Packing

We had only two days (plus a few stolen hours) to pack up all our belongings from the boat and storage and pack them into 2 cubical shipping containers. They were supposed to haul the containers away at the end of the day, but when we arrived at 2pm with a van-full of boxes, the truck was there with both cubes loaded - ready to drive off to Maine. What would we have done if we had been just a little earlier, or a little later? We flagged the truck and convinced him to unload the cubes, begging him to return as late as possible that evening. Thank goodness Shi – to whom we had promised the blue biodiesel Passat – showed up to help us ferry the remainder. At 4pm Zach was frantically packing the rest of our kitchen and I was frantically packing Zach’s suitcase. At 4:20 a call came in that Jonah was running a fever and had to be picked up. At 4:45, giving up on folding the rest of the clean laundry, I did a quick sort and piled it into our suitcases and ran off to get the kids, hoping that through some miracle things would come together. For the most part, they did, just barely – Shi and Zach managed to get most of our stuff off the boat, then at 5:45 (after I had dropped the kids with a very understanding friend) Shi and I ran back to get the very last load, screaming into the parking lot after the truck had loaded one cube and was just about to take the other. We gave the driver a big tip, threw in the seashell fountain from the tiki bar and then the guitar on top of it , then bolted the cube shut and hoped for the best: See you in Maine, broken or not. Survival of the fittest.

We spent a sleepless night at our friend’s house. Zach left at 3am with Zora (the cause of the sleeplessness) to move the rest of the stuff from the boat into our car. When they returned, I went to clean up. I had hoped to present the boat to the new owners in sparkling condition, but when they showed up an hour into my cleaning spree with buckets and mops and told me with a smile, “You’re done,” it was clear I had to surrender the ship. With triumphal classical music blasting from the speakers, we sailed out of Berkeley, waving goodbye to the encroaching summer fog and each landmark we passed until we were out of range of the familiar and could only look ahead.