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Waiting For Real Life To Begin
San Francisco, CA – A posh penthouse on the west coast. A budding acting career complete with scenes in Basic Instinct and Clint Eastwood’s The Deadpool. A day that includes Bentleys and Rolls Royces. A world most people struggle and aspire for years to achieve. But the life everyone else seems to want isn’t enough for a man who’d rather fight for his definition of freedom.
“The ocean for me has always represented mystery…if I’m on the beach for more than 6 months I get antsy.” Says Theodore Carl Soderberg, author of the new book “Uncharted Waters.” That is the very life one man gives up for months at a time to follow a need – an addiction to the sea.
“I was off the water for 15 years,” explains Soderberg, using a similar term one would to be ‘off’ drugs or ‘off’ booze. He needs the ocean to feel complete. Soderberg achieves his need for freedom in a big gray Navy boat that sails for months at a time. Instead of spending the days in that expensive penthouse, he spends them eating with tin spoons in the mess hall. Instead of spending his nights rubbing elbows with movie stars he shares quarters with burly, bad-smelling bunk-mates.
Some people only feel alive on a motorcycle, shedding their bland gray business suit every Sunday to show off their tattoos and glide down the highway. Some people need music to breathe, pulling a dusty guitar from the back of their closet to hit the cords on weeknights. Some will give up everything the typical American struggles to earn – because their spirit is fed by riding the waves.
In his new book, “Uncharted Waters” Soderberg recalls being a boy at a Yonkers, New York carnival and speeding past the ferris wheels and roller coasters that would have seized the attention of other kids. He was mesmerized he says – by the boat rides – spinning in circular basins just five feet deep – and the force compelling him to dunk his hands in the cool water.
Sooner or later, all men with a hunger try to put the yearning aside. They try to become ‘normal.’ They try to ignore that one, distinct, screaming passion only they can hear. They try to blend with the rest of the world and have a typical life. Does it ever really work?
The addiction to the sea called him home at the age of 38. “I got in a mess of a motorcycle accident on one of California’s freeways, and hit the pavement at about 50 miles an hour.” Soderberg walked away without an outward scar, but forever changed on the inside. He was compelled to re-examine his life – and head back to where he belongs. Within a year he was with a reserve unit at Mare Island in Bahrain in the Iraq/Iran war.
While the rest of the world follows stock market fluctuations or housing trends or the latest political debates, Soderberg floats a world away to wherever the Merchant Marines, and the waves, take him.
It is possible Theodore Carl Soderberg is inside every American. It is possible every American has a part of them consumed with a passion or a desire few others would understand.
Soderberg asks every American, “If you could walk away from the life you’ve worked so hard to earn – the life everyone wants – what is it that would set you free?”