Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  The cinematographer and his sound man will have been (so to speak) invited to share the first leg of the voyage with us. It will require about five days to traverse the first leg. The winds, in that part of the world, are stiff, and from east by north. This will pitch the boat in a close reach, giving speed and action. It is estimated that the cinematographer will shoot approximately twenty hours of film, from which the hour will be edited. I envision a closing film of the Sealestial and its crew departing on the long eastward leg to the Azores, at which point I hope the viewer would feel thoroughly experienced in the vicissitudes of ocean sailing, envious of its pleasures, well acquainted with the crew and the mix of personalities, wistful at not remaining aboard to complete the passage, but respectful of the privacy of the enterprise, which is a venture in companionship at sea.

  And so it was that when we did leave St. Thomas, we left St. Thomas not once, but three times. Mark Dichter, as sound engineer, headed the team of which the other member was cinematographer David Watts. Both in their late thirties, tall, patient, experienced, models of tact throughout the six days we spent together, two of them turbulent. But however resolute their deference to our own preferences and requirements, they had a job to do; and that job required a comprehensive, cinematographic documentary of our leave-taking. This meant that the camera would be on board the first time we pulled out and ashore the second time, shooting us from a distance of about fifty feet. Tony, in his journal, described the technique: “…a wheelchair from the hotel and David perched crosswise in the chair with the camera on his knees. Mark pushed him down the dock like a proud father with his first son. That was the ‘dolly shot.’” The camera sees the boat pull out of the slip, make a left turn into the channel (and into the wind), head for the midship section of a huge passenger ship lying to along the main wharf, raise the mainsail and then turn right, heading out to sea.

  The third time, Mark and David—and Christopher Little—were aboard what in the trade they call a “chase boat,” by which is meant a vessel hired to pursue the photographed object, permitting this to be done from different angles and from varying distances. We had the genoa hoisted by the time we were headed to the mouth of the harbor, and then quickly the mizzen sail; and we jibed to head west. We had in any event an hour’s westerly sail before we could round St. Thomas and head up toward Bermuda, on a course of ooo° (due north). That was the hour of photographers needed, and to oblige them we did a little exhibitionistic ballet, raising and lowering the sails, coming about, jibing, raising the spinnaker. Curiously, we managed to do all this without feeling in the least foolish. This was in part because for the first time the home team was actually working this particular boat. Danny, the spryest young sailor afloat, tore forword and aft, helping to run the large genoa through the narrow section between the head-stay and the forestay, secured on deck for contingent use. There was the usual confusion—the crossed lines, the bad leads, the missing winch handles—but there was plenty of gusto, and at no moment were we ever made to feel, by Captain Jouning and his thoroughly professional first mate David, who knew the vessel as one knows one’s old sports car, by word or deed that we were in any way maladroit. In due course the chase boat signaled that it had had enough, and I hove the Sealestial to (i.e., brought it into a state as motionless as possible, given a wind that is blowing and sails that are hoisted) while the photographers shakily boarded, with all their fancy equipment—an extensive operation, but satisfying because of the unquenchable enthusiasm of Christopher, Mark, and David, all of whom averred that never in the history of photography! had more beautiful pictures been taken of a more beautiful boat, more beautifully maneuvered, in more beautiful circumstances, human and natural. I thought their epithalamium on plighting their troth to Sealestial an auspicious moment to decree the beginning of the cocktail hour, the more so since I especially needed cheer, Captain Jouning having told me that he had not succeeded in making our brand-new Brookes and Gatehouse digital speedometer work, though he had been slaving over it for almost two hours now.

  Some people like a functioning speedometer on a sailboat, some like one but are philosophical without it. I am a mad dog without one. Just as some people need tobacco, or sex, or alcohol, or National Review, I need a speedometer—so much so that at personal expense I ordered a fancy one to replace the plaything Sealestial had been getting along with. I ordered a beautiful machine that would record not only your exact speed to one one hundredth of a knot, but would also keep track of distance traveled, eliminating the necessity of the cumbersome taffrail log, that antique (but durable) device that measures distance traveled by trailing, at about 75 feet behind the stern, a propeller-like device that transmits its shimmy onto a mechanical register astern, via a line that twirls in exact synchronization with the blades. The residual problems being that the propeller device, while authoritative as regards the umbilical line, occasionally attracts sharks, which devour it (at fifty dollars per propeller, one hopes it is their last meal); and regularly attracts ocean dross—seaweed and like stuff—that binds the propeller, whose irregular movements then constipate the register, causing great pain to the dead-reckoning navigator. That my beautiful new speedometer, after all this planning, would not work was a blow that required deep reserves of manly courage to absorb.

  But always, before finally giving up, one invokes the intercession of Reggie; and now he was fiddling with this and that, the ends of a voltmeter in his mouth—when, suddenly, it began to work! Captain Jouning, an immensely resourceful man, was both pleased and chagrined at someone else’s having figured it out, and keenly read the instructions over Reggie’s shoulder, to discover that—mistakenly—Reggie had crossed two wires that the instruction booklet had said on no account should be crossed! (Beard-McKie, under Errata—“On page 34, paragraph 2, in the sentence that begins, ‘The most important thing to remember …’ substitute never for always.”) Crossing them, however, caused the speedometer to work; and we there and then solemnly sealed the Sealestial Covenant: that no one would ever inform Brookes and Gatehouse that we had violated their operating instructions.

  The wine was poured, we were on course. The wind was from the east at about twelve knots. The sun was sinking, over there to the left, in the general direction of Puerto Rico. Suddenly the babbling stopped, almost as if we had all been following the instructions of an orchestra leader; we heard only the lap-lap of the waves, patting firmly the headstrong hull of our ketch, white-gold in the falling light, the surrounding water turned now a viridian blue, oddly diaphanous, St. Thomas receding astern. No one spoke.

  It is a period, I have found, that almost always comes, choosing its own rhythmic moment—the moment when, collectively, everyone on board recognizes that a journey has truly begun. Up there, toward which we are pointing, a thousand miles away, is a tiny little coral island. The object is to reach it, to arrive there without injury to ourselves or to our vessel. No one formally proposed a toast, but looking about—at Tony, with his floppy white hat so carefully tilted to shield his sun-sensitive face from those final ultraviolet shafts; at Dick with his jaunty captain’s hat, reluctantly putting on his shirt as he yielded to the demands of lowering temperature; Van, hatless, with his light blue crew-necked sweater, squinting at that morning’s New York Times, glass in hand; Reggie carefully screwing back the holding flange on the speedometer; Christopher, snapping away with an anfractuous photographic apparatus at the setting sun—I guessed that we were all thinking related thoughts.

  Book Two

  5

  On the first Atlantic crossing I thought to ask everyone to keep a journal. The results, as to Danny and (my son) Christopher, were wildly successful. At twenty-three Danny’s style was Huckleberry Finn; at twenty-one, Christopher’s was Henry James. The counterpoint was striking, preeminently responsible, in my judgment, for the success of the book in which their journals are so extensively excerpted.

  I found then what I now rediscovered, namely that when on a long cruise you ask
your friends to keep a journal a) everyone will agree to do so; b) some will, some won’t; c) some will keep them perfunctorily; d) others will attack them wholeheartedly. Tony’s journal took me a full day merely to read over. It must be twenty thousand words long. Tony’s father is a writer (the novelist John Leggett) and clearly Tony was being not only dutiful, but was giving way gladly to a hard case of cacoëthes scribendi. Even so the journal, from my point of view, is less than fully satisfying—because of what it does not say. It is very nearly drained of emotion. Clearly Tony had resolved to keep his private thoughts to himself, while conscientiously keeping a chronicle of events.

  To be sure, as much can be said of Captain Joshua Slocum, whose memorable journal can be read as a grocery list, but which somehow achieves, in the annals of writing on the sea: literature. No one, this time out, sought to write about the trip or about the sea in the manner of Joseph Conrad. Van, in his writing, has always managed with almost spooky success to denature his own ebullient personality. One would not know from Van’s journal that he is among the half-dozen most consistently amusing and endearing men alive; only here and there a flash of this in the journal. I am reminded of a prodigious, heart-on-his-sleeve suitor of the mother of an old friend who, however, when he turned to correspondence could manage nothing—but nothing—that did not relate to the day’s weather, and invariably he closed his ardently motivated, romantically obsessed missives, “Yrs., Chas.”

  Reggie resolves mightily to keep a journal—and doesn’t. He gets hopelessly behind, and then the dread day comes (after reaching our destination) when he faces the task of reconstruction. It is on the order of having done none of the reading during the entire semester of Russian literature 10A or 10B and finding, the evening before the exam, that all you need to do before morning is read the works of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Since Reggie was born to be forgiven any transgression, he is promptly and unrecriminatingly forgiven when he turns up with a journal with a half-dozen technical sketches of sump pumps, speedometers, and chili con carne confections—and two or three notations. It pays, then, to force yourself to remember the number of lonely hours Reggie—the single companion who knows how to fix things—has spent poring over the technical literature of all the machines and devices that are out of order, while the dilettantes were attending merely their belletristic fancies.

  Danny, who is conventionally restrained in his conversation about people, though not at all in his enthusiasm for events (the most beautiful sunset in the history of the world is whatever sunset Danny Merritt last saw), writes from the heart. The veil we all (or mostly all) wear during the day, drops: and Danny comes out with it, whether he is writing about the awfulness of a particular dish served at lunch or the uniqueness of his one true love. Dick Clurman, always the professional (though he is among the most sentimental of men, known by hosts on all seven continents as the most moving after-dinner panegyrist since Mark Antony), is characteristically methodical. He carries one of those little dictating machines and can be seen at odd hours of the afternoon talking into it. Eventually his secretary will transcribe it and it will be sent in. Trenchant, pointed, fluent, philosophical—and in this case a little vexed, because from the first moment on, having decided to participate only in the first leg of the journey, he felt a little bit the outsider, and so produced a journal psychologically encumbered by a sense of (self-effected) exclusion, like the hiker who signs up for the first third of the trip up Mount Everest.

  My own journals are entirely hieroglyphic. Few people I know are as distressed as I by the physical labor of writing. I have on other occasions mentioned the wonderful gifts of the late William Snaith, who grabbed his logbook at the end of a day’s sail and wrote his heart out in thoughts expressive and humorous, illuminating and philosophical, voluptuous in their fecundity. One has visions of Anthony Trollope writing page after page after page, sheer pleasure etched in his face—perhaps smiling, even, as he wrote. My own journal is intensely abbreviated, but I have found it serviceable. The notes I took during this trip filled only twenty double-spaced pages, one tenth the size of Tony’s journal. They are, really, notes—unpublishable as such; useful only as aides-mémoire. But not for very long. (I have found that notes more than a few months old remind me of—nothing at all; and are in any event very nearly indecipherable.)

  Tony, throughout, was much concerned about his health. His complexion reacts, or better overreacts, to the sun, and without his Total Eclipse sun-blocking lotion he suffers greatly. Moreover his stomach is weak, in proportion as his appetite is ravenous. “It was a great way to introduce the crew,” he wrote about the wine-tasting session; “everyone cracked jokes about the voting system, but it was a poor way to continue my convalescence.” The queasy stomach—to which he would allude time and time again.

  Tony managed to permit, every now and again, a little flicker of professional concern over those practices aboard the vessel that were incompatible with the highest professional standards. Of us all, he was probably the most technically skilled sailor, having raced for so long in the company of professionals. I don’t know that I would yield my own judgment to his at sea, having sailed thirty years longer; but as a precisionist he is impressive, and it is pleasant to see him making his points in the language of the technician….

  “The man overboard poles were in very bad shape. The fiberglass tubing just below the floats had gone rotten for some reason. I sawed them clear with the hacksaw, reamed out the Styrofoam, picked up a proper-sized dowel at the lumberyard, cut them to size to fit inside the tubing, taped them so they fitted tightly, and then glassed over the break. In theory it should be much stronger than the original, but the usual problem of glassing—bubbles at sharp bends—was quite grave here. Furthermore, one end of the glass was on the very soft plastic floats. We’ll see if it holds.”

  It didn’t, but the language is hard as sprung steel.

  Tony too is grateful for the unobtrusiveness of the cinema-tographers: “Mark is very good at getting the action going without making it seem forced, and without the cameras and sound gear making much of an intrusion. It should get even easier to work in front of a camera as the trip progresses, because we will soon take the camera as part of the boat’s gear. I was pretty pleased with what would have seemed a highly contrived setting, because the conversation about the wine went on whether or not the cameras were running. I think Clurman may be a bit of a ham, but maybe even he too will settle down a bit.” (Clurman will never settle down, Tony will discover over the years.) As for his own self-consciousness before the cameras, it did not easily dissipate….

  “When it came my turn to undo the spring [line], for some reason the line was up tight with all the boat’s pressure on it. I could hear the camera clicking away, focused right on my hands where I was supposed to perform, and I couldn’t do a thing.” In this respect there was something of a generation gap: “In a process that amazed me for the next week long, the active crew showed how easily it could become oblivious to the camera crew. Bill and Van and Dick started up their conversations and had to be interrupted abruptly and often to be reminded that the cameras required their attention…. I got in my two cents’ worth [before the camera] about banking [Tony’s new career] and Bill did a very creditable job on himself. I guess he’s the authority on that, and also pretty good in front of a camera. Halfway through, Chris said, ‘This is the most boring conversation I’ve conducted.’ I don’t care. All I want is to see my face and hear my voice on the silver screen.” If I have any say in the matter, Tony Leggett will get his premiere!

  There are few references in the journals to fellow crew members. Danny, as in other respects, is the exception, though his characterizations tend to be brief. “Van could perhaps be the funniest man alive, loves to enjoy self and crack you a smile. First to laugh at his own jokes, but knows they’re good.” …“Tony—less uptight, more self-assured. Easy to get along with, a good shipmate.” …“Chris Little—I feel a warmth toward Chris�
��that unusual rapport one instantly has. Perhaps the energy, drive, good nature, is what dominates the feeling. I just don’t know. Our crossing has been and is well-rounded.” …“Reg?—is Reg!”

  The first day’s grace was abruptly interrupted. I wrote in the log, late the next night, “Log 382. Heavy winds (approx. 30 knots SSE), plus 7-foot seas, suggested course change to 350 degrees at 2130, to mitigate turmoil. On new course, averaged 9.5 knots. Van and Danny came on at 2300, moderately cheerful. Skipper (Allen) and David worked on brake shaft. Broken. Applied vise-so that engine cannot be started without first releasing vises. Only Allen and David can do this. So: anyone planning to fall overboard should pre-notify skipper or David, so that one of them can prepare use of engine to rescue man overboard.”

  Hard rain and heavy winds cause acute discomfort, and Tony let it all hang out in his journal:

  “Conditions were still pretty bad, at least for my tender stomach. I could either stay on deck, or flat out in my bunk. I found that even reading made my stomach act up. So without interruption, except for lunch, I lay on my bunk trying out various positions and dozing. A major problem is that it is impossible not to be at least a little damp. When it is salt water that is in your hair it is very uncomfortable. Areas of dampness appear and grow: at the back of the knees, the small of the back, and the neck in particular. It makes sleep very difficult, and makes it a chore to stay in bed, but I had no alternative.”