The head injury added a specific dimension that physical symptoms made concrete. She could not read for approximately six years, by her account. This is not a metaphor; it is a description of a neurological deficit — whatever damage the 27 hours of unconsciousness and the head wound had done to her visual processing or her ability to integrate written text was substantial enough to prevent her from doing something most literate adults do without thinking. The recovery of this ability was gradual. The fact of its recovery was not guaranteed; she did not know, in the first years after Hilo, that she would ever read normally again.
The memoir she eventually wrote — first self-published in 1998, then published commercially in 2002 — was itself a form of processing. The act of constructing a narrative from the events of 1983, of imposing on them the shape that a book requires, was a way of making the experience available to herself as something that had happened, was over, and could be described. Books that people write about traumatic experiences are often described as therapeutic, and in Ashcraft’s case the description is probably accurate in a literal sense.
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## The Sailing Life After
Tami Oldham Ashcraft went back to sea. She accumulated more than 50,000 offshore miles after the events of 1983, a figure that places her among the more experienced offshore sailors in the world. She sailed through the Fiji Islands, through the Pacific and beyond, taking the kind of long passages that the events of 1983 had demonstrated she was capable of completing under any conditions.