Atlantic High (18 page)
Authors: Jr. William F. Buckley
Tony is too young to have taken in the street wisdom of the soldier, and knew not the dangers of volunteering:
As well as ship spotter I have another shipboard task. I found the tapes in tremendous disarray, and decided to rectify the situation. Since there are at least sixty tapes and they were all confused, it took me a goodly long time to straighten things out. I arranged them chronologically with Bach getting a big drawer all to himself. In gratitude for my meritorious service, the Master appointed me the keeper of the tapes. Now this position involves some selection also. Problems arose immediately. I put on some Strauss waltzes which I thought were perfectly appropriate for a coolish midafternoon listening session down below. While I was on deck for just a moment Bill switched it hastily to something a little more baroque [Tony meant, “a little less awful”]. Come on, everybody knows that Bach is O.K. for the evening, but
not
for midafternoon.”
But then I am not everybody, as from time to time I was required, by example, to remind Tony and such other philistines as didn’t know it already.
Probably a single volume—the novel
The Shipkiller—
was most immediately responsible for such surrounding sense of spookdom as there was weighing on us—that and the shark sighted a few minutes after (or was it before?) one of our daily swims. The novel went the rounds and I think everyone (myself excepted) read it. It is an apparently engrossing story in which a huge freighter runs over a little sloop innocently cruising across the Atlantic, killing the wife but leaving the husband alive to plan—Grrrr!—a galvanizing and satisfying revenge. The story gripped the imagination….
With all this talk of supertankers [Tony later wrote about a ship’s party] running down sailboats, it seemed funny for us all to be sitting down below in the late afternoon, with the hatches closed, and no one keeping watch but the autopilot. How would that have sounded at the admiral’s inquest? “Well, Mr. Buckley, where were you and your entire crew at the time of the collision?” [Tony had the admiral leading with his chin, because the inescapable response would have been, “Where were
you
, admiral, and your entire bloody navy that’s supposed to maintain the freedom of the seas?”]
Halfway to Faial, yielding to the entreaties of Christopher, we took immense pains to empty the Zodiac, fill it with air, lower it into the water, winch down the outboard motor onto it: all this in order to photograph the
Sealestial
at sea. It happened that during the operation a range of clouds descended to the south, occluding our view. The creaky motor was energetically primed, and in a few moments Christopher, David and I (I had in hand the idiot-proof moving picture camera, entrusted to me by Mark with solemn instructions to film our vessel from a remote distance) were ready to cast off—when the evanescent mist suddenly became dimly transparent, so that we could descry through it, five miles off, a freighter traveling roughly in the opposite direction. Van quickly improvised a scenario: David and Christopher should proceed at full speed with the Zodiac, through the cloud, toward the freighter. I would follow in bathing trunks, towed on water skis, sextant in hand, held tightly to the eye. We would zoom past the stern of the freighter, I would momentarily drop my arm, look up pointing in the direction we were traveling, and shout out, “Azores?” If memory serves, Christopher took a picture of us reacting to Van’s proposed safari …
Inevitably the end came, and analytical wits, unused for so long, devoted themselves to contriving the means of deciding which was the likeliest moment of landfall. A day or so earlier I had meditated that to pull in at Faial at four or five in the morning would be thoughtlessly—aggressively—antisocial; and so made appropriate adjustments, duly recorded by Tony.
Another brilliant, cloudless, airless day. After lunch, with the noon position in mind, and wanting to arrive in Horta at a nice reasonable hour, Bill decided to goose the engine a bit. From the usual
1
,750, we put it up to 2,000. After hardly a minute, Allen appeared in the hatchway and casually looked at the knot meter, the sails, and the engine rev counter. “Skipper ask for an increase?” We nodded yes. He smiled and went back below. Three minutes later David came up and repeated the procedure. What a conscientious and careful crew
Sealestial
has.
And then, the final suspense on this leg, the details faithfully recorded by Tony:
Everything focused a bit at lunchtime because we all put in our figures for the pool. The central group of the Azores is an interesting landfall because you can see the island of Pico for such a long time. With its height of 7,600 feet it can be seen theoretically for 103 miles. How long did it take us, and how many computers and inputs from Reg to figure that one out! So, sitting there at lunch about 80 miles out, we should have been able to see it. This process gets pretty interesting now. Bill will give an approximate position (I mean a fix, I guess) and everyone does their figuring. I thought it was a pretty useless exercise, because our sighting of Pico depended entirely on the humidity in the atmosphere since there weren’t any clouds to speak of. So, I just advanced the ETL (estimate time of landfall) a few hours from the time right then. I felt pretty outclassed by some of the problem-solving I learned [about] later. Bill was counting on the fact that the mountain would not be observed until sunset, and then we would only see it at the extreme range of the lights listed on the chart, say fifteen to nineteen miles. Pretty smart! But talk about sophistication. Reg asked the Navicomp what sunset would be at our position and then got an ETL by taking the time when the sun would provide the maximum horizontal illumination which would reflect back from the mountain at us. I can dig it. After that, I wouldn’t trust anybody else’s calculations.
So, we scribbled down our ETL on bits of paper napkins and on the clothes clips which had been holding the tablecloth. Our official pool tip sheet was a bunch of bits of napkin with four laundry clips holding them together.
Mine was 1600, which meant that it extended to 1730, because Chris’s time was 1900. After my watch was over, I slapped on some Total Eclipse and treaded up to my perch on the spreaders. I tried lots of different positions, and kept myself aimed by looking around. There was a surprising amount of plastic containers and floating polypro line and other stuff, but goddam, there wasn’t any sign of Pico. People were egging me on and asking questions like, “Have you seen anything yet, Tony?” Did they think I’d just sit and keep a sighting of Pico all to myself?
I came down a little disgruntled with the whole deal, and enjoyed watching Chris pace the deck while his appointed hour flew by. The ranting and raving seems so futile, even ludicrous, to everyone but the person who knows that the sighting will show up then.
Chris resigned himself to defeat and
exactly
two minutes later, Allen came running back from the bow to the cockpit,
“There it is! There it is!”
And sure enough, in one of the breaks in the clouds, something that could only be a mountain peak stood right up. I’m sure that I had been looking right at it many times while I was up the mast; it’s just that I had been concentrating on the horizon, rather than 10 degrees off it.
Chris was pissed off. To lose the pool wasn’t bad, since five people had to lose it, but to lose it by
two minutes
, and knowing that it must have been in view before that, but worst of all, to lose by two minutes
to Reggie!
Reg laughed, commiserated, and acted as if he had known exactly when it was coming up. Horizontal beams from the sun lighting it up? My ass. It was just sitting there, right up above the clouds.
Danny’s demeanor, during the first days out from Bermuda, was unchanged. His log entries continued to specify, and to vibrate.
“Missed moon sight today—was in bunk reading
Shipkiller,
just now getting interesting. Feel very clumsy, off balance kind of thing.”
Or, “Log
1614.0 Course 096 degrees. Speed
7.2.
Wind 10 knots from 150 degrees. So much perfect conditions it makes you sick.”
Again Danny,
au naturel: “Since 24.00 I’ve eaten three apples, two candy bars, three glasses of water and one juice; two cereals and one beer. And I still have one hour 45 minutes left.”
The next entry read,
“Add one cup coffee to above. Do not eat soggy steaks. Reg, if the moon shows itself, sight it please. Also the sun.”
The party was today. The day before, Diane had asked me when might one safely say that we had come
halfway
from our point of departure in the Virgins to our destination in Spain, and I said, Tomorrow: June 13, Friday. The preparations were extensive. They included the decoration of the entire saloon, party hats, fake noses, whiskers, noisemakers—the whole bit. A picture of the animated grotesquerie not only survives, it was published in
People
magazine about a month later. That was the reticulated excitement: the third act, entirely unprogrammed, would be produced by Danny, who had announced exuberantly that to reciprocate the crew’s party, he was giving Judy, the chef, a night off. He would himself cook steak for us all on a broiler slung over the sea astern, dangling from lines attached to a dinghy davit.
Danny is a born gourmet. I know no one who, with so little formal training, reacts more exultantly to choice food and wine; and on this night, midway from America to Europe, he was resolved to make the meal truly memorable, the more so since (gently in conversation, ardently in his journal) he had registered misgivings about the quotidian fare. After finally succeeding in lighting the waterlogged coals, which achievement came an hour or so after virtually the whole ship’s company had been well lit at the party, Danny approached me—I was below in my stateroom, snatching afew minutes of Henry James’s
The American
(which I gave up on at about page
1
50—could ever the social pace have been so slow as to countenance the attractions, so excruciatingly recalcitrant, of the American?). Danny said he wanted to talk to me “about something.” Danny is chronically reluctant to
impose
. “If you have time, I mean.” Manifestly, time was what I had most of that day, and the succeeding fourteen days. I said, to my son Christopher’s oldest friend and to my own dear friend, of course; and he replied that perhaps right after dinner would be ideal, because right now he would be needing to tend his steaks
continuously
.
As is his way, he leaped up the companionway (when Danny saunters, it is in the manner of Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, a kind of coiled, springy saunter: the racehorse bridled on his emphatic way to the starting gate). Van had elected to help Danny with the cooking and was there, arm around the running backstay, stirring and testing the sauce as Danny now gave it a little more of this or that. The bottle of wine between them rapidly emptied—and of what use, pray, is an empty bottle of wine? It was nonchalantly offered to Neptune, and instantly (a round trip by Danny, after cockpit to refrigerator and back, is measured in microseconds) replaced. By the time we sat down in the main cockpit to eat (superb steaks, with sautéed potatoes, nicely seasoned vegetables, brandied cake and parfait au liqueurs), the wine had had a decisive effect on Danny and on Van; so that when after dinner I made myself geographically approachable by moving to the after cockpit where Danny could discreetly join me, he had no sooner begun the conversation when Van hove in, instantly volunteering his own philosophy on—marriage, abortion, British bonds, Taiwan, Danny’s future, and disarmament.
What Dan had only just managed to blurt out to me was that he had made Gloria pregnant, that he wished ardently to marry her, that he harbored no reservations at all about marrying her, that neither she nor he desired an abortion, indeed that he disapproved of abortion (“personally and philosophically”), that his worries were exclusively over the question: how would his little four-year-old girl, living with her mother in Colorado but regularly and delightedly visiting Danny in Connecticut, absorb the news? And how would his former wife take it—might she interfere with future visits by his daughter? And what did I think about the wedding, and might it be a good idea for Gloria to go to Spain and be married there, or might
that
appear to be furtive; Danny didn’t want furtiveness—he was very proud of Gloria and wanted all the world to know it, and he loved her deeply; and, well, he guessed he wanted me to know, and maybe to have my reaction. Van instantly volunteered to give my reaction on my behalf, and his own on my behalf; or something of the sort—Van had trespassed his private little threshold (the only time on that journey) and I kept an eye on him until, finally, he went to bed, though only after he concluded that this was an ideal time for me to initiate him in the felicities of celestial navigation, and assured me that if President Reagan designated him as president of the World Bank (Van is, simply stated, one of the brightest bankers in the Western world), that would not prevent him from joining me on
any
future transatlantic cruise; to which I replied that no ocean cruise would be the same without him, which is certainly true.
Van approached our stateroom and with exaggerated precision achieved the passage to the upper bunk, having meditated that 4
A.M
., when he would next be on duty, was not all that far down the line. I agreed, turned off the light, and went softly back up to the main cockpit. Christopher Little and Danny were talking animatedly. The moon was radiant. The only wind we felt was of our own making: 7.5 knots of it, bearing down on us from our easterly course. I mentioned to Danny merely that I understood everything he had told me, and that perhaps tomorrow we might talk more about it. He poured me a glass of wine and said, Sure!
The next morning he was pale. A few weeks later, on receiving his journals, I took note of the relevant entry:
“Last night proved to me, once again, that I can’t drink and hold my booze. They say I (1) did not eat dinner which I so laboriously cooked off the fan-tail and (2) stayed up to within 1½ hours of my watch drinking every wine in sight. Ah, but I awoke for the 4-8 shift and stayed awake for most of it. I found my glasses on the deck, why unbroken I don’t know. I figure I’ll atone today for last night. I hate myself….”
And later, “I’ll
atone for my sins by dying after a slow painful agonizing afternoon of gas. How does one get so paralyzed by just a few bottles of Mateus—one white and one red? Wine is medicinal—at what point does gluttony reverse the good effect?”
Answer: At a point several miles behind the point Danny had reached.
