If you believe my work has value and enjoy reading on a platform that doesn’t steal your attention with ads, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and sharing my work with your family and friends.
Lucas
Ushuaia, January 21, 1992
The wind blows safely from the west, but change hangs in the air.
Navarino Island.
I wait for the Pelagic to dock and see that beautiful 16.5-meter sailing vessel approaching Puerto Williams. She sails half-wind, and Julia is on the front deck, ready to bring down the sails while Skip Novak—yes, the Skip Novak—captains the ship.
“Hey Luca, how are you doing?” Julia asks.
She’s gorgeous, always with a smile, a great sense of humour, and a lovely mixed accent from Australia and Kenya, where she was raised when the British Empire was still in full swing.
“Doing just fine,” I say. How was Antarctica?”
“Ah, you know, first you got the storms, then the ice, then the penguins, the ohs and ahs from the tourists, and of course, cooking in a vessel that bangs you around is also a real joy,” she says as the sail comes down. “How’s Catalina doing?”
“I don’t know. She went with Diana to the hospital for a check-up.”
She lowers herself from the boat and toward me on the dock.
“Hey Luca, I was thinking of skipping the next trip, so you better talk with Skip. He’s okay with replacing me for that one.”
“Me, sailing with Skip? On the Pelagic? I will talk with him right away.”
“He is busy doing some paperwork but will come back tomorrow. Talk with Catalina and let us know. If not, it’s all good. Don’t worry about Skip. He will find somebody.”
Of course, he will find somebody!
Skip Novak is best known for participating in four Whitbread Round the World Races. At age 25, he became a living legend by navigating the British Cutter King Legend to second place in 1977. Now, he’s widely considered the world’s preeminent authority on polar sailing.
The sailing vessel Pelagic is also a legend. It was built in 1987 in Southhampton with the goal of exploring the polar regions. The boat's ethos is robustness and simplicity with a go-everywhere philosophy.
I almost skip uphill to our tiny house. I want to be part of those two legends.
Catalina.
When I was in my late twenties, my biological clock started ticking, but after the gynecologist told me there was only a very slight chance to have children without interference, becoming pregnant was in a very distant corner of my mind.
I was not the kind of woman to go to a fertility clinic or tell her husband, “I’m ovulating.” If I were destined to have a child, it would come naturally and freely.
Do not long for what nature doesn’t want. That was my moeke’s philosophy after seven pregnancies, of which three were miscarriages. Another was a stillbirth at eight months
With me, she was bedridden by the fifth month because she had a placenta previa and lost a lot of blood getting up. At seven months of being pregnant with me, my father had to carry her to the taxi and rush her to the hospital, where they performed a cesarian.
“We zijn allebei door het oog van een naald gekropen.” We crawled through an eye of a needle, my moeke told me.
When I found out I was pregnant with you, Nolan, these thoughts were running through my mind—that and paperwork.
I had started to claim a piece of land along the Beagle Channel, west of Ushuaia. Land that was only accessible by boat. I pictured myself there with a big belly while making our homestead.
The Beagle Channel.
I thought about the Yaghan people living on the shores of the Beagle Channel before the white men came and wiped them all out. Their women would wade their canoes along the beach through the ice-cold waters of the Beagle Channel and dip their newborns in the water to make them more resistant.
Is that why you love ice baths and swimming in cold water, Nolan? You tell me that it’s for muscle recovery and increased testosterone, but you’ve loved it since childhood. The spirit of the land you were conceived runs through you.
As your father always says, you were sperm on the rocks.
Cape Horn: the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego.
Lucas
Catalina isn’t home yet, so I make myself an instant coffee. I rehearse how to tell her about the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
When she finally arrives, I jump up for a kiss. There’s an energy to her I don’t quite recognize, or maybe it’s my own excitement I haven’t processed.
“Hello, beautiful! I got good news!”
The way she looks at me transfers me back to the moment I met her—the moment I fell in with her in Antwerp.1
“You better sit down”.
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
It takes me a second to sit down.
“I’m pregnant.”
“You mean you have a baby?”
“I sure hope it’s a baby.”
My brain cells fire, working their hardest, just formulate the very obvious.
“I will be a father,” I state or ask. I don’t know what the hell is going on in my mind.
“Yes. How do you feel?”
“How do I—”
I can’t talk. I grab my wife, tears filling my eyes. I kiss her and we dance to the music playing in our hearts.
“And what is the good news you wanted to tell me?” she asks.
“Well, Julia told me that Skip Novak was okay with me replacing her as a sailor and cook on the next trip.”
“And you made a decision?” she asks. “Is a lovely pregnant woman going to make love to you or Captain Grumpy? What will it be?”
We both know she won't stop me no matter the decision I make. She always supports me no matter how crazy or flat-out irresponsible my decisions are. And she has paid a high price for it… more than once.
“Yes, I made up my mind. Let’s get out of here. We’re leaving.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know, baby. We need a good hospital where doctors don’t smoke. Somebody told me that the best hospital in South America is in Santiago de Chile, Clinica Alleman or something like that. That’s where we’re going.”
The end of Forever Foreign.
If you read my last post, “Coping With Failure: Replacing Unpaid Work With Leisure Time,” you know this is the previous story from Forever Foreign. Originally, this story was supposed to come three months (and three countries) later, but I wanted those who read Forever Foreign from the beginning to experience the power of two children bound by kismet strings and their longing to feel the end of the world, Tierra del Fuego.
To experience the cyclical narrative, you can find the first chapter here.
Why did we stop Forever Foreign?
You can find the answer in “Coping With Failure: Replacing Unpaid Work With Leisure Time.”
Where will Born Without Borders go from here?
Please help me answer that question by voting for the poles in “Coping With Failure: Replacing Unpaid Work With Leisure Time.”
Your support and input make all the difference.
When a baby's conceived an angel says
"such and such
is to be promised to such and such"
And harder, much harder than parting seas,
is to make in heaven a match
so what seems lucky might have been work
and angels know that, and storks
and me who is writing everything down
and rocks of fire that are your crown