It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

a blog by hewbrocca

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

Vaccination And Air Travel

6 April, 2021

Yesterday I bought the first airline tickets I have willingly bought since COVID. I say “willingly” because I did take one one-way flight from Bangor to Philadelphia back in October to deal with getting our house there ready to sell… our klutzy painters had not just locked themselves out of the house but broken the front door lock in the process. The locksmith’s recommendation was to break the door and replace it; I had to explain that that was not an option because the door cost $4500 to custom build.

Yes, $4500. Our house in Philadelphia was in a historic district. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to live in a historic district, you know what I’m talking about.

BUT I digress. I bought airline tickets, or actually re-bought them, to get us to the BVI to go sailing with Kim’s dad Ron on this lovely boat:

Confetti departing Bermuda, November 2019

The saga of Confetti is quite something. It was badly damaged in Hurricane Irma in the BVI, but fortunately not sunk unlike so many other beautiful boats there. Ron and his boat partner Scott had it shipped (yes, you can ship boats, weird huh?) to Jamestown, R.I. for a complete refit, which took until the late summer of 2019, and we then sailed it back to the BVI via Bermuda. Our plan was to fly with Ron and his wife Claire back to the BVI in March 2020 to spend a couple weeks really enjoying the boat following this very expensive refit.

Oops.

So you can imagine that I was pretty pleased to turn our Jet Blue travel credit from March 2020 into actual tickets to San Juan, P.R. for May. Obviously, we are extremely lucky to be doing all of this — lucky the state of Maine and Northern Light Health have their acts together with vaccine distribution, lucky there are vaccines at all, lucky the BVI is even allowing people in… the list goes on.

(I’ll just note here that although you can indeed ship a boat, you cannot boat a ship. Odd.)

Anyway the resumption of travel, for us at least, seems like a pretty big deal. There was a while when I wondered if we would ever travel again at all. Now I guess I am more confident that we will, slowly, although I don’t think I want to go back to the frenetic pace we were at before. I’d much rather sit here and look at the harbor. Here’s another view:

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

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

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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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