"So here is us, on the raggedy edge.”
This line crept up on me during a nostalgic (re)viewing of Joss Whedon’s 2005 sci-fi film Serenity, last week: suddenly, the discomforting realisation that the several thousand words I’ve written as updates over the past couple of years could have been distilled to just these eight:
“So here is us, on the raggedy edge.”
Plus, maybe, two more: “Help us.”
As I wrote in a recent update, our days have been spent readying Wrack and ourselves for the open sea. An unexpected windfall from an Australian donor made it possible to lay in a month’s supply of expensive prescription medications for Given and to order a much-needed electronic self-steering unit for Wrack (probably the most exciting — and essential — upgrade aboard the boat since we bought her, two years ago). However, we are still ruinously short of funds. Which is to say, we have no funds. We need take on a couple of weeks of provisions along with 155 litres of diesel and another canister of campinggaz to get us across the Mediterranean.
One by one, our dock neighbours have left us to head to warm seas off fashionable Spanish and Portugues tourist destinations. We won’t be joining them. Instead, we’ll sail for a day or two north-east along the Spanish coast, getting used to being untethered from the shore again, before we turn east to sail non-stop across several hundred nautical miles of open sea.
The search for a home that we once imagined as simple (if often uncomfortable) has turned into a real-life Odyssey. Everything about the voyage ahead is ill-defined and ill-equipped. We are afraid and uncertain — who wouldn’t be? We have no home in our head to return to. We have to sail on.
“So here is us, on the raggedy edge.” Again.
Please help us if you can.
rumschlumpel
in reply to erotador • • •