The William Thornton
Transportation Vs. Recreation
In recreational boating, as in recreational flying, there is a thing called “get-there-itis.” Get-there-itis is a disease where a normally very sensible pilot or captain makes a blindingly stupid decision to take some risk or put his crew in some uncomfortable situation, in order to arrive at a destination at a desired time. In flying, the outcome is often fatal (departing into bad weather or running out of fuel); in boating it’s usually just a crappy day that makes everyone hate the boat. Either way it’s not worth it.
Get-there-itis is a natural result of us conflating transportation with recreation. We use things for fun that we also use to get places, so it’s hardly surprising when one bleeds into the other. Get-there-itis is also likely to come about when more than one vehicle is involved — one captain has to return the boat before another, or has a higher tolerance for crew pain, etc.
The antidote? In flying, it’s simple — don’t ever fly for work unless you are a trained professional. When you are flying for fun, do it on clear days when the pleasure of flying is at its best. In boating it’s a bit more tricky, because you usually have a group of people with you, and the boat is functioning as an RV. So it does need to go places. The one thing you can do is not link yourself to another boat or a flotilla, so that you can be your own master.
With that, off I go to follow the other boat into a rainstorm…
Things Come Back, Slowly
We had dinner at Abe’s By The Sea last night. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about it, it was a traditional Caribbean lobster dinner. What was unusual was that Abe’s has a brand new building after his old building was wiped out in the hurricane. The new building is in fact better in every way — when it’s truly finished there will be a bar out front with a full restaurant behind.
Ron, my father in law (pictured below with wife Claire), first visited Abe’s we think in 1975. The famous story is that his partner Dean ordered a scotch on the rocks. Abe, behind the bar, got out a 12-ounce glass and poured it almost full of whatever scotch they had, then reached down behind the bar with tongs, pulled one ice cube out of a cooler, and dropped it into the scotch. “We a little low on ice, man,” he said…
Abe’s may not have the best lobster in the Caribbean, but it is a special place and I’m very happy he is coming out of the disaster. Saba Rock, too, up at North Gorda Sound, appears to be recovering well. The Bitter End, by contrast — maybe the most famous resort in the BVI and possibly the oldest — is now more or less an empty beach. All the old structures have been demolished and cleared away and there seems to be no motion towards rebuilding.
One is tempted to see some good in all of this — in the insurance-driven rebuilding and resetting of things, opening up new opportunities and unleashing new energy. War can be thought of similarly. Would the great post-Civil-War boom that built New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago have happened without the Civil War? Not at the same rate, probably. On the other hand, the South did not rebuild at anything like the same rate, and it was hit far harder. So no, I reject this idea — some good may come out of disaster, but it’s rare that it equals the good that is lost.
In the end, though, humanity seems to recover, by some means.