The Pirate Queen by Barbara Sjoholm

Author:Barbara Sjoholm [Sjoholm, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580056052
Publisher: Seal Press

BACK IN Tórshavn, I sneaked into the guesthouse while the landlady was in the kitchen. I had half-expected my room to have been cleaned out while I was gone, but everything was as I’d left it. In fact, she hadn’t dusted a single day since I’d been here. What was I so desperately hanging on to? Some futile desire for control in a foreign place. My own things, arranged my own way, my own place, if even for a few nights.

But travel is about letting go; there’s no other way to experience it. I knew that it’s only when you let go that the best things happen. That’s why I traveled, and why I found it so hard sometimes.

I was about seven years old when I first realized that a girl, a woman, could go off by herself to see the world. One day my mother and some friends took me along to the Port of Los Angeles. From the dock we went up the gangplank of an ocean liner and down the corridor to a small stateroom. The voyager, my mother’s friend, was a middle-aged lady whose name I don’t remember, a teacher who had the summer off. She was going by ship around the whole world, and she took me on her knee and said, “I’ll send you some post cards,” which she later did, of Japan, and India, and Paris. Then there was a warning blast, and we all rushed off. We stood on the dock while colored streamers flew out and over the sides of the ship. The lady looked very small up there at the railing, wearing a hat and a corsage pinned to her jacket. “Goodbye!” she called. “Goodbye,” we called back. “Don’t forget to write!”

The idea of her sea voyage was enormous to me, and all the way home in the car I thought about it, and laid my plans. My first trip around the world would have to be via the cardboard globe, which I spun and spun, letting my finger touch the countries under it. “I’m in Japan now,” I announced to my brother. He spun the globe and ended in the Pacific. “I’m drowned,” he said. I organized a game in the backyard of me on the picnic table throwing down some colored streamers to the mystified dog. I waved to my mother at the window: “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

“Goodbye!” she waved back from the kitchen. “Don’t forget to write!”

I lay on my bed in Tórshavn and thought about women traveling, about all those ladies without proper professions who wrote books. I was hardly any different from them. I’d come to the Faroe Islands because they sounded adventurous, because they were wildly remote, because no one I knew had ever been here. I was a lady who had sailed off on a boat and had come to an island in the middle of nowhere precisely to write about it. Elizabeth Taylor and her failure to finish her book haunted me. Who has

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