Atlantic High (22 page)

Hugh Kenner had on several occasions made an interesting point on the subject. He had made it directly to me, and indirectly to Hewlett-Packard’s Ken Newcomer: namely, that it; really does make sense, when writing instructions for the use of people at sea, to recognize that some of them are in small boats, and then to imagine conditions at sea for such folk. After all, the QE2, if really confused about the weather directly ahead, can always wire the Privy Council or whoever and get satisfaction. Aboard such vessels as the
Sealestial
, typically the circumstances are less auspicious. It is very black outside, the winds increasing in velocity. We have just taken a reef in the mainsail, checked out the barometer but found no significant movement. One watch member is at the wheel, the second approaches the radio, having first consulted Van’s radio log. He stares, to see what is available at this moment, in order to get an idea of what lies ahead.

I did this one night and I quote verbatim what the Admiralty List of Radio Signals, 1972, shot back at me:

“This volume should be corrected each week”—those of us who confess our sins less frequently than once a week marvel at the suggestion that every single Friday, on the way from the office to the country, one should check with the Admiralty List of Radio Signals, 1972. You turn to the relevant page, page 149 in our case, where is advertised,
“Transmission from St-Lys, Special Marine Weather Bulletins and Storm Warnings
.
TIME:
(messages in French); 30 m. past two successive
EVEN
hours, immediately before the traffic lists. If necessary, a repetition is made at the first
EVEN
hour in which the watch keeping schedules of single-operated ships in Zone A. (8.510: ‘Not on Sundays or holidays.’)”
There are those for whom the above is translatable into English, but they are rare; and the probability is high that they maintain their special cerebral sensitivities by insulating themselves from tumultuous situations at sea, with a fractious radio in their hands, salt water whistling past their ears, minor and major objects crashing about them and, over it all, the sound of radio static.

Moral? Teddy Tucker’s is simple. What he says is characteristically fatalistic:
Go where you want to go, and take your chances on the weather
. Teddy is very tough, and very lucky, and very ingenious. My own position is down the middle. Forget trying to tease out of the weather the kind of information that might prove critical to a racing sailor. Take, in a cruise, what comes—but try to make certain that you and a man-eating hurricane are not headed on converging courses. And this means that you need either a Weathermax (luxury stuff) or a reliable radio with one or two frequencies that will actually talk English to you, and tell you what you need to know. You are, in my experience, better off tuning in constantly to one or two very good stations stateside until about Longitude 55°, then go to England and count on them to tell you if something ominous is coming up. If so, and your radio works (try to see to it that it does),
then
call the Hurricane Center and keep track of the storm or hurricane, and make entries, every hour, of your barometer reading.

Having said as much I confess that if I were tomorrow to set out on the identical journey I would not know offhand which frequencies to recommend. What I
would
do, the third time out if ever I should go again, is talk to one or two captains of the regular freighter runs. Ask them. The kind of thing they tell you—what frequency to keep your radio tuned to—isn’t likely to show up in the yachting magazines. Or in the books of dilettantes.

It’s possible to get cross, every now and then, with Bermudians, but safe to generalize that they are really the friendliest people in the world. Their anxiety to be helpful seems to rub off on anyone who spends time there, as witness the wonderful amiability of the people at the U.S. Naval Base, to the operations center of which Van directed our taxi when we were on our way to St. George’s to board the
Sealestial
. He desired from the meteorological officer projections of the weather, and from an obliging young man we got Xerox copies of four sheets predicting the area isobars four days down the line, a high-pressure escort, beginning that very day, in the direction we were traveling. These bits of paper are by no means easy for the amateur to read: I have a terrible time with them, and devote as much attention to the expression on Van’s face as to the efforts to transcribe what the stigmata are trying to say to me. The rule of thumb, we all know, is High Pressure is Good, and Low Pressure is Bad. But the rule of thumb is qualified by what it is that the sailor is in search of—namely, wind. Not too much wind, mind, but wind enough to sail by. So that—particularly if you were racing—you would avoid heading directly into the center of a high, lest you find yourself windless. You

Would be willing to make considerable sacrifices in geographical distance in exchange for propulsion: that sort of thing. In any event, we left with four pieces of paper that suggested the going would be easy for the four foreseeable days in the future, which indeed it was.

I say we left, but not quite without incident. At the reception area, maintained by a young sailor whose dress and all-American features might have been crafted by Norman Rockwell, and whose posture behind the reception desk was disconcerting only because he’d have looked more natural coming in from the sea, towing a rescued grandmother, I espied a clock. A most tantalizing clock. Exact-time nuts are clock-conscious, and there is nothing more challenging to our machismo than a clock that asseverates its own correctness. This particular clock was the more provocative because it asserted not its correctness to the second, but to the three seconds. It is easier to ignore the magazine cover that promises to display the most beautiful woman in the world (routine hyperbole) than to dismiss the cover that promises to display the woman than whom no one has discovered two more beautiful women.

I looked at my watch, the pride of my life (when it works, this being one such moment, or at least was, as of that morning when I checked it against our radio). I paused, and addressed the young man.

“Excuse me, but are you saying that the time on the clock there is in fact correct within three seconds, plus or minus, for Greenwich Mean Time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” I said, studying my wristwatch carefully, “in fact, you are twenty-five seconds off.”

“No sir. I think you will find that
you
are twenty-five seconds off.”

What to do? Should I go to
Sealestial
, five miles away at St. George’s, bring in my $36 Radio Shack WWV time-tic, and
ram it down Jack Armstrong’s throat?
That, I thought, would be to commit the sin of pride; so I motioned to Van that we should be off. But I brooded on the subject. Twenty-five seconds. Four seconds equal one mile. So that our naval base was giving out the time, misleading people, to the extent their navigation depended on it, by six mues. I tried to crank up a sense of civic obligation, but I was too hungry, and so we simply went on to St. George’s, told the taxi driver that no, the dark-gray World War II submarine that squatted on the water like a dozing lamprey eel
wasn’t
our sailboat—the next boat, with the two masts, all the sails, and the people, was our sailboat; boarded; asked Danny—to check on myself—to check my watch time; and it was right. If our ICBMs land six miles north of Red Square, I’ve got a scoop.

That night, the first night on the leg to the Azores, I took star sights with the usual frustrating results. But I felt that I was on the verge of Discovery, and lo, this was correct, as I have revealed, forever liberating the legions who have suffered over the ages from the problem of bringing in the stars. The next morning was Sunday, and on this occasion Danny and I did meet to pray together. We sat in the stateroom looking at “suggested passages” in the index of the Bible, and Danny nominated “Separation from Worldliness,” which certainly suggested our condition, twenty-four hours out from Bermuda with a destination two thousand miles away.

“Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all the filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God…. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the egos, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world.”
How true this was—is—and how wonderfully apposite, in its current inapplicability. At that moment Danny lusted most awfully for the flesh and the spirit of his beloved Gloria. And I was most fearfully grateful to the Lord for things of the earth, the sea and the skies, and a tight hull, the sails above me, and my companions who made them function, and proud of this spirited company. But the purpose of prayer, surely, is to stress the great divisions between the material and the supernatural condition, not to gloss over them.

The second night out I shared the watch with Christopher, and we got around to talking about the book we were committed to produce about our journey. I had decided on
Atlantic High
as its title, having spent some time looking for a word—like airborne—that was intentionally ambiguous. Mark Dichter told us he had heard that Roy Disney (nephew) had poured a prodigious sum of money into the production of a feature film based on the Ensenada race, a California staple. Roy Disney is a committed yachtsman who (a coincidence) bought the broadcasting company I had served (there is a difference of opinion on how well) as board chairman. At least six times a year, in my travels, I run into people who say to me, “I saw Roy Disney the other day and told him I’d be seeing you and he said to say hello.” After a considerable accumulation of these greetings I suddenly found myself wondering why Roy did not bother to convey his own greeting. But then, why haven’t I? So: “Hello, Roy! I liked the title of your feature film—which one day I hope to see—so very much that I leaned on your title
(Pacific High)
for my own book. Hope you enjoy it.”

Christopher asked if I had a subtitle in mind; I told him I didn’t, but hoped to come up with one.
Airborne’s
subtitle was a preemptive strike. It was: “A Sentimental Journey.” There is sentiment in that book, and I didn’t want the reviewers to say it first. It worked. Van came into the cockpit. Our pace was absolutely steady, the moon and stars were out, and we were going very nearly at hull speed, propelled by a wind suddenly turned warmer than what we had experienced, inducing me to slide my sweater off while I balanced the wheel on my knee. Van overheard the last part of our conversation and said why didn’t I use as a subtitle, “How to Survive at Sea with Only $650,000 Worth of Equipment”? He proceeded to pollute the water, mutter good night, and go back to his cabin. He was still reading when, a few minutes later, at watch change, I myself went to bed in the bunk directly below his. He was chuckling, a copy of
Encounter
on his stomach. “Here,” he said, “is a quote from a sign in an Istanbul hotel: ‘To call room service, please to open the door and call room service.’ “

Christopher had said after Van went below that he, Christopher, was greatly struck by the congeniality of the crew, and I reflected on the philosophical proposition: If A likes B, C, D, E, and F, and they like A, does it follow that B will like C, D, E, and F? …etc. Van had never met Tony or Christopher; Tony didn’t know Van or Christopher; Christopher didn’t know Reg, Van, Tony, Danny; Danny didn’t know Tony or Christopher. A metaphor survived in the memory from the column I had written the previous morning—namely, the dialectic between intimacy and loneliness. It was so at the South Pole. I was there for only five days in midsummer (January), but beginning in April the sun would disappear, to rise again only in October. Six months of darkness, isolation: no traffic whatever with the rest of the world; a community reduced from its summer-size complement to about one hundred people. How did they get on? I am not ready to generalize on the subject, but it is objectively true that on our voyage no one was getting on the nerves of anyone else; and so it would be, on through the trip. Whether they will remain friends doesn’t, really, matter.

The centrifugal forces that lead people away from each other—the hectic anonymity of New York; different professions; different extra-marine interests—all these argue for separation. But in the loneliness of the sea there is a bond. It is highly attenuated, by comparison with the bond that binds men in combat, but it is there, as the element of combat is there.

Dick is of course correct that you cannot easily leave shore or, having done so, leave your concerns entirely behind. I belong to a club in California whose motto is “Weaving spiders, come not here.” Indeed the (quite extraordinary) Bohemian Encampment begins with a rococo ritual in which the members witness a pageant wherein worldly concerns are first corporealized, and then eliminated. It is called the “Cremation of Care,” and came to us right from the golden age of Victorian optimism. Bah humbug; it was at the Bohemian Grove that I first saw Ronald Reagan and George Bush pawing the ground as they greeted each other; two years later they plighted their troth so happily. And so forth.