The Philly journalist who boat-hopped around the Mediterranean, sailed across the Atlantic, and beat cancer

Nearly 20 years ago Margie Smith Holt (then just Margie Smith) was working in communications at the Kimmel Center after an Emmy-winning career in TV news. She was soon to turn 40 and (so she thought) get married to her boyfriend.

Turning 40 happened, the marriage did not. To get over the latter, Smith Holt and a friend took a vacation to St. John in the Caribbean.

Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, Smith Holt, a Plymouth-Whitemarsh grad, was very familiar with the Jersey Shore but had never seen anything like the indescribable blue water of the beaches of St. John. They returned, overwhelmed by the beauty and lifestyle of the island.

A few months later, with winter approaching, Smith Holt and the same friend decided to spend the frosty months in the tropics. “I voted for president and left the next day,” she said in a recent phone interview. “November of 2004.”

Smith Holt got a job waitressing at a bar without a roof and lived in a small apartment with big insects.

The friend moved back after a year, but Smith Holt decided to stay — and learn to sail. Then learn to race. Then to sail across the Atlantic on a yacht. She boat-hopped around the Mediterranean and sailed back to the Caribbean on a 30-foot boat with no bathroom, refrigeration, or engine.

“You’re just out there contemplating the universe and your place in it and nothing else matters because there is nothing else,” Smith Holt said. “I thought about all those hundreds of years of other people doing the same thing, being out there, looking at that same sky and all those stars and being alone with their thoughts and being comfortable with that. It was extraordinary.”

Smith Holt has now detailed the entire years-long, life-altering adventure in a new book, Not on Any Map: One Virgin Island, Two Catastrophic Hurricanes, and the True Meaning of Paradise. When she decided to write the book, years after she’d returned from St. John, beat Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and married, the plan was to focus mostly on her own story.

But in 2017, St. John was devastated by the one-two hurricane punch of Irma followed by Maria, and the book took a darker turn. Smith Holt’s reporter training kicked in and she returned to St. John to chronicle the disaster and the rebuild. She wrote about it for The Inquirer.

“I never started out to write a book,” Smith Holt said. “The whole purpose of this adventure from the beginning was to get away from what I used to do.”

And get away she did, doing things (and not doing things, like showering) she never could have imagined as a local TV news reporter. “Talk about risk averse,” Smith Holt said. “I was not an adventurer. I always described myself as a practical girl — security, a good job, regular paychecks.”

But that all changed. “For 40 years I was afraid to do things,” she said, but the people she met on the island lived by a different set of rules and only feared Mother Nature.

When Smith Holt had the option to sail the Atlantic on a small boat that might have gone faster had she rowed, she was motivated by an email she had gotten from a wise, old, sailor type, before the boat left port:

“Do it,” he wrote. “You know, you could drown and disappear forever. But at least you would have died in the glorious act of living.”