ESCAPE ARTIST l The misadventures of one man on the run from commitment, responsibility, and any job requiring nice shoes… by Terence Loose

Escape Artist | A few years ago, I woke up shivering cold on a deflated camping mattress in a friend’s spare room. Like the camping mattress, I was broke. I also had no car, no job, no prospects, and a pregnant wife by my side (yes, mine). I was 35 and starting over from scratch. It was like the day after college graduation, only without the crushing hangover and silly hat.

As in college, I had spent the few years prior chasing pure fun, utterly denying the demands of the modern world and basically shirking responsibility whenever I could. It started two years before, my wife Gayl and I had sold our house, our cars, and anything else that wouldn’t fit aboard a 32-foot sailboat and left our nine-to-five cubicled existence astern to sail to the South Pacific in search of adventure, freedom and anyplace that didn’t accept MasterCard. For those two years, our biggest decision was whether to go for a cocktail in the cockpit or a sunset snorkel.

And the decision to go was just as easy, at least for me. I had a long history of quitting jobs, “going a little crazy” and fleeing the country. And although going for broke usually resulted in just that, I still saw it as a good trait, despite what everyone else said. In fact, I had escaped many times before – to a leaky tent in Australia, a leaky tent in New Zealand, a leaky tent in Tahiti, Europe, Mexico…. Sensing a pattern?

But this time, although our little boat was as leaky as those flimsy tents, there was a difference – I had stuck around between exploits long enough to build what most would see as a decent career as a magazine journalist, signed up for a mortgage and a car payment and, according to concerned friends, “seemed stable.”

Then one day I found myself on the docks of a sailing school, tracking down interviews for a story on summer fun. The students ranged from college kids to retirees and I peppered them with questions while they tangled lines and mis-folded dinghy sails after a class in Beginning Sailing, which required absolutely no prior sailing knowledge. From the looks of it, everyone in the class met the requirement.

I approached one bearded skinny twenty-something who squinted through thick glasses and whose skin glowed white from a fluorescent bulb lit existence. He told me he was a software engineer.

“Why are you learning to sail?” I asked.

“I’m going cruising,” he said. “I’m gonna sell everything, buy a boat, quit my stupid job, and sail away to Mexico.”

He dropped the sail he was mis-folding, pulled a dog-eared class catalog from his pocket and proceeded to list the courses that would set him free: “Diesel Doctoring, Taming Tempests, Weally Wonderful Woodwork…” the list was endless.

I looked at him blankly. I imagined it was the same look he got at countless family dinners or social get-togethers, because he said, “No, really. I’ve researched it. All I need to do is take every course this school offers and I can do it.”

I could tell he sensed I was about to back away slowly – but nothing could be further from the truth: little did this wannabe adventurer know that he and I were kindred spirits. The minute he had said “sell everything” and “sail away” I was sold, hook line and anchor.

I pictured Gayl and myself sailing into the perfect sunset, cocktails in hand and a warm breeze filling a clean white sail. I pictured surfing, diving… more surfing. And wasn’t going to sea a requirement of a great writer, like the cocktails? Yes, I was in, all in. There was only one thing left to do: convince Gayl.

That was likely going to be more difficult than taming tempests, actually, for we had just bought a fixer-upper – or, more precisely, a no-hope-for – a few years earlier and were in the middle of a quixotic effort to make it a home so we could start a family. Gayl’s maternity clock had started to tick, loudly, and getting her to mute it for a few years was going to be tough.

One reason was that one of the prime characteristics of life-changing great ideas is that too often they are much less impressive once voiced. Something horribly mutating happens to them in the journey past the lips, as if they’re slathered in absurd juice. I’m sure that this is exactly why Columbus got his three boats and an energetic shove toward the horizon – anything to get this madman talking about spheres and new worlds away from the good people of Spain.

It was like that as I sat at a plastic table in a small Mexican restaurant and explained to Gayl that I had the answers the rest of humanity didn’t even know how to ask for.

“The Marquesas? I’ve never even heard of them,” she said when I told her those tiny islands would be our first landfall, 3,000 open ocean miles away. She looked at me with a “Someone-call-911!” look.

“Well, that’s only the first stop on the Milk Run. Personally, I’m looking most forward to Tahiti,” I said.

“Milk run? What are you talking about?”

“They call sailing from here to the South Pacific the Milk Run because it’s so easy,” I ventured. “Because the wind is steady and… because it’s like going out for a bottle… or maybe it’s a baby thing… Okay, I have no idea why they call it that, but it sounds soothing, doesn’t it? Besides, a lot of people do this now.”

“Name one.”

I dodged the question by ordering two more beers and launching into a Melvillesque description of the South Pacific’s enchanting beauty. The verdant green peaks of ancient islands towering over crystal clear lagoons. The laughing natives bringing us fresh fruit and serenading us with song. Nights under sail, alone together at sea gazing at a sky full of stars and a private moon brighter than any streetlamp, the romantic whoosh of the ocean constantly caressing the hull.

“We don’t even know how to sail a dinghy,” she said.

“No one sails to the Tahiti in a dinghy silly,” I said.

“What about our house?” Gayl asked.

“Oh, that has to go. To pay for the boat.”

“Could we get those beers,” Gayl yelled to the waitress.

Ten minutes later, just when I thought I was making headway, Gayl leaned over and, with the voice of a mental ward nurse, said, “Terry, honey, this is crazy. Even for you.”

“That’s what you said about Australia.”

Yes, Australia. That bought me some time. Five years earlier, we had quit our jobs, stuffed our possessions in a storage unit, and flown to Australia with nothing but backpacks and a tent (yes, the leaky one).

Gayl had resisted the idea, citing the very logical and understandable argument that it was nuts to erase the two years we each had put into our careers on what seemed like a mid-life crisis. But I lobbied hard and soon we landed in Sydney, tired, lost, but looking forward instead of back. We bought a car for $600, drove the entire East Coast, had the time of our lives, sold the car for $600 three months later, and flew home with a little over $600 in our pockets.

Within a few weeks we had jobs at our old places of work – I had even gotten a promotion. It was an undeniable success, and ever since, whenever we felt overwhelmed with the dullness of cubical life, we retreated to the Australian photo album and lost ourselves in our own dream.

There was only so far the dream could get me now, however. After all, back then, we were renting a place in L.A., unhappy with city life but grinding it out for our careers’ sake. And cruising Australia by car was tame and cheap compared to what I now proposed. Most important, back then, there was not even the notion of starting a family; we were young and had all the time in the world. Australia was an easy sell. Now, with a mortgage and a biological clock ticking, albeit softly, sailing into the sunset was anything but a cruise.

Still, I could see in Gayl’s eyes that the she wanted to believe. I hoped it wasn’t the third beer. My heart told me it wasn’t. It was the part of Gayl I had fallen in love with; she was that rare, beautiful mix of adventurer, optimist and pragmatist. I was the dreamer, sure, but I was also a defeatist at my core. I could talk a good game, but usually, it was merely that: talk. With time, the obstacles moved in like storm clouds and smothered the dream’s light. Gayl served as my clearing winds.

It took time, though. For the next week we didn’t talk about the South Pacific. We went to our jobs by day, we sanded and painted the walls of the house by night.

Then came our first sailing lesson, on a beautiful day when the wind, the clouds and the sun all seem to have gotten together for the sole purpose of pleasing a sailor. We returned home, our cheeks rosy and warm from a day on the water, and were immediately met by a broken water pipe and flooded kitchen. Our smiles faded; our foreheads wrinkled.

In bed that night, after a takeout pizza, Gayl turned to me.

“Okay, let’s do it,” she said softly, “but you’re cleaning the head.”

So, after a few years of taking classes on everything from diesel engines to dragging anchors and proving just how inept I was at any project involving my hands (those years of typing were not paying off like I had hoped), we set sail on a 5,000-mile, two-year odyssey.

We explored the life-filled waters of the Sea of Cortez, touted by Steinbeck; the isolated Marquesas Islands, celebrated in Melville’s Typee; the Tahitian Islands, immortalized by Gauguin; and the largely uninhabited Tuamotu atolls, celebrated by, well, no one famous. Along the way, we encountered raging storms, crazy characters, wild boars and wilder sharks, broke almost every piece of equipment that could break, and ate a lot of raw fish. But we also found those benevolent natives, seductive sunsets and a galaxy of romantic starry nights.

That’s how I ended up on that deflated inflatable bed, broke and homeless, with a new life – literally – driving me forward. And if you think family life would change me, well, that’s where you’d be right: it means one more person to pack for and to teach the art of escapism.

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I hope you’ll join me here often, where I’ll write about the adventures –and misadventures – I’ve had in my long and less than society-sanctioned career of dodging anything that might result in responsibility, commitment, or a desk job. I’ll try to entertain, inspire and also educate, with tips – some practical, some just plain fun – on how to become your very own Escape Artist.

Terence Loose is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals. Loose is an editor-at-large for Coast Magazine and served as cowriter on MTV’s Sucks Less with Kevin Smith. When he is not busy surviving his latest escape attempt, he is planning his next one. Catch up with him at www.tloose.com. Here, Loose will write about the adventures and misadventures he’s had in his long and less than society-sanctioned career of dodging anything that might result in a desk job. He’ll try to entertain, inspire and educate, with tips some practical, some just plain fun on how to become your very own Escape Artist.