Hilton Head Island: finished; TURNING POINT; Alex Honnold

I finished the first draft of GANNET 6 an hour ago.  126,110 words.  Far longer than any of my other books and doubtlessly to be reduced.  Although weeks or maybe months of rewriting are ahead, I am pleased.  I like rewriting more than writing first drafts and can do that anytime.  The 5 AM factory shift is a thing of the past.  

Carol and I watched the five episode Netflix series:  TURNING POINT:  THE VIETNAM WAR this week. It is well done and troubling, particularly for those who do not know history and are surprised to discover that governments lie to their citizens.

Alex Honnold of FREE SOLO fame is going to attempt to climb the skyscraper, Taipei 101, live on Netflix this evening starting at 8 PM Eastern Time.  I was very impressed by Honnold in FREE SOLO, but when I first heard of this I thought it to be a stunt.  After reading an interview with him in the NEW YORK TIMES sent to me by Ron, for which I thank him, I no longer think it a stunt.  I hope Honnold is successful or at least that he does not die.

Hilton Head Island: Good Night, and Good Luck

         The marsh is sunny, clear and cool.  There is even a chance of snow in the forecast for Sunday morning.  Good grief! 

        I am living a life of routine.

        I wake between 5 and 6 AM.  Get dressed without waking Carol.  Go into the kitchen and start the coffee maker.  Pour a glass of juice and retire to the guest bedroom to write.  I don't recall when I began working on GANNET 6 or even why, but considering that I write between 500 and 1000 words each morning and the first draft now totals 120,241 words, I have been doing this for at least five months without missing a day.  Tomorrow morning GANNET and I will cross Panama.  Not quite to the Pacific, but to a boat yard beside it from which we will not escape for four days, but the end of the voyage and the first draft is close.  I expect to finish it next month.  Perhaps even this month because I have already written about the final passage to San Diego and may be able to use that.

        When my factory shift ends I join Carol for coffee and to read the depressing news and then poetry, ancient Japanese or Chinese and modern Western, which presently are another book of Haiku and Derek Walcott’s OMEROS.

        Around 10 or 11 I have my breakfast of uncooked oatmeal, trail mix, berries, and milk, to which I sometimes add a dried date or figs or apricots.

        Weather and motivation permitting, I go for a walk or a bike ride or use a treadmill at the club across the street.

        I no longer eat lunch, though I sometimes have a piece of bread or fruit and a glass of iced tea.

        In early afternoon I listen to music.  First Bach, then whatever catches my attention from my library.

        Most afternoons around 3 there is a soccer match being televised somewhere from Europe.

        Then a workout, shower, and two drinks with Carol and dinner.

        In the evening we usually watch something on Netflix or Amazon Prime.  A few night ago it was the excellent GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK:  LIVE FROM BROADWAY on Netflix in which George Clooney portrays Edward R. Murrow in the early 1950s when he was reporting on  Joseph McCarthy.  There are those who find relevance of this to our present times, Caro and I among them.  I highly recommend the film.

        Then I go to bed and read for a while.  Most recently Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN.  I go to sleep between 9 and 10.  I often wake up during the night and read for an hour.

        Then I get up at 5 to 6 and do it all again.

Hilton Head Island: Grokipdedia and me

Google alerts me when my name appears on the Internet.  I don’t recall when or how I ever signed up for this and it is not completely accurate, but it is free.  Yesterday I received a link to an article about Webb Chiles in something called Grokipedia.  I had never heard of Grokipedia, so I googled and got one AI’s evaluation of another.  I quote Google’s AI overview:  Grokipedia is an AI-powered online encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk’s company, xAI, as a rival to Wikipedia, aiming to offer an alternative with different ideological leanings, often incorporating right-leaning perspectives from Musk’s viewpoint, generated and adapted by its Grok chatbot.

I then clicked on the link to see what Grok has to say about me.  Despite inaccuracies, starting with the year I was born, and repetitions, I am impressed.  The article is considerably more extensive than the one in Wikipedia.  Grok gets a surprising amount of Webb Chiles right.

If you want to see:

https://grokipedia.com/page/webb_chiles

Hilton Head Island: from 2018

 

        Ian sent me this photo which for some reason caused him to think of me.  I thank him for photo and thought.

        I have never found anything but bland truisms inside fortune cookies, but Steve Earley, of SPARTINA fame, received the above a few nights ago with his take-away order of Kung Pao Chicken, steamed rice and egg roll.  

        Is there somewhere a Chinese sailor making fortune cookies?

In Praise of Hazel Widen

        Carol and I had a quiet, pleasant Thanksgiving at home, where she prepared her usual superb turkey dinner. We both like the original meal and the leftovers, ending next week with turkey soup.

        To the extant that one is not completely dead as long as someone still remembers them, Hazel Widen, my father’s mother, who died thirty-six years ago, lives on, though perhaps now only in my mind and that of my friend, Louise, who mentioned in an email recently a Thanksgiving we spent at my grandmother’s Mission Beach cottage. My grandmother, too, prepared great turkey dinners. I think of her often. Not just at Thanksgiving.

​Even as an old woman—and as I have observed, that ‘old’ was younger than I am now—you could see the beauty she had been when young, in flesh and even more in character.

​She experienced the death of all the men in her life except me, outliving three husbands, two of whom died almost literally in her arms, and the suicide of my father, her only child. Yet I never knew her to complain or bemoan her fate.

​She was born a Missouri farm girl in 1896 when few had much education or opportunity, and girls generally less than boys. I don’t know that she even completed high school.

​She worked as a shoe sales clerk at a St. Louis department store until she and her last husband, Elmer Widen, whom she married when I was a year or two old and whom I thought of as my grandfather, retired in 1953 and moved to San Diego where they bought for $6,000 a little house in Mission Beach. It is interesting to note that in 1953 two working class people could buy beach property in California.

​She liked being within sound of the ocean, but I never knew her to go onto the beach itself, though only a few steps away. I don’t know if she could swim. I do know she never learned to drive. I don’t drive any more myself, so we now share that.

​She had a rare talent with clothes.

​She made all her own herself, using an old pedal Singer sewing machine, and those for several of the women in my life. She had a sense of style and fashion and knew what would look good on them better than the women themselves. There was nothing ‘home- made’ about the clothes. Her craftsmanship was exquisite. Had she been born today, I expect she would have had a successful career in clothing and fashion.

​While I like to believe that some of whatever good qualities I have came from her, we differed in many ways. She was not a reader, and she was a keeper of things. When she died, I found in her house decades old telephone books, a recommendation letter written in 1912 from an employer for my grandfather, a copy of my parents’ marriage license that showed they had been married for two years before my birth—because they had separated before I was born, I had until then thought that they had gotten married only because my mother was pregnant—and the contents the police found in my father’s pockets after his suicide, the subject of a poem.

​She was proud of me without understanding what I do or why, which didn’t matter, and kept a scrap book of newspaper clippings about me. I never did.

​My grandmother was not quite a frontier woman, but she was close.

​The summers I spent with her and my grandfather in Mission Beach kept me alive.

​Now for a few moments, she lives on in your mind as well.

         A quote from Joseph Conrad’s THE MIRROR OF THE SEA:

        The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity.  No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

        Some of you will remember that more than thirty years ago while sailing CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, I wrote:

        The terrible thing about the sea is that it is not alive.  All our pathetic adjectives are false.  The sea is not cruel or angry or kind.  The sea is insensate, a blind fragment of the universe, and kills us not in rage, but with indifference, as casual byproducts of its own unknowable harmony.  Rage would be easier to understand and to accept.

Hilton Head Island: year end accounting and TRAIN DREAMS

I set a new record for doing my standard workout last year:  124.  The old record was 121 in 2021.  Of those 35 were the extended version where in the first set instead of doing my age in push-ups and crunches I go to 100 and in the second and third sets instead of 40 I do 50.  I do 110 side leg raises each leg instead of 100 and I do a total of 300 knee bends in sets of 60 40 200 instead of 60 40 150.  When you are already doing 83 or 84 push-ups it is not much of a stretch to go to 100.  This makes it somewhat difficult to total the number of push-ups for the year, but it is about 10,748.  For the past few years I have sought to perform the extended workout once a month.  This year I am going to try to do it once a week.

books read July-December

METAMORPHOSES  Ovid translated Stephanie McCarter

MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER   William Butler Yeats

CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY

RETURN TO THE SEA   Webb Chiles

THE MISSION   Tim Weiner

THE TOWER   William Butler Yeats

THE BOUNTY   Caroline Alexander

HUMAN VOICES   Penelope Fitzgerald

300 TANG POEMS

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT   Norman MacClean

ZEN POETRY

BEING HUMAN   editor Neil Astley

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR   Kenneth Davis

THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON   Jerome Charyn

POEMS:  LI PO and TU FU

THE SHELL COLLECTOR   Anthony Doerr

THE MEANING OF NIGHT   Michael Cox

SELECTED POEMS   Fernando Pessoa

MESSAGE   Fernando Pessoa

IN THE NIGHT OF TIME   Antonio Munoz Molina 

ACT OF OBLIVION   Robert Harris

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND   Anthony Doerr

WAR MUSIC   Christopher Logue

THE ANCHOR BOOK OF CHINESE POETRY

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION  Gustav Flaubert

OUTNUMBERED  Cormic O’Brien

COMPLETE POEMS   C.P. Cavafy

HOJOKI:  A Hermit’s Hut as Metaphore  Kamo no Chomei

REGENERATION   Pat Barker

THE EYE IN THE DOOR   Pat Barker 

THE GHOST ROAD   Pat Barker

IDYLLS OF THE KING   Alfred Tennyson

MOUNTAIN HOME:  WILDERNESS POETRY OF ANCIENT CHINA

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY   Paul Andrew Hutton

THE RAINBOW   Yasunari Kawabata

SAILING ALONE AROUND THE ROOM   Billy Collins

Of these sixteen were books of poetry  Six were non-fiction.  The rest were fiction.  All are worth reading.  I started several other books that I did not finish.  I have no problem in putting aside a book I am not enjoying.

THE MISSION is a disturbing history of the CIA this century.

THE BOUNTY told me details about the mutiny, about which I have read much, that I did not know.

THE SHELL COLLECTOR is an excellent and original collection of short stories.

IN THE NIGHT OF TIME is an epic novel of the Spanish Civil War whose main character is a Spanish architect.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND is an epic feat of imagination.

WAR MUSIC is an impressive modern retelling of THE ILIAD.  

REGENERATION, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, and THE GHOST ROAD are a trilogy of WWI with some characters based on men who lived then, including the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers and the poets Siegfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen.  This is the second time I have read the novels and I was as impressed by them as I was ten years ago. 

Last evening Carol and I watched an extraordinary film on Netflix, TRAIN DREAMS.  It had slight showing in theaters before going to streaming, but has received deservedly excellent reviews.  Here is one with which I fully agree.  

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/train-dreams-film-review-2025#google_vignette

        

Hilton Head Island: a film about the 1960 Sydney Hobart Race and four haiku

I thank William for a link to a film about the 1960 Sydney Hobart Race that I find quite enjoyable and interesting.  How much the boats and equipment have changed.  And for that matter the clothes spectators wear.

I have twice spent a year living on a mooring in Sydney Harbor’s Elizabeth Bay and I have sailed past Tasmania both north and south.

In 1960 I had never even been on a sailboat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xuPPMMQz5J0

Presently my morning Chinese or Japanese poetry is THE CLASSIC TRADITION OF HAIKU.

Here are four, some in multiple translations, by Matsuo Basho 1644-1694, who is considered the most significant writer in haiku history.

This is said to be his first masterpiece and the most influential Japanese poem on the English language.

I like this one because across four hundred years Basho describes what Carol and I often see in one of the live oak trees just beyond our deck.

And two more.

Hilton Head Island: from the past

I am presently rereading the journal from June and July, 2017, when I was back in Evanston after having sailed GANNET from Durban, South Africa to Marathon, Florida, with only two stops earlier that year.

Here are a two entries that I believe are worth posting again.

From Friday, June 9:

Evanston:  You give up your dreams

     

        I happen to be listening to Dave Albin singing, “Everett Ruess” which includes the line, “You give up your dreams as you get older, but I never gave up mine.” 

        ‘Dreams’ seems too vague and romantic.

        I never had ‘’dreams’.  I had purpose and plans.  

        If those dreams are of the sea, waves will rise and smack you cold in the face, as they have me a thousand times.

        Picture a solitary child, sitting in his bedroom, looking out over an overgrown field in the middle of a continent, longing for the thousand mile distant ocean.

        He reached that ocean, of which there is but one as the ancients knew, and he sailed and knew it as few others ever have.

        He grew older than he ever imaged he would.      

        “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” he wrote after almost dying every year for two decades; but even at a somewhat deaf and half blind seventy-five years he never gave up not his dreams, which he was too hard minded ever to have had, but his certainty that he was an original, fully aware that almost all original experiments are failures.
        He continued to live his life in uncertainly and risk, as all of us do,  not knowing if his life was a success or a failure, or even how to define those terms.

From Friday, June 23

        The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, or NatGeo as it now calls itself in surrender to the apparently universal decline in attention span, ran an interesting article on genius in its May issue which supports many thoughts I have offered in this journal.  Among them that ‘genius’ like ‘superstar’ has no objective meaning and is societal judgement; there are only originals; if one is admired enough he or she becomes a genius; and that life is forty years long, roughly from twenty to sixty.  Charts in the article show productivity declines decade by decade and for most ‘geniuses’ ends by sixty.  Naturally Bach was an exception, and so was Giuseppe Verdi.  I try to be an exception to the forty year rule myself.  Luck plays a part.  Time and chance happens to us all.  And persistence and discipline even greater parts.  Few succeeded at their first attempts.  Simply, when you quit, you fail.  If you persist, you may succeed.

From Monday, July 17:

Evanston:  I liked it.  I was good at it.  I felt alive.

        Breaking Bad fans will recognize the words spoken near the end of the final episode by Walter White, under-achieving high school chemistry teacher, family man and cancer victim, turned killer and genius meth cook.  He is speaking about his life of crime.  But the words could be true of running marathons, playing the viola, painting, sailing, singing in a band, writing a poem, playing baseball and many other endeavors.

        I think that next time I am asked why I sail, I will say, “I like it.  I am good at it.  And I feel alive.”

———-

Today is Christmas Eve in the United States, Christmas Day in New Zealand and Australia and other countries on the other side of the Dateline.

I wish all of you a happy holiday season and a splendid 2026, although the numbers of these years are becoming startling.

Hilton Head Island: TravelGrit; an unmarked grave; unconscionable; and three poems

 Bernie Harberts, of whom I have written here before

https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/2025/07/hilton-head-island-swan-song.html

may have been the only person on this planet, other than myself, who knew that last Friday was the 50th anniversary of my first rounding of Cape Horn without my telling him.

Bernie has started a new site, TravelGrit, in addition to his long running, RiverEarth.

https://travelgrit.com/

https://riverearth.com/home/

I have both on the list of sites I check each afternoon and look forward to his future entries.

At present there is some Webb Chiles at TavelGrit should you not already have had more than enough, including a podcast and link to a YouTube video of an interview Bernie did with me a few months ago.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3k863u3frc&t=240s

I wish Bernie success with his new site, however he defines success, and joy with his new boat, MYSTIC.

Carol was away last week visiting friends and in her absence I watched films that I did not think she would want to see.

One was J.S. BACH:  THE MUSIC, THE LIFE, THE LEGEND at Amazon Prime.  This was not a documentary, but a biopic.

I have read about Bach, but learned some things from the film I did not know or perhaps had forgotten, so after watching it I went to Wikipedia to see if the film was accurate.  It was, except that the actors who portray the great composer at various stages of his life are all considerably more handsome than he.  Nevertheless he was married twice and fathered twenty children, most of whom died before adulthood.  Seven with his first wife who died of a sudden illness when he was traveling elsewhere in Germany.  Thirteen by his second wife.  I pause to consider that.  Both women must have been almost continuously pregnant for years, one for more than a decade.

Bach died at age 65 in 1750 of complications of cataract surgery and I quote from Wikipedia:  He was originally buried at Old St John's Cemetery in Leipzig, where his grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years. 

Incredible.

Another was DOWNFALL:  THE CASE AGAINST BOEING on Netflix.  This is a documentary showing what happened, including two airplane crashes and the deaths of several hundred people, after a merger brought in new executives and a corporate culture that valued increasing the stock price above all else including safety.  

By Po Chü-i 772-846.

And two by Billy Collins 1941-present.