I am confused.
By chance yesterday afternoon I discovered that my official South Carolina I.D. card lists my sex as “F’. I accept life’s uncertainties, but I never expected to turn into an ugly old woman with a mustache.
The ID card is good for eight years which is probably longer than I am.
We may go back to the DMV office in Bluffton and sort out what I hope is a clerical error, but I am inclined not to. The printing on the card is small and I doubt anyone will ever check beyond name, photo, and perhaps signature. The card has already been twice accepted as identification. Conducting the experiment is tempting.
Sunday Carol noticed that the film, THE PERFECT STORM, was being telecast, so we watched. We had both seen the film before and I have read the book.
You may recall that in addition to the fishing vessel that is the primary focus, the film and book both follow a sailboat also caught in the storm. The boat was a Westsail 32. A sister ship is shown in the film. On board were the owner of unknown experience and two women without any sailing experience heading from New England to Bermuda. Why they were trying to do so in October I do not know. I would have waited until later in the year.
When they encountered the storm, the inexperienced women panicked and one of them got on the radio and sent out a distress call to which the Coast Guard responded. Once the Coast Guard is present they have the power to order everyone off a vessel, which they did. The women went gladly. The owner wanted to stay with his boat but was not permitted to.
What is not mentioned in the film is that his boat survived, eventually being blown onto the New Jersey shore.
In THE LAST POOL OF DARKNESS Tim Robinson introduced me to the Irish poet, Richard Murphy, of whom regrettably I had not known. Murphy liked to sail and lived alone for several years on High Island just off the Connemara coast. I have bought a kindle edition of his collected works, THE PLEASURE GROUND: POEMS 1952-2012. After finishing with Wilfred Owen I began it and thus far have enjoyed and been impressed by the poems.
I also very much like the epigraph at the beginning from Samuel Johnson:
The only end of writing is to enable readers to better enjoy life, or better to endure it.
4 comments:
I had the pleasure of meeting the navigator during a coastal regatta of the Coast Guard aircraft that spotted them and oversaw the rescue. Your are correct the skipper was seriously miffed.
I am not criticizing the Coast Guard, who perform great and sometimes dangerous service, but am pointing out that had he stayed on the boat he would have survived ‘the perfect storm’.
The story I was told he upset with the crew not the Coast Guard
Then I think he must accept responsibility for two errors of judgement: sailing for Bermuda in October, one of the most active hurricane months, and choice of crew.
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