My Aunt Renoir

My Aunt Maxine grew up in North Carolina, and has remained in North Carolina for most of her long life. At 92 she’s entered probably the most productive period of her artistic career. Maybe it’s taken this long to conquer the business of art selling, but my aunt now finds herself with more commissions than she can manage: portraits, oil paintings, pastels, watercolors; pictures of children, prominent citizens and not so prominent, seascapes, landscapes, pets, houses.

They are all finding out about her: doctors, dentists, teachers—anyone with enough ego and money to commission a painting. (I should note my aunt’s prices have remained about what they were in 1975.) They come with photographs, sometimes clusters of photographs, and cobbling these together she will compose the picture, set a canvas in her hand-made easel, and begin to paint.

She has already populated a large part of Elizabeth City with her images: They appear in the local history museum, local art galleries, and once a whole truckful of them went onto the walls of the new City Hall. Eminent persons from Elizabeth City’s past, mayors, councilpersons, benefactors of various flavors, celebrities—singly and in groups, they have passed through the bright sphere of her gaze to the permanence of her canvas.

I will not fail to note my Uncle Jack’s place in this enterprise. At 87 he’s the errand runner, the frame stretcher, the appointment scheduler. He’s the man that makes things go. Along with her talent, my aunt also received the gift of long talk, and my uncle long ago gave up competing for a space in the conversation. If not often heard, you will see him plenty, fixing some part of the house or other, painting a porch floor, cleaning a wall, trimming a hedge. Early in the morning he’s spreading food about for the three cats and a dog, and any other stray creature finding a congenial place here amid the fig trees and palmettos.

Plenty of creatures have, myself not least.

I arrived here after yet another summer on the water, a regular but rigorous period of sweat, strenuous labor, long days in the wind, long days of squeezed-out tubes of sunblock and aloe vera, baloney sandwiches, hunting down propane cylinders, playing chicken with power boats, and the occasional trip to the emergency room. I came here last year, too, and the year before that. By early August I’m ready to experience the full explosive thrill of endless rest, days of rest, weeks of rest. I want to put my feet up until all the blood drains out of my legs.
And so I have done. Every August I have launched myself with scant apology into their lives, dragging my bike into their garage and making a mayhem of the “apartment” adjoining their house—actually its own small house attached at a corner to theirs. I have lazed on their porches and filled closets with my important papers. In return for this kindness, they get in me an occasional porch sweeper and paint fetcher, an alert boarder guaranteed to rise before noon and investigate if some great noise signals trouble nearby. It’s the least I can do.

Very quickly I have gotten used to the pace, as who could not? Jack rises by 6, Maxine a bit later. She reaches her studio by 8, while Jack hits the wood shop for a morning of framing and matting. At 11:30 all work ceases and they go to lunch at the little restaurant whose menu they know by heart. In the afternoons, there’s often some work in the garden, maybe some weeding. (I once pulled an invasive plant out of the flower bed, all on my own.) In the evening, another restaurant, and rest for the creation of more art.

And while I lounge without shame around this property, with its gallery view of humanity on the streets and its hanging gliders, while I wander amid the garden house and the woodshop, the flower beds and peach trees, this demi-paradise with a pretty lawn, and its dedication of every cove and corner to the making of beautiful things, I suddenly realize:

I am at Arles. I am in Tahiti and the Marquesas. I am surveying Paris from Montmarte. I am in Guernsey and Provence and Auvers. I am seeing stuff in person that others will admire in galleries a century from now. I get to stand by while art is being made. And I think: well, maybe I can help out a little more.

Mark and Me

An important announcement. Henceforth this shop will no longer carry the Mark Twain line of products and services, popular as they may be with our current customers. The stock has run out and will not be replenished. The Twain brand will no longer form a part of this inventory.

I mean it. I’ve gone sour on this guy. I will no longer use Twain’s life as a yardstick and standard of judgment upon all other lives, and raid it for metaphors, and chop it into anecdotes to illustrate common wisdoms. I will stop coughing up Twain quotes at every chance. Henceforth I will quit the footrace I’ve run with this man since my 20s, which I long ago lost but never abandoned. I’m kicking him out of the cabin. He will no longer rattle his sarcastic bones in my closet.

It’s time. Some fascinations really do need to end, and especially those that beckon downward. Nowhere have I read more avidly, imagined more vigorously, yearned more desperately than in the study of Clemens. Nowhere have I failed more completely than in his comparison. With his success as the standard, he has strained my labor and blighted my career--to use a word he would surely approve. He has made me nostalgic for an age I never knew, and no doubt made my company tedious sometimes when it might have been otherwise, more like his.

No one ever explained him, is the problem. Probably no one will. What James Couzens said of Henry Ford he could have said of Clemens. You can’t analyze genius.

Oh, how I hate the G-word. But Clemens surely had something, something that not even he understood. He could mesmerize with words, even himself. Whatever fear he felt, whether on the page or the stage, the words took over when he began to produce them, and that was that. The words followed their own way. There was something from Beyond that spoke through their strange and beguiling combinations, that shines yet through those truer-than-life word pictures, which I’m finished describing as talent. It was much more than that.

And let us not speak of the voice, which had a power all its own. The drawl was hypnotic, the slow cadence pulled you into participation, brought you into its own sphere of experience. You could not be in a room with that drawl and want it to stop, hope it would stop.

It’s a significant loss to American history that recordings of Clemens’s voice, made upon wax cylinders as he dictated his autobiography in 1906, have never been found. (Nor have those of William Dean Howells, who followed Clemens’s example in dictation.) Even Howells said you had the best of Mark Twain when you had the voice. To feel the utmost of his powers, you had to share the room with him, your eyes and ears awake to the performance. Whatever the voice might have told scholars, maybe it would have given me, finally, the man instead of the miracle. I have gotten right sick of the miracle.

These thoughts come courtesy of an octagonal aluminum garden house in my Aunt Renoir’s backyard, where I am now sitting. I had been taping a tear in its plastic roof, on this warm September morning, wondering if I should move my computer into it, when I began to think about Twain’s famous octagonal study in Elmira, built for him as a gift on a ridge above the Chemung River.

I have been in that study, that structure in which much of his greatest literature came into being. It felt odd. Who knows but that something about its shape, some bounced-back convection of brain waves, didn’t ignite genius in there like a vapor explosion. Clemens wrote much of Huck Finn in that study, and Life on the Mississippi, a good bit of Roughing It, and much else that has expanded the vocabulary of American letters. I would say he averaged 16.5 brilliancies a day there, a pretty good pace.

Well, maybe if I tried writing here, in my own little octagon, I could enjoy that kind of success! Maybe I could produce great literature and earn several fortunes and be hunted up by universities conferring honorary degrees! Maybe I could have that kind of life, see the great wilderness of a young America, witness gunfights in the wild west, go around the world on a steamer. Maybe I could pan for silver in Nevada and set fire to Lake Tahoe and cruise the Mississippi in a paddle wheeler. Maybe I could--

After a quarter hour of this I decided what I really needed was medication, and went and lay down. For it is no good, you see. Even I can understand that, sometimes. It is no good singing someone else’s happy song if you have the chance to sing your own. An easy lesson, but difficult to embrace. Why be the Elvis imitator when you can be McCroon the Wonder Scotsman?—a lesser light, perhaps, but steadfastly his own man. Why dance the dear old Twist when your own steps include double knee swirls and fast-action rump gyration and a complete backward somersault over an open fire pit? People might wanna see that. Imitation is a form of enslavement. Don’t go that road.

I know it, of course. Probably I always did. It’s one of those truths we don’t want to believe. However, I believe it now. You can’t be the man you never were in the first place. Forget it. Quit the whining already. Grab a rag and do some dishes or something. Hit the road till your head’s clear, don’t stop for lunch meat.

Yeah, that's the way. Say goodnight, Huck. You can go to hell without me.

Statistical Anomaly

Written Sept. 9, 2007

I am having the strange experience right now of being shut up in a remote cabin with nothing to occupy me but a couple cans of beer and this computer.

It was because of the Boy Scouts. They called Thursday for help moving boats on Friday—apparently a storm forecast for the weekend put them in a panic. And so I rose at 4 and drove four hours to the scout camp in Middlesex County, and yesterday moved two boats, first one of our Morgans, then the Hunter, to their haul-out at Yankee Point. I traveled twice along the 15-mile route, and was retrieved each time but the ever-untiring T. J. Auth in his red James Bond speedboat. (Two and a half hours down in the sailboat, less than half an hour back in Bond style. Why do I like sailing again?) For company I had only myself and at one point a brace of dolphins, who surfaced six feet from my boat and made me scream in my brother’s ear as I spoke to him on the phone.

Naturally I didn’t want to leave afterwards, but elected to stay the night in one of the camp’s cabins. These little cabins have no running water, most of them. But they do have air conditioners and microwave ovens, and a striking hilltop view of the mile-wide Rappahannock. They also have—most significant to me—coffee machines. So when I tucked in last night and opened the window to the murmur of forest sounds, I didn’t figure I’d be rising early.

And I didn’t. I rose way late and did nothing, and went on doing nothing all day, and only very slowly persuaded myself to leave tomorrow. (This same storm might pound Elizabeth City tomorrow afternoon.) But for the moment, here I am, shut up in this very Kacsinski-esque cabin, minus the books and bomb-making materials, and waiting for the urge to overthrow capitalism and the spirit-killing, ever-expanding structure of technology that has made such a slog of human life.

But I find myself not in the mood for violent overthrow tonight. I find myself troubled.

Two nights ago, the city of Elizabeth City phoned me at about 8 p.m. to say someone had found my wallet—I didn’t know it was missing—and could I possibly retrieve it soon, as it would become official “property” at midnight and retrieving it would become much harder.

No need for encouragement: I got to the police station before the voice mail finished. Lisa, the dispatcher, apologized for making me fill out a form. I found myself remaining quite patient.

The wallet came back containing every one of the seven library cards I have collected in the last three years, also my driver license, also my credit cards, also the $160 in cash I have been carrying. A young couple had found it, he from California and here with the Coast Guard, and she his sweetheart, a local girl. Lisa had no phone numbers for them.

“I thanked them for you,” she said. “I knew you would be grateful.”

Yes. Grateful is one word for it.

I have lost my wallet no fewer than three times in the last five years, two of those times on the hard streets of Philadelphia. Each time it has been returned to me, containing everything I lost with it including Schlockbuster Video card and ShopTite supersaver card, also postage stamps. Two of those times, the finder had to play the detective in finding me, for my phone number appeared nowhere in my documents.

Now, here’s the disturbing thing. I have tried very hard to remain cautious and eternally vigilant against trespass against me. We should all keep a wary eye open, no question. You can’t watch the news without acquiring a fresh batch of murders, rapes, robberies, confrontations at knife point, scams, ruses, organized deceits, fires. Each night a new assortment. I am no different than anyone else, I fear for my life out there. People are crazy, kill you for a piece of Velveeta.

The trouble is, my experience—and I’m sorry to confess this—my experience has so far failed to ratify this picture.

Oh, I know I’m not normal. No doubt I’m a statistical anomaly, a man who by some unknowable grace of god has gotten this far in the world without being shot, burned, stabbed, cheated, scammed or hated in an organized way. People return my wallet when I lose it, what are the chances? I leave my doors unlocked and find my stuff still there in the morning. I leave stuff lying around all the time, and find it still lying around when I come back.

The consequence is, I find myself becoming…less…vigilant.

I know, it’s crazy. I shouldn’t take my eyes of the scoundrels out there, the villains, the humbugs and frauds, those ever vengeful, ever exploiting figures we glimpse on all the most instructive TV programs.

I know I should be locking my doors every night, so that thieves and murderers can’t cut my throat. I know I should lock my car when I leave it, so the smash-and-grabbers must at least make noise when they steal my phone charger. I know I should breeze past the man broken down on the highway, as his steaming radiator could be masterpiece of trickery, and I need only to turn my back and he’ll brain me with a spanner.

It's the patriotic thing to do, as well. We got to be scared in these times, we got to be as frightened as possible. Even the government says so. It'll make us stronger.

So I’m gonna try harder. As a matter of survival. I’m gonna start watch the TV news again. Every night, I vow. With a little effort now, I can fear my way into--if not a happier future, at least a more secure one. And what could be more important than security?

On Ranger Road

Sometimes we hear an irrefusable voice from within. It speaks in its own language, but is nevertheless understood. It speaks without volume, but is audible always. It speaks without force, yet its command shines with overwhelming radiance. Recently this voice spoke in me. It said: go camping.

The Outer Banks of North Carolina, clogged with development perhaps, still have room enough for the occasional little camp ground, often in someone’s back yard. You’ll find more of them the further out you go, as the tourists, like in number to the grains of sand on a beach, become outnumbered by the grains of sand on the beach.

At the far end of the Banks, where the long arm of shore is interrupted by towns with names like Salvo and Waves, where every quarter mile shows you another chance to stop, and raise a tent, and heat a can of beans, and be eaten by flies, and sleep with a broken clam shell digging into your backside, the command speaks with special emphasis.

The Mighty Ranger got me pretty far out the first day. Rodanthe, North Carolina: Not even a wide patch on the highway. Rather a temporary suppression of the wild vegetation that wants, yearns, perishes to take back these islands. Private property here, as in most of these towns, has expanded to its federally protected limit. If a lot doesn’t belong to someone now, it never will. That fact, and the place’s remoteness, have preserved in it some flavor of the frontier and recently-settled. Builded lots alternate with wild meadows of beach plum and bayberry. After a windy spell, drifted sand buries the roads.

My tent went up exactly in accordance with the printed instructions, which were sown onto its storage bag so that first-time tent putter-uppers couldn’t lose them. The campsite lay on the sound side of the island—never will I understand why the western side of barrier islands go unpeopled throughout the summer—and the sunset, as well as the full moon afterwards, brought a warmth and contentment that you often find in dreams of happiness--if you could ignore the Grateful Dead playing from one of the nearby RVs.

Q: What do they say at a Grateful Dead concert when the drugs wear off?
A: Man, this music sucks.

Development takes place under great restraint in the Outer Banks. And the sheer extravagance of miles protects it from overcrowding, mostly. Miles-long stretches of surf-washed beach contain not a single soul, and what souls do arrive do so in a motor vehicle. But this is an eastern-end phenomenon. In big tourist towns like Nags Head and Kitty Hawk, you’ll find the full array of beachside commerce in full throb: jet ski rentals, custard stands, drive-through liquor stores, “sundry” shops, big box retailers, and often entire blocks of new retail shops, which universally contain at least one t-shirt store, also a den of knick-knacks featuring carved wooden light houses, sea captains standing at ship wheels in their sou’-westers, shot glasses mounted on wood blocks and many sizes of souvenir plate, all made in China and stamped with the magic words, Outer Banks.

Well ahead of the national mania for three-letter place names, the Outer Banks staked its claim on automobile bumpers, rear windows, license plate brackets and refrigerators throughout the country: OBX, the sign of a proud vacationer.

Further down, past wastes of grass and drifting sand, on a road as straight as a sunbeam, another oasis rises, a cluster of towns huddled together like three men trying to keep warm: Waves, Rodanthe and Salvo. Beyond that, Buxton, and then the town of Hatteras, home of the tallest brick light house in the country, 208 feet, now the centerpiece of a national park. And lo, for miles along the beach, four-wheel-drive vehicles gambol and frolic, many with the fence of fishing poles clustering from their grills, and coolers held in their own protruding balconies before or behind. Their tires are deflated to 20 psi, as advised by the signs.

At island’s end one of the truly amazing North Carolina ferries will take you to the next stage southward—“truly amazing” in this case meaning “free.” North Carolina operates a fleet of ferries, some of them making two-hour-plus trips every day. But you’ll never pay more than $15 a ride. Locals pay $100 for a free yearly pass. For the ferry south of Hatteras, no rider pays a cent.

Ocracoke Island: about 20 miles of beach grass with a town sprouting at the end.

Actually a village. There is something eternally small about Ocracoke the town. It stretches a mile from its sandy north to its watery south. Rampant development has not taken over, as if the modern ethos of headless growth could find no place to stand. You are as likely to see electric carts whisking about as automobiles, and more likely to see bicycles. Not so likely are you to see banks of condos, or hulking hotels by the sea, tarted up with ornamental mermaids and pink paint. Beach scrub and wild oaks break through every patch of ground that a house does not occupy, and most of those houses go back 70 years.

By unspoken consent, the automobiles creep along the roads, often letting the bicycles set the pace. The National Park Service information center provides—who could possibly think this a good idea?—a vast public parking lot where visitors may leave their vehicles and explore on foot. Almost every house is rentable, but the proportion of vinyl construction (read: modern) is as low here as anywhere on the American coast. Here again, remoteness equals repose. The madding crowd prefers easier access to its maddingness.

Which has its detractors.

“It’s a good place to visit,” said the manager of my campground, a resident of seven years. “But you’re dependent on ferries. The nearest Wal-Mart is two hours away.”

Right. I’m definitely coming back.

But she is right. Few of the appetites usually sated in a beach town can find satisfaction here. There is not a single funnel cake stand. Mini golf they have none, nor golf of ordinary size. Nor water parks, nor movie theaters, nor boardwalks, nor “go-kart” tracks, nor tarot readers, nor hermit crabs, nor traffic jams nor beach inspectors, snow cones, invisible dogs or crystals.

They do have an ice cream shop, and a general store selling camping supplies, and a little community theater tuned to visitor interest, seafood restaurants, a fancy sandwich shop and about a dozen mouse-sized art galleries featuring local artists, which you will always find on distant islands. For no remote locale is so forlorn and dilapidated that some dreamy heart will not believe it the prime spiritual meridian of the world.

Some of the tourist books warn about this: “Don’t come here for the typical busy shore town experience,” one of them says.

Amen.

The next ferry ride lasted two and a half hours, traveling south from Ocracoke to Cedar Island and its long woody passage south to Beaufort, where I got out the bike.

Make note of this: Beaufort, North Carolina (pronounced BO-fort), must be conscientiously distinguished from Beaufort, South Carolina (pronounced BYOO-fort) if you want to see the place your friend Emily called her favorite southern town.

Chances are you’ll reach BO-fort before you even know BYOO-fort exists, and then have deep confusion over which she meant. And she’s in the middle of the Pacific so you can’t call.

So you’ll assume she meant BO-fort. And why not? Here are some dignified pre-war mansions, like she described, and the remnants of a once busy waterside street, now given to the usual pursuits of the no-longer-relevant: restaurants, sport fishing charters, art galleries. Here is the charm of the 19th century separated from its coarseness and cruelty. And here also, the fleet of cruising boats fresh off the Intracoastal Waterway, which touches the ocean here. They come here to wait for good weather before jumping to Bermuda and the Bahamas. The prospect of a long boat ride: That would have appealed to Emily, certainly, whose blood is salt water.

I drove 15 miles out of my way looking for the campground I’d called, mostly because it sat behind a locked cyclone fence that I refused to believe could surround a campground. It looked like a boat and RV storage facility. But I got a spot by the river before a beautiful old house—a spot they reserve for tents, so apparently there is some decency among campground owners.

And so on around Camp Lejeune, next day. I had to stop for a view of the perimeter fence, now converted into a large Welcome Home bulletin board. If the folks around here really supported our country’s mission, they’d not make their loved ones feel so welcome upon their return home. I have no patience with people who claim to love this country and then undermine its raids of conquest in this fashion.

Retail offerings are the television of driving, and here the programs were not high brow: local yokel tax preparation, dollar stores, always the dollar stores, bait shops, army surplus stores and a store selling both guns and hardware. I’m not sure what it is about guns that let’s them be sold in combination with other commodities. In Elizabeth City there is a store that sells guns and jewelry. I’m waiting to see one selling guns and ice cream.

And so on around Wilmington, down a highway that changes without notice to a crowded commercial strip, and so on to the only campground I could find.

Campgrounds have an ambience all their own, and sometimes you can smell them a long way off. It was a mistake not bringing a guide. Very little tourist literature of any kind lists campgrounds, so you find yourself watching for those ridiculous signs picturing teepees.

I wish I had seen a teepee where I stopped, for the place was in exhilarating. It contained the obligatory crowd of permanently placed RVs, now doubling as vacation homes for many. These provide campground owners with income through the winter. But camping amid a crowd of RVs is like pitching a tent in a junk yard.

Not that RV owners lack loyalty to their choice of temporary residence. No. You are as likely to see mirror balls, lawn jockeys, cutesy wooden figures and picket fences surrounding an anchored RV as you are the regular double-wide trailer these people call their permanent home. (This is one advantage marinas have over trailer parks: it’s hard to surround your boat with this stuff.)

The ambience is largely the same but the character of the place differs.

In this particular place, signs performed the work of running the park smoothly. Signs had much to say about my behavior. They advised me I would be trespassing if I drove into the park without registering. They advised me that littering would get me thrown out, that making trouble for my neighbors would bring the sheriff, and then get me thrown out, that overloading the washing machine would bring a sinister result otherwise unspecified. They told me that vandalizing the men’s room would get me prosecuted, fined, and thrown out.

Most of the signs, scrawled on cardboard with a broad felt-tip, seemed the inspiration of a moment, suggesting a lightsome and freewheeling approach to rule making. I could not but admire the efficiency of legislation that arose impromptu, as it were, to meet the need of the hour. I resolved to try it in my own life if I could discover any conduct of mine that needed alteration.

Never camp in a commercial campground if you can do it in a state park. Or a national park. The camping there is quieter, cheaper, prettier, more interesting, and there is a notable scarcity of threatening notices nailed to trees. Also, no RV can rest there for longer than a day. If I’d driven another two miles I could have stayed in a beautiful state forest with no company but birdsong.

Next day, down to Southport, another town with plenty of free literature and a historic district. I’m going to save that for another time. I had to get back to Elizabeth City the next day, driving five hours in torrents of Labor Day traffic. The mighty Ranger continues to roll strong.

12 Crazy Sailors

Water is an expansive element, but not so expansive that you don’t run across old shipmates once in a while. In California I re-met Josie, from the Virginia, and Emily (another seafaring Emily) from the North Wind. Last week I went only 20 miles out of my way to meet another old Virginian, Bill Ryall, who’s found the most ununsual boating job I’ve heard of.

At the Ruth Parker Marina in Tappahannock I found him, and the other 11 boys and girls now sailing the John Smith Shallop around the Chesapeake. They embarked in May, seven boys and five girls, in a 25-foot hand-made wooden boat carrying both sails and oars, on a three-month tour of Chesapeake Bay. They are re-creating the trip made by John Smith, the founding buccaneer of Jamestown, some 400 years ago. Smith put out from Jamestown in the summer of 1607 with seven other swashbucklers in a boat very much like the one Bill is now sailing, to survey as much of the bay and its tributaries as possible. The recreation voyage is attempting to retrace that voyage, with a few small variations, which produced the first reliable chart of the Chesapeake, a chart that guided captains around its beautiful and shoal-bedeviled waters for a century afterwards.

Ever loyal to his maniac impulse, Smith scoured the Bay to its limits. His expedition reached the fall line of every major tributary and many minor ones, including the Elk and Susquehanna rivers, far to the north, and never turned back until further passage became impossible. He mapped the locations of dozens of indian villages, and hundreds of natural formations.

The voyage itself never found much space in school history books, strange to say, but Ryall and crew may change that. The idea for this trip took shape at the same time something called The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail was coming up through Congress. This trail, authorized by Congress in December, 2006, will be a kind of national park laid out along Smith’s route—for what can you not designate a national park if you really want to?—and will essentially put parts of Chesapeake Bay under federal protection against all manner of inimical forces, such as development and overfishing. It will also provide a focus on “appreciation of the resources associated with Smith’s voyage,” and offer new opportunities for education, “heritage tourism” and recreation. Interpretive kiosks will line the route, along with “interactive buoys,” whereat boaters may drink of rich historical knowledge on local land and seascapes, and here presumably interaction means something other than collision.

Since May, they have rowed, sailed, or drifted along on the tide for at least eight hours a day, with very few days off, stopping in the evening for a fitful night’s rest wherever they could find a friendly wharf. They have covered as few as five miles and as many as forty miles a day. They have rowed through rain, thunderstorms, chilly dews and brutal heat, sunburn, fatigue, bodily indisposition and hunger, and kept smiling about it. They have passed out on beaches, marshes, docks and coastal woodlands, napped under clusters of bushes, slept the night in tents hastily put up near their boat, all the while keeping up a happy appearance and trying not to kill the people they live with and can’t possibly get away from. Their boat offers no shelter from the elements. They have clung fast to their brisk schedule. One or two of them look tired.

Not even this non-sailing Sunday can offer them much respite, but they must rotate through their shoreside stations, to answer questions for the visitors, staff the exhibition tent which accompanies them to every scheduled stop, wash each other’s clothes and prepare food. It’s a bright and prismatic day in Tappahannock, a cool relief from the head-breaking heat of the previous week. The Ruth Parker Marina occupies a wide strip of weedy sand between route 17 and the river, running from a gravel parking lot near the highway to a narrow beach at the waterside. The shallop rests about 15 feet off the beach, its nearness a testament to the usefulness of this craft: she draws less than two feet, and can go almost anywhere. Crew members slew her about as needed, push her further out in water barely up to their waists. Yet this 25 feet of hand-hewn timber is their home.

I try to think of questions Bill hasn’t heard yet, but he answers the one he usually hears before it’s asked.

“A bucket,” he says. “Just one bucket for everyone.”

“Boys and girls both?”

He nods. “Of course,” he says, in a Beatles-like inflection (he grew up near Liverpool), “we try not to drink too much coffee, too much of anything, before we get started.”

A Week on the Corrotoman and Rappahannock Rivers

Our last week was fantastic. It's always great to have enthusiastic adults, but to have enthusiastic kids is the best. The week started with lots of rain and we got underway late on Monday, but caught some good wind several miles downriver and rode to Deltaville on it. Tuesday the wind came strong straight out of the south, so instead of the familiar swimming hole we put her head east and set out across the Chesapeake. We got pretty far, a bit better than halfway, about 11 miles out, far enough to have nearly sunk the land behind us and just raised the land before us. I had programmed a waypoint called Bikini Island on the GPS, located somewhere near our line of travel, to keep my crew interested, but I cautioned them that only the pure of heart could see it. It's probably good they didn't take me seriously. Anyone promising real bikinis to teenage boys had better deliver.

And all this time I'm starting the Perkins with a hammer. Every time that engine had to start, I had to use the hammer. It was yer basic sollenoid failure, the telltale click at the turn of the key and then nothing. Batteries good, fuel tanks filled. No grinding, just a click. But of course anyone who's been around diesel engines knows the trick of arcing the sollenoid with a piece of metal. Just line the metal along the two critical contacts and whoosh! Sparks fly out, the air crackles with electric fire. But then the machine engages and the motor starts. For three weeks I'm doing this, pressing the head of the hammer between the two contacts. My crew is calling it the Hammer of Life, and take pictures of it. It is one severely lacerated hammer. Meanwhile, two separate shops are bloodhounding a new starter for me.

Wednesday sailed to Urbanna, our favorite port. Here the kids lit out immediately for the ice cream shop, where, being scouts, they enjoy a 10 percent discount. Some go to the pool in town where, being scouts, they get in free. A few trudge all the way to the grocery store on Virginia Street, where they buy a truly astonishing amount of sugar in the form of Hershey's cookies, Little Debbie Snack Cakes, Mountain Dew, many kinds of ice cream and of course candy bars. That's just the sugar. The salt comes in its own varieties. The parents hit the Virginia Street Cafe and struggle heroically not to order a dozen cold ones. At night, a funny movie in the air conditioned captain's lounge.

Thursday, we arrive at Yankee Point Marina on the north side of the Corrotoman River, a tributary of the Rappahannock--and my starter has arrived before me! Another movie at night and all our remaining food for dinner: chicken, pork chops, peas and carrots, flour tortillas, steak strips, shredded cheese--anything we can't save till next week, which is almost everything. Friday morning after Brian installs the starter we can't resist starting the engine several times just for the joy of it. Everyone agrees the new starter speaks in an earnest and confident tone.

But we only need to use it twice. Once to get us off the dock and then again to put us into the slip at Bayport. Between those two uses we sail, we sail, mostly with the spinnaker, mile upon mile, the great sail billowing colorfully overhead and the Morgan chasing after it like love itself, the scouts taking turns flying behind us on the water by hanging on to the swim ladder. One of the scouts loses his shorts to the rushing water--I warned them--but manages to keep on his boxers. We sail 10 miles to Bayport and then a good two miles beyond, making the day last as long as we can.

The Boy Scout Navy

This makes my fourth summer—if I survive it—of working for the Boy Scouts of America, in the capacity of Sea Captain.

They don’t call the job Sea Captain. But the scouts who arrive at this program—their special-issue duffel bags stuffed with a week of clothing, sunblock, batteries, postage stamps for postcards, iPods (actually forbidden), DVD players (really vehemently forbidden), rain ponchos, flashlights, matches, water purifying tablets, science fiction novels, mosquito netting, sunglasses, miniature sewing kits, pocket knives and emergency flare kits—expect something very nautical and adventurous from the experience they are about to receive.

Maybe they get it. Usually some adults come with the kids—scout leaders and their assistants, adult staff, parents—and these also look forward to a seafaring time, full of complicated knots, salt spray, whaling yarns and the lore of boats. I usually start them out learning how to coil and cleat lines, crank a winch and use the toilet, an activity only faintly related to the similar practice onshore. During a later lesson they learn how to throw up over the side (always the leeward side, try to aim slightly upward.) Then they learn how to bucket off the deck with seawater. These early lessons take on a tediously practical character, though necessary.

I explain the importance of cleaning up, of closing bags, of collecting all crumbs of potato chips. I do this mostly to amuse myself: at the end of the first day, a riot would look more orderly than our boat.

I used to say all adolescent boys should be put on a boat and aimed out to sea; I never expected to be on the boat with them. But these kids have proven time and again to be thoughtful, awake and curious—most of them—the sorts of boys anybody would like as a son, and for a week they are mine. Included in the lot of big, helpful, always prepared young men is the occasional eccentric, and these are my favorites. We had the guy last year—long blonde hair, granny glasses--who insisted on wearing a kilt during most of the week. This he complimented with a pirate’s plastic sword and tricorn hat he bought in Yorktown, and swaggered up and down the river walk there with his entourage, to the great amusement of the local girls. There was the young man two years back who had made a remarkable number of fashion accessories including a wallet out of duct tape, and who, out of all the adults and boys there, was the only one to laugh at my less-obvious jokes.

The people I work with—another interesting group. The first pair I sailed with, a captain and mate, could not be persuaded to rise from their bunks before 10, which put us on the water from about 11 to 4, long enough to catch the ferocious thunderstorms that were numerous that year. They spent the summer naked but for their baggy Hawaiian swim trunks and never even packed their official CHASE shirts. Their presence echoed with waving palm trees and a crisping lilt of surf, and it was impossible to be near them and not relax.

Two years ago there was the mate who, after the program ended, persuaded one of his 16-year-old Venture Scout girls to join a voyage of his own boat for some near coastal cruising. At least, they were near the coast when the Coast Guard caught up with them. The girl had explained the trip to her parents as a kind of extension of our program and then disappeared completely from phone contact. The Council assured her parents the program had definitely ended, and the girl took on a status of national significance as helicopters went searching. They found her alive and well, as the whole crew of them were, sailing happily down the coast of South Carolina. They had managed to run through Oregon Inlet above Cape Hatteras on an outgoing tide, a treacherous bit of navigation in the best of circumstances, at night. Oh, yes, and without a working motor. I knew this young man to be a very good sailor. If he ever acquires some judgement he’ll be great.

More in a bit.

In the Land of the Lucky

NO ONE should come to Los Angeles unless he is willing to be lucky.

Probably the most interesting thing about creative Los Angeles—Hollywood, let us call it, the collective manufactory of illusion spread among the hills of southern California--is indifference to its own celebrity.

Popular culture has been remarkably unexalting of the place. It has failed to exalt itself. Nowhere do we hear of Los Angeles the toddlin’ town, or wish to give our regards to Sepulveda Boulevard. In no nursery rhymes do children learn of the Thomas Vincent Bridge falling down. No lines form to see the changing of the guard at the mayor’s residence.

Nowhere is sung the pride of Los Angeles the city, perhaps because the city is not pretty, this sprawl of development larger than the Republic of Ireland, spread across foothills of sandy rock. The attitude of most Angelinos seems to be one of apology--for the smog, the traffic, the odd characters who populate its streets, the ubiquity of fabricated plastic.

Los Angeles is uncomfortable with scrutiny from the learned states of the east. Meanwhile its work has changed the world.

Since 2005 the global entertainment and media industry has grown at the rate of about 7.3 percent a year. By 2009, this uber-factory of songs, movies, television, video games and advertising is expected to produce revenues of nearly $2 trillion. The death of movies foretold so many times has proven unprophetic to the utmost. Online distribution of games, movies, music, and entertainment objects of vague definition has put rockets on the entertainment market.

The worldwide appetite for online entertainment services--Internet TV, video on demand, music downloads, games, gambling and adult entertainment--will reach $36 billion in 2009, a three-fold increase over this year. Most of this increase in production will take place in Los Angeles.
But the city is simply too busy grinding out product to trumpet its importance. You can see the evidence everywhere.

Directly across from our berth in San Pedro is a warehouse with one of its ends blown off. You’ll see how it got blown off when you watch the last Schwarzenegger movie. Just down the channel, Jack Sparrow’s Black Pearl broods darkly among the container ships, a pirate ship that looks like a pirate ship only in a general way: Actual workmen built the ship from the keel to the crosstrees and digital imagery supplied everything above that.

Two of our maintenance days aboard Exy were disturbed by teams of men rappelling from helicopters above a nearby wharf. In the climactic scene of the next Die Hard, look for bewildered figures on the tall ship in the background, their paint brushes arrested in mid stroke.

The place abides in ambiguous reality. It’s strange to realize that, as you watch Chaplin’s Great Dictator frothing and raving and climbing his arras, traffic was proceeding normally on La Brea Avenue 200 feet away.

Non self aggrandizing it may be, but the cultural references point to California more frequently than anywhere else on earth. It never rains in Southern California, so do you know the way to San Jose? Are you a Valley Girl or a little old lady from Pasadena? Is there a free wind blowing through your hair on Ventura Boulevard? Are you on the side of L.A. Law or L.A. Confidential?

You know the names of Oxnard, Beverly Hills and Long Beach, but can you point them out quickly on a map? Those places have very real substance. You can get in a car and drive from one of them to another.

All this I learned when Elaine, Exy Johnson’s new mate, took me on a drive through town in her very un-Californian beat-up Toyota. Together we visited some of the places in Los Angeles that live in the collective imagination of the world.

Such as the Chaplin studios at 1416 La Brea Avenue. Just a few blocks parallel from Hollywood Boulevard and about a half mile from Hollywood and Vine (a corner, by the way, now devoid of all commercial life), the Chaplin Studios enrich about half a block with little buildings in the semblance of an English Village, all of them fronting the 10,000 square-foot sound stage.

Chaplin built this complex on land recently cleared of orange groves in 1917, and it remained his headquarters until he left the country in 1953. It housed the making of most of Chaplin’s great films, including two of my favorites, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. About 10 years ago Jim Henson’s company bought it, which explains the figure of Kermit the Frog dressed as The Little Tramp on one of the gateposts. It was also the headquarters of A & M Records and—but you can easily find a list of the great things that happened there at http://www.seeing-stars.com/Studios/ChaplinStudios.shtml.

We stop long enough at the building to perform the obligatory tourist motions—press face against gate, speak disarmingly to the guard, shoot pictures through gate, back away slowly. Elaine is happy to be doing something very Hollywood-focused that she wouldn’t do without someone to guide.

Elaine came to sailing ships by way of the theater arts and a brief stopover in office work. A stage rigger by trade, Elaine got into tall ships as relief from a busted romance and an employer who playfully held a loaded pistol to her head. This man was—still is—a giant in the movie animation world. When he put the gun to her head and asked who would possibly miss her if he pulled the trigger, Elaine beheld a change of career in prospect. Coming to Los Angeles was her first retreat from reality, she says. After the gun incident, she leaped the second: sailing aboard tall ships. The third she can’t yet foresee. But she lives in the right place to find it. What E. B. White said of luck and New York goes double for Los Angeles.

Our next stop: Hollywood Boulevard, so famous now as to be the very symbol of fame—also a necessary check on the tourist checklist. We park the car a block from the street and somehow it’s still amusing to realize you can reach this place by car rather than a puff of magic fairy dust. A few short steps and our feet are planted on the very substance of celebrity: The Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

Actually, our feet are planted on the names of luminaries both living and dead. Bernadette Peters is the first famous person we step on, followed by Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, Mack Sennett, Sylvester Stallone and Bob Barker. Every few feet another great name interrupts the pavement— Gloria Swanson, Bud Abbott, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Olivia De Haviland, Ray Bolger, Judy Garland—along with a symbol indicating the field of greatness in question—motion pictures, television, recording, live theater and performance, radio.

Fame comes in more flavors than even the entertainment business can encompass--unless Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong count as popular entertainers. They have stars for being famous on TV.

The arbitrary sequence of names tends to conflate disparate brands and wattages of fame. Thus Arsenio Hall resides next to Marilyn Monroe, and John Lennon beside Mae West.

It’s possible some archiving system may soon be needed for the famous who have become, well, less famous: Mabel Normand? Dale Robertson? Sons of the Pioneers? Some stars seem to require an explanation why they should be there in the first place. I’m thinking here of Buck Owen.

Given our current rate of celebrity production—this year some 23 names will achieve immortality, including Michael Caine, Michelle Pfeiffer, Erik Estrada, Barbara Walters, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Lily Tomlin—the Walk will need to be extended up to and over the Hollywood hills.

The commerce along Hollywood Boulevard runs to the slinky lingerie and team-logoed sportswear end of the spectrum, the shops mostly small, the whole tone of the retail environment inclining a few degrees to the seedy. But they suit the local market. Every city has its freak street, the place where the dispossessed and outlandish go to flaunt their defiance. Most of these streets in America contain kids saturated with piercings and tattoos. In Hollywood it contains grown men dressed as Wookies. These characters lurk in front of the Kodak Theater, scene of so many Academy Awards ceremonies, and sidle up to passers-by and attempt to have their picture taken, after which comes the bite for a couple bucks. We walk briskly past them.

From Hollywood Boulevard it’s a short drive—in fact it’s only a moderate walk, but let’s take the car—to a close view of one of the world’s best-known images, the Hollywood Sign on the shoulder of Mt. Cahuenga.

Built for $21,000 as an advertisement, the nine letters of the sign stand 30 feet wide and 50 feet tall, built of metal scaffolding, wires and utility poles. It originally read Hollywoodland, the full name of the housing development beneath it. It also originally enlivened the California night with a three-part blinking sequence, HOLLY, WOOD, LAND. The builders planned to take it down after a year and a half. But fortune intervened.

We wanted to hike up behind the letters on one of the trails of the state park that now houses the sign. But then we realized the park closed in half an hour.

“They’re really just aluminum siding anyway,” Elaine says.

However, we manage to drive close. Nearing the sign, ever nearer, on Beachwood Drive, which offers the closest approach, you can’t help but feel the power of it: the cynosure of billions, this beacon ablaze with promise. Give me your dreamy, your ambitious, your workday routine yearning to race across the sky. Its greatness rays filter down through the trees and lay a cover of stardust perhaps an inch thick.

Somehow just looking at it doesn’t satisfy the urge to know it, understand it, dwell with it. You need to keep watch over it constantly. I suggest using some of security cameras feeding to the web, http://www.hollywoodsign.org/247.html.

As we shift through the streets, another strange and unexpected thing appears in our windshield, this one what you might call secretly famous: the original Hollywoodland Realty Office, at 2700 North Beachwood Drive.

The little building sits enshaded among old trees and resembles, like the Chaplin buildings, an English country cottage, though the developers aimed at a more generalized quaint European village look. Built in 1923, the building anchored the development effort of the Hollywoodland tract, a 500-acre subdivision to be built on a former ranch. It was the reason the Hollywood sign was built.

Most of the houses from the original development are still here. And they have housed their share of celebrities—scarcely a location in Los Angeles hasn’t, including a great many alleys and the overturned lifeguard boats on Manhattan Beach. Some recognizable names among Hollywoodland residents: Doris Day, Lowell Thomas, Bela Lugosi, Melissa Manchester, Bugsy Siegel, Vincent Price, Connie Selleca, Peter Tork, Stan Kenton and Aldous Huxley. Oh yes, Madonna also lived here before she became a security risk.


We’re spending daylight in vast amounts. I make one last request: I want to see a beach. We head for Santa Monica.

Santa Monica really throbs on the several streets closest to the beach—the beach which seems to exist only as an ornament: I have yet to see crowds on any beach in Los Angeles. Citizens of the walk stroll and sport among the more elegant and “exclusive” shops of the town—not a tattoo or lingerie joint in sight. A pedestrian-only street, one of the few I’ve seen not killed outright by the exclusion of automobiles, contains street entertainers in plenty (yearly permit: $25), and people I could easily imagine to be film or music VIP’s now enjoying sport-shirt time with the family. Most of these people look rich and relaxed, even the kids.

Our walk takes us from one end of the street to another, passing gymnasts, comics, miscellaneous entertaining persons and, finally, dancers. Except these are not performers dancing for an audience. These are the pedestrians of the street pulled into several circles featuring a different style of dance in each: bossa nova, ballroom, freelance jazz. A set of music ends and another begins, and the dancing style changes to merengue, waltz and fandango. Twilight is falling and Santa Monica is dancing.

It’s this image that sticks in memory as the daylight finally drains away and the almost brighter lights of the storefronts take over. Elaine and I choose a restaurant on the strength of a tall ship pictured on its menu, and settle in to a single beer each. Tomorrow we go back to work on our tall ship, our small bit of fantasy in this town devoted completely to it.

Students of the Gale

Last week we took a week-long voyage to Catalina, though as with many of our voyages, high winds modified our plans. Instead of staying a week at the island, we returned to the mainland early and anchored off Long Beach for several nights--a frustrating decision but, given the swells we'd have to sleep on at Catalina, a good one.

We still managed to sail the daylights out of the boat. On our next to last day, Captain Steve Peckham, whom no one will ever accuse of cowardice, chose to exit the Long Beach breakwater and sail into the open Pacific with 10-foot swells and a constant wind of between 30 and 40 knots.

He did it with too much sail up, I thought, given the wind, but if anyone knows what the ship will bear, Peckham does. It was no surprise to me when the first 40-knot gust sent the captain running around the deck screaming “strike the upper now,” while the crew scrambled about in mayhem and the ship heeled way over and our high school students wet their pants.

I think he did it deliberately, for the adrenaline rush, but he denies it. For several hours we tore around in this maelstrom under reefed sails and damn few of them, water breaking over the bow and the masts creaking and popping and the seas tilting one way and another around us, and some of us on the top yard furling the wild sails and hanging on like leeches.

Up in the rigging you sometimes aren’t looking down, and so see nothing of the pitching and rocking of the boat. But you’d better believe you feel it up there, as if barrages of invisible force were thrusting you first forward and then back, first against the shrouds you’re hanging on to and then away from them. You learn to hold on with your eyelids. The students I took with me were exhilarated.

Somehow your response to all this throwing about passes beyond fear and goes right into giddy laughter, and the wild shout of the rodeo rider. I have seen the deck of a pitching boat erupt in a perfect riot of laughter. My own little crew of high schoolers—after I challenged them not to scream at every rising of the bow—turned immediately into a party of the most gleeful and concentrated little sailors I have ever seen on this boat. They hauled on their lines with an absolute crowing confidence, as they realized they were equal to this weather.

And they were. Next day after a calmer sail we got back into the harbor and the trifle of wind that manages to get in through all the cranes and hills and illegal immigrants. The students didn't want to leave. Neither do I.

The Big Gun

Sure, it’s a great thing sailing out Angel’s Gate to see dolphins, seals, the occasional whale. Given enough time, even the sound of kids puking assumes a consoling and reposeful tone, a reminder of the cycles of nature. Kids sail, kids get sick, kids feel better, everyone starts to enjoy themselves. Every sail, every outward course, every billowing of canvas against the smoggy sky, we have reason to be happy.

But things don’t really heat up until Captain Mike loads the cannon.

For a large part of this season the Exy suffered along with an ordinary salute cannon, the kind that mounts in one of the belaying pin holes and shoots charges the size of shotgun shells. This cannon, you’d better believe, about the size of a large rolling pin, can make some noise. It has become the custom here—whether from long tradition or spontaneous invention—to salute other sailboats as they pass us by making a very loud noise. This purpose our little gun answered pretty well, speaking out with a spirited bang, deep-voiced for its size, and satisfying in the utmost. Yet, some people felt we could do better.

Since I arrived here in December I’ve come to understand not only many points of seamanship that were mysteries to me before; I’ve also come to understand the purpose of lots of the junk lying in the supply cabin on the dock. For three months, while visiting this cabin for spare rope, varnish, seine twine and the like, I’ve been amused at the sight of the truly stupendous cannon piled into the back of the little house—obviously some kind of prop, maybe from a long-ago pirate party or something. But no. As I came to understand, this was no prop.

Somewhere or other, Captain Mike got hold of this weapon—or just the cylinder of it—because our basic salute cannon simply was not loud enough. Captain Mike wanted a Really Big Gun. He built the carriage and the wheels out of fiberglass, then painted the whole to look like the genuine wooden marine cannons of old, a very convincing job. Two weeks ago, at the request of one of my shipmates who had taken leave of her senses, Captain Mike gleefully consented to dragging this thing on board, and setting it up on the port deck as a permanent fixture.

So now, there it sits, its squat form filling the midships deck, its muzzle poking out with considerable menace toward the Ports O’ Call rest rooms. It would be scary enough if the thing didn’t actually shoot.

But it does actually shoot.

When this monster goes off, it consumes about a pint and a half of black powder per shot. This powder comes in black plastic bottles that look like those you buy when you need to add oil to your engine—one entire bottle per shot. The powder itself comes from Germany, from a company called—this is absolutely true—Schuetzen, as in “Ve now going to schuetzen zee cannon.”

The first time I heard it I didn’t actually hear it—everyone was covering their ears. Rather, I felt the explosion as a radical fluctuation in air pressure. I have read accounts of sea battles in which the cannon fire is said to stun the wind. Now I know what this means.

Now, no voyage is complete without at least one ceremonial blast from this gun. Usually the blast comes as we’re nearing home. The captain will get a look in his eye, my shipmate Amber will notice it, the powder will come out. Amber will shove a huge wad of powder down the muzzle with a loading rod, sprinkle a bit on the touch hole, then stand by with her slow match until a likely target comes into range. Everyone around the cannon puts on headphones. All the while Captain Mike will be quietly bubbling with joy.

Then the great moment arrives: Another ship heaves into view, I do my best to communicate to them via pantomime the concept of hearing impairment. Amber shouts “Fire in the hole” and touches her linstock to the touch hole. For just a moment the powder in the pan fizzes and pops while the flame works down to the main charge in the breech. And then….

We recently saluted the little town of Avalon, on Catalina Island, upon our arrival there. Avalon sits in a gentle valley running down to the water, and is in all ways a quiet and peaceful little place. When our cannon went off, with its godless and rock-shivering noise, it was as hell had split open at this precise longitude and god was saying “Time’s up for peacefulness.” The echo of that crash returned to us again and again, for many long seconds after the shot. I was surprised we weren’t immediately asked to leave the place, but then, one makes certain allowances for maritime tradition.

That is, sometimes one makes allowances.

Two days ago we decided we would salute the Irving Johnson just as she left her dock, squarely in the middle of one of the busiest commercial ship channels in the world. The shot sent up the hordes of seagulls on the dock, and probably deafened the customers at the fish market there, which was expected.

What was not so expected was, first, the radio call from the Coast Guard asking us what in God’s name was that noise, and maybe we should call them before shooting off a gun that size in the harbor; and second, the visit from the Los Angeles Port Police, who, no doubt after changing their underwear, hurried down to our dock and came on board and inspected the gun, and agreed it was a truly impressive gun, and right at home on board our ship…but perhaps we could call them before shooting it in the harbor next time.

So there it is. We are chastened in the use of our cannon, but not by any means gun shy. We don’t intend to become gun shy. Never say die while there’s a shot in the locker, is the old sailor’s adage, and I happen to know we have at least a dozen shots left.

Life Aboard

We finished another day’s work and kept watch down the channel for the Irving Johnson—she’d been gone for a week on a voyage among the Channel Islands. Tiffany brought Judy aboard—she’ll be here two weeks as a volunteer, bless her heart—and Saul dug into his stuff and brought out some refreshing beverages. Judy immediately began making a big dinner in our galley, with me peeling potatos, Courtney drifted in and out—pried away from her MySpace account for the moment--and the whole operation shifted into after-work mode. A couple of truly stupendous luxury cruise ships went by, their decks crowded with waving people—you need to look way up to see them as these mountain ranges go floating past. The mariachi bands were already warbling away at the fish market dock beside us, and Saul came into the galley to hang out awhile.

You know, he said, living aboard a tall ship is really the best way to go. You make almost no money, but you have room and board taken care of, you get to hang out with a lot of brilliant crazies, and every day or so you get to sail. You get to climb to the top of the mast and look at whales or dolphins, explain to a bunch of kids how to haul a ton of mainsail and gaff to the top of the mainmast, and then stand back and watch them do it, steer the boat, anchor at interesting islands and explore them, zip around in your little inflatable, and be generally arvy-dar and self reliant among the pasty white landlubbers you see ashore. You really could do much worse.

Saul’s headed off this week to work on another tall ship, this one in Chicago, where he’ll be first mate. It’s probably not the career his scientist parents envisioned for him, and maybe he won’t stay with it. But for now, like so many people who drift into this world, he is captured.

A bit later, Irving came grandly in and discharged her crew of college students, the Irving’s regular crew came over for dinner and the sun went down on another raucous Saturday in San Pedro.

The evening drew on, the refreshing beverages got refreshed, and things in the nav station got increasingly debased until Tiffany finally crawled off to her cabin—not even Carlos wrestling her to the floor could stop her--and the party broke up. Tomorrow, another sail among dolphins and whales.

Yes, Saul, I know what you mean.

Tarring the Rig

Hey, you gotta tar the rig today.

You see all those ropes up there, brother? All the blocks and links and pins and shackles? Get a harness on, you’re going up to be among them.

Because you see the bigger lines leading down from up there, the ones that look like a ladder, starting near the top of the mast and going down to that platform 50 feet up, and then down from there to the deck, where they form a ladder seven feet wide? Those are the shrouds. They stabilize the masts laterally. But more important, they let hot-stuff sailors like yourself climb way the hell up into the sky and lord it over the distant world down below. Working a tall ship you can stay up there a good long time and no one knows you’re goofing off.

It’s a good thing the shrouds do. But they get thirsty-dry. They need a coat of this special little formula we got here, made of a bunch of ingredients including oils and turpentiney stuff and maybe some essence of heave-ho and whale tooth. It’s called pine tar, and it’s been used on ships since tall ships began.

What you do is, you take a squeeze bottle of this stuff—an old dish soap bottle will do—and tie it to your body with a length of twine. Then climb up to the top of the mast with this bottle and a rag, and start wiping down the lines with it.

Take your time. It’s gonna take several days. The shrouds will take two days each, if you’re working alone. And after the shrouds, you’ll want to get the backstays, two on each of the main and foremasts. For these, you’ll need to get in little boson’s chair at the top of the mast, and be slowly lowered along the stay, from 70 feet up down to the deck, by a person you trust like few people you have ever trusted.

Then how about the peak pendants? For these you’ll need to walk out along the gaff, 10 feet over the deck, balancing with feet only. And then, of course, the lifts. Oh, the lifts’ll be easy. Just loosen them as much as you can, then climb up the shrouds again to reach the top parts, pulling the lifts over to you with one hand and tarring with the other; then get the lower parts by walking along one of the housetops and reaching out over the deck as far as you can. Better rig a tagline to hold the lifts away from the boom: If you get tar on the mainsail, the first mate is legally bound to cut off your thumbs.

The whole thing is just dip and wipe, dip and wipe. Work slowly and rub your rag into the service of the shrouds like you’re trying to polish them. Don’t quit till the service is soaked with black liquid. After a while your rag will be saturated with pine tar, also your hands, and you won’t need to refresh it so often. Just work that rag, brother. Get comfortable with your rag. When you’re finished, you’ll have a good looking ship with gleaming black rigging that looks supple and fresh. And you’ll smell good. Some soap makers even put the fragrance in their soap. It smells like a campfire in an evergreen forest.

But before you get started, go and find the lousiest, dirtiest, oldest clothing you can possibly find, the kind of clothing it would give you pleasure to destroy. Because by the time you’re finished, you’ll look like the creature from grime planet. It’s just the pine tar, really, a good and honest residue from a good day’s work. You’ll remember this when you go out for a beer afterwards and the other bar patrons move away from you. That's okay, you still got your crew, and they are just a crazy as you are.

In Search of the Killer Dana

The curious thing about Dana Point, where Exy took us for three days last week, is its blandness. All upscale, all palm-treed, all highwayed. It sits at a place where a ridge of highlands comes down to the Pacific, making a very picturesque headland with cliffs. The headland itself bears the name Dana Point, and the town behind goes by that or San Juan Capistrano, its original name, tiny though it was until three decades ago, when it began to grow like mad. The cliffs entered popular consciousness through the huge annual migration of swallows, who come every year to nest there—though fewer now because of development. The Inkspots wrote a song about it, which you might have heard Bugs Bunny sing in one of his cartoons:

When the swallows come back to Capistrano
That's the day you promised to come back to me
When you whispered, "Farewell", in Capistrano
T’was the day the swallow flew out to sea

But Dana Point has much more to boast about, and probably should.

I had time to kill during one of our days there and found my way into town, intent on fleshing out a bit of cultural history. More than half a century ago, a young man named Hobie Alter began building surfboards in a small shop he’d bought in Dana Point, and added some significant flavors to the American taste. It’s not too much to say that from his work in that shop we get much of what we know today as American Surfer culture: Beach Boys music, surfboards posted in rows along the beach, Annette Funicello, Surfing Surfari and the Endless Summer. I wanted to see the place where it started.

I found my way to the Chamber of Commerce office and asked the nice lady behind the desk for the location of Hobie Alter's original surf shop.

Blank stare. Another nice lady joins us. Same question, same stare. There's a Hobie Surf Shop down in the shopping center, they say, you just go back down that road there and--No no, I say, I'm thinking of the original surf shop, the one built by Hobie Alter way, way back, where he made his surfboards. It's around here very close.

We all scratch our heads for a while. Then a man from the back room comes out. Yes, he says, he knows the place. Just down the street, second building after the intersection, on the right. It's mixed in with a bunch of newer buildings so you have to look. And it's not a surf shop anymore.

I follow his directions, down the street and across the intersection, two buildings down, and there it is, The Place Where It All Began: It's now a dive bar with a loopy Mexican theme. An old frame building that you can just recognize from the old black and white photographs. Nothing on the outside hints at its history but one long wooden surfboard fixed to the second storey facade. No plaque, no poster.

This time there are dazed looks when I enter, faces at the bar, busy with the slow work of inebriation. The bar is along one side, small tables on the other. Like any other bar. The magic dust of historical momentousness does not flutter down around me. They have decorations made of palm leaves, a sign advertising $2 beers, coconuts carved into faces. I step out as soon as I enter. These people don't even know what this place was.

In 1954, Hobie Alter began shaping balsa surfboards in this building, having been "encouraged" by his father to stop doing it in the family garage in Laguna Beach. His father bought the lot, a lonesome spot on a lonesome stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. Alter shaped the boards, the surfers bought the boards, and the lonesome shop suddenly become very crowded. It became more crowded yet four years later, when Alter and Gordon Clark finally learned how to build a decent board out of foam and fiberglass, a much lighter and much cheaper product. This was the revolution. Now it was not just the California crazies who came by and hung around, but increasingly kids from the east, from the south, from the north. From anywhere near a breaking surf. Because surfing suddenly had mass appeal. Surfboards suddenly didn't require an unconscionable outlay of capital to purchase, or a long wait to receive. Supply went rocketing upward. By the end of 1969 Alter was producing 250 fiberglass surfboards a week, and production had moved to a small factory. But demand grew faster.

Increasingly, too, there were kids showing up at the shop who liked surfing all right, but who really liked the lifestyle that went with it, a lifestyle that was now becoming for many a tantalizing detour. They forgot about work and fell in love with sunsets and bikinis and baggie shorts. They cooked hot dogs and drank whisky and pineapple juice at Dana Cove. And with Alter still hard at work, they wanted to be part of what everyone seemed to believe was the dawn of a legend.

I walked the few steps through the sprawl to the other Hobie surfshop, the one the Chamber ladies directed me to first. Inside, indeed, Hobie surfboards stood in racks, along with hundreds of Hobie shirts and other Hobie gear. But more numerous by far were sun-worshiper hats, jewelry, tank tops, sunglasses, tote bags, and many varieties of beach-related bric-a-brac. This was Alter’s later surf shop, the one he built to stay current with the huge boom he had helped create. A young man there answered my questions, a surfer, who did not seem especially pleased that the surf shop he signed up with two years ago had become a boutique. But so it had happened.

Yes, he said, Hobie Alter is alive and well and living in Idaho, though an old man, now, in his 80s. He comes in every so often just to say hello, but the shop and its products have nothing to do with him anymore. He licenses the name and stays out of things. Some of the old surfer gang went with him to live in Idaho, all of them old men together. Alter's sons still oversee the name licensing and so on, and keep an eye on production at the factory, which still produces surfboards. As for the Hobie Cat, another of Alter's great inventions, the most popular catamaran in the country, the young man doesn't know much, and in a way it doesn't matter. Because it was surfing that Hobie loved first, he says. It was surfing that Hobie loved best, like it was in the old days. And here he points to a photograph on the wall that I had to look at twice to believe.

The photograph shows a man on a surfboard cutting cleanly down the face of a wave that is 20 feet high.

That, he said, was the famous wave, the Killer Dana. When certain weather patterns set in around Dana Point, waves would curl around that headland and roll in toward the beach at heights of 30 feet, sometimes. It was that wave that got surfers coming here in the first place, that brought Hobie Alter out of his garage in Laguna Beach. And it was that wave that sent the California surfing spirit rolling across the country.

But the 70s came along, he continued, and you know what happened then. The city of Dana Point asked for and received lots of federal money to build a luxury marina in the cove. Construction began with three days of public celebration. It finished with a mile-long breakwater beside a huge concrete island, and slips for thousands of yachts. Tons of rock went into the water just where the wave came around.

Yeah, I said.

That put an end to the surf scene in Dana Point, and destroyed one of the great breaks of the world. There was some noise about it at the time, but really not much when you consider the loss. And who were surfers anyway but a bunch of deadbeat teenagers?

Which may be why Dana Point doesn't make much of Alter's original surf shop now, the young man said. We're too embarrassed by the killing of our own original culture. Of course, there's still a fun little wave nearby, just down the way at Doheny Beach, and folks still come out to ride it. But it's nothing like it was.

I thanked him and left. Walking down the hill toward the water and the expensive marina where my own guilty boat lay tied up, I tried to find some more engaging moral to the story than "nothing like it was." But I couldn't. Dana Point is a sprawl of expensive condos and upscale strips. The force that used to dwell here has gone. Hobie Alter is nowhere near an ocean, and the birthplace of Surfin' USA is a Mexican restaurant.

The Day

Had a great sail today. I'm onboard the Exy Johnson, one of two brigantines named for the pioneers of tall ship education, the husband-and-wife team of Irving and Exy Johnson. Mostly we do day sails just outside the channel at San Pedro, and today was no different. Both ships went out today, which was unusual, and our crew were young people in training to sail tall ships, so the professional crew mostly stood back and watched. I took pictures. This one shows Irving Johnson with Catalina Island in the background.

Here's our first mate Tiffany Krihwan driving the boat, a very skilled captain in her own right and a blessing to those who work for her.

Here are a few of the less-active student crew.

Next week we're making a 60-mile trip to Dana Point to take over the program that The Spirit of Dana Point can't, being in drydock for a few weeks. Dana Point is a fascinating place which I hope to write more about.