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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

Something I Will Never Own

23 January, 2019

Sailboat
A very beautiful white sloop anchored off Prickly Pear

I’m not sure how boats became part of my life. I grew up in Atlanta, after all, far from the sea. The most experience I ever had with the water was skiing on man-made lakes (which was fun but not really boat-y). Given I have no family history, then, it’s a little funny that I spend so much time today thinking about being on boats, taking pictures of them, writing about them, and so on.

In the end I have to credit my father-in-law Ron, who has been a major influence in my adult life, with getting me into boats. Somewhere I have photos and videos of Kim and me at ages 25 and 22, respectively, on my first ever sailing trip in the BVI, on the sailboat Priority II — a beautiful Taiwan-built Tayana 55 — that he and his business partner Dean Burtch had just had built for themselves. I had no idea that I was ascending to the pinnacle of sailboating my first time out of the gate.

At the time I never dreamed I might some day myself own such a thing, or even rent one and captain it. But Kim and I have fallen into exactly that, between river boat trips in France and now our first sailboat charter trip in the BVI. Chartering in France is a great vacation and not wildly expensive. It’s quite a bit more expensive in the BVI, but still manageable… and here we are doing it. Strange.

But rambling about boats wasn’t actually the reason for this post. I wanted to write about owning versus renting, about the possessing of things versus the using of them for fun.

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, American culture has long been obsessed with ownership. Maybe it’s the only way to signify social standing in our supposedly classless society, or maybe it’s the role the private property aesthetic and legal structure played in our forbears’ theft of the land from its former occupants… who knows. Anyway it boils down to the “who dies with the most toys wins” wisecrack you hear now and then.

I accepted this principle — that more and better stuff was unquestionably a good thing — without question until we moved to Europe a few years ago and rented an apartment for the first time in a very long time (having left most of our possesions behind in Philadelphia). The apartment was lovely, stocked with the basic stuff we needed to live, and I found myself very happy not to have to worry about repairing it or being responsible for it in any way. I had accidentally discovered for myself the great truth that your stuff owns you just as much as you own it. Every single thing you acquire puts some level of demand on your mental energy, worrying about its welfare or whether it was worth purchasing.

So, back to the beautiful boat above. I’m not likely to have the means to purchase such a lovely thing, but I don’t think I would even if I could. On the whole, I’d rather rent.

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

BVI Gallery

22 January, 2019

  • Turtle!
  • Ron and Claire
  • Kimberly enjoying the lovely weather
  • Rainbow off Prickly Pear
  • Our friends paddle boarding at Great Dog
  • Great Dog
  • Great Dog
  • There’s a goat in here somewhere

Filed Under: BVI

Moon Over North Sound

22 January, 2019

Full moon rising over North Gorda Sound, Virgin Gorda, BVI

From the water, you almost can’t tell anything bad happened to the BVI.

I’m sitting in the cockpit of a rented 45-foot Beneteau, peacefully bobbing around on a mooring while 30 other boats in this Leverick Bay mooring field do the same. I do see lots of construction on land, but if I didn’t know what happened here in September 2017, I wouldn’t be able to tell from the water.

There are some ominous signs here and there. On some slopes, there are a lot of dead trees standing without leaves amid the usual brush; here and there there are a few sailboats blown up on shore where you wouldn’t expect. But all in all it doesn’t look like a major event happened here.

The reality is of course much harsher. My father in law lost the entire roof on his house, as I mentioned at the time in my post on roofs. Many other BVI residents with far less means suffered much worse.

What strikes me today though is not the devastation, or the inadequate response, or the awful corruption that goes along with it. Rather it’s the bizarre unpredictability of life. Devastating things happen all the time to people, regardless of their standing or virtue or whether they had it coming or not. Religion offers no useful succor, to me at least. So how is one to explain the wonderful, stunning beauty of the Caribbean islands, of life in general, when it is punctured randomly by such horror?

Filed Under: BVI

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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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