David Vann - A Mile Down - The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

The restaurant had a live local band playing Clapton and Jimmy Buffet songs. We splurged, having a Bushwhacker first, then BBQ chicken and ribs. I held a bag of ice on my knee. We talked of California and still getting out on the water. Michael, who had bought Grendel , would take us sailing on the bay.

A large sloop was coming in, its navigation lights and lower spreaders lit. It was a beautiful, expensive boat, not nearly as big as ours, but probably seventy feet. It was moving slowly, all its fenders out, down the fairway between docks A and B. There was a gusty wind, as usual, so they’d be exposed and sliding sideways in the fairway, but they would turn upwind into their slip, which would make it easy. Even with the wind right, though, I had never relaxed. It was too much weight, with too many possible surprises and too little power to control. I didn’t think I would miss big boats. Maybe small powerboats were the right thing. Nancy was always joking about boats small enough you can stick out an arm or a leg at the dock if you’re coming in too fast. That sounded good. Enjoyment on the water not spoiled by fear.

But that night, after we’d returned to our hotel room and I watched Overboard , an ’80s movie with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, as Nancy slept, I felt so lost. I couldn’t even tell exactly what it was. I was thirty-five, and I had come close to escaping everything I wanted to escape. We’d had charters to look forward to, money coming in, the boat finally fixed and ready. We were escaping the middle class, which is really the working class. And the only thing that could have prevented our escape was some extreme event. I’d had this thought several times in the past six months — that only something extreme could stop us now. And then it had. An unforecasted storm combining a tropical wave with an upper-level low hit us with force eleven, just short of a hurricane, and we sank a mile down, in just over five thousand feet of water. Even if the insurance paid, nearly everything would go to my lenders, who certainly would not offer the loans again. So we had no way back. It was difficult to believe.

Work so that you can keep working. I had wanted to escape this. In the summer, as we enjoyed our honeymoon in the islands and it seemed all would turn out well, I had felt that being a captain and business owner lacked dignity and engagement and was therefore no dream at all. I wanted to return to the university. But this return was dependent upon financial freedom. I hadn’t appreciated at the time that financial freedom itself is a worthy dream. Now, in my efforts to free myself from the working world, I had made myself a bankrupt, racked up more than $60,000 on my wife’s credit cards, and left the university, my former career, long enough I would not be able to return. I had trapped myself and my wife in the working world so firmly we’d have to take any jobs we could get.

I had also wanted to escape cheap apartments. They had always depressed me. But now even this would be out of my reach, because I wouldn’t be able to pass a credit check, and neither would Nancy. I would have to live with Nancy at her parents’ house for now, and I didn’t know when that would end.

But there was something more, some general, hollow ache I couldn’t name. I just felt lost. Everything had been decimated, mostly through my own blind workings but also by what felt like a powerful fate — hubris, perhaps — a force swelling like an enormous wave and crashing upon me, making me see the world would not be shaped by my will. I had run and run and escaped nothing. And what had happened could not be undone. Who I had been before could never be returned to me. The only word I could think of was ruin .

And most likely it would get worse. The insurance could refuse to pay because I had moved the boat from a harbor in St. Croix toward the British Virgin Islands in my attempt to find repair. And my lenders might sue. They could obtain judgements against me and attach my wages if I found a job.

I had already been threatened by the broker who had booked five charters for us and helped us in so many ways. He wanted his broker’s commissions on the four cancelled charters. He said he had earned these commissions, and it’s true he had worked hard for them. But he wanted to put a lien on my insurance policy. This would only delay and complicate my already difficult claim.

“These clients will want their money back, David. How are they going to be paid?”

He had their money in a trust account, which he’d have to simply return to them, so he was really talking about his commissions. I had to take a hard line. I told him the insurance would not pay for loss of business, especially a third party’s loss of business.

“So you’re telling me to stuff it. After all I’ve done for you.”

“No, I’m just saying the boat sank, I have no money and no job, and the insurance will not cover your commission.”

“After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of David Vann. I am ashamed of the day I first heard the name David Vann.”

“Did you hear that we lost our boat?” I asked.

“I am ashamed of the name David Vann. I am going to have to put my lawyer on you.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Your contract says right in it that you give up the right to sue under the contract.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is. After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of the name David Vann.”

MY FATHER KILLED himself in his new, unfurnished house in Fairbanks, Alaska, alone and suffering. It may have been a beautiful scene outside, the long stands of paper birch etched in moonlight or even the green, wavering bands of northern lights since it was winter. But what he did was bitter and small and left us with two mysteries.

One is the mystery of his life and suicide, sealed forever. The other, abiding in each of us who loved him, is the impossibility of knowing or living the life we would have had without his suicide. Would I have thrown away my academic career — and, for a time, my writing — for boats and the sea if my father had not killed himself? Have I built boats out of love or obedience? The questions are impossible to answer. My own reasons are an opaque sea, my own dreams and desires things I can never fully know. I can only hope that my entire life hasn’t been a plaything of his abrupt end.

In any case, like my father I’ve built my life around boats, and a boat builder is part of who I’ve become. Two years after the sinking, I’ve gone back into business with new partners and am nearing completion of a ninety-foot aluminum sailing catamaran, Paradiso. I’ve designed every part of Paradiso, every curve and line, and I’ve been at the warehouse every day to build it. All of that aluminum, so similar to watching my father’s boat being built.

A year ago, even before we had welded the first plates, I could see it three-dimensionally in my head, from any vantage, from within any stateroom. Its flybridge, open to the sun and stars, has teak deck and more than two hundred square feet of cushions. This is the excitement for me, the creation of something from nothing, the pre-existence of form, and the constant modification, also, the reshaping every day as I refine the design. Even metal is as malleable as a manuscript.

The boat is unique. It will be the largest sailing catamaran based in the Virgin Islands, and it is one of the largest ever built in the United States. Inspected and certified by the Coast Guard, it far exceeds even their regulations, with each hull divided into nine separate watertight compartments. There have been many hassles during construction, and no doubt these will continue, but in three weeks we will launch, and a week later I will sail with Nancy and my uncle and friends from San Francisco to Panama and then to the Virgin Islands on a ship of my own creation, a beautiful bird with wings.