A Millennial Aboard

When my parents finally moved to a boat a bit over a year ago, I was at somewhat of a loss.

To be fair, they’ve been talking about living on a boat since before I graduated high school, so perhaps I should have seen it coming. But when your parents say they plan on selling the house and taking to the sea as soon as your younger sister leaves for college, you expect them to
follow through about as much as you expect your seven-year-old nephew to win the Presidential Election. So when they finally told me to start putting my things in boxes, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was caught by surprise.

The change was a bit hard to get used to at first. Before they moved, I had regular contact with my family, probably more than an average college student should. I blame this on my Latino background. I lived about three hours away by train. After my last class every Friday, I would dutifully hop on Amtrak to spend the weekend with my family in our Bay Area house. The constant travelling was stressful, but I enjoyed seeing the people I had been raised by and the place I called home.

Now visiting my parents is a bit of a hassle, to put it lightly. I would only see them a couple times a year, in the brief breaks between school quarters, when I could afford to take the time off to travel to whichever remote location their boat was currently docked in. When I wasn’t visiting them, I was given emails detailing their location and sailing plans and told to contact the Coast Guard if I didn’t hear back from them in a while. I developed abandonment issues—kidding, of course (for the most part).

Socially speaking, when your parents decide to do something fairly bizarre and out-of-the-blue like move to the other side of the country in order to pursue a water-borne nomadic lifestyle, two things happen: your friends suddenly have a lot of difficulty relating to your family situation, and word about it ends up spreading faster than you’d like.

I was suddenly known by people outside of the tiny sphere of my social group. I really wasn’t that famous in the grand scheme of things, but as somewhat of a social recluse, this was more fame than I knew how to handle. People I had never met would know me as the person whose
parents live on a boat. First-time conversations were more nautically-inclined than they were before, and I did my best to seem as sailorly as possible and give off the impression that I understood what my parents were doing. Mothers of friends would feel sorry for me and offer to adopt me.

So it’s true that I now regularly experience a few minutes of fame and intrigue, courtesy of a decision that was not mine. But if I’m being completely honest, it isn’t me that holds the fame and it isn’t really my parents, either. If anyone is a celebrity, it’s the cat.

More often than not on a typical day meeting up with friends, I end up handing around pictures of my cat Oliver. Oliver riding on the dinghy, Oliver on a leash with my mom on a Bahamian beach. People would ask me for updates on how he was doing. They would also ask me his opinion on the move. I would tell them that I didn’t know, that he’s a bit hard to read at times. From what I see of him, he seems happy enough, though. He’s kinder to me when we’re on the boat than when we’re on land. I think it’s because the boat has no heater and he enjoys the warmth my body gives off.

For the most part, life on the boat (assuming you’re a guest and not a sailor) is fairly mellow. Occasionally the boat would rock around while I was asleep and I would roll a couple of feet to either side. I got used to it.

I would do small things to help my parents sail when I could. Sometimes I would help by staying up late to watch the little lights on the horizon. This sounds calming and romantic—and it is if you forget that its main purpose is to ensure that we don’t crash.

If you lack sailing expertise, though, for the most part you are useless to the crew except as moral support. There were many hours my parents spent tugging on various ropes and plotting the boat’s course that I spent primarily immersed in my sketchbook. On the plus side, I get much better at drawing whenever I go visit them.

Visiting my parents is really not as bad as what I had once imagined it would be like, despite the lack of wifi and the occasional lack of drinkable water. I used to hate the idea of sailing. I know a lot of people dislike it because they get nauseous, but I’ve always been immune to seasickness, so that wasn’t the problem. My parents used to take me sailing rather often, frequently during fairly rough seas, and I would spend the hours in the hull reading a book.

I guess I disliked the claustrophobia of it. I felt confined in those floating vehicles that did not belong to me. But now that we’re no longer renting a boat and I have a space that is (mostly) my own, surrounded by the people I love, the boat no longer really bothers me. It just feels like home—a home far away from any other place I’ve called home, but a home nonetheless.