When people hear that I live on a 42’ sailboat in Ballard, the most common reaction I get is, “You live on a sailboat? Wow. That is SO cool!” I suppose it is. But during the decision and then the transition process I felt anything but cool. I didn’t just say, “Yeah, let’s do it! Let’s sell our house and all our stuff and live simply and shrink our footprint.” I cried and argued and worried and stressed and resisted – qualities and behavior not often associated with cool people. So while it may be “cool” to live on a boat, I feel like an imposter accepting this particular designation.
When my husband first started talking about it, I didn’t take him too seriously. Dan had had so many schemes and plans to move us toward financial freedom over the years that I began calling him “Ralph” after Jackie Gleason’s character from the Honeymooners. “OK, Ralph, sounds great,” I’d say when he presented me with another idea.
I was sure it couldn't happen because, well, what would we do with all our stuff? How would we ever find the time to sort through our things, decide what to keep, what to store and what to toss? How could we stomach putting the house on the market and having strangers traipsing through every day? What about actually moving - leaving our dear little house? Changing our mailing address? It paralyzed me to think of adding such daunting work to all we were already juggling.
Truthfully, we had been toying with the idea for a while. During our many summers cruising the west coast of Canada, we traveled deeply into the rainforest and even more deeply into ourselves. After a month or more on our floating home that provided everything we needed, I would dreamily say, “I would be happy if we lived on the boat full-time. I could do this.” And I really believed I could.
But once Dan started getting serious about it, I learned pretty quickly what a faker I was. I panicked when I realized that this one wasn’t going away. The universe has a bothersome way of calling you out when you start patting yourself on the back at how cool you are. “Oh yeah?” it seems to say, “let’s see just how you deal with THIS.” And suddenly you are looking in the mirror, stark naked, not an undergarment or hair-product or tube of mascara in sight to disguise the flaws, the raw truth of how far you still have to go to that perceived coolness to which so many of us aspire. Grasping at straws, I demanded the impossible: a boat with three dedicated sleeping rooms, a couch, and a master bed that could be gotten in and out of from either side. “It won’t happen,” I secretly thought. That way I would never be exposed.
