In Florida: Everyman's Dream

By Gregory Jaynes

With two live chickens and 200 eggs, $20,000 and no prospects, the Couvreux family from Bordeaux crossed the Atlantic in a 40-ft. ketch. There was Michel (the father, the Frenchman, the architect) and Janis (the mother, the Californian, the first mate), and their little boy Sean and his baby brother Brendan, as newborn at the time as his father's dream -- everyman's dream -- to sail away.

The decision had been reached through the usual channels. A structured life is a box, if you think about it (as architects like Michel Couvreux certainly do, drafting refinements left and right). On land, you can remove as many as five of a box's six panels by shedding all structure and discipline; nothing to either side, nothing above or behind, or, more important, nothing blocking the path ahead. On water, even the sixth panel -- solid earth underfoot -- is gone. Michel, savoring these selected uncertainties, asked Janis to name their boat. She reached into her past and chose a surfing cry: Cowabunga!

Janis was reared in Orange County, a mecca of conservatism. "I lived in suburbia, in middle-class homes. I got my driver's license at 16. I was on the drill team in high school. I was going to grow up and have a successful career. Now it all makes me want to throw up." Her notions changed when she went to France in her junior year (1974) to study at the Universite de Bordeaux. There she met a young student in the school of architecture; passion followed, as did marriage.

The next little period was pretty routine. They lived near Bordeaux. Janis free-lanced articles. Michel started his firm. Sean was born in 1979, the year his father began to chafe. "I was 90% businessman. I was wearing a mask all the time." He would project himself as a man of the masses when dealing with socialist clients, could quickly affect a monied mien for the benefit of the capitalists, and felt like a fraud. It was also in 1979 that the couple bought the boat, for about $35,000, and began to lay plans.

"Michel was getting his architectural experience," Janis recollects, "but we both wanted to go to the States. We thought with a boat we could work our way there and take our house with us. We were going to do a family thing. We were going to go on a little trip, and then we were going to live like everybody else. I don't like surprises. I planned Brendan three years after Sean, so we decided we would leave with two kids. Michel and I both had our appendixes out. Michel had his wisdom teeth out." Having seen to these precautionary surgeries, there was nothing for it but to sail, and in late summer of 1982 the wind blew them to Spain, then Portugal, then Africa.

Oh, the stories! The first major storm, according to Janis, "built and built and built and lasted 24 hours. There's nothing you can do 300 miles from a coast but button it up and bob like a cork until it blows over. I don't like weather like that, but I don't panic. Things break all over the place, and you have to find a port and get them fixed."

They reached Dakar at the end of a rope after their engine had failed. A berth was offered them aft of an American destroyer. Michel said, "It's your country, Janis. Go talk to them." Whatever Janis did, it succeeded. "For the next week we had five sailors working on our engine. They filled our icebox with steak and ice cream. And all around us was this harbor of poverty. It was horrible, and it was heaven. I'll never forget it."

Nor the 30-day crossing to Rio -- "fantastic," Janis recalls, offering further a sort of book-jacket blurb that would surely kill sales: "Nothing hairy about it!" Michel and his sextant navigated a course straight as the kerf from a sawmill blade. One day he told his family they would be in Rio at 1 the next morning. At midnight, they could see land. With scant instruction -- he had had a couple of lessons in 1976 -- Michel was now a credible yachtsman, and a diesel mechanic and carpenter to boot, what with all the breakdowns that never cease on a boat -- any boat, ask anyone.

For her part, Janis had stood her watches and shouldered half the load. She had performed wizardry in the galley with 200 eggs -- souffles, quiche, omelettes, desserts. She knew they would run out of meat and would have to turn to eggs somewhere on the crossing, and the trick was to keep the eggs from rotting. First, she learned, turn the eggs once a week (it takes one week for the yolk to drop to the bottom, touching the shell and commencing to rot). Second, coat them with vaseline (to clog the porous shell and keep moisture and oxygen away from the yolk). For good measure, they had taken two live chickens. Michel promised them, "If you lay one egg, I will spare your life." The chickens contributed their lives to the larder.

The family hung around South America for two years, working here and there. Finally, in June 1985, they pitched up in Florida, at Port Canaveral, with a dead engine and a new way of looking at things. They had met a lot of people along the way, Janis says, "people who just wanted to travel. They didn't want to work anymore. We started to think, hey, that's not a bad idea. I mean, who wants to work anyway? After all, we were able to travel for nearly three years, until we got here."

"Here" is the middle of the Banana River, near the seaside town of Melbourne. "You could say we've sort of changed our optic. We don't want the house and the big stereo. Instead, we'll travel and work a little, travel and work a little. We also think about making a fortune so we can travel endlessly, but we haven't got very far with that."

Mullets jumped in the river as Janis talked one recent winter afternoon. Dolphins glided gracefully by. It is an economical life, she conceded, pointing to a 5-gal. canister on the deck. Normally the thing would hold weed killer, but on this boat, it holds fresh water. "That's the shower," Janis said. "Two people can bathe with it if you don't wash your hair." This was as far as she got on the subject of economy.

The boys had to be fetched from shore in a dinghy, and then Michel, who has been working at an architectural firm for a year, had to be boated home. On land he proudly drives an old rusted $500 Ford LTD. "Janis hates it," he said, coming aboard. "I had only had little European cars. I very much wanted a big, stupid machine." This was on a Friday, and Michel did a very American thing. He handed his wife his paycheck and got himself a beer.

Then the breadwinner sighed and spoke of work. "A week or two of vacation. Be there on time. I can survive because I have my family, my boat and my house with us. My toothbrush stays in the same place, but I don't have to. We have no future. Zero. Plans for retirement, zero. Plans for college for the kids, zero. I can tell you maybe three months ahead, but no more. We realize thinking too much about tomorrow can destroy today." A dolphin plashed, and Michel said, "I have a very small house but a very big garden."

One day soon the Couvreux family will sail away again. Through the Panama Canal and up the west coast to Alaska, they think, and eventually to Tahiti, of course, and one year or another, Michel says, "we go to France so my boys can be French too." When they are at sea, the boys take correspondence courses that are accredited in France. When anchored, Michel feels schools are important for social intercourse. "They must know there are little girls" (yes, thank heaven, he said, "leetel gulls") "and good guys and bad guys and all those things."

All well and good for the time being, Michel thinks, but what he has in mind | for the boys is a larger education. Before he is through, they will all be citoyens du monde. He uncorked a bottle of vin rouge and placed a large, juicy slab of meat on the charcoal grill. He looked serene, and if there were a word to sum up why, it would have to be a French one, naturally. Debrouillardise, say. Roughly, it means to know your way around.