From the Tropics to the Temperates
Sailing North, Jimmy Buffett, and the magic of Latitude 32
This is Clouds Form Over Land, weekly writing about life at sea and going ashore.
Singer, sailor, and songwriter Jimmy Buffett released “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" in 1977 when our boat was just a pile of fiberglass, wood, metal, and plans at the Pearson factory in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
44 years later, our 9,000 mile U-shaped route began at Latitude 38 in San Francisco. Two years later we are set to conclude along the same parallel in the Chesapeake Bay.
Here in Charleston, at Latitude 32, it’s neither too warm nor too cold, at least at this time of year, and that brings about an easy sense of well-being. We felt the magic of this latitude for the first time in San Diego, California while waiting for the seasons to change so we could head south to Mexico and beyond. In both places, we’ve oscillated between relaxed contentment and hurried, worries about what may lie ahead. On this side, we are re-entwining ourselves with United Statesian civilization, on the other, we were heading into a great unknown.
On the Pacific side of Latitude 32, I took surf classes and we started rollerblading. SeaWorld put on a fireworks show every night and we rode the beachfront wooden rollercoaster with friends. On the Atlantic side, I'm jogging, biking, and seeing our journey come into focus.
Cypress, the ship’s cat, joined our crew at Latitude 32. Little is known about her first year of life, but the scrappy gumption she’s brought along the route has us guessing that she fended for herself a fair amount and attuned to her environment. On the return to her latitude, she is settling into the blankets and prowling the docks with an air that seems to suggest she’s at home. Further south, she was more subdued by the heat and humidity. The return to the temperates from the tropics has added a spring to all of our steps and ease to our slumbers as well. It's a delight to pull my quilts and handknit sweaters and blankets out from onboard storage.
We celebrated Scott’s birthday here with a trifecta of a cocktail-making class at a speakeasy, dinner at Vern’s, and a ghost tour. One of my best travel tips is to use Airbnb Experiences to find a local guide for something unique and location-specific. Later in the week, we did a walking tour focused on the Gullah Geechee, descendants of enslaved Africans who built a language and culture out of differing heritages and disastrous conditions on the plantations. We learned that the enslaved were purposely isolated from those who shared their language, but practices persisted through the tenacity to connect across differences. Other participants in the walking tour connected the traditions of their elders to the ways of the Gullah Geechee, finding possible connections to the past that had previously been dead ends in the family tree. The tour ended with an offering of rice to the river. It was a powerful moment to acknowledge the fresh waterways around us after a raucous sail on the Atlantic to get here. Many varietals of rice, peas, and beans were brought to the US in the braids of women's hair, an act of resistance as they boarded ships under much different conditions than my own voyaging. I quickly ordered Hoodoo Medicine to learn more about herbalist practices in the sea islands.
Charleston is a “walled city” like Cartagena, Colombia, a city we got to know while waiting out the trade winds last winter. Charles Town was founded in 1670, 137 years after Cartagena, and 107 years before the Declaration of Independence. King Charles of England is the city's namesake and all the land was initially granted to eight men who developed it into the capital of the Carolina colony. Heavy ship traffic brought together French, Irish, German, and Caribbean folks, as well as an estimated 150,000-200,000 enslaved Africans. The city was the wealthiest south of Philadelphia, thanks to the rice produced by the Gullah Geechee on land that is now often called “colonial gardens". The Civil War and following emancipation ground the economy to a halt when much of the coastal landscapes were abandoned by the wealthy landowners who could not turn a profit when forced to pay wages. The sea islands had few bridges, which left the locals in isolated agency, not unlike a boat at anchor. Today Charleston tops the charts as a tourist destination with history mixing with pleasant climate, cobblestone streets, tremendous food, and friendly people.
This time outside US borders has given us a wider view of our continental history. It seems a shame we don’t embrace our Americaness in a broader sense, with our shared history of independence from empires, clashes and collaborations with indigenous populations, and the cultures and natures from Northern Canada to Cape Horn. Culturally, we’ve focused on Euro-centric norms rather than our neighboring states who share much more of our circumstances.
Familiar names like Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard, Sir Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and of course, Columbus have been following us around like ghost stories on this long coastal route. I've spent many night watches pondering the psyche of those onboard ships in the 1400s onward. How did they hold together with no destination and no indication of progress along a route? I can take a look at our iPad for an ETA based on weather, tide, and current data gathered by those first pirates and refined over the years by sonar and satellites. I can also text my parents on a satellite phone, listen to any content downloaded when in port, and be fairly certain that we aren't at risk of a mutiny or cannon fire.
Jimmy Buffett has been my unexpected guide of late for wading through these impressions and observations aboard a boat in the tropics. I had previous notions of his work as a Margaritaville caricature, the unaware North Americans bumbling around with their dollars and sunburns, seeking that cheeseburger in paradise.
Listening to local music has been a strategy for acclimating to new surroundings, and I figured there was no need to stop once north of the border. One morning while doing laundry in the rain, I queued up Banana Republics. My dad recommended this particular song numerous times, but it took me a while to align cell reception with a heads-up approach to understanding my circumstances. This song singles out the expatriated Americans wandering around the tropics:
Some of them go for the sailing
Brought by the lure of the sea
Tryin' to find what is ailing
Living in the land of the free
It’s hard to say what we were searching for by taking this trip. The straightforward answer is that we wanted to live on the East Coast, wanted this sailboat to come with us, and thought moving it ourselves sounded more fun than putting it on a truck. We had bought Azimuth with distant shores in mind, but in the five years we lived aboard in San Francisco, we kept saying we’d leave in three years — a safe timeframe that required no immediate action or change. Then COVID-19 knocked most of us on our heels, seeing just how much daily life could shift through no agency of our own. We had to deliver layoffs to our teams and scramble to find a new semblance of normal, all within the confines of a 36’ boat. Oakland and the rest of the world’s reaction to the murder of George Floyd surfaced an unjustness that couldn’t be unseen. Then fire season turned the sky orange and made the air thick with smoke from miles away. Living on a boat puts one closer to the climate realities and further from modern conveniences like air filtration.
So I suppose something was ailing us, living in the land of the free. Or rather, several somethings, coming at us at an untenable pace. Each problem building as each generation prioritizes capital over nature, survival and joy over long-range sustainability — all tracing back hundreds of years to power structures and exploitation of continents that's evident in the places we all live.
My other favorite Jimmy song of late is A Pirate Looks at Forty1. He says, “Yes, I am a pirate, born 200 years too late” and notes his “occupational hazard being his occupation is just not around".
The romanticized view of pirates swashbuckling (whatever that verb means) across the Atlantic, subverting colonial rule and doing whatever they damn well pleased has taken root in the culture from Captain Hook to Captain Morgan. The reality is that these pirates were slave traders as well, dealing in both human trafficking and goods produced on plantations. They were both closest to freedom and culpable for the further enslavement of others. Many resonate with this song, wishing that messing around on boats could add to the treasure chest, rather than simply drain it.
As for me, I don’t feel that I was born 200 years too late. My role on a pirate ship would likely have been a woman in disguise, rather than a dashing hero. There has been only a sliver of human history in which a couple and their cat could take a vessel on a long journey of their choosing, and it’s a reality that isn’t available to most today. This freedom of time and location is made possible by our blue passports, green dollars, and to a lesser extent, personal gumption to meet the conveyor belt of DIY projects required to keep Azimuth sailing onward.
Jimmy Buffett has managed to capture a less-seen side of the tropics and the behaviors and motives of expatriated (US) Americans. The alcoholism, aimlessness, and failure to learn Spanish and otherwise integrate. (From experience, it seems one can only dabble in one of the three of these at time while still keeping their head on straight). These themes, alongside the catchy tunes, have helped me process some of the grief of being so far away from my groups and norms, while also becoming so much more aware of our continent’s history. The time away has helped me pinpoint what ails me, while also resting up enough to do something about it.
We're all on this rock together, shaped by the consequences of history stretching back further than we can fathom. How will we spend our time?
Other latitude 32s, sourced by Scott: Central Morocco, the southern Mediterranean, Tel Aviv, Xiangyang, Kumamoto, San Diego, Dallas, and a section of the Texas/New Mexico border.
Learn your latitude and consider reading Longitude, a fascinating tale of the genius who figured out where we all are.
Take a look at your next decade. What do you want to do?
Add a new musician to your rotation.
Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.
Did you try any of these? I’d love to hear about it.
Have a can-do activity to share? Bring it on.
This isn’t exactly a footnote, but I wanted to add this aside. The concept of “taking a look at 40” from my vantage point of 31 years old is striking. The late twenties and early thirties are a slippery time for women. We hear that the clock is ticking from some, or that we have plenty of time from others, or that childrearing shouldn’t be our focus, from yet more others. Our friends are suddenly and incrementally at different stages of life, after being in lockstep up til now. Taking a look at forty feels spacious and exciting.
I'm loving your chronicles of you two humans and a cat well-matched in gumption, and I do hope you'll keep writing when you land! You have a lot of good insights and write about them beautifully. Also, from my "Flower Child" (aka old person) perspective, I appreciate hearing your perspective as a young person. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I imagine what ails you may be what ails so many of us now — the way late-stage capitalism has messed up so much in our lives, the need to search for meaning in a world focused on material goods, and the lack of community that's especially severe in our U.S. culture. One of the pieces of that is that people of different generations don't interact enough, so I appreciate all the more getting to know someone younger than me! Thanks for the opportunity. I wish we could hang out in person and get to know one another more, but I'm glad that at least we have this virtual venue to do it in.
As for your list, I've been thinking a lot about #2, how to spend the next decade (I am also at the beginning of a decade of my own life). Doing more writing here is part of it!