Cars, Boats, Airplanes

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:

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.

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?

Not Having A Car

6 April, 2019

We checked out a Zipcar and drove it to Jamestown RI on Thursday to visit the in-process refit of Confetti, my father-in-law Ron’s boat. Beautiful weather, lovely day for a drive, and I find I actually enjoy driving more than I used to mostly because I never do it I think.

On the way back Friday morning, I found myself reflecting on how easy the whole process has become. If I decide I need a car for some reason, I can reserve one within two or three hours of needing it. I walk up to the car with my special card, the car reads the card, lets me in, and off I go with it. I have no idea why the big car rental companies haven’t adopted the same model, honestly — why do I need 15-30 minutes of human interaction for something that is apparently possible with a few clicks on a website?

It’s true that Zipcar is expensive — we spent $100 for the privilege of taking this car to Rhode Island overnight and returning it the next morning. Compared with the actual cost of owning, insuring, and parking a car in Boston, however, it’s a serious bargain. And that doesn’t factor in the time and worry that come along with owning something (you may own things, but they also own you).

I guess our recent decision to rent rather than buy in Boston is based on the same logic. I like being unencumbered, even though in America it is costlier than owning a place. (This is not true for example in Europe, where there is no subsidy to the home-building industry in the form of a mortgage interest tax deduction, and as a result many more people rent.) I wonder if one day renting an apartment will be as easy as checking out a Zipcar? Will the differences between a hotel and an apartment and a house continue to blur?

Now that I think of it, we’re going through the same thing in our Boston office at Red Hat right now. We’ve been blessed with strong growth there, which means that we are outgrowing our current space, and that means that some of us — managers like me, in particular, who spend much of their time on the phone anyway — will switch to “mobile desks.” This doesn’t mean the desk is actually mobile, which is too bad because that would be hilarious. (Especially if motorized… imagine managers wheeling around the office while talking on the phone…) What it means is that there are decent well equipped desks available in the office that no one can “own.” You just walk up to the thing and use it, and leave it clean when you’re done. I’m actually looking forward to this because it will mean I can’t pile useless junk on my desk.

I guess what all of this leads me to is, isn’t it interesting that I am moving into a world where there are fewer and fewer barriers to me moving around as much as I like, wherever I like? And what exactly is it that is making that possible or comfortable or desirable even? Is it that I have a strong network of “neighbors” that I do neighborly things with, online? Is it just that transaction management is so much easier in a computerized world?

What I find even more interesting is that the moment all this is happening is the same moment we find reactionary forces trying to rebuild the old walls around “nations” and “cultures.” I wonder if there is a measurable difference in car ownership rates, between folks who want more walls, and folks like me who want fewer?

Things You Hear Around Airplanes

12 March, 2019

This announcement will serve as your final boarding call… (Why “Serve as?” Is the actual final boarding call on a bathroom break?)
The flight attendants will be passing through the cabin… (I hope somebody opens the door for them first or it will be a very messy business.)
Please place your carrion items in the overhead compartment… (Yes, please do, before they draw flies.)

… And so many others. I love to take a step back and listen to the “routine announcements” as though I had never heard them before. It’s amazing how funny they are.

What Makes Us

9 March, 2019

I’m with my brother and sister this this morning outside Philadelphia, waiting to go to my uncle Benson Brock’s funeral this afternoon. I have written elsewhere in this blog about his passing, but I want to go into more detail about who and what he was to all of us.

Benson was born eleven years after my father, so my image of him as a boy was of a much more glamorous and interesting person than my parents were. Benson dropped into our lives from time to time with tales of learning to fly an airplane, tuning pianos for a living (this seemed impossible to me), playing jazz in nightclubs. Living in Philadelphia, he represented the Northeast of my early childhood, left behind when we moved south to Atlanta. If I was lucky, he and Dad would sit down together at the piano and read through duets together — a four-hands arrangement of the William Tell Overture was a favorite. Sometimes he would play Scott Joplin rags for us or tell ridiculous jokes. I knew he was not married, had no children, drove a 280Z, and lived on a house on an airport where he kept his airplane. I think I thought it was impossible anyone could do all these things — whatever they wanted, apparently — without any obvious negative repercussions.

As I grew older and started thinking about my path through life, Benson continued to loom large in my imagination of what I could be and what I wanted to do. When I felt lost in my first year of engineering school at Rice, Benson’s example — switch to music school — was an option in front of me, and in fact what I ended up choosing. When I decided I wanted to learn to fly, it was because Benson had done it so I knew it was possible. As my brother Jeff reminded me last night, Benson’s example was always there as we became men, showing that there was a path for us outside of conventional wisdom, outside of what was expected, and that we should believe that path was something we could achieve even if we didn’t have the skills or the background that other people on that path did.

Somewhere along the way Benson found his way into commercial flying, and over the years he followed that career to a number of different places. He particularly loved flying for Air Wisconsin in Colorado — the routes were short and the pay wasn’t very good, but he loved the mountains and the airplane he got to fly in them. Later, Air Wisconsin moved to Philadelphia and Kim and I found ourselves seeing a lot more of Benson. The highlight of this time was that we finally got to play some jazz together — more than once Jeff brought his bass down from Rhode Island and all three of us played on piano, bass, and vibe. Jeff’s son Sam even joined us on sax once.

Benson retired a couple of years ago, maybe a year after we moved to Brno in the Czech Republic. I was distracted with work and living abroad and I didn’t make as much effort as I should have to stay in touch, but we did still connect every so often. I thought of Benson as young, compared to Dad, so it never occurred to me that he was already older than Dad was when he died — Dad only made it to 64. I was confident we would have time to catch up again, play some more music, talk about flying, tell some more lousy jokes.

Fate proved me wrong on that point last week and closed the last chapter of Benson and Dad’s generation of Brocks. I’m bitter with it, and with myself for not treasuring and caring for that connection a little deeper. But in truth I already learned, long ago, the most important thing I could learn from Benson. It’s quite simple: Remember that there is always another path to the one you are taking, and if you want that other path, a little hard work is all that’s required. Also, don’t be afraid to tell absolutely lousy jokes.