Bringing Home… Home

The Backstory

For four years, my address was a thirty-eight-foot Gulfstar named Starship. Built in Florida in the late seventies. Fiberglass hull, tired systems, honest bones. I kept the name because renaming a boat is bad luck, and because I liked the joke. A boat named for the heavens, mostly worried about weather, bilge water, and where to sleep that night.

Highbourne always felt like the first sentence. Coffee in the cockpit, no wind yet, water so green it did not need a name. South of there, Shroud and Leaf sat quiet inside the park, where you do not fish and you do not take. You just pass through and behave yourself. Then the Sound opens up, and the world gets serious. Squalls come fast out there. So does grace.

I remember Norman's Cut running hard with tide, an anchor set like the bottom had teeth, and a lobster good enough to ruin every lobster after it. I remember trading a fuel filter to a couple from Abaco for a mango and feeling like civilization had briefly remembered what it was for. Georgetown was moonlight, anchor lights, cockpit smoke, and some stranger three boats over playing guitar like he had lost something too.

That is where the song came from. Not from escape. I thought that was what the boat was, but I was wrong. Escape runs from. Starship was running toward. Toward a thing I could not name until the place, the shelter, and the soul lined up for a minute. That is home, best I can figure. Not a coordinate. Not a feeling. A small mercy when the anchor holds, the hull swings easy, and something in your chest says, “Here.”

- Echo Thatch, 2020, Exuma Sound