“The smell of salt air filled my nostrils. . . . I searched the southwest horizon, trying to find the light from Bodie Island. There were no landmarks. There was no land. I’m committed now; no diving overboard, no swimming back to shore.”

Earlier in the summer I picked up Tori Murden McClure’s A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. I was leaving the rolling hills of the Catskills for a few days on the rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and while I was neither looking for my heart (it’s back here in the Catskills) or getting even remotely close to the middle of the ocean (been there, another story), doing some buoyant reading while I was floating my way from Long Island to New England seemed like a good idea.

Cut to me grasping the lifelines while I leaned over those roiling waves and heaved my partly digested turkey sandwich overboard. Reading at sea was not to be. I didn’t crack open McClure’s oyster of a tale until my stomach had settled back on land. And then I pretty much didn’t close it until the end.

I’m not giving anything away by saying that McClure was the first woman to row alone across the Atlantic Ocean. It says that right on the book’s cover. But how she did it, why she did it, what she experienced and how it changed her are all questions that are gradually answered as her oars push the water back towards America and her twenty-three-foot rowboat, the American Pearl, on towards Europe.

While the book begins on the very first day of her journey, launching near Nags Head, North Carolina, within a chapter or two it’s clear this story will not remain on the surface. McClure dives deep into her childhood, revealing memories of stern parenting and an anguished bond with her developmentally disabled brother who is frequently bullied. Physically strong and intellectually gifted, McClure is torn between being his protector and finding a place where she can thrive. 

McClure ultimately finds many places, and it’s at Smith College in Massachusetts (a place we distantly crossed paths) where a crew coach sized her up and said, ‘you will row.” I don’t think the coach realized how seriously those words would be taken to heart . . . or how far.

All in all, McClure rows almost 7,000 miles, setting her alarm to go off before dawn and sometimes rowing deep into the night. The strength and stamina it must’ve taken to do this day after day is hard to fathom, but it’s the being all alone in a very small boat in a very big ocean and not knowing what the next storm will do to you that makes an even greater impression. Capsizing was not an if but a when.

“You think you will become used to it,” her friend Gérard d’Aboville tells her, remembering his own crossings of both Atlantic and Pacific. “When the boat is upside down, every time is as frightening as the first time.” 

McClure may be able to recall, twenty-five years later, how many times she did capsize, but I lost track. The most terrifying is when a wave throws the boat end over end in what is called a pitch-pole capsize. “Dear God, that hurt,” she remembers moaning. “Please don’t do that again.” But it does.

And it doesn’t take many gripping descriptions of monster waves, sodden clothes and supplies, broken equipment and possibly broken bones to make one wonder: why??

McClure makes it clear she doesn’t like that question. Partly because it suggests that she is doing something wrong. “The pathway to enlightenment is through a room with a thousand demons,” she finally tells one persistent reporter. 

But McClure’s demons seem to be back on shore, deep in her memory. They cling to her like barnacles. I don’t think she would disagree that if the trip had gone smoothly, they would’ve remained. It took a hurricane to shake them loose. And then it took the writing of this book to make sense of them. 

Like many adventurers before and after her, McClure surely had many reasons to set a goal and work extraordinarily hard to achieve it. Most of us won’t fully understand her reasons why. A handful might come close. I, for one, am perfectly happy not to row across the ocean, but having made a few journeys alone, relying on your own planning, preparation and decisions is a powerful thing. So powerful, McClure discovers, it may take you somewhere you weren’t planning to go.

A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean by Tori Murden McClure is available to order from your local bookseller, or to borrow from your local library.