Lazy Hazy Days

It’s our usual time for what I call the vacation (being on our boat in Connecticut) from the vacation (being retired and living in Florida).  Our life here is very different from that of being in our home, living in a couple hundred of square feet on the water, and in the locale of my working days.  Everything must have its own place and must be secure when we run the boat, which with each passing year is less and less.  When a boat is a home (even for a few months) it becomes more of a challenge to secure for running and to deal with the umbilical cords to the dock, the power lines, the water line, the lines that hold us secure enough so our fixed satellite dish does not stray from its southwest target.  And then what we did as a younger couple on the water takes energy and sometimes daring, wares in precious short supply as we age.  And finally, we’ve been to most ports worthwhile visiting on the Long Island, Block Island, Vineyard, and Nantucket Sounds, and we are happily content at our dock or at our mooring off the Norwalk Islands.

Missing from our boating life here, though has been a small boat, one to take us on a cocktail cruise in (diet coke for me, the Captain), together or with friends, on placid twilight evenings. Recently we were able to buy such a boat – a fairly new one, so it’s likely that we’ll be out on the water more often now.  That is how it should be.  Naturally, we are happy to share it with our son, Jonathan, who has practically grown up on boats.  He’ll help keep it standing tall.

But, aside from our usual routines, the shopping and provisioning, meeting friends for lunch or dinner, my early morning walk in Shorefront Park which adjoins our marina (marveling at the rebuilding going on there and the raising of homes still in the aftermath of super storm, Sandy), there is the endless working on the boat and, for me, some writing (working on some short stories).  I also have my “summer reading” list.  Along with reading short stories by John Updike and Alice Munro, I squeeze in a novel here and there and my most recent read, Solar, by Ian McEwan, certainly classifies as “summer reading,” not literature at the level of what I read before by McEwan,  Saturday, but, still an engrossingly, compulsively readable novel.

I was curious about how the author would handle, in fiction, a subject that has interested me ever since I was exposed to it in high school: solar energy.  At a high school science fair, GE put on a demonstration of solar energy using a small model car on stage, shining spotlights on its roof and miraculously the small car moved across the stage.  I was hooked.  If I had more of a scientific bent, perhaps I would have gone into the field.  Mind you, this was the late 1950s.

So while the technology has been around, we’ve been slow to use it to partially solve our energy needs.  The State of Connecticut sponsored a rebate program in the early 1980s in the wake of the gas crisis, for installing solar powered hot water and we were one of the first houses to line up for it.  It was the most basic of systems, direct heat transfer, a pump circulating a liquid that quickly absorbed heat and then transferred it through a number of coils in a special hot water heater which had an electrical back up heater when the sun didn’t shine.  There was no battery storage of energy.  But it worked!  And by timing our hot water usage we squeezed everything we could out of the sun before reverting to electrical back up.

It’s disheartening we haven’t more rapidly developed this technology to make much more widespread use of solar energy, especially now with battery storage of energy becoming much more efficient.  It’s one of the reasons I admire Elon Musk’s vision, huge garages with solar panels on top, powering his Tesla tethered automobiles.  Even the rooftops of Manhattan could be outfitted, but instead the luxury buildings there have pools and cabanas.  Where are our priorities?

Ian McEwan’s Solar deals with the weighty subject of global warming and the solar solution through one of the most despicable protagonists I have ever encountered, a Noble Prize winner who is a compulsive liar, over eater, sexaholic, and criminal.  One can hardly cheer for his success but McEwan’s novel  makes interesting reading as a satire of everything Michael Beard – our prodigiously plump, reprehensible physicist who can’t save himself but sees himself saving the world -- comes in contact with.  No sense going into the plot in detail as it is readily available on line.  But if you are up to some beach reading, and like McEwan as I do, it’s worth the time.  Some of the novel is very funny, so it is a change of pace for McEwan, as Straight Man was for Richard Russo, although the latter overshadows McEwan’s work for sheer hilarity. 

But Solar is about a serious subject, and one can only wonder why as a nation we haven’t made it a greater priority for solving our energy needs.

Low Tide Shorefront Park

High Tide Shorefront Park

It’s a Wrap

Hard to believe our summer on the boat is drawing to a close.  Next week we’ll be on our way to Budapest to begin a river cruise that will take us on the Danube, the Main, and the Rhine, through five countries and many medieval towns and villages.  I’m particularly looking forward to Cologne, the city from which my great grandparents emigrated.  As a boater, a highlight will be the leisurely navigation of the three rivers, through a total of 47 locks.

Our clearing off and packing up signals the end of our boating season here, leaving old friends, the Boat Club we’re active in, and neighborhoods that are ingrained in our sub-consciousness.  Compounding a sense of sadness was our attendance at two funerals this summer to say farewell to old boating friends, both our age.  We also had a rather sad dinner with a boating friend who had a severe stroke over the winter, a once vigorous man who is now disabled.

I’ve mentioned Shorefront Park before, where I usually do my morning power walk.  I love that little neighborhood here in S. Norwalk, so evocative of the neighborhood I grew up in Queens, but with the added luxury dimension of being on the water.  However, this lovely neighborhood suffered the wrath of Super Storm Sandy, and the devastation can still be seen, homes totally ruined, others in stages of reconstruction, even raising one house a full story to elude possible future flooding.  The storm left its mark on this area.  I usually walk early in the morning and already there is a certain late summer stillness the last few mornings foreshadowing the oncoming fall.  Indeed, time to leave once again.

I did not read as much as I would have liked during our relatively brief stay here.   But in addition to The Orphan Master which I described in the previous entry, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  It reads like a suspense novel and Wolfe makes you feel as if you are right there.  It mostly covers the original Mercury 7 Astronauts’ training and launches, but against the background of the Cold War of the late 50s and 1960s, a period I remember so well, but never fully realizing the extent to which it drove the space program.  The book begins though with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier and fittingly ends with Chuck Yeager’s last test flight, the point being that unlike the Mercury 7, Yeager flew a rocket as a pilot. Wolfe’s description of Yeager’s last test flight is unforgettable, and provides a strong incentive for reading the book.

 

Nonetheless, there are several other selections which resonate with me and therefore I include them below.  The first is his description of where the astronauts stayed while at the Cape: Cocoa Beach.  I’ve been there and I can attest that while it has obviously been more developed, Wolfe still captures its essence and the meaning of the place to the Mercury 7:

….Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West.  Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach.  That was the resort town at the Cape.  Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn’t afford the beach towns father south….Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.  It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick.  It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover.  At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants – it was hard to say, since you could never see them – rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s  There was no such thing as “first class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach.  The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcraker ground.  And that was one reason the boys loved it!

And then onto Wolfe’s definition of the intangible, “the right stuff” as he so poignantly describes it: ….Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment.  But that didn’t matter.  The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American History.  Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket – and our rockets always blow up – challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral.  The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense.  And then he had gone through with it.  He let them light the fuse.  He hadn’t resigned.  He hadn’t even panicked.  He handled himself perfectly.  He was as great a daredevil as Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country.  Here was a man..…with the right stuff.  No one spoke the phrase – but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.

And how did the geopolitical events influence the space program?  Probably there would have been no program, at least not in the 1960s, without those events:  ….Kennedy was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets.  He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up.  Let’s find somebody – anybody…There’s nothing more important”…Catching up became an obsession.  … Finally Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit.  The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years.  It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second Work War…..Less than a week later…the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier” looked more like a retreat on all fronts….And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration…They were all absolutely startled when Kennedy said: “I want you to start on the moon program. I’m going to ask Congress for the money.  I’m going to tell them you’re going to put a man on the moon by 1970.”

The program and the book culminate with John Glenn’s first orbital flight.  The adoration of the man knew no bounds and his parade with the other Mercury 7 down Broadway brought even the city of steel and concrete to its knees: ….And what was it that had moved them all so deeply?  It was not a subject you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives.  Or they knew about part of it.  They knew it had to do with presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty five years before to Lindbergh – except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War….But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else.  They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right! The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!

 

I also reread Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (merely 50 years since the last time).  It was a very different experience reading the book as a septuagenarian.  I see Roth as a young colt writing this novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years, with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become.  Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite Roth work, American Pastoral.  Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age would one day arrive.  And true to Roth, is a very funny work as well.

The title symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy."  My friend Bruce and I spent part of the summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National Student Association from our university.  It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of life as if it were endless.

The 1984 Paris Review carried a remarkable interview with Roth (hat tip, my son, Jonathan). The interview is a treatise on his process of writing, and I was fascinated by how “fake biography” enters his art, using the analogy of the art of the ventriloquist.  As such, Roth himself is omnipresent in his works: ….Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. Think of the art of the adulterer: under tremendous pressure and against enormous odds, ordinary husbands and wives, who would freeze with self-consciousness up on a stage, yet in the theater of the home, alone before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be “themselves.” Make-believe can take the subtlest forms, you know. Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife?

Luckily, before leaving , just this past weekend, all the stars fell into place for us, schedules, weather, etc. and we enjoyed a weekend visit with Jonathan and Chris, yes, both sons!, and Jonathan’s lovely girlfriend, Anna, a really special person, wise beyond her years and with a patient disposition.  We took the boat out to our mooring of some thirty years, between Chimmons and Copps Islands, early in the morning, and had a leisurely breakfast there, Ann, Jonathan, and Anna later playing Scrabble, while Chris and I read.  The day was a “10,” the islands sparkling in the sun and the boat in peak form.  We wish we had had more time with them and better weather in July, but it was not to be.  Nonetheless, we saved the best for last.  And on that note, farewell once again Norwalk, until – hopefully -- next year!

Dock Life -- and Loss

I've written before about living on a boat, something we've done now for the past 13 summers in their entirety and before that, on weekends and summer vacations.  In spite of traveling on the boat, much of the time has been spent at the dock, either getting ready to go out, returning and cleaning up, or in bad weather, just staying there, rain, wind, lightning and all.  How many days of our lives have been at the dock? Probably, in the aggregate, it measures several years.  A brief video of awaiting a storm at the dock is here:

Dock life is unlike any other.  It's close living and on weekends, when we were younger, it was a party atmosphere, someone was always hosting cocktails or sometimes there would be a dock party, everyone putting out something and dock mates strolling past, and filling up on finger food, libations. and good cheer. When we were younger, it was a family affair, the kids running up and down the dock under the watchful eye of the community. 

Of course, our boating life has been defined by the fact that we are "Long Island Sounders," berthed in Norwalk, CT. Over the years, we have cruised to most of the ports in Connecticut, to the north shore of Long Island and as far east as Newport, Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket.  As we grew older, the amount of cruising and distances traveled diminished to the point of now spending most of our time at the dock or the occasional short cruise to the Norwalk Islands. 

Our boating is also different because we live in Florida, and our boat in Connecticut is now our home up north.  That changes everything.

When we had a home in Connecticut, jumping on and off the boat was easier and the boat was less cluttered.  Taking the boat out now means stowing much more and unplugging all of the umbilical cords to the dock for power and water.  Easy when younger, but more challenging now.

 

We also have a small boat in Florida. Boating is different here, primarily because many in Florida have their boats, as we do, behind their homes.  There frequently is no marina or dock life.  Of course, there are people from up north who bring their boats to Florida for the winter.  I see lots of Canadian flags coming down the Intracoastal.  Many of those boats, though, wait out cold fronts to make a crossing to the Bahamas.

So, my comments are more "northern boat" centric, not Florida or Bahamas focused.  I could divide the boaters at the two docks we've lived at into several categories: fishermen (rarely saw much of them, they were up early and off to Montauk), cruisers (we fell into that category until I retired), liveaboards or people who rarely took their boats out (that's us now), and, strangely, people who have boats but never seem to use them.

For a long time we thought we wanted to live on a boat 24 x 7 x 365, selling our house and ties to land.  Our good friends Ray and Sue felt the same way and when towards the end of the 1990s it looked like, coincidentally, both Ray and I would be out of jobs, we fantasized about pooling our resources and buying a big yacht, something that would be comfortable for all, a ship that four experienced boaters could handle.  We looked at large Hatteras motor yachts, and some high maintenance ships such as the welded aluminum Burgers.

In our mutual excitement, we went to boat shows searching,  thinking up names for our fabled new home such as 'Moments to Remember,' 'Four Happy Hoboes,' Four Seasons,' Summer of our Lives, 'As Time Goes By,' and the overly cutesy 'Home Sea Home.'  But things have a way of taking care of themselves.  Ray and Sue were gravitating toward a sport fish style boat and we were also looking at homes in Florida.  It seems we both came upon our own individual dream places for our next phase of life simultaneously, wisely abandoning the idea of sharing a yacht, they buying a 56' Ocean sport-fish and we our current Florida home.  It worked out better this way, and we remain close friends.

They are still to this day true liveaboards on 'Last Dance,' having no other home, spending part of the year in Norwalk and the other part in the Abacos, Bahamas (usually stopping at our dock in Florida before heading out to the Abacos, and we've joined them a couple of times, stayed for awhile and then flying home from Marsh Harbor to West Palm).  Thus, we still have our own independent boating lives in Norwalk during the summers on our 'Swept Away' and that is when we try to catch up with all of our former boating friends.

Our dock life has changed as we ourselves have become summer liveaboards. Aside from Ray and Sue, we know few people who are year-round liveaboards.  But one such person was our friend, Lindy, who I referred to a couple of entries ago when he was entering a hospice.  Lindy succumbed to cancer shortly after I wrote that entry.

It occurred to me that we shared the same dock for 26 years, first at Norwalk Cove Marina, and then at the South Norwalk Boat Club.  We knew each other well and relied upon one another, checking the other's boat if one of us was away, picking up something at the store if we were going there, having a quick bite at the Club and sharing the same table at regularly scheduled boat meetings.  Lindy was somewhat of an enigma, typical though for a man who lived alone on a boat, even through the harsh winters in Connecticut, shoveling snow off the dock to get to his car. 

To Lindy, his boat was a sacred refuge and as much as he talked about leaving it behind for the winter, staying with one of his sons, or renting a place in Florida, he stuck with his boats, in the northeast, through blizzards and ice, awaiting the thaw of summer, until the following Fall when he would talk about not living another winter on the boat and then just do it again.

Lindy was an optometrist during his working years.  His boats were appropriately named 'The Optimist,' and if a sign of optimism is to have a joke du jour, he was the supreme optimist.  He always had me laughing and for most of the time I knew him as a live aboard, he had but two boats, a 42' Post, a beamy boat which I think he later regretted selling, and then a 42' Bertram. Both are classic sport fishes and, indeed, in the earlier years that I knew him, he would plan one big trip to Montauk each summer with some friends or his sons to "fish the canyon." But as he aged, his boating stayed more local until he rarely took the boat out as well.

His social life on the dock was spent visiting us and a few other couples, but mostly with a couple of guys who no longer married, ones who were on their boats a lot, particularly Harold, who remarkably boated into his 90s, having a 42' Bertram as well.  Harold predeceased Lindy by only a little more than a month.  I think it was one of the final straws for Lindy, who had been struggling with esophageal cancer during the last year.

Lindy's closest companion for many happy years was his beloved black Labrador, Charlie, a large dog to have in the confines of a boat.  I am convinced that no one knew the man better than Charlie, an exceptional dog, keenly intelligent, and extraordinarily well trained by Lindy.  That dog would sit in the cockpit of the boat and NEVER leave it until commanded by Lindy.  There could be a litter of cats parading by and Charlie would stay fast.  If Lindy was walking down the dock, Charlie would follow him with his eyes. He did not pace or whine like so many dogs missing their owners. He waited patiently as the photograph below attests (ironically, I have no photos of Lindy as he usually vanished when he saw my camera out).

Once Lindy said watch this:  he walked down the dock, Charlie keeping his eyes on him.  At the end of the dock, Lindy turned and just stood there, looking at Charlie.  He raised a finger and his eye brows, and Charlie came bounding out of the boat towards his master.  That was the sign.  Otherwise, Charlie would have stayed put.

It is strange, all those years on the same dock, knowing the man well, but not closely, and having to acknowledge that his dog knew him best.  But that is the way Lindy wanted it.  During the last few years I urged him to spend more time with his son, John, and family during the winters rather than the hard life on the dock in the winter.  He was the ultimate maverick, though, and felt that would be an imposition.  This summer, when we saw him for the last time in early September, we had a prescient feeling that that would be the last time, even though, as the perpetual optimist, he felt he would get better. 

But the operation to remove the cancerous tumor from his esophagus had taken its toll.  He wasn't able to eat, and had lost a lot of weight.  He was unsteady on his feet and we worried.  Ann had sent over quite a few meals and we had been shopping for him, but we were then going back to Florida.  Lindy, I said, why don't you make arrangements to go to New Hampshire to your son, establish doctors up there, the winter here will be impossible for you.  We'll see he said.  I spoke to him in early December and he said he was going to go to his son's for Christmas.  Great, I said, you are staying there, right?  Make arrangements with local Doctors?  He said that he'd like to get back to the boat. 

I called him on Christmas Day and I could tell he was in bad shape.  The cancer had metastasized in his lungs and the plan was for him to start chemotherapy after he had hoped to put some weight on. He said he would like to see the boat one more time.  On Dec 26, though, John had to call an ambulance, over Lindy's protestations.  He had pneumonia and it was then, according to his son, that he "realized that to continue to try to fight the cancer would only extend his life a short while but at the cost of his dignity and his quality of life. He decided to discontinue nutrition and enter hospice." And so finally at the end he was with family for a compassionate, comfortable passing. 

I remember getting up on Jan. 4 and looking at the clock.  It was 6.00 am.  I didn't think anything of it -- about 15 minutes earlier than I normally wake up now. Later that day I got an email from John, about Lindy's passing at approximately 6.00 am. Indeed, Bon Voyage, Lindy.

His death has had a big impact on us, not only because of the years we spent on the dock together but because it reminds me, and anyone connected with him, of our own mortality.  I wish I was a religious person and could say with conviction that there is some sort of heaven, but I believe in the here and now and, when dead, especially after such a horrible disease, one is indeed in another better place.  As Susan Jacoby quoted 19th century Robert Green Ingersoll in her article in last week's New York Times on atheism -- when Ingersoll had delivered the eulogy for a child who had died -- “they who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.”

Many years ago when I used to go down to our boat to check on it during the winter, the boatyard which during the summer was such a bustling place, became one of stark desolation.  Most boats were up on land for storage and the early morning winter sun and wind made it an eerie place (I think of Emily's Dickinson's poem that begins, "There's a certain slant of light, / On winter afternoons, / That oppresses, like the weight. / Of cathedral tunes."). On one such day I felt compelled to write my own poem about the experience, not a very good one, I'm not a poet, but it expressed my feelings.  I include it here in memory of Lindy.

Wintry Moorings

Halyards slap

in the winter morning’s

northwest wind.

The boat yard

is a lonely place.

Hulls are awkward hulks

beached on parking lots,

stringers and fiberglass

settled on blocks and cradles.

Some boats still endure the water,

lines urging

finger slips to test pilings;

ice-eaters drone in the briny dark.

On land they are shrink-sealed in plastic

or framed under bulky tarpaulins,

riding out the wintry bombardment,

awaiting next summer’s voyages.

Others lay abandoned

by Captains who are no more