We’d arrived on the island of Kauai just hours before and were on our way to the boatyard, eager to meet this ship and ‘lady’ of our dreams. Navigating through Lihue to the harbor, the winding road opened to a grassy field littered with decrepit vessels. None of them appeared capable of ever tasting the sea again. I anxiously looked for the boat that would become the center of our lives, scanning the yard for a likeness of the photos we had received in the mail.

“There she is, over there.” Tosh, my husband, pointed excitedly as he drove around the access road to the back corner.

“Yikes, she is huge!” I exclaimed.

At fifty feet overall, she was the biggest boat in the yard and in far worse shape than the photos we’d seen. In those images her white topsides, black waterline, and burgundy bottom paint were clear and apparent, with rig and superstructure, including rails and cabins, all intact.

Today there was no rig, no rails, and her colors were barely distinguishable. I could make out the remnants of faded blue tarps, their shreds hanging off her cradle, the cabins, and over the stern. Tosh drove off the road, cut across the yard between the boats and came to a stop twenty feet from her port side. He turned off the truck. We sat in total silence for a long moment, lost in our thoughts as we looked at Elixir, the object of our aspirations for the last seven months.

“Whoa,” my ten-year-old son Gavin said, the first to speak, “I don’t think that boat will float. It’s too old.”

“Ahh, she just needs a little TLC and a coat of paint. She’ll be shipshape in no time,” Tosh countered.

I agreed with Gavin’s assessment. She was enormous, at least six times as big as our newly acquired truck. She sat in a cradle of ten-by-ten-inch square beams held together with two by fours cross-structured for stability and surrounded by swathes of trash and overgrown weeds. Her dingy white topside paint was peeling down to bare wood, her bottom paint almost gone. Like a mangy dog with great furless patches, her neglect was extreme, heartbreaking.

“How do we get up there?” I pointed, unable to see the cabins from the ground.

“Climb, I guess,” Tosh said. Finding foot holds on the cradle, he scrambled up and swung his leg over onto the deck twelve feet above me. I followed more cautiously, but the cradle was solid and didn’t move with my weight, nor did Elixir as I stepped aboard for the first time.

“Watch where you put your feet,” Tosh called from somewhere out of sight.

The teak decks were partially torn up, leaving holes to fall through. The two cabins had large portholes, their glass cracked, and bronze rims weathered verdigris. As I made my way aft, I gingerly picked up bits of weathered tarp to see what was hidden beneath. Behind the cabin, the deck abruptly ended, and I stared into a mess of broken beams strewn haphazardly like a pile of giant used matchsticks. They had fallen onto the old engine where it sat rusting in pools of slimy black water. I moved more of the stringy tarp and saw the companionway hatch. One of the doors was ajar, revealing a ladder descending into the dimness below.

Curious, I climbed backward down the ladder into the dark. The smell was awful; mold, damp, rot, and another scent, a creepy crawly scent I would become familiar with. There were loose boards thrown haphazardly over what I would learn were called the floors, the vertical triangles between the frames in a boat. Where did Roy sleep? I thought about the previous owner. How could he have lived here? The interior seemed to be mostly dismantled.

Stepping carefully, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I discerned the intact galley lockers. Golden spruce doors were decorated with small cut out anchors in the corners. How quaint, I thought and instinctively reached to undo a small bronze latch. The door fell open, and I was stunned for a moment as I beheld the entire inner surface of the hull inside the locker seething and squirming with cockroaches. Layered several inches thick, shiny and brown, I heard whispering accompanied by soft chitinous clicking that was coming from the frenetic movement of the insects massing together.

Reacting instantly, I closed the locker door softly but firmly. I quickly retreated up the companionway ladder to the deck where the fresh air of the harbor cleared my nostrils. After finding my way down the cradle, I noticed the skin on my entire body was crawling. I wanted to jump in the nearby ocean to wash away the entire experience.

“Did you go in there?” I asked Tosh when I got back down.

“Uh huh,” he mumbled slowly.

“Is this what you thought it would be like?”

“Ahh, not quite.”

“Are we still going to do this?” I wondered how on earth I could work, and eventually live, in this stinking, bug infested, decaying old boat.

“Well, we’ll just clean her up, get rid of all the garbage, and see what’s left, I guess.”

Tosh was generally unshakable. However, in this moment, he seemed far more subdued than usual.

“I am glad you can see the possibilities here,” I said, trying to find something reassuring to say, determined to stay outwardly positive. But I thought, I can’t stand the smell and the cockroaches. How could this boat ever be restored to something beautiful, clean, and wholesome? It seemed impossible and extremely unlikely to happen. Ever. But I kept that to myself. For now.

I missed my spiritual life. I missed that place of peace and feeling that everything would be taken care of by something bigger than I was. Why did I agree to do this? Was it my love for Tosh? It looked far worse than I’d imagined, but there was nothing else left. I mean, we had no other “life,” only this one. Only this boat. Only my husband and my family. That was all that mattered, wasn’t it?

But let’s go back a little further in time, to when I first heard about this boat, only seven months before landing in Kauai.

Deborah Rudell

Deborah Rudell lives in San Diego where she is a college professor and participates in her city’s vibrant writing community. She is a graduate of Hay House Writer’s Workshop and the Certificate in Memoir Writing Program at San Diego Writers, Ink. Her work has been published in the International Memoir Writers Association’s anthology, Shaking the Tree: I Didn’t See That One Coming. Deborah lives with her black cat in a tiny house built in 1906 by a retired sea captain, who carved a sailing ship into the front door. Grit & Grace: The Transformation of a Ship & a Soul is her first book. For further information visit, www.DeborahRudell.com.