It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

The Sublime

2 January, 2020

Vern Thompson standing watch on “Confetti”

In November I sailed from Bermuda to Tortola BVI with three other folks on “Confetti,” a 54-foot cutter. Two of the three other folks on board were my father-in-law Ron and his friend Scott, who own the boat; the fourth was Vern Thompson (above), a longtime friend from the BVI who maintains the boat for Ron and Scott. It requires quite a bit of maintenance, being that it is after all a boat, which is another word for a hole in the water you throw money into.

This is my third time doing this particular sail. As open ocean sails go it is a pretty easy one. Typically you have west to northwest winds the first couple days, then a day or two of relative calm, then another two or three days of “trade winds,” the prevailing easterly winds that dominate the Caribbean and also account for slavery, the shape of commerce, and so much else in the societies that border the Atlantic. Of course the route also goes directly across the “Bermuda Triangle,” which I guess would make me nervous if I was a superstitious person. The reality is there are plenty of real things to worry about on an ocean voyage in a small boat without making up supernatural ones.

But as I said this trip is not terribly difficult for an open ocean voyage. You’re not usually required to beat into the wind, and the temperatures are relatively mild, and as long as you stay well away from hurricane season the weather is not likely to be terrible. (And pay attention: We sat in Bermuda for a week waiting for conditions south of us to improve, conditions that would have required us to beat into 30-knot winds and 6-meter swells for two or three days, which is not pleasant by anyone’s standards.) Note that “not terribly difficult” doesn’t mean I don’t barf on the first day, which I have learned to accept as the price of this experience. It also doesn’t include anyone getting what you would think of as normal sleep, since somebody has to be on deck on watch every minute, which means you’re up in the middle of the night fairly often. To be completely honest, the whole experience, even on this comparatively mild sail, is unpleasant enough that I always spend the first two days or so of any trip questioning my sanity.

So why do it, anyway?

When I was in college and later graduate school, I spent a lot of time reading poetry, 17th and 18th century poetry in particular. I remember being quite puzzled by a notion that the late 18th century poets — Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron — were particularly obsessed with: the “sublime.” In any discussion of beauty and what it meant and how one defines it, this “sublime” thing emerged as — well, not an alternative, but as something else worth seeking out and grappling with in literature and art. It turns out to be one of those things that is quite difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it — or rather, as I have discovered, when you feel it. People would say “Go look at a mountain” or “Look at the ocean,” and although I had seen all those things plenty of times before, I didn’t get it. I certainly didn’t get how you could find it in art or music. I was supposed to be feeling some kind of awe about the size and power of the natural world, something that would take me out of myself and overwhelm me with the enormousness of everything, but I felt nothing like that.

Sunset, 200nm north of Anegada BVI

Then one day around the third or fourth day out of my first open ocean sailing trip, I looked out at a view a bit like the one above, and I felt it. I was overawed with the size, the scale, the notion that something so much vaster than I could exist as a coherent whole. I knew immediately what I was feeling: It was, at last, the sublime.

I think it is a condition of modernity that we don’t often see or feel things that are simply beyond us. If we see a mountain, someone has climbed it, and there is probably a beer stand at or near the top, if not a paved road leading there. Skies, flown in; oceans, sailed across, on such a routine basis that we don’t even think about it. Even the moon and the other nearby planets have junk on them that we’ve put there. I read the other day that some nut case had hauled a rowing machine up to the top of the Matterhorn (and of course left it there). Have we done all this on purpose? Are we so terrified of eternity that we go out of our way to reduce the truly vast things in our world to sightseeing opportunities with nearby concession stands?

Maybe so. But the sailors of the world have a secret in common, and it is the feeling and the aesthetic of being in the middle of a vast, featureless ocean, filled with beauty and danger, utterly indifferent to your presence. No concession stands, no roadways, only you and the tiny piece of fiberglass holding you up.

When are we going again, Ron?

Filed Under: BVI, Cars, Boats, Airplanes

The Water

24 February, 2019

Water, with turtle

One of the things I like about living where we live in Boston is that I get to walk over the ocean every day crossing the Summer Street Bridge to Fort Point. No matter how big a hurry I am in I find my eyes wandering to the surface of the water. It is choppy, churning, glassy smooth? Is the tide — without measuring, there must be a ten-foot variation in the Fort Point Channel — going in or out? Can you differentiate the ripples from the tidal flow from the chop the wind is blowing up? What’s under there, can I see the bridge pilings? There’s an endless flow of information — mostly useless, sure — that I can sample, and I find it delightful.

It’s safe to say that I don’t find land nearly as interesting, unless I am viewing it from the water. The interface between land and water is endlessly fascinating (I’m far from unique here I guess judging from all the time we spend at beaches). Even far out at sea, though, water is interesting. It reflects what’s around — the sky, clouds, your boat — while distorting it according to its mood. Occasionally interesting things like turtles pop out of it.

As I think about it, it occurs to me I like the same thing about people. I’d rather have a conversation with someone who is able to absorb, change, color, and reflect the world in interesting ways, than a conversation with someone who is not reflecting, or not changing. Even the music I like — jazz, bluegrass — involves absorbing, coloring, and reflecting back, hopefully in real time. The interplay of light on flow, or chop, or storm surge, is like the reinforcing feedback loop between a great soloist and a great drummer, where the net result is greater than either could achieve alone.

Unfortunately I am afraid reflection is out of fashion these days, at least in the shouting contest of social media and the popular press. I am certain it will come back in one day though, just like the tide.

Filed Under: BVI, Cars, Boats, Airplanes, Music

It’s My Birthday

20 February, 2019

And I am spending it in the best way possible: sitting in a micro-architecture security conference that I organized!

Here is a photo of some birthday calamondins. That is all.

Calamondins

(They’re not quite ripe yet… Once they ripen they are the best garnish ever for a Gin and Tonic.)

Filed Under: BVI, Work

Avoidable Drama

3 February, 2019

The Moorings, looking west from the north side of A dock. B dock was destroyed in the hurricane and is being replaced, hence the barge and crane. If you look carefully to the left of the barge you will see the mast of a sunken boat sticking out of the water — a Hazard to Navigation.

I was chatting with a friend in the BVI last week who had seen an interview with someone — I don’t recall who, unfortunately — who made the point that there are two kinds of drama to be dealt with in life: Avoidable Drama and Unavoidable Drama. Hurricanes, and interacting with your family, are examples of Unavoidable Drama. There is nothing you can do to mitigate or prevent it, you just have to deal with it as best you can.

Avoidable Drama, on the other hand, can and should be avoided, unless you are a Dramatic Person and thrive on that sort of thing. (Probably worth mentioning that most Dramatic People don’t realize they are inducing Avoidable Drama, rather they believe they are victims of Unavoidable Drama. But that is another blog post.)

Anyway — Avoidable Drama was in full force during our return to The Moorings dock A on Friday afternoon. Total disorganization on the dock was made worse by a few as yet un-dealt-with shipwrecks in the harbor (Unavoidable Drama). This was further aggravated by a whole bunch of catamaran crews with no idea what they were doing (Unavoidable Drama). The combination turned what should have been a straightforward procedure into a stressful interaction with lots of yelling back and forth between us and The Moorings boat handlers that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth at the end of a really nice trip.

Why was this avoidable, when there are so many unavoidable elements present? Well, all that had to be done to remove the drama and lower everyone’s temperature would have been to tell all the boats coming in to hold in Road Harbor (where there is plenty of sea room) until cleared to enter the marina. This would only have required a single organized person with a radio, a pencil, and a pad of paper. Instead, the standard procedure was to tell every boat that radioed for permission to enter to come to the end of dock A and wait for further instructions. Unfortunately, because of the above-mentioned Unavoidable Drama (shipwrecks), there is only really room for one boat at the end of dock A. Try to put us and 8 clueless catamaran captains there at the same time, and hilarity ensues.

(What did we do when faced with this situation? The only safe thing to do: We entered a random open slip and tied up the boat. We were lambasted by the dock maser for this, but the alternative was crashing into something and endangering people and property, so…)

If there is a moral to this story, it is that the way to avoid Avoidable Drama is by putting a bit of process in place. Of course, if you put too much process, then you create more Drama than you avoid. So be careful…

Filed Under: BVI, Cars, Boats, Airplanes, Work

Mixup

1 February, 2019

Mixup The Dog

Since I’ve never been sailing with a dog before I thought I should provide a little documentation. Mixup the Dog, pictured above, belongs to our friend Guy Clothier from Great Camano. Unlike ours, Guy’s house got through Irma in a habitable state, although the hurricane did decide his refrigerator would look better on his front porch.

Mixup and Guy rode out the hurricane in his bathroom. Guy is completely deaf from head injuries he suffered many years ago. He is able to understand speech with help from a cochlear implant (which is amazing in and of itself), but if the external microphone and computer isn’t turned on he can’t hear at all. This of course means he didn’t hear the godawful hurricane sounds that Mixup was hearing. Guy says he just held Mixup there in the bathroom for four hours straight, wrapped in a blanket while he shivered in fear.

Mixup has gotten old since the last time I saw him three years ago — he doesn’t have the island mutt energy he used to. He’s still a sweetheart of a dog, though. It was a lot of fun sailing with him.

Filed Under: BVI, Cars, Boats, Airplanes

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Meet Hugh

I'm the Research Director for Red Hat, married to harpist and writer Kimberly Rowe, living in Boston. We lived in Brno, Czechia until pretty recently. Read More…

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