Decatur GA, 20-Oct-2018 – The most pleasurable difference, between sailing and being on the dock at Lee’s landing in Seattle, is unlimited water and unlimited power. Granted, the water comes in 25 gallon slugs, but with the unlimited electricity it means that the water is hot.
Each 25 gallons or so, we need to refill a water tank or switch from one tank to another, but after the water conservation we have been practicing for the last six months, it feels like heaven.
But, everything has a cost. Back in a major city, we’re back in the discord of the American political scene; we are bombarded by marketing and media.
I often use the simile of Diet Coke: if you don’t drink Diet Coke for a bunch of months, and then do, you find it to be the most dreadful stuff imaginable. It doesn’t taste like food, because it isn’t. With time, one becomes accustomed to it and it almost begins to taste good.
I never expected to feel that way about returning to dry land. I never expected to feel this way about so many facets of American society in 2018.
The evening we arrived, traffic on the Aurora Bridge was normal. The horn exchanges between the Fremont bridge and transiting vessels were the overheard conversations of familiar neighbors.
The Aurora Bridge was modestly draped: impossibly large tarps covered her normally exposed underpinnings, giving her a garment that emphasized her, hitherto unrecognized, lovely curves. The tarps also concealed what can only be likened to a long-overdue dental cleaning and re-enameling. Each morning at 8 AM, the sandblasting of the paint from the girders, which define the bridge, starts as an unceasing scream of a multi-engine jumbo jet, 200 yards east and 100 yards in the air.
On the second Sunday after our arrival, we made breakfast for marina mates past and present, and for friends, both of ours and of our marina mates.
We like having friends. We like our friends as people, and we enjoy the social bonds that tie us all together. I like the role I play in the marina. I’m a source of wisdom and experience, both nautical and life. I like, that because of the marina, I have friends my age and older, and my age and much younger, young enough that they have not been adults for very long.
My friend Peggy Haggerty, who I haven’t seen since I graduated high school, came to breakfast with her husband, Kim. Some breakfast friends stayed for the entire event, others came and went during the hours everyone was eating and I was cooking. By 11 o’clock or so, Carly gave me great joy by telling me she’d been here long enough that it was time for lunch, and she was hungry again.
I had only the same ingredients I had when we started, but arranged differently and finished with a propane torch, the ingredients for omelettes, were fashioned into a frittata, which miraculously flipped out of the pan onto a cutting board.
Seventeen people passed through breakfast, and other people apologized later that they hadn’t been able to attend. Has breakfast on Caro Babbo become a hot ticket? In my cinematic self, I am Steve Martin yelling, after he finds his name in the phone book, “I am somebody!”
After 10 days of dinners with friends and family, and attending a marvelous, risqué, mildly kinky and wonderfully staged “burlesque,”minus baggy pantsed comedians, it was time to attend to the rental houses that allow us to sail.
I spent almost my entire adult professional life traveling by air. While traveling by sailboat in places that we are the only people, where there are no communications other than by satellite, where I have found that the freedom from the social pressures of everyday life and being alone with Jennifer, is a heaven I haven’t expected to find, traveling by air is the comforting return to the old neighborhood, where everything is familiar and there are no problems to figure out because every encountered problem is dealt with by reflex.
I doubt I exude whatever I did when I was at the height of my profession, but I’ve learned to be interested in everyone I deal with, to ask about them, rather than tell them about me. The trip to Atlanta was a cocoon of people within arms reach within a frame swirling with movie extras.
The actor Shelley Winters said, “no one is a minor player in their own life.”
In Atlanta, there is truly unlimited water, hot and cold, not only unlimited electricity, but practically unlimited sockets to plug things into. The bed is stable and new, but it is without Jennifer.
The work I’m doing here is the definition of work. Unlike all of the “work” I did in my professional life: I find this work generally unpleasant and I don’t want to be doing it. But, the contractor we engaged to the work over the summer never showed up. It is only by happenstance that only one house was broken into, and because that house, like the other I’ll also be working on here, already had all of the copper plumbing stripped out of it by previous thieves, the only copper that could be easily stolen was the copper air-conditioning lines to the outside unit: about $300 to replace.
It’s been difficult to get into the swing of working productively: I haven’t been writing, and I’ve only been working six hours a day at the houses. Productivity will come.
Modern technology, which we use and rely upon when navigating, allows Jennifer and me to be in visual contact as often as we would like. But, it doesn’t allow time for the reflection that comes from being out of touch with the person you love. The constant availability of being in contact, and using that ability, means there are no considered love letters reflecting on the life that we’ve built and how fortunate we are to have found each other.
Yesterday, after a three hour delay because of weather at SeaTac, Jennifer flew to Phoenix to oversee the replastering of a pool there, and to perform maintenance on the most beautiful house we own.
In a few weeks, Jennifer’ll come to Atlanta and we will work together on these two houses, employing contractors and day labor to move the houses onto the market so we can use that money in a different investment strategy.
We’ll also start the education process that will help us decide how we’ll sail to Hawaii next year, and whether we’ll then sail to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula before working our way back to Seattle.
Or, whether we should stay in the warm weather that we have so little experience with, and head straight from Hawaii to the Panama Canal.
Thank you for staying with us through our travels and travails. Thank you for reading about our adventures and my musings.
We plan to return to Seattle in January. Jennifer wants to live in her house in Port Townsend, and we both have many, many tasks to perform on Caro Babbo.
Come visit us, virtually, or physically. Come to breakfast, if you’re in the PNW, or we’ll try to visit you, if you’re in the American Southeast.
