But during the second week, a horrible malaise had descended upon the crew of the Bossanova. There was just no joie in our joie de vivre. We were tired. We felt ha.s.sled. John, Samba and Heck all got sick. The trip seemed endless. Of course, in the period between June 28 and July 5, we took three days off. It's no wonder that North Carolina seemed the size of Texas. This middle week was the worst part of our journey and very difficult for both of us, in different ways. I knew John had moments of regret for committing himself all the way to Sag Harbor, and I, in turn, felt guilty that I couldn't release him from his servitude.

But as we left Rudee Inlet bound for Chincoteague, the pall lifted. Just like that. There's nothing like escaping a huge storm unscathed to make you feel grateful for a dull day underway. And the whiff of summer I'd caught filled my nose like a bloodhound on the trail. We were getting closer-I could feel it now. Optimism returned to the Bossanova and perched on her bow like a seagull portending the first shout of "Land-ho!"

The Bossanova had an easy day with a familiar rhythm to it. I brought us out, then John took the helm while I made coffee and stepped outside to look at the pa.s.sing sea. I still couldn't get enough of it-watching the ocean in all its thousand gradations of blue as the st.u.r.dy-looking bow of my little ship plowed it aside. It was my dream come true. When I had imagined a different life for myself, this is what I had pictured. And for once, it was every bit as satisfying as the fantasy had been. No, it was even better. I had never experienced such a sense of contentment, pure pleasure in the here and now, the deep desire to be nowhere other than exactly where I was. This was happiness.

FO R A T I M E , HA P P I N E S S , too, had been Leslie. Tall, slender, blonde hair, great legs, big heart, blue blood, s.e.xy and more fun than a barrel of chimps.

It wasn't love at first sight. We met at a party one night during my brief breakup with Laura. I ran into her again about a week later at a way-off-Broadway play. She called me the next day and left a message, asking me if I wanted to have dinner. I was already getting embroiled with Laura again and politely declined.

Several years later, my brother-who had never played matchmaker before-said, "I know somebody who might be perfect for you." By then, her name didn't even ring a bell.

But when she called me this time, I said yes. We had a great dinner at Clementine, where we seemed to do nothing but laugh. The next day, she hitched a ride to Connecticut with me-she was coincidentally spending the weekend with friends in my neck of the woods and she broke away at some point and came over to my house for a short visit. Leslie had left New York City to work in Los Angeles a few years before, and when she asked if I'd fly out and visit her the following weekend, I said yes.

I remember standing in front of the pa.s.senger terminal at LAX and seeing her pull up in her little Mercedes convertible (known among her friends as the Morgan Fairchild). As she got out of the car, dressed in a navy windowpane suit, her face lit up at the sight of me, and I thought, Wow. Lucky me. This is the girl of my dreams. "You are a sight for sore eyes," she remembers me saying, and that her heart fluttered at the words.

One of us flew cross-country every weekend but one that summer. We were giddily in love, head over heels. We wrote each other little notes, sent each other flowers and presents.

When we were together, we always seemed to be laughing. This was definitely the woman I'd been waiting my whole life to meet. She felt like home, and I felt completely married for the first time in my life.

In the fall, Leslie moved back to New York and into my apartment on Christopher Street-it was perhaps the first time she'd ever been below 14th Street and I'd check her Upper East Side skin for signs of hives each day, but she grew to love downtown very quickly. My apartment was charming but rundown, so Leslie insisted on renovating, even though it was a rental. We shared a deep appreciation for home design and we seemed to spend every waking moment poring over shelter magazines together, visiting showrooms and antique shops.

We both had new jobs. I was a content director for an Internet website that wasn't online yet. It was infuriatingly dull. Leslie had started a new job, too, and she was in a somewhat similar position, but making oodles of money.

So, there we were, living in a one-bedroom apartment that was a worksite, going off to jobs we didn't like-in retrospect, we should have had separate apartments for a while or perhaps moved into something that was new to both of us and ready to live in. Our life together was good but fraught with constant low-grade stressors.

In the spring we started house hunting. We looked at places in Connecticut, where I spent weekends, and places in the Hamptons, where she used to spend weekends. Though Connecticut was less expensive, it was quiet. That suited me fine, but Leslie was a very social person. In the end, I figured I could stay home if I wanted quiet, but if Leslie wanted more to do, she could find it in the Hamptons.

I remember when we found the plain Victorian farmhouse with two sweet guest cottages and a gorgeous pool in Bridgehampton. We both loved it, though the house had a very dowdy interior: cheap bra.s.s lighting fixtures, heavily sh.e.l.lacked woodwork, ugly floral wallpaper. The previous owner was returning it to an authentic dismal-period look. But we could easily see our way past these cosmetic problems. We worked hard every weekend stripping wallpaper and painting, and by the time summer came, we had an enchanting little compound.

But that's when the trouble started. We'd been under a lot of stress for the last nine months, between working at our bad jobs and living in a construction site, but we very rarely fought. We were kind to each other, gentle and forgiving when we did clash. Now, though, Leslie seemed to get further and further away from me. She was anxious much of the time, compiling lists of things we needed to get done. Our social calendar seemed constantly booked, and I was often bored by these obligations. Too many of these gatherings seemed to have an air of desperation about them: people wanting to see and be seen. It wasn't that these events were always fancy, but in this circle of the Hamptons, I never felt as if I could go to a summer barbecue in casual attire-"casual fabulous" was the de rigueur look. People competed, stealthily, to be the best dressed, the funniest, the richest, the s.e.xiest. It was exhausting and not very interesting to me. I should have just stayed home but I didn't.

Here is where a side of Leslie emerged that I didn't like much: she had always been the life of the party, but now I saw how much the need to be liked and popular fueled that need for fun. She could easily get caught up in this frantic social performance because it played to her insecurities. And yet, I knew that deep down Leslie felt the same way I did about these scenes. She didn't really have a sn.o.bby bone in her body, despite her upper-crust background and acquaintance with everyone who was anyone in New York. She liked nothing better than having a great conversation with an interesting person. She was deeply compa.s.sionate toward the less fortunate, and she went out of her way to help anyone she met, in any way she could. Sure, maybe a small part of that was fueled by the need to be liked, but not very much.

Later, we agreed that if I had moved to Los Angeles, we might have made it. I liked her friends there and they liked me. Surprisingly, her LA cohorts were all smart, funny, accomplished people, enduring the colossal superficiality of Hollywood so they could get ahead, without letting it transform them into "players." The New York circle seemed so much more interested in money, power and fashion than any of the other wonders that the Big Apple nurtures-they would have been better off in Los Angeles.

It was a wretched summer. My Internet company started collapsing and I lost my job. Leslie's situation at work had never resolved itself either, and she finally left with a hefty severance package. We fought daily and grew further and further apart. I couldn't find a way to get Leslie's attention anymore, to remind her of the bargain we had made to love each other forever. And I was petrified as I watched things unravel. She seemed anxious all the time, unwilling to draw boundaries between her friends and our relationship. I had sold my house, bought one with her, shared an apartment in the city-my life was gone. It was our life now, yet I felt increasingly excluded from it in any meaningful way.

In September I moved out for a month, declaring as I went that I wanted to work things out, but that I didn't see us getting anywhere in our current situation when all we did was fight. Maybe some s.p.a.ce would help us put things in perspective. Maybe we could decompress-have dinner twice a week and see if we could get back to solid ground again.

But Leslie wasn't interested and I never did go back. I spent most of October in my brother Hamilton's Bridgehampton summer rental (which he had taken through Thanksgiving), in bed, fully clothed, staring at a small black-and-white television. I don't know what was on because I couldn't see a thing. It was the darkest time of my life.

I was crushed by the failure of my relationship with Laura- I lost weight, I was very depressed-but it had been a long time coming and I knew it was right. Now, though, I felt like the most precious thing in my life had been jerked away from me. I felt stunned, traumatized, utterly disbelieving. Our breakup was a cruel mistake. I rationalized that it was messed up for Laura to give up so easily, but that didn't make me care any less about her or feel any better about my heartbreak.

And, stubborn as I am, some small but vital part of me kept pining for her, through every kind of ugly up and down.

After we broke up, we spent a year hanging around together, toying with reconciliation but never making it happen. When I finally started to date, Leslie had a complete meltdown and convinced me to try again with her for a week. It was a week that I spent, literally, a thousand miles away on a business trip, feeling suspicious and resentful of her timing, because it had taken me so much will power to start to move on. I still loved her, but I didn't trust her motivations and I continued my new romance. A few months later, Leslie started to see someone, and then it was my turn for a complete collapse.

I know-it all sounds very screwed up. But what's at the base of it all, our friendship, is not screwed up. We have been each other's favorite person on the planet, and no amount of icky drama (which I will spare you) has managed to ruin that.

I used to feel that someday we might get back together over the last few years Leslie has grown so much-she's much more secure, less eager to please, capable of intimacy with both friends and lovers. I'm happy for her and proud of her, but it's also painful for me to see: she's becoming someone that I might have spent my life with. We always agree: at a different time maybe we could have been the right people for each other.

And for a long while, I felt positively haunted by my love for her. Stalked, even. There's no doubt it was a big part of why I ran away to sea.

Now I was doing something with my life that Leslie would never have done-and I wouldn't have done it if I'd been with her. Leslie hated boats; she always got seasick. But I was feeling completely blissful while underway aboard the Bossanova, and I realized one day that I had stopped pining. I just was.

That sensation was unbelievably freeing. I accepted, at last, that I would always love Leslie, even though we were over. I began to believe that there were other people I would one day love as much, but differently. I got comfortable with my grief and acknowledged that I might always have to lug it around, but that its weight made me stronger. I even suspected that one day, it would feel as light as a feather.

And it was this sense of liberation that made me understand what my journey was really all about. Someone once suggested that I was redefining myself, but that wasn't true.

In fact, I was undefining myself. It was as though I'd made a list of "Everything I know about me" and was just erasing each item, one by one.

What would I do when the page was blank?

WE MADE CHINCOTEAGUE INLET in the late afternoon.

The ride up the channel to the town dock seemed endless. We tied up behind a long, red, slightly rusty fishing vessel, rigged with bright lights for working on deck at night. A policeman on a mountain bike came to the boat to collect the dockage fee: $40 for a piling to tie to-there was no bathroom, no laundry, no fuel facility, no other boats, no real slip, absolutely nothing. The small town looked a little worn-down, quieter than you'd expect given the endless number of store windows that hawked merchandise celebrating the swimming Chincoteague ponies. It had that "If we build the T-shirt stores, they will come" feeling, a kind of desperate optimism in the face of failure. Because of this, its authentic charm hadn't yet been subsumed by fake charm and I liked it there.

We had a fun meal that night at a bar on the water. Two old-timers sat next to us, drinking Amstel Light and reviewing recent movies.

They looked like doppelgangers for Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in Dirty Old Men, but they talked Hollywood like they were at the Ivy with Bob Evans.

The bartender was busy with the waitresses' orders, so we sat for at least twenty minutes before he remembered the parched people at the bar. I made the mistake of risking a margarita on the rocks, then watched with horror as he used Rose's lime juice.

When the place quieted down a bit John struck up a conversation with our barkeep. He was good-looking in a cheesy kind of way-tight jeans that were faded beyond the point of fashionable, a surfer necklace and a blue short-sleeve shirt that was no doubt carefully chosen to play up his eyes. Since I expected him to pull a comb out of his back pocket at any moment and do a little primping, I wasn't surprised when he confessed his goal of moving to New York City to become (gasp!) an actor. I resisted the urge to ask him to try Method-acting a good bartender. (I'm always a wee bit irritable after the senseless slaughter of an innocent margarita.) We were off bright and early the next morning. Shortly after we reentered the Atlantic, we heard a communication from a 90-foot fishing vessel that was 30 miles offsh.o.r.e. They reported 54 inches of water in their engine room and rising. A high-speed Coast Guard rigid inflatable boat went flying by us, and we heard a navy warship announce it was altering course to a.s.sist. A Coast Guard helicopter was also dispatched to drop a pump and possibly remove the crew.

Later that day, we heard another Coast Guard call seeking information on a vessel that disappeared after issuing a Mayday. This kind of message went out several times over the course of our voyage, and it was always chilling to wonder what had happened. A Mayday is the most serious of distress calls-even the fishing vessel on its way to sinking used the urgent but less dire Pan-Pan signal (p.r.o.nounced "pon-pon"), as did the pleasure boat off the Frying Pan Shoals. A Mayday (from the French, m'aider, "help me") is to be used only when your life is at immediate risk. So a vessel that issued one and then disappeared was obvious cause for concern.

For the Bossanova, though, it was another banner day. After a week in North Carolina, we felt like veritable speed demons as we left Virginia behind and breezed past Maryland and Delaware on our way to Cape May at speeds reaching close to 10 miles per hour. Wwwwwhhhheeeeeeeee! This was one of the loveliest days of our trip. It was clear and sunny and we were treated to a constantly changing display of aquatic life.

Midmorning, we saw two giant sea turtles mating. Several miles off the coast, there they were, gettin' it on in the middle of nowhere. Get a room, I shouted to them.

We saw a solitary shark, too. The casual but relentless back and forth of its dark fin against the sea made me shiver in sympathy for its prey. It was good to be standing in 30 tons of steel.

There were countless stingrays and millions of jellyfish. Their small, nearly invisible bodies created an enormous gelatinous river that coursed through the ocean for miles. We'd seen dolphins the whole way up the East Coast, but they were most plentiful and most playful in the South.

They frolicked in Florida, leaping out of the water in small, synchronized groups. The farther north we went, the less abundant and more lethargic they appeared, their arched backs clearing the surface but not much else. Still, they were always exciting to see and we kept a close lookout for them wherever we went. They felt lucky to me-and months later I read that dolphins swimming with a ship are, in fact, always considered a sign of good luck, according to sailors' lore. (On the other hand, women onboard a ship supposedly make the sea angry. But a naked woman on board will calm the sea, so I supposed that my excellent personal hygiene was evening things out.) Today, we were treated to a big dolphin revival. They were probably drawn by the slick of transparent delectables we motored through. At one point, we counted as many as eighteen dolphins together.

As we approached the unlikely Mecca that New Jersey had become, a quartet of dolphins peeled away from the larger pod, doubled back and got directly in front of us. It was thrilling to stand 10 feet above them on the bow and watch their subtle ch.o.r.eography, their perfect calibration, just beneath the water and a yard before my boat. There was something so beautiful and friendly in their spontaneous escort that it made my eyes water with happiness. The dolphins ran before us for about three minutes and then veered back toward their pod. It was hard not to feel we'd been honored.

At Cape May, we pulled into a large marina with a huge restaurant and small tiki bar. It was Friday night and the joint was jumping. I joined John for a drink, then left him chatting with a few guys and went back to the boat for a cold dinner with the boys and Anna Karenina.

I was finally making some progress with old Anna K., after a very slow start. Although I had read Tolstoy's masterpiece before, I couldn't remember a thing about it so I thought it would be a meaty choice for a long trip. One of the few advantages of a lousy memory is that you can reread all your favorite books, rewatch all your favorite movies and enjoy them as though it's the very first time. In theory, anyway. What I discovered is that my tastes had changed a lot in the twenty-eight years since I had last read Anna Karenina. Why a prep.u.b.escent girl would find the politics of prerevolutionary Russia more interesting (or at least less dull) than a 40-year-old woman disturbed me. Had I become dumber with time?

But as I forced myself onward, I was gripped by the intricate character portraits Tolstoy drew and by his understanding of human nature. Maybe this was what I had liked about the book the first time.

The last time I'd read the book was during "The Year of the Russians." I was 13, and we were living in Ireland at the time, at Walker's Lodge in Sligo. I was a reading maniac. We all were. There wasn't much else to do after we'd finished dinner in the kitchen, the only warm room, which was heated by a big coal range. Sometimes Dad would quiz us on current events or literature. Or we'd listen to Radio Luxembourg count down the top twenty hits and send out dedications while we did our homework at the kitchen table. But bed, with its promise of warmth and privacy, soon beckoned.

Armed with a hot-water bottle and a kerosene lantern or candle, off we'd rush to our imaginary worlds. The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes and made the low light flicker on the page. The smell of a struck match still makes me think of those nights in Ireland.

I'm not sure why I chose to obsess over the Russians that year, but I've always considered it a miracle that I'm neither blind nor severely medicated. Maybe nightly sleigh rides through the bitter cold of St. Petersburg and hard time in the permafrost gulag helped make cold, damp Sligo a cheerier reality by comparison. Maybe this was the beginning of my habit of reckless optimism and deep denial.

The next morning, John and I chugged up the Jersey sh.o.r.e, past Avalon, Sea Isle City, Ocean City and Atlantic City. We stopped for the night at Point Pleasant Beach, just south of Spring Lake. We had run as far as we could before dark, and Garden State Marina was the only place we could find with a slip for us. It was a summer Sat.u.r.day night on the Jersey sh.o.r.e, so that made sense. Sometimes we completely lost track of what day it was while we were underway.

The marina was closed when we arrived, but we'd already paid and been told which slip to use. Unfortunately, it was a slip for a 60-foot boat and the pilings were s.p.a.ced far apart; a stiff breeze pushing us to port made it difficult to tie up.

When we finished, we were treated to a delightful welcoming committee. A swarthy guy with a big scowl on his face came down and said, "Does Richard know you're docking here? Did he say you could dock here?"

"Hi. How you doing?" I asked pointedly. What a rude jerk.

"Yes, he certainly does." What I wanted to say was, "We're paying $120 to stay in this c.r.a.p hole, so why don't you at least be civil, if friendly is too much for you to manage?"

I was in a bad mood as I walked the dogs at dusk around the small blacktop parking area that Garden State called a marina. John had gone to find us a dinner spot, but I wasn't hopeful. I could see a line of fast-food joints on either side of busy Route 35 South. But I should have had more faith-not in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, but in John. He called me with elaborate directions to some place called Stretch's, about ten minutes away. I had to walk across the highway, down several blocks to a restaurant called Tesauro's, cut through their parking lot and keep walking down a road near the water. John warned me that it was a dark and kind of a dubious-looking neighborhood, but when I had pa.s.sed the easy chair someone had dragged to the curb, I'd know I was almost there.

When I arrived, John was in seventh heaven. He was halfway through a dish of giambotta, a dish he ate frequently back in Chicago. "Oh, Mare. You gotta try this. It is out of this world." I had a forkful-it was delicious and, except for the addition of sausages, a lot like ratatouille. I knew if I told John that his beloved Chicago dish was reminiscent of one of my beloved French dishes, it would just ruin his appet.i.te.

The French were one of our verboten subjects-John would flash me a dirty look if I had a gla.s.s of red wine.

Stretch's was a great find. It was an unpretentious place with a great menu and a homey atmosphere. Best of all, there was a jazz duet playing-one guy on keyboards and one on guitar. I asked them if they could play "Wave" and they looked thrilled that someone was actually listening. I got "Wave" and then I got two or three other Brazilian cla.s.sics without asking. Point Pleasant beach was saved. I'd even go back in a car, if I had to.

John was happy, too. He hadn't eaten this well since his last trip home. The Windy City has never had a finer amba.s.sador than John, who makes it sound like an exotic gourmet paradise. He was always getting misty-eyed about Italian beef, or giardiniara. During the long, uneventful hours we spent underway, John would often tell me stories about his friends back home and the places they hung out. By the time we made it to Sag Harbor, I knew I'd miss John and many of his favorite dishes, not to mention Skychair Bob, Red, Voges and all the rest of his gang of "knuckleheads." (This endearment of John's was both a dig and a huge sign of affection. When I overheard John one morning greeting Heck and Samba with a "Good morning, you two knuckleheads," I knew they were pals.) It continued to amaze me that John and I got along as wonderfully as we did. We joked about sending our Chapman colleagues an e-mail to let them know that after three weeks together nonstop, I had become a Chicago Cubs fan and ardent Republican and John was listening to NPR and reading Anna Karenina.

"Nah, Mare," he said. "That's going a little too far. No one would ever believe I'd listen to NPR."

On Sunday morning, we had yet another lovely summer day before us. I had long harbored a fantasy of a triumphant New York City arrival, circling Manhattan in style, maybe inviting some people down to the dock to have c.o.c.ktails aboard my little ship. But time was running out. We also had to sc.r.a.p a plan of cutting through New York Harbor to h.e.l.l's Gate and then motoring up Long Island Sound. We knew the currents at h.e.l.l's Gate could be tricky and our pa.s.sage should be timed to go with the tide. That would mean waiting around in the East River. Since John had a fight out of LaGuardia early Tuesday morning, it looked like we were going to be cutting it close no matter which route we chose.

I studied the charts. It seemed it would be both faster and less stressful to stay on the outside of Long Island and cut through the Shinnec.o.c.k Ca.n.a.l. My own personal Circle Line tour was going to have to wait for another day.

After we'd run about 15 miles up the New Jersey coast, we decided to cut straight across to Long Island. It would put us roughly 15 miles offsh.o.r.e at one point-farther than we liked-but we'd be able to completely bypa.s.s busy New York Harbor that way, and at least make Fire Island before the end of the day.

One of the great moments of my life was standing at the helm of the Bossanova looking at Manhattan, home, just 10 miles off in the distance. The city looked as majestic as ever, though it would always be different without the twin towers.

Now, looking at the skyline was like seeing a smile that still dazzled even without front teeth. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

Today, looking across the water at New York, I was dazzled by its verticality. (I once heard that if everyone in New York spilled out onto the sidewalks at the exact same time, the streets would be forty-three people deep!) I imagined the millions of different lives happening in that little s.p.a.ce: people eating brunch, making love, watching TV, paying bills, walking dogs, fighting, jogging, reading the New York Times, shopping, biking, singing, dying-all at once, right over there. If you could take a cross section of the buildings and look down at it all, it would be exactly like an ant farm: teeming with intricate and pointless industry to a distant viewer, yet full of meaning and purpose to the ant.

It was a Sunday morning in New York, and I could imagine my friends Julie and Adam and 9-year-old Jackson in their apartment right now as vividly as if I was standing there with them. It felt good after the long trip, even if it was an illusion. I like to close my eyes and vividly picture myself in different places. I developed this habit of mentally projecting my physical self in Brazil when I was a 16-year-old exchange student. Whenever I felt really homesick, I would close my eyes and imagine what was happening in our kitchen back in upstate New York. I wasn't particularly attached to the house, where I had only lived for a year, and I didn't really like upstate New York. But despite my very nomadic childhood, I'd never been away from my family. And I suppose that I was more fiercely attached to them as a result of all that moving.

At home, All Things Considered would be on the radio, Mom and Dad would be having c.o.c.ktail hour, leaning against the old refectory table while they fixed dinner. Sometimes I smelled hamburger and onions simmering in olive oil. And I would imagine myself touching that table, stirring the food in the pan, helping myself to a piece of cheese and a cracker, like a ghost wandering through the present. But this wasn't mere reminiscing, a nostalgic savoring of the details of home. It's hard to explain, but on these visits, I forced myself to understand that there was only a fineline between actually being there and being there in spirit. I would remind myself that I could actually be standing in that kitchen in less than 24 hours if necessary, and if I did that, it would then all seem so ordinary, so much as I pictured it, that there'd be no point actually being there. Visiting home in my imagination helped relieve the pressure of separation anxiety and let me feel like I could almost be in both places at once. It's a trick that comes in very handy now, whenever I'm away from the boat or landlocked for any amount of time.

I decided to give Adam and Julie a call from my cell, which was working. Un-friggin' believable. I didn't know whether to be glad or annoyed. Half the time you couldn't get a decent signal standing on top of a cell tower, and here I was 15 miles off the coast.

"Wooooooo-hooooooooo," I greeted them.

"Wooooooo-hooooooo-hooooo," they whooped back on speaker phone. "Where are you now?" they asked. They'd been checking in with me every few days to monitor my progress up the East Coast.

"Well, I called to tell you I'm pa.s.sing New York right now and waving at you like a crazy person. We should make it to Sag Harbor by tomorrow night."

There was some more wooo-hoooing, with promises to see each other the next weekend, and then I hung up. As New York disappeared behind us, we realized we were making much better time than we'd antic.i.p.ated and altered course slightly to aim farther up the coast of Long Island. Later, when we were sure we could make it, we altered course again and continued on to Shinnec.o.c.k.

Shinnec.o.c.k was so close to Sag Harbor by car that it was hard not to feel we were practically home when we tied up for the evening. We were now in a neighborhood that a Los Angeles realtor would call "Hamptons-adjacent," and if we hadn't realized it before, we certainly did when dockhands in white uniforms arrived to help with the lines. The sun was just starting to sink, and the restaurant above the docks was jammed with women in Capri pants and big sungla.s.ses and tanned men in golf shirts with booming voices. The tables were littered with cosmopolitans and Judith Leiber handbags, and the restaurant overflow spilled onto the deck, shouting over the sounds of a steel drum band.

We decided not to battle the crowds and found our way to the deserted inner bar. We toasted an amazing trip and our most successful day, and ordered the best crab cakes I've ever had. I tried to pry the recipe out of the chef when he came out to the bar, but he could not be bribed.

John and I were now becoming very nostalgic about the end of the trip. We even looked back at the purgatory of the middle week with fondness. What would our voyage have been without at least a little bit of suffering-and we'd gotten off so easily! I had to admit, I was ecstatic about the Bossanova. Not only had she seen us through some really rough weather, but she'd made her very first trip with me, over a thousand miles, without a single mechanical problem. (I didn't count the two batteries we'd replaced partway up-that was more of a maintenance issue.) Even though we weren't home yet, we were now close enough. On the off chance that we suffered some ma.s.sive failure the next day, John would still make his fight and I was only a phone call away from a bed at a friend's.

In the morning, we pushed off a little bit later than usual, around 0900 hours. The skies were gray, the clouds looked stuffed with rain. We motored through the approach to the Shinnec.o.c.k Ca.n.a.l and wondered what it would be like. As we approached the lock, I looked up at Route 27, the highway that pa.s.sed above it. Over many years of driving that road to the Hamptons, I'd developed a little ritual about looking to the left, right there, toward Great Peconic Bay. It was always the first glimpse of water after driving out of Manhattan, and seeing the boats arrayed at the marina below made me feel happy and excited. I had never realized that this was the Shinnec.o.c.k Ca.n.a.l, that there was a lock here, or that I would one day bring my own boat beneath the highway and out into the bay.

Since we'd taken the Atlantic route, we'd had no need to use the systems of locks that link many inland waterways.

They're designed to convey boats from the level of one body of water to a connecting body of water at a different level. I'd heard they could be really harrowing but had no idea what to expect. Up ahead, we saw that traffic was divided into two lanes. To port were Atlantic-bound vessels, to starboard, boats headed for Great Peconic Bay, Gardiner's Bay and Long Island Sound. A Boston whaler coming through to the Atlantic side fishtailed wildly as it exited the lock. The skipper looked like he'd lost all control as he veered toward the retaining wall, then fishtailed back away from it and recovered the middle of the channel.

"What the h.e.l.l happened to him?" John asked.

A green light ahead of us indicated that the lock was open and we would not have to wait. Excellent! But as we pushed toward the gates of the lock, we felt the amazing force of the current rushing against us. I throttled up from the gentle 1,000 rpms we'd been running at as we approached. We were being pushed back. I kept pushing the throttle up, past 2,000 now, and we were still being forced ever so slightly back. As we hit 2,500 the engine's growl got deeper, throatier, and the boat finally stood still. We were trapped squarely between two concrete walls 15 feet away from either side of the Bossanova, with another boat not far behind us and we still weren't making any headway.

"Oh, my G.o.d, John. I can't believe this. I'm not sure we can make it." I was perhaps more panicked than I had been at any other moment of our trip. Turning around would be very difficult against this current. At the same time, I wasn't sure I could control the boat if we had to back out-and the vessel waiting behind us added to my nervousness. I did not want to tangle with it. I gave the engine one more blast of throttle, pushing her to her limits, and-hallelujah-we surged forward.

Of course, now we knew why the boat exiting the lock toward the Atlantic had been swinging around-he had the force of the current on his stern pushing him out. This close call at the locks was something we hadn't antic.i.p.ated, but once we were through, we were a little giddy. We knew it was likely to be the last adrenaline rush of our journey, and we were almost glad for that final taste of challenge.

As we cleared the ca.n.a.l and chugged around toward Sag Harbor, I watched the coast for landmarks. But everything looked different from out here. I wouldn't have had a clue where I was without a nautical chart.

We rounded the point into Sag Harbor around noon. I can't possibly explain how happy I was, how exhilarating it felt to tie up at the town dock and climb onto a pier I'd walked down a hundred times before. One summer I had belonged to the gym near the wharf, and I'd never been more diligent about working out. The view of the docks, stacked with superyachts, as well as the view of the harbor's more humble moored fleet, always filled me with a sense of peace. That was only a few years ago, yet I had never once looked out at those boats and thought I might actually own one, live on one, pilot it over a thousand miles through the Atlantic.

The major accomplishment of what we'd done had really escaped me until this moment, but now it was sinking in. I had brought my boat all the way up from Florida in under three weeks, on $600 worth of diesel, with no breakdowns and no disasters. We had stepped aboard in Stuart, Florida, and here we were, disembarking in Sag Harbor, New York. The trip was over. We'd done it.

John and I went immediately to Dockside to celebrate. We had lunch and toasted an amazing journey. John said, "Mare, I gotta tell you. It was a great trip. It couldn't have been better. I actually feel sad that it's over. And I've gotta admit, the ole Bossanova is a h.e.l.l of a boat. Thank you for asking me to come with you. Really, it has been one of the best experiences I've ever had."

I hardly knew what to say.

"Hey, I don't know why you're thanking me, John. I never could have done it without you. Truly. And even if I had found someone else to come, it wouldn't have been the same. There's no one I'd rather have done it with." And much to my surprise, that was absolutely true.

I was too wound up to sit at the bar and drink all day, so after lunch, I left John and walked around town. I knew I had a ridiculous grin on my face and my feet felt like they were hovering above the sidewalks. I was giddy, positively high. I simply could not believe that I was in this town, which I thought of as my second home, and that I had made it here in my own boat.

Let's face it-it's been done a couple hundred thousand times before. It was a lot bolder than coming up the ICW, as most people do, but it wasn't nearly as daring as climbing Everest or sailing solo around the world.

But the joy I felt today had nothing to do with risk-taking or daring. It especially had nothing to do with what anybody else thought of my trip. I had finally done something that was intensely meaningful to me. More meaningful than good grades, scholarships, speedy promotions, bestsellers everything else I had done right in my life, all my other "accomplishments." I had gone from knowing nothing six months ago to coming up the East Coast through the Atlantic as captain of my own boat, and it was the greatest thing I'd ever done. No doubt about it.

The next morning, John and I got up early to drive to the airport. It was pouring rain, but we had a head start, so I wasn't worried about missing the fight. Silly me. We were trapped for what seemed like an eternity on the Long Island Expressway, in the 30s exits that have been under construction since the dawn of man and probably still will be when the last star fades from the sky. The minutes ticked by, and it began to seem like there was absolutely no way John was going to make his fight. We laughed about how funny it was to come all this way and then screw up something this simple. I dropped John at LaGuardia feeling lousy that he'd probably have to wait around for the next fight.

Forty minutes later, he called me from his cell. Apparently Poseidon was still watching over us. The rain that cascaded from the heavens had delayed all departures. John was sitting on the plane, preparing for takeoff.

The trip was over.

CHAPTER EIGHT.