Atlantic High (11 page)

But always, before finally giving up, one invokes the intercession of Reggie; and now he was fiddling with this and that, the ends of a voltmeter in his mouth—when, suddenly, it began to work! Captain Jouning, an immensely resourceful man, was both pleased and chagrined at someone else’s having figured it out, and keenly read the instructions over Reggie’s shoulder, to discover that—mistakenly—Reggie had crossed two wires that the instruction booklet had said
on no account should be crossed!
(Beard-McKie, under
Errata—
“On page 34, paragraph 2, in the sentence that begins, ‘The most important thing to remember …’ substitute
never
for
always.”)
Crossing them, however, caused the speedometer to work; and we there and then solemnly sealed the Sealestial Covenant: that no one would ever inform Brookes and Gatehouse that we had violated their operating instructions.

The wine was poured, we were on course. The wind was from the east at about twelve knots. The sun was sinking, over there to the left, in the general direction of Puerto Rico. Suddenly the babbling stopped, almost as if we had all been following the instructions of an orchestra leader; we heard only the lap-lap of the waves, patting firmly the headstrong hull of our ketch, white-gold in the falling light, the surrounding water turned now a viridian blue, oddly diaphanous, St. Thomas receding astern. No one spoke.

It is a period, I have found, that almost always comes, choosing its own rhythmic moment—the moment when, collectively, everyone on board recognizes that a journey has truly begun. Up there, toward which we are pointing, a thousand miles away, is a tiny little coral island. The object is to reach it, to arrive there without injury to ourselves or to our vessel. No one formally proposed a toast, but looking about—at Tony, with his floppy white hat so carefully tilted to shield his sun-sensitive face from those final ultraviolet shafts; at Dick with his jaunty captain’s hat, reluctantly putting on his shirt as he yielded to the demands of lowering temperature; Van, hatless, with his light blue crew-necked sweater, squinting at that morning’s New York
Times
, glass in hand; Reggie carefully screwing back the holding flange on the speedometer; Christopher, snapping away with an anfractuous photographic apparatus at the setting sun—I guessed that we were all thinking related thoughts.

On the first Atlantic crossing I thought to ask everyone to keep a journal. The results, as to Danny and (my son) Christopher, were wildly successful. At twenty-three Danny’s style was Huckleberry Finn; at twenty-one, Christopher’s was Henry James. The counterpoint was striking, preeminently responsible, in my judgment, for the success of the book in which their journals are so extensively excerpted.

I found then what I now rediscovered, namely that when on a long cruise you ask your friends to keep a journal a) everyone will agree to do so; b) some will, some won’t; c) some will keep them perfunctorily; d) others will attack them wholeheartedly. Tony’s journal took me a full day merely to read over. It must be twenty thousand words long. Tony’s father is a writer (the novelist John Leggett) and clearly Tony was being not only dutiful, but was giving way gladly to a hard case of
cacoëthes scribendi
. Even so the journal, from my point of view, is less than fully satisfying—because of what it does
not
say. It is very nearly drained of emotion. Clearly Tony had resolved to keep his private thoughts to himself, while conscientiously keeping a chronicle of events.

To be sure, as much can be said of Captain Joshua Slocum, whose memorable journal can be read as a grocery list, but which somehow achieves, in the annals of writing on the sea: literature. No one, this time out, sought to write about the trip or about the sea in the manner of Joseph Conrad. Van, in his writing, has always managed with almost spooky success to denature his own ebullient personality. One would not know from Van’s journal that he is among the half-dozen most consistently amusing and endearing men alive; only here and there a flash of this in the journal. I am reminded of a prodigious, heart-on-his-sleeve suitor of the mother of an old friend who, however, when he turned to correspondence could manage nothing—but nothing—that did not relate to the day’s weather, and invariably he closed his ardently motivated, romantically obsessed missives, “Yrs., Chas.”

Reggie resolves mightily to keep a journal—and doesn’t. He gets hopelessly behind, and then the dread day comes (after reaching our destination) when he faces the task of reconstruction. It is on the order of having done none of the reading during the entire semester of Russian literature 10A or 10B and finding, the evening before the exam, that all you need to do before morning is read the works of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Since Reggie was born to be forgiven any transgression, he is promptly and unrecriminatingly forgiven when he turns up with a journal with a half-dozen technical sketches of sump pumps, speedometers, and chili con carne confections—and two or three notations. It pays, then, to force yourself to remember the number of lonely hours Reggie—the single companion who knows how to fix things—has spent poring over the technical literature of all the machines and devices that are out of order, while the dilettantes were attending merely their belletristic fancies.

Danny, who is conventionally restrained in his conversation about people, though not at all in his enthusiasm for events (the most beautiful sunset in the history of the world is whatever sunset Danny Merritt last saw), writes from the heart. The veil we all (or mostly all) wear during the day, drops: and Danny comes out with it, whether he is writing about the awfulness of a particular dish served at lunch or the uniqueness of his one true love. Dick Clurman, always the professional (though he is among the most sentimental of men, known by hosts on all seven continents as the most moving after-dinner panegyrist since Mark Antony), is characteristically methodical. He carries one of those little dictating machines and can be seen at odd hours of the afternoon talking into it. Eventually his secretary will transcribe it and it will be sent in. Trenchant, pointed, fluent, philosophical—and in this case a little vexed, because from the first moment on, having decided to participate only in the first leg of the journey, he felt a little bit the outsider, and so produced a journal psychologically encumbered by a sense of (self-effected) exclusion, like the hiker who signs up for the first third of the trip up Mount Everest.

My own journals are entirely hieroglyphic. Few people I know are as distressed as I by the physical labor of writing. I have on other occasions mentioned the wonderful gifts of the late William Snaith, who grabbed his logbook at the end of a day’s sail and wrote his heart out in thoughts expressive and humorous, illuminating and philosophical, voluptuous in their fecundity. One has visions of Anthony Trollope writing page after page after page, sheer pleasure etched in his face—perhaps smiling, even, as he wrote. My own journal is intensely abbreviated, but I have found it serviceable. The notes I took during this trip filled only twenty double-spaced pages, one tenth the size of Tony’s journal. They are, really, notes—unpublishable as such; useful only as
aides-mémoire
. But not for very long. (I have found that notes more than a few months old remind me of—nothing at all; and are in any event very nearly indecipherable.)

Tony, throughout, was much concerned about his health. His complexion reacts, or better overreacts, to the sun, and without his Total Eclipse sun-blocking lotion he suffers greatly. Moreover his stomach is weak, in proportion as his appetite is ravenous. “It was a great way to introduce the crew,” he wrote about the wine-tasting session; “everyone cracked jokes about the voting system, but it was a poor way to continue my convalescence.” The queasy stomach—to which he would allude time and time again.

Tony managed to permit, every now and again, a little flicker of professional concern over those practices aboard the vessel that were incompatible with the highest professional standards. Of us all, he was probably the most technically skilled sailor, having raced for so long in the company of professionals. I don’t know that I would yield my own judgment to his at sea, having sailed thirty years longer; but as a precisionist he is impressive, and it is pleasant to see him making his points in the language of the technician….

It didn’t, but the language is hard as sprung steel.

Tony too is grateful for the unobtrusiveness of the cinema-tographers: “Mark is very good at getting the action going without making it seem forced, and without the cameras and sound gear making much of an intrusion. It should get even easier to work in front of a camera as the trip progresses, because we will soon take the camera as part of the boat’s gear. I was pretty pleased with what would have seemed a highly contrived setting, because the conversation about the wine went on whether or not the cameras were running. I think Clurman may be a bit of a ham, but maybe even he too will settle down a bit.” (Clurman will
never
settle down, Tony will discover over the years.) As for his own self-consciousness before the cameras, it did not easily dissipate….

“When it came my turn to undo the spring [line], for some reason the line was up tight with all the boat’s pressure on it. I could hear the camera clicking away, focused right on my hands where I was supposed to perform, and I couldn’t do a thing.” In this respect there was something of a generation gap: “In a process that amazed me for the next week long, the active crew showed how easily it could become oblivious to the camera crew. Bill and Van and Dick started up their conversations and had to be interrupted abruptly and often to be reminded that the cameras required their attention…. I got in my two cents’ worth [before the camera] about banking [Tony’s new career] and Bill did a very creditable job on himself. I guess he’s the authority on that, and also pretty good in front of a camera. Halfway through, Chris said, ‘This is the most boring conversation I’ve conducted.’ I don’t care. All I want is to see my face and hear my voice on the silver screen.” If I have any say in the matter, Tony Leggett will get his premiere!

There are few references in the journals to fellow crew members. Danny, as in other respects, is the exception, though his characterizations tend to be brief. “Van could perhaps be the funniest man alive, loves to enjoy self and crack you a smile. First to laugh at his own jokes, but knows they’re good.” …“Tony—less uptight, more self-assured. Easy to get along with, a good shipmate.” …“Chris Little—I feel a warmth toward Chris—that unusual rapport one instantly has. Perhaps the energy, drive, good nature, is what dominates the feeling. I just don’t know. Our crossing has been and is well-rounded.” …“Reg?—is Reg!”

The first day’s grace was abruptly interrupted. I wrote in the log, late the next night, “Log 382. Heavy winds (approx. 30 knots SSE), plus 7-foot seas, suggested course change to 350 degrees at 2130, to mitigate turmoil. On new course, averaged 9.5 knots. Van and Danny came on at 2300, moderately cheerful. Skipper (Allen) and David worked on brake shaft. Broken. Applied vise-so that engine
cannot
be started without first releasing vises. Only Allen and David can do this. So: anyone planning to fall overboard should pre-notify skipper or David, so that one of them can prepare use of engine to rescue man overboard.”

Hard rain and heavy winds cause acute discomfort, and Tony let it all hang out in his journal: