I'm home now. I flew home.
Back up.
The plan from the beginning was to have one last overseas trip, to take as long as we wanted, a year or three, and then to be done with flying after we got home. We wanted to go all the way around the world, flying as little as possible, but seeing as much of everything as we wanted: Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, then South America on up back home.
A month into the trip, 'we' became 'me', and everything changed. The Plan of the whole thing fell apart and required reconstruction to reflect the reality that I was now on a solo trip.
I revisited the idea of crewhitching, which is when you join on a sailing vessel as an extra hand. For novice crew, which is what I'd be, you typically chip in to cover costs of food and fuel and such. I liked the idea. Sailing is an interesting, adventurous thing to do, and the carbon footprint is obviously lower than flying, so it seemed an obvious choice.
Circumnavigating West to East isn't really a thing, I learned. Also, because of weather patterns, there are certain seasons for when it's best to cross the major oceans. Instead of going round the world, I decided to continue to workaway in Europe until the end of the year, and then I'd crewhitch back West across the Atlantic. Most boats make the passage from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean between November and January, as winds are favorable and the odds of running through a storm are low.
By May, I'd settled on this as a good plan.
A sensation develops
An odd thing started to happen, beginning around June. I noticed a slight ache in my chest. The sensation would come and then go. I didn't think much about it at the time.
As weeks went on, this sensation increased in average intensity. Some days it'd be the dominant sensation in my body, other days I'd hardly know it was there. I got curious about the sensation and did some internal tracking on it.
It was always accompanied either by thoughts of the desert I grew up in, or of projects I wanted to do in that desert when I got back. I realized I was... homesick?
I'd never been homesick before, so this was entirely new psychological ground for me. The joy of fresh internal discovery nearly eclipsed the unpleasant sensation of wanting to be somewhere I was not. I continued observations on this new and fascinating sensation. Pain! Related to a place! How interesting!
Some of my early observations led to this post, where I noted how this sensation was increasing the strength of my bond to the place I was away from. The sheer distance that I felt from home - six months, ten thousand miles - made homecoming a much more than trivial endeavor.
I accepted this feeling as something I just had to deal with and kept on with my plan.
By early August, the feeling had grown into the dominant sensation in my mind and body. It had nothing to do with any aversion to where I was - I was loving my time on Rubha Phoil, every day felt like a gift - but rather with the overwhelming sense of belonging to that chunk of desert. We belong in the desert, my body was saying. Why aren't we there?
By August the time had come to get serious about sorting the logistics to sail home. I first needed to travel 3,000 miles back down to Portugal or Spain. Then I needed to hang around a port for long enough to find a boat to hitch on to the Canarys. I had to secure accommodations there while waiting for the season to start, of course, and find another boat to make the Atlantic passage to the Caribbean. From there, I'd have to find lodgings again while searching for another boat to get me either to South America or North America, I didn't really care as long as I got to a mainland where I could then overland in the direction of California.
I created profiles on crewhitching websites, and read articles about seamanship. I bought the Sleight textbook on sailing and began memorizing sailing jargon. I practiced knots.
Finding a spot on a boat is competitive. Some people try really hard and don't find a boat to cross. I wanted to increase my odds as much as I could, since I've not sailed more than two days on San Francisco Bay. I put the word out through my friends who were in the world of sailing.
I found myself facing internal resistance to doing all of this. I'd procrastinate. I wouldn't do as good a job as I could making my sailing profiles attractive. This resistance to what arguably was going to be the coolest part of my travels was an interesting clue. I dug in.
Rather than being excited about the whole experience, I found myself dreading the whole snarling pile of logistics. I knew what overlanding from Spain to Scotland was like. I wasn't looking forward to the days and days of travel back south. I wasn't looking forward to the uncertainty of whether I'd find a boat. I wasn't looking forward to trying to meet skippers in a harbor bar. The expense of the whole thing was a turnoff. I was pretty sure I'd have a few days at least of seasickness, which also didn't sound fun.
I was lost. It was time to build a spreadsheet.
I sat down to do the carbon footprint calc of flying versus sailing. Off the top of my head I guessed that flying would emit about ten times more co2e than sailing.
The thing is that I'm not calculating X miles flying vs X miles under sail. I'm calculating flying from London to SFO, to the whole journey from London to Portugal overland, sailing to the Canarys, waiting for a boat, crossing the Atlantic, then sailing to the mainland, and overland across the US.
I looked up a straightforward one way flight from London to Montreal to San Francisco: 550 kg co2e. All right. Now let's take a stab at the footprint of my sailing journey.
Ground transport, at 0.035 kgco2e/km per passenger, to get across Europe and then across North America, comes out to 280kg co2e. Oh. Hmm.
An estimate at the amount of diesel fuel the boat will use when the winds lag, divided by crew, comes out to 75kg co2e.
Then I looked into food. I realistically was looking at being six months from home, but call it four months. Even with a vegan diet of 1 kg co2e per 1,000kcal, that's 210kg co2e for four months of food that I consider to be part of the carbon cost of the sailing option.
Adding those up, the number I got for the sailing journey home was: 565kg co2e.
So sailing vs flying home in this particular case...
...is a total wash? What the hell?
The interesting thing is what happened to that sense of homesickness when I did the calc. I got this enormous flood of relief. Ohthankgod! I don't have to sail across the whole damn ocean! I can just go home now!
Uh... what? I asked myself.
We don't actually want to sail anywhere, I replied. We're a desert rat, remember? People who crewhitch are people who dream of sailing for years. When was the last time you dreamt of sailing, self?
I've, uh... I've never dreamt of sailing.
No? Not even once?
No. I've had chances to go sailing and went along, and that was interesting and fun and I'm glad I went, but there isn't any part of me that actually wants sailing to be a part of my life. It sounds like just a whole thing.
So then why are you taking six months out of your life, at significant cost and effort, when you could be doing something you are currently yearning to do, to do something that you don't actually care about, and the carbon emissions are a wash between the two?
Uhm.... yeah alright screw this, let's go home.
It's not homesickness
The thing I decided about that ache in my chest is that it's not homesickness, not precisely, because I'm not going back to the life I left behind. There's no stable home, social circle, job, or activity set that I'm coming back to. When I left, it was us as a couple trying to figure out how to construct a life that made sense for both of us. It's just me now. The life I left behind in February doesn't exist anymore.
My ache isn't about going back to something I have, which is what I understand homesickness to be, it's about wanting to get on with creating what I want to have for myself. What I've learned on my travels has cracked something open for me, shown me a way forward that is pulling at me like gravity. My stoke to do what I can only do from home has been growing in intensity, eventually overcoming my stoke to continue workawaying around the world, and overcoming my stoke to sail home even.
Traveling taught me to come home
Actually, the experiences I was having - particularly my last two months at Rubha Phoil - contributed greatly to my sense of wanting to come home in an interesting way. At the end, I felt like I'd learned what I'd set out to learn, and I wanted to take those lessons home with me and begin applying them. Taking six months to grind my way back home was not on-mission, not part of my felt purpose in life. It'd be a diversion from what I feel like my personal niche in the world is, and I was worried that I'd lose the thread.
I'm not a traveler. I'm a... well, I don't know quite what to call what I am yet. But it involves building stuff, both physical things and social and psychological things. I make things in my mind, in collaboration with other people, and then I go try to make those things in the world. It's all related to the flotilla. The idea of frittering away six months when I could have been tinkering on my little part of the flotilla twisted my stomach up - my body said no! wrong!
I'm really glad I traveled and had the experiences I did - there's nothing about my trip that I regret. And I'm done now. I'm ready to get on with building my life. In a strange way I didn't expect, my travels taught me how to fall in love with one place.
