Home, Sweet Boat

In September, as wildfires consumed Northern California and the air was often too toxic to breathe, I began to question the unconventional life I had built in the Bay Area. When my husband, Tim, and I left Brooklyn in 2014, the idea of living on the water seemed romantic. I was newly pregnant with our first child, and we felt the tug of family — nearly all of ours was on the West Coast. But if I was going to leave New York, I wanted a change so dramatic it would quash unfair comparison. So instead of renting an apartment in wildly expensive San Francisco, we bought a boat and moved aboard.

In the five years since we pulled up to our slip across the bay in Alameda, we’ve brought two babies into our home, a 50-foot vintage trawler, a motor yacht with classic lines, Taiwanese cherry woodwork, a working writer’s price tag and — amid a sea of boats designed for people who have someone to cook for them — a cooking person’s galley. She had “Destiny” painted on the stern, but we renamed it Red Headed Stranger. It was an unspoken homage to my childhood: My father was a sailor, the kind that actually sailed. By association, I was a sailor too. So while buying a motorboat, not a sailboat, felt a bit like abandoning an inherited faith, my dad supported my conversion. Regardless of the vessel, he could see the beauty in the waterfront life we were building.

When I tell someone I live on a boat, most people assume I live on a houseboat. But the difference is big: while a houseboat might be able to putt around a placid lake, they’re far from seaworthy. The Red Headed Stranger could take us almost anywhere there’s a waterway to an ocean. The engine room, which houses two massive diesel Caterpillars, is larger than our daughter’s bedroom. We could decide tomorrow to head north to Puget Sound, or motor south to Mexico. We could keep going — through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean or, further still, across the Atlantic. But while our boat can go anywhere, it almost never leaves the slip.

To go anywhere — we have only traveled a few times in our life as liveaboards, as permanent boat residents are known — takes days of preparation. We have to store, tie-down, and otherwise restrain our possessions. Before each trip, no matter how small, we test and retest our systems. And, crucially, we have to get our confidence up. After all, taking your home — an irreplaceable, multiton, $140,000 machine laden with deep emotional significance (and which we haven’t yet paid off) — for a spin isn’t exactly a casual, carefree joy ride.

But when docked, our boat looks like a lot of family homes. She’s lived in, with house plants and overloaded dish racks and disorganized bookshelves. While the Red Headed Stranger is remarkable in its seaworthiness, the things that make it ours — the framed photographs, my favorite ceramic olive oil bottle, the fruit bowl we got as a wedding gift, the lamp Tim’s grandpa brought back from Japan — are not. Were we to throw off our lines and head into the bay, it would be an earthquake of our own making.

We’ve hung hammocks, planted gardens, and inflated kiddie pools on the Red Headed Stranger’s roof deck. (Who needs a yard?) We’ve made a community of the marina’s seals and rays, night herons and sea gulls, as well as its crusty sailors and resident drunks. Every window has a bay view and we can kayak from our back porch. Our sunrises and sunsets are so stunning, I have to restrain myself from sharing them again and again on social media. It feels like bragging.

I still miss New York City, but early in the pandemic I was grateful every day to be here — to be gently rocking in the brackish water of the Oakland Estuary, the only liveaboards on our dock. We were isolated yet surrounded by a metropolis of eight million. Living in the Bay Area, we could order almost anything we needed online, from toilet paper to 20-pound bags of flour to some of the world’s best produce, and have it delivered to our gate. Aside from passing boaters — who the kids greeted with waves and cheers, as if they were being rescued from a desert island — we saw almost no one. Beyond the ambient stress of living through a pandemic, our life was oddly peaceful.

From our boat, pre-Covid, we can typically hear the drudgery of traffic on I-880, the planes coming and going from Oakland International, children squealing at the marina playground, sirens and car alarms and parties on neighboring boats. It feels, in short, like we live in a city. Despite my sailing background, I am an unapologetic city person. But during those first months of shelter-in-place, the skyline was empty and quiet, the playgrounds taped off, the raucous energy of the Bay Area silenced. It was deeply unnerving to stand on our boat deck and see only the occasional car on the interstate, not a plane in the sky.

Even so, the forced break from our collective business gave me room to breathe. Given all that was happening in the world, I can’t imagine remembering the early days of the pandemic fondly. But in those moments, when my mind went to the darkest of dark places, I took comfort in our boat-home and all of the ways it was the best possible place for us to be.

But life aboard the Red Headed Stranger isn’t idyllic. Like living on a farm or a remote corner of Alaska, it is both magnificent and messy — challenging in ways you can’t fully appreciate until you’ve experienced them. For me, early on, the learning curve sometimes felt insurmountable. Boats are complex systems. Marinas are peculiar places. Tim and I have had to become intimate with marine plumbing in a way I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. We’ve lost innumerable Legos, two iPhones, and a high chair (long story) to the voracious waters of the estuary. We installed a new washer-dryer using the boat’s built-in dinghy crane, a feat that involved swinging a $1,200 appliance over the open water.

And we regularly fend off the excesses of our fellow boat owners, who bumper-car around the marina when their motors, or they themselves, are too impaired to navigate. Even during normal times, living on a boat was more exciting — with higher highs and lower lows — than our landlocked, apartment-dwelling life.

The pandemic had already upended that reality. Then the wildfires arrived.

The fires burned for months, one after the next. Surrounded by water, we were fortunate to be spared from the flames that consumed so much of our region. But the fires created a blanket of smoke that forced us indoors for weeks at a time. With two small, extremely active children, our boat-home went from a peaceful refuge to a squalid, claustrophobic animal shelter. We were the animals, and we were increasingly feral.

Without its openness to the outdoors — the hours on its roof deck, painting or splashing or hammock-swinging, the barbecues and boat drinks on the back deck, the socially distant get-togethers with a dear friend who arrived by sailing dinghy or paddle board — the boat became a goldfish bowl with a 360-degree view of a horrifyingly orange sky. But the worst of it was the heat. Old boats, like old houses, are drafty. They’re built to breathe. Suddenly, the boat’s airiness was not just another quirk of boat life, but a genuine danger. To keep the smoke out, we sealed ourselves in, using insulated cardboard to block vents and seals around the doors. Our salon, as the main living area is called, reached 100-plus degrees. The air was suffocating and stagnant. What we’d loved about the room, its loft-like wall-to-wall windows, now made me feel like a fly trapped between dual-pane glass.

Over five years in California, we’d never used an air-conditioner. Living on the water, we’d never needed one; we just threw open the windows and turned on a fan. Now the kids, five-year-old Roxie and two-year-old Felix, and I were in our underwear, taking turns misting each other with a gardening spray bottle while sprawled on our couch or flat on the cherry-wood floor. I didn’t dare use the stove. Instead of the elaborate homemade meals I’d been preparing during the pandemic, we ate “snack dinners” of cold vegetables and fruit, cheese and crackers.

The Red Headed Stranger’s most essential amenity — the bay itself, the perfection of the California climate — had been stolen from us. With it went any remaining markers of normality and with that went some of my confidence in our unorthodox family life.

But just as the fires initially made me feel conflicted about where, and how, we’d chosen to settle, they ultimately reminded me that we’re not, in fact, trapped. Were we to simply throw off our lines and head out to sea, it would be an earthquake of our own making. But like many things, once you’ve done it, the easier and less overwhelming it becomes.

Even as friends and acquaintances leave California by what feels like the dozens, I feel more rooted here than ever. We’re not going anywhere. Not yet, anyway. Still, it’s comforting to know we can — that we don’t have to leave our home, because we can take it with us. Or, more accurately, it can take us.