Everything Left to Lose By MichaelAJO, ARIZONA

Me and Old Frances. This is my 95 1/2-year-old
grandma we just visited in Nebraska. She still
lives alone and drives. And I just noticed that's
also me in her acrylic tissue box.

It seems like three years ago that we were in Tonga. Yet it was only 12 months ago that we were in Tonga’s Ha’apai group aboard Del Viento, arrived from Vava’u. Then back to Vava’u en route to American Samoa to visit old friends, east to Samoa for the first time, and then southwest to Fiji. That’s where we decided to buy a house in Arizona, sight unseen, and managed the whole transaction from Fiji. In October we buttoned up the boat and flew to Washington, D.C. via a 4-day layover in Australia. Then on to California to visit family and buy a truck before driving to Arizona to start work on the house. Here we’ve introduced a number of new friends into our lives over bonfires and dinners and hikes. We’ve vacationed in Mexico and attended a gay-pride parade in Phoenix. The girls have enjoyed their first real stretch in public school and emerged unscathed. We’ve spent time with family in Nebraska and California and Washington state.

It’s been a very full year.

We’re lucky to have had it.

We’ve been able to have it because we’ve broken free.

That is probably the single biggest benefit of this cruising life we’ve chosen, freedom. And the freedom we’ve gained from changing our lives up wasn’t even the reason we left to go cruising, it’s an unexpected benefit. And I’m not talking about win-the-lottery-and-quit-your-job kind of freedom, but something different.

Making the decision to leave our careers behind and sell nearly everything except what would fit on the boat meant breaking free, free of all the trappings and obligations of lives that would have made a year like the past year impossible.

Young Frances dolled up and
being silly ahead of a school
performance.

I’ve fretted since we took off about what our end game would look like. Most families don’t cruise forever, and most don’t want to. (We probably won’t.) We didn’t leave a house rented that we could slip back into, resuming careers put on hold. When our savings ran out and we had to sell the boat and stop, we could land literally anywhere and start new lives. But where?

While in Alaska we seriously considered making that our future home (we still talk about it today). While in San Diego we realized that would be an easy place to live aboard and work, barely getting rooted so that once we’d saved enough we could make a quick escape. (We paid $75 to get our names on a waiting list for a mooring.) In La Paz, Mexico, we peeked into the courtyards of homes for sale.

“But where would we work if we lived in Mexico?”

Before crossing the Pacific two years ago, our bank statements were flashing red warning lights when we opened the envelope. We cast feelers far and wide for work. I networked through IT contacts about cleared jobs on Kwajalein Atoll and uncleared work in the Marshall Islands. I pestered Meri on Hotspur about what we were qualified to do in American Samoa. We envied the French cruisers who could work at will in French Polynesia. We listened to the stories of Kiwi expats who’d started successful businesses in Tonga and wondered if that was for us. We didn’t want to give up our freedom, but our savings were running on fumes.

Then fortune smiled on us. I got an email out of the blue from Karen Larson over at Good Old Boat magazine. She’d read my book, Selling Your Writing to the Boating Magazines, and I’d sold her stories and cover photos over the years and she now wanted to know whether I’d be interested in interviewing for a managing editor position at her magazine.

“But you know I’m cruising, I live on a boat, currently in Tonga, yeah?”

“Do they have internet in Tonga?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that wouldn’t disqualify you. All of the staff works from home, wherever home is.”

A pretty view of Ajo.

That was just over a year ago.

The anxiety I’d felt over determining our end game vanished. All the writing I’d done since we started cruising, the magazine articles and the two books, had paid off. We didn’t have to give up our freedom just yet.

I’m now a member of this new class of mobile worker. My work is what I do, not where I live. I don’t earn as much money as I did in D.C., but our cost of living isn’t tied to D.C. We can continue setting sail, reefing sails, and plotting courses for all kinds of places, or settle down and live wherever we like. We’re free in a way that we never were. We have talked about renting a place in Japan for a while to see what that’s like. Of following in the footsteps of our friends on Hotspur and doing the same thing in Vietnam or Mexico.

And it’s all possible because we took the leap into the unknown to head down a road that extended only as far as our savings. When we left, we could see the length of that finite road and there was absolutely nothing at the end, except the good fortune to able to return to the lives we left behind, albeit a few steps behind our peers who didn’t take a five-year sabbatical and blow through their savings.

That’s the view that keeps many people who are otherwise interested in cutting the dock lines, close to shore. We’re a society that celebrates the risk taker, but few take big risks. Few should. I don’t begrudge the risk-averse. I don’t pretend that the decisions we’ve made are appropriate for everyone, nor that they’re prudent. I just know that they’re right for us. I look forward to another year that I can’t see from here.

--MR

Windy with Frances, working on one of the windows in our house.
Okay, just kidding, this is an abandoned place we found hiking
in the desert near our house, but its not much better than our house.

Eleanor trying to beat Old Frances at cards, big mistake showing
her hand when she scoots in for this picture.

The girls with one of the replica prairie schooners on display
in Scottsbluff. This bluff was a major landmark in the
big westward migration, part of the Oregon Trail.

So on the way back to Denver airport, we pulled off the road and hiked
to the base of one of those turbine wind generators so I could show the
girls just how massive they are, the huge blades rotating above our heads with
a colossal whoosh. So just before we reached the turbine, Eleanor grabs
onto be and tries to stop me and push me aside. I saw this big guy right after
exclaiming, "What the heck are you doing?!" She enjoyed a few hours in the
limelight after claiming credit for saving my life, but then I looked this guy up and
he's just a harmless bull snake.