Walking Away

How about it? one of the men said to Karen on that first humid night in Tahiti, March 1970. The Endeavour II’s crew still numbered a few short. Her decision was immediate. She sent a letter to her supervisor at the airline she worked for and told him about this once-in-a-lifetime experience. She’d be two weeks late returning to L.A.—maybe more, definitely not less. She crossed her fingers and hoped he’d understand. The next morning, Karen—twenty-seven, husbandless on what was supposed to have been her honeymoon in the South Pacific—skimmed out of port on a tall ship.

Her fiancé had called off their wedding just weeks before; Karen had come anyway. On her first night in Pape’ete, she’d walked along the piers and heard boisterous American English wafting among the sails of a shoddy replica of Captain James Cook’s HMB Endeavour. She walked toward it.

A skimpy crew scuttled around the deck, drinking and rigging the masts. Weeks before, the Endeavour II had left Ensenada as the Monte Cristo, aiming for Hawaii. From there it continued to Tahiti, where most of its paying passengers disembarked. The ship’s owner renamed the boat and prepared to cast off. It was starkly understaffed, gloriously understaffed. But officials threatened to impound the ship—a 140-foot vessel with a crew of six was a shipwreck waiting to happen. The owner asked around for friends of friends with experience at sea who might like a free trip across the South Pacific and offered to fly them out. (If the boat made it to Australia for the bicentennial of Captain Cook’s arrival, in April 1970, he’d take away a cash prize.) They all converged on Tahiti right about when Karen arrived.

Karen had always wandered. As a toddler she used to walk right out the back door, into the world. She remembers the sensation of it, watery memories of streets she didn’t recognize. She’d wandered two miles once. Her parents had called the police; they learned to lock the screen doors. As a teenager, she’d sit on the cliffs in Santa Barbara, tracing vectors toward Alaska, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Tahiti, Australia. She’d flown around the world. She said yes to sailing a chunk of it, too.