Above is a somewhat distorted version of my present view. It is 7:12 PM and I am sitting on the deck, sipping cabernet sauvignon and listening to the soundtrack of MASTER AND COMMANDER on headphones. The temperature is 81ºF and there is a slight breeze fluttering the Spanish moss. I am quite comfortable, but I also was last night when I sat out here from 8 to 9 PM listening to music and sipping Laphroaig when the temperature was 91ºF, but there was also then a cooling breeze.
This condo is a legitimate version of paradise. I say that not boasting, but in continual surprise that although it took almost eighty years I am happier here than any other place I have ever lived ashore.
I am filling time before the Copa America final between Brazil and Argentina which begins in forty minutes.
Permit me to copy one of the quotes on the lists page of the main site that I have used in the front of my books.
(I) am, I believe, following the clear path of my fate. Always
to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the
limits--what else should a man’s life be? Especially an old man
who has, by a clear stroke of fortune, been violently freed of
the comfortable securities that make old men happy to sink into
blindness, deafness, the paralysis of all desire, feeling, will.
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings,
of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the
edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not
yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there
bearing the fragrance of islands we have not sighted.
--from AN IMAGINARY LIFE by David Malouf
I am an old man, partially deaf and I estimate between 60% and 75% blind. I have enviable comfort, but my desire, feeling, will are not paralyzed.
I paused for a moment because I sometimes wish they were. A line from a poem I long ago discarded: ‘intensity not duration’. Yet I lived both intensity and duration and am stuck with both, which have had their rewards, but also their trials. It is possible to live too long.
Only a half an hour before the match begins so I need to hurry.
The relevance of this, if any, is to my dry suit.
With application of teflon spray to the zippers and the addition of loops of Dyneema to the zipper tabs which gives me better grip, I donned my dry suit yesterday and got all the zippers closed, including the one around the back of my neck.
One most definitely does not need a dry suit in Hilton Head in July, but I am planning a voyage next summer to waters that are cold. I am not going to say where. I may not even say in advance before I set out. I will say it is not Cape Horn.
This will be decisive. I wrote on the first passage of GANNET’s circumnavigation “Use yourself up, old man. Use yourself up.”
On the two sails I have made since then I have not reached my destination. If I don’t next summer, unless it is due to breakage or chance beyond my control, if it is due to failure of will and determination, I will accept that I have used myself up.
I don’t suppose many almost eighty year olds wonder what they ought to do next, but I do. 2022 will be an important year in my life, assuming I live that long. And if I am used up, I am, and I take solace and satisfaction that I have lasted decades longer than I or anyone else thought I would.
My other prevailing today was over wasps.
I walked down to GANNET this morning, carrying a roll of Raptor non-skid and wasp spray. Upon arrival I cautiously opened the dock box wasp spray in hand. The wasps have good scouts and were gone.
The music has ended. A hawk glides by overhead without moving a feather. The sun is about to set. Skull Creek is golden. The soccer match is due to start in twelve minutes. There are a couple of sips of wine still in the glass.
L’Chaim.
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