There only a couple of questions that people ask consistently when they step onboard a tall ship. I’ve heard them all a hundred times.
“What are the fuzzy things in the rigging?” (Baggywrinkles.)
“Does the boat actually sail?” (I’m always tempted to reply with, “No, we put it on a truck and hauled it here from the last port.”)
“Do you guys actually live on the boat?” (Yep. All of us. Most of us in the same room.)
There’s another question that I get on a somewhat regular basis from passengers and people who come on for tours. And while answering the same question over and over can be annoying, this one always leaves me a little twitchy.
“So what’s your real job?”
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Well, this is my real job. But let me skip back a little to a time when I was working as a line cook and going to San Francisco State University pursuing my bachelors degree. Let me skip back to a time when I might have answered this question differently.
At the time, I was working in a prestigious, high volume restaurant in San Francisco. I would wake up at 5am most days of the week, catch the first train from my apartment in the low-rent outskirts of the city, and work until 3–4pm. On the days that I wasn’t working, I’d take a shorter MUNI ride to school, where I was taking anywhere from 18–21 units studying Journalism. This wasn’t really new, since I’d been doing the school/work shuffle for a few years. My schedule between school and work had been seamless since I was living in the North Bay and going to junior college and working as a cook at a great rustic Italian restaurant. It was totally normal for me to get done with school, go home, change, and head straight to work. 12–14 hour days were my life.
But if you’d asked me as a cook what my real job was, I would have told you, “Oh, I’m just doing this to help me get through school. Someday I’ll have a real job.”
And after I graduated, I found that real job. I worked at an incredible publishing company, helping make books that people loved. I had a desk in an office. I had a company email address. I had a 401k and would get sent to industry conferences on the company dime.
I had a “real job.” And I was miserable.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a great company. I got to work with smart people making books that mattered. But after years of working with my hands, making tangible things, sitting at a desk didn’t feel fulfilling. I felt stagnant, no matter how hard I worked. Eventually it started to affect my job performance. And so I quit.
I ended up going back to what I had done before; working at a cafe/bar. I had the incredible fortune to get hired on by Jennifer Colliau as part of the opening team at The Interval. Her approach to cocktails, coffee, and service was heartfelt and serious. This is someone who is an amazing bartender because she really cares about this stuff, and expects her employees to as well. A few weeks after we opened she passed around a copy of 7x7 magazine, turned to the page of this great interview with another cocktail luminary Thad Vogler. There was one quote that really struck me:
“This industry is populated with people who think they should be doing something better with their lives,” says Vogler. “For me, this is doing something better with my life.”
A light went on. God. Of course.
Sure, there are plenty of people out there working restaurant and retail jobs as a means to achieve something more. But for me, I’d always loved cooking. It was something I cared about deeply, and seeing people enjoy the food and drinks I made was rewarding. And I was lucky enough to work for chefs and employers who also loved what they were doing. Regardless, I think there is a prevailing attitude that doesn’t value the kind of work I’d found so fulfilling. And I bought into it hard, which is why I never thought of cooking as a career, or a “real” job.
So I guess I’m not entirely surprised when people don’t view working on tall ships as a real job either. I mean, think about it. I’m out here doing what I love, in an incredibly beautiful and often esoteric environment, and making a (humble) living. I’m out here doing my dream job because I decided it was my dream job and then went and just fucking did it. How many people can say the same? No wonder it is a hard thing for people to wrap their head around.
The trope of the unhappy office worker is a characterization of the lie a lot of my generation was sold: you’ve got to go to college, get a marketable degree, make money, achieve stability, and then you’ll be happy. But that one-size-fits-all attitude doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for me, and by buying into that lie I spent a lot of years not treating the work I was doing, and loved, as a real job. If I had, who knows! Maybe I’d be perfectly happy on land, having worked my way up the ladder as a chef at my own restaurant.
I just recently lined up work for myself for the rest of the year. After leaving San Pedro, I’ll be heading up the coast to the Puget Sound. There, I’ll be working on an environmental science education boat taking kids out to study the waters around Orcas Island. There, my “real job” will entail sailing a beautiful 61 foot yawl, helping kids take water samples, and probably seeing a bunch of Orcas.
I think that sounds pretty damn good for a real job, don’t you?
