You go about your day-to-day life, and you read about people who climb mountains. Or they reach the pole by dogsled. Or they sail oceans. They are fascinating characters. They sneer at risks. They overcome impossible odds. Occasionally they die, or disappear. You read about them while you take the el to work. Their lives are impossibly removed from yours.
Commitment is moored at the far outer rim of Monroe Harbor, as if she were already straining to leave port. When I went there to visit, the strong north wind was flinging rain almost horizontally. We were in the cabin, and Pinkney was taking apart his computer–on loan from IBM–attaching a bracket to the bottom that would fasten the terminal to the countertop and prevent it from sliding around in tumultuous seas. He took a large panel off the computer and began fastening a bracket to it.
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Pinkney, who’s in his mid-50s, has a receding hairline and a beard sprinkled with gray. Concentrating on his work, he told me in snatches about his sailing life. Twenty-five years ago he lived in the Caribbean, where sailing from island to island was the most efficient means of transport. When he moved to New York, he took sailing lessons on Long Island. “Then I was ready to be King Neptune himself,” he said. “But not having the financial wherewithal to get my own boat, I started sailing on other people’s boats.”
We went out into the cockpit, where a plastic canopy shielded us from the driving rain, to try it out. Pinkney pointed the satellite-location device, donated by a California marine-electronics manufacturer, up at the sky. The device was covered with buttons and had a small LCD display like a calculator. Pinkney turned it on, waited a few moments, and received an error message. “I’ll turn you off and see if you’re smarter this time,” he said. “‘Satellites found,’ it says now. Let’s see what that means,” and he began flipping through the instruction manual. “New toys are always like this.”
When Pinkney thought about what he would need to know to make it around the world, he also thought about how inspiring it might be to students to work out real-life problems in geography and navigation. “I found that there was a great potential for my grandkids to learn about the world, about how the things you study in basic education are put to practical use. I thought, maybe this is an opportunity to do more than just my personal odyssey.”
Lone Star had been piloted alone around the world in 1986-87 by the American sailor Mark Schrader, in the British Oxygen Corporation around-the-world race, a quadrennial event that drew 25 entries. The 47-footer was the only boat of the 16 that finished that didn’t need repairs when the voyage was over. It was the used-boat buyer’s dream: only one owner, sailed only once. “A cream puff,” said Pinkney. Of course it was a 27,000-mile trip, but that proved to Pinkney that the boat could take the worst the oceans could throw at it.
“There are 100 black businesses in this city that could afford $2,500, and could provide an opportunity for kids to learn math, geography, in a way that would interest them. In class, the kids for the most part are bored to tears. Education is really the memorization of things you like. If I can get a kid to like math because he can figure out how fast I can get from point A to point B, and he can beat the kid next to him who’s supposed to be the smart guy, he can show off.”
