Cars, Boats, Airplanes

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.

The first time I tasted one of these things I was 22 and in love. It was May of 1990 and my soon-to-be-fiancee Kim and I were sailing here on her father Ron’s new boat Priority II. I was in love with her, in love with her family, and in love with the boat, which was the most amazing thing I think I had ever seen. So many things to fix!

So we sailed up here to Anegada and moored up, then dinghied ashore to the Anegada Reef Hotel. Since it was the afternoon, naturally we stopped for a smoothie, which turned into… many. I mean it’s basically a rum punch with some family secret ingredients (they won’t tell you what), but in such an amazing setting. Anyway I vaguely remember the dinghy ride back to the boat, but only vaguely…

So here I am again at Anegada, almost 29 years later. The friendly guy pouring the smoothies back in 1990, Lowell Wheatley, is no longer with us — the harsh island life got him in the end. His children are now running the place and in general they seem to be doing well with it. They have been odd beneficiaries of Irma’s destruction of so many of the bars and restaurants in the main part of the BVI. Weirdly, the storm went just a bit south of them, so they had some damage but nothing awful, and as a result there are many more charter boats willing to make the long (for a week-long charterer) sail up here than there used to be… which means the lobster dinner at the hotel is much better attended than it used to be.

What I find remarkable is how much has changed around me since I had that first smoothie 29 years ago… marriage, business, career changes, grandparents and then parents dying. Yet I carry the funny illusion that I myself, like the smoothie, am no different. Heavier, grayer, wiser, sure… but coming back here reinforces the feeling that I and the smoothie are at the center of some kind of whirlwind of change that flows around us while we remain the same.

Of course, if Irma had gone just a few miles north, its 200-knot winds would have removed all signs of life from largely-unprotected Anegada, and then there would no longer be a Reef Hotel or anyone to make the smoothies. Are we all just as close to the brink of disaster? I suppose so… so I had better keep coming back here to make sure nothing happens to the smoothie. It’s as good an excuse as any.