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See You Later

JUNE 11, 1985

 

Five years ago, setting out from Bermuda to the Azores on a sailboat, I advised friends and critics of this space that for the first time I would take two weeks’ holiday at one time, instead of the customary one week at Christmas, the second in midsummer. The experience apparently entered my bloodstream because, however unremarked, there were building within me seeds great and strong in effrontery, blossoming one month ago in outright contumacy. What happened one month ago ranks with the day that Oliver Twist held out his porridge plate to the Beadle and asked for “more.”

I asked my editor for one month’s leave.

It isn’t exactly sloth. It is that a month ago I addressed myself to the question of how to transmit my wisdom from where I would be to Kansas City, home of Universal Press Syndicate. I will be on a sailboat wending my way through Micronesia, propelled by the trade winds. I shall be pausing only four times in a five-thousand-mile journey, in exotic atolls where telephones function irregularly. One of these atolls is unfriendly to visiting yachtsmen, allowing them to disembark only if wearing gas masks, because the island in question is one of the places where the arsenal of democracy, as we used to call what now goes by the name of the military-industrial complex, stores its toxic gases, manufactured back at Bitburg time in case the Axis powers decided to use poison gas against American troops. Evidently there are leaks from time to time from those old rusty tanks, so one goes about in gas masks. The prospect of telephoning in my instructions through a gas mask proved the conclusive argument, my spies tell me, in this unusual act of indulgence by my friendly editors, one of whom is said to have remarked, “He’s hard enough to understand speaking through plain ether; I wouldn’t want to listen to him through a gas mask.”

And so it is that this is the final column. Final, that is, for four weeks, after which, if the Pacific is pacific, they will resume. And the Pacific Ocean, from north latitude twenty degrees in Honolulu to south latitude five degrees in New Guinea, tends to dawdle pretty gently during the summer months, and if we have wind of a typhoon we shall show it great respect. I do not believe in accosting natural irruptions under the rubric of mutual assured destruction.

To get out of the way of a storm whose location you have established requires of course that you know where you are. Well, I will have on board two secret instruments, one conceived by me, a second by a conglomerate of geniuses. This last permits the measurement of one millionth of a second, and this translates, or will by the year 1989, into a little box that tells you where you are so exactly that you can double-park by following its instructions. The other is computer software that permits the navigator—which is me, a sometime columnist—to inform the computer where I think I am, within thirty miles, in which direction that star I just shot is, within thirty degrees, what second, minute, hour, and day it is in Greenwich, England, exactly how high up from the horizon it was—and lo! the heavens vouchsafe you the star’s identity. The computer will say, “By Jove, that was Arcturus!” And you will know where you are.

Our preoccupations during this period will be with the nitty-gritty. Heat, for instance. We shall be hovering over the Equator, propelled by winds that come astern, as we travel at seven or eight knots. If the wind behind you is sixteen miles per hour and you are moving forward eight miles per hour, the net impact of the wind on your back is a mere eight miles per hour. I have never measured the velocity of the wind from a house fan perched at the corner of your desk, as it used to be before God gave us air conditioning, but I would guess the wind comes out at twenty or thirty miles per hour, which is why the skin stays tolerably cool. It will be otherwise when the sun is more or less directly above you, the temperature is hour after hour in the high eighties, and your ocean fan dribbles out only one quarter of the air you get from an electric fan. As though the motor had a speed marked Extra Special Slow. In such moments, sailors dream less of wine, women, and song than of Frigidaire.

Do such concerns get wished away, under the category of Problems of the Idle Rich? Well, the case can be made: Nobody is forcing me to sail from the United States to the East Indies. But it is the human way to exert oneself every now and again in eccentric enterprises. Last week I listened to a classmate describe his ascent of Everest and wondered how it is that anyone should engage in such madcappery; but then Dick Bass was taking risks I do not contemplate in my irenic passage with my son, and my friends, and books, and music, across the great Pacific Ocean.