And so it began

It is a misty autumn morning. Three unfamiliar masts above the roofs of a quiet Dutch harbour. It is around seven in the morning, the time of year when the Netherlands disappears beneath thick morning mists rising from the still warm earth into the cold air. Like every morning, I walked to the window of my living room overlooking a row of rather ordinary houses, probably built sometime in the 1950s. Above their roofs stood the familiar masts of Minerva, a sad tall ship that almost never left the harbour. Except this morning they weren't hers. Three wooden masts rose above the rooftops, with white sails casually resting beneath their yards. I rubbed my eyes. An eighteenth-century ship?

Afraid she would sail away, still in my pyjamas I hurried to the shore. And there she was. Until that morning I believed ships like this belonged to maritime novels, many of which I had devoured as a child, or to the models I built on the living-room table. Certainly not to an ordinary Dutch harbour only a few hundred metres from home. To my even greater surprise, the crew spoke Russian. "Where did you find this ship?" I asked one of them. "We built her." A man with long blond wavy hair answered as though there was nothing remarkable about it. Before leaving I asked where they were sailing next. "Hellevoetsluis. Maintenance." "Is it possible to sail with you?" "Of course. Just buy a ticket. But today we could use another pair of hands."

I volunteered for a few days and very quickly realised how naïve I had been about my usefulness in a dock. Before that week I thought sailing a wooden tall ship was the remarkable part. And it is. But building one, and keeping her alive, is even more remarkable. The endless maintenance. The endless repairs. The enormous physical work. The knowledge accumulated over generations. Only then did I begin to appreciate what it actually means to build something that can carry people safely across the sea. At the dock I was utterly useless for anything but shovelling giant mounds of dirt scraped from her massive hull below the waterline, while the crew made her look brand new again, ensuring her seaworthiness. Months later I was invited to join the spring voyage, from Rotterdam to Zaandam, a short passage across the North Sea, mostly at night. The first task sounded innocent enough. "Any volunteers to unpack the sails?" Without hesitation I raised my hand. Halfway up the shrouds I realised that masts look much shorter from the deck. My hands clenched around the rope until they became numb. My knees shook while children climbed past me as though they belonged there. "Dude... relax," I told myself. "You've wanted this since you were five. What's the worst that can happen? You'll fall to your death. But what a beautiful way to die." It seemed a poor moment to abandon the dream. Finally I reached the first yard, which from the deck had looked as thin as a pencil, yet in reality I could hardly embrace it. That day I climbed the rigging again and again until fear disappeared. Or perhaps until I simply stopped paying attention to it. I never made it to the highest yard, some thirty metres above the deck, but I no longer cared. The crow's nest eventually became my favourite place aboard. Not because of the view, although it was magnificent, but because of the silence. Only wind, squeaking timber, canvas and sky. Standing there, I often found myself thinking about the countless people who had crossed oceans exactly like this. How little separated them from the elements. How completely they depended on one another. I observed how remarkably little room there is for nonsense aboard a ship. The sea has an efficient way of reminding everyone what actually matters. Is that why so many sailors said, "I frequently overstayed by a few days, forgetting what my profession ashore even was"? Is that why so many people joined her for a day or two, and unexpectedly remained with her for years? I do not know. What I do know is this: that reluctance about stepping ashore. For what? Looking back, I don't think I was escaping anything. Maybe I was finding myself instead.