San Diego: a shared email

(I reread this many times wondering if I should post it.  That you are reading it shows my decision.)

A little after 8 PM.  Rain is pattering on the deck.  A pleasant sound, though today has been dank.  I have spent the day sitting here at Central, reading, listening to music, watching an enjoyable first episode of a four part Netflix series, FOUR SEASONS IN HAVANA.  I only stepped on the dock once to invert the Avon.  I have a sleeping bag as a lap robe and as you might expect a glass of warming Laphroaig at hand.

Some have written that they want the unadulterated Webb Chiles.  Well, I promise you you don’t and although we live in a weird time when every burp and sneeze seem to need to be shared that is not going to happen.  However I sent an email to Carol yesterday that I am going to share part of with you.  Perhaps it is more Webb Chiles than anyone wants or needs, but I am in the dying part of my life and owe no one anything, except you the truth with omissions and Carol my love, and I am going to put some things on the record for my future probably nonexistent biographers to find.

 I am an old freak of nature.  I was a young freak of nature, but it is more obvious now.

I have long acted as though my luck were average.  That is very wise when you expose yourself to survival conditions.  But I have come to believe that in fact I have been extraordinarily fortunate, both genetically and by chance, particularly in meeting you in the only brief moment our lives could have come together.  I don’t know if that was better for me than for you.  I hope it was equal.

I have understood my life as I lived it as very few have theirs.  I understand it now that I am moving toward my death.  Whatever my life meant in words, voyages, love, has mostly already been set, yet almost incredibly I am not yet used up.  There is no precedent for me to follow.  There never was.  I am one of the cutting edges of our species and knew as I wrote more than forty years ago that almost all such original experiments are failures.  I have fulfilled my destiny, and I expect that I am a failed experiment, particularly now when people become rich and famous by posting videos of themselves over eating.  Yet this freak body goes on and I will too.  I really have no choice.

You have overheard me say when I have drunk too much, ‘Die Webb’.  

I would in fact like to outlive you, though that is highly unlikely considering the difference in our ages, just to be there to help you across the threshold at the end.  

You among others have observed that I am among the best read people you have known and from that reading I believe that I have been out here alone on the edge as long as anyone who has ever lived.  Those who have lived with the intensity I have burn out and die young.  Yet through a combination of an exceptional body, an even more exceptional animal instinct to survive, intelligence, and luck, I have grown old.   I almost said that I am tired.  Well I  sometimes am, tired of being me, but I will push on into the unknown.  I am captive of myself.  Who knows what joy I might yet find, what words I might yet string together, what unimagined voyages I might yet make.  

I hope I have been a good husband to you.  I have tried to be.  As I have often written but don’t know if you have read, you are the great grace of my life.