The Water In Between: A Journey at Sea

by Kevin Patterson

Release Date: 19 June, 2001

Edition: Paperback

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A Sailing Story- sort of.

In this autobiographical book, Kevin Patterson, medical doctor, unsuccessful army officer, and failed lover, takes us and a series of increasingly reluctant crew members along on his sailing trip from Vancouver to Tahiti and back. By the last leg of the journey, Kevin, unsurprisingly, is sailing alone. This book is not a sailing manual, in fact it becomes apparent that even by the end of his journey Kevin is still unable to sail. It is not adventure writing. It is instead a meditation on travel and travel writers and Kevin himself. And if Patterson's thoughts are sometimes a little banal, his love affairs a little adolescent, his prose not always up to par with the authors he generously quotes, and even if the ending is a little abrupt, then this does not stop the book from being an interesting read. Patterson is witty and clever. However, it it's a funny travel book you want, look to Bill Bryson, for meditations on travel look to Chatwin, for damn good travel writing read Theroux, and if it's sailing you're after then you can't go wrong with Slocum and Montessier. If you've read them all and a few more then try this.

Highly recommended

Twenty-nine year old Patterson, fleeing a failed love affair and the Manitoba winter, buys a 37-foot sail boat in Vancouver and sails to Tahiti and back. Patterson has no sailing experience, but he attracts a companion, Don Lang, who does. They brave storms and boredom. They even survive a brief stay in Hawaii.

Not surprisingly, the voyage gives Patterson a chance to think. The results, included here, make this more than just a travel book. He discusses the reasons why men roam and travel writing as a genre. Among the author's inspirations are Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby. For a modern-day Canadian (or American) to have heard of these classic travel writers, let alone discuss them with any measure of authority, is an achievement. I'm impressed. For that alone I have to give this a high rating.

The author concludes that while men may travel to escape, it is no solution to their problems. It is better to stay at home and deal with them. Travel as escapism solves nothing: you just bring your troubles with you.

Patterson's critique of Chatwin is spot-on. For all their enthusiasm for nomadism, Chatwin and the others fell far short of the ideal. They were never true nomads. Chatwin always had his American wife ensconced in an English cottage to come home to. And Thesiger, despite living for years in Arabia and Iraq, relied on a considerable annual private income and his mother's flat in London. They travelled only because they could afford to: home was always there for them.

And that, I think, is one of the points of this book. It is settlement -- home -- that first encouraged the growth of civilisation, which in turn has allowed men to think, to travel, and to write at leisure. And of course without that we would not have such fine books as this one. I highly recommend it.