Lake Forest: more gannets and no more alarms; Daniel Kahneman; Luis de Camoes

 

Gannets rule.  But you already knew that.  The photo above won first prize in the World Nature Photography competition.  It was taken off Scotland by Tracy Lund who was out on a small boat when gannets started diving.  She lowered her camera in a waterproof housing over the side. 

While we probably will set alarms again from time to time, this is Carol’s last day of work and she will never again set an alarm to wake up to go to the office.  This is momentous.  A life changing experience that some of you have had and most of you will and I have not.  I last held what is called a ‘real job’ fifty years ago and can attest that having control of your own time is wonderful, if you can fill it purposely and enjoyably.  Carol is ending a successful forty year career as an architect.  She tells me she is ready, but that she feels this morning as though she is stepping off a cliff.  I will help her fall with grace and land safely.

There is an outstanding article in the WALL STREET JOURNAL about Daniel Kahneman, the Noble Prize winning economist who recently died.  I did not know of him, but he re-enforces some of my own observations.  I read WSJ through my subscription to Apple News+ and so cannot give you the link.  I checked and the WSJ site will not let you read the article without a subscription, but here are two key segments.

Before the pioneering work done by Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, economists had assumed that people were “rational”, meaning we are self-interested, use all available information to make unbiased decisions, and our preferences are consistent.  Kahneman and Tversky showed that’s nonsense.

In other words we are not homo sapiens.

Danny also insisted that studying the pitfalls and paradoxes of the human mind didn’t make him any better at problem solving than anybody else:  ‘‘I’m just better at recognizing my mistakes after I make them.’’  

For all his knowledge of how foolish investors can be, Danny didn’t try to outsmart the market.  “I don’t try to be clever at all,”  he told me.  Most of his money was in index funds.  (So is ours.)  “All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.”

An intelligent and interesting man.  Read the article or about him if you can.

A worthwhile result of my being cabin bound is that I have been reading even more than usual.  A few days ago I finished the BEING ALIVE anthology and so needed to find another book of Western poetry.  I decided to reread Luis de Camoes THE LUSIADS for what will be my third or fourth time.  It was a fortunate choice. 

The poem relates Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India and a reader benefits from knowing some Portuguese history which I do.

Camoes was himself in India and China for seventeen years, perhaps banished after a duel.  His return from The East took almost three years and included his leaping from a sinking ship with nothing but the manuscript of what would become THE LUSIADS.

He finally made it back to Lisbon in 1570.  THE LUSIADS was published two years later and he was given a tiny royal pension for ‘the adequacy of the book he wrote on foreign matters’.

He died in poverty in 1580 at age 55 or 56.  The exact date of his birth is not known

My Kindle edition translated by Landeg White is very readable and is bringing me great pleasure.  My aged spirit still thirsts for the epic.

Lake Forest: thanks; under the weather; three poems

 

I am sure that on your daily visit to the main site you have noticed that the line and photograph I recently I wrote I would add to that site if I could are now there.  For that I thank Rich, a sailor who follows this journal and read that entry and contacted his friend, Sheldon, who is a computer professional who can access my site and make changes.  I thank them both.  

I have been thinking about this and will not often take advantage of Sheldon’s gracious generosity.  I don’t know how long the main site will outlive me, but almost all of what I will ever write or do is already there.  Unless I am struck by some unexpected inspiration, I believe I will only want to include the completion of my five year plan, if completed it is, and my death.

In the meantime I will continue to write here and sail when the spirit moves me.

I have been under the weather.  Not in the usual meaning.  I am not ill, though as is also usual my latest slice is healing slowly.  For some years I have noticed that I heal much more slowly than I did when younger.  But under the weather in that the weather has been oppressing me.  Snow last Friday.  A few flurries Saturday.  A bit warmer Monday and Tuesday, but with rain and gale force winds.  All of which have been keeping me inside and less active than my aged body wants to be.  I have been doing my workouts, but workouts are not enough.  I need to get out.  The sun has just partially broken through after an absence for days, but the temperature is 32F/0C.  It is 70F/21//C in Hilton Head.  I found the above in my photos to remind me of what is waiting for me to return to, though probably not for another month.

Three poems.  The first two Japanese written a thousand years ago.  The last written by an American still living.

Lake Forest: a slice of life

A snowy day.  The weather is changeable in this part of the country at this time of year and not unusual.  I walked to a nearby drugstore to get a few things for Carol who is not feeling well.  I have winter clothes and it was not unpleasant.  Almost no cars on the streets and only two other pedestrians, one of whom, probably in his 60s, was having a ball.  He approached me smiling.  We shared ‘good-mornings’.  I was out running an errand.  He was out enjoying himself.  Good for him.

I removed the pressure bandage from my leg today.  I was told to leave it on for a week, but I was also told that if it bothered me too much, particularly if it felt too tight, I should remove it.  It had started to itch excessively, so I did and saw for the first time the incision the doctor made.  It is minimal for what she removed.  So much better than the butchery done to me by doctors in Hilton Head.  She is an artist of doctors.

I have told her of my admiration of her as a doctor.  I have never mentioned my appreciation of her beauty.  Beautiful women know they are beautiful.  That they have won a somewhat conflicted gift—and I hesitate at that word, for most would consider it a gift; some who have received it would not—gift or not, they know the results their physical appearance has on others.

For whatever reasons, many beautiful women have shared part of their lives with me.  This is about them, not me.  I come from nothing.  I invented myself in uncertainty and that some remarkable women responded to me was the first external indication that I might be what I thought I was.  Maybe they all made errors of judgement, but I had the advantages of not being threatened by their intelligence and of being able to make them laugh, and perhaps some others.

Of those women, some exalted in their beauty.  Some simply accepted it and lived on.  An unexpected number were uncertain about themselves, despite their obvious physical beauty and their admirable character.  I have thought about that and perhaps their uncertainty came passed on from their parents, particularly one Filipino I knew long ago.  I wonder how her life evolved.  I wonder how many of their lives evolved.  I hope they knew joy.  Some caused me pain.  It passed.  The memory of the joy they caused me, not just with their bodies, but with their presence, has not.  

Of all of them, Carol is the one who most downplayed her beauty.  It was a detriment to her career. 

Carol has always looked ten years or so younger than she is,  Most would welcome this, but in her work at times in meetings with those who did not know her, she would be thought an assistant, when in fact she was the boss as she made her way as a woman in what even the professional journals acknowledge is a male dominated field. 

I am not being unfaithful to Carol in acknowledging the obvious fact that there were other remarkable women in my life before we by chance came together.  She  was the right woman at the right time and an inexplicable gift.  

So to a great doctor and a beautiful woman who will never know that I admired her beauty, I offer a piece that is on the main site, which I know you visit every day in pursuit of grace and wisdom, but you could do worse than read again.

A Slice of Life

2018

        Once not so long ago there was a sailor who crossed oceans alone in small boats.  He did this for many, many years and became a legend.

        He found purity and joy alone in what he called the monastery of the sea and loved sailing toward the setting sun or toward the dawn.

        When as a young man he departed on his first voyage, three tantalizing sirens kissed him good-bye and waved until he disappeared over the horizon and then, as sirens often do, forgot him.

        He suffered hardships, not eagerly but inevitably.  Sometimes he starved.  Twice he almost died of thirst.    He learned that thirst is much worse than hunger.  Eight times he survived the great storms that are called hurricanes and cyclones.

        People often told him he was brave because he made voyages that not only had no one else ever made, but that no one else had even thought of.

        He did not consider himself brave.  He did not fear the sea and he knew that men do not conquer the sea or mountains, they only transit them.  Still he was at home at sea as few others have ever been.

        He did fear thirst.

        After every voyage he made a pilgrimage to a beautiful sorceress.  Wise men told him he must do this and so he did.

        The sorceress dwelt in a high tower beside a lake so vast some called it an inland sea.  That lake was deceptive, sometimes as turquoise as the Caribbean, sometimes as black as the North Sea in a gale.

        The sorceress had coal black hair, a friendly smile, and a gay laugh. 

        Each time the sailor visited her she sliced small pieces of flesh from him.  Though the pieces were small, they did not grow back and over the decades they added up.  Each time the sailor returned to the sea he was smaller.

        The sailor lived far longer than anyone expected, including himself, and though he grew old he kept crossing oceans.  Sometimes he wondered at this.  He did not believe in the gods and never asked them to protect him. 

        Finally when he was very, very old, he sailed his small boat into port and made his customary way to the sorceress’s lair.

        The sorceress did not age.  She was still beautiful.  Her hair still jet black.  Her smile still friendly.  Her laughter still gay.  She welcomed him and cut the tiny remnant he had become into three pieces and he vanished.

      (I made my biannual visit to my skin cancer specialist, who is a beautiful woman, today and amused myself on the train ride in by writing this in my mind.  I typed it out when I returned home.

        Originally the title was a dull “A Modern Myth”.  Steve Earley in an email called it a slice of life.  Knowing a good thing when I read it, I stole it.  Thanks, Steve.)

       

Lake Forest: the last slice; POOR THINGS; gannets

 

Snow was falling and the temperature was below freezing when I walked three blocks to the train station Monday morning for my final slicing by the beautiful skin cancer doctor.  I noted ruefully that at that moment Hilton Head was 70F/21C and sunny.  

I also noted that morning a news item headed ‘Christie Brinkley Diagnosed With Skin Cancer.’  Having a long running personal interest in skin cancer I read the article and found that she has a basal cell carcinoma which is hardly newsworthy, although its removal will leave a scar which, depending on location, may be more significant to Christie Brinkley than it is to me. 

Although the distance from Lake Forest to downtown Chicago is little more than thirty miles, the commute involves changing trains and takes most of two hours.

Once in the office I was treated quickly and efficiently.  Mine a squamous cell.  And for the first time had my lower leg wrapped in a pressure bandage and was prescribed antibiotics.  The beautiful skin cancer doctor waited to make the biggest slice last.  I will miss not only her beauty, but her professional excellence.  I have yet to find anyone on Hilton Head who is even remotely as good as doctor as she.

The pressure bandage stays on a week.  The stitches for two.  I am going to try to resume my workouts later this afternoon, doing push-ups without putting weight on my right foot.

POOR THINGS is a strange, unusual, original and ultimately excellent movie.  I say ultimately because I was somewhat disenchanted with the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film which seemed like a less funny Addams Family.  However as the story developed it became exceptional.  I would not be surprised that in time POOR THINGS will be considered a classic.  We rented it from Amazon Prime.  It is available for rental from several other sources as well.  Here is a link to a review with which I entirely agree.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/poor-things-movie-review-2023

The gannet photo is taken from THE TIMES OF LONDON.  

Lake Forest: my worthless life; a secret to a good marriage; notes nevertheless to my future biographer

 

I have watched on Apple TV+ THE DYNASTY.  For those of you who do not live in the somewhat not quite United States this is a series about the New England Patriots’ domination of the National Football League as no team ever has under coach Bill Belicheck and quarterback Tom Brady who has won seven Super Bowls, the last with a different team.  Brady is often called the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time.  I do not believe in GOATs because different times cannot objectively be compared, but unquestionably he has won far more Super Bowls than any other quarterback, so we must accept his wisdom in all things, or be outcasts.

In the final episode of THE DYNASTY when Brady was being acclaimed on his return to the Patriot’s stadium he said, and this is an exact quote: It is one of my core beliefs that there is nothing significant in life that can be accomplished as an individual.  It is always about the team.

So, far too late I have learned that my life has been worthless.  I have believed in the individual and I have worked alone; but who can argue with a GOAT?  Given a second chance I would try to do better, but as someone else observed life is not a dress rehearsal, so I don’t get a second chance.  Sorry, Tom.  Sorry all of you.  I screwed up.

Despite my failed life, most accept that I know something about sailing boats alone across oceans.  A few even think I am a pretty good writer.  But until now no one has considered that I might also be able to offer advice about marriage.  Odd for I have been married more than most and to confuse some have now been married to one of the most intelligent and beautiful women of her generation for thirty years, so I offer free a rare secret of a good marriage.

Everyone knows the basics:  respect, compromise, kindness, communication, great sex, but few know that a key to a good marriage can be noise-cancelling headphones.  I have them on now.  

Carol and I agree on most things, but we have different tastes in music and television.  She watches what poses as the news on television which I find an intolerable combination of Entertainment Tonight and the National Enquirer where all the talking heads speak rapidly and breathlessly, deliberately creating fear which has long been proven the way to sell newspapers and the media’s subsequent descendants,  Descend indeed.

Our condo in Hilton Head is configured better to solve this problem.  Carol can be watching and listening to whatever she wants on the television which is located near the kitchen while I am reading or watching whatever I want sitting in front of the bedroom window and looking out at Skull Creek.  However in this apartment that is not possible.  Noise cancelling headphones are a technological salvation.

To my future biographer:  you are going to make your academic career by discovering a previously little known genius—not my word, I prefer ‘original’ but ‘genius’ will sell better— and one who has the advantage of being as exceptional physically as he was as a writer, who made voyages no one had ever even imagined and may still again, and repeatedly survived the seemingly unsurvival, and who defined some words—sailor, artist—better than any one ever had—plus understood as a teenager that to call ourselves homo sapiens is a cosmic joke, that we are homo insipiens or perhaps homo narcissus, so I don’t apologize that the record is split and that you are going to do some work and go to my main site, if it still exists, and to the various places the journal has been uploaded.  I like, no I love, simplicity and clarity, but this technology is not in my control and I can no longer update the main site, so here are two additions I would make if I could.

I would add to the Lines page:  

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lines.html

To life,

And pushing as hard as you can as long as you can and being grateful for whatever moments of peace you find.

And I would add to the Webb Chiles section of the photographs page

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/webb2.html

this one Steve Earley took last month while we were sipping drinks on the Hilton Head condo’s screened porch.

The top photo was taken by me a few decades ago at a cremation in Bali when I could still see well enough to use a camera beyond shooting videos and excerpting single frames.      

Lake Forest: patched; open boats

 

You can blame Michael for this.  He wrote that he would like to see a photo of me with an eye patch, so I searched and came up with this one.  It dates back to 2011.  You will probably be surprised to learn that my reaction to it is how young I look.  Now I don’t delude myself I was young.  I was seventy years old, but when I look in the mirror now as I occasionally must, to my eye I look a lot older.  At age 82 twelve years is about 15% of my life, so I should look 15% older and I do.

You can thank Michael for this one, which I happened across while looking for a patched me.

I include it just because.  It dates to 2005 when THE HAWKE OF TUONELA would have been on her mooring in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  While Carol is prettier, that the camera focused on the flower is serendipitous.  

The first winter Carol and I were married THE HAWKE OF TUONELA remained on the hard in the Florida Keys and we lived in a rented apartment.  That next summer I sailed her up to Boston and that winter I insulated her interior so we could live on aboard and built a v-berth in the forepeak which had been empty and used for sail stowage when she was a racer.  I drove Carol to her office and then continued on Memorial Drive to Constitution Marina.  This being Boston usually the temperature was well below freezing and upon arrival I turned on the space heater and shivered until it warmed up enough for me to be able to hold tools.  Many of you are much better at building things than I, but I managed and doing the work myself had the great advantage that I could afford my wages.

What is called Mary Bryant’s open boat voyage has caused me to be thinking about open boat voyages.  I have tried to learn the size of the boat she, her husband, two infants and seven other escaped convicts sailed.  It seems it was about 25’ long.  That is a lot of people in a small boat, but then Capt. Blight had nineteen in the BOUNTY’S 23’ launch, including himself.  CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE could have floated inside both of those boats.  Here from Sailboat Data are the specifications of a Drascombe Lugger.

I would have much, much rather have been alone in the smallest boat.

Of the Bryant voyage, they had about 700 miles to sail from Sydney before they reached the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, which would have provided increasing protection as they continued the thousand miles north to Cape York.

I have sailed the last six hundred miles from present day Cairns to Cape York four times in four different boats:  CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, RESURGAM, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, GANNET.  I have said that it is my favorite coastal sail in the world, but then I don’t do much coastal sailing.  Or I didn’t before I moved to Hilton Head.  Now I suppose I do.  From Marathon to Hilton Head.  Hilton Head to The Chesapeake and back.  Down to St. Marys.  Up to Cape Lookout.  And sometime this year I’ll sail to Charleston.  

The last five hundred miles along what is now northern Queensland  are still empty and would look much as they did when the Bryants passed. Still they were sailing into the unknown and I along that coast was not.  Cook and Bligh had passed that way, but it was a great feat of seamanship and determination. 

Lake Forest: THE FATAL SHORE and an epic open boat voyage; half price; death of a thousand cuts; relapse; and a poem

 I am rereading Robert Hughes’ excellent THE FATAL SHORE about the British colonizing of Australia.  Hughes was an Australian who went to England to make good and did as an art critic, writer and television personality.  I first read THE FATAL SHORE not long after it was published in the late 1980s and am enjoying it very much again.

There is something to be said for having sailed and experienced much of the world.  I have spent more than four years in Australia on my voyages, two of them in Sydney, and I have sailed an open boat around Cape York.  Recently I read Nathanial Philbrick’s MAYFLOWER, and I have anchored where the Pilgrims first did at present day Provincetown and at Plymouth, and so bring that knowledge to these books.

Here are some excepts from THE FATAL SHORE.  The first about scurvy.

It is estimated that between the 16th and 18th Centuries more than 2,000,000 sailors died from scurvy, far more than from all other causes, including drowning, combined.

And here are the observations on the Māori by Joseph Banks who was with Cook when he first reached New Zealand and found the Māori a far different people than the welcoming Tahitians.

I do not know if this observation by Hughes is true, but it is interesting and may be:  All people, but especially the young, tend to become what society says they are. 

Somehow I had forgotten one of the great open boat voyages of all time, that of Mary and William Bryant, their two infants, and seven other convicts, who stole an open boat to escape from Sydney and sailed more than 3,000 miles up the coast, around Cape York and across the Timor Sea to Kupang.

Here is a link to an article about that impressive voyage.

https://navyhistory.au/mary-bryants-open-boat-voyage-from-sydney-to-timor-in-1791-opportunist-convict-or-our-most-magnificent-heroine/

I had a routine eye exam this morning.  Having to exam only one eye, the doctor should charge me only half price, but doesn’t.

I also learned this morning that the growth removed from my lower right leg a week ago is a squamous cell carcinoma and I have to return next week for further chopping.  This is no surprise.  I have seen enough of these things to be able to diagnose them myself.  This was the third squamous cell on my right shin in the past year.  What I need is a full skin transplant.  In its absence it would be more efficient just to amputate my right leg at the knee instead of this death by a thousand cuts.  I could then have a peg leg.  I already have an eye patch, though I seldom wear it.  I would then need only an ear ring and a parrot to look like a real sailor, though I realized a long time ago that whatever I look like is what a sailor looks like.

I have been back in the upper flatlands less than two weeks and I am already suffering from my self named captiterraphobia—fear of being trapped by land.  I have detuned myself.  I am good for the duration, as is my nature, and we are making progress.  Retiring is complicated.  I am glad I never have.  But I am missing the coast and Skull Creek and GANNET.

From the BEING HUMAN anthology:

Lake Forest: a good book and a poor movie; imagine

I found myself wondering why I read and watch so much about war.  Both the book and film in this post are about war and of the fifteen books I have read so far this year five have been about war and of the remaining ten, five were books of poetry.  I have concluded that I read and watch so much about war because war is along with love and scrounging for a living one of the most fundamental human behaviors.  We are an aggressive species and that aggression has played a large part in our survival.  Probably all those of us alive today are because we had ancestors who were among the most aggressive in their times.  The meek have died out.

The book, UNNOWN SOLDIERS by Vaino Linna, I mentioned while I was still reading it.  Now that I have finished I consider it to be among the finest of war novels.  Seemingly realistic to me who has not been in combat and so cannot truly judge and totally unsentimental.  I thank Michael for bringing it to my attention.

Since reading UNKNOWN SOLDIERS I have read more about Finland history.  The novel is about Finland’s part in World War Two fighting on the side of Germany from 1941 to 1944,, not in shared values, but a shared enemy.  Finland calls that The Continuation War because it followed The Winter War which lasted three months after the Soviet Union invaded Finland on November 30, 1939.  At that time the population of the USSR was 186 million.  The population of Finland was 3.5 million.  Nevertheless Finland inflicted significant defeats on the USSR until finally overwhelmed.  I have read elsewhere that the poor performance of the Soviet forces in that brief war influenced Hitler in his decision to invade the USSR.

In 1944 the Soviet Union had the Germans in full retreat and were able to turn some attention to what was to them a sideshow and again overwhelmed Finland’s army forcing the country to sue for peace.  Finland then had to fight The Lapland War against German troops in the north of their country who did not want to leave.

Considering its history, it is interesting that currently Finland is usually ranked among the happiest countries in the world.

With the caveat that there are some brutal scenes, I highly recommend UNKNOWN SOLDIERS.

Last evening Carol I concluded watching the recent Ridley Scott directed NAPOLEON.  I try to read reviews minimally before reading a book or watching a movie, but I did see some of this NAPOLEON which were unfavorable and unfortunately accurate.  A large part of this is due to the screen play which is incoherent and spends far too much time on Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine, which may appeal to prurient interests, but was hardly the most significant part of his life.  

There are many historical inaccuracies, among them that Napoleon deserted his army in Egypt because he learned Josephine was having an affair back in France.  That Nelson had destroyed his navy at the Battle of the Nile and left him isolated in the Middle East is never mentioned.  Nor that he returned to France because he was afraid in his absence others would seize power.

Napoleon also deserted another army, this the one he led into Russia, and left it to be destroyed while he again saved himself.  Estimates vary but of the 600,000 men he led into Russia it is generally agreed that fewer than 100,000 survived.

I suppose that Napoleon thought as have others like him that if these fools are willing to suffer and die for my glory, let them.

Again estimates vary, but Napoleon was responsible for millions of deaths.  A foremost current scholar puts the figure at 5,000,000.  Yet the French built a more grandiose monument to the loser than the British did to the winners, Nelson and Wellington, whose remains are in the crypt of St. Paul’s.  We are indeed a strange species of celebrity worshipers.

Don’t waste your time on NAPOLEON.

Imagine a time when two men have the power to destroy the world.  Imagine that those two men are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  Unimaginable.  But that time may soon be at hand.  

Lake Forest: roughing it; odd; two poems

 

 

To call Cape Horn The Everest of the Sea is an insult to Cape Horn.

You have probably seen the obscene photos of dozens of ‘climbers’ standing in line waiting their turn to summit Mt. Everest.  The above photos were all taken at Base Camp to which you don’t even have to walk any longer.  You can be flown up by helicopter after, as an article in THE TIMES OF LONDON, recently reports preparing by sleeping in a pressurized chamber in your own home.  I wonder if soon it will be possible to ‘climb’ Everest and impress all your friends without the inconvenience of having to step outside.

Here is a link to the article:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/everest-base-camp-sprawl-triggers-backlash-against-luxury-treks-lcrd2vptd

This is a screen shot taken an hour ago of the Earth Wind Map which I look at each morning.

https://earth.nullschool.net/

Until recently hurricanes were unknown in the South Atlantic.  They are still rare, but that tight circle in mid-ocean certainly looks like it might become one, though the winds are presently only 45 knots.  As you may have noted, the times they are changing.

Two poems.  The first from BEING ALIVE.  The second from HOJOKI:  THE HERMIT’S HUT AS METAPHOR.