Almost 7:30 PM. As perhaps you can see rain is falling.
We are in a South Florida summer weather pattern with sunny mornings and thunderstorms in late afternoons and evenings.
I am sitting by our bedroom window watching the rain fall and listening to distant thunder while sipping from a small glass of Laphroaig.
You know I like it here. It is not New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, but it is as good is possible for me as far as I know.
I see the ripples on presently gray Skull Creek at high tide. The water is not more than fifteen yards away. Maybe less.
The sun is still perhaps ten degrees above the trees on Pickney Island. Part of the creek is silver and part white.
The Spanish moss on the Live Oaks is hanging down.
A fellow sailor whose boat is docked near GANNET is impressed that an 84 year old bikes down to the marina and works on his boat each morning. I had not thought anything about it.
If you read the last post, you will know that the publisher is playing up the age at which I made that voyage. It was unusual, but far less unusual than that it was a sixth circumnavigation and that the book is exceedingly well written—forgive the immodesty, or not. That voyage was ten years ago.
I do not have nostalgia for the past, but I woke last night after a dream in which I was on CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE in Tahiti in 1989. I was then in my late 30s, and I felt the strength I had then, the sense of joy of making a voyage beyond the edge of human experience. I do not want to be young again, but it was good to feel what I was.
I believe I can legitimately claim to be about as good as any of our species can be at 84. I do not claim credit for that. It is genetic chance. But even now, when having written a book in the past year that validates my claim not to be retired, and when my body tends to stiffen when I sit too long in one position, I wonder, perhaps under the influence of Laphroaig, if I have another voyage in me.
The marsh gets too hot in summer, which is odd for this is Hilton Head Island’s busiest tourist season. I understand that this is caused by summer school vacations and people inland wanting to be on the beach and ocean. But for those of us who live here, summer is the least desirable season.
Before Carol retired I flew back and spent part of July and August with her in Illinois. I never thought of Chicago as having a good climate, but the summers there in the suburbs were quite pleasant compared to Hilton Head.
Since her retirement we have gone away in August to escape the heat and to celebrate our wedding anniversary which is in August.
We will do so again in a few weeks, flying to Portland, Oregon, where we will rent a car and Carol will drive us to Astoria and then south along the coast all the way to perhaps my last visit to San Diego.
The trip is open ended. We do not have reservations for a return flight. But Carol has rented an Airbnb house for us in Bodega Bay, California, for four nights where we will celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary.
You may recall, as I did not, that Bodega Bay is the site of most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie THE BIRDS. It is one of Carol’s favorite movies, and we rented it last night from Amazon Prime. This was a colorized version, but the colorization was well done and seemed natural, yet I think the movie is better in black and white.
The film dates from 1963, the long ago year in which I graduated from college and moved to California. Bodega Bay has no doubt changed much since then, but Carol tells me one of the cafes in the movie still exists.
Next month we shall see.
Both of us had seen the movie at least twice before, but this time I noticed as I had not before that it is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. So I goggled and found the story. Permit me to pause and observe how amazing that is. Impossible to do only a couple of decades ago.
Daphne du Maurier was a very good writer. It is a very good story, and particularly interesting to compare with Hitchcock’s version. If you want to here is the link:
https://mrnsmith.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/the-birds-by-daphne-du-maurier.pdf
I happened to look back at my recent post about books read and realized that I did not mention DAUGHTERS OF MARS by Thomas Keneally, the Australian who is most famous for having written SCHINDLER’S LIST.
THE DAUGHTERS OF WAR follows Australian nurses who served in Europe in WWI. It is a unique perspective on war and I highly recommend it to any who are among the few remaining readers.
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