Serenity Now

During the COVID pandemic, Vanessa G. Aaron and husband Ed took social distancing to new lengths. For two years, beginning in September 2020, they sailed their boat, Serenity, up and down the Eastern Seaboard and into the Caribbean.

“I love new experiences. I love new adventures. I am a constant learner and a very curious person,” says Aaron, now an associate at Bullivant Houser in Portland. “I will look at things like, ‘I wonder what it’s like to do that?’”

Aaron had graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School that chaotic year; but it wasn’t just COVID that sent her to sea.

“We’d just lost a dear friend of ours in a glider accident,” says Aaron, a longtime sailplane pilot. “Where we were flying was very, very remote, so the group of us were left to literally pick up all of the pieces. … It took a while to come to grips with that. There were just a lot of reminders where we were at that point in our life of needing to hit the reset button.”

Newly empty nesters—both had children from previous marriages—the couple sold most everything they owned before setting sail so they wouldn’t be tempted to return to their old lives. That included their old boat, Free Time, as they went shopping for one that would accommodate their plans. They found it in Florida, and renamed it Serenity—after the memorable “Serenity now!” mantra on Seinfeld.

She kept a blog during the voyage. “The worst piece of equipment you can have on a boat is a calendar,” she wrote. A post from a year into the journey mentioned: “My favorite benefit from cruising so far has been the people we’ve met and the friends we’ve made along the way. Our ‘neighborhood’ is essentially the whole of Earth as we sailors meander across her oceans. The sailing life seems to attract a certain personality, and it is a personality that Ed and I gel with very well.

“Oh, I definitely miss it,” she says now. “I am so extraordinarily thankful that I got the opportunity to have that experience.”

Aaron spent plenty of time in the air before taking to the sea. She was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Air Force, while earning her pilot license, then continued working as an air-traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration. Eventually she felt she needed a change, and it was her husband who suggested the law. “Because you’re good at arguing with people,” he told her. She adds, “But I think he just wanted me to go argue with people other than him.”

She wound up in aviation law. “That’s what I know,” Aaron says, “that’s what I’m passionate about. Right now I have a couple of cases involving aircraft accidents. Thankfully, those don’t come up a lot. Despite recent events, aviation is still the safest mode of travel.”

Aviation law is, ironically, preventing her from flying more herself. “I would love to have more time to do it,” she says, but “I can’t just drop everything for two weeks and go do something different, have some different experiences, have some different scenery. And the really difficult thing with being a litigator is you never can totally unplug. There’s always something happening where people need to be able to reach you.”

As for the latest project with her husband? It’s a little more stationary than the previous. “We’ve been building a house and we’re almost done with that,” says Aaron. “We literally did it from the ground up. We’re both project DIY-types, and we’re both handy. Maybe when we’re done with the house, we’ll get back to sailing. Since we live right on the Willamette River, we’ve got plenty of places to go to by boat. I’m sure the itch will show up again.”