Around The World In 1,080 Days

"The rat race in Maine?"

She smiles. "I think that we'll come back as much better people."

The trip was David's idea. He was reared near the sea and seeks the sort of powerless serenity it gives him. "At sea your sense of pace changes, along with your appreciation of the uses of time," he says. He shows me a quotation that he has photocopied from Dava Sobel's book Longitude: "Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp."

Judy was hesitant at first, in part because of the practical difficulties of the adventure. "There's no dialing 911 out there; you handle your own emergencies," says the doctor. "At the other end of the scale, the sea becomes monotonous. We will have to create our own stimulation, invent our own environment."

She gladly acknowledges that David will be the captain. "It's not that way at home," she says pointedly, looking at her husband, who agrees. "But the one who knows how to do something ought to have the authority." She recalls that Tropical Storm Mitch came up while they were in the Caribbean. "I was terrified, but not David. I realized, Nothing is going to rattle this guy." David says, "It doesn't do any good to get flustered at sea. My particular mood will not change the equation."

The children are not equally enthusiastic about the trip. Charlotte is ecstatic to be Charlotte anywhere. Jasper waffles because, while he likes the idea, he is especially fond of a teacher he'll be leaving. Sarah out-and-out does not want to go, because she'll miss her friends, gymnastics and horseback riding. Young David can't wait. Physically and attitudinally his father's son, he wrote in a journal after last year's voyage, "Time seems to change on a boat; it just drifts by like the sea around you. If you're not doing much it drifts past, and if you're busy, it still drifts past (only a little faster). Time might not be the only thing that changes. Sight does. Once I would have sworn that I saw tons of whales and a few dolphins. I tried to show them to people, but they said they were waves."

He shows me this journal entry in the family home, a gray-shingle place in the seaside village of Edgecomb, sufficiently large but hardly fancy, with more window space than walls, looking out on deep pine woods and down to a river. The kids, who are blond and have the dreamy look of summer, flop around their parents and me on a couple of soft couches. Young David and Sarah discuss the coming journey with mature seriousness, Jasper, half shyly, half exuberantly. Charlotte contributes the chaotic, look-at-me tyranny of any four-year-old.

On board Danza they will continue their education by participating in a home-study program created by the Calvert School in Baltimore. The accredited program provides study guides for kindergarten through the eighth grade on a range of subjects, with an emphasis on reading. The three older children are voracious readers already. Much of their learning will derive from everyone's wit and imagination, aided by a good, seaworthy library. Of all his preparatory problems, says David, the most difficult was selecting books. They can take aboard no more than 200 because of the weight.

I ask how they plan to stave off boredom, particularly on the leg to the Marquesas, when they will be at sea for 3� weeks. Their typical day, says David, will begin with the children's schooling, in which David and Judy will take turns as teachers, depending on who is more rested. (The two of them will split the watch of the night.) After the formal part of the children's education, Judy and David will read aloud to them. "We don't do enough of that when we're ashore," he says. Some of the reading they hope to do will consist of pertinent stories such as Captains Courageous, Mutiny on the Bounty and The Swiss Family Robinson.

The children will spend the afternoon playing board games and card games. Jasper loves chess. And the family will do a lot of reading. Mealtime is especially important to them—no less than an hour for lunch and two for dinner. David says that conversation over meals has always been a part of their lives. Physical exercise is limited by space, of course, but David says that walking and staying upright with the normal roll of a boat are plenty of exercise.