I looked at Doug, dumbfounded, and then stormed onto the deck to do the dishes. I had obviously lost, but when you spend an hour fighting about a kerosene lantern that isn’t even powered by kerosene, nobody wins.
I woke up the next morning feeling sheepish, my anger transformed into regret after a poor night’s sleep. I had to go to work, where I would spend the day performing tedious manual labor for a local land trust. We were working to restore native plant communities in the sensitive dune habitat of coastal California — a cause I certainly believed in, but the work itself would leave me with eight solitary hours to rehash every line of my ill-founded argument.
Doug offered to ferry me to the pier in the dinghy, but I told him to go back to sleep, that I’d take the paddle board.The sun had just crested the hills above the port, and the water was a glassy sheet. The fishermen had left before dawn and the tourists and beachgoers were yet to arrive, so the port was quiet aside from the small waves breaking on the sand and the occasional splash of a pelican. I tied off the paddle board and climbed the rickety ladder to the pier, where I pulled out my phone and texted him: “I’m sorry.”
Six months later, we were pointed south with wind in our sails, headed for Mexico. For eight weeks we sailed from Port San Luis to Puerto Vallarta, covering some 1,400 miles at an average moving speed of five miles per hour.
Along the way, Doug taught me how to estimate the wind speed, how to set a course and how to trim the sails. He taught me about kelp forests and the Madden-Julian Oscillation and the migratory patterns of whales. He taught me how to dive for scallops, how to load a spear gun and how to clean and filet a fish once I finally caught one. He made me jump overboard in the middle of the Pacific, where the water was 2,000 feet deep, to swim with rays.
As we slowly made our way south, Doug reminded me why I had joined the environmental movement in the first place. His eco-conscious life has been driven by his awe of the natural world — an awe so pure it’s almost childlike. And while mine started out that way, it had morphed over the years into something driven mostly by anger at what we’re losing.
