Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  I thundered at Danny, who came loping down to the navigator’s desk. We embarked on an act of total reconstruction.

  The figure written down in the logbook had been taken from the memorandum I sent out to the crew, reproduced above.

  The coordinates of all the destinations of the passage had been read out by me from the New York Times Atlas, in my study in Stamford last January, to Danny—who wrote down the figures in my notebook and then, for convenience, dictated them back to me when I composed the memorandum.

  Either he had spoken “64-24,” and I had correctly transcribed what he said—the illegitimate seed that now, six months later, had germinated as a real possibility that we would bypass Bermuda altogether—or Danny had read out the correct figures, and I had made the inversion.

  Whose was the mistake?

  There was one way to tell: Danny had written down the penciled coordinates, from my dictation, in the notebook that lay in a bundle of papers in my stateroom.

  I looked up at Danny’s grave face, and winked.

  “Let’s agree,” I said, “that neither of us will ever open that notebook to that page.”

  At this moment the notebook lies three feet from me. It is still virginal, and will remain so.

  The very first thing you learn from ocean cruising is that when you spot a major light at landfall time, you are still hours away from your destination. The second thing you learn from ocean cruising is that you have forgotten the first thing you learned (note, above, our arrival in Yucatan). Year after year, decade after decade, I find myself bounding like a child toward Santa Claus on first spotting a light, grabbing the helm. Characteristically it is about six hours later that I leave it. At midnight, I reaffirmed the likelihood of spotting Gibbs Hill Light “at about dawn—5 A.M.” I asked Reggie, who was relieving me, to wake me when the light was in sight. At 4:12 he did so, and I took the helm as we approached Bermuda, its pink blue green pastels gradually reifying as first twilight came, then dawn. By the time we rounded north opposite St. George’s, it was after seven. We plodded on into the north channel, destination Hamilton where, at the wharf of the Princess Hotel, in the early morning blue, we threw out the docking lines at 9:30. When one lands, never mind the hour, one drinks—champagne, if it is handy. We had champagne, and so we popped open two or three bottles, and drank, slouched about the cockpit, ten feet below the hotel guests who, leaning over the railing, peered down at us, occasionally clicking a camera. One of them—a slim, dark young man clutching as if for life to his girl—honeymooners, Bermuda’s June specialty—waved at me.

  “Where did you sail in from?”

  “St. Thomas,” I said.

  “Where’s that?”

  I wondered how should I put it. “East of Florida?” …“Near Puerto Rico?” …“North of Venezuela?” …“West of Antigua?” …

  I said, “A thousand miles”—pointing—“down the line.” The girl giggled. The boy giggled. I giggled.

  7

  Bermuda is something of a blur, though we stayed three days, the last day mostly for the convenience of Bob Halmi, who was determined to film some extra talk sequences in Sealestial which he thought Mark and David had neglected. And then he wanted some aerial shots of Sealestial, to which end he set out busily to rent an airplane. He found one, available at the dizzying cost of eight dollars per hour, including gas and pilot. The antique amphibian had been built sometime in the mid-thirties, and a veteran flier in Bermuda keeps it in tenuous operation: one of those biplanes with struts all over, open cockpits fore and aft, not ideal for moviemaking because of the struts, which are ubiquitous. In addition to the airplane shots, there was to be a second session with a chase boat.

  We had some serious business to attend to, notably the repair of the radiotelephone. Whenever I have problems in Bermuda, and I can’t remember when I haven’t had them—I have entered Bermuda by sail seven times—I go to Teddy Tucker. He is the most intriguing of men, learned, jolly, omnicompetent. He is made to order for What’s My Line? because his line is discovering buried treasure, from which pursuit he has done nicely, thank you. He is available as an expert on any subject that touches the sea (Peter Benchley dedicated The Deep to Teddy and his wife, Edna): one is always trying to think up ways of repaying his acute kindnesses. I knew Teddy because of Reggie. Reggie lived in Bermuda for a period and went to school with Teddy Tucker forty years ago. We had already asked Teddy, by mail, to get a carpenter to build some cradles for tanks of extra fuel.

  Allen didn’t think we really needed the extra fuel (the Sealestial burns only two gallons an hour, and carries 350 gallons, or enough for 175 hours of cruising; at seven knots, makes (175 × 7) 1,225 miles, or about 60 percent of the distance to Faial, our landfall in the Azores. Ah, I say, Yes, yes; but the answer to the suggestion that we proceed without the tanks is No, no. You see, once on Cyrano I ran out of wind and fuel thirty miles from Bermuda, and there is no exasperation to equal that exasperation; so Teddy and the carpenters arrived with the wooden cradles, and on the third day we loaded on four fifty-gallon drums. Good thing, as it happened, though without them we would actually have limped in—with about four gallons to spare. What would have been hell was the preceding three days, the fingernail-chewing period during which we’d have treated our diminishing fuel supply with exaggerated parsimony.

  Then we had, of course, to solve the ice problem. The assignment was given to Reggie, and his report at the end of the afternoon, when we convened at our hotel suite to exchange information, was classic. You must understand that it is Reggie’s style to speak very slowly, hesitantly, tentatively: in sixty seconds he can turn Dick Clurman into a churning mess. His report, faithfully transcribed, read something like this:

  “There’s no dry ice in Bermuda…. But they make dry ice in Canada…. They fly dry ice from Canada into Bermuda every third day…. The dry ice in Bermuda is used by the chorus girls…. Where? In the Cabaret. Here at the Princess…. You can’t order dry ice from Canada unless it comes in to protect something—I mean, you can’t just order ‘dry ice.’ …No, Bill, you can’t order three hundred pounds of dry ice with an ice-cream cone inside…. What do the chorus girls use the dry ice for? … I couldn’t figure it out, but it has something to do with the last act, when one of the girls goes up in smoke…. Dry ice releases a gas that can be made to look like smoke, if you shine the lights just right…. What does the dry ice from Canada for the show girls come in covering? I don’t really know; I’ll make a note to ask. I guess it comes in covering something, or maybe they’ve worked out some sort of exemption with Eastern Airlines…. How do we get the dry ice away from the chorus girls? …Well, I spoke to the manager about that. A very nice guy—we were in school together, we figured, though I don’t actually remember him. He says that if we leave on Saturday after the last show, he can give us what’s left of Saturday’s ice because the next show isn’t until Monday…. How much is left after a show? Well, they use the three hundred pounds for three shows, Thursday’s, Friday’s, Saturday’s. They figure there’s about half left, about a hundred and fifty pounds…. Will that last us till the Azores? … I figure yes, if we pack it just right …Danny and I will figure out just how to pack it—”

  “Reggie! Danny! Stop! Don’t say another word!” Once every year or so, I simply assert myself: “Will you both personally guarantee me that even if it takes fourteen days to get to the Azores, we’ll have all the ice we need? I mean guarantee?”

  Reggie’s face was solemn as he raised his right hand. Danny was a little slower, but entering, as usual, into the spirit of the occasion, he raised his hand.

  “I solemnly swear you will have ice,” said Reggie.

  “I solemnly swear you will have ice,” said Danny.

  “I solemnly swear I won’t raise the question of ice again. All in favor?” Van, Christopher, and Tony solemnly raised their hands. We had a compact.

  That night at dinner Teddy told us endless fascinating stories, eventually disconcerti
ng his patient wife Edna, because his appetite to tell his stories got in the way of his appetite to eat the food that sat, getting old, on his plate. My absolute favorite involved a Russian freighter, though I suppose my delight should be mitigated by the near certainty that, as I write, the navigator of the freighter in question is off in Gulag. But the episode couldn’t have happened to a nicer country. Teddy’s story recalled my own memory …

  I had a friend called Carl, who used to sail with us regularly. He was a shipmate of exact, entirely unfocused, intelligence. If you gave him a line and told him on no account to release it, he would hold on to it even if his old aunt fell overboard and he alone—at the cost of temporarily releasing the line—could toss her a life preserver: boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck stuff. Once, coming down Buzzards Bay after an entire night on the helm, I gave him a course of 260 degrees and asked him to hold it while I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep. It was midafternoon, bright as Hollywood Bowl, when I was awakened by the unmistakable shock of yacht-running-smack-into-rocks. I bounded up to the cockpit and found us aground. The rocks we had hit were not submerged. They rose six feet above the water. I had made a terrible mistake. My instructions to Carl should have been: “Follow a course of 260 degrees until you see a rock. When you see that rock, go 240 degrees until you have passed the rock. Then go back to 260 degrees.”

  Well (Teddy with great amusement reminisced), this here Russian navigator was using plotting sheets, sailing from the Baltic to the Gulf of Mexico. Plotting sheets are squares of paper marked with horizontal lines, each one representing one degree of latitude. You draw in the vertical lines, representing the meridians of longitude, spacing them apart to correspond to the distance between meridians at those particular latitudes—as simple as applying your divider to the little graph printed at the bottom right-hand corner of every plotting sheet. What this does is save you thousands of charts of empty stretches of ocean, which after all you don’t need.

  Provided there isn’t an obstruction in the area.

  Bermuda is an obstruction. It is, in fact, one enormity of an obstruction—as thousands of vessels, beginning in 1515 when Juan de Bermúdez first ran into the magic island and its surrounding coral bed, have discovered: incidentally providing, centuries down the line, for the financial security of Teddy Tucker. But the Russian navigator, laying out his plotting sheets from the British Channel to the Straits of Florida, clean forgot about Bermuda, so that one night in March this great big boat was coasting on down toward Florida, with a couple of million dollars’ worth of cargo—I forget just what: gold, copper, spies—when suddenly the boat hit—Bermuda. Well, not exactly; but they hit the reefs off Bermuda, and were most thoroughly grounded. (As I live and breathe, the sentence I just finished typing was interrupted by a shudder, followed by a thud. I ran out of my cabin, to learn that we had been rammed. I am writing this book while cruising around South America, Rio to Valparaiso. A freighter, Panamanian registry, at the last minute decided to pass us port to port, cutting across our bow. I deduce from the shudder that our boat, the Delta Line’s Santa Marta, either veered to starboard to expedite clearance and ran aground, or went into reverse. Something caused the shudder preceding the moment of impact. Both vessels are under the command of pilots. We are eight miles from Buenos Aires, in that long channel opposite Montevideo. More precisely, directly opposite where Hitler’s beloved Graf Spee was hunted down and scuttled in 1939. We are proceeding on our way. The tort-feasor appears dim on the horizon. Perhaps it can’t turn around due to a falling tide. (Beard-McKie: “Collision: Unexpected contact between one boat and another. As a rule, collisions that result in the creation of two smaller and less seaworthy vessels from the hull of one are thought to be the most serious.”)

  Teddy said his team had had to blast a ditch along an entire mile astern of the freighter, to make it possible to drag it back to flotation level. One tug was brought in from Germany, another from Georgia, at a cost of $35,000 per tug per day, and God knows how much for Teddy and the underground blasters. It was a high old time—but worth it, apparently, given the value of the cargo. The moral is not to use a plotting sheet for an area in which there are objects shallower than your draft, unless you take the time to plot in those objects, so that you can maneuver around them. I thought it a great story, and remember wondering whether Reagan could make a joke out of it during the campaign. Decision: Negative. At this point Dick Clurman left us. His journal read:

  “ ‘I’ll miss you, Richard, when you get off in Bermuda,’ Bill said when we are about to get some sleep. And I’ll miss him too, along with the rest, and the whole experience which grows day by day into something unlike cruising, or day sailing or, for that matter, doing anything else. Crossing the Atlantic with a destination 3,000 miles away, knowing you’re going all the way, is different from getting off at Bermuda.”

  The day we paraded out through the channel (a two-hour trip) to hit the deep water opposite St. George’s was Bermuda at its best. Bermuda has a nasty habit of attracting a kind of haze that obscures the vernal splendor and color of the island, causing a bleary etiolation. We had reckoned with such a possibility, and Halmi and Mark and David and Christopher were fatalistic about it: if the weather conditions proved inauspicious for photography, somehow we’d have to manage without the airplane scenes. What was excluded was that we could simply lie over another day, hoping for better weather. A trip like ours requires too much planning (I concede the point) insouciantly to take delays of one or two days, let alone three. But the sun shone magnificently, and again we went through our paces, returning to St. George’s in the late afternoon. We took taxis back to Hamilton, since I had already paid for the suite for the third night, intending to set sail at noon the next morning after fueling, watering, and icing. We agreed to meet for dinner at the dining room of the hotel.

  But Danny didn’t show up. Reggie went to telephone him, but the line to his room was busy.

  When we had finished, an hour and a half later, we went up—and Danny was still on the telephone and, as deferentially as he could, motioned us please to congregate in the other room, which we did. I began to worry. I think within thirty seconds I had figured it out. Gloria was pregnant.

  Danny was on the phone a total of two and one-half hours. I had gone to bed before he finished talking. I dreaded the next morning, fearing the worst: Danny would announce, whether giving the reason or not, that he would have to pull out of the cruise. If a great deal of thought is given to the composition of a cruise, a single absence is totally dislocative. It is as if you approached a painting, turned to the artist, and said, “Try it again, this time without using any blue.”

  But Danny was silent, engaging himself totally in the last-minute details of the journey.

  I had to write one final column and telephone it to New York, so Van agreed to pick me up at noon. He, Reggie, and I would taxi to St. George’s, board the Sealestial, and head for Europe. What shall I write about? I asked Dick, as he closed his bags for the final time—he was headed for the airport to New York. “Write about the trip, what the hell.” So I did.

  SEE YOU LATER

  Bermuda. Syndicated columnists are given two weeks off every year. And this, I note in passing, is by no means a venerable convention (in my case, the vacation came only after my fifth year in the trade). Moreover, there have been columnists who as a matter of principle never took a vacation, lest their public discover that life was possible, nay even keener and more joyous, without the columnist’s lucubrations. The late George Sokolsky wrote six columns a week for King Features, and then a seventh for the local Sunday paper. When he learned that he had to have his appendix out, he carefully composed columns ahead based on all the variables in the art of prognosis: two columns in the event everything went smoothly; four columns in the event of complications; six columns in the event of major complications. I asked him, on hearing the story, whether he wrote a seventh column in the event of terminal complications, but he replied that his in
terest in his worldly constituency was only coextensive with his life on earth.

  Mine isn’t. When I go, I intend to hector the Almighty even as, episodically, I do from here, to look after my friends, and (most of) my enemies. But I confess to being uncomfortable at taking my two weeks together, instead of separating them as is my practice (one week in the winter, one in the summer). But I am setting sail on a splendid racing vessel, from here to the Azores and on to Spain. The next leg of my journey will keep me incommunicado at sea for eleven days, in the unusual posture of being only on the receiving end of the world’s events. During that period President Carter, Senator Kennedy, the airlines, the people who spend their days profaning the English of King James, may perform their abominations safe in the knowledge that there will be no reproach from me. It is horrifying to meditate what enormity the White House will execute, I having advertised my isolation. On the other hand, if President Carter is determined to make me a boat people, I am splendidly well ahead of the game: I need only to sail on.

  But sail on to where? Ah, there’s the rub, as the poet intuited four hundred years ago. Where can we go, if distress should come to America? There is only Switzerland, and this would not be the season to rely on U.S. Naval helicopters to pick up my boat and ferry it into Lake Geneva. [I wrote a few weeks after the abortive attempt to rescue our hostages in Iran.] Accordingly, I adjure my lords, secular and spiritual, not to be too licentious while I am gone.

  What shall I concern myself with? Well, the exact time of day. I really must know—no kidding—exactly what time it is. I wear a chronometer which for several years lost exactly one second per week. Even folks as disorganized as I can cope with such retrogressions, and I happily set it right every Christmas and every Fourth of July, and I always knew what time it was. But in an idiotic fit of hubris I returned it to the clockmaker, reminding him that my watch was guaranteed not to gain or lose more than twelve seconds per year. It has never been quite right since. So …well, I have a computer I navigate with, and it has an inbuilt chronometer. It keeps—excellent time. But you see, excellent time will not do; you need the exact time. So I also have a little radio ($36 at Radio Shack) which is supposed to bring in wwv from Fort Collins, Colorado, which vouchsafes to all the ships at sea the exact time. Mostly, the little radio brings in that signal. Every now and then it does not. In which case I ask Danny for the time, and his watch is pretty reliable. Dick’s cheap little Casio keeps disgustingly good time. And I can tell from Reggie’s sly smile that he believes, in a pinch, he can come up with the time.