A tough call

I have had quite a tense couple of weeks trying to work out how I am getting home. Trying to find a yacht owner willing to let me hitch back across the Atlantic was much easier than for the outward journey. Despite my complete lack of sailing experience, there were a few boats who would have had me. (These are the sites I used to look.) Everyone was leaving in the first two weeks of May from either Saint Martin or the Virgin Islands, in the north-east tip of the Caribbean. The dream of swimming, snorkelling and learning a new skill to help future fossil-fuel-free travel meant I adjusted to the idea of leaving four weeks earlier than I had meant to.

However trying to get to any bit of the Caribbean without flying proved too much of a challenge. Strand Travel told me that no cargo ships accepted bookings for such a short leg. Odd given that on my way here a couple had got on in Martinique to travel to Cartagena.

The Cruise People were a bit more helpful and at least found me a 13 day voyage to Jamaica which had already left by the time we spoke. (And they are cheaper than Strand.)

My conscience had seemed quite prepared to do a little flying jump from an island I could get a freighter to, to whatever island a boat was leaving from. It reasoned that such a short flight wouldn't go right up into the stratosphere, where littering CO2 directly to the greenhouse gas blanket is more of a problem than down in the biosphere where it might get recycled into something useful like a tree.

My conscience was less sure about flying all the way there, and even less sure when it learnt there aren't any direct flights and you probably have to go via Miami.

I gave up flying in 1998, and since then have done two return flights to the Middle East for Palestine solidarity work which I considered to have a positive karma debt. One friend told me that given some people fly to work and others fly to Spain every weekend, my decision to fly or not on this one trip is irrelevant and is part of activists' problem of deliberately depriving themselves, which he sees as fundamentalism.

That did slightly convince me for a day. Cos I did really want to go.

Then I spoke to my parents, who sounded disappointed. Dad said, “Well, you've got to do what's right for you”, paraphrasing something George Fox said to William Penn, with the same effect.

Today I've just had to go through it all again, as I got an email from the family I was gagging to sail with, who originally did not have room for me. Now they do. Look at how much fun they're having! Ooomigod. What an incredible way to spend a year of your childhood. Happy happy blond children. And enough of them to make loads of party games viable.

So I looked into flights, squirmed some more, and eventually came back to the same conclusion:

I may regret not taking up this opportunity, but I think I would regret flying more.

For me, making that flight would be like saying that my life and my choices will not make a difference. And I know that they do. I know this because people tell me so. The person who told me I was part of her decision not to fly on holiday to Bolivia, and the person who told me she now flies to Europe less often because of me, have become part of my reason not to fly to the Caribbean.

Obviously all forms of transport I might make my journey on are going anyway, and my decision is pretty abstract and symbolic. But it is a symbolism I find I don’t want to let go of right now.

Although, granted, I may change my mind again tomorrow.