I'm not sure how, when or why the idea hit me. But it did. Kind of like the decision to quit a new job 10 years ago, buy the first van I could afford, and then hit the road. Something about parents dying I guess.
Anyway, I'm barely scraping by financially. I couldn't even afford to go to Tennessee to see my mother when she was dying.
So now I want to buy a sailboat (I can't sail. I've only been sailing a couple of times and then I was a passenger) and sail 500 miles down a strange river with my dead mother's ashes, reunite with my brother and spend a week arguing and whatever with him before dispatching mom to the waves. At least it's true to the Southern character of bizarre and dramatic. Do you really think Flannery O'Connor would have been famous had she lived in Colorado? No. They've have pegged her as crazy and locked her up.
Here in the South this kind of thinking is normal. I'll be criticized for not having a gun, a dog and a pickup truck in the story. But someone will write a country music song and include those for me I'm sure.
Start a Go-Fund me campaign and depend on the curiosity, generosity and compassion of strangers to help me raise the money for the boat, the trip and the training. Apparently sailing, unlike living in a Walmart parking lot in a 30+ year-old multi-green-hued van named Booger, can kill you pretty fast if you don't know what you're doing. I have no desire to personally deliver my mother's ashes to Davy Jone's locker somewhere along the Tenn-Tom. So I will need my powerboat license, and at least four days of hands-on training and six weeks of practice before I can take the boat anywhere outside of the Chesapeake Bay.
I'll need to find a sailboat, or a decent houseboat that will hold me and my two-cats. What's an adventure without animals right? I'll have to buy maps, plans, safety stuff, an inflatable dinghy thingy to take me from an anchored boat to shore or a dock. There'll be budgets and planning and stuff. Unlike the van I can't just whip into a parking lot, lock the doors and crash for the night. After looking at all I have to do, I figured out if I had enough money I could just throw money at the problem.
But I don't have that kind of money. I still have bills and a life, such as it is, that must stay on track for at least 2-4 weeks while I'm sailing Wild Betty's ashes to the gulf...That's why I started this blog. So you can see what it takes to do something like this, and what comes out of it along the way. In a nutshell: Learn to sail. Buy a boat. Practice. Save, beg, borrow or raise the money to do all I need to do. Get to Memphis, or wherever this river journey starts. It may need to be the Intracostal Waterway. I don't know yet. Set sail. Cry a lot. Arrive. Release. Return to my life. Write a book about it all. After all, I'm a professional writer (meaning I consistently make enough money to keep me off the streets), and that's why I do. Sounds simple doesn't it. We'll see.
So now I want to buy a sailboat (I can't sail. I've only been sailing a couple of times and then I was a passenger) and sail 500 miles down a strange river with my dead mother's ashes, reunite with my brother and spend a week arguing and whatever with him before dispatching mom to the waves. At least it's true to the Southern character of bizarre and dramatic. Do you really think Flannery O'Connor would have been famous had she lived in Colorado? No. They've have pegged her as crazy and locked her up.
Here in the South this kind of thinking is normal. I'll be criticized for not having a gun, a dog and a pickup truck in the story. But someone will write a country music song and include those for me I'm sure.
Here's my wild-ass plan:
Start a Go-Fund me campaign and depend on the curiosity, generosity and compassion of strangers to help me raise the money for the boat, the trip and the training. Apparently sailing, unlike living in a Walmart parking lot in a 30+ year-old multi-green-hued van named Booger, can kill you pretty fast if you don't know what you're doing. I have no desire to personally deliver my mother's ashes to Davy Jone's locker somewhere along the Tenn-Tom. So I will need my powerboat license, and at least four days of hands-on training and six weeks of practice before I can take the boat anywhere outside of the Chesapeake Bay.
I'll need to find a sailboat, or a decent houseboat that will hold me and my two-cats. What's an adventure without animals right? I'll have to buy maps, plans, safety stuff, an inflatable dinghy thingy to take me from an anchored boat to shore or a dock. There'll be budgets and planning and stuff. Unlike the van I can't just whip into a parking lot, lock the doors and crash for the night. After looking at all I have to do, I figured out if I had enough money I could just throw money at the problem.
But I don't have that kind of money. I still have bills and a life, such as it is, that must stay on track for at least 2-4 weeks while I'm sailing Wild Betty's ashes to the gulf...That's why I started this blog. So you can see what it takes to do something like this, and what comes out of it along the way. In a nutshell: Learn to sail. Buy a boat. Practice. Save, beg, borrow or raise the money to do all I need to do. Get to Memphis, or wherever this river journey starts. It may need to be the Intracostal Waterway. I don't know yet. Set sail. Cry a lot. Arrive. Release. Return to my life. Write a book about it all. After all, I'm a professional writer (meaning I consistently make enough money to keep me off the streets), and that's why I do. Sounds simple doesn't it. We'll see.
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