This is some of what I was remembering when I looked down from our balcony at Quivira Basin last week: the beginning of the open boat voyage.
I had intended to leave the day before on my thirty-third birthday, but San Diego had a rare gale with south winds that day, so I waited.
In the photos I find myself rather better dressed than I usually am when I go to sea.
The last photo shows CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE at the mouth of the Mission Bay Channel about to enter the Pacific Ocean in what I have called probably the most audacious thing I have ever done. Others might use a different word; but it is fact that the little boat sailed 20,000 miles, crossing both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including one 4,000 nonstop passage that as far as I know has never been equaled in an open boat, and was not stopped by the ocean, but by man.
I am writing in my usual armchair in our bedroom looking out at Skull Creek. Sky and creek are slate gray. The Spanish moss hanging limply. Rain has been falling and is forecast to fall again soon, but is not at the moment.
November 12, 1978 is forty-eight years past. A long time in terms of our butterfly’s cough of life. In my reading of poetry I find the Japanese like cicada’s chirp. Whatever the image, we are in accord.
Perhaps you will forgive me if I sit here late in my eighty-fourth year and am quietly proud that I sailed that day.
Do not fear, this journal is not going to become political, but I happened upon a poem by William Butler Yeats a few days ago whose attitude toward politics I share.
(Rain and wind have just resumed. The Spanish moss is swaying and I can hear rain pattering on the roof.)
And Eric, perhaps needless to say a Canadian friend, sent me a link to an amusing video about our President’s attempt to rename another body of water. First the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario. He is thinking too small. Why not the Atlantic Ocean? Or the Pacific? Or, better yet all oceans., I have long agreed with the ancient Greeks that there is but one ocean surrounding the land. Go for it: The American Ocean Uber Alles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKa7tHbrFA&list=RDPUKa7tHbrFA&start_radio=1
When you copied the Yeats poem you copied page #10 into it. "And maybe what they say is true of war and war's alarms"
ReplyDeleteThat is not page 10, but line 10. That anthology puts line numbers in the poems. I wish they didn’t, but simply screen shot the poem as it appears in the book.
ReplyDeleteGot it. It is a remarkable couplet. Being affectively generous, with such a delicate sniff of contempt, before Yeats throws them overboard.
ReplyDeleteThose 1974 photos are truly extraordinary….superficially quite mundane and yet recording the beginning of an act of almost mythic proportion…those figures on the footbridge had absolutely no idea what they were witnessing….this is why I cant help but admire you Webb. The world is desperate for inspirational people like you, people with vision for true greatness and yet disdainful of personal fame and fortune
ReplyDeleteDavid ( now retired O&G)
Best dressed sailor award for 1974 ! Webb - You cut a handsome profile. Fashion has only gone downhill since then.
ReplyDeleteScott - Los Angeles
Thank you for your words, David..
ReplyDeleteAnd Scott, I do not recall why I was so dressed that day other than it, being the day after a gale, was cool for San Diego. I was not dressed that way for long.
Scott, your reference to 1974 caused me to realize that I had the date wrong in the journal entry. It was November 12, 1978. I left on my first attempt at Cape Horn in November of 1974. I should be able to tell them apart. I have made the correction and will mention it in the next journal entry as well. I am glad your comment brought it to my aged and sometimes faulty attention.
ReplyDelete