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Politics & The Nation


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SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010


MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST After returning to Maryland, the Crafton family continues to share the boat’s small living quarters. Trading possessions for family ties sail from A1


“I went to a Wal-Mart the first week we were back, and I had to come home and take a nap,” says Tom, rolling his ice-gray eyes and leaning against the teak bulk- head. “It’s way too soon for that. Some of our cruising friends warned us about reentry. Baby steps, baby steps.” After seven years at sea, the


Crafton Five are coming ashore, but slowly. They are in no hurry to shed the awe they feel about what they have accomplished: an 83- month, 30,000-mile circumnavi- gation of both the globe and the roughest years of their kids’ child- hoods. “We just seemed to get along


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better the longer we were out there,” marvels Tom, who turned 50 in May as they crept through the doldrums of the equatorial Atlantic. “The day we moved onto the boat, the sibling rivalry stopped. I don’t think they ever complained, not once.” His wife bobs her head slightly in the wake created by a small boat puttering by on Cattail Creek, just off the Magothy River. She concedes that she was the driving force behind the decision to finally point the bow home- ward, but she, too, would set out all over again — if the kids were younger.


“I would never trade the time we had to raise our kids out there, seeing the world through their eyes, being together 24/7,” she says. “But now it’s time for them to come back and learn more about their own country. They need to start their own lives.” “And plus, we’re flat broke,” she adds with a laugh.


Focusing on family


It took everything the Craftons had to keep afloat for most of the trip, but that was largely the point. After achieving two-career success in Anchorage (Kathy as an ICU nurse, Tom as a family psychologist), the couple found that big-house status and plenty of everything left them feeling not much of anything, save frus- tration and want. With both Jena and Ben having significant devel- opmental and speech delays, what the parents really craved was less stuff and more time to- gether. “We looked at each other and


said, ‘What the hell are we do- ing?’ ” Tom says. It took six months to liquidate


everything. By 2001, they had sold two houses in Alaska and their share of a family property in Severna Park, where Tom grew up. With the proceeds, they bought the sturdiest ocean cross- er they could find, a Taiwanese- built Hans Christian with twin yellow masts, and set forth. It was an adjustment, of course. There were head bumps in the tiny sleeping berths and five hurricanes during the year and a half they spent prepping in Florida. But almost at once, an in- stinctive choreography emerged, allowing five people to colonize a space not much larger than a


1 Craftons’ sail from Maryland June 30, 2003


Pacific Ocean


South Carolina Mexico


Guatemala Honduras


French Polynesia (Fr.)


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Pacific Ocean


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5 6 78 9


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Galapagos Islands (Ecu.)


place to provision,” says Tom. “It’s like a desert with volcanoes.” They spent hours in that first


grocery store in Charleston. “Oh my God, Pop-Tarts!” Kalena, who goes by Kali, remembers exclaim- ing.


Together still COURTESY OF TOM CRAFTON


Siblings Kali and Ben Crafton rest from hiking at Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand.


on postlocal.com


See a photo gallery of highlights from the Crafton family’s travels by sea in seven years away from suburban Maryland.


minivan. The close quarters stayed re- markably clear of clutter. They even got rid of the small refrigera- tor, not wanting to run the smelly engine just to keep beer cool. At sea, they lived on fish and canned goods. Ashore, they delighted in taking jitney buses to the market each day, living a local’s life. They wandered the Americas for a couple of years, finally cross- ing the Panama Canal in 2006. This was pure blue-water cruis- ing, sailing for miles and for months between Pacific Islands. Vanuatu, where the people owned the least and smiled the most, was one of their favorites. They stayed three months. “They are the happiest people in the world,” Tom says. “It re- inforced everything we believed about putting time with the fami- ly over this blind pursuit of ma- terial things.” There was a break, 18 months


in a New Zealand harbor. They would have settled there perma- nently but for bureaucratic has- sles and the cost of living. To buy a house would have meant selling the boat, and that wasn’t an op- tion. “She’s like a member of our family now,” Kathy says. And so they sailed, ever west- ward. Even now, they make a point of gathering to watch the sunset together, and of getting up early to see it rise. In many places, they traded for fresh food from the canoes that surrounded them when they dropped the hook in an island harbor. Bunches of bananas and mountains of fish could be had for an empty plastic bottle, cov- eted for storage in places where everything is biodegradable. But it wasn’t all mangoes and


papayas. Their Pacific diet also in- cluded betel nuts, kava (a ceremo- nial hallucinogen), fish intestines and, at separate events, dog and bat. Last spring, during the final 43-day crossing from Ascension Island to Charleston, S.C., they lived almost entirely on canned tuna. “Ascension is the worst


25 Craftons’ return to Maryland June 5, 2010


EUROPE


Atlantic Ocean


Florida Belize


Colombia Panama


AMERICA SOUTH


AMERICA SOUTH


Ascension (Br.)


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Atlantic Ocean


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Helena (Br.)


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South Africa


THE WASHINGTON POST


Pacific Ocean


AFRICA AFRICA Indian Ocean Mauritius 2019


Reunion (Fr.)


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Cocos Islands (Australia)


Guinea


Papua New


AUSTRALIA


New Caledonia (Fr.)


Solomon Islands


17 16 Vanuatu 15 14 13 Samoa


12 11 Fiji


EUROPE ASIA ASIA


They were done. Although Tom still yearns for those days when cyclone season was the only item on his calendar, even he cops to the emotional fatigue of facing potential hazards month after month, connected to their former lives only by sporadic e-mail via high-frequency radio. After seven years without using


a credit card, they went into debt the day they reached the United States, paying marina fees upon their arrival. A few weeks after getting back to Tom’s parents’ house in Severna Park, they are still debriefing each other on a re- markable chapter in their family history. Least favorite ocean: the turbu-


lent Indian (“the washing ma- chine,” they call it). Worst mo- ment on land: when the jeep they were riding in plunged over a ridge on a steep New Guinean mountain. Rudest encounter: a few days after reaching Mary- land, when a cranky boat owner warned Jena and Ben to keep their rowboat away. “I can’t remember a mean word


anywhere else on our trip,” Tom says. “We’re relearning how things are around here.” And maybe doing some teach-


ing, too. Tom thinks the experi- ence that buoyed his own family so profoundly could be a model for anyone looking for a kinder, family-focused way to navigate the world. He’s working on a book and hopes to find some public- speaking gigs. For now, they plan to stay in their floating cocoon. Tom will home-school Ben; Kathy will be- gin a nursing job in Baltimore in August. Jena has already joined a choir at a church down the road. Kali, who evolved from an 11- year-old passenger to an ace sail- or, multilingual adventurer and published essayist (Cruising World, August 2010), is climbing onto the launching pad. She’s ap- plying to college, working part time, and beginning to meet friends and venture away from her two-mast shelter. “It’s nice to be able to make some long-term plans, yeah, rath- er than changing countries every month,” she says. Faintly freckled with a friendly grin, she could have stepped from a Norman Rockwell painting, except for the henna chain snaking up her an- kle. “It’s nice to get some space.” After spending most every night of the past seven years shar- ing a V-shaped mattress in the bow compartment with her sister, last week Kali spent her first night ashore in her grandparents’ air-conditioned guest room. It was very still, very roomy and very lonely.


“I missed the boat,” she says. “I missed being with everyone.” hendrixs@washpost.com


Islands New


Zealand


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