Hilton Head Island: open and three bad ‘poems’

Our air-conditioning went out last Wednesday afternoon.  This was irritating because we replaced the entire system, as we did everything else in this condo, only a few years ago.  To the credit of the company that installed the new system, they had a technician here within the hour.  Presumably he was already working somewhere on the island and came to us as soon as he finished that job.  He quickly determined that a motor had burned out long before it should have, but these things happen.  He also quickly learned that they do not have a replacement in stock and somewhat more slowly that they can not obtain one until Monday, that is tomorrow, at the earliest.

In midsummer this would have been seriously distressful.  However, Helene kept us relatively cool Thursday and Friday with wind and rain, and we have overhead fans in both bedrooms and on the screened porch, plus Carol drove to Walmart and bought a powerful floor fan.  

Our highs have only been 83-85F/28-29C and lows 71-73F/21-22C.  Not intolerable and once the rain stopped, we have been living with all the doors and windows open which I am enjoying very much.  The membrane between us and the outside world is negligible.  I hear the wind in the live oaks and Spanish moss.  Ripples on the shore of Skull Creek.  Birds.  I awaken at night to feel the usually slight breeze off the creek as well as that of the fan.  I can smell the not unpleasant marsh.  With everything open this condo is even more than usual like living on a boat.

However I confess that when the replacement motor arrives, we will close up again for a while.

I have more than a dozen books of Japanese and Chinese poetry.  When I finish one, I scroll down in the Kindle app on my iPad Pro to the one I last read longest ago and start rereading it.  I have now read all of them several times.

My copy of ZEN POETRY:  LET THE SPRING BREEZE ENTER is 188 pages long.  Of that, the first 62 are introduction and the last 12 are about the death of Shinkichi Takahashi who lived 1901-1978.  That leaves 114 pages of poems. 31 of those pages are devoted to Takahashi.  

I have written that with a few exceptions I much prefer the ancient Chinese and Japanese poets to the more modern.  The ancients speak to me as the moderns do not.  This is particularly true of Takahashi and devoting so much more of the book to him than any other poet is disproportionate, to say the least.

I offer you three examples of what I do not even consider poems.  These are representative.  I could have provided many more examples.  In fact practically all of those of his included in the anthology.

These are among the greatest poems of cultures that go back more than two thousand years?  I think not.

An anonymous did not like my thought about Zen in a previous entry.  Although I admire most of the poetry in the anthology, this will give him something more to complain about.

Hilton Head Island: uneventful

Helene passed to the west of us during the night uneventfully.  We received only 1.59” of rain and only one gust of more than 34 knots was recorded at the airport.  That gust registered 46 knots. There are some trees down and power outages, but we are not affected.  The wind is still blowing  around 20 knots and there are whitecaps on wavelets on Skull Creek.  I have never seen what I would call a wave on the creek.

Carol and I walked to GANNET this morning.  Lots of leaves and twigs and a few small branches on the path.

GANNET is fine as I expected.  

A few boats have torn biminis and other canvas work that they were unable or unwise enough not to remove.

The wind is presently from the SSW blowing up Skull Creek and plastering the side tied boats opposite GANNET against the dock.  A huge fender on a big slab sided catamaran has been pushed onto the dock and no longer protecting the boat.  I don’t think almost any number of men could push the boat away and get the fender back in place until the wind diminishes which it should do by sunset.

Hilton Head Island: waiting for Helene

   

The photo does not accurately capture what I am seeing and experiencing, which is odd considering how flawed my vision is.  Even damaged we are impressive constructs.

Light to moderate rain has been falling since dawn.  Now it is nominally sunset though there will be only a darkening of gray.

As I write a Great Blue Heron is squawking.  I cannot see him, but have lived here long enough to know the squawk.

The storm, which as you know I do not think should be named, will pass west of us between midnight and dawn.   Other than a possible tornado, about which we can do nothing—there is no safe place in this building—I do not expect much.  I believe that most experienced sailors become fatalists.  You know chance can kill you and so if you are intelligent you plan and prepare to reduce chance to the minimum.  But you cannot eliminate it.

I am on the screened porch.  A glass of Laphroaig is on the table.  Rain is falling.  The Great Blue just squawked again.  

It is pleasant out here, listening to the rain patter against the leaves of live oaks and the deck as I have often heard it patter on decks of boats.  A cool breeze.

I biked down to GANNET yesterday to tie a line around the tack of the jib to prevent it from possibly unfurling and to tie down the tiller.  I found I already had a line around the jib.  I did tie down the tiller, though I don’t know that makes any difference.

My standards are different from almost all, certainly the alarmist talking heads on television.

I know hurricane force winds.  Not category three or four as Helene may be upon landfall.  But all the talking heads who have experienced nothing offer only cliches and fear.

I came out to listen to music.  I left the choices to chance.  The first to come up was Lucio Dalla and Luciano Pavarotti singing ‘Caruso’ 

https://www.google.com/search?q=lucio+dalla+pavarotti+caruso&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari

and the next Erik Bogle, who wrote ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFzCmAyOp8

Rather good choices by the algorithm.

The rain continues to fall.

The stitches in my arm come out a week from today and soon after I hope to sail to Charleston.  

I am so much looking forward to sailing a month or two early next year.  It has been too long, particularly since I have so little time left.

I continue to read Tim Robinson and with regret have only five or six more days of his being a part of my mornings.  The oriental poetry I read now is a book of Zen Poetry, although I think those who believe in zen are so afraid of suffering in this life that they accept a life that is already death before death inevitably comes.  And I continue to read five Shakespeare sonnets each morning.  I am almost at the end of those written to a young man and am looking forward to those last twenty-eight to or about the ‘dark lady’. 

Shakespeare had some bad days, as we all do,  as shown particularly in several of the sonnets in the 70s.

I had to move chairs.  Rain is blowing in from the north.

Totally dark now,  The sound of rain,  A slight breeze against my face.

I’m going to listen to more music.

Hilton Head Island: unsmooth; LIBRA; countdown

A great writer has observed that life is the process of turning baby smooth skin into scar tissue.  I now have more.  What I hope is the last of this year’s crop of skin cancers was removed Wednesday leaving a two inch diagonal scar on my right bicep with impressively neat and even stitches.

This was done by a female doctor.  I believe she will be a satisfactory replacement for the beautiful skin cancer doctor in Chicago.  She, too, is attractive, which is not an essential medical quality, but pleasing.

During our conversation while she was slicing and stitching, she asked what I did.  I corrected the tense and learned that she and her husband own a 51’ catamaran that is operated by one of the bareboat charter companies in the British Virgin Islands.  They use it a few weeks twice a year and the charters the rest of the time pay for the boat.  When it is paid off, they plan to sell it.  She asked if I like sailing here.  I hesitated, but said as I have written in this journal, I like living here, but I don’t like sailing here.  To my relief, she said she doesn’t either.

I just finished reading LIBRA, a novel by Don DeLillo about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination.  DeLillo is quite clear that it is a novel and that he has taken liberty with the facts.  I am not given to conspiracy theories, but the novel offers one that is interesting and internally coherent.  I also find interesting the statement made in the novel that the CIA file on Oswald now runs to 144 volumes. 

I remember where I was when I first heard that Kennedy had been shot and when a few hours later I learned that he had died.  I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live television.  I was twenty-two years old.  Carol was six.  She remembers where she was too.  Some others I have asked who are about her age do not.  

Carol and I are sixteen and a half years apart.  We met when I was in my early 50s and she in her mid-30s.  The difference in our ages meant considerably less then than it did in 1963.

The marina offers a 10% discount on slip fees if you pay for a year in advance.  My contract expires at the end of this month and yesterday I paid for the coming year.  In doing so it occurred to me that I will do that only one more time. In October of 2026 I will start paying by the month because when the hurricane season ends, I sail.  A very pleasing thought. 

Hilton Head Island: rogue; cool; two views of the future; two harbors

I thank Larry for this link about “the most extreme rogue wave on record”. Extreme not in being the highest, but the highest in comparison with the other waves present at the time.

https://www.sciencealert.com/gigantic-wave-in-pacific-ocean-was-the-most-extreme-rogue-wave-on-record

I think the definition of a rogue wave as being twice the height of the other waves present is far too conservative.  Twice is not usually of much significance.  

As you may recall the most dangerous moments of GANNET’s circumnavigation came not in the two 55 knot gales, but on a sunny moderate day in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Samoa.

At just after noon three hundred and fifty miles north of Apia, Samoa, I was standing in the companionway when I saw two 10’ waves coming at us, high above the average 4’ waves.   They were steep and close together.  As the first one hit, I ducked below, sliding the companionway over me.  However, the vertical slat was not in place and not reachable.  The second wave exploded into and over us, knocking GANNET down, masthead almost in the water.

With GANNET heeled 90º I braced myself from falling and stared down at the ocean.  GANNET’s lee rail was below water.  The ocean only a few inches from entering the cockpit.  The wave was gushing in and pressing us down.  It was a matter of whether the ocean would reach the cockpit before GANNET came back up.  Time slowed almost to a stop.  Probably a few seconds passed.  GANNET came back up.

I walked onto our deck this morning at 8:30.  It was 65F and sunny.  I was too cool in just t-shirt and shorts, rather than too hot.  First time that has happened in months.  

The low that has been sitting off our coast gained some strength and went ashore yesterday near Wilmington, North Carolina.  Our seemingly perpetual Small Craft Advisory has finally been lifted.  However I go in tomorrow to be rechopped.

September, normally the height of the hurricane season, has thus far been relatively quiet.  However, this morning’s GRIBs show something that might develop at the end of the month.  Projections nine days out are problematical, but here what the GRIBs are showing for Thursday, September 26.

The first is the European model.  The second U.S.

Two harbors:

Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening. The view from the deck

 Not a dramatic sunset, but subtle beauty.

I am sitting here listening to music.

Wind rustling live oaks and Spanish Moss.

We have a Small Craft Advisory for waters out to twenty miles as we have had for more than a week, daily renewed.  As always not as much wind on this side of the island.

Just after high tide.

No sound except my music,  Presently ‘The Lord’s Rough Ways’ from the soundtrack of the movie, THE HOSTILES.

I gain strength from such moments, as I gain strength from knowing that a few of you appreciate my words and what I am doing with my life.  I pause, for I tell myself I should need no strength from others, and I am certain I would live and write as I do if no one knew, but I am glad that a few of my fellow misnamed species do care and understand.  The present tense is deliberate.  Not even at eighty-two:  what I ‘have done’ with my life.  I sometimes think:  this has gone on too long.  It does not matter what I think.  I have no choice.  I am not yet over.

I am on that part of the bell shaped curve of life where on the far right the line parallels and does not ever touch the baseline, but of course in reality the moment comes when it does.  I started to say I face that without regret, but I do have regrets.  Yet the regrets are details.  Mistakes I made in ignorance and inexperience.  I have done what I was born to do and still am.  It takes more effort now.  Yet I have time, until I don’t.  And as I have written the secret to my success—which presumes that I have had any—is that I do so little.

So I will gather what strength I can and continue doing little.

Hilton Head Island: an apology; a perspective; and three poems

 

Above you have our forecast and radar from the Apple weather app.  You will note that the temperatures are moderate and we are going to have rain.  The extreme heat usually ends this month, but this is early.  In fact since we returned from the Azores on August 21, only two or three days have been uncomfortably hot, and that is very early indeed.

As regular readers know I like living here and may have sensed that I don’t like sailing here.  The summer heat and the hurricane season are among the reasons.  Another is that from GANNET’s slip it takes hours to be truly free of the land.  1.8 miles to the mouth of Skull Creek.  5 more miles to the mouth of Port Royal Sound.  7 more miles to be in 30’/9 meters of water and beyond the shoals.  And 3 or 4 more miles to be beyond most of the buoys and the line of anchored ships waiting to enter Savannah Harbor.  On a daysail you never make it.  When I invented the word ‘captiterraphobia’: fear of being trapped by land, I was thinking of being trapped inland far from the sea as I was growing up in a suburb of Saint Louis, but in ways I feel trapped by the land even here on the coast.  To escape requires a determined effort.

Now that the heat has ended, we still have the hurricane season which as you probably know has thus far been much quieter than forecast.  I do not criticize the forecasters.  Meteorology is a very young science and the variables are immense.  I don’t recommend that others follow my example, but there is still something to be said for looking at the sea, looking at the sky, and looking at the barometer, and having confidence based on experience in your own skill and ability to endure pretty much whatever happens.

All this is in way of apology for my not going sailing.  I expect that almost all of you are here because I am a sailor, and I haven’t sailed much this year.  So please accept my apology.  I had intended to sail soon, but have just learned that I have to go back in next week and have the skin cancer on my arm rechopped, so it isn’t going to happen at least until the stitches come out.

I have plans to sail to Charleston sometime this year and a plan to sail much farther, spending a month or two on GANNET, early next year.  And if I am still healthy and alive when I turn 85 in a little over two years, I will attempt to sail beyond the edge again.  So if your attention span is long enough, hang in there.  Some of this will be about sailing again.  Some, I hope, relatively soon.

I thank James for a link to a one minute video that puts our lives in perspective.

https://youtube.com/shorts/cHyrZEPbhxA?si=oQozRqzpKQv4ud6S

One might be discouraged by this.  But as I have written one might also take it as a challenge to do what we can in our brief lives.

The ANCHOR BOOK OF CHINESE POETRY ends with those written last century.  It even includes poems by Mao Zedung.  I prefer the older poems to those influenced by the modern West, but a few have merit.

This one was written by Dai Whangshu, 1905-1950, while he was imprisoned by the Japanese during what we call World War 2.

And from Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886:

The sea.  The sea.

Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening and some poems

 

I am sitting on the deck around sunset after a day of rain.

I don’t believe that the above distorted panorama taken with my iPhone fully expresses the beauty I am experiencing.  Skull Creek is glistening silver in the dying light and as I glance up two egrets are flying between the shore and the marina, left to right.

A slight breeze.  A pleasant temperature.

I cherish these moments.  I cherish this unexpected beauty.  I never imagined I would enjoy living in a marsh.

Carol has retired to the bedroom to read.

I came out here and was watching a video of Julio Inglesis “El Amor’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

I am still filled with passion.  Perhaps unseemly at my age.  For women and for life.

Of women, they became singular when I met Carol thirty years ago.  I admire the beauty of the young without envy or regret for I had my time with them decades ago and do not want more.

But, and not unrelated, I think about despair, of which I have known much, some with women, and still do.  That might be surprising.  I have done much with words and wind and women, but…And I pause at the ‘but’.  Perhaps it is just as I have written:  joy does not need explanation.  It is its own justification.  But we wish our suffering had meaning and I don’t know that mine does.

Artists have made careers conveying their despair to others.  That is appropriate for they are expressing an almost universal human experience.  I have in some of my earlier writings expressed despair myself.  But with time I have learned that the greatest strength is to absorb the evil that has been done to you without passing it on.  A Christian virtue not historically often practiced by Christians, of which I am not one.  And as an artist to keep my despair to myself.  Everyone already has enough of his or her own.  They don’t need mine.  And to offer as much hope as I honestly can.  

I do not claim any rational justification to be on the side of hope rather than despair.  I just would rather be.  Probably, as most is, a quirk of what I got from the genetic lottery.

So I sit here immersed in beauty and know that perhaps experience of beauty ought to be enough, but for me it isn’t.  

I have lived far longer than I ever expected, yet I confess at eighty-two I live in hope that I will last until I am eighty-five and embark on another voyage beyond the edge.  Somehow for me moving toward that gives meaning to all the rest.

An old man with hopes and plans is truly egregious, but then I always was.  In the root meaning of the word.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/egregious-word-history-and-meaning#:~:text=The%20Latin%20word%20grex%20means,Latin%20%E2%80%94%20something%20that%20stands%20apart.

As I have been writing the sun has lowered beyond Pickney Island and the colors of sky and water have become more intense.

I raise my empty glass:  To making whatever you can of our butteryfly’s cough of life.

Emily Dickinson  1830-1886

Xu Zenquing 1479-1511

William Shakespeare  1564-1616

Hilton Head Island: in the Great Cabin; a new meal; a mistake

I walked down to GANNET yesterday and spent the day and night on board.  Not sailing, only at the dock.  We have had some rain and more is forecast, and there is a small craft advisory which seems to have been in effect forever, though as usual we do not have that much wind on this side of the island.

I was able to be on board in relative comfort because our temperatures are running almost ten degrees below normal.  The dangerous heat, which I consider ‘feels like’ over 100F, generally ends in September, but not this early.  It may return, but the ten day forecast shows highs in the low 80sF and lows in the low 70s. Yesterday the Great Cabin was 81F with the hatches open and a moderate breeze blowing though, not the 100 it was a week earlier.  I didn’t even need to use my new fan.

I scrubbed away some mold, read, listened to music, found a place to stow the fan, sipped some wine, tested the deck running lights, and watched the first half of the Chiefs/Ravens football game.  Rain in the evening caused me to close the hatches, but it passed and I was later able to open the forward one partially and slept well.  

I enjoyed being on board and at Central again.

For dinner I had a new to me freeze dry meal from Trailtopia, a company I learned of from Steve Earley for which I thank him.  I bought eight or so of their single serving meals.  This, Beer Braised Chicken Stew, was the first I had eaten.  Although I did not taste any beer, it was very good and tasted ‘more real’ than some freeze dry food, and I will include it in future provisioning.  

My only criticism is that their pouches are smaller than other brands and pouring boiling water into them with GANNET underway would be hazardous, so I will prepare them in the big plastic measuring cup I eat from.

https://www.trailtopia.com/one-serving

When I suggested in the last entry that the intent of the first several of Shakespeare’s sonnets was to seduce a woman I was wrong. 

I vaguely remember from a college Shakespeare class more than sixty years ago that some of the sonnets were written to a man.  That becomes clear with the use of the masculine pronoun in Sonnet 19 if not before.

I googled and learned that of the 154 sonnets, the first 126 are addressed to a man.  The last 28 to or about a woman.  Some scholars find interest in what seems to me the pointless pursuit of arguing about who the young man and woman might have been and in speculating about Will’s sexuality five hundred years later.

Presumably I was guilty of attributing to Will what would have been my own motivations.

Although as I think about it, I never tried to seduce a woman.  I did make overtures, but usually the woman let me know she wanted me to.

No seduction.  A mutual coming together.

Hilton Head Island: old boats; flat sails; Emily and Will

A sailing friend visited the marina recently to look at a 38’ sloop he is considering buying.  I walked with him and his wife to the slip and was struck by how big the boat looks compared with my memories of EGREGIOUS and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA which were only a foot shorter.  I shouldn’t have been.  I am aware of the trend in boat design toward ever greater interior volume for a given overall length.  30’ boats now have interiors at least equal to 35’ boats built a few decades ago, and I have never owned a boat built later than the 1970s.  

And, as I believe I have mentioned here once before I have never done a sea trial on a boat before I bought her.

I bought my first four boats new.  An Excalibur 26 in 1967 which I never named.  An Ericson 35 that I named EGREGIOUS in 1969. And an Ericson 37, which I also named EGREGIOUS without adding a 2, in 1973.  The two Ericsons I ordered off the plans before they went into production.  The Drascombe Lugger who became CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, I bought having only seen a lugger on a trailer in a driveway in Anaheim, California.  She was delivered in June of 1978 and I set off for The Marquesas five months later in what was probably the most audacious passage into the unknown I have ever made.  After that I became aware of the dramatic difference in the cost of new boats rather than used and never bought new again.  I was the second owner of the She 36 I named RESURGAM who I bought in 1983.  She was built in 1976.  I was I think the fourth owner, one of which was the U.S. Naval Academy to which she had been donated, of the 37’ Heritage OneTon I named THE HAWKE OF TUONELA when I bought her in 1992.  I think she too was first launched in 1976.  And I am I think the fifth owner of GANNET after buying her in 2011.  She is Moore 24 hull #40 of 156 and was built in 1979, and thus the latest built boat I have ever owned.  I had not until I saw the big 38’ and started thinking about my boats realized this.

I don’t claim that older is better.  Obviously it is cheaper and three of my boats—CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, RESURGAM, and GANNET were great boats.  GANNET still is.

Of GANNET I biked down to her the other day and when I opened the companionway the temperature in The Great Cabin was 100F38C.  When I came back to the condo I ordered another fan.

https://www.amazon.com/Caframo-Ultimate-Direct-Cabin-Black/dp/B00NYTN6LE/ref=asc_df_B00NYTN6LE/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693345907102&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13516757977467391859&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&h

It arrived from Amazon the next day and I took it down to GANNET for a test.  It is quite powerful.  It has two speeds.  The lower speed provides a refreshing breeze.  The higher speed is a wind tunnel.

From Dan comes a pleasing story about another old, but not as old as mine, boat that he built that has found a serendipitous home. I thank him for sharing the story with me.

https://smallboatsmonthly.com/article/hand-me-down/

I hope that link works.  It did for me the first time, but not the second.  The article is worth reading, and I happened to scroll down the page and found under ‘More From This Issue’ Audrey of Kent and Audrey’s Armada fame wearing a Tilley hat and looking good.

Eric wrote that he is watching YouTube highlight videos of the America’s Cup.   I know the AC is happening but have little interest in anything that cost that much money.  Nevertheless I did watch part of one of the races this morning.  Of course those things—I am not sure they are boats or that is sailing—go fast, but I am most impressed by how flat their sails—or are they wings?—are.  I cannot get GANNET’s sails that flat, but then I am sure they are sails.

For a couple of dollars I bought a Kindle of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Works.  I started reading and quickly discovered that is too much Emily Dickinson.  Although only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime, she wrote almost 1800.  So I decided to let someone else cull them for me and bought 100 POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON.  Much better.  Here is one.

Impressed by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, I bought a Kindle edition of all 154 of his sonnets.  I have added three a day to my morning’s reading.

If I am understanding the first fifteen, they are mostly an effort to try to convince a woman to have a child.  I am suspicious that Will was more interested in the act of conception than in the result.