Atlantic High (17 page)
Authors: Jr. William F. Buckley
The day we paraded out through the channel (a two-hour trip) to hit the deep water opposite St. George’s was Bermuda at its best. Bermuda has a nasty habit of attracting a kind of haze that obscures the vernal splendor and color of the island, causing a bleary etiolation. We had reckoned with such a possibility, and Halmi and Mark and David and Christopher were fatalistic about it: if the weather conditions proved inauspicious for photography, somehow we’d have to manage without the airplane scenes. What was excluded was that we could simply lie over another day, hoping for better weather. A trip like ours requires too much planning (I concede the point) insouciantly to take delays of one or two days, let alone three. But the sun shone magnificently, and again we went through our paces, returning to St. George’s in the late afternoon. We took taxis back to Hamilton, since I had already paid for the suite for the third night, intending to set sail at noon the next morning after fueling, watering, and icing. We agreed to meet for dinner at the dining room of the hotel.
But Danny didn’t show up. Reggie went to telephone him, but the line to his room was busy.
When we had finished, an hour and a half later, we went up—and Danny was still on the telephone and, as deferentially as he could, motioned us please to congregate in the other room, which we did. I began to worry. I think within thirty seconds I had figured it out. Gloria was pregnant.
Danny was on the phone a total of two and one-half hours. I had gone to bed before he finished talking. I dreaded the next morning, fearing the worst: Danny would announce, whether giving the reason or not, that he would have to pull out of the cruise. If a great deal of thought is given to the composition of a cruise, a single absence is totally dislocative. It is as if you approached a painting, turned to the artist, and said, “Try it again, this time without using any blue.”
But Danny was silent, engaging himself totally in the last-minute details of the journey.
I had to write one final column and telephone it to New York, so Van agreed to pick me up at noon. He, Reggie, and I would taxi to St. George’s, board the
Sealestial
, and head for Europe. What shall I write about? I asked Dick, as he closed his bags for the final time—he was headed for the airport to New York. “Write about the trip, what the hell.” So I did.
SEE YOU LATER
Bermuda
. Syndicated columnists are given two weeks off every year. And this, I note in passing, is by no means a venerable convention (in my case, the vacation came only after my fifth year in the trade). Moreover, there have been columnists who as a matter of principle never took a vacation, lest their public discover that life was possible, nay even keener and more joyous, without the columnist’s lucubrations. The late George Sokolsky wrote six columns a week for King Features, and then a seventh for the local Sunday paper. When he learned that he had to have his appendix out, he carefully composed columns ahead based on all the variables in the art of prognosis: two columns in the event everything went smoothly; four columns in the event of complications; six columns in the event of major complications. I asked him, on hearing the story, whether he wrote a seventh column in the event of terminal complications, but he replied that his interest in his worldly constituency was only coextensive with his life on earth.
Mine isn’t. When I go, I intend to hector the Almighty even as, episodically, I do from here, to look after my friends, and (most of) my enemies. But I confess to being uncomfortable at taking my two weeks together, instead of separating them as is my practice (one week in the winter, one in the summer). But I am setting sail on a splendid racing vessel, from here to the Azores and on to Spain. The next leg of my journey will keep me incommunicado at sea for eleven days, in the unusual posture of being only on the receiving end of the world’s events. During that period President Carter, Senator Kennedy, the airlines, the people who spend their days profaning the English of King James, may perform their abominations safe in the knowledge that there will be no reproach from me. It is horrifying to meditate what enormity the White House will execute, I having advertised my isolation. On the other hand, if President Carter is determined to make me a boat people, I am splendidly well ahead of the game: I need only to sail on.
But sail on to where? Ah, there’s the rub, as the poet intuited four hundred years ago. Where can we go, if distress should come to America? There is only Switzerland, and this would not be the season to rely on U.S. Naval helicopters to pick up my boat and ferry it into Lake Geneva. [I wrote a few weeks after the abortive attempt to rescue our hostages in Iran.] Accordingly, I adjure my lords, secular and spiritual, not to be too licentious while I am gone.
What shall I concern myself with? Well, the exact time of day. I really must know—no kidding—exactly what time it is. I wear a chronometer which for several years lost exactly one second per week. Even folks as disorganized as I can cope with such retrogressions, and I happily set it right every Christmas and every Fourth of July, and I always knew what time it was. But in an idiotic fit of hubris I returned it to the clockmaker, reminding him that my watch was guaranteed not to gain or lose more than twelve seconds per year. It has never been quite right since. So …well, I have a computer I navigate with, and it has an inbuilt chronometer. It keeps—excellent time. But you see, excellent time will not do; you need the
exact
time. So I also have a little radio ($36 at Radio Shack) which is supposed to bring in wwv from Fort Collins, Colorado, which vouchsafes to all the ships at sea the exact time. Mostly, the little radio brings in that signal. Every now and then it does not. In which case I ask Danny for the time, and his watch is pretty reliable. Dick’s cheap little Casio keeps disgustingly good time. And I can tell from Reggie’s sly smile that he believes, in a pinch, he can come up with the time.
I need sun. Not to darken my skin, because in fact the doctor says that sun is the enemy of fair skin and I must use something called Total Eclipse #15. I need the sun, and the time, to discover which way to point in order to effect a rendezvous at the Azores. If in this matter I should fail, the reader may deduce, two weeks hence, that I am absent without leave. The moon is getting lean right now, but will flower again; and when it is half-bright, it gives you a horizon, and on some magical moments you can combine that horizon with the north star, and before you know it, you have your latitude, even as Columbus had that, and only that, having little idea of the time, and yet managed to discover our wonderful country.
The chances, then, are overwhelming that, like MacArthur, I shall return. In the meantime, the Republic is on probation.
The following leg was uneventful, if you take into account only the weather. The most drastic literary compression of external conditions and social circumstances was Van’s formal entry, “3 days perfect sailing, 7 days winds
0-10
, powering 75 percent of the time. No casualties. Many dolphins. Much swimming. Radiotelephone, no work. Occupations, varied.”
I lean, for a little while, on Tony Leggett’s journal.
Tony’s posture toward his journal is at all times dutiful. Clearly he considers it a matter of personal honor to confess to his journal when he is feeling less than …whole. (“For the next three or four days I was a little unsteady.”)
During the first few days, when we had the fine sailing wind, Tony took leisurely thought to compare the experience of the helmsman, on duty and off, in a boat the size of
Sealestial
by contrast with the racing boat, only a little more than half
Sealestial’s
length, Tony had previously sailed across that Atlantic:
On board
Imp
at night during a solo watch, I always got a feeling of tremendous vulnerability.
Imp’s
deck was absolutely flush. There was a well, about two feet deep, for your feet. The dodger over the main hatch had only one purpose, to keep spray out of the hatch when it was open in rough conditions. It was not considered a means of sheltering anyone on deck. Therefore going on watch at night was something I always had to prepare for, mentally and physically: the wind came right at you off the water, unobstructed; and the flat, open deck made one feel very exposed. The opposite—going off watch—was a tremendous joy. To see a light below through the companionway as Robert got ready to relieve me was very heartening. The passage from deck to cabin was marked. Down below, the air was still and warm. The light was usually weak, but it illuminated just enough so that the cabin felt like a cocoon. Finally to crawl into the sleeping bag and wedge myself between the bunk and the hull was bliss. The bag soon warmed up, and the water rushing past only inches away was both soothing and an indication of how fast and far we were going. I remember thinking one night how crazy it was to imagine this little cocoon of warmth and light, out there bobbing around a thousand miles from the nearest land, in an environment totally inhospitable to man.
On
Sealestial
I get very little of those sorts of emotions. For one thing
Sealestial
is too big to seem vulnerable in the open ocean, and the cockpit and deck layout provide lots of protection from the elements. Going on watch, therefore, involves none of the trepidation of a much smaller boat. For some reason, I find the most disturbing activity at night is taking a leak. The leeward rail aft of the cockpit has sheets, backstay tails, and vang lines crisscrossing it, making secure footing very difficult. There is also the need at the end to lean far outboard to miss the wide gunwale. To do this at night with an irregular swell, pitch black, no moon, and especially the fear of going overboard with the autopilot on and no one on deck is more disconcerting to me than it logically should be.
Going below, then, has less of the sharp contrast than it did on
Imp
. The cabin is warm, and well lighted, and inviting, to be sure, but it misses out on that siege mentality so evident on
Imp
. It is even difficult to hear the boat’s passage through the water when down in the saloon.
All this is true. A fortiori, the passage across the Atlantic on the
1
6-foot
Tinker belle
was a closer-to-nature-experience than on
Imp
. Sailing aboard the
Sealestial
is different from sailing aboard a kayak. But it requires dormant imagination to forget that the
Sealestial
, for all its apparent mass, stem to stern, is only as long as eleven Tony Leggetts stretched end to end.
What hit us, after the third day, was something very nearly like the doldrums. I think I remember that we always had the mainsail up, but that is easy to do if you sheet it down tight so that there is no lateral movement whatever in the boom, and vang it down to discourage floppiness in the sail itself. But it was only every now and again that there was wind enough to justify hoisting the genoa. The days crawled by. Van deduced that the chances now were very nearly gone that we would reach the Azores in time to make his connection to Switzerland for the conference he had contingently agreed to attend.
So what?
“We haven’t made the expected time, and the conference in Switzerland looks doubtful.
Tant pis
and as Agnew said, if you’ve seen one conference you’ve seen ’em all.” Van is by temperament impatient, by philosophical discipline, stoical. How to pass the time on watch? “I had the 2400 to 0400 watch with Danny last night and we played double-ended Ghost which allows for adding a letter before as well as after the word. The four hours were absorbed very quickly and I recommend it to all semiliterate mariners in search of a time killer when reading is impossible.”
Van permitted his thoughts to roam. He got around to describing a typical day in the doldrums. “The Muses rarely lyricize over the empty bowel, but they should. My diet of roughage has paid off, crapwise. Our routine has become routine. Everyone flops around, above or below, in the morning after breakfast reading or writing. Not too much chatter. Then Swim Time. Gregarious lunch in the after cockpit, naps in the afternoon. More reading. Swim. Read. And cocktails at 1900, dinner at 1930, talk escalates and then fades. Night night.” He acknowledged the special problems that disadvantaged us during those languorous hours: “In the Problems-of-the-Idle-Rich-Department: Reg and I keep bumping into each other while swimming which leads to comments like, ‘This ocean is just not
big
enough for the two of us,’ or, ‘The water is refreshing but there are just
too
many people.’ “
What were the aggravations, excitements, irritations, fantasies? Tony addressed himself to these. For instance, there was the aesthetically distressing matter of Danny’s indescribably unattractive cap, his teddy bear:
Danny has a horrid, dirty, once-white plastic and acetate visor baseball cap which says Something White Water on the front. Bill was desperate to get Danny to stop wearing it. The first solution obviously was to give him another hat to wear, but Bill was shocked for two days when he realized he couldn’t
find
the five hats which Pat had so carefully packed for him: a) because they were such useful hats, and b) because he could not therefore give Danny a substitute. [Yesterday] Bill came on deck in the late afternoon, triumphantly bearing his five hats: a blue Greek sailor hat, a brown Greek sailor hat, a Black Diamond Sou’Wester, and two strange Australian sun hats. Danny got the brown Greek sailor hat and I hope we don’t see his white baseball cap again. Bill’s first attempt had been a plaintive [Tony meant, “seductive”] innocent ‘Danny, let me look at what size your hat is,’ but I guess he (Danny) had heard that tone of voice before and all Bill got was a ‘Oh-no-you-don’t-Bill.’ “
