Hilton Head Island: some recently read poems

 

                                     Matsuo Basho  1644-1694

A great blue heron often sleeps in the afternoon in one of the live oak trees just beyond our deck.  (EM are the initials of the translator.)

These are the last line of T.S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) ‘The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock’.

Eliot like me was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and like me did not want to be there.  He became an Englishman.  I became whatever I am.

Whatever that is, I am not Prufrock.  I think the mermaids sang to me.  I even hope they still will.  Perhaps fondly of what we have shared.  Perhaps in respect for one who has unexpectedly grown old and still seeks their company.

                                               Robinson Jeffers   1887-1962

                                                       e.e. cummings  1894-1962

                                                        Countee Cullen   1903-1946

Hilton Head Island: a Swamp Fox burger and resailed

Carol drove us to Charleston last Thursday to pick up GANNET’s sails. 

We stayed the night at the historic Francis Marion Hotel, named after the Revolutionary War general known as the Swamp Fox.  I remembered his name vaguely and found an interesting Wikipedia article about him with some revisionist history.  I believe that people should be judged by the standards of their time, not by those of the ephemeral present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion

The hotel restaurant is not surprisingly called The Swamp Fox.  We dined there on a shared half pound Swamp Fox burger and salad.  We don’t eat much meat.  I don’t even recall the last time I had a hamburger, but it sounded good to both of us and accompanied by a bottle of Pinot Noir was.

The next morning we rode the National Park Service ship for a tour of Fort Sumter.  The morning was sunny, with a hard blue sky, and cool for this part of the world, 44F/6.6C, and with a 15 knot wind gusting 23, felt colder.  We wore jackets and gloves.

The ride to the fort took thirty-five minutes.

Charleston Harbor is bigger than I expected, but on that morning not busy for what is said to be the eighth busiest container port in the country.

We were on the 9 am boat, the first of the day.  Park rangers accompanied us and raised the U.S. flag over the remnants of the fort, a flag with thirty-four stars, the number of states at the start of the Civil War.

Only the first story of what was a three story brick fort is left.

Some of you may recall that not long ago I read a good book about the events that led up to the beginning of the Civil War, many centered in Charleston, and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, THE DEMON OF UNREST, by Erik Larson.  Without any chance of reinforcement or resupply, the fort surrendered after three days of bombardment from multiple batteries surrounding it.  Standing there it was obvious they had no choice.

After an hour and a half on the island in which we saw a cannon ball still in a wall and the fingerprints of one of the slaves who had built the fort in a brick, we rode back to the mainland.  The wind was stronger, the white-caps higher, and the ship even swayed a bit.  The return took only twenty minutes.  I think the tide was with us.

Back on land Carol drove us to North’s loft and we picked up the sails.  The bill was a bit higher than I expected, mostly due to their replacing the sacrificial sun strip on the leech of the jib.  It had been exposed to strong sun for six years, so about time.  

Yesterday Carol and I bent the sails on.  I have done this by myself, but some parts of the process are much easier with four arms.  North told me that they probably couldn’t do much about mold stains and they didn’t.  One side of the jib looks pretty good, the other doesn’t.  I have never had sails professionally cleaned before and had no idea of the cost.  For GANNET’s small sails it was $150 each.  Insignificant, but I don’t know that it was worth it.

I am glad to have GANNET resailed.

Hilton Head Island: GERMINAL; a speeding Pole/ quagmire

 I just finished re-reading GERMINAL, the thirteenth novel in Emile Zola’s twenty volume Rougon/Marquart series set during what is called the Second French Empire from about 1850 to 1871.  GERMINAL is often called Zola’s masterpiece.  It is a very great novel indeed, but I think Zola wrote many masterpieces and I rank it with NANA, THE DEBACLE, and THE BEAST IN MAN, and could not say that one is greater than the others.

GERMINAL is said to be about a strike by coal miners in Northern France, but it is about much more.  

Zola’s descriptions of the bestial working conditions of the men, women and children crawling in heat, poor air, coal dust, seeping water, cave-ins and explosions, a half mile and more below the surface for bare starvation wages are vivid.  I remember thinking when I read Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE about the meat packing industry in Chicago at about the same time why the owners treated workers so badly while they themselves were incredibly wealthy?  Why they did not share a little more of the profits the businesses were making?  And concluded that in the cut-throat capitalism of the time the owners had no choice.  If they did not pare costs to the human minimum, others would and they would be driven out of business.  That argument is in fact made in GERMINAL by a mine owner and by the manager of another mine.

Here is an insight to life in the mines.

GERMINAL was first published in 1885, a time when reaction to the extreme exploitation of labor  and to the extremely wealthy and aristocracy was taking place.  There were Marxists, nihilists, anarchists, and millions who merely wanted enough bread to stay alive and even dared to dream of a little bit more.

Zola was clearly in sympathy with the workers, but he depicts the desire of some owners and managers to treat the workers better and some of their own sorrows.

There is a lot of sex in GERMINAL.  Not specifically described, but alluded to, and much unfulfilled, including that of a manager who still desires his wife who will not have sex with him, but does as he knows with other men.

There is one scene in the novel that startled me, and I am not easily startled, so how much more startling must it have been to those who read the novel when it was first published 139 years ago?  I deliberately refrain from saying more so as not to provide a spoiler for any of you who might read GERMINAL

There is also great drama and excitement in the novel.  As I read it I thought:  this would make a good movie.  I am not the only one and have discovered that several film versions exist.  Carol and I found a 1994 French version at Amazon Prime with English subtitles starring Gerald Depardieu and watched the last two nights.  It is a very good movie, true to the novel, though of necessity sometimes sketchy.  To my surprise it contains an abbreviated version of the scene in the novel I found startling.

A great novel.  A very good movie.  I recommend both.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/magnetic-north-pole-earth-2024-qrlnl2zz9

I remember that in the late 1960s early 1970s when I was living in San Diego the variation was 13º East.  It is now about 11º East, not a significant difference if you are navigating by a traditional compass.  I navigate now electronically.  Velocitek, iSailor on iPad and iPhone, my Apple watch Ultra, and set all my devices to display true headings, not magnetic, which is quite revealing when you are crossing the Gulf Stream and find your COG is thirty or more degrees different than the true compass heading.

In my life at what I could do alone I have been almost entirely successful.  In what has involved others I have had mixed results which is probably the common experience.  

I am feeling frustrated.  Here in the Low Country getting anything done that requires others is more difficult than any place I have ever lived, and not just with boats.  I know I have said that before, but I am feeling it strongly now.  I feel stalled, stuck in a quagmire, unable to go forward.  I have wondered if this is part of my being old.  I do not think so.  Carol and others tell me that this is a fact of Low Country life.  If so, it is not a desirable one.  

There is work I would like to get done on GANNET that I cannot myself do.  I have workarounds for some of it and with or without the work being done, hope and expect to be hundreds of miles offshore two months from now.  What a relief that will be.

Hilton Head Island: mind set; sinking?

Levis, not shorts.  Socks.  And a jacket.  54F/12C and sunny.  Fall has come to the marsh.  We will be back in the 70sF/low 20sC and shorts in a few days.  This alternation is what the weather will be on the island until next May or June.  Carol misses the seasons.  I do not.  I hope never to see snow again except in photographs.

Carol drove us to Dolphin Head this morning and we walked a couple of miles beside Port Royal Sound.  There were white-caps on the sound and maybe one foot waves.  I estimated the wind at 12-14 knots.  Having had some practice I am pretty good at that.  When I checked later the wind at the nearby airport at that time was reported to be 13-15 knots.

We saw a few dolphin and a sailboat about 40’ heading up the sound under power.  No sails set.  I thought this odd because if they had been the boat would have been just forward of a starboard beam reach, an excellent point of sail.  As we walked I wondered why she was not under sail and then I realized it was a matter of mind set.  Those on board are not sailors, they are power boaters with a mast.  Sailors think about sailing first.  Those who aren’t don’t and power even when sailing would be faster and quieter and cost less.

You have probably seen the report that a Disney cruise ship ‘rescued’ four ‘sailors’ from a sinking catamaran a couple of hundred miles off Bermuda as shown above.

Am I the only one who sees that the catamaran is not sinking?  She is on her lines and the seas are moderate.  I am told by the owner of a similar size catamaran that catamarans can’t sink.  I do not know what went on, but this does not compute.

Hilton Head Island: two news items; three books; no royalties; 83 push-ups

That the rich are getting richer is not news, but that the ten richest people in the world gained $64 billion in wealth in the day after Trump’s re-election is impressive.  At least to me.  I have no other comment.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/07/investing/billionaires-net-worth-trump-win/index.html

You may have also read that 43 monkeys have escaped from the facility in which they were being bred for research purposes here in the Low Country.  Reportedly there is a double door to their enclosure, but an attendant failed to secure both and forty-three monkeys, no fools, left for open spaces.  Seven stayed behind.  Freedom does not have universal appeal.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/43-research-monkeys-on-the-lam-still-playfully-exploring-police-say/

These monkeys are only a few of more than 10,000 being bred nearby.  I had no idea there are that many.  Fortunately most do not run for political office.

That monkeys are wandering around free in South Carolina presents almost infinite possibilities for jokes and cartoons, especially when it happened so soon after the election.

For some reason I am reminded of my fellow native Missourian, Mark Twain, observing more than a century ago, There is no distinctly American criminal class—except Congress.  

By coincidence I finished three books this morning.  One excellent.  Two not.

The excellent, perhaps great, is Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 trilogy SWORD OF HONOR.  In the preface he admits that in order to sell more books the publisher insisted it be originally published over several years in three volumes, OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN, MEN AT ARMS, UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, but that it is really only one story and should be read as such.  For SWORD OF HONOR he removed some duplication and passages he found tedious.

The novel follows Guy Crouchback who at the outbreak of WW2 has been living alone except for servants for several years at a family estate in Italy following an unhappy divorce.  He becomes an overage officer in a famous regiment and sees minor action in what is now Senegal and the Balkans.  His ex-wife comes back into his life as do many strange characters, some civilian, but mostly military.  Like all of Waugh SWORD OF HONOR is partly satirical and ironic, but it is also humane, compassionate and intelligent.  Some claim it the best novel of WW2.  I do not know about that.  I can think of others that are its equal, including Vasily Grossman’s very different LIFE AND FATE.  But SWORD OF HONOR is exceptionally good and a pleasure to read.

Here is a passage I particularly like:

Not a pleasure to read were the other two, both purporting to be poetry,  T.S. Eliot’s COLLECTED WORKS and THE ROSE OF TIME by the contemporary Chinese Bei Dao.  I have of course read Eliot’s major poems before.  I came across Bei Dao at the end of an anthology of Chinese poetry and was sufficiently interested to order THE ROSE OF TIME in paperback from Amazon.

While there are moments in Eliot, including from his Four Quartets, “Old men ought to be explorers”,  which I have quoted, too much of his poetry and even more that of Dao is so obscure as to be unintelligible.

I open THE ROSE OF TIME at random and find ‘Nightwatch’ which includes:

                    glass paperweights decode

                    writing’s wound of narration

                    how many black mountains blocked

                    where a nameless tune ends

                    blossoms scream clenched fists

I could include endless others but don’t want you to suffer needlessly.

I could do the same with Eliot.  I know he is considered a great poet, but perhaps obscurity has been mistaken for imagination and meaning. 

I went back to the anthology in which I first read Dao and was not impressed by what I found there.  I must have been in an odd mood when I first read his words.

The image in the preceding post was not my first t-shirt.  ‘A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind’ has graced t-shirts, greeting cards, place mats, coffee cups, and was even used in an ad for women’s shoes.  I don’t understand that one.

I receive royalties from none of them.

I do still receive very minor royalties from my books, more from Kindle editions than paper.

I did 83 push-ups this morning as required.  This is getting ridiculous.

Hilton Head Island: my legacy

 

Hilton Head Island: an anniversary a day late

 

I woke not long after midnight and realized that yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of my departing for what would become my first attempt at Cape Horn.

EGREGIOUS had no engine.  As you can see the mainsail was up.  When I dropped the line in my left hand I was off into the being part of my life.

I could not have imagined what was ahead.  Six circumnavigations.  A cell in Saudi Arabia.  At least eight storms with hurricane force winds.  Adrift for two weeks.  Swimming for twenty-six hours.  A million or so words.  Suzanne was a year and a half ahead.  Jill nine years ahead.  Carol twenty years ahead.  Or that I would today be living in the marsh and finding beauty and a little peace here.  

The photo was taken by a newspaper photographer.  I do not know how they knew of me.  I did not tell them.

From STORM PASSAGE the part of Yeats poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ I quoted at the beginning of the book and the first entry.

Hilton Head Island: sailless; swimming headless; early birds

 

GANNET looks odd to me without sails.  This is the first time she has been sailless since she was launched after being trucked here in September 2020 and she will be for a while.  North cleans sails in bunches and tells me I am not likely to get mine back until mid-November at the earliest and that there is no guarantee the mold and other stains will come out.  As Billy Pilgrim said, “So it goes”

After dropping the sails at the North loft we had an enjoyable lunch with Jason, an American friend who now lives in New Zealand and is back visiting, at a famous restaurant in the historic district of Charleston, and then Carol drove us along the harbor front, past huge old mansions which survived the Civil War and still appear to be privately owned, not turned into hotels or AirBnbs.  Out across the harbor I think I saw Fort Sumter in the distance. The harbor is big and with depths of 52’ the deepest on the East Coast and the eighth busiest container port in the U.S., but not as busy as Savannah, which ranks third.  I was not aware of any of this until we moved to Hilton Head Island.

In the absence of sails I have been desultorily scrubbing GANNET inside and out.

When you fly into Hilton Head you see a labyrinth of land and water below you.  This was reinforced on the drive to and from Charleston where it is still tidal ten and twenty miles from the ocean and neither land nor water dominates.  What land there is is flat, so tidal water has nothing to give it pause.

A neighbor loaned me THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES by Colin Woodard.  I have no special interest in pirates, though I have read about them from time to time.  I knew some of the history, but Woodard introduced me to men of whom I had not heard.  He states the ‘golden age of piracy’—I did not know they had a ‘golden age’—lasted only ten years, from 1715-25–and most of them ended on the gallows.  Even those who were instrumental in destroying piracy ended badly.

I find it curious how tribes make heroes of criminals.  Jessie James, Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, and endless others are remembered when almost all of their contemporaries have vanished without a trace.

One pirate of whom I had known is Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.  According to Woodard he was among the most humane of pirates, never mistreating those he took captive.  He was killed near Ocracoke by an expedition sent by the governor of Virginia into North Carolina illegally.  His head was cut off and tied to the bowsprit of the ship, ADVENTURE, and sold for £100 after the ship returned to Norfolk.  Woodard relates, “Blackbeard’s headless body was thrown into Pamlico Sound, where, according to legend, it swam around the ADVENTURE three times before sinking into the brackish water.”  Of course it did.

I am writing near noon on our screened porch on another perfect day in the marsh.  77F/25C, sunny and a slight breeze.  A sailboat about 40’ is powering south on Skull Creek, one of the early snowbirds.  I have noticed a few every day this week, but then it is almost November.  At least this one has his mainsail up.  

Hilton Head Island: two books, two movies: great, excellent, very good and terrible; unjibed

I recently read two books, LORD JIM and M.A.S.H., and then Carol and I watched the movies based on them.  

This was the third time I have read LORD JIM and Conrad was a pleasure as always.  M.A.S.H. was offered by BookBud a few weeks ago, so I bought it.  I probably read the novel when it was first published in 1968, but I am not sure.  Reading it now the book was seen through the prism of the long running TV series and partly the movie which I have seen a couple of times.  I have always enjoyed the movie as an original, gory, dark comedy of men and women forced into the exhausting struggle to save the lives and what parts of the bodies they could of those caught in the maelstrom of war.  In some ways I think the movie is even better than the book.

So the great is LORD JIM, the novel.  The excellent is M.A.S.H., the movie.   The very good is M.A.S.H., the novel.  And the terrible is LORD JIM, the movie.

I remember when I first saw LORD JIM, the movie.  It was in a Los Angeles first run cinema in 1965.  I was with my wife and another couple who I thought were friends, but proved to be merely acquaintances.  I disliked the movie intensely.  It uses Conrad’s title, but has nothing of the depth of his story of a man who after a single impulsive act of cowardice tries to redeem himself in his own mind.  The movie got bad reviews.  You can find them if you are interested enough to google.  And did poorly at the box office.  Two nights ago Carol and I had enough after forty-five minutes and stopped watching.

We rented both movies from Amazon Prime.  They are also available elsewhere.  Enjoy M.A.S.H.  Don’t bother with LORD JIM. 

Day after perfect day continues in the marsh.

Carol drove us the short distance to the marina parking lot this morning and I pushed a dock cart out to GANNET.  The intent was to lower the jib from the furling gear and trundle both it and the mainsail which I had stowed below deck after removing it a few days ago back up to the car to be driven on Friday to North’s loft in Charleston to be cleaned.  Because I have not removed the jib from the furling gear for two or three years, I wondered how this would go.  In the event it went perfectly.  Carol eased the halyard while I stood at the bow and pulled down on the luff.  We had chosen a morning with only a few knots of wind and the sail came down smoothly.  I had sprayed the luff tape with McLube when I bent it on, but as noted that was quite a while ago and I don’t know if it was still effective.

I will be interested is seeing how clean North can get the sails.  They are now six or seven years and 8,000 or 9,000 miles old and spotty.  But then so am I, though I have the excuse of being much older and having covered considerably more miles.

Hilton Head Island: voted

In South Carolina anyone over 65 can vote with an absentee ballot.  Not liking to stand in lines, I requested such a ballot.  It arrived Saturday.  I completed it and mailed it back today, but as I have already noted, it won’t matter.  One man, one vote sounds good, until you consider that the vote of an individual who believes in the current conspiracy theory that the U.S. Government is engineering hurricanes to sway the election counts just as much as does a vote of one who is sane, and when you consider that not all votes are equal.  Thanks to the anachronistic Electoral College put in place by our Founding Fathers who did not trust the common man, this election will be decided by votes in several ‘swing’  or ‘battleground’ states, of which neither South Carolina nor Illinois are one.  No matter how I vote, South Carolina’s votes in the Electoral College will go to the Republican candidate.  Those in Illinois to the Democratic.

Unfortunately Georgia is one of those swing states.  Unfortunately because Hilton Head’s television comes from stations in Savannah and the political ads are relentless.  This is a bipartisan complaint.  I am tired of them all.  I am tired of this campaign that has been going on seemingly forever.  I read that some voters are still undecided.  How can anyone be undecided with all that has been thrown at them unless they live under a rock?

I googled to learn how much is being spent on this election.  I found various numbers, but $15 billion dollars is common.  $15 Billion.  I don’t know whether to put a question mark or an exclamation mark after that.  

More than a decade ago I wrote:   

        Democracy does not work and never has, except perhaps on a village scale.  

        The United States is a plutocracy and always has been in which the monied nobility maintain their control by political contributions and lobbyists, while giving the masses the illusion of the vote.

Other countries similar to the United States do this better.  They call an election, campaign for a month, have the election, and the country moves on.

I have done my civic duty and I will be extremely glad when this election is over.