Hilton Head Island; transplanted

 

The bamboo plant is wilted as am I after two days confined in an SUV, and I was not even tied up as the bamboo was.

Carol tells me that the bamboo turned pure white after its transfer of only twenty miles from Evanston to Lake Forest, but it recovered.  How it will respond to a thousand mile move from 42N to 32N I do not know.  I am not sentimental.  The plant does not have a name but I admire it for needing almost nothing from others beyond a little water from time to time and oblique sun light and growing in a graceful form.  Do any of us do better?  So we have given this plant a chance.  I hope it survives.

Obviously I am on Hilton Head Island and very glad to be.  The Midwest, where I was born by a cruel jest of the nonexistent gods, is behind me.

Many of the men I most admire came from the Midwest:  Lincoln.  Grant.  Clemens.  Truman.  

I was born there, but I am a creature of the open ocean.

It all came right.

I found my way to the coast and taught myself to sail, apparently well.

Chicago is a great city.  Lake Forest is a wealthy and pleasant place.  But I do not belong there.

As we turned off the Interstate for the last few miles to Hilton Head Island I felt a heightened joy, which increased as Carol drove us over the two span bridge to the island, and was greater when we were beyond the mainland, and greater still when we were in our condo and in our own space.

If I remain alive and healthy for a few more years, I will leave this place and expose myself to the ocean and time and chance, but for now I am so glad to be here, having breakfast and drinks and dinner on the screened porch, watching squirrels and birds dart between the branches of the live oaks.  The silence.  The tranquility.

I will enjoy what I can.  Then I will gather my strength and try to push on.

L’Chaim.

Lake Forest: surfers; stuff; the poet’s delusion

You may have seen the above photo taken during a surf competition in Western Australia.  I like to believe all the surfers are feeling the same joy.

Stuff oppresses me.

As is known I have twice lost all my physical possessions.  

When I drove north from Key West in a rental car to buy a boat and try to put my life back together nine months after sinking RESURGAM all I owned then in the world fit in a single duffle bag.

I have long thought that the best size boat for two people is between 35’ and 40’.  I have owned and lived aboard with the then woman in my life on a 26’, a 35’, a 36’, and two 37’.  I have said that if something will not fit on a 37’ boat I don’t need to own it.  Now, by proxy, I own or half own, much that will not fit on a 37’.  

For myself alone I would now say that if it does not fit on GANNET I don’t need to own it.  Part of this is due to technology.  I need books and music and what a few decades ago would have taken up considerable space no longer does.  I have four or five hundred books and seven or eight hundred albums of music on my phone alone.  But I can live ever more simply..

There is too much stuff.

I finished reading the thousand mostly very short poems in AN ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL JAPANESE POETRY.

Here is one.  I have sympathy with Monk Saigyo’s delusion, but I don’t share it.  On the other hand, his words have lasted, however faintly, more than a thousand years.

Lake Forest: Connemara; kissing the moon; beach day; Nero’s deadline

 

I read LISTENING TO THE WIND, the first volume of Tim Robinson’s Connemara trilogy, the way I drink Laphroaig, sipping slowly, a chapter a day.  This is a book to be savored, not gulped.

Before Colin in Ireland brought Tim Robinson to my attention, for which I thank him, I knew the word Connemara, but I could not have placed it on a map.  Now I can.  An edge of Europe midway up the west coast of Ireland, not far from Galway, about twenty miles/ thirty kilometers of coast and low, but rugged mountains, eternally assaulted by the ocean and the elements.

Tim Robinson was not Irish, but English, raised in Yorkshire and educated at Cambridge.  He and his wife moved to Ireland in 1972, first to the Aran Islands, about which he wrote two books, then to Roundstone on the Irish mainland.

Here is a link to his obituary.  I regret to learn that he, a very physical man, developed Parkinson’s Disease and died of COVID.  It can happen to any of us.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/tim-robinson-obituary-english-writer-who-went-native-in-connemara-1.4225031

Robinson found his place in western Ireland as I have found my place at sea.  He writes of the geology, the biology, the history—both factual and legendary, of Connemara with a rare style so that I, who have never been to Ireland, feel I know the place.

Here is a sentence I particularly like:  I accept the complication, the obstacle to writing, with gratitude:  it widens the boundary region between established truth and unstable imaginings that is my preferred territory and through which my book prowls to its conclusion.

I finished LISTENING TO THE WIND yesterday with the satisfaction of knowing that the two other books of the trilogy, THE LAST POOL OF DARKNESS and A LITTLE GAELIC KINGDOM, await.

 

The WALL STREET JOURNAL recently ran an article about the above Winslow Homer painting, Kissing the Moon, which I had not previously seen.  The author points out the mysterious and unanswerable questions:  what are these men doing out there well offshore?  Just sitting?  Just waiting?  For what?  Each looking a different direction.  The man in the stern, who may have been Homer’s favorite nephew,  dressed for hunting, not fishing.  Rough seas with the diagonal wave providing tension as I learned years ago from the chance photo I took from the inflatable of a swamped CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE. 

And the distant moon seemingly so close.

Spring in Chicago is fickle.  Yesterday was almost summer.  73F/23C.  So Carol drove us to the lake front in mid-afternoon for drinks and an early dinner.  Our favorite walk is down there, a mile long loop, starting in the parking lot, climbing the 120 steps up to the top of the bluff, than along it until a road takes us down to lake level and back to the car.  Lately we have been almost alone there.  Yesterday we were not.  A few of the young even ventured knee deep into the still 45F/7C water.  We set up our chairs on a narrow strip of grass and enjoyed looking out at the calm water.  In a few days the low temperatures are forecast again to be near freezing.

I am rereading the collected poems of one of my favorite poets the Greek, C.P. Cavafy.  Here is one.

Lake Forest: anniversary year; unlicensed; another thought on 65 years

I thank Zane in New Zealand for reminding me that next month will mark the tenth anniversary of the beginning of GANNET’s circumnavigation.  In the midst of clearing out Carol’s apartment and moving full time to Hilton Head I had not thought of that.  Zane even considerately provided the link to what I wrote the night before I set sail.  I had not read it for years.  Perhaps not since I wrote it and I enjoyed doing so again.  Perhaps you might too.

https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/2014/05/san-diego-this-is-so-great.html

The next morning I got up, pushed GANNET out of her slip and left.

I have not forgotten two other anniversaries that will occur this year.  In August Carol and I will have been married thirty years, and November will mark fifty years since I sailed on my first attempt at Cape Horn and the beginning of what I have called the being part of my life.

2024 is going to be more memorable than I expected.

GANNET’s insurance is due for renewal.  In South Carolina the cost is four times what it was in Illinois and California, though not as expensive as it was in Florida.  As I have mentioned here before I asked if this is due to the hurricane season and was told only partly.  Florida in particular is a high claim state due to incompetent power boaters often under the influence of alcohol or drugs.  So I decided to shop around and get other quotes.  I started with Progressive’s website because we have other insurance with them and could bundle.  I filled out their form online which asked questions about me and the boat one of which was for my driver’s license number.  I checked the box unlicensed.  After I completed the form a message appeared that they would not provide me with a quote because I do not have a driver’s license.

Somewhat irritated I telephoned them and was told the same thing.  I hung up more irritated.

I do not like insurance or insurance companies generally.  If you work for one I don’t apologize.  That is just the way it is.  I have never had insurance on an ocean voyage and only have it in port because marinas require it.  I work by choice without a net and take full responsibility for myself including losses. 

Progressive never asked why I don’t have a driver’s license.  Just:  no vehicle driver’s license.  No quote.  

One might question if my vision is so poor that I don’t want to drive a car, then isn’t it so poor I can’t sail a boat?  Other than that this is demonstrably not true, the difference is that cars are two ton projectiles often moving at 70 miles per hour in close proximity with many other such projectiles.  GANNET is a one ton projectile usually moving at 6 or 7 miles per hour with few or no other such projectiles  anywhere near or even in sight.

I gave up seeking alternatives and am just going to renew with BOAT US which to their credit never asked if I have a driver’s license.

I have several friends and a wife all of whom are or will soon be 66 years old and realized that photos of them taken 65 years apart would show considerably greater change than did mine.

Lake Forest: 65 years and other photographs

 

That is what sixty-five years will do.

The top picture was taken in 1959.  I ran the hurdles in track in high school.  It is the only photo I have of me under age 30.  I have twice lost all my physical possessions and don’t hang onto the past except for some words.  The photo comes from a high school year book and was sent to me several years ago by a classmate.  I did not keep the yearbook myself.

The second photo was taken a month ago by Steve Earley while we were enjoying drinks on the screened porch in Hilton Head.

Age 17 and age 82.

I came across the top photo while looking for ones of the Jordan Drogue to send to Colin in Ireland who is making his own drogue.

That is the drogue in its deployment bag, which folded up looks like this.

Two parts of the drogue are missing:  the bridle which is shackled to the eye at the end of the drogue to the right and the weight which is shackled to the eye at the end at the left.

The bridle is massive as are the shackles.  Far larger than anything else on GANNET, indicative of the strain expected on them when the drogue pulls tight when the boat is caught by breaking waves.  The weight at the aft end of the drogue is fifteen pounds/6.8 kilos.  I use a length of heavy chain.

With all three components connected, the drogue is heavy and awkward to move and would be difficult to attach to the plates bolted through the hull in the extreme conditions in which I would want to use it.  GANNET has been through two 55 knot gales in which I was not tempted to deploy the drogue.  In the second, off Durban, South Africa, the met service said the waves were 6 meters/20’ and the little boat safely lay ahull, so I would not expect to use the drogue in less than Force 12.  I think it would already have to be in place for me to do so.  Set up and connected ready to deploy probably before leaving port.  On GANNET this is complicated by not wanting to block solar panels or the cockpit drains.  I have not yet come up with a solution.

And I also came across this photo.

I am sailing GANNET out the Mission Bay Channel.  I think Carol must have taken it, but neither of us remember her doing so.  I am using the tiller extension so I can handle the jib sheets while short tacking.  

 

Lake Forest: better tasting martinis; absurb

Because I am a cyclops which seriously effects depth perception out to twenty feet, which if you are sailing a 24’ boat is your entire world, for some years I have avoided using stemmed glasses which I knock over too easily.  We don’t have any stemmed martini glasses at Hilton Head, but we do here, and the past few weeks I have dared to use them.  I have been very careful and thus far I have successfully consumed my drinks without spillage.  I do not claim this is science, but I find martinis taste better when drunk from a martini glass.  They certainly look better.

I went and stood not long ago by the windows looking out over the street.  I stretched my arms and said, “It is absurd.  I am eighty-two years old and I still feel strength that wants to be used.”

Carol came over and put her arms around me and said, “Use it.”

Lake Forest: “dry wood on the water with a sail”; contemplating a limpet; three weeks

 

I have finished rereading Camoes THE LUSIADS during much of which Vasco de Gama relates the history of Portuguese military prowess to rulers in Malindi, a port north of Mombasa in present day Kenya where his small fleet was welcomed, and in Calicut on the southwest coast of India where they ultimately fulfilled the purpose of the voyage.  In addition to describing the voyage itself, there are two other unusual episodes, one when on the return they are brought by Venus to the Isle of Love where they are entertained—to use a polite word—by beautiful nereids, and another much earlier when just as they are to depart from Lisbon an old man standing on the shore disparages the enterprise in total contrast to the heroic tenor of the rest of the poem.

I am fairly certain that I have quoted the line about ‘dry wood on the water with a sail’ before in this journal, but I find the entire tirade so ironically pleasing that I want to share it with you.

J.M.W. Turner is one of my favorite painters, but I came across a reference this morning to one of his paintings I had not seen, ‘The Exile and The Rock Limpet’.  It was described as ludicrous and it is.  Even the greatest artists make mistakes.  It is meant to depict Napoleon on a beach in St. Helena contemplating a rock limpet, presumably impressed by its ability to hang on and persevere.

That there is no such beach in St. Helena—I have been there and Turner never was; the island doesn’t have a harbor and just falls into the sea—and that Napoleon was short not tall, and kept in a large house in the hills well away from the coast to prevent any escape attempt, are perhaps irrelevant.  An artist is entitled to his vision, but Napoleon and the limpet is romantic nonsense.

Carol advised me last evening that we are leaving this place on April 26.  That is three weeks from today.  She has made reservations for that night at a nearby hotel just off the Interstate so I believe she is serious although this place is still full of stuff.  The two day drive will see me looking at Skull Creek and GANNET on Sunday, April 28.  Excellent.  I feel like a prisoner with an indeterminate sentence who has just been given a release date.

Lake Forest: desire among the Japanese

I am halfway through AN ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL JAPANESE POETRY which includes one thousand poems composed between the sixth and thirteenth centuries.  Most are in a form known as tanka of only five lines so I easily read twenty-five a day.

The subjects vary.  A significant number are about desire.  I considered titling this ‘love among the Japanese’, but I believe desire is more accurate.  Even lust would be.  Though Christianity has given lust a bad name, including it in the seven deadly sins, the definition is:  very strong sexual desire, which does not sound bad to me and is the essential means by which DNA projects itself mindlessly into the future.  

Many of the Japanese poems are about unfulfilled desire through indifference, duty, custom.  At one time women of the higher classes were not allowed to speak to any man in public who was not a family member.  Prohibition led as always to subterfuge.

So here on a dismal day of rain due to turn to snow are a few poems of Japanese desire.