in a stateside pawn shop. Guitars were expensive in the islands
and Dominic had left his old guitar behind in Trinidad. Cold beers
were quickly procured from a nearby store, an impromptu party broke
out as Peter presented Dominic with his new instrument, and any bar-
riers between races, classes and backgrounds quickly melted away.
These northern friends had gotten more than they bargained for,
since we were so far behind. They threw themselves into the maelstrom
with amazing good humor and energy, especially considering they had
been recruited with promises of balmy tropical breezes, cold rum drinks
and sailing in the tropics, a way to soak up some sun after a long winter.
They managed to blend right in with the boatyard crew and soon were
also covered with dirt, grime, fiberglass dust and sticky black caulking.
In the midst of all this bonhomie there were moments of stress,
anger and anxiety, especially as the days dragged on, more necessary
repairs were found, the mess got worse instead of better, and it seemed
as if Nirvana would never be ready in time to meet our deadline. Hart-
mut disappeared (he was hiding from the police after getting into a bar
fight), Ralf showed up one morning drunk, singing and balancing a
beer can on his head, having not yet gone home. Neil, Russell and Peter

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nearly mutinied, and went looking for a vaguely rumored all-night

bonfire party on the far side of the island, and Dominic disappeared
entirely the last few days before we launched the boat. His container
was locked up tight and we assumed he had blown us off entirely, espe-
cially since he had said he needed money, and had asked for an advance.
Important parts disappeared, leading to angry thoughts of theft,
but then would materialize under a pile of debris. Late afternoon rain
squalls would sweep the boatyard, soaking everything and shutting
down production. The need for one particular size bolt or particular
thickness Lexan porthole would necessitate a day-long search through-
out every chandlery and hardware store on the island. There were
moments, hours, days, when we thought we would never get Nirvana
back in the water. And then the final clincher: on the morning we were
ready to launch, a flirtatious French con woman, who had provided a
couple finish carpenters to help with interior cabinet joinery, threat-
ened to call the police and have Nirvana impounded, claiming that we
owed her more money. We thought our own workers were going to
murder her on the spot.
But in spite of (or perhaps because of ) all the mayhem and madness,
we managed to put Nirvana back together again, stronger, sturdier
and more seaworthy, leading to that magical moment when Meg
christened Nirvana’s bow, the travel lift winches groaned, the slings
lowered her navy-blue hull into the water, and Nirvana finally lay
floating in her natural element.
Man is a social animal, and modern research into happiness tells
us that the happiest people tend to be the ones with close coworkers,
friends and family—the people who have the most positive social inter-
action. I know that my spirits—my own personal boat—were buoyed
by the presence of these workers who had quickly become friends, the
presence of old friends who had quickly become workers, and by the
companionship of my new life partner, Meg.
And Dominic? He had been in jail after getting into his own bar
fight; he felt terrible that he had not been around to help during our last
days on the island. We felt terrible that we had doubted his honesty. But
all was not lost. He retrieved his guitar, got a dingy ride out to Nirvana
and serenaded us on our new home as she—and we—finally lay float-
ing peacefully at anchor, bathed in the golden glow of the sunset.

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