Working from the Heartland

Cecil and Elizabeth Johnson
Owners, Tybee Island Charters
Tybee Island, Georgia

When I first met Elizabeth Johnson, I asked her this question: "Does your work support your life, or does your life support your work?" She thoughtfully paused and spoke carefully, "My life supports my work." And then she thought about it for several days. Yes, she confirmed, that's it. "My life supports my work."

When it comes to many entrepreneurs, it's often very difficult to draw clean sharp lines between work and life. Their personal authenticity dictates their purpose in life and the kinds of things they love to do for fun. Those things are often one and the same. And, usually, when you're caught up in your mission, it sloshes over into all other aspects of life.

Just as it's difficult to distinguish life from work in people who work from their heart, it's also difficult to separate the water from the Johnsons' life. They live in a small bungalow on Horsepen Creek, a cottage built by their earliest mentor, Captain Charlie Walsh. The walls, painted a "sailor blue," are covered with pictures of special fishing trips and artifacts found on their many beachcombing excursions. A beautiful wooden airplane propeller found at a wreck site by Captain Walsh himself hangs prominently over one wall. (I guess the pilot decided it was better to lose the plane than to be found with it.)

Only one wall is not painted blue. That's the wall that frames the gigantic picture window overlooking Horsepen Creek. Several chairs are pulled up to that window, and binoculars are always ready. From there Cecil and Elizabeth can spot redtail hawks, otters, minks, great blue herons, snowy egrets, kingfishers, cormorants, pelicans and bufflehead ducks...all going about their own business of catching their day's income.

Then there are the dolphins who cruise their way deep into the creek as well. It's a daily sight, but it never loses its thrill from the Johnsons' neighbors up and down the creek.

"You can hear the shouting, 'the dolphins are coming!, the dolphins are coming!'" says Cecil. "Then we run down to the creek and watch them make their way up, flipping their tails, splashing all around. It's always quite the sight!"

Just this past weekend, Elizabeth was out on the water and a dolphin approached the boat. She leaned over the side to stroke its head. But instead the dolphin took her fingers into its mouth and sucked them for a few seconds before swimming away.

"Gosh, I hope it was one of the dolphins we know," she says. "Some of them know us, some of them don't. In the summertime, we have the same four dolphins who meet the boat everyday."

After 15 years on Tybee slowly building their fishing charter business, it's hard to imagine that they could have started anywhere else. Even Elizabeth 's mild southern accent belies the fact that she was born and raised in Iowa. She and Cecil met in Atlanta, where he sold printing supplies. She sums up their dating story with one sentence: "He is the best time I have ever had."

Fun times included camping, whitewater rafting in western Georgia and taking weekends to visit his aunt on Tybee, this mysterious, remote island that has been home to his family for several generations. It was also the heart of his dreams as a young city boy, he knew he would someday go back there and find a way to earn a living on the water.

It unfolded as though it was meant to be. Elizabeth took a job selling insurance door to door in North Carolina 's foothills. Cecil joined her in the insurance business. And the weekends on Tybee grew more frequent and it was increasingly wrenching to leave Sunday night for that six-hour drive back to their North Carolina home.

So the company transferred them both to sell insurance on Tybee. And one day Cecil happened to be at a dock when Captain Walsh and his fishing partner were about to head out. But, being old men, they needed someone to heft the anchor. "Want to come along?" they asked.

With that question Cecil's life would be changed, and Elizabeth 's would soon follow.

Captain Walsh became their beloved mentor. He taught Cecil day after day, year after year, until one day Cap blew a rod through his engine. He needed to borrow Cecil's new pleasure fishing boat for a charter that was booked that day. "You're in the charter business now," he said. And from that day Cecil got serious about obtaining the necessary Coast Guard captain's license under Cap's watchful eye.

And pregnant Elizabeth was beginning to get curious, herself.

"By that time, I was getting pretty interested but I was pregnant with Eli," she recalls. "In fact, I had to get Cecil off the boat to take me to the hospital. They were just about to go off on a charter, but I sent Cap's wife running down to the dock to get him."

"I started out totally supportive of his goal, but I hadn't quite realized how deeply involved I would get myself."

Just as Cecil was ready to exercise his newly minted coast guard license, Elizabeth was ready to begin the process of learning seamanship herself. So Cap moved from Cecil's boat to her boat. First he was the captain, then as she developed her skills and worked toward her license, he became her mate...always there if she needed him, but always letting her make her own decisions and learn from her own mistakes. First.

"It was such a natural progression," she says. "Just when Cecil needed him to be off his boat, I needed him to be on mine. In retrospect, it was very easy, everything falling into place exactly as it was supposed to."

"I personally believe that if it's meant to happen, it will happen. And it will be an easy happening," she says. "Not that there aren't obstacles, but they should be easily overcome. If it's a major struggle, you should take another look at what it is you're trying to achieve."

And not that every aspect of the job is all fun and games and dolphins sucking on your fingers. Take the hot, dirty, smelly job of keeping the boats in good working order, for instance.

"When it comes to maintenance, nothing's easy. When I have a 20-minute job to do, it always turns into an hour's job," she says. "But you can find the joy in doing even those things. It's not always easy, and it's not always fun. But it's never impossible, and there's joy in learning how to do something new."

Elizabeth and Cecil also discovered that fishing isn't only about hauling out of the ocean fresh meat under gleaming, thrashing scales. Elizabeth says the fishing part is the ticket out into the ocean, but her work is really about enlightenment.

"We live in paradise and I want to introduce people to what we have here," she says. "This is becoming more and more defined as my purpose every day. There are so many common people, just like myself, who start out knowing nothing. But now I have an opportunity to share the experience of God in nature."

"The majority of the people we take out are meat fisherman, they're there so they can catch fish to eat," she says. "But even every one of those guys realizes the beauty, the abundance and the vastness of that ocean. You just can't avoid being affected by it."

"Some people think they're out there for the sport of it," she says, "But deep down inside, they're out there for the wonder of it, too."

She talks about the ever-changing sea as a way her work stays fresh and always exciting...even when it's a calm day. "It's a great adventure, you never know what's going to happen, what you're going to catch, what you're going to see."

So, too, she says with life in general. And their work on the island has brought them closer to their most authentic selves.

"My life has been a progression," she says. "I've been unhappy, not knowing who I am, how I fit into the grand plan of things. I'm still there sometimes."

"But life is like a spiral, round and round we go," she says. "But even though we may return to the same lessons or questions, at least we're still progressing upward. Every time you go around, maybe you learn a little bit more."

"Since Cecil and I have gotten together,things have been wonderful, moving continually upward. I have had so many revelations of so many different things and I'm happier than I've ever been. In the main scope of things: why worry?"

"Everything is going to be okay. Once you remember that, it relieves everything."

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.