words & art by shé

bookshelf

Tag: Mexico

  • Tink

    Habibi has a side-kick, Tinkerbell the dinghy. Tink for short, rhyming with ‘dink’, which is what some folks call their dinghies. She’s a wooden rowboat with oars. “You need a motor,” said Francisco from the guard shack. I was returning with provisions from the big city (Loreto, about 18 highway miles away, population 20K). “I am…

  • In Praise of Floating Boat Hooks

    A piece of advice: given the choice of letting go of the boat hook or releasing the mooring line, always release the mooring line! Otherwise the current and Habibi’s momentum will wrench the boat hook from your grasp (which you’ve used to catch the line), and you will watch with dismay as both line and hook…

  • Heard

    Anxiety is finally taking a back seat. Feels like years that she’s been driving me around. But now I have a home — Habibi of the Sea. And time and space to write. A publisher contacted me recently. She’s interested in Letters to Lulu, the epistolary novella I penned in 2013, the same year I evacuated…

  • Gifts

    I finally left the harbor — yahoo! Habibi came through torrential rains and gale force winds just fine! Nothing shifted, nothing broke, the mooring held. The holding tank leaked a little because I’d been working on it and hadn’t tightened the lid enough. But all the hatches stayed battened until I opened them to the…

  • Hilary

    My mother did not evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit and the levees failed. She hunkered down in the first floor bathtub. She had cleared out — unnecessarily, in hindsight — many times before, she explained, so she decided to stay. “River of misery,” she saw afterwards. Followed by “river of joy,” the following Mardi…

  • Velerista

    Balanced. Smooth. Minor hull blistering. A bit of rust. A quality build. Satisfactory condition. These are the key words I took away from the sea trial and haul-out of Habibi last week. Yahoo! Two days with the marine surveyor, who crawled into and inspected every nook and cranny. We tested the engine, steering, navigation electronics,…

  • Come Sail Away

    Sometimes it takes a long time to get back to all right. Been ten years since I exited Olympia and began looking for a home by the sea. Took awhile to realize I could choose a boat instead of a house. Today I wired a 10% deposit on Habibi and contacted a marine surveyor to…

  • Round & Round

    Sometimes I get frustrated with my indirect, repetitive routes. Up and down California, before I can retrieve the tiny house. Roundabout Oregon before deciding not to live there. Across the country to save my mother, who didn’t want to be saved. Up and down Baja wondering what I’m doing with my life. All this traveling…

  • Certified

    I did it: sailed around the Sea of Cortez for five days with four strangers and learned to helm a boat. Smiling. The hardest part was the four strangers. Several were loud and chatty. Distracting. But then Doubt is loud and chatty, so I had to deal with it anyway. There were three written tests,…

  • La Bolsa Roja

    Cabo Pulmo is known as a primo snorkel spot, so early one morning I drove over and set out down the beach. I found a sandy spot to enter and donned my gear, putting land clothes in a brilliant red drawstring knapsack up on a dune. The bay was murky and cool. Every so often…