Authors: Jr. William F. Buckley
“Hello, darling. OVER.” (audible)
“Don’t hello-darling me, you bastard. I know all about Flo. OVER.” (inaudible)
“Oh, well what do you know! How
is
my goddaughter?” (audible)
“Who the hell do you think you’re fooling? Goddaughter—sheeyit; I
suppose
you’re having a good time. How many girls do you have aboard your ‘men-only’ cruise?” (inaudible)
“Ho ho ho! That’s wonderful. Well, do give her
my
love also. Oh-oh, have to cut out—trouble with the …line …hello, hello? …This is Whiskey Oscar George 9842, Whiskey Oscar George 9842, signing off. Thank you operator.”
Nothing, of course, went that way. But when the radiotelephone is situated at or near the center of the boat, as is usually the case, there is no such thing as a
private
conversation. No public conversation is, really, emotionally satisfactory. “Try to get me on Flight one-oh-one on the twenty-ninth, Iberia, Marbella-New York” is okay; nothing much tenderer than that. Still, you document that you are alive.
Finally I reached my wife. After the two-hour effort to make the connection on the deteriorating radio, I counted eleven sets of ears that could, and necessarily did, overhear our conversation, which accordingly took the form of Basic Social Exchange (“Christopher is fine. And how is Van?”).
Eight years earlier I was at the South Pole. What was I doing at the South Pole? No answer to that question, really, satisfies any reasonable curiosity. The fact is, I was there, at the solitary Russian outpost. (In the treaty, “they” drew Magnetic South Pole, “we” drew True South Pole,
1
,700 miles away.) And, fifteen minutes after festivities (caviar, vodka) had begun in the Russians’ central igloo, Senator Barry Goldwater, premier virtuoso of the ham radio community, walked in, dressed in the swaddling clothes of the Antarctic. He was on the wagon, and so was not distracted by the general jollity in that tiny frozen little encampment of thirteen souls who hadn’t had visitors for six months, visitors whose airplane’s motors you could hear even in the ice cellar because the propellers continued to turn—one daren’t turn the motors off, lest in the 50° below zero cold they should fail to start up again when the time came, ninety minutes later, to return to headquarters at McMurdo Base. Goldwater turned to me, all smiles.
“Just talked to Peggy.”
“You don’t mean it?”
“Want to talk to Pat?”
“You mean I can call Pat from
here?”
“Follow me,” said Barry, while the toasting proliferated, and beckoning to two other members of the party we slunk out, through the cold and the squeaky snow, to the private little igloo, fifty feet away, of a young American scientist whose avocation was also ham radio. He spent the day measuring the isotopes 29,000 feet below the earth, or whatever else it is one finds interesting at 29,000 feet below the earth, and the evenings patching in ham telephone calls to his wife and little daughter. Would he ring my wife?
“Sure try, Mr. Buckley.”
An incredible six minutes later, in that padded little ice station, with the scientist, Senator Goldwater, one admiral, the Secretary of the Navy, and one warrant officer present, I heard the telephone ring.
“Hello …”
“Is this Mrs. William Buckley?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m patching a call from Orange Kalamazoo Igloo Zingping. Will you accept a collect call from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from Mr. Buckley?”
“Mr. Buckley isn’t in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He is off somewhere in the Antarctic.”
“I know, ma’am. I’m patching in the call. All you have to pay for is Harrisburg-Connecticut. Will you accept the call?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead, Orange Kalamazoo Igloo Zingping. Come in, Mr. Buckley.”
“Hello darling!” I said trying to imagine how Bertie Wooster would try to sound under the circumstances.
“Do you realize what time it is?”
“I’m calling from the South Pole!”
“It is four o’clock in the morning. When you go to the South Pole, do you need to go at four o’clock in the morning?”
“Ho ho ho”—I looked around, and the senator, and the admiral, and the secretary, and the radio operator, and the warrant officer, were making valiant efforts to affect total ignorance of an exchange they could not have avoided hearing unless stone deaf. “Well, darling, just wanted to say hello. The connection is awful, so I’ll have to sign off.
Thank you, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania”—I
thrust the receiver into the hands of the scientist, who completed the formalities.
Grant, then, that conversations of an intimate nature are encumbered in small vessels crossing the seas. But there would be nothing intimate about such a message as: “MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY. This is the yacht
Sealestial
. We are on fire and sinking. Request all assistance from ships at sea. Our estimated position is Latitude 32 degrees 30 minutes north, Longitude 64 degrees 10 minutes west” (you repeat this, over and over again, pausing every two minutes for thirty seconds, hoping desperately to hear an acknowledgment).
In any event, the radiotelephone, after that one conversation to my wife, simply didn’t work, and the pooled talents of Reggie, Allen, Dick, and Tony were insufficient to put it back together again. There is a little curtain—gossamer-stuff, but a curtain nonetheless—that closes when your boat loses all radio contact. The flywheel within you that has gone along chirpily, well lubricated, works now with a sense of contingency that brings to every problem the slight edge of crisis. In the mind of every sailor there is an automatic table by which the escalation, or, more accurately, the graduation, of crisis is processed. When you are plowing through the seas and they are a menacing gray, fleeced with altar-boy white lace, the knot meter registering 9.5, every twelfth wave ripping down the lee deck like the flick of a whip over a mule team, you know, without ratiocination, that Man Overboard is Man Lost. When the radiophone doesn’t work, you know that certain kinds of emergencies at sea—a fire, most prominently; a capsize, of course—are more menacing in their terrifying reaches. We did have aboard—part of Reggie’s mandatory safety equipment—a contraption designed for life rafts which is guaranteed to emit, for seventeen hours, signals that would reach the radios of passing aircraft over an area of 400 square miles. Such a device would easily work to permit triangulation on an object in distress; and, of course, the device could be activated not necessarily from a life raft, but from a disabled 71-foot ketch—one whose mast, let us say, had been toppled, and whose engine had been swamped…. So travels the imagination; and, at sea, one doesn’t incline—far from it—to gallows-talk, though there was spirited discussion, this time, on the tortured experience of the yachts that had participated in the previous summer’s Fastnet Race. Fifteen drownings, twenty-four yachts lost. Late at night, once or twice on this run, the waves roared by like express trains, leaving you (even after thirty years of sailing) with that surrealistic sensation of immunity. The juggernaut has failed to topple you. Like the nightmare, a pleasant nightmare, in which you traverse the speedway down which the racing cars are hurtling, and—somehow—you walk casually, without particular plan, right across the track, this one just failing to hit you from behind, the other just failing to knock you in the stomach as you make your way nonchalantly through. But in such situations, every now and then you find yourself rehearsing, either in your mind or in conversations with such as Van—he likes to know everything—Just What Would We Do If…. It is engrossing, the more so if the radiotelephone is withdrawn as a contingent resource.
In his journal, Dick made perfunctory note of our radiotelephone problem. This was sheer stoicism on his part, since he is given to spending significant parts of the day on the telephone. He weathered, even, the Weathermax crisis. This one was, primarily, a crisis of pride. Dr. Papo had said, at the beginning of our negotiations, that he would not think of dispatching his beautiful $650,000 ketch across the Atlantic without the advantages of a Weathermax, which after all was now available at something on the order of five thousand dollars.
A Weathermax is a most remarkable instrument, the only problem being that, in my experience, it seldom works. My sailing is usually done on the relatively indigent side of the track, and in my own boats I never dreamed of such luxuries as Weathermax, or Omega navigation. But in 1977, sailing from the Dominican Republic to New York on the Argentinian cadet ship
Libertad
, a magnificent 360-foot three-masted schooner, I was introduced for the first time to the Weathermax, which proudly puffed out a four-foot-square silver-paper isobar map of the entire Atlantic Ocean indicating exactly where the highs and lows were, and inviting attention to those little telltale signs of hurricanes abrewing—especially interesting at the end of August, which was both hurricane season and the period during which the
Libertad
sailed north on this leg of its six-month journey. The problem was that, after that first demonstration, the Weathermax didn’t work again. Nor, as a matter of fact, did the Omega navigation system, although the admiral was wonderfully proud of having it on board, and enjoyed greatly telling you what it would do when it
did
work.
The
Sealestial’s
Weathermax didn’t work at all, ever. Somewhere along the line I ceased asking after it, as one would, say, after a dozen years cease to ask Allen how was his arthritis this morning, if the first hundred exercises in solicitude drew the identical response. We Omitted Mention of Dr. Papo’s Weathermax.
What else? It is, in an enumeration that began with the subject of survival, embarrassing to recall: but beyond any question this was the one serious crisis we
all
felt. We were matter-of-factly informed, three days out of the Virgin Islands, that for all intents and purposes the
Sealestial
was not merely short of ice, as Dick had written, but out of ice.
Dick and I were on watch when Diane gave us the news. I take longer than Dick to externalize True Shock. He was at least thirty seconds ahead of me when I heard him say, “What do you
mean
we’re out of ice?” Diane has one of those matter-of-fact voices, as in, “Sorry, we’re out of blood plasma.”
“We can’t make our own ice in the deep freeze,” she explained, “because it’s full, and the extra supply of ice we brought on board has melted.”
Dick and I looked at each other. It wasn’t necessary to say anything. We were wired to the same circuit, and the shock passed through us simultaneously.
I said—I was, remember, commander-in-chief—“We have to do something.”
That meant we called Reggie. Hours later we had arranged a kind of commutation system. The meat, chicken, lobster, and other extraneous stowaways in the deep freeze were taken out for just so long. Just so long was defined as that interval that a) kept the meat, chicken, and lobster from deteriorating permanently; and b) permitted the energy of the deep freeze to devote itself to the fabricating of just enough ice to fill our evening’s cups. Fine tuning, of the kind Walter Heller writes about, was called for; but it was not beyond Dick’s and my resources, not when faced with such an awful alternative. I engaged my companions in a flashback, about which I had very nearly forgotten, though at the time it had totally absorbed me.
It was 1958, and the Spanish Ambassador to the United States, a close friend, called me at my office with the information that he needed most desperately to speak to me privately on a matter of august importance. Seeing me is relatively easy, even on matters of non-august importance, and an hour later José María de Areilza, Count of Motrico, Ambassador from Spain to Washington, now President of the Council of Europe, was in my tatterdemalion office at
National Review
explaining the nature of his crisis.
As I knew, he said (I had been at the reception the night before), the Count of Barcelona, a.k.a. Don Juan, King (uncrowned) of Spain, was in New York, having sailed (he is a great yachtsman) from Lisbon to Puerto Rico to Washington—where he was received by President Eisenhower, the okay having been given, via Areilza, from Franco—to New York, where he was currently being lionized.
The problem, the ambassador explained, looking at his watch, is that this is Tuesday, and at noon on Saturday Franco has scheduled a speech on the subject of succession. It is a speech deemed
so
important, we cannot expose the King to the dangers of impromptu reflections on it in response to questions by the press.
“Therefore,” said José María, dramatically, “the King must be ‘absent’ from the United States when the speech is made.”
“Well,” I said, “where’s he headed? Bermuda?”
“Yes. But the
Saltillo
is not fit to sail. It needs substantial reparations. You know the boatyard people in Connecticut. You must take his boat to the boatyard tomorrow, arrange for the necessary repairs, and hide out the King and his crew until after Saturday morning—he estimates repairs will take one week. They will wave goodbye to the press from the pier at Seventy-ninth Street [at the Hudson River] as though they were setting out for Bermuda, but you will pilot them around Manhattan, up the East River, to Stamford, and hide them out. Say you will, my dear Bill.”
I found the invitation not only enticing, but positively Grau-starkian. The next morning, however, I was off to a very bad start, having misread the current charts in such a way as to ordain a cast-off time that had us in the East River not floating with the current, but fighting a foul current approximately equal to the engine power of the
Saltillo
. I tried to joke about how one should cruise slowly up the East River the better to enjoy Manhattan, and fortunately the King was well-disposed, and rather enjoyed my awful miscalculation: but it was only when the King offered me a gin and tonic that I saw my advantage.
“Sorry I can’t offer you any ice,” he said.
I made bold to say, “Why not, sir?”
“Because,” Don Juan said resignedly, “the
Saltillo
carries one ice chest, and it lasts approximately four hours. We are out of ice.”