Uncharted: Kim Brown Seely's Epic Adventures Sailing ... and Narrating!

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas via otter.ai

Kim Brown Seely  0:02  
The wind beat upon the white canvas, blowing an anthem like freedom. The sun was out, always a pleasant surprise in northern Canada; the sails were high, and we were higher, flying across a cold blue sea.

Brett Barry  0:18  
That's an excerpt from "Kim Brown Seely's Uncharted: A Couple's Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another." Silver Hollow Audio had the honor of recording--and this month, publishing--the audiobook version of Kim's book about adventure and the natural world and the transitions of life. In a moment, you can hear the first couple of chapters from that audiobook, and then an interview with the author about her experience both on a 54-foot sailboat in Canada's wilderness, and in a 5'x5' soundproof vocal booth in the Catskills, where she narrated the 9-hour audiobook edition of the memoir that documents that adventure. Stay tuned in between those segments for your chance to win a copy of "Kim Brown Seely's Uncharted." Kaatscast is also a production of Silver Hollow Audio, with support from Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy. Just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599; and for an adventure close to home, check out the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. And now, the first two chapters from "Kim Brown Seely's Uncharted: A Couple's Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another." Available now wherever audiobooks are sold.

Kim Brown Seely  2:08  
PROLOGUE. The wind beat upon the white canvas, blowing an anthem like freedom. The sun was out, always a pleasant surprise in northern Canada; the sails were high, and we were higher, flying across a cold blue sea. Minutes before, we'd been enjoying along crossing, the boat heeled over, humming along. Now it was time to start the engine, bring in the sails, and motor through a maze of small rock islands. But when we turned the key, nothing. There was no charge, no reassuring rumble of safety. I took a deep breath and held it. We hadn't left time to tack, hadn't planned on having to turn our big boat, and now we were barreling toward a rocky islet, me at the helm and my husband, Jeff, down below, banging a wrench on the starter. I stood at the sailboat's wheel, twisting a tiny metal key in the ignition--praying that the solenoid he was hammering would engage. The key was pathetic. The island loomed closer. We weren't going to make it. Jeff shot up, released a line, and we slammed the boat hard to windward, coming about. I let out my breath, stunned. We were alone together and had courted this chaos. We were grown-ups and people's parents. We'd raised two sons together, battled cancer together, and lived on both coasts of North America together. When our son's left home, we'd found ourselves on one of those coasts with a window of time, and so we'd launched ourselves into it. But now, with a boat whose moods changed as mercurially as our own, we were wrestling with forces larger than ourselves, and sometimes, paying a price. We were immersed in a world that was brand-new for both of us--it felt immediate yet eternal. I loved the rhythm of waves lapping at our boat; it seemed like a long-lost friend. We all have ocean in our veins. Back home at our house just outside Seattle, we'd been dreaming of exploring this world for a while. I'd first heard of it from a sailor I'd met at a dinner; he was ferrying a well-known "National Geographic" photographer to a rarely visited part of British Columbia's coast to shoot wildlife photos. When the story came out a year later, I was slayed: on the cover of "National Geographic" there was an image of a white bear. There was something strange about the bear: it had fur the color of a yellow Lab. Even though it was a white bear or so-called spirit bear, it wasn't Arctic white like a polar bear, nor was it cinnamon brown like a grizzly. It was some weird vanilla-white in between. It reminded me of a mythical creature--like what you might get if you crossed a bear with a dog. Its snout was brown and its paws were brown, but its claws were translucent. Across its shoulder blades matted tufts of fur stood up like they'd been dipped in orange marmalade. "What's that?" "A spirit bear," I told my husband, when he found me that fateful day frozen in front of our coffee table, staring at the yellow-bordered cover. It trumpeted, "The Wildest Place in North America: Land of the Spirit Bear." The spirit bear, I learned, was, in fact, a black bear born with a double-recessive gene causing white fur. It was a walking contradiction: a white black bear. Also known as the Kermode bear, it was rare--more rare than the giant panda. I pictured fur and forest, rain and sea; bold explorers sailing off to distant wilderness islands and hiking through giant trees; Paul Nicklen, the "National Geographic" photographer, waiting in the woods for days and then weeks until the singular moment when he came upon this strange creature climbing a cedar. This particular spirit bear had been photographed in British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest, part of planet Earth's largest intact coastal temperate rainforest, at the far edge of the North American continent. More than thirteen thousand years before, humans lived alongside these bears. But now the region, which stretched from north of Vancouver Island to south of the Alaska Panhandle--a rugged and complex maze of islands and fjords where vast swaths of cedar and spruce met the North Pacific--was about as remote as you can get in this world. I have a weakness for remote. Never in my life have I wanted anything as much as I wanted to sail off in search of that spirit bear. Our sons were leaving the nest, the economy was in free fall, our jobs were stagnant, and it seemed my husband and I had come to the edge of something: we could live safe, small lives or try something totally new by launching into the unknown. And so, the year before our second son left for college, we bought a gently worn sailboat. The boat that turned out to be the best deal at the time was an enormous, fifty-four-foot, cutter-rigged sailboat--a ridiculous amount of boat for two people with no prior sailing experience together to learn how to sail. Our friends all thought we were nuts. No one we knew had ever been to Canada's Great Bear Rainforest. And oh, by the way, didn't we know it rained up there all the time? But our plan didn't seem that far-fetched to me. My husband and I had always dreamed of doing something like this. Up until then, we'd spent the majority of our lives together as many couples do: trying to be decent parents and good friends and engaged and informed citizens and thoughtful sons and daughters, all while making a living. Now, with our boys leaving home, we had an opening. It was a time of transience: one son in college, another on his way; our small family, after years of intense and close living, was dispersing. Also, my husband had survived a recent cancer scare. We were suddenly acutely aware of the impermanence of things and imagined a sailing adventure would create space in which to share something true and lasting together. After a decade of the roller coaster of working hard and raising a family, my husband and I hoped we'd come to rest for a few weeks at sea. (How little did we know.) Here, we told ourselves, was where we would begin again. In setting off on our sailboat, first the four of us, then just the two of us, we'd pay attention to the shape of the journey. After we said goodbye to our sons, we'd embrace these weeks of adventure, putting all our chips on wildness. We figured a sailing expedition would allow us the time and distance to sort out our lives at this juncture, and we looked forward to the quiet and solitude of sailboat living over the modern world's noise and clamor. Coming from a long line of campers and covered-wagon crossers, pilgrims, and pioneers, it was staying put in our home near Seattle and driving the same circles day after day--becoming prisoners to the known--that seemed unthinkable. If you want to create a larger life, I reasoned, you expand the size of your universe. That is, you come to the edge and step (or sail) over. I knew our boys, resilient and smart, would survive wherever they were. And I hoped they'd still like us enough by then to come sail around from time to time. I imagined a snug cabin caulked against storms. A teapot whistling on the stove. Shelves lined with the best books. Somewhere small to live well in a world filled with uncertainty. This is the story, then, about how my husband and I (and occasionally our kids) lived simply and boldly during that time in a place that was both immense and contained: immense in the sheer expansiveness of sea and possibility; contained in that our boat felt as compact as a shell, and we existed in a world of our own design, a world that stood outside time as we knew it. Returning home, our house felt strangely quiet, and another journey began. This is also the story of the interlude before that journey--of moving from one life to another, and the passages in between.

PART ONE. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. Herman Melville, "Moby Dick."

MIGRATIONS. I'd always known Empty-Nesting would be uncharted territory. My mother had told me how it had gone for her: "The house was so different when you left," she confided one day out of the blue. I was practically thirty. "It was?" I said, startled. We were having lunch near my office in Midtown Manhattan, where I'd worked for a decade. My mother was visiting from California. I was suddenly flooded with guilt: I'd never even thought about how it had been for my parents once I'd left for college. "You were away at school, and we missed you but didn't want to bother you--you were a freshman!" my mom said, as if that explained everything. She took a sip of water, refolded a napkin. "But by the time your sister left for college, I realized I'd fallen into a kind of depression." "You did? Why didn't you ever say anything?!" "Well, that's why I'm telling you now ... in case you ever feel like you might be dealing with depression," she said, smiling brightly. "Well, how are you? Are you okay now?" I was stunned. I had a hundred questions ... Like many young girls growing up in the 1960s and '70s, my sister and I had been encouraged to follow our dreams--to be whatever we wanted to be. Our parents had always pushed us to excel, to be independent, to venture as far from home as possible. Also, our parents were young. They were hip. I was proud of them, and it had never occurred to me, even remotely, that I'm pleasing them we were hurting them--and that my mom, especially, with so fiercely, deeply miss us. That she'd be sad once she'd launched us on our way. My mother, a fine-boned woman--with chic bobbed hair, china-blue eyes, and the metabolism of a hummingbird--said she was better. And anyway, she didn't want to dwell on the past. Since then, her career as a photographer had taken off, had given her new purpose. Indeed, she'd go on to create a serious artist's life in the space after kids, with her work hanging in major museum collections and several critically acclaimed photography books to her name. As we were leaving the restaurant, however, she said, "I'm taking some medication now--it helps." And then, "Do I seem any different to you?" Another thing I'd noticed, watching my parents' generation, was divorce. It was as if kids had been magnets holding these couples together--almost like they'd mostly stayed together because of their kids. But once children no longer factored into the equation, legions of seventies parents woke up and discovered they didn't have that much in common. You could count the couples splitting up along the Southern California cul-de-sacs where we'd grown up. Sproing! Sproing! Sproing! They bounced apart like atoms released from ionic bonds; without those kid-fusing electrons, there wasn't much to fuse them in place. But my parents stayed together, supportive of each other. I suppose it was with this in mind then--wary of depression, watching divorces still springing up, as rampant as gray hairs, hearing girlfriends say, "I feel like everyone's leaving! Our kids are leaving, our parents are leaving!"--that I'd hit on the vague idea of some kind of shared project, something my husband and I could take up together as novice empty nesters. We'd had shared projects before. My husband, Jeff, worked on Wall Street when we first met, but he lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Shortly after I fell in love with him and agreed to give up my downtown artist-garret to move uptown to his place, he bought an old farmhouse in Connecticut. And so we began spending weekends there, fixing it up. In retrospect, the project was ideal training for the enormous, irrational leap of faith required to take on a sailboat years later. The difference, however, was that in Connecticut we'd also inherited several wooded acres, fruit trees, a two-hundred-year-old house in need of a new furnace, and a tumbledown barn. We couldn't afford to fix the furnace or hire any kind of help, so we wore multiple layers of clothing inside the house and worked like dogs outside. If we had weekend guests, we'd con them (all) into a group project like tarpapering the roof of the shed or whitewashing the fence. Then we'd cook up a big dinner--mixed grill with flank steak and sausage, or herb-crusted lamb with roast potatoes and a green salad with the garlicky vinaigrette out of "The Silver Palate Cookbook"--strip the sheets off the beds the next morning, drive all the laundry back to our apartment, wash the sheets in the basement, go to work all week, and do it all over again the next weekend. We were married in the backyard of that house in a late-September wedding with about a hundred friends, our families, and a Jersey Shore band that drove up from Asbury Park. Two years later, when our first son, Sam, was born, we retreated to the farm when he was only three days old. The quiet and solitude of those Connecticut weekends held us together as a fledgling family. But there were also lonely days. Days when I experienced the paralyzing isolation that comes from feeling trapped, as a young mother, in a house with a white picket fence. More than once I found myself alone in that house on a Saturday afternoon, with a baby in one arm and a flower vase on the other. And I understood viscerally what Betty Friedan had so brilliantly warned middle-class white women of more than twenty years before. I felt overwhelmed, isolated, and stuck. To be clear, this was a first world kind of stuck, and yet there I was--standing on two-hundred-year-old tulip-wood floors on a bright spring weekend, wanting to wing a ceramic vase through a plateglass window and break out of there. A house is a haven. But it can also be a cage. Decades later my understanding would shift, part of growing into adulthood, and I'd remember the farm as a key chapter, but an odd chapter for someone who craved a less settled existence. I'd think of all the choices that go into making a life--the decisions people make, individual and combined. Drops of water, incalculable, collecting in a pool. It takes years sometimes to recognize when it's time to make a few ripples. My husband loved the house. But we were also trapped by it and could never afford to do the things needed to maintain it. When a job opportunity in Seattle offered to move us all west in the dot-com 1990s, we packed up our apartment, sold the farm, and threw a massive goodbye party for our friends. We knew almost no one in Seattle but started a new chapter there. One of the art directors at the magazine where I worked in Midtown Manhattan said to me on my way out the door: "It's a healthy thing to repot yourself every few years." I prayed he was right. Twenty years later: We had worked all our lives and had never taken more than two weeks off to travel--even though I was a professional travel writer, having spent decades working in publishing. Jeff had simultaneously built up a company in Seattle and sold it, agreed to run another and sold it--the last while battling prostate cancer. Now he was a cancer survivor, and our kids would soon be heading off. We had diligently squirreled away savings since our first jobs, setting money aside for years. Also, we'd been lucky. There was paying for college, but somehow our boys had both been awarded academic scholarships, which helped. What were we waiting for? we wondered, True, we loved to work, but the world, its oceans and continents, lay right outside the front door. Life in all its complexity--and even more so with this window of good health--seemed worth celebrating. We were in this dangerously vulnerable state then, looking for some sort of project, a new shared adventure, when my husband came up with the idea of buying a used boat off the internet. "Hey, honey, check this out," he said one night, fingers tapping on his laptop. "It's a Moody 54, bank owned." I peered at the screen. "Isn't it cool?" he continued, tap-tapping. "Kind of," I replied. "Where is it?" "Rhode Island." "Hmm ...," I said warily. "Well, that's convenient." Three weeks later my husband flew to Rhode Island to check out the boat. It was snowing, and the temperature was fifteen degrees. His best friend, a college buddy from Boston, drove down to meet him, and they called in a third party, a local boat surveyor. "I think we should get her," my husband said, clicking through boat photos on his laptop the night he got home. Uh-oh. It had already become her. "I know it takes vision to imagine having cocktails in this frozen cockpit," he went on, "but ..." "It's covered in ice!" I protested, interrupting while squinting at the big blue hull. The foredeck was frosted over and the cockpit, even more forlorn, caked with almost a foot of snow. The bilges inside the hull were frozen solid with brown scum water; a riot of mildewed cushions and plastic parts lay strewn around inside the cabin. I peered at an image of Jeff and his compadre, also named Jeff, shivering inside the sad-looking cabin, grinning sheepishly at the camera in their down parkas, ski caps, and leather gloves. "Trust me, she's a screaming deal," my husband said happily. "Plus, at this price, we can afford to move her across the country and put some work into her." All I could think was: It's fifty-four feet! A fifty-four-foot money pit! And, I don't even know how to sail! I looked at my husband, already obsessed with the complexities of this new nautical project. Had he actually just said, Move her across the country? I pictured how the boat would look once it got here: the huge hull with its seventy-five-foot mast, a giant flagpole announcing to the entire world that someone on board was having a midlife crisis. But then I considered all the places we could go: the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands and the Queen Charlotte Islands off the Canadian Coast, Alaska ... Heck, maybe we'd even learn enough someday to cruise south to Mexico or cross the Pacific. It was thrilling. But it was also 2009, a year when sane people were not out shopping for sailboats, even used ones: The economy was a mess. Daily headlines screamed "Record Layoffs!" "Housing Foreclosures!" "Bankruptcy!" Millions of people were looking for work. And then a wild idea hit me: If the world turned upside down and everything went under, we could live aboard the boat. We'd have the ideal survival capsule. This notion, ridiculous as it was, calmed me. And so, caught up in the idea of it all I said, "Okay, in addition to saving for the boys' college educations, we'd better start an Empty-Nest Fund." I let myself imagine how it would feel, to have a boat, and all the food we'd need for months on her. To be able to go anywhere we wanted--maybe even sail halfway around the world! Ever since our friends' kids had begun heading off, I'd been noticing the ways many of these friends' lives shape-shifted. It seemed to be a time when fierce, almost biological empty-nesting patterns emerged. Downsizing--putting the family home on the market and moving into a simpler, smaller place--was a familiar refrain. Another common trend was getting a new dog to fill the void. But that wasn't always a shared project; the wives seemed to do most of the dog walking. As I watched my friends downsize, simplifying their nests; or stay in their homes but spend the next years refinishing the floors; or troll rescue-dog sites, looking for abandoned canines to love and be loved by and fill those empty rooms, I began to wonder if unknown to ourselves, we each had an image buried somewhere deep inside that was a new chapter, an image that outwardly was of a place or a thing but was actually of ourselves. Maybe it was ourselves, our new selves, that we were attempting to define as we cleaned out our drawers, and repainted our children's rooms, and adopted yellow Labs and big-eared collies and mixed retrievers. What does it take to sustain a long-term relationship when the most shared common ground (in our case, the kids) shifts? What do we need to define and continue to define in order to sail ourselves into the unknown? To shape ourselves alongside another person for the duration? As the idea of her boat grew real, and we began making plans to move her across the country and rename her, and wash the grid from her decks, revealing the weathered weave of her bones beneath--I realized it was ourselves that we were slowly shaping, it was ourselves that we were putting into a kind of order, it was yet another life that we were creating.

Brett Barry  25:13  
Stay tuned for my interview with Kim about her experience both on a sailboat and in our recording booth. But first, if you'd like a copy of the audio book, be sure to click the link in our show notes for a chance to win one. We'll announce the winners (all five of them) in our next episode. So, Kim Brown Seely, we've spent this week in the studio with you ... really beautifully narrating your book and it was a really nice experience and I just wanted to see what your impressions were.

Kim Brown Seely  25:48  
Oh, thank you so much. Well ... first, I have to say it was such an honor to be able to come to Silver Hollow Studio and be here this week in the Catskills and to get to read my own book. I ... I was a little nervous, actually ... I have to say at the prospect ... because I wasn't sure but I could physically read the whole book. I just had no idea how it would go and ... and I have to say after the first sixteen pages, I couldn't believe it only read sixteen pages. But then, it's somehow ... and maybe it's, you know, I think we just settled into a rhythm; and from there, it actually seemed to flow and it was really, really fun. I'm so glad. I'm so glad that I got to ... I got to read it myself and it's been, you know, I think it's just gonna be beautiful. So, thank you.

Brett Barry  26:36  
Thank you. Before you bought and restored heron, which is apparently a pretty large sailboat, I had to look up what a fifty-four-foot sailboat looks like and it looks like a lot to handle. I'm curious what yours and Jeff's sailing experience was to that point.

Kim Brown Seely  26:53  
Well, Jeff had ... had a ton of sailing experience before we'd ever met. He'd grown up spending summers on a bay on the Jersey Shore and his father bought the family a small sailboat and they'll learn how to sail that together and have many misadventures on it and he taken a few, you know, bareboat charter adventures with friends in college and got themselves in and out of all sorts of trouble down in Florida, and ... and then later for years, he raced a pretty technical, very fast racing boat only sailed and a few shallow bays and he learned a lot about being quick-thinking and ... and then later (before we met), he crewed on giant big racing sailboats along the east coast and doing offshore racing; and so, he, you know, learned to think when he was hadn't had sleeping three days and, you know, he's ... he's a very quick study and he was a serious sailor used to racing; and I (by contrast) had grown-up windsurfing, which is really different. I grew up doing that (early on) and my sister and I taught wind surfing, but that's really different. That's just feeling the wind on your body and it's a very simple sail and you're standing on a surfboard or a whole; nothing at all, like captaining a fifty-four-foot sailboat with the complexity of something like Heron.

Brett Barry  28:23  
How did you get up to speed so quickly?

Kim Brown Seely  28:26  
Well, it's very nice that you would think I got it so quickly. But it was ... it took a long time; and actually, it's been years on that ... on that sailboat, I feel like I'm now finally up to speed and we're actually pretty smooth at it, but it was a very rocky start. Because I had never sailed on a sailboat like that and all I can say is that you have to really want to do it. You know, if there's that unlevel the playing field as a couple sailing any sailboat ... let alone a sailboat (the size of a Heron sailboat), which was a ridiculous amount of boat for a couple to take on it. It was just ... it was such a good deal and we thought there'd be a lot of room for our kids, which there was. But it's ... it's still a lot of boat to handle and ... but I took some sailing lessons, and then we basically just got out there and did it and sailed a lot in Elliott Bay near Seattle, where we live and practice a lot before I left on our trip. But I don't think there's anything that really could have prepared us for what we ... what we set out to do and if we'd known how hard it was ... I don't know if we actually would have done it and a lot of adventures like that, right? You don't really know. You just have to fall in love with the idea of something, and then ... and you figure it out. If you knew, you probably wouldn't do it.

Brett Barry  29:51  
As with a lot of things in life. What was your son's reaction to the book, you know, (they seemed really) at least how you write about it. They seem very supportive of your decision to do this when they went off to college and they seem to enjoy the experience of joining you on the boat, but what was it like to look back and reread that moment of time?

Kim Brown Seely  30:13  
Right. Well, not only for my sons but for my husband is written about. So (honestly) in the book, all three of them; the boys and just they've ... they've been amazingly sweet and supportive. They all read the manuscript. My parents read it, which is pretty much a no-no in memoir. You're not supposed to let anyone in, you know, and your family read it. I couldn't put it out there at that (without that) and they were ... they were amazing. I ... they're very proud of the book and Sam came home that holiday with an annotated manuscript and made some suggestions which I took. He has ... he had a great year and it's really ... they've been fantastic and I am very grateful to them. Because I, you know, I think it's hard to be written about and I wouldn't want anyone writing about me; and so, they ... they trusted me and (anyway) it's been ... they've been great.

Brett Barry  31:11  
Were there any standout moments when you thought ... we're in way over our heads and we may not even make it out of this life?

Kim Brown Seely  31:21  
I probably should have thought that there were a lot of really scary tense times on that boat and I think a lot of the tension that comes later on in the story and what you hear and, you know, the (sort of) really hard moments we have and the big fights. It's because all of that pressure unfairly was on Jeff (my husband) and he recognized very realistically ... how far out on the edge we were and how little I knew and I ... and I actually wasn't afraid to be there because I had so much faith and confidence in him, but it was so much pressure on him and it really, you know, and so ... yeah, there were times when anything could have happened and we did do some safety drills we practiced. I didn't put that in the book where we would get our stuff into some remote cove buried in fog and pretend that he'd had a heart attack and I had to do everything and get us out of there. I could do that. I could drive the boat. But if he'd been knocked off (for instance) or overboard with all the sails up, the chances of might getting him a life ring and are turning the boat around and getting to him in time and that freezing water, but we never go overboard because the chances are slim.

Brett Barry  32:42  
How did that trip reshape your relationship or even your worldview?

Kim Brown Seely  32:49  
Well, as far as the relationship, you know, it was ... we put a lot on ourselves. Parts ... it's hard, you know, some of it was really, really hard and yet I think if you experience something like that together as a couple in the end, it definitely makes you stronger. There's no question, you know, we look back on it now and ... and not only laugh and we're (sort of) incredulous that we got through all that. But we're also intensely grateful, you know, there are so many times during the pandemic that we ... when we weren't leaving our house when we were hunkered down and all our kids had come back to live with us. We all talked about the boat a lot and you look back on that summer now. I can't believe we were able to do something like that then just move so freely even across the Canadian border. If it's during the pandemic, you know, we couldn't affect this last summer was the first we're able to cross that border again. So that (even that) really changed our worldview. Something that we've taken so much for granted. It's not always such a given, it's a huge, huge privilege to begin with; to be able to take the time to do that to, you know, be able to figure out a boat and, you know, all the preparations that go into that it's, you know, it's just an unbelievable privilege. But at the same time, it's a privilege, and then also it's ... it's a global privilege now not always possible.

Brett Barry  34:13  
Jeff says in the book that he'd recommend any parent with kids off to college do something similar. Do you agree?

Kim Brown Seely  34:20  
I do agree, you know, we both agree and I mean, obviously not. That was extreme. I wouldn't recommend that people do some. Everyone do something that extreme and very (actually) probably very few people would ever want to do anything like that. But for us that ... that was the right thing. But now, we have lots of friends who got these cool (kind of), especially during the pandemic. But even before that, you know, these vans that are (sort of) off the grid and you can, you know, it's a lot like a boat actually and you can take long extended road trips and camping deserts and, you know, so several friends who did that and other friends who've (sort of) manage to take a sabbatical and, you know, finally, we're free to go, you know, pick a few different cities around the world and these really (kind of) wild, fascinating places and go live for six months at a time and each one and, you know, and affordable by Airbnb. Yeah, you know, I think it's just this window of time, and then everything settles down again. But that's just great and I feel like a very natural window of time between these two very distinct and different chapters of life and it's a good time to grab before grandkids.

Brett Barry  35:36  
Which you now have.

Kim Brown Seely  35:37  
Exactly.

Brett Barry  35:39  
When you bought the boat and planned this journey, did you know right away that there was a book in it?

Kim Brown Seely  35:44  
No, I was wanting to write a book and I was thinking that the shape of this journey and (especially) knowing that there is this incredibly rare bear that lived at the apex of it ... felt like a book to me. But I ... I'd never written a book before and I wasn't sure if they're actually would be a book in it, but I hoped there would be and it was similar to the kinds of books that I'd read and always loved that I did from the very get-go from the very first day with, you know, untied inside off. I always had a notebook with me in the cockpit and I was paying really close attention and taking notes and that was interesting. It made the trip more interesting for me.

Brett Barry  36:29  
How extensively did you write or outline or note take during the adventure and how much of that happened afterwards?

During the adventure, I really only took notes. There was just too much going on and it was even still. It was a huge effort. It's a tremendous effort to even have the energy to take notes. That's a lot of work on a ... on a boat, especially if you're just two people. It is ... it's, you know, it's just ... there's a lot to do so ... but I would try and force myself if there were quiet moments, if I was on watching the cockpit and there were no logs or debris and it was a safe time to try and jot down what I was seeing or just take little notes about the wind and the way it felt and because it would be easy to forget. I didn't write down the texture. I want to just capture the texture of where we were. There are details I layered in later from subsequent summers because we sailed (we've sailed now for twelve years and it took me several years to write the book). So, there were holes that I was able to go back and fill in later. There was just too much going on and I couldn't remember the way (a particular island) literally looked at what the trees were, you know, so those ... those are things I could fill in later, you know, thankfully.

So, Leslie Sharpe, author of "The Quarry Fox," which is a book that we recorded here.

Kim Brown Seely  37:52  
Yes.

Brett Barry  37:53  
Introduced the two of us and an "Uncharted" audiobook edition was born. Did you have any apprehensions about narrating your own book?

Kim Brown Seely  38:04  
Only that I'd never narrated a book before and I wasn't sure if I could physically do it. It just seemed like so many pages to read. But no, I ... I just thought of it be such, you know, such an honor. Really and it has been. It's been really, but it's been actually much more fun than ... than I thought it would be. I thought it would be that I would just be, you know, I wouldn't even be able to speak at the end of it and hear some voice left. So no, it's been ... it's been so much fun and I would recommend any author read their own book. It's ... it's just an entirely different experience, you know, hearing: hearing the language, hearing it out loud. Because if you're a writer, you're obviously always hearing language, but it's only in your head. It's in your own head and you never hear the spoken word. So it's been really, it's been wonderful.

Brett Barry  38:58  
Were there any surprises or anything unexpected when you were (kind of) locked in that booth for a few days?

Kim Brown Seely  39:05  
Well, I found a typo, you know, and Leslie and I talked about that. She found a typo in her book too evidently.

Brett Barry  39:13  
Always comes out in the audio version.

Kim Brown Seely  39:14  
I was convinced until this week that there wasn't a single typo in this book and it stunned me to see it and I realized that when you're reading a book and it's silently in your head that your brain does correct and often it puts a letter there that's not there and it was only when I spoke that word that I just froze and that ... oh no, there's that typo. So, but I guess it happens, you know, no matter how carefully a book is edited and re-edited and copy edited three times ... things just slipped through. Luckily, it's a very small typo and only one.

Brett Barry  39:53  
We won't reveal what it is; and I realized (too) when we did the audio version that the editing process never really ends does it if you have the opportunity to change a word here and there and I loved that you weren't so precious about your words that it didn't stop you from making little changes here and there when he thought, "Oh, I probably could have said this a little bit better or I don't think I need that word again," and he pulled it out and I had to get on to the mic and say, "Did you mean to subtract that word?" And he said, "Yep. Moving on." Tell me a little bit about (some of) those kind of last minute minor changes to the text when you were in the booth?

Kim Brown Seely  40:28  
Yeah, well, it's interesting. I realized that when you are hearing a story that there were actually there ... there are a few word repetitions, which is something I'm usually really attuned to when I'm writing, but even still, there were one or two that I somehow missed or that bothered me when I was going to hear them out loud; bothered me more than they would have bothered me in my head that way and that's part of writing really a part of, you know, it's like music, really, it's very similar and yet interestingly with writing, you hear the rhythm and the words, you hear the language, pretty much in your head as a writer, but reading it aloud, it took on a completely different quality and it just seemed to (sort of) edit itself where it ... where it needed it.

Brett Barry  41:12  
Well, I totally enjoyed it again having read it, and then having listened to it and I'll be listening to it at least one or two more times as I edit it together. But ... thank you so much, Kim, for making this trip all the way to the other side of the country to record this beautiful book with me.

Kim Brown Seely  41:27  
Brett, thank you so much. It's been ... it's just been a huge pleasure. It could not have been more fun.

Brett Barry  41:36  
Kaatscast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio, with support from Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past as you watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their new exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org or call 607-278-5744. Thanks also to the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. Don't forget to enter our drawing for one of five free audiobook downloads. You can find that link in our show notes. Until next time, please be sure to subscribe on the podcast app of your choice and you can keep in touch at kaatscast.com. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.