S/V Spindrift

I dropped Sarah at the airport in Palermo this morning. She is flying to Boulder to be with Sam for Parents Weekend and will be back in about a week. On the drive back to Trapani, at the western tip of Sicily, alone in the car, something turned over in my head.

There is another way to look at the people we meet. For most of my life I met people on the way to something else. A meeting, a deadline, a flight home. Colleagues, clients, the man who fixed the car. I rarely had time to wonder where they had come from. They were passing through my life. Out here I have started to see it the other way around. I am the one passing through. Every harbor is full of people whose lives were going long before S/V Spindrift tied up, and will go on long after she leaves. I walk into the middle of their story, stay for a few pages, and sail on.

There are more than eight billion people in the world, and each one is where they are for a reason. Somebody’s grandfather moved to this town. Somebody stayed when the others left. A long string of chance and choice put each of them in a place, a family, a community. The same kind of string put S/V Spindrift in their harbor.

This week it’s boat chores. After I dropped Sarah off in Palermo, I found a replacement for the forward head pump. A lucky find. So now the pump is at the top of the list. It sits behind a panel with no easy way in, and the only way to reach it is upside down, one arm in, cheek on the floor, saying words Sarah is glad she can’t hear from Boulder. Jobs like this mean chasing parts, and chasing parts is one way I wander into other people’s lives. Food is another. And of course, every new marina.

Here are four of those lives.

Cristian runs the yard at Marina Arturo Stabile, where S/V Spindrift and I are staying while I work through the list. He is 50. He started in this yard as a teenager and never left, so he has been hauling, blocking and launching other people’s boats for about thirty-five years. The yard is immaculate: lines coiled, tools put back, nothing lying where a foot can find it. The service is superb, the kind where you mention a problem once and it is already being handled. I am one boat in thirty-five years of boats.

(Photo: Cristian in his yard at Marina Arturo Stabile.)

(Photo: The yard at Marina Arturo Stabile. Swept clean, boats blocked and waiting.)

(Photo: The gate down to the pontoons.)

(Photo: S/V Spindrift stern-to at the marina, bikes on the swim platform, ready for chasing parts.)

Miguel makes fishing nets. In Italian he is a retaio. He is 60. When I found him he was on a bench in a back room with a mountain of red net across his knees, working the mesh by hand. I asked him how many generations of his family had been in Trapani. He didn’t know. He never met his mother or his father. All he remembers is being raised by friends. He has never left Sicily. He has been here for all sixty of his years. I have been here for five days.

(Photo: Miguel at work on a red net.)

(Photo: Miguel’s shop, seen from the street.)

(Photo: Miguel sent me to Roberto. Miguel makes Roberto’s nets. Every morning Roberto sets up a stand on the quay at sunrise and sells what he can until about nine.)

(Photo: Roberto with two calamari. In Sicily they are stuffed with breadcrumbs, pine nuts, raisins and pecorino, then baked. Calamari ripieni. I’m making mine with walnuts instead of pine nuts.)

(Photo: Cicale di mare, a kind of mantis shrimp. The dark spots on the tail are fake eyes. I am going to try them simmered in a spicy tomato sauce for spaghetti alle cicale.)

Maria and Giuseppe run the beach bar on Favignana, a small island about ten miles off Trapani, where we spent four nights before crossing to Sicily. It’s called Kiosko, because that’s what it is. They were high school sweethearts, and now they are living their dream of owning a beach bar together. They also make a mean Negroni.

(Photo: Maria and Giuseppe behind the bar at Kiosko.)

(Photo: Kiosko, on the beach at Favignana.)

Cristian, Miguel, Maria and Giuseppe are not background characters in my trip. I am a walk-on in theirs. They are all books, and I only get to read a page.

We leave Trapani in about a week, and I will probably never see them again. Their books will go on being written long after S/V Spindrift is over the horizon. If I show up in them at all, I hope it is a line or two saying I listened more than I talked. For a retired consultant, that would be a first. Out here I am meeting more people who are living life well than I ever met in 41 years of corner offices. A man who has kept the same yard spotless for thirty-five years. A man mending nets in a back room. Two high school sweethearts mixing Negronis on a beach. Every one of them living life well. The honor was mine.

Fair Winds – S/V Spindrift