Coming About : A Family Passage at Sea - Softcover

Susan Tyler Hitchcock

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034540663X ISBN 13: 9780345406637

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1998

Synopsis

"I had never lived on a sailboat. I had never sailed more than ten days straight. Would I like it? Could I do it? Was this journey a solution, or would it turn out to be just a new rendition of the same old problems?

I breathed deeply, and I jumped in."

Susan Hitchcock felt her family of four drifting apart. As she watched the daily demands of life tug her away from her husband and two young children, she knew they must find a way back to each other. So to reconnect as a family, they took to the sea.

Sailing for nine months and 3,500 miles around the Caribbean aboard Hei Tiki, they meet formidable challenges from the volatile moods of Mother Nature and the mighty ocean to the cultural barriers on distant islands, and their own innermost fears. Though a novice sailor, Susan soon develops an affinity for the water, feeling her life pulse with the sensual rhythm of the tides. And through both the rigors and the serenity of sailing, her family discovers a newfound intimacy and joy in the adventure of a lifetime.

An inspiring and triumphant chronicle of life at sea, Coming About is a wonderful meditation on marriage, family, and the fulfillment of dreams.

About this title

From the Publisher

o Winner of Sail America's Southam Award for best book on sailing.

o "... filled with amusing insight, turmoil and sensitivity." Doris Colgate, National Woman's Sailing Organization

o First published by Ballantine Books, 1998 ISBN 0-345-40663-X

About the Author

Susan Tyler Hitchcock lives in Covesville, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with her husband and two children in the house they built on their 16 acres of mountainside property.

Hitchcock grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan, earning an Honors B.A. and an M.A. in English in four and half years. She worked in New York for two years thereafter, as an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and as an editor for a children's book and toy packager. In that job, she served as editor and ghost writer for Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She blindly followed a boyfriend when he gained admission to the University of Virginia, and yet perhaps it was fate. Although she and that beau have long since parted, she still lives in the Blue Ridge countryside outside Charlottesville.

After writing a dissertation about the religious psychology implicit in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and earning a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia in 1978, Hitchcock recognized that writing for the general public interested her more. Since then, she has earned a living writing, editing, and teaching. She has published five non-fiction books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on food, country lifestyles, and nature. She contributes a column of personal meditative essays, called "Letters from Home," to Albemarle, a magazine published in Charlottesville.

Two of her books, Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager's Year (Harper & Row, 1980; University Press of Virginia, 1995) and Wildflowers on the Windowsill: Growing Wild Plants Indoors (Crown Publishers, 1984), secured her a reputation as an expert in the field of gathering useful wild plants. For four years, Hitchcock and two other artists published a Calendar of Wild Things. She has been invited to speak at many nature centers and public gardens, discussing the many edible and useful plants ordinarily considered weeds. She comments on edible wild plants monthly on WINA's "Charlottesville Live," a morning talk show.

Her interest in sailing has developed more recently, and in that time she has written and published several articles on the subject, including a short piece in Sail on doing laundry in the Caribbean and several articles in Cruising World about friends she has made while cruising. The promise of continued family cruises, with which Hitchcock concluded her book Coming About, has come true: she and her family have sailed twice since then, once to the Bahamas and once to the Northwest Caribbean, including Belize and Guatemala.

The thread that weaves through Hitchcock's writing about plants, food, nature, and sailing is her continuing search for a more wholesome life, in tune with the elements and the human spirit. She delights in finding meaning in simple moments and turns of events that others might simply overlook. Writing is a way to find -- perhaps even create -- meaning, she believes, and she tries to practice that belief in every piece she writes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 034540663X
• ISBN 13: 9780345406637
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 337