Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley Read Free Book Online

limits of the infant’s awareness, the birth pangs that are occasions of such joy to unseen others are to him a senseless crisis of unimagined proportions. His uterine world is literally collapsing around him. He has no capacity to understand that he is being delivered to a life of incalculably greater meaning, in a new world that expectantly awaits his arrival and already knows his name. He screams with anxiety and is slapped ignominiously, but his present pain is only a temporary hardship, destined soon to be utterly forgotten.
    I believe that the heartache we experience in our journey in this world is much the same. I have sensed this truth many times in my own life. Others express it routinely in the idea that things happen—even things that seem senseless at the moment—for a reason. The existence of reason implies the existence of a reasoner.
    I recall once hearing a television talk show host not best known for his humility and reticence say that he dismissed the whole notion of redemptive theology because it simply made no sense to him that God would need to bleed and die on a cross for our sins. Frankly, I share his incredulity. Even the church acknowledges that our faith is an inscrutable mystery (“Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again”); yet faith tells me that it is true. Humility allows me to accept by faith what I cannot know by reason or intelligence. What a small church it must be whose altar spans only the verities of the rational mind. The world is so very much bigger than that, and so likewise must be its creator.
    It was good to be home, in Beaufort, when the Gypsy Moon glided to those docks in the gathering darkness of an August night in 2009. It was good to be back in North Carolina. It was good to be near New Bern, which held so many memories, both bitter and sweet. I had smiled inside, in those lonely hours spent ghosting down the coast in the darkness off Cape Hatteras, to hear US Coast Guardsmen pass the baton—their broadcasts changing from the clipped elocution of big northern cities to the relaxed drawl of little southern towns. The South is my home.
    Though a child of Baltimore and an early admirer of certain refinements of northern life that forever eluded me—namely a well-placed shot in lacrosse and the rigors of piano lessons at the Peabody Institute—I had never much warmed to northern culture. Since my first visit to rural Tennessee, at the age of fourteen, I had recognized in southern folk a genuine sense of friendship and community—often mistaken for mere politeness—that was like mother’s milk to me.
    Yes, I like it here. That being so, it was not immediately clear, nor was it ever clear for very long, why I should leave on a half-baked sailing voyage for someplace else.

Chapter 10
An Unlikely Adventurer
    The matters of my departure from Beaufort and my ultimate destination were decisions yet to be made. I knew this in my heart to be true, even though I admitted it to no one and had set out from Annapolis amid great fanfare, with news to all that I was “bound for Nassau.” Telling people you are sailing to Nassau—especially people who would never attempt such a trip themselves but are sure to be impressed that you would—is easy to do. It evokes an air of adventure, derring-do, sophistication, and romance. James Bond seduced beautiful women, danced at Junkanoo, and foiled diabolical plans for nuclear blackmail in Nassau. Telling people that you are sailing to Nassau when you are as yet in a harbor a thousand miles away is much like telling people that you are writing a bestselling novel or running for president. It is a thing much easier imagined than realized.
    Actually sailing to Nassau, I would come to understand, is hard to do—not just in terms of time and distance but, for me, psychologically. The wind and the waves are not the only forces that must be overcome or even the most worrisome. The whole idea evoked in me assorted feelings of