On Arriving

December 21, 2016 by s/v sionna 11 Comments

At what point does a transient – whether by car, plane, foot or boat – determine that they have “arrived”? How do they know? If traveling and moving on have been your purpose of existence for 4 months, how and when do you transition to staying and growing roots?

Thus was the (admittedly existential) discussion over rum punch aboard the good ship Sionna the last couple of nights. Attempting to answer the question, “Are we there?”

Since long before we moved aboard the boat in August, people have been asking us where we were headed and what our plans were. And our short answer has always been a variation on two ideals: “South” & “Someplace warm”

So what is “South”? And what is “Warm”? From Maine you could say that pretty much anything is “South”, but of course we meant “far enough south that it rarely or never gets colder than the number of years I’ve been alive”. Far enough south to be warm.

Boston doesn’t cut it. (31 F as I write this)

New York City isn’t even close. (Also 31 F)

Charleston, South Carolina regularly dips into the 40’s several days a month in the winter. And in case you’re not aware, neither of us is in our forties anymore.

There was a quantum shift for the crew of Sionna when we reached St. Augustine, Florida. It wasn’t a conscious thing, so much as a sudden, unexplained lack of a drive to keep moving. We still have places to be and things to see farther south, but suddenly the urgency was gone.

We’d stopped needing to run away from winter. We’d arrived.