Atlantic High (26 page)

Eventually (about
11 P.M
.) it became clear that we were indeed coming in on Horta, at a respectable distance south of the island. A head current kept down our speed, and there was no wind. I had that morning confided to Diane and Judy that I estimated we would tie up between midnight and one. I note with amusement an entry in Tony’s journal:

“Reg finally coaxed us in with a skillful blend of radar, chart reading interpolation, and a little local knowledge from Allen. The breakwater had Bill stymied for a second because a row of lights on shore appeared to him as a solid wall right where we were telling him to steer. Was it his contact lenses playing tricks or was he just a little plastered?” I smiled on reading this because I automatically cut the booze to a submetabolic level of consumption when I am coming in for a landing or otherwise maneuvering. I had not always done so. I am as grateful for the experience in 1960, at Cape May, as I am for an experience at a casino in New Orleans the summer of my freshman year. It was in New Orleans that, in a single trauma, I lost what had been a (to be sure, short) lifelong compulsion to gamble. My roommate and I lost everything we had been given (by generous parents) to see us through the summer, and I was reduced to acting as a guide-chauffeur, taking visiting Shriners, gathered for a leisurely convention, around Mexico Gty and as far away as Taxco. Today I can walk through a casino like a eunuch through a harem.

The night Nixon and Kennedy first debated, Van and I, with Peter Starr and Mike Forrestal, set off down the Hudson River to take my cutter
The Panic
to Annapolis, where it would winter. We’d race it up to Newport in the spring. We experienced the not unusual crisis when, with a light southerly wind on the nose, our engine conked out opposite the Statue of Liberty. Mike deduced (correctly, as it turned out) that the engine had got too cold, the result of our having overcompensated by opening full the water intake after we had retrieved the boat from Maine, where the temperature of the outside water requires a smaller volume for the engine cooling system. He predicted that in an hour or so, after the condensation dried, it would start up again; and in an hour it did, while we tacked quietly out toward Ambrose Lightship, listening to the debate over the radio and concluding (as did most people who heard, rather than saw, the debate)—even Mike, a Democrat of indomitable loyalty, who would soon serve in Mr. Kennedy’s administration—that Nixon had won it.

In any event, our engine functioning, the wind turned into a brisk easterly and we made absolutely record time, putting in at Cape May exactly twenty-four hours later. There we had resolved to spend the night, proceeding the next day up the Delaware and over to Annapolis. Ah, but that was before dinner at the marina restaurant’s bar.

After dinner Mike was treating us to—stingers. And to stories of the boat he had chartered the preceding summer in the Baltic, and the terrible crewman who came at him one night with a knife! Resulting in—a fight to the finish! It was Mike or the Baltickian—one or the other had to go—and with a
huge
effort Mike finally kicked him overboard, and he gurgled down into the cold, dark, deep: good riddance, I said, and Van and Peter cheered, and the man at the bar said,
“Another
round of stingers?”

That was the moment when I said, “Why stop tonight? Let’s sashay through the canal, and on into the Delaware and have a nice sail?” Everyone thought that a quite superior idea, and ten minutes later we were on board
The Panic
, and three minutes after that, aground. I decided to winch us out of our difficulty, threw out a heavy anchor with a long line, and winched in the line with the greatest of ease, because I had not properly fastened it to the anchor. Now we had no alternative but to sleep, until the tide rescued us. That was the last night I permitted alcohol to get in the way of my duties aboard a boat, heartily though I endorse the uses of wine and fine spirits at sea. What I have developed, after some very close calls, is super skepticism when you aren’t one hundred percent sure of what lies directly ahead, when coming into an unfamiliar harbor.

But suddenly the logic of the breakwater became plain, and the eyes settled down and, rounding, I felt the confidence of Superman, spotting a narrow opening alongside the crowded quay, to which I took the
Sealestial
for—dare I say it?—a perfect landing at 0100. Then the champagne, and a little walk, up and down the long wharf, so crowded with boats of every variety. It was too late to go out on the town, and in any event we hadn’t been properly cleared by Immigration. So we just walked a little, on land for the first time in eleven days. We had sailed 2,150 nautical miles, approximately the distance from New York to Denver, and we felt just fine. It would have been perfect except that the next day, Van would leave.

When we reached the Azores we found waiting for us, in the hotel suite
I
had reserved, a case of champagne together with a telegram, written of course in the cablese that had been Dick’s staple for so many years:

The following day was busy and we occupied ourselves with the usual chores. Tony’s special commission, this time around, was to find some edible bread, which we hadn’t had since leaving St. Thomas. What we brought from there was so mangy and bleached it might, with a drop or two of water have been served as vichyssoise. In Bermuda, Van had gone to the biggest and best bakery in Hamilton and ordered twenty-seven different kinds of bread, of every size, shape, and color, whose only common denominator was that they were every one of them tasteless. Tony secured for us, at Horta, and again at São Miguel, heavenly bread, which is the way bread tastes before you take the flavor out of it. Years ago Murray Kempton remarked that the United States had succeeded in taking all but a bit of the flavor out of our bread, and when we were through developing the peacetime uses of nuclear energy, we would succeed in getting
that
last bit of flavor out. Actually,
pace
Mary McCarthy, whose King Charles’s head in her penultimate novel was the tastelessness of American bread, America is teeming again with edible bread.

We took a little tour of the island which included an inspection of the only functioning windmill I have ever seen; I mean, it was not a Disney World reconstruction, but a genuine survivor, with the old grandparents inside making flour, and the blades turning at a fantastic velocity, rather like propellers on an airplane. We drove past the forlorn northern end of the island, which in 1957 was smothered—the lighthouse included—by a great eruption that buried tens of thousands of acres in a sooty ash. That was the explanation for the mysteriously missing lighthouse signal, though it is no explanation of why a new lighthouse, somewhat to the south, didn’t reproduce the antediluvian signals; and certainly no reason why charts purchased in 1980 should not have been corrected for what happened in 1957. From the ashes we drove back into the lushness of Faial to the airport, leaving Van there, all of us feigning stoicism at his departure; and on to dine at a little restaurant recommended by someone Tony had run into during his bread-searching—one Otto, as we called him.

A native place—and there, seated with friends in the far corner of the thoroughly utilitarian restaurant, was Otto (Othon Rosado Silverra), whose mission in this world is to serve. He dashed overto describe the kitchen’s alternatives, translate our orders, and expedite the service. Basically it was roast meat, potatoes, wine, and vegetables—every item superior in every respect.

We were to see more of Otto who, it turned out, was by profession a scrimshander, which is a fellow who takes whales’ teeth and carves designs on them, as in the days of yore when sailors, spending two or three hundred days on boats without sight of land, sought out means to divert themselves. We were invited to see Otto’s collection the next morning, amassed during the winter for a single purchaser who had bought the yacht
America
and would soon come around to collect the scrimshaws. Wonderful pieces, two or three dozen, of various sizes and decorations. Otto was working in his atelier, the size of two pullman berths.

He is active, to be sure, in every capacity, but a specialty is his ham radio, and as he sat at his workbench etching figures on his whale teeth (the teeth are covered in black tincture of sorts, and after the etching is done, they are buffed by an electrical device that looks like the revolving bushy things you shine shoes with, and the dye remains only in the little cracks, and you have your scrimshaw), he diddled with his radio. Throughout the operation he was interrupted by calls on the radio, of which he kept dutiful record in his logbook, patching in calls here and there, uttering pleasantries to his friends in half a dozen languages.

He invited us, as we waited for the three scrimshaws we had commissioned and for the earrings for Tony’s girl and for Gloria, to survey his scrapbooks. There were six of them, and on the odd pages were pictures of beautiful yachts, opposite which was an inscription, of which a typical one would be, “To Dear Othon: How can we ever repay you? If you hadn’t stood by us during those terrible weeks, everything would have ended for us. Come to us in Newport. Come to us in Palm Beach. Come to us in Monaco. Forever yours, Gloria Merrill Vanderbilt Auchincloss Gibson”—but literally dozens and dozens of people whom, over the years, Otto had apparently taken in hand, quietly attending to their problems, ordering their meals, getting their boats fixed, arranging their communications, making them a scrimshaw or two for peanuts. If I had had handy a picture of
Sealestial
, I’d gladly have added to his collection, but Otto is overburdened with gratitude.

We headed for the boat, hoping to recapture an afternoon five years earlier at a bight on Pico Island. The wind was bracing at first, from the east, which suited our southerly purposes perfectly, but—unaccountably—I slid past the deserted village I was looking for, and we settled instead for an undeserted village, of probably a hundred fishermen. We threw out the anchor and set out for a two-hour walk up the steep hills, during which Tony spoke of his immediate plans, and of his intention to sell the hacienda on Majorca he and his cousin had inherited from his great-aunt, a friend who first gave me Tony’s name as a qualified sailor. It is unlikely anyone had ever before parked a yacht in this little half-bay. The natives were typically five feet two in size, and friendly: they insisted we ride their burro, and the children giggled, in their rumpled white cloth skirts and pants, and ran off to hide.

Danny would cook again, and as he laid on the coals, two fishermen approached us in their dory. I called for Allen to ask whether he wished to purchase fish. Only on the condition, he indicated to the fishermen with gestures, that they clean the fish first, which the two men—one of them young, the other perhaps his father-proceeded industriously to do, devoting half an hour to the enterprise.

What followed will live in the annals of humiliation. Allen took the fish—twenty of them—and asked how much did we owe them? The answer came back, with smiles: “Nada.” Nothing. The news was flashed to me below, and I said that they must be given a twenty-dollar bill, if necessary tossed to them in their boat in a receptacle of some sort. After much arguing, they consented to take the money—but only after handing up a bottle of white wine. They left then, waving. But ten minutes later they came back. This time they did not reduce their speed as they approached our stern. They rounded us closely, in elegant stride, and having signaled to Danny, standing astern tending his coals, to prepare to catch something, tossed over to him a bottle—and, waving and smiling, sped off. They wished to make us a gift of a bottle of brandy, and would not, this time, expose themselves to the ignominy of being offered money for it: I mean, what would these Americans, on returning home, otherwise say about Portuguese hospitality?

We drank the brandy, after Danny’s chicken and the roasted fish, and felt truly welcome. At ten, we hauled up the anchor and set out the
1
50 miles east to the island of São Miguel, which favorable winds put us in sight of at eight in the morning, when I took the helm, remaining with it—such is my inclination on nearing land—until, shortly after noon, we pulled alongside the quay at Punta Delgada, the busy little harbor with the wide Mediterranean avenue arcing opposite the great breakwater, marred now by an abortive skyscraper-bound hotel. Begun since we were last there, it had never been completed, serving now only to profane the city’s silhouette. It is a scar on an otherwise engrossing and stately harbor, once much busier than it now is, when the cruise boats don’t even call—there being, really, no cruise boats left that cultivate the Atlantic, let alone the Azores, which from my brief knowledge of them are, quite simply stated, the most beautiful group of islands in the world.