Saturday morning I had the unexpected pleasure of an email from a man who asks that his name not be used, so I refer to him as ‘D’. I have thought about that email now for two days and how much of it to share with you. I have decided at the risk of immodesty to share most of it, trusting that I will be forgiven for taking satisfaction that a few are still reading and appreciating words I wrote now almost a half century ago. We all can occasionally use some encouragement, even me.
As I have said before, STORM PASSAGE is the book I have been most tempted to revise. I was more brash then, but I was unproven then, to everyone, and most of all to myself. The voyage in EGREGIOUS was the test. Ultimately I passed it to my satisfaction and perhaps to others.
I have not made revisions because I believe STORM PASSAGE is true to the man I then was. Fifty years later I am still the same man, but I have revised myself.
For those who don’t know, my first two attempts at Cape Horn failed because of rigging damage. My third succeeded despite EGREGIOUS having a cracked hull for almost all the five month passage from San Diego around the Horn finally ending in Auckland, New Zealand, because the sails were shredded almost beyond use and the boat was sinking out from under me. Toward the end I was bailing seven tons of water every twenty-four hours out of the cabin with a bucket. I went on to complete a two stop circumnavigation in what was then world record time for a solo circumnavigation in a monohull and during which I became the first American to round Cape Horn alone.
In the selections below, those through page 140 were written during the first two failed attempts. Those after, during the successful circumnavigation.
I find it interesting to see what words D chose to select and which he didn’t.
I have not reread STORM PASSAGE myself for many years and had forgotten some of the selections, but I have also remembered many, including the imaginary sailor on the third planet around Antares, and Carol and I were talking a few evenings ago about the huge pod of what I believe were pilot whales.
———
Hi Webb,
I catch up on your blog every week or so. It's an exercise in contrast that gives me an excellent feeling. I think the good feeling comes from a contrast of time and eternity (cultural eternity, you know, which is as good as it gets). Daily contrasted with centuries, say.
There's the cultural permanence of your life and books. Not many people have done that. Have made their worthwhile and benevolent mark, that will always be there for anyone to happen upon or seek out. Maybe we all look to various people who have done that, in order to enjoy the "long" perspective on existence. (Probably even those who have actually accomplished it.)
Then there's you right there in your blog. Daily life. Everyone has a daily life, and it's also a lovely thing. The first lovely thing, from which some people can make the other -- something culturally permanent. There's Webb Chiles -- same man, same life. But the books and the blog offer contrasting perspectives that feel very good, viewed side by side.
I say all that by way of making sense of, I hope, forwarding you my copybook of Storm Passage. (Kindle books make this a no-labor process as I'm reading a book, and I'm glad of that.)
It's a strange thing to do ... to quote a man's best paragraphs, back to him. But Storm Passage is so enjoyable and strengthening, it's a favor to the world to promote it from time to time. Here are my favorite passages, if you think it useful or appropriate to share them in your blog.
Otherwise, just take them as a 'thank you' and a wave.
D
Webb Chiles’ Storm Passage:
Some people who have known me relatively well have seen my
desire to sail around the world alone as an obsession. They have
been partially right, but the obsession has been with greatness,
with the heroic, of which the voyage is one possible
exemplification.
-Page 17
I have rung for the cabin boy to come and sluice down the
deck, but regret I must report that this ship is run by nepotism.
The cabin boy bears a striking resemblance to the captain.
-Page 20
As I stand on the companionway steps, my head and shoulders
above deck, the bow seems always to be pointing downward; as
though we sail down the face of a gradually rising wave, miles
down a gigantic crest, sailing not upon—but into—the sea.
-Page 25
I write to several possible audiences. I write to myself. I write
to those I love and to my personal friends. I write to an unknown
boy who lives in a crowded city far from the sea. I write to those
who love solitude and sailing and the sea. And I write perhaps
most of all to a being who may exist only in my perhaps-too-vivid
imagination.
One night more than a year ago, a few months after Egregious
had been built, I sat looking up at the stars from her deck. In the
southern sky was the constellation we know as Scorpio, with its
brightest star, Antares. I had been wondering how many other
planets have oceans and beings who love to sail upon them; and
as I gazed toward Antares, I became convinced that at that
moment someone on the third planet of Antares was preparing
to sail across its seas, just as I was ours, and that he was thinking
of me, as I of him, and that across space we both knew and
understood. So I write this also to my friend on Antares.
A fanciful, childish thought? But I don't wish to grow any
older.
-Page 24
I feel as though I have struggled for twenty years for nothing, that I have always deluded myself that I am an exceptional man. I am thirty-three. By that age men have conquered empires, written masterpieces. I have done nothing but scribble away on my worthless autobiography. An autobiography of failure. The only arts I have mastered are those of suffering and self-pity. That I so wanted this to be a good time in my life, that I fear I will always fail at that which is most important to me, or spend years trying to accomplish what others have done more easily. Living not on the edge of human experience, but failing in its backwash. This dream of mine—this great glorious chimerical dream—has cost too much.
I try to step aside and view myself objectively. I try to tell myself that I must fight against this mood, and for a few moments—sometimes even a few hours—I succeed. Yet always it returns and often with increased strength, feeding upon itself; for there is nothing else for me to think about while we roll on to Tahiti, still more than 1,400 miles distant. I try hard to suspend thought about the future, but I am not by nature passive enough to live in suspended animation for two weeks. I had thought I might exorcise my pain by writing, but I do not know if I have not made it worse instead. I hope that your voyage is going better for you, my friend near Antares, than mine is here. I am going to force myself to read and occupy my mind with something else.
-Page 28
One might scoff that Euripedes' characters are only myths. Yes, and so am I.
-Page 51
It has been said that we do not live in a heroic age, but that is
not true. During my lifetime, epics have been enacted time and
again. But they have always been epics of evil and the only men
of heroic scale have been monsters.
Precisely against such men and such an age, I affirm my belief
in the importance of my private dream; in the value of any
dream to which an individual devotes his life and which harms
no one else. My dream of simple pleasure has become only a
more complex pain. I will live with that pain. I will try to keep it
in perspective. But I will not lose it or myself in the statistics of
mass horror or in the trivial concerns of the sybaritic shadows
that in this age pass as men.
-Page 60
I have sat today inside the cabin, as remote from the land as if I
were back at sea, reading Ludwig's biography of Napoleon, who
at my age was made First Counsel of France for life. When I was
a child, I used to read the biographies of great men to learn how
they became great; only to find that the biographers quickly
passed over the process by which the great man elevated himself
—or was elevated—from obscurity. Now I know that what is called
genius stems only from an inexplicable innate belief in
oneself, which in turn creates a perseverance in one's efforts that
is unfailing. One cannot help but to continue to believe in oneself,
so one cannot help but persevere and endure. Once I took those virtues lightly,
but they are everything. Everything but luck.
-Page 81
Almost certainly I was seen from the island. Few boats pass this
way, so I imagine that many Raivavaens are speculating this
evening on who I am, where I came from, and where I am going.
They are all good questions. I often speculate about them
myself.
-Page 91
There is nothing ugly out here but me; and at this moment
when I want for nothing, when I am no longer striving, when I
am not in a process of becoming but of being, when I am whole,
complete, one, transcendent, I am also transcended and do not
exist, except as an essential part of the beauty around me. How
incredible that this should happen here as I enter the Forties.
How incredible that it should happen anywhere.
-Page 98
My response to the most recent breakage surprises me. I find
that I do not care. I think I will go back to San Diego and return
to work and live a quiet, normal life. I long for the fragile beauty
of flowers in bloom and green fields and thickly wooded hillsides
and for the soft caress of a woman I love. That my twenty-year
dream should die overnight does not seem possible. Yet it seems
to be true. And I have no regrets.
DAY 56 · January 13
THE storm has passed, leaving swells from the north and a light
wind from the south, before which we wallow northeast at 2
knots. The sails collapse and refill an average of fourteen times a
minute.
THE numb indifference which protected me yesterday is gone. I
feel acutely the pain of failure, but with that pain has come the
knowledge that I will again attempt to sail around the world
alone. I do not know if I will be able to try again this coming
November, or if I will try again in this boat. My own words
sustain me: If I truly believe in myself, I have no choice but to
persist.
-Page 106-107
DURING all too much of my life I have played the role of the
extraordinary man who would be a hero in a decadent age, the
original individual who could find fulfillment only at sea.
Yet I have known and said that I am not only a sailor, but also a
writer and a voluptuary and an ascetic. This voyage has brought
me some fulfillment, and, if successful, certainly would have
brought me more. But it has also brought the understanding
that I will not find complete fulfillment at sea anymore than I
have found it in women or solitude or writing. I have said that I
am a child, but to have thought as I did that my life would be a
success after the completion of this voyage, was being too much
of a child.
Nothing seems important tonight. Everything has failed.
-Page 108
LAST night I deliberately turned Egregious back toward Cape
Horn. It is not an act of which I am proud. I had just reread my
brave boasts of the past, and they overcame all logic and reason.
Unfortunately, they do not make the rig stronger and they will
not keep the mast up in a gale. After lying sleepless in my bunk
for three hours, I went on deck and changed course to the
northeast.
-Page 109
AN eerie night. There is no moon, and the stars are obscured by
clouds. We sail through absolute blackness. No phosphorescence
outlines wave or wake. Always there has been some light,
but tonight not the least glimmer. The light and dark of space
have become one and none, as though primordial currents were
again flowing blindly toward another unknowing genesis. I peer
about, futilely seeking any variation in shade or form, but the
cutter ghosts from nothing into nothingness, until I add to the
depths of obscurity by falling asleep.
-Page 110
IN the early evening I read until 8:30, when I went on deck to
watch the gibbous moon appear and disappear behind scattered
clouds and the moonlight sparking on the water and the pale
sails against the night sky.
-Page 114
A moonless night. Cold rain. Breaking waves. At 10:00 P.M. I
undress and go naked onto the deck, deliberately leaving my
safety harness below. Mostly there is the terrible cold and the
fear that I will slip—I have been afraid twice before on the
voyage: in Papeete Pass and the very first instant I thought there
was a crack in the hull—but I know what I am doing and make
my way forward, past the mast, past the storm jib, then the final
few feet until I stand in the very bow, fingers clutching the
headstay. Freezing water beats down from the sky and up from
the sea against my flesh. I lean forward beyond the bow, far
beyond where the guardrail and lifelines would be, and look
back at Egregious roaring through the wild sea. For perhaps a
full minute I hang there until I feel my numb fingers begin to
shake uncontrollably. There is a moment when the headstay is
slipping from my grasp, I am about to fall into darkness, and
time stops. The white panthers of the sea. An ordeal of grandeur.
Mary. The broken tangs. The transcendent hours at
39°South. Porpoises. Raivavae disappearing behind us. The
groaning rudder. The overflowing bilge. The spectral sea of
Albert Ryder. Bach in the Roaring Forties. The grinding mast.
The surge of speed to 11 knots. The white heron. I want the sea
for my unmarked grave. Sailing beneath the full moon. Winds
and waves of torment cease. Papeete Pass and the palms clustered
on the point south of Paea. The voyage has not been the
vision I had, but I have lived as intensely as I had hoped. To
speak would be unthinkable, and the only possible words unnecessary:
I am. My hands drop helplessly open. I twist as I fall
and manage to land on the steeply inclining deck, across which I
slide until I stop myself with my arms wedged against the deck
coaming. I do not believe I have ever been so cold. Each wave
washes away more of my meager remaining strength as I crawl
slowly aft until at last I fall through the companionway.
-Page 133 to 134
Point Loma has become visible and is now a silhouette 1/2 mile
to the west. Within that dark shape, darker hollows more sensed
than seen are filled with the cries of gulls, whose restless forms
fall through the somber sky above the cliffs.
POINT Loma cleared at 5:14 P.M.
Ahead the lights of the city come on as I sail up the bay.
Egregious man, boat, voyage, life. Smile, fool, and sail on.
-Page 140
I often think that those men who compromise
or abandon their dreams do so from a pathetic inability to
imagine their own deaths. They live as though death were optional.
I know that I could not contentedly face my death after a
life in which I was no more than a lover of women
-Page 197
I have often gazed up into the night sky and known that if Egregious
were able to rise from the sea and I voyage alone through space
never to return to earth, I would set my course that instant not
for the nearest but the farthest star.
-Page 198
I deliberately resist the role of the great loner, but people
cannot be alone for as long as I have and not be affected by that
austere solitude. Last year I defined myself as a sailor, writer,
voluptuary, ascetic. Two hundred eighteen days alone have
made me more adventurer and ascetic than lover. The most
passionate of men is also the most celibate. Presumably, when I
return to shore, I will become gregarious again; but at the
moment it seems as though what I will gain in gratification of one
pleasure will be lost in the denial of another.
-Page 198
I have been rereading Samuel Eliot Morison's great biography
of Columbus. He had firm religious faith to sustain him.
Even in moments of contentment, sea life is hard. For me there is
only the image of myself I must try to live up to.
-Page 200
AT the sound of something breaking the surface of the water for
the first time in 10,000 miles, I glanced aft to see an apparently
endless procession of dolphins and what looked like small whales
gamboling toward us. They all swam together in one great pod.
The dolphins were about 3 feet long, with grey backs and tan
bellies. The other species—much the more numerous—
averaged 8 to 10 feet in length, although some were more than
14. They had high-domed foreheads, a white stripe near the eye
and a white patch aft of their dorsal fin. Hundreds of them swam
very near, seeming to pass to windward by choice, and when a
series of breaking waves approached, a dozen or so hurried over
to surf down the crests. It took more than forty minutes before
the procession was gone and I again had the ocean to myself. I
could not help but wonder what they feed upon. Whatever it is,
the amount necessary to sustain so many creatures living together
must be enormous, and their effect, as they pass, devastating.
-Page 200
Briefly I consider the future and wonder what an obsessed
man does when he has fulfilled his obsession.
When he was a young man, St. Augustine prayed, "God, make
me pure—but not yet." There will be other commitments and
other voyages for me, including another solo rounding of Cape
Horn—after all, who, having visited hell, would not, given the
opportunity, return to see if it really was as bad as he remembered.
But, like St. Augustine, I say "Not yet." For the moment, I
have no ambition beyond lying in the sun like a lizard and
swimming tomorrow in the warm sea off Maeva Beach. I know I
will tire of indolence, that having lived on the edge of life, I can
never return for long to something less. The intensity is too
intoxicating. But not yet.
-Page 246
In Auckland, Suzanne and I attended an exhibit of Chinese
art. One of the objects was a figure holding aloft thirty-two
concentric spheres, only the outer half dozen of which were
visible, all carved from a single piece of ivory. The satisfaction of
the artist upon completing carving all thirty-two spheres and
knowing that each—even the innermost which would never be
seen—was perfect, is the same as that of a man who completes a
solo circumnavigation, who fulfills any dream, even though no
one else knows.
I smile to myself as Egregious sails slowly across the dusky
harbor; and behind the sea-etched face of the man, a small boy
grins because he has made his dream come true.
Egregious man, boat, voyage, life.
The fool smiles and sails on.
-Page 248, end
1 comment:
Read & remembered.
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