Cyclone Frieda and the Incredible Sulk

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Joseph Stevenson

✱ NEW EDITION — Unabridged and Illustrated ✱

[from “Around the World on a Shoestring” — Chapter 3]

New Zealand to Australia, March 1981

by Joseph Stevenson with illustrations by Rita M Brown

PREFACE

I’ve decided that prefaces are definitely better than postscripts. Make your excuses before the fact I say. Nobody is going to go back and forgive you for an intemperate remark on page five because of a blanket apology on page twenty-nine. If you had to do your writing with malaria mosquitos buzzing around your ears, tubercular drunks hanging over your shoulder, sweat dripping off your nose, and disco drumming through the walls, better by far to make these appeals for sympathy on page one.

I don’t know about you, but sitting here in Calcutta I’m a bit weary with writing all this autobiography. The piece I wrote about Hawai’i I rather enjoyed myself. I read it a number of times. If I still had a copy I wouldn’t mind reading it again. It makes me laugh. The next installment, on the South Pacific, was not so much fun for me. With this one, written under the difficult circumstances sketched above, without a typewriter (sob), without so much as a single cup of coffee (gasp), I begin to wonder what I do it for. Is anybody reading this crap? These days when I sit down to write I generally end up feeling like a geek staring fixedly into the mirror of the past. The truth, I suppose, is that I’m homesick, and all my accumulated mail for the past four months has disappeared into a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Rangoon, Burma. To distract myself I have taken up the pen, but it has not taken my blues away.

The trip across the Tasman Sea came as sort of a climax to 22 months of nearly continuous involvement with boats, beginning with boat repair work in Hawai’i, a boat-building job in American Samoa, followed by sailing roughly 4500 nautical miles of ocean passages from Samoa to Tonga, Tonga to New Zealand, and N.Z. to Tahiti. The sailing experience is difficult for me to write about just because I love it so much. It’s too deep and multi-faceted to explain in a few words, and a lot of words seems like too much. To stand alone on the deck of a sailboat looking out across an endless expanse of storm-whipped ocean, with everything under control for the moment and a cup of hot soup in your belly…you could write a whole book about all the factors that contribute to that moment, but what would that explain? It’s hard to write about the good times, I’ve said that before. First of all, it’s difficult to communicate exactly what it was that was so good, and at the same time I always feel like the attempt is as likely to trigger cynicism as any other emotion. As I try to cram the right words into place, I can just hear the reader saying, “Big deal…” I guess what I’m saying is I wish I were a better writer. Sorry.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I love sailing, all sides of it except for one. I wouldn’t care to own a sailboat. Too much work; never-ending headaches of inspection, maintenance and repair. I’ve done plenty of that as it is. I’m quite happy to sail other people’s boats. Don’t even try to give me one unless a couple of dedicated servants and a large expense account comes with it. No…nobody has tried to give me a sailboat yet, but I mean it, I’m serious. Nothing is more likely to turn a perfectly nice fellow (like me) into a raging tyrant than a few seasons of sailboat maintenance, that is, I repeat, unless he can afford to hire (or con) competent help to do it for him.

Somebody has to pay for all those days spent scraping gunk off the bottom or brushing it on, those hours in the so-called engine “room” upside-down and bent into a human pretzel with knuckles and elbows bruised and bleeding, the never-ending battle against the menace of water, fresh from above and salt from below, steadily gnawing away at every piece of wood, wire, paint, and metal. “What’s that noise?” “Where’s that water coming from?” and the plaintive “It worked in the shop…” No thanks, just hand me the sextant.

Joseph M. Stevenson • Calcutta, India • May 20, 1982

ADDENDUM

This is the “original” unabridged version of this account, well over twice as long as a later edition circulated privately and previously published online. The illustrations, omitted from the abridged version, will assist those wanting to nose into the details of the yacht itself and the foul weather strategies we employed.

Astoria OR • September 2018

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By the time we got the bad news over the radio, the crew of Seahawk had settled into a routine of sorts, governed by a list of watches and duties I had posted in the galley. An uneasy peace gradually supplanted the incessant bickering and the explosions large and small that had peppered both our three-day “shakedown cruise” to White Island and back, and the subsequent four-day trip up the east coast of New Zealand from Auckland to the Bay of Islands. From there, on March 4th, the five of us set sail for Australia; Michael and Christine Tubbs, the owners, aged 42 and 32 respectively, two recently-acquired crew, Mike Hart and Rod Townsend, both white-collar Kiwis in their mid-30s, and me, 39 years old and now 20 months and 6400 miles down the road from Astoria, Oregon, USA.

I had been living with the Tubbs’ for nearly two months already, helping them to complete final preparations for the maiden voyage of their 37-foot trimaran, assembled over nearly a decade of intermittent labor in their Auckland backyard. Due to an unfortunate complex of personal problems (I’m trying to be generous here) the Tubbs’ had never learned how to sail. Now with their bridges burned behind them and their 10-year-old son waiting for them in Brisbane, Australia, they were face to face with the unnerving task of sailing an untried boat across one of the world’s most notorious stretches of ocean with a “green” crew in the middle of hurricane season, when no sensible yachtie ventures out on the Tasman Sea. I was the only one on board who had ever sailed on the ocean before, and my previous experience came to a grand total of 31 days at sea. In my first 14 days I had learned the rudiments of celestial navigation, and my next 17 days of sailing were spent navigating a new 46-foot catamaran being delivered from N.Z. to Tahiti. On Seahawk I was officially the navigator, as no one else on board had ever used a sextant before or plotted a course. However, it soon became obvious that nobody else knew how to set a sail or even steer by compass, and so the overall responsibility for running the boat and training the crew fell on me by default.

At the same time, I was expected to maintain the pretense that Michael Tubbs was Captain of the boat. For these two months I had tried to educate him to his task as best I could. I spent hundreds of hours answering questions, discussing potential problems, and checking over the boat inch by inch, but in the end there’s no substitute for experience, no matter how many adventure books and yachting magazines you’ve read. During the trip to White Island it became apparent that our captain was prone to seasickness, and that deep down inside he was really scared. Afterwards he called a meeting of all the crew and tried to blame my “recklessness” for his hysterical behavior at sea. Mike and Rod did not agree with this view and took the opportunity to let him know that they were not interested in making the trip to Australia unless I was on board. Out of this meeting came the notion that from now on we would discuss important decisions amongst all the crew and try to develop a consensus, but Tubbs never really recovered from the ignominy of this occasion, and his subsequent behavior became increasingly childish; basically a profound sulk, with attendant bad manners and occasional tantrums.

A last attempt on my part to clear the air was scuttled when, in front of the whole crew, with nothing left to do but pull up the anchor for the last time in New Zealand waters, a sullen Tubbs refused to shake my proffered hand or muster a single friendly word with which to inaugurate our uncertain voyage. At this point I blew a fuse internally, decided that I would leave Captain Tubbs to his own devices, and retired to my bunk. As we motored out of the Bay of Islands someone tapped me on the shoulder with a question from the Captain, “Should we put up the sails?” It was like putting a match to a cherry bomb. I exploded all over him in a tirade to the effect that if he didn’t know whether or not to put up the sails on a sailboat, how the hell was he going to run the boat? I was done whispering in his ear what to do next. At this point I figured my best chance of enjoying this trip was to pretend that Michael Tubbs wasn’t on board. On this cheerful note we began our passage to Australia.

Figure One will give you an idea of what Seahawk looks like. She is 37 feet long overall, and if memory serves me, 22 feet across the beam. The cockpit is located amidships with the mast sitting in the center of it. The wheel (tiller) is on a post just aft of the mast. Running down the center of the cockpit floor is a narrow well housing a large built-up plywood centerboard which can be lowered into the water under the main hull like an adjustable keel. It acts to give the boat more directional stability and better turning response when tacking (turning to take the wind from the other side of the boat). All the sheets and halyards (the lines used to hoist and trim the sails) come to the cockpit, hence it is seldom necessary to leave the cockpit in the course of normal sailing, a nice safety feature. Of the three forestays (A,B,C), A and B are used to fly the jib and staysail respectively, and C is for mast support only. Only the jib, flown from the first forestay (A) requires a crew member on deck to handle it.

Figure 1.jpg

When bad weather threatens, the first thing you do with this rig is to drop the jib and secure it. If the wind increases, you can put one or two reefs in the mainsail, decreasing its surface area. This can be done right in the cockpit. If the wind gets over 40 knots it’s time to drop the staysail, perhaps substituting the little storm jib. It is possible to hank on or remove the staysail while standing in the forward hatch (D), actually using the toilet as a footstool. If the weather is that rough the toilet may take a bit of spray, but it’s a great comfort not having to go out on deck. I like the center-cockpit, cutter rig (two foresails) design; it’s very sensible for safety, convenience, balance, and adaptability to weather conditions. The only significant disadvantage, as far as I can see, is that because of all the lines and rigging in the vicinity it is extremely difficult to devise a workable canopy or dodger to protect the helmsman from the wind and weather. In tropical, latitudes this is not a serious problem, but in Alaska, or even the Pacific Northwest, it could get to be a drag.

Viewed from the front, a trimaran somewhat resembles a bird with its wings outspread. The two out-hulls are kept pretty much empty for maximum floatation. (If you should capsize, it’s the out-hulls that keep you afloat.) In the center hull, as already mentioned, the toilet is located in the bow. It is curtained off from the next space, a washroom with a sink, a bench, and some stowage cupboards. There are ventilation cut-outs from this area into the “wing-decks” between the center hull and the out-hulls, to keep dampness from building up. I cut and pre-drilled plywood covers for all these cut-outs, to be applied quickly in case wave action should punch holes in the underwings in a big storm. This would serve to keep water out of the center hull in such an emergency. At the same time, I made plywood “storm-covers” for all eight windows on the boat, to be nailed into place should we be faced with a “survival storm”, a real “get-down-on-your-knees-and-pray” hurricane.

Item E is the self-inflating eight-man life raft, which comes completely stocked with food, water, paddles, flashlight, signal mirror, smoke bombs, fishing lines, Dramamine, and morphine. I can’t tell you what a protracted argument went on between Tubbs and me over where to put this $2000 marvel. I reasoned that with the boat upside-down, and undoubtedly a dreadful tangle of lines everywhere, I would not care to dive under the boat with a knife between my teeth to cut the lashings securing this treasure. Tubbs couldn’t really dispute this argument, but neither could he see putting it in some asymmetrical location near the edge of the deck spoiling the racy lines of his craft, and perhaps tempting some greedy wave to snatch it away in the night. I finally shut up, and the life raft was wrapped in a bright yellow oilcloth and lashed to the forward cabin-top, where it sat like a great gold nugget. I came along later and revised the lashings to make them a bit more vulnerable, and taped a sharp knife to the oilcloth to save wear and tear on my teeth.

Just aft of the life raft is the hatch and companionway leading to the forward cabin. Each cabin contains two bunks, a double on one side and a single on the other. The foot of each bunk actually lies beneath the bench running fore and aft on each side of the cockpit. The forward sleepers have their heads toward the bow, and the aft sleepers face the stern; get the picture? In the aft cabin, after the bunks comes the galley, with propane stove, sink, counter, and cupboards. (An ice-chest under the floorboards stayed cold for about a week.) In the extreme stern, with windows all around it, sits a lovely formica table flanked by comfy benches, and featuring a panoramic view of where you’re coming from, which at sea looks pretty much the same as where you’re going. This table, while admittedly quite handsome and sturdy, was for some reason not flat. In the absence of any other area in which to work, I had to do my navigation on the galley table which, with its gently undulating hills and valleys used to drive me wild, especially when trying to “walk” across a chart with the parallel rulers. If I happened to land on a hill, the rulers would suddenly pivot, leaving me to grit my teeth and start again.

That’s the dingy (F) lashed to the roof of the galley, and the wind-vane for the self-steering mechanism (G) sticking up behind it. I argued against putting the dingy here, where it would be in the way when furling the mainsail to the boom or adjusting the self-steering. But again, as with the life raft, it seemed to be symmetry rather than convenience that counted with Tubbs. Having the decks clear would have been a distinct blessing on other yachts I’ve sailed on, but on Seahawk, where one rarely had to leave the cockpit and there was lots of deck space, it didn’t really matter. I never knew Tubbs to touch the self-steering anyway; hanging over the stern was my specialty. Not shown in the drawing are the safety lines I installed running from the cockpit to the bow and stern. Each crew had a “safety harness” as well as a life jacket, and in rough weather was expected to clip the end of the “leash” on his safety harness to some part of the boat when on deck. If a crew had to venture out on deck fore or aft, he or she could clip onto these safety lines before leaving the cockpit.

The “Searunner” series of trimarans designed by Jim Brown are aimed at the backyard handyman interested in serious ocean cruising. The Searunners are not racing machines, designed more for safety and livability for the cruising family, but with following winds and a favorable sea they can be persuaded to “surf” the waves at 15 or 20 knots, a most exhilarating sensation. Their safety record is remarkable. As of about 3 years ago [1978], when the latest Jim Brown book was published, with well over 1000 Searunners in the water, only one boat had actually capsized. (During our shakedown cruise when the wind began to gust up to perhaps 20 knots, Tubbs became convinced that we were about to become the second casualty.) Brown lives and runs his business in Berkeley, California and his books and building manuals bear the mark of Berserkeley ingenuity, creativity, and humor. In particular, the illustrations and cartoons, by an artist whose name escapes me, are really hilarious. There is also a fascinating book, co-authored by Brown and Mark Hassel, with illustrations by the same artist, called “Love for Sail”, that would make anyone drop whatever they were doing and start building a trimaran. Tubbs had this book and constantly referred to it in conversation, almost as if he had made the voyages and fought the battles described therein.

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There being five crew, ordinarily watches would have been two hours on followed by eight hours off, but for several reasons, mainly the fact that most of the crew were still not adept at steering by compass, I doubled all the watches. For two hours one crew would be assigned as “lookout”, while the other steered the boat, eyes on the compass. Then the helmsman went off-duty, the lookout took over the wheel, and a new lookout came on deck. This system allowed each crew to practice steering without the need to keep lookout at the same time, provided company and help should any problem arise. The boat’s self-steering actually worked quite well, better than most of the crew certainly, but I wanted everyone to learn to steer by hand first. We knew when we departed N. Z. that there was a small cyclone about 1000 miles to the north, and if it should turn our way we would need as many competent hands on the tiller as we could muster. The watches were so arranged that I did not have to share the cockpit with Captain Tubbs, who had been in a profound sulk ever since the sail-raising incident and had so far made no move to take command of his boat.

The only other scheduled duty on board was galley clean-up, which was the responsibility of each crew member once every five days in rotation. Cooking was left to the discretion of the hungry, although anyone working out in the galley was expected to enquire of anyone else not asleep at the time whether they would care to share in the meal under preparation. This system worked quite well in practice and was something of an emancipation for Christine who had apparently been cooking for and cleaning up after Tubbs & Son for many years without any help from Michael. She was not particularly keen on the boating life. She told me she’d gone along with Michael’s dream, for ten years pouring all of the family’s resources into the boat, out of a sense of wifely duty. About the trip she was admittedly nervous, but again felt it was her duty to go it with Michael rather than fly to Australia with her son. In the early days of the trip, as Tubbs sulked and festered, Christine took an interest in things on the boat. I think it was really the first time in ten years that she had enjoyed any significant freedom from heavy domestic labors or social contact apart from her childish and demanding husband. They still spent a lot of time together, but Christine seemed to have decided, much as I had, not to let Michael’s black mood ruin the trip for her. She learned to steer a straight course by compass; Tubbs never did.

The second day out, for some reason I couldn’t find the regular N.Z. marine weather broadcast. At the appointed hour there was nothing on any of the scheduled frequencies, not so much as a bit of garbled static. Strange, but what can you do? There was enough wind from the north to keep us moving westward at an easy 5 or 6 knots, but not enough to rekindle the captain’s fear of capsize. Tubbs merely sulked, I immersed myself in my navigation, and everyone else began to relax and enjoy the pleasant weather. For this trip I had decided to use the trigonometric functions on my little $20 Casio calculator instead of the big book of Sight Reduction Tables. On the Tahiti trip I’d had the use of a pre-programmed navigational calculator that belonged to the boat. This time I manually punched in the spherical geometry equations that were pre-programmed into that other calculator and came up with the same results. It just took a little longer. I had a goodly collection of equations for figuring out any number of things and I spent many hours during the trip trying them out. I only used the tables once, just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten how. They make things easy, but it’s a heavy book and hard for a traveling man to pack around.

Then at about 5 PM on the third day out, the weather forecast came in loud and clear. Cyclone “Frieda” had done the very thing we had hoped she wouldn’t do. Not only had she changed course from east to south, but the storm was now moving towards us at a speed of twenty knots instead of six. The voice gave the projected location of the storm’s center for various times in the next twelve hours and I jotted down the coordinates. The only good news was that apparently Frieda had not increased in severity. Her winds were still being clocked at a maximum of sixty knots, nothing to sneeze at, but just barely rating the title of “cyclone”. My hand shook a bit as I plotted the predicted path of the storm as well as our own projected course. They coincided neatly at a point about 150 miles north and slightly west of the North Cape of New Zealand. I was glad I had given the Cape a wide berth. More ships are lost on a lee shore than sunk by wind and waves. According the radio we had about 24 hours before the storm would be upon us.

The trimaran is a fast-moving design. In 24 hours a tri should easily cover 100-200 miles, and there’s generally a big difference between being smack in the path of a storm and being 100 miles away. But there was a serious problem for us regarding evasive action. We were presently headed west and Frieda south, and the wind was out of the north. To continue west would put us right in the path of the weather. Our only chance to avoid the storm was to turn east, back the way we’d just come, never a happy choice. Furthermore (see Figure Two), in the southern hemisphere the winds of a cyclonic storm revolve in a clockwise direction around the center of low pressure. For us this meant that as the storm system approached our position the winds would likely move around to the east, and we would be faced with having to beat our way into the mounting seas, bound to be slow going as well as hard on the boat. To head south was to close with the N.Z. coast, the last place I wanted to be in foul weather.

Figure 2.jpg

In my big green Bowditch (“The American Practical Navigator,” the Bible of marine navigation), discussing the tactics of hurricane evasion he speaks of two sides to a hurricane: the “safety side” and the “danger side.” In the southern hemisphere the danger side is the right (east) side if you are in the path of the storm and facing its center. If you can head for the safety side (A), the winds will tend to push your craft out of the path of the storm. Whereas if you must head for the danger side (B) the weather will try to push you into the path of the storm and fight you every step of the way. Nevertheless, our best bet seemed to be to head east, as close to the wind as possible, and hope we could get far enough east of the storm that the winds would stay northerly and not hinder us (C). Remember, Frieda was still over 100 miles north of us and reportedly on a course that would pass about 100 miles west of our current position. To turn around and try to put another 100 miles between us and Frieda seemed like the prudent thing to do.

Still, this was the situation I had dreaded right along, and the reason I’d wanted to push Seahawk a bit during the trip to White Island. If it happened that we were forced to run for it in nasty weather, I’d wanted to have some idea of how the boat would react. But Tubbs had gotten hysterical every time the wind had come up and screamed bloody murder until we dropped the mainsail, so I never got a chance to let Seahawk kick up her heels or even to check the adjustment of the rigging with a bit of strain on the mast. At one point in the recriminations after that trip I accused Tubbs of concealing some defect in the construction of the boat. It puzzled me that he should be so nervous about what, by all reports, was quite a seaworthy design. Eventually it dribbled out that he was worried about the strength of the underwings, but “capsize” is what he had actually been shouting about, a different issue entirely. So here we were, faced with a bad choice, but no real alternative. I explained the situation to everybody and changed course 180 degrees. Tubbs held his peace. The wind had already moved somewhat to the east, and to sail east and not south we had to take the weather pretty much on the nose.

As the evening progressed the ocean got rougher, and the waves began to jump up and slap the underwings with an impact that shook the whole boat. By this time I had done some research into this problem of wave action on the underwings. Some Searunner builders choose to build “open wing,” leaving the wing decks largely open except for the main structural members connecting the center hull to the out- hulls, thereby eliminating the pressure of the waves against the big, flat plywood panels of the conventional design. Brown’s builder’s manual contained a few suggestions for strengthening the construction in the wing deck areas, but these suggestions had not been incorporated by Tubbs into his boat. Eventually I realized that he had already cracked both underwings down the middle where the two plywood panels butted together, probably during one of his two excursions on Auckland Harbor before I came along. He had gotten into some major difficulties on the second trip, though he refused to elaborate, and what I know about it now came in bits and pieces from Christine, from some neighbors, from my own guesswork, and from one subsequent incident that took place later in our voyage. Those long cracks, one on each side, I remembered filling with epoxy when we had the boat out of the water in Auckland. I had already made some provisions for serious damage to the underwings at suggestion of another Auckland Searunner owner (the pre-drilled plywood covers for the ventilation cut-outs).

As the waves began to work on the underwings, Tubbs began to sputter and I began to reduce sail, until finally around midnight the last sail came down. There seemed to be nothing else to do. To proceed was punishing the boat for little gain, to alter course was to head for greater danger, and so we “hove to.” The boat seemed take care of herself pretty well with the tiller lashed down, and we all turned in.

Dawn was red and angry-looking with big black clouds covering the northern horizon, recalling the old sailor’s ditty: “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.” The morning weather broadcast announced a new projected path for Cyclone Frieda. She had apparently drifted eastwards of her earlier course and was now headed directly for our new position as near as I could figure. When no one was watching I lay down at the leading edge of the wing decks and looked at the underside. The cracks I remembered had reopened down the middle on both sides. In addition, inside the port wing a stringer had pulled loose from the plywood, and the protruding nails had punched a few extra holes in the skin of the boat. I pulled the nails to keep them from further mischief. The actual damage was slight, and pretty much self-draining should water get in, but it was a warning not to push too hard into the weather. I got my face washed several times during this inspection; the ocean was still quite rough. I mentioned my findings to Mike and Rod, but not to Tubbs. I figured there was a chance that he might use such an excuse to order us back to New Zealand, an order which would have resulted in open mutiny, a situation I wished to avoid if at all possible. With the weather acting up our Captain was not feeling at all well, and there was no chance whatsoever that he’d be making any such inspections himself.

With Frieda heading straight for us, we were now free to run for the safety side of the storm, also the Australia side I noted with some satisfaction. The wind had come around almost easterly; we put it on the port quarter and sailed southwest under storm jib, staysail, and double-reefed main. It was an odd-looking but well-balanced rig, and we ran downhill all day at 7 or 8 knots, mostly in bright sunshine; the dark clouds to the north never caught up with us. I began to wonder what had happened to our cyclone. I was actually feeling a bit let down that^–afternoon when I wrote facetiously in the log: “Weather: Mostly fair with occasional cyclones,” a parody of the typical Auckland weather forecast: “Mostly fair with some clouds, occasional rain, and possible thunderstorms.” By late afternoon the dark clouds had vanished, the 20 knots of wind had backed somewhat to the north, and in the absence of a new radio report I decided that Frieda had either passed us by, gone off in some other direction, or perhaps just blown herself out. I put the boat on a westerly course, with the north wind on the starboard beam, and as night fell we were once again pointed towards Australia.

But the weather would not cooperate, and before long we were beating into roughening seas much as we had the night before. Again, the waves began to pound on the underwings, Tubbs began to grumble, and I dropped the staysail at 8 PM at the end of my watch. Christine was at the helm with Mike Hart on lookout about 9 PM when I crawled out of my bunk and prepared to go back on deck. It didn’t sound so good out there. All of a sudden Tubbs came exploding out of his bunk across the way and started raving that I was trying to destroy his boat. I let him rave as I put on my foul-weather gear. Then Mike Hart opened the hatch from the cockpit to see what all the commotion was about. The two of them began to shout at each other, and it was really the both of them I was addressing when I finally yelled, “BE QUIET!” Just before I went up on deck I said to Tubbs, in the calmest, coldest voice I could muster: “I’d advise you to watch your mouth.” Surprisingly enough it shut him up. Looking back on it I think it finally dawned on him that the rest of us were about ready to stuff a rag in his mouth and strap him into his bunk.

Up on deck it was bad news. Christine, bless her, was doing her best, scared but determined, but the weather was getting out of hand. I took the wheel and sent her below. After a few more minutes of crashing through the night, Mike and I dropped the main. We were now down to just the little storm jib out on the first forestay and just barely moving. The storm jib really belonged on the second forestay for better balance, but there seemed little point in shifting it now. The weather was still building, boat was complaining (not to mention the owner), and I was not about to turn around and sail east again. After another ten minutes or so I gave the wheel to Mike, clipped onto the safety line, and went out on the bow to gather in the storm jib. I gave up trying to guess what Frieda might do next. We bagged all the sails, lashed everything down, and retired to our bunks.

There are many possible strategies to bring a boat safely through bad weather, but one of the simplest and most reliable is just to pull down the sails, close everything up tight, go below and wait. Like a bottle with a cork in it, so long as it doesn’t hit something solid and break, chances are it will, like the red red robin, keep bob-bob-bobbin along. I had read a book belonging to Tubbs by a man who had sailed a trimaran around the world single-handed and non-stop, and this was his one and only foul-weather tactic: take down the sails and go to sleep. True, his boat took such a beating that she eventually broke up and sank, but he did make it around the world, and I reckoned we could make it through the night. Sometimes this tactic is combined with a small sail and the rudder set so as to keep the boat nosing into the waves, but every boat is different, and it takes a bit of experimenting to find out how to set the sail and tiller for best results. I did not propose to start experimenting at 10 o’clock at night. Besides, a multihull doesn’t rock and roll the way a monohull does when left to drift in a running sea; so long as the waves didn’t start breaking over the boat, I saw little reason to start fooling around on deck.

At exactly 2 o’clock in the morning I was rudely awakened by a tremendous crash as a big wave hit the boat. I reluctantly pulled on my already-wet clothes. There was no point in going out there in dry ones, they wouldn’t stay that way long. The boat was strangely quiet. It seemed impossible that anybody could actually be sleeping, but nobody stirred. How did I feel? Well, before we ever left New Zealand I had done everything I could to prepare for the possibility of cyclone weather. I had harped continually on this possibility all the time we were outfitting and stocking the boat, and I’d had to fight hard for some of the gear we had on board. I had studied all the available literature on foul-weather tactics for multihulls and talked to other owners. I’d been through every inch of Seahawk and had scrutinized our human resources as well. Like the generals with their H-bombs I was almost eager to see some action. I knew, or believed at any rate, that we were not likely to face winds of more than 60 knots, and that such a fast-moving storm would be unlikely to trouble us for more than a day. (Actually, the last weather broadcast I’d received, earlier that evening, had demoted Frieda from her cyclone rating. They were now calling her a “severe depression,” an apt description of the effect she was having on my crew.)

I had lived through such weather before while tuna fishing offshore in the Pacific Northwest, and I had little doubt that I would live through this one as well. I knew that no one else on board was quite as sure about it no matter how I reassured them, but my confidence was their best support, and I kept that in mind later when my own knees began to shake. They had never seen anything like what lay outside, and my first priority was to see that nobody got hurt. I reasoned that if I kept any helpers in the cockpit and safety-harnessed to the boat, it would be hard to lose anybody unless we capsized. Of course I could lose it and fall off the boat or something equally fatal, but that kind of danger is always there on a boat, and with so many other people depending on me I was going to be extra careful. I confess I’ve always preferred the thought of drowning to getting run over by a city bus. So many of the battles we wage in the lives we lead are over abstractions: love, money, loyalty, prestige, doctrine, and so forth. How many of the dangers we fear are real? There is a simple reality to a storm that threatens to smash your boat and take your life. It’s an honest game, and if you win nobody gets hurt.

The scene on deck was intimidating. The wind was screaming through the rigging and all around the boat I could hear great waves breaking in the darkness. My job was to get the boat to take the waves over the bow or the stern. The biggest danger lay in getting it broadside where breaking waves could do real damage, even flip us over, a real disaster on a multihull as it is impossible to right the boat once capsized. A trimaran turned turtle will not sink unless the waves succeed in breaking up the boat, but there is no question of’ righting it again. You set up housekeeping in your upside- down craft, turn on your emergency radio beacon, and hope somebody finds you soon. If the boat breaks up, you deploy the life raft and start paddling and praying.

The first thing I tried was trailing a line with a chain attached to the end. Even without any sails up, the wind is moving the boat, especially a lightweight multihull. If you trail lines in your wake it can help to keep the boat pointed away from the weather, or so it said in the books I’d read. I opened the hatch to the forward cabin, where Mike and Rod had their bunks. I reached in and switched on the spreader lights up on the mast, illuminating the deck area, and asked Rod to prepare the line and chain. I closed the hatch while Rod went to work and took a look around. Apparently Tubbs had been out on deck at some point in the night as someone had done a very messy job of trying to keep the main halyard from slapping against the mast. There was a tangle of lines in the cockpit, and as the weather raged around me I tidied up and secured loose ends. Rod fed the line to me from below and I ran it over the side. Trailing a line and chain established that we were sailing downwind on the starboard tack, but it did not seen to have any straightening effect on the course of the boat relative to the weather, and I fed it back down the hatch to Rod.

Interesting fact: there are only two “ropes” that I know of on a sailboat. One is the “bell-rope” attached to the clapper of the ship’s bell, often elaborately knotted, and the other, the “bolt-rope” is sewn into the perimeter of the sail. Aside from these there are lines, sheets, halyards, vangs, rodes, warps, hawsers, and half a dozen others I never learned or disremember, but no ropes. Technically what I was feeding into the sea at the moment was a “warp”. It’s the function of a line that determines its proper name.

At this point Captain Tubbs appeared in the cockpit, as white as his foul-weather parka. “Put out the sea anchor!” he croaked. A joke perhaps? A proper sea anchor which you could toss out in a bad storm to keep you dead in the water and bow-on to the waves, was the one thing I had not been able to persuade him to purchase. The beauty of such a device, basically just a nylon parachute on a long bridle, was that once in position it needed no attention, that is to say, no one on deck. When there was nothing left to do, or you were too tired to do it, you could utilize such a sea anchor to keep the boat under control. It would have meant a cash outlay of at least several hundred dollars and Tubbs pleaded poverty. I had finally agreed to a compromise, getting an extra crew member in lieu of a sea anchor, but it irked me when, just before our departure, our poverty-stricken captain went down to the duty-free shop in Auckland and spent over $400 on two gold wrist watches, electronic marvels that would do everything but whistle Dixie. I don’t think they could whistle Dixie, but I’ll never know for sure because Tubbs couldn’t figure out how to make them work (and I didn’t feel like trying). A thick book in five languages came with each watch, and after a week or so Tubbs got his watch to tell approximately the right time, but even two professional jewelers they consulted couldn’t seem to make sense out of Christine’s or get it to perform even one of its countless functions.

Figure 3.jpg

I reminded the captain that we didn’t have a sea anchor. I refrained from suggesting that he tie a line on to his gold wrist watches and try throwing them over the side. I got out what we did have, an automobile tire “drogue.^” Figure Three shows how it works. A piece of chain (A) helps keep the tire (B) down in the water, while another short piece of chain joins the tire to a large swivel (C). From the swivel, which keeps the lines clear if the tire should twist or spin, a line runs through a block (D) on each out-hull and secures to the big jib winches (E) at the rear of the cockpit. Unlike a sea anchor, the drogue does not stop the boat, in fact the boat must keep moving for it to function properly, hence there must always be someone at the helm. When the two bridle lines are of equal length, should a wave push the boat to one side (known as a “broach”) the line on that side becomes slack and the tension on the other line helps to pull the boat back on course. (See Figure Four: in this case the boat has broached to port. Port is left, starboard is right, basic nautical lingo. We covered this right?)

Figure 4.jpg

That’s the theory anyway; I had never employed such a device before. Before our departure I had prepared two such drogues, complete with all the necessary lines and hardware. If we somehow managed to lose the first, I had another, bigger, stronger and heavier all the way around. (I’d had one conversation in Auckland with a man who’d lost two such drogues in the process of sailing his homemade tri across the Tasman.)

Putting out the drogue was the one thing that really did make me nervous. First of all in our low-budget operation I had to join two lines to make each side of the bridle. Since the necessary knot wouldn’t pass through the blocks on the out-hulls, I had to run the “boat end” of each bridle line through the block first, then join it to the “drogue end”. Then, when both bridle lines had been joined in this fashion and secured to the winches, I had to get out on the stern, heave the tire into the drink and hope that the lines wouldn’t tangle, or worse, foul the rudder, before the bridle came taut.

Once there was tension on the drogue I could pay out the “boat end” section from each winch, but until then there was no way to pay the lines out slowly without letting someone else out on deck to help me, which I had decided not to do. By this time Tubbs was on his knees in the cockpit praying and throwing up, and had been joined by Mike Hart, who was game but terrified. As long as they stayed in the cockpit and clipped on with their safety harnesses I didn’t worry about losing them, but I didn’t want either one of them out on deck. I put one on each winch and threw the tire off the stern. It went out without a hitch. I had my winch-operators feed out more line until we had about 150 feet of bridle from drogue to boat. Trouble was, in the dark there was no way to tell if the lines were exactly even. The boat was still careening from side to side and I remembered that we had to get moving enough to keep the lines taut. I turned the key on the motor but there was nothing.

I guessed as best I could on evening the bridle lines and sent Tubbs below. Steering to keep the boat stern-to-the-waves was difficult at best. The drogue was helping but not that much. The boat still broached frequently as the waves pushed us along and correcting it with the helm wasn’t easy. Sometimes there was just no response as you sat slack in the trough of a big wave, the compass telling you you were broadside to the weather, just waiting for the “big one” to come crashing down around your ears. Another problem was that the compass, rather small to begin with, was set into the forward wall of the cockpit, a good four feet in front of the wheel. There being no protection whatsoever from the elements in the cockpit of Seahawk, the wind (a solid 50 knots with higher gusts at this point) was blowing rain and sea-spray through your field of vision, and it was hard to see the compass.

I gave the wheel to Mike Hart for a moment, but just then the boat hurtled into another wild broach. Mike turned to me and said, “I’m sorry but my nerves are shot.” I had been saving Rod up to this point, and now I opened up the forward hatch again and stuck my head in. You could tell somebody had been throwing up. “Rod, can you take the helm for a while?” and told Mike to take a break. As Mike disappeared aft into the galley. Rod entered the cockpit swathed in his bright yellow oilskins. I gave him the course and told him, “Just do the best you can. Don’t panic if the boat broaches; use the helm and she’ll come around eventually.” Rod sat down beside the wheel, his lanky body leaning forward with his eyes glued to the compass, and pointedly ignoring the storm he held the fort while I went below for a cup of coffee.

It must have been about 4 AM by now. Tubbs was quiet in his bunk, from whence he did not stir for another twelve hours. Christine was tense and pale, but able to make coffee on our lurching galley stove. As I drank mine Mike Hart suddenly announced, “I’m going back out there. If I don’t go now I never will.” and he disappeared up the ladder. I had counted on Mike for energy and enthusiasm, Rod for steadiness and stability, and Tubbs not at all. Things were working out pretty much as I’d expected. I chatted with Christine. She apologized for not standing her watch. I laughed and told her we could manage for the time being, but that it would go easier on her at the court martial if she could come up with a pot of hot soup.

When I finished my coffee, I went back on deck and relieved Rod. I tried the engine again and it worked! Things were starting to go our way. I set the RPMs for about half normal cruising speed, just enough to keep us moving amongst all the turmoil, and it made an immediate difference. Not only did it become much easier to steer, but I knew that the sound of that little Italian diesel chugging away was a great comfort to everyone on board. Soon after the engine started, the first light of dawn gave me enough visibility to even up the bridle lines on the drogue. It also brought the awesome sight of mountainous green waves with white breaking crests as far as the eye could see in every direction, probably averaging about twenty feet high with occasional whoppers.

Wave height is a deceptive thing, and probably the most commonly exaggerated statistic connected with a storm at sea; my estimate is consciously conservative. You may have noticed that when diving into water from a high place, it always looks about twice as far when you’re up there looking down at the water as when you’re down in the water looking up. On the sea it’s exactly the other way around. A twenty foot wave maybe doesn’t sound like much, or really look like that much when you’re on top of it, but when you’re down in the trough and you see a twenty foot wave rearing up behind you, it looks like a monster about to gobble up your little boat in one crunching bite and make mincemeat out of your composure, your rational mind, and your personal dignity.

In the trough of the waves the motor kept the bridle lines tight from drogue to boat. Then as the following wave began to push the boat, the lines would tighten and stretch dramatically. Occasionally when a particularly big wave had us in its grip, the tire would actually come popping out of the water and roll down the wave face for a few seconds before the chain pulled it under again — a snapshot etched on my mind forever.

It was downright nerve-wracking to look behind. Every wave threatened to engulf the boat, snap the lines, and send us to the bottom, yet somehow we rode out each one, the lines held, and the boat no longer broached at all. I tried the self-steering and it worked perfectly. As full daylight arrived we were sailing through the storm on automatic pilot. I set the storm jib and shut down the engine. I stood on the roof of the aft cabin, holding on to the mainsail boom and surveying the scene: the endless miles of green and white froth, the dull grey sky, the roaring wind, and Seahawk, all cream and orange, sailing herself. Mike, Rod, and I took half-hour watches. I went below on a break and played a tape of some favorite Joni Mitchell songs: Electricity, Amelia, Woman of Heart and Mind, Barangrill, Raised on Robbery, and Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I had to put my ear close to the little speaker; it was still plenty noisy outside. Afterwards all those songs played in my head and echoed in the sound of the wind and waves for as long as the storm lasted.

By about 8 AM the weather was moderating noticeably. Christine was still unable to sleep, and I talked her into taking a half-hour watch. I sat with her in the cockpit for a few minutes, and then left her alone in her big white slicker with all those waves. She’d have something to tell her grandchildren (and her husband). As the morning wore on the weather moderated rapidly, and by noon I had brought in the drogue. I checked the underwings; there was no further damage. By the time Tubbs emerged from his bunk late in the afternoon, the sea was flat calm and we were forced to motor. The maelstrom of the past night had become a duck pond, and about 6 PM I suddenly realized that lack of sleep was starting to make me grouchy.

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It took us another 11 days to reach Brisbane, days that were largely uneventful, at least compared to the drama of our first five days at sea. When everybody (except Michael) seemed to have the knack of steering by compass, I began to use the self-steering routinely and established a new schedule of single watches, each of us standing a two-hour watch followed by eight hours off. There was more time now for chatting, napping, reading, and culinary experiments. Tubbs eventually noticed the cracked underwings but didn’t make an issue of it.

A couple of days after the storm we passed Norfolk Island, 100 miles or so north of our course. Norfolk, which belongs to Australia, seems to be a quiet and peaceful place where nobody locks their front door. Recently the island had been rocked by news of a burglary in which some jewelry had been removed from the house of a long-time resident. After much agitated discussion in the local press, the thief apparently turned penitent, the jewelry was returned with an apologetic note, and Norfolk Island breathed easy again. We were able to pick up their radio station for a day. It was all 50s pop music. I remember hearing “Green Door,” “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation,” and Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz.” If they have television I imagine they watch “What’s My Line” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

In the absence of any moves on his part towards reconciliation I continued to ignore Tubbs, and he continued his trans-ocean sulk. Rod, Mike and I spent many hilarious hours recounting his various gaffes: Tubbs’ antics at the helm, the knots he came up with, his distaste for galley duty and so forth became the comic relief of the trip for the rest of us. My communication with the Captain was limited to giving brief answers to direct questions (like “Where are we?”), hence I got into no arguments.

Rod managed to keep out of trouble pretty well, but Mike used to mix it up with Tubbs now and then. I recall one occasion when they got into a shouting match over something or other, and when they had simmered down they ended up going out on the bow of the starboard out-hull and having a heart-to-heart that went on for nearly an hour. I was on watch, Christine was sunbathing on the port side deck, while Rod was keeping me company and feeding me glasses of wine. We wondered to each other what might be born of the reconciliation taking place out on the bow. Then the conference broke up, the two Mikes came bouncing into the cockpit like brothers in Christ and announced that they were going to make scones.

Tubbs asked me where Christine was, I pointed to the port side and said, “On the out-hull.” Next thing I knew he was crawling into my bunk with a flashlight in his hand. When I heard him calling her name I suddenly realized that he had thought I’d said, “In the out-hull.” The only way into the out-hull was to wriggle through my bunk and into a narrow crawl space leading through the wing-deck. I cracked up at the thought of Christine huddled out there and Michael not thinking it odd. It reminded me of days during our repair-and-make-ready work in Auckland, when Seahawk was hauled out of the water. Christine sometimes used to seek out thankless jobs in such secluded parts of the boat just to get away from her whining, griping husband. “I might just crawl out there myself,’’ I gasped, as Rod and I rolled with laughter.

About ⅔ of the way across the Tasman and somewhat south of Brisbane lies Lord Howe Island, another Australian property. I wanted to catch sight of Lord Howe for navigational reasons. First of all, until you actually see an identifiable point of land, all navigation is nothing but sophisticated guesswork. If you announce that a certain island will pop up on the horizon tomorrow at such and such a time and it actually does, it gives you a lot more confidence in your calculations as you close with terra firma at the end of a long passage. In addition, the more direct route to Brisbane, which would pass at least 50 miles north of Lord Howe, passes quite close to two infamous mid-ocean reefs, Elizabeth and Middleton, already strewn with the wrecks of unlucky ships. To confirm our position with a sighting of Lord Hove while in the neighborhood of these reefs seemed like a wise move.

Lord Howe did indeed appear on the port bow on the appointed day, though 3 or 4 hours later than my prediction. I blamed the discrepancy on an easterly current, the all-purpose navigator’s excuse, impossible to confirm or deny. Ocean currents, which are virtually impossible to detect or measure without high technology [in 1981] can move as fast as 4 knots an hour, which means 100 miles a day in a direction you might not want to go. The pilot books will give you statistical probabilities as to their strength and direction in a given area at a given time of year, but like the percentage “chance of rain” figures the weather man gives us, such figures are not a reliable indicator of what will happen on any given day. This is one more reason why a navigator must always allow a healthy margin for error. As this hypothetical current of mine would be pushing us in the direction of the reefs, I set the course a good 10 degrees more westerly than I might have otherwise until we were well past the danger.

One night as I was crawling into my bunk after coming off watch, I noticed a little puddle of water on the floor boards. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, it might have come through the hatch from the cockpit or somebody might have spilled something, but there was something about that puddle that wouldn’t let me fall asleep. Reluctantly I climbed out of bed and lifted the floor board. The bilge was full of water, salt water. I roused everybody and we manned the pumps. There were two hand pumps and one small electric, and using all three it took close to half an hour to pump out the boat.

The water was coming in through a pipe that acted as sort of a bearing for the shaft on which the centerboard pivoted. The open end of the pipe had been sealed with, get this, a rubber chair-leg tip, the kind you use to protect the floor. In the construction days Tubbs had just pushed the rubber cap the end of the pipe and figured that was good enough to keep out the sea. It also developed that this rubber tip had come off once before, during one of Seahawk’s two trial runs on Auckland Harbor before I came along. Tubbs had done nothing to correct the problem nor mentioned it to me. There was no need for me to say anything once I was sure we weren’t going to sink; I just stood back and let Captain Tubbs grapple with this problem. Captain Tubbs slapped the rubber cap back on the pipe. I scratched my head and gave each helmsman coming off duty the additional duty of checking the bilges and making a note in the log. By the time we had pumped out the boat for the third time I got impatient with Tubbs, who couldn’t seem to think of anything to do but slap the chair leg tip back on, and I devised a way to keep the rubber cap on the pipe. It was makeshift but it held, though we continued to make regular bilge checks for the rest of the trip.

As the weather and the water warmed up I took to bathing in the following fashion: first a bucket of sea water over the head, then a heavy lather all over with shampoo — ordinary soap is useless in salt water. Next I would jump overboard holding on to the end of a line secured to the boat. To tow behind a moving sailboat at up to 5 or 6 knots is a marvelous sensation and an excellent way to rinse off the suds. Any faster than this can get hairy, as I’d already found out on Vehia, the racing catamaran I’d already sailed from N.Z. to Tahiti. For my first tow behind Vehia I tied a loop in the end of the line and threw the line in the water first. Then I dived off the stern and looked around to grab the line. The boat was moving along at about 10 knots, and I just barely managed to grab the line before the loop went zipping past me. When I did get hold of the tow line I thought it was going to pull my arm right out of its socket. It was difficult to keep my head clear of the water in order to breathe, and I was frankly scared by this unforeseen turn of events. I was eventually able to get back on board without assistance, but never again did I jump off a moving boat without the line in my hand, and certainly never at 10 knots.

The Australian coast came into view one afternoon more or less on schedule, and Rod, Mike, and I broke out a bottle of champagne we’d been saving. The Tubbs’ didn’t even come out on deck to see. Brisbane’s harbor is sheltered by a big sandy island, and with night falling we had just enough time to get inside the island and anchor for the night. The next morning, Saturday the 20th of March, we crossed Moreton Bay with all its fishing boats and cargo ships, and cleared customs half a mile up the Brisbane River.

Mike, Rod, and I had agreed that the first two things we wanted to to were (1) get our stuff off the coat and (2) swill some of that famous Australian beer. Rod had a sister in Brisbane and Mike a brother, and I had already accepted an invitation to stay with Mike’s brother for a few days. We took Seahawk on up the Brisbane River to a moorage at the Botanical Gardens, where the Tubbs’ reportedly had some yachting friends. We tied up between a couple of pilings, and ten minutes later I had my pack and fiddle on deck ready to jump ship. Christine thanked me with some kind words, and I gave her a big hug. I liked Christine, and I hoped she would somehow find a better lot in life here in her native land.

Michael rowed us to the dock, and as I climbed out of the orange dingy he offered me the handshake he’d refused me back at the Bay of Islands the first day of the trip. “Thanks for everything.” he muttered, looking at my feet. I shook his hand, said “Good luck.” and was gone.

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This account of Seahawk’s passage to Australia is the story of both a success and a failure. The voyage itself was a success. Despite the unknown quantities of a new boat, an inexperienced crew and the physical trial of inclement weather, both boat and crew survived relatively unscathed. The failure was in my relationship to Michael Tubbs, or perhaps it wasn’t a failure, perhaps it was what might be called “an unpleasant inevitability,” “just what he deserved,” or “getting the job done goddammit.”

But deep down I know that there must have been a better way, and I regret that I couldn’t find it. These days [in 1981] I am reading a lot of books about ethics and ethical behavior. It’s a very tricky subject. The Tibetans, for instance, in order to obey the letter of the Buddhist precept not to shed the blood of living creatures, used to sometimes strangle their animals when they got a hankering for meat. Was it cruel of me to ignore Tubbs, to wait in vain for him to even make an attempt to stand up and take command? Was it kind of Christine to baby him all those years, wait on him hand and foot, and cater to his every whim? I did what it seemed like I had to do, even if it was a course of action I came to adopt in a moment of anger.

My meeting with Tubbs, our early conflicts and the work we did together to ready Seahawk for the voyage have already been detailed in my previous account “South Pacific.” I won’t review them here, but in the months before we set sail, while I was still trying to coax him into joining the party, my guiding philosophy was: “This man has been sent by God to try my patience.” God tried my patience every day, and often found it wanting. The next day I would try again, and so would God. My patience finally collapsed during an incident described earlier that coincided with our departure from New Zealand. It seemed like a failure at the time, but perhaps there is another side to it, perhaps patience is not always a virtue.

I believe in the quasi-military system of command that has long been a tradition at sea. Our “discussion and consensus” idea never really had a chance. There are many occasions aboard ship when the safety of the boat and the crew depends on fast action. There is no time for an encounter group, discussion, compromise, and consensus. There must be someone whose responsibility it is to assess the situation, decide on a course of action, give orders, and not be all day about it. That is not to say that there can’t be discussion, but if there is no time for it, the others on board should have enough respect and discipline to follow orders whether they understand them immediately or agree. Real boat Captains are more often cantankerous than careless, more often intemperate and downright impossible than incompetent.

I once worked for a 61-year-old fisherman on a two-man offshore tuna troller, a man who had a reputation for burning out his deckhands in a single trip, trips that often lasted 4 weeks or more. He was a loner and a diehard, a stingy, impossible-to-please taskmaster who had built his own 57-foot boat, and had more regard for her than for any human flesh and bone. One morning we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a tempest of roughly the same intensity as Cyclone Frieda. As I stood there gaping at the size of the waves sweeping past us, old Joe Smith put the boat into gear and barked, “Throw out the jigs.” I was too astonished to say anything, I just fed out the fishing lines, and with waves breaking over my head we fished that storm all the way from Coos Bay, Oregon to San Pedro, California. Sometimes days went by without a civil word exchanged between Joe and I, but I had confidence in that man, who had seasoned his boat lumber in a warehouse for seven years before starting to build the “Spirit,” and that’s the reason I was able to sleep nights when the weather threatened to fling me right out of my bunk.

Yes, I believe that there should be one captain per boat. He must have real authority and he may not be a nice guy. The trouble is, and I’m afraid this is one thing that attracts many unfortunates like Tubbs to yachting, that this kind of authority or “playing God” can seem quite an attractive proposition, especially to people who have been pushed around and pecked at all their lives by their parents, spouses or employers. To suddenly become King of your own floating castle, to be judge and jury, priest and policeman, to marry and bury at sea…what a rush! Ah yes, that’s the life for me, on the open sea…that’s for me…the open sea….for me….sea…..me…..zzzzzzzzzzzz…

The night closes in around the ship like an impenetrable wall, echoing only the splash of the bow wave and the creak of the rigging. Captain Tubbs stands alone at the helm, gripping the polished hardwood spokes of the old wheel, hat tilted back exposing a brow furrowed with tension and watchfulness, his leathery jaw set against the wind and weather, gnawing at the stem of a pipe that went out hours ago. A cup of coffee is delivered up from the galley, and after two gulps he gives the order, “Haul on the bowline and hose down the poop deck.” Down below, sleepy crew leap out of their warm bunks to obey the call. “What’s the course?” he calls to the navigator. “Dead ahead, Sir,” comes the prompt reply.

The Captain peers intently into the black curtain of night, sensing what he can’t quite see, or can he? Moving shadows to port, eerie noises to starboard, and what’s that smell? He turns to find the first mate standing by. The guy never changes his underwear at sea, says it’s bad luck. “Here Nelson, take the wheel,” Tubbs grumbles, trying to conceal his affection for the old salt. “Loyal as an old dog,” he thinks, “and always there when you need him.” With practiced fingers he quickly adjusts the sextant and takes a fix on Venus. “Just as I thought,” he cries, “we’re in the Hudson River.” Nelson farts and says nothing. They understand each other.

What these armchair admirals don’t realize is that the real sources of a Captain’s authority are his or her experience and acceptance of responsibility. Michael wouldn’t crew for anybody else and so he never learned to sail. He wanted to start at the top, but he didn’t have the experience and he didn’t really want the responsibility. When his authority was mysteriously taken away, or at least thoroughly undermined, all his pleasure evaporated. Whether or not he understood how or why it happened I didn’t care then and don’t know now. We completed the trip without my once having to actually refuse an order (there were precious few) or restrain him physically. It was a strange affair, and having struggled with the writing of it, I understand it a little better than I did at the time.

Since then I’ve had one exchange of letters with Christine, who writes (in August 1981), “I’ve decided that living on a sailboat tied up in the Brisbane River is what you call a dead loss…” Apparently Seahawk has become a river duck, and it sounds as if Christine, who once told me, “The boat is Michael’s dream, I always wanted to fly an airplane,” would like to spread her wings. She’d make a sailor; Michael never will.

Mike and Rod and I tucked into the first pub we came to, and in the middle of my second glass of ice-cold Aussie beer I suddenly remembered a joke I’d heard from my friend Seiffe in New Zealand.

Question: What’s green and sits in the corner?

Answer: The Incredible Sulk.

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New Zealand Dreams — 1981

Posted on April 5, 2018 by Joseph Stevenson

When I journal sometimes I write the dreams down. It is what it is; I was 38 years old. Adults only.

The phone rings. Would I like to join two other musicians for a trip north to play at a festival in Washington State? Of course I would, these New Zealand guitar strummers are driving me crazy — too much “I’ll cut my hair short and go off to war with you Johnny” ballads and “fol de rol derry down derry.” The phone line is foul, somewhere a phone booth is burning up. Puppylove dog is dancing with a deer, up on their hind legs, round and round. The deer has flowers on its back, the kids have tamed it for a pet. Wild children will tame the wind. They are so lovely, the dog and the deer. “Hello? Hello? Yes, I’m ready anytime.”

Nicolette left me with the typewriter and never came back, sailed away on a big schooner with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. She doesn’t trust me, or is it her father that doesn’t trust me? When it comes to money everybody’s a poor sport nowadays. When does it come to money anyway? On the sidewalk they’re shearing a sheep. It’s tall and skinny like a giraffe, with a pink ribbon here and there. I know I’m a fool, but we’ll all get what we deserve in the end.

In a little Chinese grocery with the last of my money. I’ve been staying with the Newells and I want to contribute something. Might as well be beer for John, now what kind to get? How much is the Budweiser? Half a case for $4. Seems like a lot, 33 cents apiece, but sure, I’ll take it. Wait a minute, John doesn’t like Budweiser. Oh shit, the last time I bought him Budweiser he wouldn’t even drink it. Didn’t I see some Rainier Ale, good ol green death? That stuff’s stronger than shit, he’d love it. The stock boy pulls out case after case of the wrong stuff. Bread, toilet paper, nappies…this is getting to be a drag. Finally, one box has a few beers in it, a pale blue can with a Buddhist design in silver from Thailand, and something from Japan. OK, how much? Oh hell, where’s he gone now? What time is it anyway? Five minutes to closing I got to hurry. Oh Christ the big hand is moving around like it’s a second hand. What the fuck? Got to get across the Tasman Sea somehow. I guess I’ll build a boat. Let’s see, you break off these plastic parts and they just snap together. You don’t even need glue!

Here comes the Auckland City Council truck to clean out the culvert. The driver’s got the manual: Chapter 18, Section D, Paragraph 43: “First park the truck as close as possible to the work, put down the stabilizers and warning buoys on both sides of the parked vehicle.” Down comes a big backhoe bucket and neatly uniformed men fill it up with trash, glass and shrub clippings. It’s like sweeping under the bed, nobody ever sees this place. “Shrubs should be cut vertical to the ground and tapered in at the base, with the top cut flat and the edges gently rounded.” Out of sight or not, it’s the cleanest culvert in town. At the water’s edge a house sits sprawling over its tiny foundation. “Yep I built it myself.” It balances there as Bob Dylan says “just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.”

Days upon days out there in Walluski. Nobody comes, nobody goes, I think I’m losing touch. Then the sound of wheels in the driveway. I look down and see a small red step van I don’t recognize. A teenaged boy gets out and greets me, somebody from the valley. He’s got a small problem, a pair of runaway girls in Crescent City need a ride to Bozeman, Montana. Great, just what I need, a Mann Act conviction. I don’t have a vehicle. “Sorry man, I can’t help you out.”

What a dump! Missing boards, torn up wallpaper, bits of wood and half-finished projects lying around, dirty dishes, full garbage bags stacked up, broken windows, yard-high weeds in front. I share this place with Holden, we get by, but when I bring a girlfriend around she usually finds some reason to leave fast, just when I’m ready for a little loving. Well, shit. Actually, I’m not worried because real estate prices in Astoria are skyrocketing and we’ll make a fortune on this place. Life is too short to be cleaning house all the time.

Ah the fast life, bopping around the big city, racing around on yachts. All the beautiful people. Driving somebody else’s car, it just wants to go and go. I have to slam on the brakes just to stay under the speed limit. Now that I’m in with the in crowd I get to see my Sabrina. She’s 19, well-heeled, a bit tough around the edges, looking slightly used and seedy but self-sufficient. She’s wearing a top that’s short and doesn’t fasten in the front, so that when she raises her arms I can see her little apple breasts. We have a pleasant conversation and don’t really say anything. Life is a hustle, and there’s no time to fool around. Bangs and eye makeup, the body in its prime, the mind washing dishes, and the soul taking a nap. Then it’s on to Hiscock Motors, all plate glass and neon plastic.

Michael Hurley is living upriver somewhere, and I manage to book him into the Lewis & Clark Civic Theatre for a one-night-only concert. Wow, I’m really stoked. I pull up to the theatre in the afternoon to get ready. It was supposed to be the week before, but Hurley was too drunk, and there was some other problem on our end. The stage is pretty big, like the ones at the College, some conga drums, a grand piano, and a synthesizer. I want to get somebody to clear the marquee and put up Hurley’s name, but Pierce won’t do it. I tell him: “Tonight could be a complete bust, or it could be an incredible evening.” He still doesn’t want to do it. Somebody drops the curtain and starts fooling around with it. I start bellowing so loud it wakes me up.

Too bad, I miss the concert, but now it’s the Democratic convention, and it’s a Kiwi-style circus with everybody running around representing some disadvantaged faction or other. Charles is some kind of official delegate. There is a fat black man in his late 30s walking around looking for a job. He tells me he has a master’s degree in obfuscation and, although a bit older than most of the delegates, can bullshit with the best of them. I tell him that the California delegation has just arrived, and they seem to have quite a bit of money. He ends up working with Charles and sharing his stipend. They also hire a bespectacled but quite attractive Norwegian lady with beautiful legs straight from Vulcan Lane. Engineering an entire society is a complicated business!

Another goddamn night sleeping in the front seat of the goddamn Datsun. In the morning I have to sit for an exam at the hospital. They make me climb up a goddamn tree so somebody can draw a portrait of me looking like a goddamn monkey.

At last I find myself in bed with a woman. I put my hand on her waist and caress her gently through the sheet. She responds not at all, it’s as if we were sharing the bed like you’d share a table in a crowded lunchroom, politely ignoring each other. I jostle her a bit to get her legs apart, and smearing her pussy with baby oil I say, “Excuse me,” as I slide right in. It feels so good. Why does she not respond? As I climax quietly she mutters “Do you come here often?” I grab a ride with a volatile young man and his girlfriend. I ride in the back seat. Suddenly I realize that my fiddle is missing and so is my test paper. We search the car to no avail. The young man is turning nasty. I must have left it at the restaurant where I went with Harlow. I’d nibbled off other people’s plates and then as they were closing I negotiated a special deal on what they had left: snow peas on toast. Delicious.

Out to sea with the Ring family, I got us a guitar and then lost it. We make land-fall in a place where I find my brother living in a cheap hotel room full of dogs. We go to the movies, and as usual I lose my clothes and have to run home. Samoan Joe fishes the nearby river that runs through this fairly big city. His boat has a lot of heavy machinery on it. I stop off to visit the Leopold family, who keep a pretty fancy house. I need a shower, but I can’t seem to get one. Finally, I get cornered by a horse with long dog teeth and I have to holler for help. The horse turns into a woman. Rocinante goes sailing after Hoolihan leaves his garbage on my boat, including a soggy pack of Camels, but the sonofabitch keeps my red shorts, so I go for a fun hike with Lena and Nettie. Down the trail we come to a bad corner with loose rocks. I struggle with a big boulder that finally goes crashing down, narrowly missing someone below. Then an elevator comes up to fetch us, and I ride down the cliff-face clinging to the outside.

The South Pacific

Posted on March 19, 2018 by Joseph Stevenson

Samoa to Tonga to New Zealand and Tahiti • December 1979 – March 1981

Vehia

“Around the World on a Shoestring” began in June 1979 when I left Astoria, Oregon with a one-way ticket to Hawai’i and $200 in my pocket. My adventures in Hawai’i and how I got south of the equator are described at length in the piece “Apprenticeship” posted previously on this blog. “South Pacific” takes up the story as I arrive in a Western Samoan village as the invited guest of a young fisherman returning home for a visit, and follows me to New Zealand on one sailboat and to Tahiti on another. The piece ends as I leave New Zealand on a third yacht headed for Australia as a Tasman Sea cyclone threatens.

This is a pretty straightforward account of what it’s like to travel to faraway places with little or no money, relying on one’s own resourcefulness and ingenuity to survive and find a way from one place to another — at least what it was like in the 80s, it would be different in 2018 I’m sure. There are not a lot of philosophical asides, few jokes, not much navel-gazing or scrutiny of my own shortcomings, but plenty of judgement of others and opinionated rants. Popeye was my mentor in those days: “I yam what I yam.” To others who might want to try traveling “on a shoestring,” I would advise you to do it when you are young enough to put up with a lot of discomfort but old enough to have some significant survival skills.

Joseph Stevenson • Astoria, Oregon • March 2018

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The author in 1981.

Joe’s mother was as surprised to see Joe as she was to see me, but she greeted me warmly and so began my nine-month love affair with the land and people of Samoa. The extended family of Joe Wulf consisted of nearly 20 souls under one roof: Joe’s father and mother, his youngest sister Star, his elder sister Marcella, her husband Faaumu, and 10 of their 12 children. Faaumu was 36 years old and Marcella one year younger, the whole family Catholic. The Samoans are solidly Christian these days, and of various denominations. It is about the only aspect of “Western” culture that they have embraced wholeheartedly.

Probably because most of the children were still too young to do much work, another teenage boy and girl lived with the Wulf-Faaumu clan, borrowed from another family. In Samoa children are frequently passed around. This in no way implies a lack of love and care, often it is the child’s own wish. A child is not expected to stay where he is not wanted, needed or happy. The Samoans love children to a fault, and are much more gentle, tolerant and affectionate with them than in the average American family. Faaumu and Marcella’s second child was living with relatives in American Samoa and going to school there, and child number 11 had been given to another family when still an infant. One of the first things I noticed about the Wulf family was the degree to which Star, a Downes Syndrome woman in her 30s, was integrated into the life of the family. She was an important working member of the family, cleaning, sweeping and tending to the smallest children with boundless patience and affection. She spoke very little, but she learned to say my name and did so every time we met around the house. Star gave, and received, a lot of love.

Clockwise: the author, Joe’s mother & father, Joe’s sisters Star and Marcella, and her husband Faaumu with their youngest child Pouli.

Never have I experienced such hospitality as I was shown in Poutasi, especially considering the slender and severely taxed resources of the Wulf clan. The Samoans have strong traditions of hospitality and a guest is waited on hand and foot. To house a guest does honor to a family in the eyes of the village, and one is not encouraged to reciprocate in any way. All my attempts to help out in the ways I am accustomed: washing dishes or clothes, or helping around the house and garden, met with severe disapproval, and eventually I just relaxed and let it happen. I was thin as a rake at this point from lean days in Hawai’i, and I couldn’t have come to a better place to put on some weight.

The Samoans love to eat. All of their coins are adorned with pictures of food items. They generally eat only twice a day, but when they do they really put it away. My gargantuan appetite was the most Samoan thing about me, and they enjoyed stuffing me to capacity with every sort of food available. The staple foods are taro, breadfruit, and boiled green bananas supplemented with various vegetable greens, fruit, coconut cream, eggs, fish and a wide assortment of shellfish and other sea life from the reef. Occasionally a pig is roasted in the earth oven or “umu”, or perhaps a chicken, or a goat.

They had me try everything. I learned to love fish heads and raw urchins with their spines still’s waving about. The only thing I never cared for was fermented sea cucumber guts, but most of it was delicious. At the table you never have to ask for more, your plate fills up automatically and is generally as full when you finish as it was when you started eating. Later, back in American Samoa I received a letter from Poutasi which included the lines: “You are the number one eater we have ever seen!” — a remarkable statement coming from a Samoan.

Sunday after church is a weekly feast — always an umu on Sunday. No one works on the Sabbath, you can actually be fined by the village if you do, so everyone just eats and goes to church, sometimes two or three times, with in-between naps. The nap is another Samoan institution. I have always envied people who can flake out at a moments notice and cop a bit of rest and the Samoans are expert. They tend to do the hardest work in the dawn hours, eat a huge brunch late in the morning, nap and take it easy in the midday heat, finish up work in the late afternoon, gorge again at supper time and then early to bed.

My fiddle made me an instant celebrity in the village, violins simply don’t exist in Samoa and no one has ever seen one before except in pictures. I was often called upon to play for curious people and neighbors who dropped in to see the “palagi” (the Samoan word for Caucasians). It being December, Christmas carols were quite popular and I found that most of them came quite easily on the fiddle. Most Samoans can play guitar or ukulele, and I got to sit in on some of the fia fia music parties. I soon discovered that the Samoans have their own version of “Jambalaya”, all about food of course, and we played that one a lot. “Home on the Range” is another song well-known in the Pacific Islands for some reason. Probably the most popular contemporary song is “Rivers of Babylon”. By and large Samoan music is vocal, and they love group singing in rich harmonies. The children’s choirs have a brilliant, vibrant sound that goes right to your marrow and brought tears to my eyes the first time I heard it. Faaumu was the leader of his church choir and I was exposed to a lot of fine hymn singing both in church and at home.

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I thrived on the village life, learning to eat with my fingers and sleep on a mat on the floor, certainly cooler than a bed. My first visit lasted five days, and I returned to Poutasi two weeks later for Christmas and New Year’s. I arrived Christmas morning with a box of toys for the kids and a bottle of 151 Bacardi for Faaumu. Faaumu took me and the bottle to a neighbors house where we settled down to some serious drinking. The Samoans mix their booze with lots of water in a big tea kettle. The drinkers — there were about a dozen on this occasion — sit in a circle and drink until it’s all gone. I didn’t last very long. I have vague memories of playing a bowling game where you roll a breadfruit at some tin cans, and later sitting in the top of a tree laughing fit to bust at the efforts of Faaumu and his friends to get me down. When I got back to the house Joe’s mother handed me a bar of soap and a towel and pointed to the river. Faaumu didn’t get home till the next afternoon.

One night as we sat chatting in the moonlight they asked me to invite my mother to visit them in Poutasi. By this time they had found out that my mother lived alone, unthinkable in Samoa, and I suspect they were trying to cover for me, such a negligent son to go off and leave his mother. The more I thought about this invitation the more I thought that perhaps my adventurous mother might accept the invitation and have a great time to boot. So upon my return to American Samoa, where I now had a job painting a house for two dollars an hour, I sent off a 17-page letter of invitation and description of the scene in Poutasi.

Joe Wulf & Janet Stevenson in American Samoa.

Sure enough, in late March my mother flew into Pago Pago, spent a few days with the Kneubuhls, old family friends from Southern California days, and then we set out by ferry for Western Samoa. I had spent a great deal of time and energy worrying about this adventure: what if there was an accident or some kind of medical emergency? As it turned out I was the one who caught a cold and spent a lot of time in bed with the sniffles, while my 67-year old mother spent most of her time skin diving out on the reef. I literally couldn’t keep up with her. Faaumu took took us out to a little island half a mile offshore owned by his family. One of their few sources of hard cash was taking day parties of picnickers out to Nusafe’e. Nusafe’e is the tropical isle you’ve always dreamed about being stranded on, preferably with an intimate friend. About the size of a football field, on one side the shore is rocky and on the other white sand, with beautiful reefs all around it. Coconut palms cover the island, and are so tall relative it’s diminutive size that from shore it looks something like a green cake with little white feet. A few of Faaumu’s relatives are buried there but it is otherwise uninhabited, and I ruminated about returning in my old age with a few pigs and chickens to plant nine bean rows. My mother has some great photos of Nusafe’e and Poutasi that I’m sure she’d be glad to show to anyone who can find the leak in her water line. [This offer has expired.]

Returning from Nusafe’e (in the background) — Faaumu at the helm.

Life in American Samoa is not quite as traditional but despite 60 years as an American territory, except for television, soda pop and printed T-shirts, even in the American sector the Samoans remain largely unaffected by American culture and customs. Samoan is still the language of choice, and fa’a Samoa still dictates all the important social, political and family structures. Two dollars an hour doesn’t sound like much, but in Western Samoa wages are more like two dollars a day, and on my small salary I could live and save enough for the occasional trip to Poutasi. Eventually I got a place to myself, a tin-roofed shed in the corner of the Kneubuhl family compound/estate/plantation, surrounded by a lush assortment of fruit and flowers. I called it “my little brass shack.” I could actually reach out my window and pick papayas off the tree. I ate lunch daily from the family’s ample leftovers at the house I was painting, bathed from a rain barrel, cooked dinner on a little Primus stove Mrs. Kneubuhl lent me, and in the evenings watched the enormous fruit bats flitting about in the moonlight.

Since Samoan houses have no walls, driving along the road at night you often see them glowing with the ghostly light of television. Wireless communication is the modern wonder in much of the world, and the traveler is continually surprised by unexpected often paradoxical juxtapositions, cross-cultural tableaux. A year later I hiked 5 km into the hills of Bali where most of the small children had never seen a Caucasian person, to find my hosts listening to a BBC broadcast of Stefan Grossman playing Blind Willie Johnson records.

Back in 1980 television came to American Samoa in the form of videotapes flown in from California and broadcast a week later. Every night you saw the NBC nightly news from a week ago. The only live show was a short news program without any visuals, and so it was that the day Mount St Helens erupted, announced on the live news, the last item on the week-old video: “Scientists observing Mount St Helens today predicted that a major eruption would take place within a week.” It was a bit eerie. I was really put out to be missing all the action. Turn around for one minute and a volcano goes off in your backyard! Everybody sent me photos, it must have been the most photographed volcano of all time, and my house-sitter Winley Zanetto back in Astoria sent me some ashes off my own roof. I ate them and felt more a part of things.

But far and away the most popular television show in Samoa is the wrestling from Hawai’i. I don’t know how many of you watch pro wrestling – my grandfather did – but the Samoans are crazy about it. It doesn’t hurt that there are lots of Samoan wrestlers these days, generally festooned with the traditional tattoos solid from the midsection to the knees: big, and tough and mean. In Hawai’i of course they are generally cast as the bad guys, so to keep up the interest they usually win the match. Well there is nothing the Samoans like better than watching one of their own demolishing one or more handsome, clean-cut palagis. One night I saw a 300 pound tattooed Samoan with a wild head of hair take on two palagis and pin them both simultaneously. When it’s time for the wrestling broadcast in Samoa the streets are empty. Towards the end of my stay in Tutuila, the largest island in the American group, the power generating facilities were breaking down so regularly that all the offices on the island were forced to turn off their air conditioning, a real trauma for the white-collar crowd. All television broadcasting was discontinued except for Sunday night wrestling. Never mind air conditioning, if they ever canceled the wrestling there would have been an uprising.

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Around this time I had hatched a plan to build musical instruments as I traveled on, using whatever materials were locally available and giving the finished instruments to my hosts as a way of repaying their hospitality. With this in mind I was assembling a small tool kit and working on three stringed instruments as well as experimenting with making flutes out of bamboo. The first instrument I had started in Hawai’i, it was to be a fiddle with the body made of two intersecting coconut shells. At the time I was looking for ways to increase my earnings as a busker, and I figured a playable instrument of this kind would attract a lot of attention. I finally finished this instrument in Samoa, also two ukuleles: one made from a Philippine mahogany cigar box, and the other from a big Poutasi coconut shell with a sharkskin top. The sound of the coconut fiddle was disappointing, I think it needed a different top, but I didn’t have the heart to tear it apart so I just shipped it home to Astoria where it still hangs on the wall. The cigar box uke, which looked very sharp and played beautifully I gave to the Kneubuhls, and the little sharkskin uke traveled on with me.

That’s “Leroy” on the left.

People always used to ask, “What’s that thing called?” and I never had an answer until one day a little girl in New Zealand said to me, “Anything at our house that doesn’t have a name we just call Leroy.” And so little three-stringed Leroy became my traveling companion for the next year and a half. Small, sturdy and remarkably loud for his size, Leroy served me well, and only when I started traveling overland in Indonesia and found that I absolutely had to reduce my traveling weight was I persuaded to put Leroy in a box and send him on the slow boat to Astoria. I also used my new tools to repair a guitar that I spotted in a store with one whole side kicked in. They gave it to me for $15 – it had been brand-new – and when I got it back together I left it in Poutasi with Faaumu’s family where it got a lot of action. Eventually when it came time to travel on, it became obvious that I couldn’t pack all those tools around, so I had to content myself with a Swiss army knife, a few warding files, and a bit of sandpaper sufficient to turn out the occasional flute.

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Early in 1980 I took a five week sabbatical from house painting to take a job bonito fishing, same as my friend Joe Wulf, though not on the same boat. Two young Samoans and I set out every day at dawn in a 25 foot outboard powered catamaran and trolled around Tutuila island for about 6 to 10 hours depending how the fishing went. What you do is watch for birds circling and diving and head for that spot; rarely do you pick up a fish unless there are birds around. We went full throttle all the time, stopping only to pull in a fish using big wooden reels. Generally the fish were about 3 to 5 pounders, though we’d occasionally get a 20-pound yellowfin tuna or the odd shark. Sometimes the birds and the fish were moving just a little bit faster than the boat could go and we’d chase them for miles without landing a fish. Sometimes there was just nothing, and we’d shut down and nap for a few hours, or swim, or play the ukulele I’d bought for $10 in Pago Pago. I bought the uke about the same time I started living with the fisherman in Faga’alu village. I let it be known that I didn’t mind anyone using it as long as it stayed in the village, and that little uke was busy from dawn till late at night every day of the week. If I wanted to play I could generally stick my head out the window, hear it playing somewhere in the distance and retrieve it.

Ukes being so small are not only quite easy to pack around but less fragile than a guitar, and mine never came to any harm. I absorbed a lot of Samoan music in the month I spent in Faga’alu, and became quite fond of the Samoan popular music broadcast by the local radio station “WVUV — The Power of Polynesia”. After persistent inquiry I found out that these were not commercial recordings. The songs the radio broadcast were were recorded at the station and I doubt that the groups were paid. Radio-cassettes being cheap and popular, Samoans made their own tapes from the radio and played them all the time at home and in the colorful little “chicken-catcher” buses that scurry about the island, each of which boasts a leather-lunged sound system. Some of the songs came from afar like “Jambalaya” and “Crying Time” but with new Samoan lyrics, most were original compositions. I loved the beautiful harmony singing and the tasteful acoustic guitar work. Since my departure from Samoa some of these groups have recorded in the studio and commercial tapes and records are now available, but I treasure the memory of that lovely music played and disseminated for free, a truly “popular” music with no commercial angle. [WVUV is still on the air today but the music has acquired an unappetizing gloss. The guitars have been replaced for the most part by synthesizers and there’s a GarageBand feel to all of it. The local news is still interesting to listen to. Yes I’ve been streaming WVUV as I edit this piece.]

One of my fellow fishermen Filipo was a hot guitar and ukulele player, though he didn’t seem to own an instrument, at least not with him in American Samoa. Like Joe and most of the other fishermen he was from Western Samoa, over in the other territory trying to make some money for his family back home. American Samoa serves this function for Islanders from a large area of the Pacific. The US government sends something like $60 million a year down there (the population of American Samoa was only 30,000 at the time), and some of it gets siphoned off to the benefit of people from Western Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Niue and the Tokelaus. The medical care at Pago Pago hospital is something between free and extremely cheap, and again many of the needy come from afar. (Me for example, more on this later.) Filipo used to play “Roll Out the Barrel” on my uke, his hand a blur, using a matchstick for a pick. Sometimes he would stop quite suddenly in the middle of a song having improvised some witty verse, and leap up with a great whoop while everybody rolled with laughter. Good times. I managed to record some tape of Filipo and other Faga’alu folk playing and singing, sometimes with my rudimentary accompaniment.

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A few words on the subject of communication, the language barrier. English is taught in all the schools of both Samoas, and in fact until recently the Samoan language was not officially used or taught at all in the schools of American Samoa. The fact that you find very few Samoans who can actually speak the English language I consider a measure of how tenaciously they have stuck to their own language and culture. Everybody knows a little English, but all ordinary discourse is carried out carried on in Samoan. It was possible for me to communicate fairly well using some basic English, a lot of body language and pantomime, and a small assortment of Samoan nouns and adjectives, although – and I’m not proud of this – in nine months I never learned to make a proper sentence.

When I went fishing with the boys I learned the words for line, hook, birds, motor and the names of the various fish and so forth. They didn’t know much more English than I did Samoan but we got along fine. Not to say that it wouldn’t have been quite a different experience to have been able to chat with them in their own language, but it’s remarkable how much you can communicate without a lot of words. In fact occasionally the language barrier was sort of fun. They used to do a lot of singing on the boat, and my name (Iosefa) used to pop up regularly in their songs, so I used to retaliate by improvising songs in English prominently featuring their names. Occasionally things got pretty wild and we used the hardwood sticks we used to quiet the fish and beat rhythms using every part of the boat for a drum.

One day on the way home I dozed, half-listening to one of the guys singing a melancholy air when I suddenly realized that he was harmonizing with the steady drone of the outboard motor. I began to experiment with this idea, experiments which evolved into a song contrasting my experiences in Hawai’i and Samoa, and dedicated to songster Michael Hurley.

“I went to old Hawai’i, the people there are rich,
Or else they’re on the welfare, but you can’t tell which is which.

They hit me in the back with a bottle of beer, I was walkin’ in
the ditch,
They got no use for a fiddlin’ man and a travelin’ sonofabitch.

(Chorus)

And it’s fa’a Samoa, I couldn’t ask for more,
Eatin’ with my fingers and sleepin’ on the floor.

Now if you got no money Hawai’i is the pits,
Unless you’re a sweet little honey with a great big pair of tits.

So it’s goodbye Hawai’i, aloha, lotsa luck,
I’m off to Pago Pago with a fiddle and 100 bucks.

I spend all day on a fishin’ boat a couple of miles from land,
Chasing down the aku (bonito) and pullin’ em in by hand.

Now when you’re on a fishin’ boat, boy you got no band,
You sing with the outboard motor, jump and clap your hands.

I think about Michael Hurley, back in the States somewhere,
He was “Goin’ to Polynesia”, and I wonder if he ever got there.

When you come to Samoa the booze is duty-free,
A fifth of ol Jack Daniels, just $7.63.

Now this is the end of this ol song, it’s been one helluva day,
We’re coming in with 58 fish to Faga’alu Bay.”

I recorded this one day on the boat with the original outboard motor accompaniment and sent the cassette to Mr. Hurley along with some other Samoana in care of his sister in Vermont.

So back to the subject of language and communication. I think that most places in the world you will find at least a few people who speak a bit of English, and if you speak slowly and distinctly, sticking to literal sorts of constructions and as much as possible avoiding the colloquialisms that English is rife with, that you will get along okay. In other words don’t let the language barrier scare you off from traveling. Pantomime is also extremely useful. In fact if someone were contemplating an extended trip such as mine, I couldn’t think of a better preparation than studying mime or at least playing a lot of charades. Someone highly skilled in pantomime could not only make money in the street, but communicate and entertain anywhere in the world. It would be a fabulous way to travel requiring practically no extra gear. Of course music is also a universal language and has been a vital key to my trip, both as a source of income and a way to relate to people.

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Bonito fishing was a paying job but I averaged less than $50 for a six-day week and eventually the pressure of poverty dictated a return to the less exciting but more lucrative house painting that was slowly driving me to drink. 151 proof Bacardi rum was $3.74 a quart downtown at the duty-free store and my letters and journals from that time tend to bear the stamp of the demon. I was rescued from this downhill slide by a boatbuilding job in Pago Pago village. The biggest sporting event of the year in Samoa is a boat race featuring 90 foot ‘whale boats’ with 46 oarsmen, a captain on the tiller, and a drummer in the bow beating out very complex rhythms on a big biscuit tin. The race usually takes place on April 17th, the anniversary of the date the chiefs of Tutuila put their island under the territorial umbrella of the USA in the year 1900. At the time, the Americans were interested in Pago Pago as a Naval base, but after World War II the base was closed, and since then American Samoa has functioned primarily as a distribution point for Yankee dollars to Polynesia, and a way for Islanders to get into the US. There are now as many Samoans in California as there are in Samoa.

Anyway, in 1980 the US Air Force sent a skydiving team to assist in the celebration of “Flag Day” (or “Dependence Day” as I dubbed it), and apparently the night before there was a wild party somewhere on the island attended by the entire Air Force crew. Afterwards at least one man was too hungover to make the skydiving exhibition the next morning, and lucky for him. After discharging two groups of divers, the plane made an unscheduled third pass down the bay and ran smack into a large steel cable that spans the harbor. The tail was sheared off and the plane crashed into Tutuila’s only hotel, demolishing the west wing and killing all seven men still on board. Fortunately most of the hotel guests were downtown watching the show and only one unlucky tourist perished.

A faded postcard shot of downtown Pago Pago taken about 100 feet from where the plane crashed. The path of the fateful cable is indicated by the arrows.

The race was postponed till the 4th of July and the island went into mourning. It was quite a long time before the story of the wild party trickled down the grapevine; it may not be true, but I never did hear a different explanation of what happened.

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The village of Pago decided to make use of the extra time to build themselves a new boat (called a ”fautasi”) and hired a young American yacht builder who had temporarily settled there while his wife had their first baby. This was to be the first fautasi built with modern plywood and epoxy technology, and Larry Potter the builder, who I’d met in Faga’alu Bay where he lived on his trimaran, hired me at the hefty sum of five dollars an hour to act as sort of a working shop foreman while he spent much of his time zipping around on a motorcycle chasing down materials. I had four young men from the village working under me, and they turned out to be a most difficult lot. I tried to live in the boathouse while the work went on. There were a few villagers who brought me food or took me home for the occasional dinner, and were cordial and appreciative of my efforts, but my “helpers” were no help at all, snotty assholes who succeeded in making my life in the boathouse so miserable that I had to look for another place to live.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the folks who took me in adopted me totally, and I became like a member of their family. Pepe Lam Yuen was half Chinese and half Samoan, a biker, weightlifter and former badass turned Mormon. He had finally married a really lovely girl, and their first baby had just turned one when I came on the scene. They lived in the back of a dingy old gymnasium about 20 yards from the boathouse, where every afternoon incredible co-ed volleyball games took place. Upstairs in the back was a weightlifting room managed by Pepe, who also worked as a carpenter by day and bouncer by night at the Tepatasi Club across the street. At 5 o’clock the weightlifters went home and the room full of barbells and assorted exercise equipment became our living room. Pepe and the other bodybuilders and boxers who worked out at the gym were a welcome change from the badmouth, skinny-ass punks I had to work with all day. Pepe and his friends had no need to prove how tough they were, they were tough. One was the South Pacific middleweight champion. As a lot they were the sweetest, gentlest folks I’ve met to date on this road.

The Lam Yuens

Pepe’s wife, Papauta, was one of those rarities, a stunningly beautiful woman without a bit of nonsense about her — gentle, considerate, unselfconscious, friendly and unspoiled. In the process of inviting me to live with them, Pepe in his halting English said, “I want…to share… my wife with you…” and my heart turned flip-flops. He didn’t mean what you’re thinking, but they truly opened their hearts to me, and it is such experiences that make this kind of journeying worthwhile for me. Baby White (born on “Whit Sunday” or Pentecost in the Anglican church) took to me right away, and we spent many delightful hours together. White took to almost anybody. One day I walked into the gym and found White in the arms of a woman I hadn’t seen before. I asked her, “Do you know where Papauta is?” “Who’s Papauta?” she replied. A bundle of mail I received later in Northern Sumatra when I was writing this account included a Christmas card from the Lam Yuens with a photograph of the family with Pepe’s new motorcycle and White in a pretty red dress well on the way to displacing her mother as the prettiest girl in Samoa. Papauta wears a T-shirt that says “Sonic Booms Kill Blue Coots.”

We had only five weeks to build this fautasi and I put in many long hours in the boathouse. Evenings with the Lam Yuens were a real pleasure after the rigors of the day. At this point, having learned of the cheap hospital services in Pago and having saved a few bucks from the boat job, I arranged to have an operation to correct a small umbilical hernia incurred from lifting an engine block in Hawai’i.

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When the boat was finished I entered the hospital and went under total anesthesia for the first time in over 20 years. It’s kinda scary to think about, you can’t be absolutely sure you’ll ever come back. They stuck a needle in my arm and my brain went down in a black whirlpool. The next thing I knew I was being shifted to a cart for transport back to the ward, and there was a great pain in my belly. The next few days went by in a Demerol haze. Pepe and Papauta came bearing fruit and fried chicken, the Polynesian middleweight champion brought me flowers. He had the softest handshake imaginable.

The old fautasi, with my foot for scale, patterned after the whaleboats of yore. The new fautasi under construction, much lighter and faster, is under the shed roof behind.

The day after the operation the new fautasi won the race hands down, but by then I was fed up to here with the Pago boys and would rather have heard that they’d all drowned or something. I had come to regard Pago Pago Bay as the ass hole of Samoa, where most of the highrollers and would be highrollers hung out trying their best to be like the angry punks you find in Hawai’i, where indeed many Samoans have migrated. There they give the pissed off Hawaiians someone to fight besides tourists, and the Samoans give good battle. On occasion it’s gotten so bad that they’ve had to close the schools…but I digress.

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After five days in the hospital I moved onto a yacht recently returned from a circumnavigation. “Naomi” was a 47 foot steel yawl, a veritable tank of a boat that had carried a family of four safely around the world. It felt like the right place for me. The plan was to rest up while my belly mended, and look for a job crewing on a yacht to New Zealand, Australia or some such place. I had already been in Samoa nearly 8 months, and it was high time to hit the road again. By the way my total bill for the operation came to only $93.

Actual painting of “Naomi,” from Mogens’ Facebook page. He is now 88 and still in Pago Pago.

The Ring family, originally Norwegian now naturalized Americans, were taking a welcome holiday on dry land after six years on the boat, and were glad to have someone looking after Naomi. I love living on boats — the gentle motion of the liquid world, the ebb and flow of the tide. On Sundays I went to church with the Lam Yuens and feasted back at the gym afterwards. After a nap we’d watch the wrestling on TV and wrestle with White. Trying to wean them from their soda pop habit, every week I brought big bottles of fruit juice: apple, orange, apricot, pear, pineapple, prune, grape, cranberry, whatever I could find. Pepe would dress me up for church in his flashy clothes as I didn’t really own a respectable set myself. I rattled around in Pepe’s clothes but nobody seemed to notice. One Sunday I took the dinghy from Naomi and drove Pepe, Papauta and White all around Pago Pago Bay. White loved it and kept trying to jump into the water.

After a month the Rings decided to move back to the boat so I shifted to another, smaller yacht, which I shared with Don Carr, an American engineer who had deserted the US five years before when his marriage fell apart, vowing never to return. He was also looking to get to New Zealand, and eventually a job came our way. “Desiderata” was a 50 foot ferro-cement ketch from New Zealand which had set out about five months previous intending to cruise to Canada with the owner, his wife and assorted crew. We were told that the wife had gotten so seasick that she’d flown back to New Zealand swearing she’d never again set foot on Desiderata, and the owner was shopping around for a crew to take the boat home.

We eventually found out the hard way that basic maintenance on the boat had been neglected for many years, and under the shiny new paint lay many problems. Of course Don and I didn’t know these details at the time. At first the owner was going to make the trip with us, then the plan changed and he flew a hired skipper up from New Zealand to make the delivery. Of the seven people who rode Desiderata into Pago Pago Bay not one departed on her. We should have taken the hint. But it was a free trip, and I was glad to get my foot in the door of blue water yachting at last.

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One more thing: Though Samoans are by and large more polite and considerate than most people, there is one situation in which this falls away utterly – the line. If you are faced with waiting in a Samoan line, you might as well come back some other time. If you leave what we consider a normal space between you and the person in front of you, someone will immediately slide into it. If you press in closer, and remember it’s hot down there, the moment the line moves again if you’re not paying attention the same thing will happen again. Many more people will be cutting in at the head of the line or wherever they can find a friend. If you should by chance actually reach the front of the line, more than likely the window will suddenly close and you will be invited to repair to another line. In short, there is nothing you can do. Give up.

After several such experiences especially at the Pago Pago customs dock when returning from Western Samoa, I decided to make the ultimate effort. An hour before we got to Pago I was waiting with all my gear down on the usual disembarkation deck. As we neared the dock I was still the only one down there. Finally somebody clued me that I would have to go back to the upper deck, that today the immigration procedures would be carried out there. As I entered the upper deck area there was soon the usual crush of people eager to be off the boat. I fought hard for my place, I gave no quarter. I was maneuvered out of first position, but I was still close to the front, and I stuck like glue to the back of the person in front of me. Behind me a wiry five-footer had his pointy little chin dug firmly into my right shoulder blade but I hung tough. The two people in front of me seemed to have a great number of other people’s papers as well as their own and I could begin to see the handwriting on the wall, but I didn’t relax or give an inch.

By this time it had taken on the dimensions of a research project, and to slacken would have prejudiced the results. As I finally made it to the desk of the immigration officer (there were three of them working now, and perhaps half the passengers had already left the boat), he folded up his papers, took his rubber stamps and split. Knowing I was doomed but unwilling to concede, I wormed my way into the adjacent line and continued to push. I was the very last passenger to disembark from that boat, and never again did I try to get the best of a Samoan line.

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Before we leave Samoa I have to say that what I’ve written seems awfully brief and sketchy. It’s difficult to communicate just what it was I found there that affected me so strongly. Samoa represented to me an ancient and sensible way of life with enough inner strength to resist the push and hurry of the modern world. In Hawai’i I had seen the sad result of a disintegrated culture that exists only as a sort of museum piece resurrected in the hotel lounge every night at eight. The Samoans welcomed me into their world, gave me succor, and renewed my faith that perhaps the whole world isn’t doomed to Californication. A full description of fa’a Samoa would take a large book, and a complete account of my nine months there would fill another. I offer these sketches hoping you catch the flavor. There is so much more I could say about the music and dance, village dramas, the snorkeling, the food, sexual habits, marijuana, bonito fishing, and the amazing Easter I spent in Western Samoa.

I didn’t leave home in search of exotic scenery, there is precious little description here of the land and seascapes I have seen along the way. I was out to meet the folks who populate the rest of the world — good, bad and in-between — and it’s these encounters that I have focused on. Countless strangers befriended me. I have tried in my life to find ways to pass these gifts along, repay these debts to the good and kind people that comprise most of the human race. And as for the bad apples, well you learn to watch your step and later maybe rave a bit in your journal. “It takes all kinds of people to make a world,” my father used to say.

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The delivery skipper Ian McDonald had brought along his girlfriend Nicolette, and on August 25, 1980, the four of us headed south into a stiff 25-knot wind. Our boat was made of ferro-cement fully 1½ inches thick – by contrast the sailboat my friend Hank Niemi built in Astoria was only ¾ of an inch. Hence Desiderata was extremely top-heavy and rolled like a bastard. Everyone but me was instantly sick. The first sign that all was not well with the boat came as we cleared the harbor when black oil began to come bubbling up into the cockpit, making it extremely slippery and difficult to keep one’s footing at the helm. Then someone discovered a fire in the aft cabin. It seemed the exhaust pipe from the engine came up under the stern bunk and unless you removed the mattress you soon had smoldering plywood and foam rubber on your hands. In the time it took to clear the harbor and put the boat under sail we had a fire. The owner had neglected to tell us about this unique feature of his boat.

As I was the only one not throwing up at the time, I went down into that cloud of stinking black smoke with a bucket of water and extinguished the smoldering embers. Next the jib sheet block suddenly disintegrated and the now-slack jib line started cracking like rifle fire. It took Ian and Don half an hour to find a way around this. Shortly after dark Ian called us together and we took a vote whether to go on or turn back for repairs. The vote was unanimous — keep going. “Good old bricks this bunch,” I thought to myself. Then all the power went out and we had to use a flashlight to see the compass. The owner’s last words to us were, “Don’t you boys worry about a thing, this boat will amaze you.”

The next morning Ian found a Honda generator in a stern locker and managed to get the engine going long enough to get the batteries up. Times like these are transporting. Survival is the name of the game, and if everybody does their part pretty soon, no matter how sick and tired you might be you find yourself laughing at these trials sent to test your fortitude, and later the people who lived and laughed through it with you will always have a special place in your heart. I can still hear Don as he looked up from retching over the side and remarked dryly, “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.”

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Mogens Ring at 80 with Kim, one of his two beautiful daughters, teens when I knew them.

I was not feeling all that great, but at least I wasn’t vomiting, and the second day out I asked Ian if I might take some shots with the sextant. He obviously didn’t feel like getting out on deck and he told me to go ahead. Mogens Ring the circumnavigator had suggested that I study celestial navigation to make myself more useful on a boat, and with his help I had been practicing for a couple of months. I would work from his log book, plotting old sights from his trip and comparing my results with his on the charts, but as yet I had never actually taken a sight with the sextant on the open sea. Before Ian had arrived on the scene I had wondered what sort of a person he would be. Would he let me use the sextant at all? Often you find captains and navigators quite jealous and secretive about their art, but I hoped at the very least he’d give me his times and altitudes and let me compare my plotted results with his. Little did I dream that I would get to do all the sextant work and get to plot the whole trip myself, but that’s just what happened.

Ian was about my own age, came from an upper-class New Zealand family and bore the marks of a good education. He’d spent a number of years sailing around the Pacific and exuded the kind of quiet confidence in the face of adversity that was just what we needed. He did his own plotting by dead reckoning (or “DR”), using my shots to confirm our position, but he had enough confidence in his own abilities and in mine to let me jump into offshore navigation with both feet. For this I’ll always be grateful.

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By the third day the list of things wrong with the boat had gotten so long that we were officially headed for the Tonga Islands for repairs. The weather had moderated somewhat and everybody had his appetite back, but water was leaking into the boat from both the hull and the decks, and the bilge pumps were packing up one by one. There was a short in the electrical system causing the batteries to go flat overnight and something was radically wrong with the steering. The night before we got to Tonga we finally had no port helm whatsoever (translation for landlubbers: we couldn’t turn left), and there was nothing to do but pull down the sails and tear the whole steering apart. Luckily the weather cooperated and we completed the job overnight in nearly dead calm waters. About midmorning I had us figured to be pretty close, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. I turned on the depth sounder (surprisingly it worked) and got bottom at 140 feet. Ian climbed the mast and reported coconut trees dead ahead. My first landfall.

Tonga is a group of atolls so low that the first thing you see over the horizon is the tops of the coconut trees. We motored into Nuku’alofa Harbor, home of the capital city and residence of the renowned 400 pound King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, and dropped the hook about a quarter-mile offshore in the calm waters inside the reef. We had drinks on deck as the sun set in an orange haze of umu smoke and the sounds of singing drifted out from the shore. It was a picture postcard ending to a hellfire trip.

Nikki & Ian in happier days.

After one day of rest for everybody, Ian sent off a 14-page letter to the owner detailing the misadventures of our five day passage and the repairs needed for the safe completion of the trip, and we set to work. Having an engineer around was quite handy, and Don set out to unscramble the rats-nest wiring in the engine room. For a while it seemed like we were going backwards, finding things wrong that we didn’t know about already, and Ian finally hired a professional boat surveyor to assess the condition of the boat, partly to protect himself should the owner get obstreperous or try to blame him for the difficulties we experienced. (This is exactly what did happen later.) The surveyor found a quantity of diesel fuel in the engine sump, indicating a problem with the injectors and a potentially deadly situation. Diesel in the oil drastically reduces its lubricating effectiveness causing overheating. If the overheating should go unnoticed the engine could conceivably explode sinking the boat instantly like a stone. This boat was made of stone after all. Nicolette had to fly home as she was a schoolteacher and had not expected to be away so long. Ian, Don and I toiled on, keeping detailed accounts of the work we did.

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Ian’s letter to the owner took some time to reach him and when it did he was grievously offended. He and his wife jumped on a plane and breezed in on us without warning one day saying, “What have you done to our boat??” In the two weeks we had already worked trying to get Desiderata seaworthy again we had developed considerable animosity towards this fellow who had stupidly let his boat go to the dogs, and even more stupidly thought he could sail it across the Pacific regardless, and then jumped ship leaving us to get his rotten hulk home for him without telling us anything about all the problems on the boat. Well he and Ian had a lot of hot words, threatening suits and countersuits, and three days later Ian flew home, leaving Don and I to ponder our future.

My first impulse was to get off the boat. I had a pretty clear idea by now of how many problems lurked in its bowels, and the owner was blustering to the effect that nothing was seriously wrong and that we could sail back to New Zealand without the engine if necessary. Well on some boats you could if you knew what you were doing, but Desiderata was not designed to make do without power and I was convinced that the owner did not know what he was doing. It seemed the height of foolishness to set off in a crippled boat under such a captain. I would have sailed in practically anything with Ian, but this bloke?

Once Ian left things did settle down a bit and the repairs went ahead. I kept working and developed a wait-and-see attitude. Don, who’d had much more sailing experience than me, was a calming and stabilizing influence but we both felt pretty much the same: we’d get off the boat unless it was brought up to a standard we considered reasonably safe. I depended a lot on Don to evaluate the work done.

Of course I always had my eye out for another boat. I asked one German yacht if they needed extra crew but they didn’t. Then a ragged-looking catamaran turned up with a large crew of young Kiwis (New Zealanders) and Australians. They turned out to be into folk music and country dancing, known as “bush dancing” down under, and before long we had a contra dance going on the cats big wide deck. They were delighted to have a fiddler around and invited me to accompany them to some of the outer islands in the Tonga group for more festivities but I had too much work to do on the boat.

By the time they returned to Nuku’alofa I was seriously looking for another way to New Zealand and I asked if I could go with them. That’s when I found out what this boat was all about. “Dirty Dick” the captain, who had formerly run a folk club in Auckland, had built this boat himself about five years before and set out to circle the globe financing his trip by taking along paying crew. This had worked out well for him, he was nearly home and with money in the bank to boot. His boat had nearly as many problems as ours, but I knew that at least Dirty Dick could sail. But it turned out that his jolly crew was paying as much as $20 a day for this “adventure holiday”, and I just couldn’t afford that kind of money. I did make some friends on that boat who I visited later in New Zealand and Australia including Dick’s charming and devoted girlfriend Ginny who seem to do most of the work on the boat and whom he deserted soon after arriving back in New Zealand.

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The best part about being in Tonga was the music. The Tongans are the best musicians I encountered in the Pacific, and the only ones I ever saw play the fiddle or banjo. As luck would have it, during our one-month stay there was the weeklong Heilala Festival of music and dance, and every night I wormed my way into the huge crowds of Tongans who turned out on the malae (the central city park) every night to watch and listen and carry on. I borrowed a tape machine from Don and recorded a lot of it from the middle of the crowd. There were school choirs, male and female adult choirs, string bands, and pop singers ranging from “Some Enchanted Evening” baritones to extravagantly-sequined 12-year-old Michael Jackson clones. One fellow called Rocky came out with just his guitar and sang one song in English called “How I Want You, How I Need You, Baby Blue”, one I’d never heard before and remarkable only because he had the audience howling with laughter for no reason I could discern. John Kneubuhl used to tell me that the Tongans have a very subtle sense of humor. Two little girls performed the singing square dance call to “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” just like caller Susie Holden back in Astoria.

The Tongan string bands are fantastic, usually all-male, though there was one with two girls singing. Typically three or four guitars and maybe a ukulele or two, all playing comfortable rhythm except for one lead guitar, tuned very strangely and usually played with considerable virtuosity. But the best part is the singing, creamy smooth falsetto harmonies, really ethereal stuff. I have some pretty good tapes of this music, one recorded at a party of Tongans at the Kneubuhl home in American Samoa and a couple of tapes I bought from the radio station in Nuku’alofa. Any musician thinking about a trip to the South Pacific should definitely plan to spend some time in Tonga.

But the climax came the last evening which was devoted to “floor shows”, groups who performed at the various hotels around Nuku’alofa. Some of these were enormous, perhaps 50 or 60 musicians and dancers. I will try to describe one. They brought out a piece of stage scenery that looked like the front of a big television set or maybe a wall with a big window, but all covered with green leaves. (A lot of the dancers wear costumes made of variously colored leaves sewed together, a painstaking creation you wear for one night and then throw away.) The band was stationed behind the big green TV though they spilled out around both sides. There might have been half a dozen guitars, a couple of big bluegrass banjos played hard with a flat pick and incredibly loud, one or two big tea-chest basses, assorted drums, and anyone who wasn’t dancing was back with the band singing with raucous abandon.

There were women’s group dances both standing and sitting featuring smooth flowing movement of the hands, arms, and torso, right down to the toes. The men did a lot of war dances, popular with the tourists no doubt, and some of their club-swinging dances reminded me of Morris dancers cracking their sticks together though their garb was certainly different. They were all really charged up that night. Several spears were accidentally discharged into the crowd, and at least one overenthusiastic dancer went right off the stage on his final fearsome lunge at the audience. In the later parts of each ‘show’ the specialty dancers came out, perhaps a fire or sword dancer, or some particularly lissom female. This particular group finished up with a sequence of girls dancing solo in the company of a clownish old man who kept the audience in stitches with his antics. The rest of the company was hanging around and out of the big green TV and everything was going full tilt. The funny man dancing with the girls kept grabbing at his lava lava to keep it from falling off, and at the climax when he finally lost it completely he turned out to be wearing a pair of pink satin shorts with big white ruffles, and the crowd went berserk.

After six hours of this my legs cried for mercy and I had to bail. When I got back to the boat I turned on the radio and found that they were still going strong back at the malae. It was three in the morning when the last floor show finished. Getting back to the boat after a late night like this was never easy. Since the dinghy would be back at the boat, I had to strip at the end of the wharf, swim out to the boat through the spooky dark waters twinkling with glimmers of phosphorescence, then row back in to pick up my clothes and Don’s tape machine.

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A few days later Don and Ian told me that they’d heard a fine string band in the hotel bar the night before featuring not one but two fiddles. That night I went to investigate and found five old men sitting casually around a table in the bar and playing an amazing variety of tunes, mostly old American standards like “Sioux City Sue,” “12th St. Rag,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary.” They also played a couple of interesting instrumental medleys, including classical themes with lots of counterpoint between the fiddles. I was so taken with their music that after a couple of tunes I left and walked back a mile and a half to the boat (now inside the harbor and much easier to get to) to fetch Don’s tape recorder. I was accompanied most of the way by a persistent female impersonator who kept insisting that he was a woman and trying to drag me into the bushes. By the time I got back to the hotel, the “Oldtimers Band” was about ready to go home, but they told me to come back the next night. When I did I brought Leroy with me and was immediately invited to join in.

For the next two weeks I played with the Oldtimers nearly every night. Four nights a week they played standards at the tourist hotel and two nights only Tongan songs at a little motel. This latter was a more relaxed atmosphere and a slightly different lineup featuring a lead singer who played that peculiarly-tuned lead guitar oh-so-softly with the fingers. But the real leader in both cases was obviously the old man with the battered viola. Peni Filimoehala was in his mid-60s and had owned that instrument for some 47 years. It looked like it had been demolished and rebuilt more than once, and was strung with old guitar and banjo strings, but how sweetly he played! They sang in lovely three and four part harmonies, high quavering falsettos with the kind of mellow blend that comes only with many years of singing together.

Peni Filimoehala

At the International Dateline Hotel I was able to follow the chords of the somewhat familiar tunes, but at the Friendly Islands Motel I was so blown away by the Tongan music, the like of which I’d never heard before, that I just listened, rapt. At first I used to buy beers for the band; towards the end when my pocket money was running low they used to share their beers with me. Sometimes they would come by the boat to collect me when it was time to play. The last couple of nights I had gotten familiar enough with some of the Tongan tunes to join in with my fiddle, or Peni would play mine and I his. For a while it looked like he wanted to trade instruments, he really liked my cheap Chinese fiddle. I would have given that sweet old man anything of mine he wanted but eventually he decided to stick with his old tried-and-still-true viola with its fingerboard full of hills and valleys.

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In the end Don and I decided to stick it out, and so in the last days of September the four of us set sail, Don and I hoping that at least one of our five patched up bilge pumps would survive the voyage. As we sailed south towards the “Land of the Long White Cloud” as the native Maoris call it, it soon became obvious that the main reason Desiderata’s owners had aborted their trip was that the incessant rolling of the boat kept the misses in a state of perpetual nausea. She was the “official” navigator having completed some kind of navigation class, but unlike Ian she was very jealous of her gear and wouldn’t let me use the good sextant. She was too sick to use it herself, so we plowed along on her dead reckoning which she plotted lying flat on the chart room floor.

I finally secured permission to use an old plastic sextant that I had found on the boat and fiddled with while we were tied up in Tonga. I had already established that it was inaccurate by 10 to 15 miles matter how you adjusted it, but I reasoned that if I shot three stars at roughly 120° apart, that three errors would cancel each other out and a position in the center of the resultant triangle would be reasonably accurate, more accurate in any case then the guesses of our seasick navigator. My calculations had us heading directly for the only real danger to navigation between Tonga and New Zealand, a mid-ocean reef named Minerva, according to the pilot book littered with the wrecks of many a ship. I brought this to the attention of the Captain but he didn’t seem to care. “Reef, reef, what’s another reef?” he blustered, “I’ve seen thousands of them, sailed by so close you could reach out and pick off the barnacles!” Besides, the navigator’s best guess didn’t agree with mine, but my positions continued to put us closer and closer to Minerva Reef until I could no longer get any sleep for worrying. What’s that song about the implacable will coming up against the immovable object?

Again I brought up the subject with the Captain. By this time I had us so close that to alter course wouldn’t have necessarily helped since my sextant was so inaccurate that one couldn’t say for sure at this point exactly in which direction the reef lay from our present position, but I was sure it was close. Finally the Captain prevailed upon his wife to get out on deck with the good sextant, and with him physically holding her up she took a single shot of the sun. She insisted that it had been a good shot and upon plotting the result announced that we were at least 40 miles north of Minerva Reef. Relieved but not really convinced, I was able to doze for the first time in two days.

I was awakened an hour later by some commotion on deck. The helmsman had just sighted Minerva Reef dead ahead. What a strange sight to see in mid ocean — miles of breaking surf with occasional rocks sticking up, and the odd remains of a shipwreck here and there.

Minerva Reef

After this I made a point of keeping my own DR, and though I was still not permitted to use the good sextant, the Captain began to take an interest in my calculations. His wife continued her own navigation, and at times our positions were 50 miles or more apart, but oddly enough the night before we made landfall in New Zealand we both worked out a position for Desiderata and the two were only a mile apart. We shook hands on that, and sure enough the next morning Piercy Island at the mouth of the Bay of Islands came popping out of the fog right on the bow and we were home safe. The passage took nine days and was, except for the Minerva business, relatively uneventful. The boat continued to leak and the bilge pumps continued to break down, but one of them hung on gamely until the end.

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Don and I stayed two nights with Desiderata’s owners and then went off to look up Ian and Nicolette who lived in a beach town about 20 miles outside of Auckland, New Zealand’s one really sizable city. At this point I was very nearly broke, and everybody told me that for work to go to Australia, so I began haunting the docks of Auckland Harbor, putting up signs at the yacht club, and prying mussels off the rocks near Ian’s house. One day Ian got offered a navigating job for a brand-new yacht to be delivered from Auckland to Papeete, Tahiti. He was tied up at the time waiting on a long-sought job on a big cargo ship, but several days later when we happened to be together in town we stopped by the customs dock to see the boat. “Vehia” was a real beauty, a 50-foot catamaran designed more for speed than comfort and destined for charter work in Papeete. The owner, a young French-Tahitian named Henri Lucas, and three of his surfing buddies had flown in a couple of weeks before to take the boat home, but it developed that the buddy who had claimed to know about navigation had all the right books but no experience whatsoever, so Henri was looking for someone to take over in that department.

Ian had been recommended to them, and when Ian introduced me as a navigator they offered me the job on the spot. I speak no French and they spoke very little English, so I was spared any detailed accounting of my previous experience (which amounted, at this point, to a total of 14 days at sea). They offered to pay all my expenses, put me up in Tahiti as long as I wanted to stay, and fly me back to New Zealand whenever I wanted to go. It was 2000 miles in the wrong direction, but what an opportunity, not only to have sole responsibility for navigating a long ocean passage, but to see the fabled paradise of Tahiti. How could I say no? Besides, they were quite a jolly bunch of guys, it looked to be a fun trip. Henri had a beautiful new Tamaya sextant and a preprogrammed navigational calculator that was the latest and greatest gadget back in 1981. [Both of these items have been obsolete for decades now; nobody uses a sextant in 2018, we all have a GPS in our shirt pocket or purse.] I had heard about this marvel and was dying to try one out. We made one trial run on the harbor, zipping along at 15 knots in a 25 -knot breeze with more than a dozen curious Auckland yachties on board. They and I were suitably impressed; I had never moved that fast on a sailboat before. The next morning, 10 days after my arrival in New Zealand, we departed for Tahiti, roughly 2200 nautical miles east-northeast.

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The weather was so rough for the first three days that we had to restrain the boat or she would leap off the tops of the waves and go crashing down into the following trough with an impact that felt like it would tear the boat apart. It was a very strong boat though, and the only weak points turned out to be the main cabin windows which for some reason had been fastened on with little screws barely ¼ inch long instead of the bolts specified in the plans. The screws began unscrewing, and little trickles of water began to seep into the cabin, the bunks and the food. We kept tightening the screws, added a few extras, and kept a tight rein on the boat for as long as we were beating into the weather. It was not a serious problem.

One issue I did have was that my Tahitian crew was freezing cold. Back in Auckland they had complained about the 60° temperature, a good 20° cooler than they were used to. Below the equator and sailing east the usual strategy is to keep at least 30° south latitude in order to catch the westerlies. Auckland is about 35° south so my directions were to steer due east and avoid the relatively windless but warmer horse latitudes to the north. However every time I went to sleep, when I woke up I found the boat headed north for reasons I was slow to figure out.

I instantly fell in love with the Tamaya sextant and probably took about three times as many shots as were actually necessary just for practice and because it was such a joy to handle such a quality instrument, like driving a Rolls-Royce. The calculator was also quite interesting to use. About the size of an eight track cassette [now there’s a dated reference], it contained much of the information usually gleaned from the yearly Nautical Almanac, right up through the year 2000. For some shots you needed neither the almanac nor the sight reduction tables, with the calculator you just punched in the time and altitude and it did the rest. For a backup system we had the reduction tables (in French), and I had a small pocket calculator with trigonometric functions on which, by punching in the equations already programmed into the Tamaya calculator, I could arrive at the same results. I found that with all the figures in front of me, what took two minutes on my calculator took 30 seconds with the Tamaya. Learning to use the $20 pocket calculator was to come in handy later.

I really took to celestial navigation. In high school I had clawed my way through a lot of higher math: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, analytical geometry, and differential calculus. At the University of Chicago I even took a crack at integral calculus, but by that time I was clearly sick of math and school, and I actually failed integral twice before giving up math forever. In any case I’ve never had the least use for all this math until at the age of 37 I got into celestial navigation. Actually with the books in front of you all you really need to do is add and subtract, but in terms of strict step-by-step procedure and the importance of accuracy, the kind of discipline that math demands is also required for reliable navigation. Geometry was my favorite branch of math, and celestial navigation is really a problem in spherical geometry. [Trigger warning: If an account of this lost art is not interesting to you, you should have already started skipping ahead in this narrative.]

The basic idea is this: with the sextant you measure the angle between the horizon and any heavenly body (except Bo Derek), and you note the exact time at which your observation took place. You then choose an “assumed position” somewhere in the general neighborhood of where you think you are, and by using the Naval Almanac and the sight reduction tables you calculate what the altitude of that particular body would have been at exactly the time you took your shot, if you had been at this assumed position. There will, of course, be a small difference between the two altitudes. The difference, in minutes of arc (60 minutes to one degree) Is the number of miles you are from the assumed position. Actually from one shot you get not a point but a line. You are, or were, somewhere on this line. You must now take another shot, establish another line, compensating for the boat’s progress in the interim, and where the two lines cross is your position at the time you took the last shot. Got that? Good.

If you’re using the sun, you have to wait 4-5 hours for it to move around to a new azimuth (point on the compass) in order to get a usable second shot, but with the stars you can take a number of shots at different azimuths at virtually the same time and get very quick and accurate results if you’re careful. Most navigators don’t bother much with the stars and planets as you have to shoot them in the 20 minutes or so at dawn or dusk when both the brightest stars and the horizon are clearly visible. You have to work fast, you have to know or be able to figure out what you’re shooting at, and the weather must cooperate. The moon can be used, but it wobbles around a lot in its orbit and requires a lot of additional corrections, increasing the chances for error, hence it has a bad reputation as a navigational aid. The sun is the popular choice. You have to look through heavy optical filters of course, but it is big and easy to find and the horizon generally bright and clear. It’s not so accurate as the stars for various reasons, and I always liked to average about five shots when using the sun. I liked the stars, and always shot them, visibility permitting.

Because the heavenly body is always drifting up or down in its orbit, the boat is moving in at least six directions at once, and you have to make sure you’re not mistaking the top of a swell for the actual horizon, it takes some practice before you start to get reliable results. With a boat rolling in heavy seas you may have to adopt bizarre positions on deck, bracing against whatever’s available while you operate the sextant. Once on the cabin top of Desiderata I was leaning back against the mast for support and I reached out with my foot for the ratlines and missed. The boat went out from under me and I dropped like a stone 4 feet onto the deck. Luckily I landed square on my feet without banging the sextant against anything and escaped with only a bruised elbow, but the physical problem of finding a stable stance from which to work is often half the battle . You can see why the modern navigator prefers pushing buttons on the GPS to falling overboard clutching his precious sextant.

Some shots are going to be better than others and you have to develop a sense of which are which. Shooting stars or even the sun on a cloudy day you might have to use that not so good shot if you don’t get another, but you keep in mind when evaluating your results that it wasn’t a reliable shot. Navigation is not an exact science. In the end it is always your best guess taking into consideration your DR, your celestial sights, possible ocean currents(essentially invisible), leeway (which way the wind is pushing you) and more. Your timepiece must be accurate and you check it regularly against the shortwave radio time signals. If it gains or loses it should do so consistently and you should know how much in case for some reason you lose the time signals. My little digital Timex gained a second a week, pretty remarkable I thought. A 4-second error in your time will put you one mile out of position. Most navigators used to get someone to hold the watch and take notes for them, then all they have to do is take the shot and call out the altitude. When I broke in on Desiderata nobody felt like getting out on deck with me and so I got in the habit of doing it all myself with the watch on my wrist, a little notebook in my pocket, and the pen in my teeth. That way at least any errors would be my own responsibility.

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My favorite time at sea would have to be the clear night. Generally everyone else is asleep and as helmsman you have two or more hours of utter solitude with the stars and the sea. The ocean is beautiful anytime, a vast empty beauty like the desert. Daytime happenings like whales and porpoises, rainbows and thunderheads, albatross escorts and sunbaths can be wonderful of course, but at night the blue dome disappears and the waters become dark shadows, and you see where you really are, adrift in the universe. With the naked eye you can just make out the smudge that is Andromeda galaxy, 100,000,000 light years away. If the boat has an autopilot you can just lose yourself in the stars, but you should be careful not to fall overboard. Henri’s sextant had such excellent optics that when the moon was full I could shoot stars all night. I sat on the cabin top steering with my foot and shooting stars by moonlight just for the hell of it.

I loved that sextant and Henri knew it. I knew that he knew it, and I also knew that he would likely swap it to me in lieu of the $740 return ticket to New Zealand if I asked, as he would not need it once back in home waters. It was a nice daydream but that sextant lived in a box the size of a typewriter and there’s no way I could have carted it around. Today I can’t believe I carted around the almanac, the sight reduction tables and even Bowditch’s “American Practical Navigator” — about 10 lb worth of books — as long as I did. Those days are over now, but back then there was a real romance to navigation. In Tonga I met a German sailor who was trying to sell a boat he had built and sailed 1½ times around the world by himself. His notice read, ”Complete with all gear and provisions. All you need is a sextant and a toothbrush.” A guy can always build another boat but you might never find another sextant that felt just right.

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Henri had provisioned with some excellent food, but not enough of it, and by the time we’d been out for about 10 days there wasn’t much left to eat but rice, salami and powdered split pea soup. We kept a fishing line trolling behind the boat but hadn’t had a hit except for one giant swordfish that instantly broke the line, and so we altered course for Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to put in for supplies. A couple of days out of Rarotonga my 38th birthday came up and the boys did me right. Jean Baptiste managed to insert a fork into a hand drill and used it to beat the batter for a birthday cake. They produced a bottle of French champagne, and when that was gone we finished off the beer and started on the rum. The weather cooperated by going flat calm and so we pulled down the sails and spent the afternoon floating drunk in mid ocean.

October 27, 1980 • Henri on the left, Baptiste to my right, with birthday cake and champagne.

The next day the wind was back and a mahi mahi hit our trolling line. This fish is legendary for its beauty and delicious flavor. You always know when you have one on the line because they jump and jump and jump. We’d had quite enough of rice and salami by now, and so the landing of the mahi mahi was anxiously attended by all. Since the catamaran has a flat deck without gunwales, once he came aboard there was a mad scramble to grab him before he managed to slither off the boat. Eventually someone got a grip on him and was hanging on for dear life to the tail of this lively 4-foot delicacy. Kiki called for a screwdriver and Jean Baptiste went to fetch one. When he returned, Baptiste tried to beat the fish over the head with the blade end of the screwdriver, a sight that made the rest of us roll with laughter. Kiki, a fisherman by trade, got the screwdriver away from JB, stabbed the fish in just the right spot, and the fight was over. Tahitians really know what to do with a fish. We had that fish raw and cooked about six different ways, and four days later we were still dining on it and giving away chunks to other yachts at Rarotonga thanks to our small refrigerator onboard. Last we ate the head, considered the greatest delicacy in the islands, and for good reason. Yes I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.

When we went to fill the water tanks we discovered we that we actually had plenty of water; someone had apparently turned off a valve somewhere, likely looking for an excuse to get off the boat for a night after two weeks at sea. We bought more food, fresh fruit, beer etc., then we all went to a nightclub where, after a lively Cook Islands floor show for the tourists, a four-piece electric band took over and played such typical bar music as “Louie Louie,” “Proud Mary” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” The Cook Islanders were quite a different lot than the Samoans. Most of them wore hot, uncomfortable and expensive trousers instead of the cheap and sensible sarong (or “lava lava” as the Samoans call it). Many of them spoke good English; I think that the Cooks are still connected with the British Commonwealth. At the nightclub I overheard one young man confide to his friends, ”What I try to do is go for the money without lowering myself you know…” Baptiste got so drunk it took some time to locate him later asleep in the bushes outside.

Baptiste was the clown of the trip, and it astonished me later to find out that he was several times surfing champion of Tahiti. Eventually I got to watch him in action, and up on a wave he was as smooth as silk, but to meet him on the street you’d think he was a stumblebum rather than an accomplished athlete. I wanted to spend another day and take a hike across the island, but the boys were in a hurry to get home, and hungover or not we pushed off the next morning. I did manage a quick trip to the post office where I was able to get myself a Cook Islands one-dollar coin, famously featuring the Queen on one side and Tangaroa the “god of the sea and fertility” on the other with his enormous dick hanging down between his legs.

It was a fast three-day run to Tahiti; one day we made 263 miles. As we neared Tahiti’s sister island of Moorea a small motor launch full of friends and family came out to meet us, and we were suddenly busy catching cans of cold Heineken, beautiful leis of fresh flowers and little packages of Tahitian delicacies. We eventually veered into a lagoon at Moorea where most of the welcoming party came aboard for the final 20-mile run to Papeete. We made this last stretch with the most favorable winds of the trip, and Vehia surfed along like a bird on the wing, bearing a happy crowd bedecked with flowers and awash in beer.

A recent photo of Vehia chartering out of Papeete.

We tied up to the seawall in Papeete which is right on the main street of town, a jolting contrast to 2½ weeks weeks on the open sea. Reporters took pictures and conducted interviews with Henri, more family and friends and curious passersby, more beer and scotch, and so it went on into the night. Baptiste took me home to a tropical bungalow straight out of somebody’s dream vacation, with its own dock, sailboat and jet ski, a gigantic bathroom with two sinks, an enormous shower with several spouts and a regular jungle of houseplants. I woke up the next morning with a bad sore throat and spent the day in bed leafing through all the articles about us in the morning papers, sensational and inaccurate in the extreme.

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Except for delicious ripe pineapples for $.25 apiece, the cost of living in Tahiti is the highest I’ve seen anywhere, but the island is also remarkably well-preserved compared to others in the Pacific, and Papeete is one of the prettiest towns ever. Not the least of its attractions are the gorgeous women, stunning blends of Polynesian, European and Asian genetics. The French are much less puritanical about intermarriage and although there are many Christian churches here you don’t find the blue laws and the Mother Hubbard clothes for women that have become the norm in many other parts of the South Pacific. The fabled French chic is everywhere in evidence. To walk around Papeete during lunch hour when all the shop girls are on the street was one delight that I could afford. Once I got over my strep, such strolls were my main recreation.

[I can’t find a photo to illustrate exactly what I’ve just described, so I’ll just post this:] oh my!

While I was recuperating at Baptiste’s, one Sunday morning on the radio I heard a Tahitian song with sort of a Guantanamera rhythm to it. The singers kept repeating something that sounded to me like “P. F. Sloan”, a name that hadn’t crossed my mind in quite some time. Remember the protest song “Eve of Destruction?” He wrote it, put out one album, and as far as I know was heard from no more. Anyway, out of this reverie was born a new song which revives the memory of P. F. Sloan. The tune is loosely based on the old calypso song “Shame and Scandal in the Family.”

“There was a call for me down at the Island Club,
My woman she mad, she say ‘Look here Bub,
I’m tired of you, yeah I’m sick to de bone,
I’m goin’ off to Hollywood with PF Sloan.’

[Chorus]

PF Sloan, PF Sloan, why don’t you leave my woman alone?
PF Sloan, PF Sloan, why don’t you find a woman of your own?

She said, ‘I’m takin’ the car and my old guitar,
PF Sloan’s gonna make me a star.
You can give all my clothes to the Goodwill,
I’ll get plenty more in Beverly Hills.’

Well I begged and I pleaded, I started to cry. She said,
‘It’s too late now daddy, goodbye!
You’re always out drinkin’, you leave me at home,
Things will be different with PF Sloan!’

About 3 in the mornin’ when they closed the door,
They found me sleepin’ on the barroom floor.
They picked me up, they heard me moan,
‘Oh my baby’s gone to Hollywood with PF Sloan.’

But when I got home, what did I find?
There sat my baby with a bottle of wine.
She said, ‘Aw Honey, I’m right here at home,
You know I’d never leave you for PF Sloan.’

Well I kissed my baby, and I took her by the hand,
When all of a sudden, the telephone rang.
I said, ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Thanks for the loan!’
It was the voice of PF Sloan!”

P. F. Sloan channeling Bob Dylan.

One night Baptiste took me to the movies to see “Tess“, the new Polanski film. It was all in French, and consequently I suppose I missed some of the detail, but I had quite a vivid reaction as follows. It seemed to me that there were two films. One was the Thomas Hardy story, beautifully shot on location, well-cast and well-produced. The other was Natassja Kinski who I could happily gaze upon for many hours without the need for any story, sets or costume, but the two films just didn’t go together. There was no way on earth I could believe she was an English peasant no matter how they dressed her or how much mud they smeared on her face. An Eastern European peasant possibly, but an English peasant, never! The fact that everyone else was so well cast only made poor Natassja stick out all the more.

I had already seen stills in Playboy magazine from her first movie, a skin flick with Marcello Mastroianni, and I‘d heard that she was living with Polanski at the time “Tess” was made. I could just imagine the preliminary dialogue. ”Roman darling, I want to do a film where I don’t have to take off my clothes, something with… class.” “Yes dear, I understand…a little lower please, more to the left, not so hard, ahhh that’s it. I think I have just the thing in mind, anyway it’s time I got away from these pervy flicks and horror shows.” I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the evening, but as a “work of art” I thought it was a monumental flop. Two years later she was posing naked with pythons for Richard Avedon. [FYI: I see that you can currently buy the 24 X 36” poster, signed by Avedon, for $900 on eBay.] Now back to the South Pacific:

With Leroy & Henri’s kids at a cookout feast.

The social life at Baptiste’s consisted of endless conversations over beer, and speaking no French after a while I got bored and moved to Henri’s where there was a nice guitar and two sweet children to keep me company. A promised trip to Moorea on Vehia never materialized but I finally managed to hitchhike a ride over there on a yacht from Lahaina, Hawai’i where I had spent many bittersweet months the year before. Captain Jimmy knew my zany friend Marina and that was introduction enough. That night some Tahitians came out to the boat with guitars and the amazingly loud little ukes carved out of hardwood with goatskin heads. The party went on until dawn by which time the cheap French rum had poisoned me right to the core.

The Tahitians are great partying people and their music is more wild and exuberant than what I heard in the western parts of Polynesia. One of the party was an American fisherman named Leo who had brought his little 22-foot power boat all the way from Hawai’i to do some exploratory fishing in Tahitian waters. By using special night fishing techniques he had already landed several broadbill swordfish to the astonishment of the locals who didn’t know that the broadbill existed in that area. Leo was one of those people who have been everywhere and done everything. Originally from Texas, he was delighted to hear some fiddle music. “Now here’s a song I’ll bet you don’t know,” he said, and was suitably impressed when I joined right in with him on the choruses of the old Ed Sanders song from the first Fugs album:

“Clara June, Clara June,
I done gived up heifer for youuuu…”

Two days later I was on the plane back to New Zealand, having failed to find a yacht or even a cargo ship to take me for cheaper. I arrived back in Auckland the last days of November and resumed my search for an Australia-bound yacht in need of crew or navigator, but by this time it was already hurricane season in the Tasman Sea and most sailors who knew what they were doing were waiting it out.

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One day Nicolette asked me if I’d like to come to school and sing for her 10-year-olds. I always have a great time in the schools and so just before Summer vacation in early December (this is the southern hemisphere remember), I came in one day with my fiddle and Ian‘s guitar. I sat with the class out on the soccer field and sang ‘When I first Came to This Land,” “Polly Wolly Doodle,“ “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago“ and a few others. During lunch hour I sat under a tree and played fiddle tunes. Afterwards we moved back into the classroom and I decided to have a go at P. F. Sloan, not exactly a children’s song but I had a hunch it might be fun. I wrote “P. F. Sloan“ in big letters on the blackboard and ask the kids to sing that much. Well they got right into it, laughed at the verses, belted out the chorus with me, and when it was over and I started to noodle up another song, one little girl spoke up shyly. “Please… could you sing… P. F. Sloan again?“ and they all started shouting “P. F. Sloan! P. F. Sloan!!“

I said OK, but I wanted them to sing a song for me first, so they did a group-and-leader song called “Goin’ On a Bear Hunt” complete with hilarious sound effects such as slogging through the mud. The second rendition of P.F. Sloan eclipsed the first, the kids even spontaneously chimed in with sound effects like the ringing telephone at just the right moment. At the end a great cheer went up and I didn’t get away from school without singing it one more time. Nicolette told me the next day the whole school was humming P. F. Sloan. If there were any complaints from parents about the type of songs their children were bringing home from school, Nikki didn’t have to deal with them as she was throwing up her job anyway and looking to do some world traveling for a year or two.

12651362_714610378675692_404479033643177071_n

Nikki ended up in Amsterdam — with husband Peter and daughter Samira.

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Wandering the docks of Auckland harbor one day I ran into Jack Russell, a salty character I’d met previously in Hawai’i. He loved New Zealand and was determined to settle there even though they’d deported him once already. I had last seen him on his way to Australia, from whence he had planned to worm his way back into New Zealand somehow. Eventually he accomplished this, and during the ride into town from the airport had proposed marriage to a girl he’d just met for the very first time. Eventually she had been persuaded, and he was now officially an “alien resident“ although he was having difficulties with his new wife who didn’t even know where he was living. He was actually living with an American girl, also married conveniently to a Kiwi; it was pretty complicated. Jack took me along to meet some musician friends of his, and I instantly had a place to stay in Auckland proper though I still spent a lot of my time with Ian and Nikki at the beach. I had already started busking on Queen Street in the heart of town and found that I could make $5-10 an hour playing solo fiddle, but my new friend and roommate Seiffe was an excellent guitarist, singer and dulcimer player, and we began to team up in the street.

The trouble with Seiffe was that he is the worst skirt-chaser I have ever known, and it was difficult-to-impossible to get him to play two songs in a row without stopping to chat up some lady, or even take off after her down the street. This probably sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not. Playing with Seiffe was fun but not very lucrative, and I made more money on my own. Another fellow from Seiffe‘s house, an Englishman name Chris, was a better partner in the street. He was more accustomed to playing folk clubs and restaurants, but when he found out how much I was making he sat up and took notice. He had an interesting repertoire including some good original material, and was a seasoned performer. With Chris I used to play fiddle with his guitar and sing harmony; sometimes I’d pick up Leroy and a kazoo and we’d do jug band tunes. We used to draw quite a crowd. After the money was split up I didn’t make any more than I did alone but it was much more fun, but Chris was drawing $50 a week from the government for doing nothing, and unless there was some pressing financial need, he was loath to hike downtown with me.

Chris had an Achilles heel however and that was alcohol. One night I saw him perform at a folk club, and though he played well he seemed awfully nervous. I was about to suggest that he have a stiff drink with me across the street between sets when I saw him filling his coffee cup with whiskey. As the night wore on he got more and more uncomfortable on stage and his guitar playing began to fall apart. He would falter, stop, start again, falter some more; it was painful to watch. Another time in a drinking session at home when we both got into hot water by drinking somebody else’s bottle of brandy when we ran out of our own booze, he literally came unglued right in front of me. I can only guess that for Chris alcohol triggered some kind of toxic reaction in his system, and after that I simply refused to play with him, in public anyway, unless he left the drink for later.

Busking — right pocket bulging, full of coins.

There were quite a few other buskers on Queen Street: old derelict harmonica players, clarinet duets, Neil Young clones, one day even a classical quintet of flute, French horn, clarinet, oboe and bassoon. There was one middle-aged Maori chap who made a bloody nuisance of himself by using a small ratty amplifier on his harmonica, turned it up to top distorted volume and accompanied himself with a tambourine he played with his foot. The only tune I can remember him playing was “White Christmas,” I think maybe there was one other, but anytime he started up in the little shoppers alley I used to frequent, it was no use to try and compete even though he might be 50 yards away. Fortunately he was rather short-winded, and if I was patient he generally didn’t last long, or at least took such long breaks between his renditions of “White Christmas” that I could sneak in a few tunes of my own. With him around I came off pretty well by comparison and may have benefited from the backlash.

Seiffe and I still worked together occasionally. He was great company, one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and a fine musician. We would sometimes go down into the concrete stairwell leading to the underground parking lot in the center of Auckland and play there. There weren’t many people around but the acoustics were amazing, and often the people who did linger to listen were generous with money, drink and smoke. We worked out some odd numbers down there including the old Doors song “Light my Fire.” With Christmas hard upon us, we worked out some Christmas carols as kazoo duets. The kazoo is actually quite an ancient instrument, and there are many medieval instruments that have that same sort of reedy, farting sound. The only trouble was that it was really difficult to keep from laughing, and it’s not possible to laugh and play kazoo at the same time. Seiffe was also a sometime poet and songwriter, and his song about the rigors of singing in a folk club is hilarious. A typical if unusually short example of his brand of humor is the line he used on every single waitress: “I’ll have a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy!“

On Christmas Eve, 1980, I played Queen St. by myself, determined to make enough money to kick back for a while. I’d heard about a folk festival coming up between Christmas and New Year’s out on a sheep farm in the green hills south of Auckland and I wanted to go. I’d been told that it would be “semi private,“ for musicians and folk club members only rather than a commercial operation. I like folk music — there I said it — and it sounded like just the thing I was looking for. Instead of my usual pitch, far enough from the traffic to be heard and with a few benches nearby where people could sit and listen while they munched lunch, I got right out on the busy sidewalk and played “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” for six solid hours. Well if you’re going to jingle, you need to jingle all the way. Nobody likes a half-assed jingler. I knew I couldn’t be heard for more than 10 or 15 feet, nor was it possible for anyone to stop long enough to discover that I was playing the same two songs over and over. These are the only two carols I could think of that are easily recognizable in the time it takes to walk 10 or 15 feet. My take for the day came to more than $90 plus a Christmas card from somebody named Cass. It was hard work, I didn’t touch the fiddle for days afterwards and I never got so mercenary in the street again.

✱

Seiffe and I rode to the folk festival in the back of a van with a couple of girls, singing and whooping it up all the way with the help of some flagons of New Zealand wine, one of the few shopping bargains besides milk and butter in that sleepy little country. If you bring your own flagon (2¼ liters) to the store, you can fill it up from a spigot with port or sherry for as little as $3, and we were well-stocked. It was 20 miles of bad road from the highway to the sheep farm, and the green rolling hills were a welcome change from the streets of Auckland where busking and yacht-hunting had held me fast. By the time we arrived there were already tents springing up here and there and little groups of people playing music. Right away I saw Jack Russell slapping away on a tea-chest bass, and strolled over to say hello. They were playing “Peggy Sue.”

To make a long story short, what everybody at this “folk festival“ wanted to play was American pop music, and I just wasn’t in the mood. There were some good musicians around but nobody seemed the least bit interested in playing folk music. There were about 47 guitars, 4 mandolins, a couple of banjos and dulcimers, and one fiddle – mine.

Unsurprisingly, young Brendan Power went on to fame if not fortune. There are currently 4 of his albums available on Amazon, and for as little as $80 you can buy one of his very special custom harmonicas.

The one bright spot was a teenaged harmonica player named Brendan. Brendan could play anything from great blues to fast Irish jigs and could learn a new tune in no time flat. With Brendan‘s help and encouragement I put up a few signs announcing a “country dance workshop” for the morrow, and arm-twisted a small group into joining us to rehearse a few minimal dance tunes.

At the appointed time, one prospective dancer showed up. I was about to give up in disgust when Jack appointed himself deputy arm-twister and went around trying to drum up more dancers. After a full hour of wheedling we finally managed a Virginia Reel. I don’t like to wheedle. If people want to dance, great, I can help, but I’m just not into dragging them kicking and screaming onto the dance floor. It ruins my mood. After the reel the Kiwis were all in, and that was that. I consoled myself with New Zealand fortified wine and Sarah Trusdale.

On the way to the folk festival I had gotten rather friendly with this young lady who wore so much make-up that it was sort of intriguing. I couldn’t wait to see if she would keep it up out there in the sheep pastures, but sure enough the next morning when she emerged from her tent there it was: rouge, paint, powder, blue eyeshadow, mascara, eyeliner, the works. People told me she was a fine piano player but as there was no piano on the sheep farm I never found out for sure. That night we lay together on the hillside kissing and cuddling as reggae versions of “It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” drifted up from the campfires below, but when I tried to put my hand inside her shirt, she jumped up and ran away. When I caught up with her she explained, “I don’t want to get into anything heavy.“

Flagon in hand, I spent the next couple of hours wandering campfire to campfire. It was Neil Young here, Buddy Holly there, Bob Dylan and Judy Collins and the Beatles. I did hear one folk song somewhere, I forget which one. Dejected, rejected, disgusted, and catastrophically drunk, around 3 AM I packed my gear and split, stopping only to add quotation marks to the word “Folk” on the sign at the gate.

✱

A lot of my contacts with the ‘folk scene’ in New Zealand ended up in frustration of some sort; it just wasn’t what I expected or what I was used to I guess. There are quite a few folk clubs where typically anyone can get up and play 3 songs, and you pay about $3 at the door whether or not you play. There may or may not be a featured performer who makes about $25 more or less depending on the gate. On the North Island of New Zealand anyway, the performers are nearly always solo guitarist–singers who apparently sit alone for hours behind closed doors polishing up their act. Informal jams seem to be just about nonexistent, and even good musicians seldom know how to follow one another into unfamiliar territory. You can follow them if you like, but chances are they’ll slap on a capo and insist that they can only sing this song in C-sharp or A-flat — tough deal for a street fiddler. It’s goddamn frustrating. I took to hiding Seiffe’s capo. One bright spot for me in there clubs was the unaccompanied singing, something we could do with more of back in Oregon. Without an instrument in your hands you can get pretty theatrical, and I heard some wonderful songs from time to time at the Auckland clubs, with and without audience participation.

One night Seiffe asked me to play with him at a folk club Christmas party. We arrived at a small, dark building on the fringes of a lake-side forested park, and entered a crowded room illuminated with candles. It was the usual 3-song format and largely tedious. I mean how many times must you sit through uninspired versions of “In the Pines” or “Wabash Cannonball” or “Cocaine Blues” sung by a man in a suit and tie? OK it’s all for fun and fellowship and all that, but why the emphasis on the individual performance? Why can’t I get up and join in on fiddle? Why should I sit there and applaud politely when I’d rather be outside throwing stones in the lake? [I really am cranky when it comes to folk music — first I can’t get enough and then it’s too much.]

Seiffe and I sat in the back drinking beer. As long as you bring it yourself you can drink anything you like in these clubs, thank goodness. Seiffe is the kind of performer who demands attention and quiet, and I remember him early that very night going out to the kitchen in back to shush some loud talkers, but if he had a mind to (or a few beers) he could be as rude and disruptive as the next guy, if more witty, and so after the first couple of bottles and perhaps the third version of “Gypsy Rover,” he and I began to titter and chitchat.

A lady mounted the stage with a fiddle not a guitar, and I sat up encouraged. Then I saw the music books and the music stand and groaned. Seiffe poked me in the ribs and we both began to giggle. The available candlelight wasn’t sufficient for this violinist cum fiddler to read her music, and so the lights had to be turned on, triggering more mirth from our corner of the room. Finally with the books all spread open and well-lit, she announced that she was going to play a Texas fiddle tune “The Dusty Miller,” and off she went.

She made lovely pear-shaped tones and her classical technique was smooth and articulate, but after the first couple of bars she began to drift out of tune. I held my breath hoping she would get back on the right track, but it only got worse. All the notes were there, but not on the right pitch. Next to me Seiffe was doubled over with his hand clamped over his mouth and I did the same hoping that it would all be over soon, but she went on and on. There was nothing to do but get out of there before I disgraced myself by bursting out in uncontrollable laughter, so with one hand over my mouth and the other firmly clamping my nose, I headed as unobtrusively as possible under the circumstances for a little door in the back of the room. Behind the door was another room used to store the chairs, but even with the door closed the sound of the out-of-control fiddler was inescapable.

I had just caught my breath when the door opened and Seiffe staggered in, likewise looking like the victim of a gas attack. There is little hope for two people in the same room both with the giggles, and as outside the fiddler rampaged on heedless of our agony, Seiffe and I tried our best to contain the explosions of mirth. At last, long last, the music stopped, and we stood there gasping for breath like fish out of water, deliberately avoiding each other‘s eyes and precipitating fresh gales of laughter. Surely she would desist but no, she tore right into another tune. This time it was even worse, and she actually had to stop twice in the middle trying to get her bearings. By the time she finally finished, to polite applause as always, Seiffe and I were wrecked, weak in the knees with aching stomach muscles, and as we sagged against the wall like a couple of midnight drunks, we heard our names announced as the next performers.

This piece of bad news only brought on the giggles again, but giggles or not we emerged from the room, all eyes on us, and got out our instruments. As we busied ourselves with strings and straps and picks, now and then a chuckle would seep out, and both of us would crack up all over again. Seiffe is generally very self-possessed on stage, he really thrives on it, but tonight he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face long enough to get on with the music. Finally someone in the audience remarked, “I don’t know what those two were smoking back there, but it must’ve been pretty good,“ and everybody laughed. The plan was for Seiffe to sing one, sing one together, and one for me. After about five minutes on stage trying to regain enough composure to proceed, Seiffe finally managed his folk club song, which I’d never heard before and was all too appropriate under the circumstances. It’s a clever adaptation of a Paul Simon song, one I didn’t hear till several years later. If you’re a Simon fan you’ll probably recognize it from the lyrics.

“Playing in a folk club you’re bound to win a prize,
They’ve been singing out of tune all night long, (sings out of
tune)
And I’m nearly asleep,
I only came cuz it was cheap,
Here I am at Poles Apart (big Auckland folk club)
And here’s my song, won’t take long.

(Chorus)

Die, die, die you buggers die,
Fiddle all day, play all night,
Die, die, die you buggers die,
Fiddle all day, she’ll be right, mate.

My mother played the dulcimer, my father played around,
I was born with my fingers in my ears,
And when I reached my prime,
Left my home at the age of 29,
Came down to Poles Apart
To see what’s here, drink some beer.

Keen lad in a folk club, he’s singing to a crowd,
Trying hard but ending up with tangled strings and
f-f-f-f-f-fingers, (at this point not only the poetic
meter but the guitar playing gets all tangled)
And he clean forgot the…clean forgot……clean forgot the chorus,
But the audience plowed right on,
Obviously they’ve clapped themselves,
They’re singers, real dead ringers, and the chorus was:

Now we’ve hit the big time and were headed for the top,
And the guitars seem to stay in tune sometimes (bad chord here)
And were workin’ on a version
Of Dylan’s latest song
Called “Growin’ Pains a’Comin”,
Nearly rhymes, almost…”

Then we did The Band’s “Take a Load Off Fanny” with guitar and dulcimer, and I could think of nothing more appropriate to close with than the a verses to the Temperance Reel that I learned from Clyde Curley in the late 70s, performed a cappella with an empty whiskey bottle for a prop.

Possibly because I was so involved with my own music at the time I didn’t make much contact with the music and dance of the native New Zealanders, the Maoris. The white New Zealanders, unlike the Australians, have practically no folk music of their own – – they will argue this point but it’s pretty much true – – but they do take a good deal of pride (unlike the Australians) in the original indigenous culture that existed before their grandfathers took over. All Kiwi school children learn to sing Maori songs and even study a bit of the language. The Maoris came from Tahiti about 1100 years ago on 4 big canoes, and they keep such careful genealogies that any Maori can tell you which canoe he descends from.

Their performances traditionally have the women in long beaded skirts, beadwork blouses, and with distinctively tattooed chins. They usually sing in large groups with swaying movements and percussion accompaniment. The Maori women also do special routines with “poi balls” which consist of a cord with a ball attached to each end, and they twirl these balls quite skillfully in different patterns in time to the music. For tourist shows the men do a lot of war dances.

iur

Stripped to the waist and bearing spears and clubs, they are famous for their spine chilling war whoops and grotesque facial expressions with unnerving tattoos, bulging eyes and tongues protruding like Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss. They say some Maori regiments during World War II caused real havoc in the German lines in North Africa, descending on the Germans in a wild yelling horde. The poor Germans, who had never seen anything like it in their worst dreams, dropped their guns and ran for their lives.

✱

At some point in early January 1981, Ian had to go somewhere for a week or so, and with Nikki gone in the daytime working on something or other, I took advantage of the empty house to borrow a typewriter and do some writing. I had filled seven journals so far since leaving home, and I couldn’t go on packing them around, but before I shipped them home I wanted to edit out an account of what I’d been up to for the past 18 months to send home to my family and friends. I opened the first book and began. 27,000 words later I hadn’t even made it to the end of the first journal book, and I was running out of time and money. As the writing evolved I realized that my original intention was going out the window but I was having such a good time of it that it didn’t matter. Sometimes I would read back what I’d written at the end of the day and howl with laughter, but it was a rough draft yet, and I had to put it aside the day the phone rang and the voice at the other end asked if I was the navigator who was looking for a passage to Australia? It was a terrible connection, Ian’s phone was the kind you had to crank. I had difficulty not only with the line but with the Australian accent. Eventually I got a telephone number and arranged to make connections in Auckland.

The next afternoon I met Michael Tubbs for the first time. He drove up to Seiffe’s in an old white Ford and we had a little chat on the front porch. He had built his 37-foot Brown-designed Searunner trimaran in his own backyard in roughly 6 years of intermittent labor. Soon after launch she had broken loose from her mooring in a storm and gone careening around Auckland Harbor smashing into a number of other yachts and actually sinking one of them. “Seahawk” had suffered remarkably little damage herself, but there were several holes in her sides and some of the safety railing stanchions had been pushed right through the deck. The incident had not endeared Mr. Tubbs to the Auckland yachting fraternity, and this had contributed to his decision to move to Australia in the middle of hurricane season.

Michael was born in Burma of mixed English-Burmese parentage and had spent a lot of his youth in India. Then his folks had moved to New Zealand where he eventually met and married Christine, an Australian 10 years his junior, off on a “walkabout” with some girlfriends. It’s become a tradition for young Australians to make at least one long adventure trip, to New Zealand if not Asia, Europe or America before settling down to marry and work and drink beer. Both Michael’s parents were now past and gone, and the Tubbs’ had decided to move to Oz where Christine still had folks and it’s considerably easier to find work. New Zealand is a fine place to mosey along, but the ambitious usually end up migrating elsewhere.

Tubbs was looking not only for a navigator but someone to help fix the boat. He offered me room and board while the work went on and guessed that it would be a month or so before we were ready to sail. I took a look at the boat and had a chat with Christine. We seem to get along okay. and so the deal was made and I moved in with the Tubbs’. My room was tiny but it was mine, the first such space I had enjoyed since my “little brass shack” in Samoa, and there was a tiny desk big enough to hold a typewriter. In the evenings I managed to finish a second draft of my lengthy open letter home.

The Tubbs house looked like a marine warehouse with yachting gear stacked up everywhere. They were obviously committed to leaving. They’d already shipped off their only child, a 10-year-old boy, to Christine’s parents. There were big packing crates filled with stuff they were going to ship, and they were selling off the washing machine and other household appliances. It gradually became apparent that the one thing they’d neglected to do regarding this proposed voyage was learn how to sail. In all the 10 years they’d been dreaming about a boat, assembling materials, and putting it all together, they’d hardly ever done any sailing.

Tubbs told me something to the effect that he didn’t want to accept invitations to go sailing with other people because then they’d all want to go sailing with him when his boat was finished. This was typical Michael Tubbs thinking. At the same time he complained continually that none of his friends ever came around to help him, but he was obviously deathly afraid of getting in anyone’s debt regarding future boat rides. Perhaps he was thinking about how embarrassing it would be for his friends to find out that he didn’t know how to sail. He even changed the interior design to two single and two double births instead of the four doubles described in the plans, to reduce the number of guests should he be forced to take anybody out for the weekend.

Two days after I moved in with the Tubbs’ I got another call, from a guy who wanted to sail to Australia tomorrow. I had one hour to think it over. I could see that the smart thing to do would be to leave the Tubbs’ to their own devices, get myself over to Australia and stuck into some kind of paying work, but on the other hand the Seahawk job offered a number of interesting opportunities.

This is only photo I have of Sea Hawk.

First of all I like to fix boats. You always learn a lot, and you get to know the boat. Secondly it began to look as if this was not only a navigation job, but as I was the most experienced person currently involved I would probably end up calling all the shots. On Vehia, Henri generally took the courses I recommended, but he chose and set the sails and otherwise took responsibility for running the boat. It began to look as if this kind of global responsibility would be mine by default on Seahawk, a really valuable opportunity not easily come by. Besides I had already listened to many a sad story from Tubbs about the difficulties they had experienced, and I couldn’t feel good about deserting them now. I didn’t know yet that complaining had become a way of life with Michael; he will spend the rest of his life blaming other people for life’s every little irritation. On the negative side was the real danger of crossing the Tasman, one of the worlds roughest stretches of ocean, smack in the middle of hurricane season with a green crew. Would they be sick, terrified or otherwise incapacitated? And what about the boat, brand-new and untried? They had sailed her exactly twice, and had suffered some misfortunes in the process that they seemed reluctant to discuss. Would she hold up in a blow?

I decided to stick with the Tubbs’. I wrote a will of sorts and sent it to Zanetto my house-sitter with strict instructions not to mention it to my mother unless I didn’t make it. Then I set out to get on top of the situation. I had sailed on a trimaran only once before, in Hawai’i, and I started reading some books on the subject of which they had quite a few. I studied the boat’s plans and checked as best I could to see that the construction had been done to specifications. It was something of a relief to find out in the process that Mr. Tubbs had done little of the actual building himself. He would buy timber and plywood and fiberglass, cut things to size according to the plans, and then hire somebody else to do the actual assembly, Tubbs acting as the laborer. I compiled endless lists of necessary gear including all recommended safety equipment, and occasionally had to do a little arm-twisting to get Tubbs to lay out the necessary cash by threatening to pull out, the only kind of leverage I had under the circumstances. I inspected everything from the tip of the mast on down. I may be a bit adventurous, but I try not to be stupid. If we were caught in a Tasman cyclone I wanted to have a fighting chance.

I told Michael we’d need at least one more crew, preferably two. If the weather got nasty I knew I wouldn’t be sick but what about them? I’d heard too many tales already about unfortunate crew left to struggle alone through a storm, perhaps for days, with the owner and guests in their bunks too sick to care if they lived or died. Tubbs asked if I knew of anybody and I immediately thought of Nicolette who had thrown up her teaching job and was looking for a crewing job herself.

W. N. Ragland

So Nikki joined our crew, and it’s too bad she didn’t last because she was the only one I ever saw who could always cut through Michael’s whining bullshit and get him to laugh at himself. It would have been a much more jolly trip with Nikki along, but three days later she got another offer, a job on Neil Young’s hundred foot schooner “W. N. Ragland,” departing shortly for the Solomon Islands, Japan, Alaska, and the States. It paid $600 a month on top of the experience of living and sailing aboard a real classic sailing ship, sturdily built, beautifully rigged, painstakingly restored, with everything on deck solid teak, and a superb heavy timber interior with lots of decorative carving. Nobody blamed Nikki for jumping ship but a replacement was hard to find. For some strange reason nobody seemed very keen to go out on the Tasman Sea during hurricane season in a brand-new trimaran.

I might mention here that amongst the yachting fraternity a great controversy perpetually goes on between the monohull crowd and the multihull believers. A lot of the monohull people won’t set foot on a multi, and the multihull fans love to tease the monohulls by zipping past them in their generally speedier craft. I take no sides in this matter. Both designs have been around for thousands of years, and in most circumstances and in the right hands one is about as safe and seaworthy as the other, but of course not everyone agrees.

✱

By this time we had Seahawk out of the water and a genial fellow named Gordon was fixing the holes in the hull and deck. Gordon occasionally demonstrated a talent for deflating the Tubbs balloon in a friendly way, and one incident I’ll always remember with a smile. Michael, for lack of anything else to complain about at the moment, was carrying on about the people who day after day took nasty spills on the slippery concrete at the waters edge where they came to launch their trailer-sailers. Gordon remarked that maybe the harbor ought to put up a sign or something warning people to watch their step. “No that wouldn’t do a bit of good,” Tubbs railed on, “they’re just plain stupid and 100 signs wouldn’t make any difference.” Gordon thought this over for a moment and then drawled, “Well, you could be right. You’re not often right, but this time you could be.” We all laughed at that, even Michael.

Meanwhile I had discovered some discrepancies between the dimensions specified by the designer for the rigging, what was written on the rigger’s bill, and what was actually on the boat. The diameters of all three were different, and I was determined to get it ironed out before we went to sea. I complained and finally a man came from the company that had done the work, and we (he and I, Tubbs stayed out of it) got into quite an ugly scene. He insisted that there were no discrepancies, that I was a loud-mouthed Yank who didn’t know what he was talking about, and that if I didn’t believe him I could call ‘so-and-so’ who would set me straight. In the process he told a couple of bald-faced lies which made me quite angry, after all it was my life that was going to be depending on that rigging not his. I did call ‘so-and-so’ who was not easy to get hold of, and he agreed that the boat should have the rigging specified by the designer. Eventually the riggers came back and replaced four of the mast stays with considerably heavier wire, and after this I redoubled my efforts to make sure that nobody else had cut corners on the not-terribly-bright Tubbs who apparently never checked these things himself.

It was a full-time job and then some. All day at the boat: painting, installing handrails on the cabin tops, mounting life rings and buoys, designing and installing lights for the compasses, new anti-electrolysis sinks on the prop shaft, the list was endless. I made emergency storm covers for all the windows, and special patches that could be installed quickly to seal off the center hull should wave action punch holes in the under-wings going out to the two side hulls. I replaced the latches on the out-hull hatches as the ones Michael had installed came open with just a tug. At night back at the Tubbs’ residence they peppered me with questions as long as I could stay awake, and I finally had to insist on a bit of time to myself to finish my writing and collect my thoughts.

During these weeks I saw practically nothing of my friends except for one or two who came down to see the boat. Ian flew off to Hong Kong and his cargo ship job without ever setting eyes on Seahawk. One night I was determined to get away and Seiffe talked me into accompanying him to a restaurant gig that entailed a ferry ride across the harbor. I was quite tired of the Tubbs’ menu by now which consisted of mincemeat curry four or five nights a week, lots of white bread, Kool-Aid, and canned mackerel, and Seiffe assured me we would eat like kings. However on the ferry boat he started chatting up a lady and by the time we’d had a few beers on the other side and he had her phone number tucked away in his pocket, dinner was over, and it further developed that Seiffe didn’t actually have a gig at all.

It turned out to be a folk club-type situation where people just got up and played, and by this time I was too hungry and put out to feel like playing for a cup of coffee. As we left the place Seiffe indicated a fellow standing near the door as somebody who he wanted nothing to do with, and in fact he made a point of sliding by when the fellow wasn’t looking so as to be spared any pleasantries. When I asked why, he told me that this man had a perfectly nice girlfriend to whom he was continually unfaithful. I had to laugh. This was a perfect description of Seiffe himself, who had been for two years sleeping with an 18-year-old beauty whose charms he couldn’t praise highly enough, and yet not a week went by without his bringing home some new piece of action from the folk club. One of the strangest laws of human behavior is that the faults we criticize most strongly in others are usually the faults we have ourselves; we know them so well we are quick to see them in others.

✱

At last Seahawk went back in the water. I had found out that the frugal Tubbs had neglected to sacrifice a bottle of champagne over her bows during the initial launching, and I thought perhaps this had something to do with her subsequent rampage through Auckland Harbor as well as the mysterious misfortunes of her maiden voyage. So without saying anything to anybody, as Seahawk slid into the bay I poured a can of New Zealand’s best beer over the bow. Not champagne perhaps, but better than nothing. I wasn’t keen to go out on a boat that was still thirsty, perhaps for somebody’s blood. With little else to do but find crew, I decided to take off for a week and hitchhike down to the South Island, about which I’d heard a lot of good things.

Back in Hawai’i, Jack Russell had showed me a book of photographs of the Hyde Park-type free speech area in the city square of Christchurch which featured daily confrontations between the Wizard, a charismatic freethinker, and the legions of the Lord led by Renee Stayton, the violin-playing Bible Lady. The Wizard appeared in a variety of costumes including a sackcloth outfit that made him look just like the Woolworth paintings of Jesus.

“The Hammer of the Heretics”

He kept handy a white princess phone with which to speak with God up in heaven as well as a red phone for calling the Devil. It sounded like a lively scene in an otherwise somewhat boring country and I had hoped to make it to Christchurch somehow. Several of the folks I’d gotten to know on Dirty Dick’s catamaran in Tonga lived in and around Christchurch and I already had invitations to stay.

✱ ✱ ✱

I packed a light bag and was “off to see the Wizard”. The two-day hitch was not so difficult. In New Zealand sometimes you wait a long time for a ride but when it comes, more likely than not you’ll be invited home, treated to lunch or some such gracious gesture. In Wellington at the tip of the North Island I was taken in for the night by a Maori by the name of Max Crapp. My first host in Christchurch was Tony Hamilton, a Dirty Dick alumnus who was putting the finishing touches on his dream house in the country a few miles out of the city, a gingerbread affair of ferro-cement over 2X4s and tarpaper, with bedrooms sticking out in all 4 directions made of enormous sections of sewer pipe with big round windows at the ends. Tony had three children, the oldest of whom was just in the process of leaving the nest for the first time. Consequently things were aflutter with all the usual “get out of here/don’t go” emotions. Bridget the youngest and I played tiddlywinks and stayed out of the way.

In the morning I hitched into Christchurch proper, arriving a bit early for the noonday action. It was a spacious flagstone square with a small cathedral to one side in front of which most of the speakers held forth. At 12 o’clock sharp a fellow emerged from the church carrying a Bible and a small step ladder, and setting up in front of a set of wide steps that provided convenient seating, began to tell me and one or two others how the Lord had changed his life. After a few minutes a picturesque character wearing striped trousers, an ornate vest, some exotic jewelry and a big wide brimmed black hat strolled over and sat down with us. After a few minutes of listening quietly he suddenly reacted to something the evangelist had said by loudly remarking, “Oh bullshit!” The street preacher ignored this comment and went on with his testimony. The fellow in the black hat, whose name was Bernie, was soon joined by a few other dissenters, and they were not a bit shy or polite in their comments concerning the heartfelt witness of this earnest soul who had been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ from alcohol, marijuana, fornication and a long list of other evils sure to result in eternal damnation.

I must confess that at first I was a little shocked at the intensity and foul language of Bernie and his friends, but it soon became apparent that this was business as usual in Cathedral Square where the only rule is: no physical violence. Bernie roared, “You’re not saved, Don, you’re just another wanker with a Bible. You just like attention, standing up there telling us how holy you are now. You’re just a show-off who wouldn’t know Jesus if he were standing on your foot!” Not everyone was so articulate or witty as Bernie and there was a lot of “fuck you” and “shove that Bible up your ass” and the like, but now and then they would engage Don, and those that followed him, in regular theological debate, and it was obvious that a lot of them knew the Bible pretty well. I couldn’t help but laugh, even at the crudest comments. How many times have we had to listen to such preaching — funerals are a good example of a captive audience often subjected to severe Bible-thrashing — and when was it ever permitted to question, harass and harangue in turn? Sometimes people would jump up and start speaking themselves to make a point. Sometimes the evangelist would stop and listen, sometimes he just plowed right on. Someone told me that the Wizard was out of town that day but would be back tomorrow.

✱

Then another character appeared wearing a Sherlock Holmes cap and all the gear an English gentlemen might wear on a fox hunt, really dressed to the nines, even a cravat. By this time Don had been replaced by another Bible-thumper as Sherlock Holmes set up his own stepladder nearby and began a long and very funny oration on the subject of vegetarians. “We’ve all heard these pious vegetarians who say, ‘How can you eat animals? How can you be so heartless as to kill the gentle cow or sheep to satisfy your craving for meat? Must we shed the blood of God’s creatures in order to live?’ and so forth. But what do they do? They seize on the innocent vegetables, fruits and flowers sitting peacefully in the earth or hanging from a tree, bothering nobody. They take out their knives and cut them up into little pieces and devour them. The vegetables never have a chance! At least the animal has a chance to escape, possibly even mount a counterattack, but the poor defenseless vegetable has no chance whatsoever. Friends, I tell you the reason these people eat only vegetables is that they are cowards! Rather than taking their chances with an animal that has legs to run, teeth and claws to bite and scratch, they take on the unfortunate vegetable who cannot escape their hungry jaws. These vegetarians would like us to think that they are some how less cruel or more humane than the meat eater, but the truth is that they are bullies every one!”

The Wizard & Sherlock much as they looked when I saw them in Cathedral Square in 1980.

This is a highly condensed version of what took Sherlock about half an hour to expound in a very witty and articulate fashion. The poor evangelist nearby was no match for Sherlock and went forlornly droning on to an empty set of steps. As the crowd expanded to perhaps 100 people, Sherlock shifted to another favorite topic in Cathedral Square: the devilish Yanks (that’s us folks) as the source of most of the world’s problems including pollution, war, fast food, advertising, women’s liberation, disco and bad taste in general. “We won the war in spite of the Yanks, and in the process we found it out exactly what’s wrong with them: they’re overbearing, oversexed, and over here!” (Big roar from the crowd.) There were several American tourists in the crowd who were apparently taking all this quite seriously and one of them, who seem to typify everything that Sherlock bemoaned, began to get angry and disruptive. Finally he jumped to his feet, faced the crowd and shouted, “I’ve had enough of this shit! Every day this week I’ve come down to the Square here, and all I hear is lies and slander about my country. If it went wasn’t for the USA all of you would probably be speaking Japanese! Well I’ve had about as much as I can take, I’m not going to listen to another word of this rubbish!”

So saying he produced a small tape recorder and switched it on. It began to play “God Save the Queen.” Sherlock, like all of the Wizard’s band being a staunch royalist, snapped to attention and removed his hat. The obstreperous Yank then produced an aluminum pie plate and a can of shaving cream, and as he filled the plate with a heap of lather he went on: “From now on we Yanks are not going to stand for any more of this abuse, were going to fight back!”, and with that he quite deliberately pushed the plate full of shaving cream right into Sherlock’s face where it remained during the final strains of the British anthem. The Yank went on: “I call on all loyal Americans here in Christchurch to join with me to put a stop to this scurrilous propaganda campaign. We will seize a piece of ground here in Christchurch from which to operate and defend it if necessary from any attacks by the Wizard and his cronies.”

Meanwhile Sherlock had peeled the pie plate off his face and made two holes in the sea of white lather so that he could see out. From his waistcoat pocket he produced a small mirror and a safety razor, and as the Yank went on about his plan to organize opposition to the Wizards anti-American propaganda, Sherlock calmly shaved. When he was finished he tidied himself up with a towel somebody handed him, retrieved the pie plate, and shoved it in the still-ranting Yank’s face, dusted off his hands with a flourish and strolled away to loud cheers from the crowd.

I’m a little thick sometimes, and I didn’t immediately realize that Sherlock and the Yank had planned this whole scene beforehand. I thought perhaps Sherlock always carried a mirror and razor just in case. I did follow them to a nearby coffeehouse where we all sat around a table and discussed the execution and dramatic impact of the performance, much as a group of actors might talk about opening night. I was told that the Wizard would surely return the following day and that there would be further confrontations with the rebellious Yanks. I volunteered to play music for the Yank contingent. That night at Tony’s I constructed a large Uncle Sam hat out of heavy cardboard, gave it a fine red white and blue paint job, and decorated it with bits of Americana like Bob Dylan, McDonald’s, Raquel Welch, baseball, Nixon and apple pie.

✱

The next day, sure enough, at 1 PM sharp the Wizard arrived in a long purple robe, carrying a large plastic carrot which turned out to be some sort of a flute on which he played a short tune to open the proceedings. Earlier I had already searched out Renee the Bible Lady, heard her life story in a personal interview, and joined her on fiddle, struggling through a number of hymns I’d never heard before. Playing with the Bible Lady I got my fair share of abuse, and when the Wizard showed up I excused myself and went to join the legions of the damned. The Wizard began in his most stentorian bellow: “I understand that in my brief and necessary absence there has transpired a Yankee uprising here in Christchurch, and that loyal defenders of the monarchy have been physically attacked by unscrupulous Yanks right here in Cathedral Square!” He went on to reiterate the many evils that could be traced to Yankee influence and declared that the world map should be turned upside down, putting New Zealand at the top of the world and the Yanks and the Russians on the bottom “where they belong.”

The Wizard of Christchurch still going strong in 2012.

I should mention here that the Wizard is British by birth, and an extremely intelligent and erudite fellow with degrees in psychology and sociology. He was reportedly a lecturer at Sydney University in Australia during the Vietnam era [which in 1981 remember was less than a decade previous] and became the leader of a movement to defuse campus violence by instituting mock battles with paper swords and water balloons. He’d declared himself “Wizard of Sydney University” and actually had some sort of official recognition. From there he went to Melbourne, where he was declared a “Living Work of Art” by the National Art Gallery. He was currently “on loan” to Christchurch, where he heads up the “Imperial British Conservative Party”, a small but devoted group who dress up in quasi-military garb featuring the Union Jack colors. Group photos generally include his stately white-haired mother, the only female in the Wizard’s entourage who doesn’t wear a veil. He is a staunch foe of Women’s Lib and declares that all women should be as “slave girls,” waiting on their men hand and foot, and when not busy around the house should be found lounging in seductive poses.

He is a great believer that human beings need strong myths to sustain them and is therefore a stout monarchist and an enemy of all democratic and all egalitarian political systems. One of the articles in his “Wizard’s Almanac,” a fascinating publication full of wonderful nonsense, is entitled “Mythleading the Masses.” His tongue is so firmly implanted in his cheek that it’s quite impossible to say what, if anything, he really believes in, but he is a consummate orator who maintains an open challenge to debate with anyone in public who would dispute his title of “Wizard of the Antipodean Realms.” He seems to survive by selling posters, postcards, pamphlets and maps of the upside down world during or after his regular Monday through Friday appearances in Cathedral Square.

“Where is this dastardly Yank?!” he demanded, and the dastardly Yank came forward, followed by me in my new hat playing “The Battle of New Orleans” on kazoo and ukulele, a song that I’d already heard Sherlock declare in public that he detested. Paper swords were produced and the Yank began to duel it out with one of the Wizard’s lieutenants while I encouraged him with a medley of patriotic melodies and Sherlock attempted to steal my hat. But the duel was clearly a draw, and during a pause in the action I was asked to play “God Save the Queen” again.

I can’t believe I still have this book!

By this time the Bible Lady had spotted me and she joined me on the fiddle for the British anthem, and as the Wizard came to attention, as Sherlock had the day before, the Yank drenched him with a large bucket of water poured right over his head. After this treacherous act there was no alternative but to declare all-out war. The Yankee faction had already laid claim to an island in the Avon River which flows through the middle of Christchurch, and the Wizard vowed to flush them out on the morrow by means of a water bomb assault, real saturation bombing. I wandered off for a final chat with the Bible Lady whose parting shot at the Wizard was, “Now everybody can see that you’re all wet.” She told me that once when she’d been riding on a float in the Christchurch Easter parade dressed up as an angel with wings and all, when the Wizard’s boys had attacked with water balloons and soaked her right to the skin. “He’s a very wicked man,” she told me confidentially. She sold me a book of her poetry for $3, some of the worst verse ever to hit the printed page.

✱

I had to leave Christchurch the next morning in order to catch up with Seahawk so I had to pass up the big water fight, and as I left the Square for the last time I was thinking hard about the significance of all this horseplay. I’m convinced that this sort of free-speech and nonviolent games are an excellent institution on a number of levels. Language becomes so loaded at times, we’re ready to fight somebody we don’t even know over a careless word, even at the international level. I’m sure a lot of us have been in situations where if we had said the wrong thing we’d be dead now. We forget that it’s only language. On the other hand the freedom to use it freely is, I still believe, extremely important. I am currently living in a country (Indonesia) where you cannot print “President Suharto doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” in your newspaper or magazine. With an election this year there are big billboards going up showing Suharto out in the rice paddy with a hoe. No one believes that General Suharto has ever seen the business end of a hoe, but you won’t see any graffiti on these ridiculous billboards and people get very nervous if you poke fun at them. Democracy is a somewhat ponderous and inefficient system of government, but it seems to me to be the one that best ensures that the welfare of the people as a whole will be the most important consideration, and without the freedom to express all points of view democracy becomes impossible. No nation on earth is currently what I’d call a shining example of this kind of freedom, but people like the Wizard make it hot for those who would suppress the opinions of others.

I liked the Bible Lady, and it pained me to hear Bernie and his boys shouting “Shut up and go home you old bag! You wouldn’t be out here making a racket every day if your old man hadn’t thrown you out of the house years ago for bitching and nagging him to death,” and yet the Wizard and the evangelists really fed off each other. If I was to become a Bible-thumper some day I’d want to test my faith in the fire of Bernie’s skepticism. Bernie was not a man without morals, but he had no mercy on hypocrites and holier-than-thou types repeating scripture like parrots, and could rip them to shreds. Bernie was good for these people. Just as we wouldn’t know what good was without having evil to compare, so the two factions in Cathedral Square played their parts in a daily drama that was generally entertaining, thought-provoking, nonviolent and therapeutic. My two days in the Square were worth every bit of the 4 days it took to get there and back.

Tony had finally managed to locate Ginny, Dirty Dick’s ex-girlfriend, and she invited me to spend my last night in Christchurch at her parents house. Unfortunately she was still carrying a torch for Dick. She was the only person I ever met who liked him. Dick had taken up with a 19-year-old hippie from Kansas, had bought himself a Land Rover and a few kayaks and was running a land-based adventure holiday business out of Christchurch. Poor Ginny was still running errands and doing paperwork for him, and taking kayak lessons in the vain hope that Dick would come back to her someday. She took me to an international folk dance class which turned out to be run by a nice lady from Oregon. The very first dance they did was a New England contra that I used to call, and though the music was all recorded I had a pretty good time. During the intermission the caller and I chatted about Oregon and dance. She asked if I’d like to call a dance and I said sure. She invited me to look through her collection of tapes, but I had brought my fiddle and said I’d like to try to play and call myself. In 1978 back in Amherst, Massachusetts I’d spent a couple of wonderful hours contra dancing in the front room of an ice cream parlor, a spontaneous middle-of-the-night adventure made possible by a guy named Campbell Kaynor who could both call and play fiddle and keep it together all by himself. It had since been my lingering ambition to attempt to do the same myself someday. I put everybody in a big circle and stood in the center — taught, played and called a circle waltz to the tune of Ash Grove. It worked! The next morning I set off for Auckland having made it to roughly 43° south latitude. Only the tip of South America, Antarctica, and a few islands lie further south.

✱

By the time I got back to Auckland, Michael had found a couple of crew willing to take their chances on Seahawk. This was too bad in a way because I’d just found out that Jack Russell and his girlfriend Pam were parting company and she, a sailor with at least as much experience as me, was looking for a boat. Neither of Tubbs candidates had ever sailed on the open ocean before though they both owned sailing dinghies that they raced on Auckland Harbor. When I showed up they were all ready to go on a shakedown cruise out to a small volcanic island off the East Coast, about a three day trip. I really liked Pam and consequently was a bit slow to warm up to Rod and Mike, but they turned out to be pretty good blokes and we got along well. Tubbs was another story. The main things I wanted to do on the shakedown trip were: find out who was going to be seasick, try out all the sails and running gear, push the boat a bit if possible to see how she might react in a blow, and run a few “man overboard” drills. That last means to throw something that floats over the side and then practice bringing the boat under sail back to that spot — a very tricky business and something none of us had ever tried including me.

Michael turned out to be the only seasick one, and every time the wind came up he got hysterical and began shouting, “Pull down the sails we’re going to capsize! I want to live to see my boy in Australia!” Seriously. I tried to reassure him that we were not in danger of capsize but there is no arguing with fear, so down came the sails. We limped along making 2 or 3 knots and I wondered when Michael would call the man overboard drill. He never did. We rounded White Island at dusk the second day. The crater is blown out on the south side right down to sea level making it possible to look right in at the clouds of steam and smoke bubbling out of the waters. Quite a sight, also quite a stench. By the time we got back to Auckland Harbor, Tubbs and I weren’t getting along at all, and I just retired from the scene and let him putter along as he pleased.

The next day, parked in front of the bank, Tubbs suddenly exploded and all this shit came out. I was reckless and rebellious and putting his boat in jeopardy and why did I question everything and I was trying to ruin him financially by insisting that he buy a sea anchor and so on and on and on. I got a little ruffled at all this abuse. I had been listening to Michael abuse everybody and everything in sight for over a month now, especially the bit about “Nobody ever helps me, everybody’s against me.” I had been working for him for three meals a day and a bed and was about to guide him across the Tasman, a service that alone would have cost him at least $1000 plus return air fare from a professional if he could find one to take the job in hurricane season. I was losing patience with Tubbs and all his wingeing. I told him there was no evidence whatsoever for the contention that I had put his boat in danger except for his own fear, largely the result of inexperience, and that the real danger lay out there in the Tasman should we be unlucky enough to encounter real weather, not just a 20 knot breeze, but 50 or 80 or 100 knots.

At this point I had read enough about Searunner trimarans and talked to other owners with experience that I believed that with the proper equipment we could survive such weather if it didn’t last too long, but I was no longer counting on any help from Tubbs who I assumed would be too sick to assist or interfere. I pointed out that he had not demonstrated any leadership qualities on our shakedown trip, and despite several reminders from me had never called the man-overboard drill that we’d already agreed must be practiced before we set out. As things heated up I even accused him of possibly concealing defects in the construction from the rest of us; I just couldn’t figure out why he was so over-the-top nervous about his boat. We had a lot of hot words for each other, and when we got back to being gentlemen again Michael declared that he would call a meeting of all the crew for that afternoon and we would talk it out together. He was sure that Rod and Mike would back him up and put me in my place. I had spent the previous night as Mike’s houseguest, discussing the trip over many a beer, and I had a feeling that Tubbs was in for a big surprise.

Later that day we all sat down under a tree: Michael, Christine, Rod, Mike and I. Tubbs opened the discussion: “During our trip to White Island there seem to be a few disagreements…” That’s all he got out before Mike interrupted him. Mike and then Rod held the floor for the next 10 minutes or so, and the gist of what they said was that Michael obviously didn’t know how to sail and therefore it would be wise for him to listen to the advice of the only person on board who had ocean sailing experience; that they’d never felt the boat to be in any danger; that they had confidence in my ability and judgment; and that furthermore if for any reason I was not going on the trip, they would pull out as well. Well Tubbs didn’t have a thing to say after that, but down inside I guess he never forgave me. I tried to persuade him to take Pam along too, but he said no, five was enough. [In case you haven’t figured this out for yourself by now, my luck in this department was horrible right down the line.]

The night before our final departure Jack Russell turned up on the boat when the others had gone, his new girlfriend in tow. We smoked a joint and he showed me a couple of knots I’d been keen to learn. One of them I still carry around with me — there it is right in front of me, but I can’t reproduce it to save my life. He brought a special package from Pam containing three other packages, one for each Sunday of the trip, a sweet gesture that only another sailor would think of.

After they left I made a final call to the weather bureau and received the unsettling news that there was a small cyclone brewing up slightly north and east of Australia, winds of 60 knots, the storm moving slowly eastwards at about 6 knots/hour. Their advice was to stay in New Zealand waters until it was clear what was going to happen with this weather system. Since we had several hundred miles to go to clear the North Cape we decided to depart the next morning as scheduled — my visa expired that day in any case — and island-hop for a few days while we assessed the weather situation.

✱ ✱ ✱

We cleared customs at Admiralty Steps in Auckland the morning of February 28, 1981, and sailed 30 miles across the harbor to Kauau Island where I put the crew through some good tacking drill, beating (sailing into the wind) up a narrow bay before dropping anchor. We spent two nights at Kauau, went for a hike and saw a wallaby. Cyclone Frieda was still puttering along eastwards at 6 knots with 60 knot winds, no change. From Kauau we sailed out of Auckland Harbor proper to Great Barrier Island off the East Coast. On the way Tubbs and I got into another of our stupid little tiffs. I wanted to go to Great Barrier for two main reasons: we had a chart for it, and from there it would be downwind sailing all the way to the Bay of Islands up north. Michael for some reason wanted to go to Whangarei, a section of the coast for which we had no chart. I had done precious little coastal sailing, I like to be out away from reefs and rocks and the like, especially when there’s no chart, but Tubbs seem to think he knew this area like the back of his hand. At this point we were still operating under the “let’s all discuss these decisions together” plan, and when the rest of the crew took my side Tubbs got very cranky and petulant.

It was a beat out to Great Barrier and on the way the winds changed for the worse and then died. As it became clear that we would not make it before dark, Tubbs began to exult in this evidence that my plan had been faulty and we should have gone to Whangarei instead. He actually seemed keen to hamper our already-slow progress, and when I wanted to use the motor he put his back up. Finally he agreed to start the motor, but when I set the throttle up to normal cruising RPMs he began to carry on, claiming that I was trying to blow up the engine. This was a lot of hokum of course, but by the time I dug out the operation manual several days later the situation had deteriorated to such a degree that there was no point in bringing up the subject again. We exchanged some hot words, and then felt our way slowly into an anchorage and dropped the hook without further incident.

Piercy Island

The next day we made the downhill run to Russell in the Bay of Islands with fair winds, sailing wing and wing with the main and the two jibs feeding the wind from one sail into the next. As we made the turn around Piercy Island where I’d arrived in New Zealand nearly 5 months before, I had Seahawk surfing down the swells at up to 16 knots. It really was a nice boat; I’ll give credit to Tubbs where credit is due. Building a boat is a big job, and for the most part it had been a job well done.

After four days of sailing up the coast the news from the weather bureau was the same: Cyclone Frieda still reporting 60 knot winds, still moving very slowly east, roughly 1000 miles north and slightly west of us. We decided to make a run for it. Frieda didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and in any case barely deserved the title of cyclone; anything less than 60 knots would be called a gale. If it should turn in our direction, at the rate it was currently moving it would take a long time to reach us, allowing time for evasive action. Seeing this reasoning on paper in black and white it doesn’t seem as convincing now as it seemed then, after nearly a week on the same boat with Michael Tubbs. I think we were all anxious to get on with it.

We had supper on shore together, Rod and Mike made last phone calls, and we had enough beers to get reasonably jolly. The next morning another squabble broke out. I can’t even remember what it was about…a screwdriver or something. This time at least it didn’t involve me. Tubbs was doing his sulking act and Mike called him on it. “I thought we were supposed to talk things out on this boat,” he insisted. “You’re just acting like a big kid. If you don’t get your way you just go off and sulk. That’s what you are Michael, just a big kid!” This led to another meeting, but nothing was really resolved, and Tubbs sulked for the rest of the morning while we did a last load of laundry and made one more call to the weather man.

✱

I had been thinking about all this interpersonal friction, sure to magnify itself out at sea, and about how much of it could be my fault. I had tried repeatedly, virtually every day, to bury the hatchet with Tubbs, going out of my way to try and cheer him up, teach him about sailing, pat him on the back, swallow his bile and come back smiling. It was something of a challenge. What I’m just not capable of is to smile and agree when I don’t agree. When I don’t agree I like to defend my opinion. I don’t insist that I’m always right, but until such time as I change my mind, I feel like I have a right to my opinion. I never insisted that Michael do what I said, and would have only if I felt the boat to be in actual danger. I decided to make one final public gesture in an attempt to start out the trip on the right foot. When there was nothing left to do but pull up the anchor, with everybody on deck I said, “Michael, up to now we’ve had our little disagreements, but we’re about to embark on a long and possibly dangerous voyage together and I’d like to suggest that we forget our past differences and start this trip as friends. You’ve got a fine boat here and I’ve got a lot of respect for anyone who can build a boat fit to cross the ocean. We’re all in it together now and we’ve got a long way to go, what do you say?” and I stuck out my hand. As everyone looked on dumbfounded, Tubbs left my hand hanging out there, darting black looks at me from under knotted eyebrows. “No,” he muttered, “wait till we get to Brisbane.” I couldn’t believe it “Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked. “Nope.”

I turned my back on the man and went to pull up the anchor. For a few seconds I thought, “I should get off this boat now; I can’t go to sea under such a Captain.” And then the anger washed over me, and as I yanked up the anchor rode I said to myself, “Well, fuck him! If he wants to be that way, let him be that way. I’m not afraid of him. If he gets in the way we can bloody well tie him up. (This possibility had already been discussed between Rod, Mike, and me.) But I’m all through changing his diapers. If he wants to be Captain, let him be Captain, and if he wants to putter along at 3 knots I’m in no hurry, but if there’s a cyclone sweeping down on us and we’ve got to run for it he’d better stay out of the way and keep his damned mouth shut. I’m gonna get to Australia and I’m gonna enjoy this trip in spite of this prick, and if he thinks I’m going to take any more of my time to teach him how to sail, plot a course, or use a sextant, he’ll soon find out different. He can sulk and stew in his own bile all the way across the Tasman for all I care. I’m all finished being a nursemaid for this big spoiled sulking brat of an overgrown baby…” Thunk!! Oh yeah, the anchor…and we were under way.

We motored out of the bay and I gave a course to clear North Cape. There was a fine breeze blowing but Tubbs made no move to hoist sail, so with the sun going down I crawled into my bunk and resumed my mutinous meditations. Half an hour later Christine gave me a shake. “Michael wants to know if we should put up the sails.” It was like putting a match to a cherry bomb. I literally exploded out of my bunk and up into the cockpit.

“YOU WANT TO KNOW IF WE SHOULD PUT UP THE SAILS? WHO THE HELL IS RUNNING THIS BOAT ANYWAY? YOU WANT TO MOTOR ALL THE WAY TO AUSTRALIA, BE MY GUEST! I’M JUST THE NAVIGATOR AROUND HERE, AND YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN, RIGHT? YOU WANT ME TO RUN THE BOAT, YOU WANT ME TO BE CAPTAIN? (shocked silence) OF COURSE YOU SHOULD PUT UP THE SAILS, THIS IS A SAILBOAT, REMEMBER? YOU DON’T WANT TO BE FRIENDS, THIS IS JUST A JOB, RIGHT? YOU DO YOUR JOB AND I’LL DO MY JOB, AND MAYBE WE’LL GET ALONG BETTER THAT WAY!”

I had a good rant and the sails went up, but it was obvious that Tubbs still didn’t know the difference between a jib and a gybe and was not anxious to take responsibility for running the boat. I had run out of reasons for maintaining the pretense that he could or would even try to take command. I decided that my best chance of enjoying this trip was to pretend that Michael Tubbs wasn’t on board. On this cheerful note we began our 1200-mile passage to Australia.

✱ ✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Afterword — March 2018

This account was originally written in Medan, Northern Sumatra in a dusty typewriter shop kind enough to let me come in daily for a solid week and use one of their machines. That was in February 1982. Now it’s March 2018, 36 years later, and my effort to digitalize this faded old 28-page, 8½” X 14”, 28,000-word onionskin manuscript has leaned heavily on modern dictation software. In a few places I have tried to bring the piece up to date, substituting past tense for present tense in reference to things that were but no longer are, inserting an explanatory note here and there in brackets, adding the few photos I have or was able to find, but otherwise it is much as I laboriously typed it out in 1982.

Oh yeah….I guess I left you all hanging. If you want to know what happened next, see “Cyclone Frieda and the Incredible Sulk” elsewhere on this blog.

Update

About 8 years ago I tracked down Seiffe LaTrobe and we corresponded back and forth a few times. He was still in New Zealand, still playing music and still chasing the ladies, but today I found a comment on a YouTube video of one of his songs that seems to indicate that he is now deceased. The performers in the clip mention that his lyric was full of gossip about Auckland musicians — that sounds totally Seiffe. Last week Chris my other Auckland busking pal and I exchanged emails. He is still alive and well, back in England and still playing great guitar. Click here to hear him.

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Mother Teresa’s First Love

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Joseph Stevenson

by Joseph McClendon Stevenson

as published in Co-Evolution Quarterly • No. 39 • Fall 1983

Introduction

Is this an exposé? Harsh journalism in the temple? The complaint of a disaffected former believer?
If the subject weren’t a famous do-good operation, if it weren’t a respected religious practice, we wouldn’t even ask. Taboo country: objectivity impossible, ambivalence not permitted, all motives questionable.
This account is not the one-eyed view of expose journalism. Nor the one-eyed view of an embittered true believer. All life with eyes that isn’t maimed sees with a minimum of two eyes. Joseph Stevenson reports that way on an exceptionally worthy activity that has slipped a bit, not too far for easy repair. This too is love, Mother Teresa. Maintenance and improvement is as inspirational as founding (especially in these slipshod days), or what is the Church for?
Stewart Brand

YOU DON’T STEP OFF A CALCUTTA BUS, you come squirting out from the press of flesh like a wet watermelon seed squeezed between thumb and forefinger. In the summer it’s hot and muggy even at 7 a.m., but compared to the bus ride it feels heavenly.

Up Kalighat Road there is no sidewalk; the street is a river of people and vehicles, the banks lined with shops and hawkers offering rice, fruit, vegetables, tea, tobacco, and sugar; household utensils of brass, aluminum, plastic, and earthenware; cakes and candies, tabla drums and harmoniums, sarongs and saris, rat and cockroach poison; pots and pans, pins, pens, and umbrellas. Many stalls sell incense, religious posters, and plaster statues of gods and goddesses with two arms, or four, or ten; some white skinned, some blue, some black. Old women sitting in the street make intricate garlands of red, white, and gold flowers, for two blocks ahead is Kalighat, the main Kali Temple for Calcutta’s eight million Hindus.

Kali is not one of your “gentle Jesus meek and mild” gods, but a holy terror: a shapely black-skinned lady with her bright red tongue protruding, one of her four arms brandishing a special decapitating sword, wearing nothing but her long hair, a necklace of severed human heads, and a belt of severed hands. My 1978 “Fodor’s Guide to India” says of Kali’s temple: “Once the scene of bloody sacrifices, now the offerings are all incense and flowers,” but the day I wandered into Kali’s courtyard, in the space of ten minutes I watched four goats beheaded with the same peculiar sword with the sickle-shaped tip that Kali holds high. One elderly Brahmin told me confidentially that in some remote places human sacrifice has not been totally eradicated.

In Kalighat Road a lovely brown-and-white cow stands lazily munching on a pile of slightly wilted red hibiscus, and a fat raven pecks at a dead rat. Children in rags laugh and skip down the street. The sound of a bell means you’re about to be run over by a bicycle, a clapper means it’s a rickshaw, and a horn is a taxi. Nobody looks back, nobody moves very much, just enough; clearances are in inches or fractions and collisions are a rarity. There are more than the usual number of beggars here because of the temple; pilgrims who come to worship acquire additional merit by giving alms. I always give something to beggars, except here. I walk this road four times a day; they understand and do not pester. They know I’m one of the crazy foreigners who works for Mother Teresa.

IN 1948, A 38-YEAR-OLD ALBANIAN NUN working in Calcutta with the Sisters of Loreto order resigned her position as principal of a convent school for upper-class girls to devote herself to serving the needs of the poor. By 1950 she had been joined by other sisters inspired by her example and a new order was formed: the Missionaries of Charity. The first permanent Missionaries of Charity care center was opened two years later in an abandoned pilgrim hostel next door to the temple in Kalighat and dubbed “Nirmal Hriday (Immaculate Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes”. In 1965, having by now established facilities all over India for the care of abandoned children, the mentally ill and handicapped, the indigent aged, and lepers, the Missionaries of Charity opened their first overseas house in Venezuela.

Mother Teresa is today acclaimed by many as a living saint, was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and has become an international focal point for people who feel called to work with and for the “poorest of the poor.” In an age when religious orders are everywhere dwindling, the Missionaries of Charity are strong and growing, active now in some 66 countries on six continents. Mother Teresa herself, now 72 years old, spends much of her time these days traveling: visiting her missionaries at work abroad, accepting awards and honorary degrees, and spreading her message of loving service. In spite of the many honors bestowed on her and the obvious successes of her far-flung projects, she continues to live a life of austerity and insists that “the work” is not hers but God’s. In the poor and the needy, the Missionaries of Charity see the body of Christ, the Christ who said, “I was hungry, I was naked, I was sick, and I was homeless, and you ministered to me.” Mother Teresa: “On these words of His all our work is based.”

On April 2, 1982, three days after my arrival in Calcutta I walked in the front door of Nirmal Hriday where it all began 30 years ago. In the three years it had taken me to busk my way halfway around the world from Astoria, Oregon to Calcutta I had seen a lot of human misery, but never so much of it in one place. Along the way I had also been the recipient of a lot of kind hospitality, charity if you will, from all sorts of strangers including the very poor. I felt like it was time to give something back.

The author and his well-travelled fiddle at the entrance to Nirmal Hriday.

NIRMAL HRIDAY HOME FOR DYING DESTITUTES houses men and women in separate parts of the same building in two long dormitory-style rooms with about 50 beds each. In the early days most of the patients brought here were really on their last legs and usually died within a matter of hours or days. The founding principle was that no one should be left to die alone in the street, hungry, sick, destitute and forsaken. Indeed it is difficult to imagine a more bitter fate. This idea is expressed in a quote from Mother Teresa that hangs in a frame on the wall: “The greatest aim of human life is to die in peace with God.”

Today conditions in Calcutta have improved noticeably and there aren’t as many dying destitutes as there used to be. According to the Gonzalez-Balado book “Always the Poor”, five years ago about 70 percent of the patients at Nirmal Hriday “soon died.” I would say that today the percentage is no more than half that. Consequently the emphasis is shifting from comforting the dying to curing the sick, and though the sisters will stoutly deny it, Nirmal Hriday is looking less like a home and more and more like a hospital, with the Missionaries of Charity folk spending most of their time administering medicine and serving food. Most of the cooking and cleaning is done by other Indian helpers who live on the roof.

As you enter the building from the glare of the street, your immediate impression is one of gloom as your eyes strain to readjust. You stand at one end of the men’s ward next to the main nursing station and look down the row of shadowy, skeletal figures sitting or stretched out on their low iron cots. What the lavish writers like to call “the smell of death” hits your nostrils, but mercifully the nose adjusts in time much as the eyes do. The novice sisters in their plain white saris float back and forth with an air of ethereal good cheer. No one pays you the slightest attention. If you have come to help, you don a green apron and wander down the aisle. A patient calls, “Oh brother!” and asks for pani (water). You take his cup and fill it from a bucket. Another wants “A bottle, brother,” and you fetch an empty urine bottle from the toilet.

The food is brought from the kitchen in big steel buckets or aluminum bowls. A heap of rice is served onto each plate with a big spoonful of dahl (thick lentil soup), another of potato-vegetable curry, a piece of fish or perhaps some chicken soup, and the plates are delivered to the patients’ beds. This one wants more dahl, that one more curry, or more soup or bread or milk. Special orders: no soup for this one, or no curry; another complains about the size of his piece of fish. Everyone gets pretty much whatever he wants if we’ve got it. They eat well and often cannot finish what’s on their plates. There are usually plenty of leftovers and these are served to the beggars lined up outside who eat from their own begging cups, plates, tin cans, clay pots or just a few leaves spread on the ground.

After breakfast there are shaves and haircuts to give, finger and toenail clipping, back rubs, and the never-ending trips for water. About half the patients can’t make it to the toilet and require bedpans and urine bottles. Quite a few can’t even manage these and we clean them up, changing the blue pajamas and bedsheets in situ. Distribution and administration of medicines — by pill, liquid, injection, and intravenous drip — is handled mostly by the sisters and brothers of the order, sometimes assisted by foreign volunteers with some medical background. In the last hour of the morning, after lunch and before they run us out at noon, I take a seat on somebody’s bed and play my fiddle. There is no other entertainment here and the patients seem to enjoy my rough-hewn efforts. They show a distinct preference for fast American hoedowns, except for John Smith, an old Anglo-Indian suffering from tuberculosis, who always requests “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

At noon everyone leaves except for the permanent resident-helpers, and the doors are locked. At 4 p.m. we return to serve the evening meal, a last round of medications, and at 6 p.m. the day is over for us. By the time we return at 7 a.m., one or two patients will probably be missing from the ward, now resting on a shelf in the dark room marked “I Am on My Way to Heaven.”

A recent view of the men’s ward from the nurses’ station, looking very much as it did in 1982 except that another row of beds has been added in the center aisle.

Most people might imagine that working in such a place would be a gruesome business, and certainly it takes a while to adjust to the more disagreeable tasks like changing patients who have soiled themselves, or even to the shocking appearance of men (I worked in the men’s ward) who are little more than skeletons covered with skin. But as I learned what I could do and how to do it, I found a lot of joy, even humor, in the work. For starters, faced with a roomful of dying destitutes, it is virtually impossible to feel sorry for yourself. Life’s little insults and injuries fade into insignificance when you are forced to consider these unfortunates, what they suffer now and what they have been through in their lives. For most of them this is the best they’ve had in a long time, maybe the best they’ve ever had. It feels good to be a part of this giving.

But it’s a curious thing — and this used to keep me grinning day in and day out at Nirmal Hriday — that there seems to be a fundamental law where human beings are concerned that there is no such thing as “enough.” No sooner do we get what we want but we want more of it or something else. Contentment is a rare bird, and what passes for it usually could be better described as momentary satiety. The wise ones teach that this insatiable craving is the root of all our unhappiness, afflicting the rich and poor alike. I have never seen this more clearly than at Nirmal Hriday. The well-to-do generally mask their frustrations and do not complain in public but the poor have nothing to lose or hide.

Take someone who is dying in the street, a starving, naked human skeleton without enough strength left to stand up, suffering from wounds, dysentery, tuberculosis, gnawed by worms and rats, utterly helpless, destitute and alone in the world. Take this person, wash and dress his wounds, give him clean clothes, three meals a day, a doctor’s care and modern drugs, a bed cooled by a big ceiling fan and the society of his peers — you might think that such a person would be counting his lucky stars at such a change of fortune, if not content at least grateful.

To be sure some of them are, but by the third or fourth day most new arrivals will already be finding fault with their new situation. He doesn’t want rice, he wants bread, his shirt has a hole, his piece of fish is too small or he doesn’t like the soup. I try to give them whatever they want, that’s why I’m there, but I can’t help being amused when a man who a couple of days ago was dying in the gutter is now upset because his shirt has a hole in it.

I shake my head and laugh; they eat better than I do actually. When I get a moment I search the closet for a shirt without a hole, or the kitchen for another banana or more bread. If he thanks me it will be a nice moment, and if he snatches it out of my hand with a scowl the grin comes back and I scratch my head at the wonder of it, this unfathomable thirst. Like as not he’s already got three pieces of bread under his pillow that he stashed there this morning and has already forgotten.

TIM AND I ENTER TOGETHER. Tim is an Australian chemist who volunteered here two years ago and then went to Bangladesh to help train workers in a new government pharmaceutical factory. Now between jobs he has come back to Nirmal Hriday briefly before taking a holiday in Darjeeling. Right away we notice that old John Dodson has been moved from his bed at the end of the room to another near the front door directly under the Madonna that sits in a glass box on the wall, a bed usually reserved for the current patient-in-crisis. Tim takes one look at John and says to me, “He’s dying.” He puts his hand on the old man’s brow. “Yeah, he’s getting cold already … he won’t last an hour I’ll bet. Sit down with him, nobody else will. They’re too busy with food and medicine to sit with the dying.”

It’s a bit of a shock to me. Only yesterday John had been so worried that they were going to discharge him since the wounds on his legs were nearly healed. Now John lies on his back gasping for breath, his eyes half open but rolled up, seeing nothing. I sit down at the head of the narrow iron cot and take the old brown hand that has squeezed mine so often in the past weeks. The hand is cold and so is his face. I fetch a blanket from the closet, but a sister stops me, saying, “Don’t use that, brother, that’s a new blanket.” I climb the stairs to the roof, where they hang out the wash, and find an old one. As I cover John with the old blanket I wonder to myself what the new ones are for.

I take his hand again, stroke his brow, and say, “John, can you hear me?” No response. Tim passes and I ask him, “Do you think he can hear me?” “I think so, but it’s hard to say.” I try again. “John, I brought you the Sunday paper,” I say, feeling somewhat stupid but wanting him to know. He closes his mouth for the first time and puffs his cheeks a few times before resuming the gasping rhythm, but slowing down a little now.

JOHN ERNEST DODSON, AGE 61, BED 49, of Anglo-Indian descent. His lanky body is really too long for these cots, and his toothless mouth lies like a ravine between the great beak of his nose and his long pointed chin. “Hello my dear friend,” he used to greet me every morning, taking my hand in both of his and pulling me down next to him. Then I would hear his complaint for the day — someone took his blanket, or the fan isn’t working, or he hasn’t a cigarette left to his name. “See, my dear friend, my little box is empty,” and he’d show me his little tin cigarette case. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that, John,” I would say. “After all, you’re our superstar.” “Yes, superstar ….superstar.…” he’d repeat rapturously, smacking his lips and then chattering on and on like a lonesome housewife, always at a bit of a loss as to what to do with those long arms and legs in a world designed for smaller frames.

Sometimes I would see him waving at me frantically from the end of the room, and when I got to him he’d just hold his nose and point to some neighbor’s un-emptied bedpan. One of his nearest neighbors was a young man who was blind, deaf, mute, and had difficulty feeding himself. This fellow liked to get up occasionally and walk around very slowly with his arms folded across his chest, sometimes taking a minute or two between steps. Of course he couldn’t see where he was going and frequently collided with whatever part of John’s anatomy was hanging off the bed at the moment. John’s efforts to fend him off were hilarious and usually futile, but we generally took pity and pointed The Walker in another direction.

John was always asking for something, and I usually gave him whatever he wanted. He’d kiss my hands, touch my feet and carry on like a supplicant. “The crafty old devil,” I’d say to myself. I came to think of him as the wolf in the “Little Red Riding Hood” story who put on a bonnet, pulled up the blankets up to his long hairy chin and tried to impersonate Granny. To see John asleep, his pointy, wolfish face with its perpetual stubble of heavy grey beard sticking out from one end of the covers and a knee or a foot or an arm inevitably poking out somewhere else, my imagination easily supplied the bonnet and somehow I’ll always remember him that way.

John’s neighbor, The Walker, was a sad case. He was young, possibly still in his teens, with a sturdy physique, but couldn’t seem to see, hear, speak or deal with a bedpan. He tried to feed himself but more food ended up in the bed or on the floor than in his mouth, so we generally sat down and fed him with a spoon. He did have an excellent appetite. The rest of the day he spent either asleep or staring fixedly into space. Once or twice a week he would take one of his walks. At first it seemed so pointless to me: pouring food into one end of this zombie, collecting the shitty pants at the other, and changing the urine-soaked bed several times in between. This process could go on for another 50 years.

My attitude changed in time. For one thing, it seemed clear that this boy was a victim. It seemed unlikely that he would have grown up so robust had he been crippled from birth, not in India. I theorized that he had suffered some kind of brain damage fairly recently, perhaps from a savage beating, perhaps from an accident of some kind. He displayed not a bit of crankiness, fear or hostility, and given his sweet and cooperative disposition it was hard to imagine that he had brought such a fate upon himself. I also found that he was capable of learning new or forgotten skills. Instead of pouring the water into his open mouth I taught him to hold the cup and drink without assistance. With practice he spilled less and less. One day I watched him make the mistake of fastening his lips on the far instead of the near rim of the cup, and when the water landed in his lap he realized his mistake and corrected it.
By this time he had evolved in my mind from a vegetable, a bed-soiling machine, to a person, one I rather liked despite his shortcomings, especially when contrasted with some of the crosspatch patients in the ward with their senses intact. Then one day as I sat with him rubbing his shoulders (which he obviously liked), suddenly he blurted out “Cha!” — “tea” in Bengali, a beverage to which all Bengalis are wholeheartedly addicted. I felt a kind of a thrill I hadn’t experienced since many years before when I’d managed to teach a sadly neglected 16-month-old baby to walk. I hugged The Walker and ran off to find some cha.

Gopal was another sad case, an incontinent madman who sat or snoozed on his bed, didn’t like to be disturbed and took no interest whatsoever in his surroundings. If handled gently he was usually but not always cooperative about bathing, shaving, bed-changing, medication and meals. Sometimes he would start talking to nobody in particular, often working himself into a pitiful state with the tears streaming down his face. When I left Nirmal Hriday late in May I left Gopal with a new haircut and a sporty moustache. When I returned for a visit in September he was the only man remaining from before but it was two days before I finally recognized him. He had been moved into a dark corner, had a month’s growth of beard, and swung at me wildly when I tried to shave him.

One of the patients suffered from a condition in which there is a rupture in whatever seals off the scrotum from the lower abdomen and consequently what he carried between his legs was nearly the size of a volleyball. This prevented him from walking but otherwise he seemed relatively healthy, certainly not badly emaciated like most of the others. He had a bald head, a sweet face and a disposition to match, never made a fuss about anything, and spoke a few words of English. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of when food was about to be served. Quite often about five minutes before a meal he would motion for me to sit down by his bed and then tell me earnestly, with great emphasis, “I have not rice! ” or “I have not tea! ” or “I have not bread!” One day he really bowled me over. It was not mealtime, and when I bent over to hear his words, he said, “I . . . am . . . melancholy.” I gave him a vigorous back rub, he cheered up and went to sleep.

The most disagreeable patient in the ward I referred to as The Pest. He had been admitted with a grossly swollen belly, and as he improved under the doctor’s care he began to gripe, wheedle and beg. He apparently had a stash of coins secreted somewhere and used to prevail on the volunteers to buy cigarettes for him. (The little conical Indian cigarettes called beedies, consisting of a bit of tobacco rolled up in a leaf and tied with a thread, sell in Kalighat for two paise, or nearly five for a penny.) I put a stop to this eventually when I noticed that not only did he hoard his smokes, never sharing with others, but he was developing a bad cough. I began to give him khaine (chewing tobacco) as I did to most of the others — a little bit every other day. I considered it a much lesser evil than smoking for these men, many of whom were suffering from TB and other lung diseases. A lot of them preferred khaine anyway.

The Pest was the worst beggar in the ward and the only one I can remember who had any money. After I cut off his supply of beedies, he would beg for khaine every time I came by. I soon discovered that he often had a supply hidden away, begging was just a habit with him. If I came within arm’s reach he would fasten onto me and amplify his pitiful pleading. He was ambulatory and would sometimes actually follow me around. Once when I was trying to comfort a patient in real pain I had to beat off The Pest who came slinking up behind and tried to pull me away. Like the squeaky wheel, The Pest got more than his share of grease, but no matter what you gave him he was never satisfied, never grateful, and was universally detested in the ward for his constant griping and utter selfishness.

YESTERDAY WAS EASTER SUNDAY. John, a Catholic, joined Mother Teresa herself for Mass and Holy Communion. I had arrived in the morning to find all the patients decked out in the best the clothes closet had to offer and each one wearing a garland of flowers. About a dozen Catholic patients, some volunteers and tourists, and the Missionaries of Charity folk were gathered in front of the main nursing station which had been converted into an altar for the occasion. I recognized Mother Teresa from photographs I’d seen, but it was the only time I was to lay eyes on her. She looked heavy, tired and rather grim. I decided not to join the crowd of onlookers rubbernecking the old woman in her devotions, so I faded back into the ward and started shaving Hindus and Muslims. In the afternoon John complained of stomach ache and hardly touched his dinner.

Old John’s starting to let go now. The heavy breathing gradually slows. The fighting is over — for food, for blankets, for shade and cigarettes. I squeeze the wrinkled hand, smooth the wrinkled brow. By now I’m sure he knows I’m here; he knows it’s me, and we both know the time has come. Back and forth people rush with plates of food and loaded syringes. Over our heads Mother Mary looks down sweetly, wearing a few of Mother Teresa’s decorations around her neck — but there is nothing more to be done for this one except to be there.

Tim comes by again. “Feel for the pulse in the neck.” He shows me, but I’m not all that interested. “After they stop breathing it just slowly fades away . . . beautiful.” He is radiant, which I don’t really understand, but this is my first time; I have never seen anyone die before. John has been in and out of Nirmal Hriday several times; Tim had known him when he worked here two years ago. Now he is dying easy, slipping away quietly in a place he obviously considers home. There is no cause for sorrow.

John stops breathing, then starts again, then stops. Half a minute goes by. One last breath flutters the old cheeks, and then all is still. I feel for the pulse as Tim showed me and as he predicted the heart rolls on for a minute or two, and then all is still, peace in the end, and the “spirit” of John Dodson, the mysterious factor that held all these molecules in that certain form for 61 years ceases to dwell therein.

I find it hard to believe that this subtle spirit simply ceases to be. Nothing ever just ceases to be. The universe is a kaleidoscope of matter and energy transformations, but nothing is lost, nothing just disappears. What becomes of this sophisticated organizing and sustaining force, where does it go? Our instruments cannot detect its departure. The diaphragm gives up, the brain swoons, the heart rolls to a stop. What exactly is the moment of death? No one can say.

We often speak of “the miracle of birth,” but where is its mystery? We have watched the sperm and the egg unite, the embryo develop and the baby emerge. We can observe growth and reduce it to biochemical equations but its conclusion remains a mystery — our minds are not equipped to fathom it. In the end we disappear up the shirtsleeve of God, and none can unravel the trick.

To live, we kill the cow and pull up the carrot, swat the fly and poison the rat, and think nothing of it. Without love we cannot grasp it. If we feel anything it’s “better them than us,” but to watch what we love, even a little, wither and die, we are compelled to look, to witness and to wonder, to feel those bonds that unite us with all that lives and the majesty of our common fate. Where the intellect cannot go the heart may lead us to a wordless understanding.

They dressed John in white and put a garland of flowers around his neck, and he lay there for most of the day looking quite stately except for the open mouth which refused to be closed. A new volunteer who had come in late that morning tried unsuccessfully to rouse him for lunch.

THE NOVICE SISTERS who make up the bulk of the work force at Nirmal Hriday, are a sweet and cheerful lot. They live and eat at the “Mother House,” where Mother Teresa also stays when she’s not jetting around the world. They come to Kalighat in a bright blue Peugeot ambulance and pay their respects to the Madonna inside the door before setting to work. Sometimes we ride home in the ambulance with them as Tim and I live not far from the Mother House. All the way the girls chant their Hail Marys and sing simple songs in English. (English is the lingua franca of the Missionaries of Charity who come from all parts of India where there are 14 major languages and countless dialects.) The driver is as wild and aggressive as any Calcutta taxi wallah, weaving in and out of traffic and leaning on the horn, but with the prayers and songs ringing melodiously in our ears, Tim (a Catholic) assures me, “This is the safest vehicle in town — divine protection you know . . .” Even the formidable Head Sister Luke tends to relax and smile a bit during the ambulance ride. She wears the blue-bordered sari these girls will don when they take their final vows after nine years of novitiate.

The novices are not saints or superwomen, and in the course of their work they must overcome the same fears and squeamishness that would trouble anyone else. For psychic armor they are given the doctrine that is central to Mother Teresa’s philosophy: that each person under their care is, in fact, Jesus Christ Himself. When they feed the hungry it is Christ they are feeding, it is His wounds they wash and dress, His suffering they strive to alleviate. Thus armed, they go where others have feared to tread, but they do so with a strange detachment.

It seems as if, in the effort to see Christ in their patients, they fail to see them as they really are. They do what is asked, they perform their tasks with gentleness and good cheer, but they do not chat with the patients, do not know their names, do not relate to them personally, and most unfortunately it seems to me, they leave them to die alone. A dying patient is nearly always put on an i.v. and life-saving drugs may be employed, last requests for tobacco and such will be honored, and I have seen novices dip a finger in water and draw a cross on the forehead (this is a last-minute baptism known in the trade as “giving a ticket”), but as far as sitting down with a patient who obviously has only a few minutes to live, it is not done.

I remember one case vividly. Late one morning I noticed a cot surrounded with people and when I went to investigate, in the center of the crowd I found one of the brothers sitting next to a dying man and a nurse injecting cortisone into his i.v. The man was trying to speak and the brother told me, “I think he just wants somebody to stay with him,” as if this were a rather strange and unreasonable request. He was obviously uncomfortable and said, “It’s almost time for our lunch.” I took the man’s hand and he clung to me tightly as the brother hurried off to his duties. With my free hand I began to rub the man’s brow, and when after a few minutes I paused to adjust my cramped posture, he reached for my hand and put it back on his head. A passing novice eyed my patient for half a minute, dipped her finger in his water cup, gave him a ticket and walked on. Ten minutes later as he breathed his last, all the novices were gathered nearby with their backs to us, saying their farewell prayers to Mother Mary. In peace the breathing ceased, the heart stopped, and it was over.

I rose and walked to the washing place to clean my hands and feet before leaving. When I returned to the ward I found the novices clustered around the dead man, staring in hushed wonder. I had just seen a man’s life come to an end, witnessed that mystery towards which all of us are drifting relentlessly. It’s a moment of real significance, for the dying one and for those who care. To share this moment, to ease and witness this passage has to be the whole point of a Home for Dying Destitutes. “Do they really understand that?” I wondered. While the brother fetched a few last bedpans and the sisters said their prayers, the moment came and went, and nobody saw it but me.
THE SISTER-IN-CHARGE AT NIRMAL HRIDAY is Sister Luke. She is often the only fully ordained sister in the place, the others being novice sisters and brothers. I get the impression that Nirmal Hriday is considered one of the most intimidating of the various tours of duty in the Missionaries of Charity’s charitable empire, and it’s a toss-up which is more intimidating: Death or Sister Luke. Her bark is biting, and after being bitten a few times I dubbed her The Crocodile. Sister Luke has been at Nirmal Hriday for ten years now and it could be she’s due for a change of scene. Normally sisters are shifted every two or three years to avoid personal attachments and dynasties. The consensus among the veteran volunteers seems to be that while she is admittedly often disagreeable, short-tempered and downright rude, as a last resort telling her to “stuff it” seems to work remarkably well to settle things down. Most of us however find it difficult to say this to a nun, and so we tend to lick our wounds and steer clear of The Crocodile.

The other point of conflict with Sister Luke stems from her fondness for employing heroic measures to drag patients back from Heaven’s door: injections, i.v. drips, even violent scolding. This policy seems to fly in the face of the motto on the wall about dying in peace with God and even the Western doctors and nurses who come as volunteers are often startled, if not dismayed, by her life-preserving zeal. She in turn accuses her critics of being euthanasia enthusiasts. “They just want to get rid of my patients,” she declares, “just kill them off, get them out, out, out.” In any case, at Nirmal Hriday today the only attention a dying patient is likely to get from Sister Luke is a poke with a hypodermic needle. The novices give them a wide berth and seem as frightened of death as any other schoolgirls would be. The brothers are more offhand about it, but they never have time either: there is the food and medicine to distribute, the bedpans and so forth. Comforting the dying is left to whatever euthanasia-loving volunteers happen to be around. Of course most of Luke’s heroics postpone the inevitable only briefly. After all, the “medical team” is there only eight hours a day at most.

I do recall one of Sister Luke’s few success stories, a fellow who spent nearly a week in the bed at the head of the room under the Madonna but refused to die. He was constantly surrounded by people, the center of attention, hooked up to i.v.s and continually shot full of drugs. Every day I would figure him a goner, and the next day there he’d be, still hanging on. He was one of our walking skeletons (except he couldn’t walk), all the meat gone, literally skin and bones. Then one day he asked me for a cigarette, and I knew he was getting better. The next day they took him off the i.v. and this time I gave him the cigarette.

As his condition improved he no longer got so much attention. They no longer got sweet curd from down the street and fed it to him with a spoon. Sarah the pretty English nurse no longer spent so much time fussing over him and poking him with her syringe. After a few more days he was moved from the place of honor and back into the ward. Was he glad to rejoin the merely destitute? On the contrary he grew more surly and cantankerous every day. He complained loudly about the food, the clothing and the bedding, and begged continuously for tobacco. His immediate neighbors would tell him to shut up, he became most unpopular. One day as he was sounding off about something, I was sitting with the patient who had “not rice! ” He raised his head to locate the source of commotion and then shook it sadly, murmuring, “Idiot!”

Then came a day when lunch was rather austere: no fish, no dhal, only rice and vegetable curry, and not a great deal of that. We supplemented this with lots of bread and milk, but there was nonetheless a storm of protest, led by this character who Sister Luke had brought back to life. He was so angry and outraged that he refused to eat anything, threw down his plate and made up his mind to leave. He couldn’t walk so he waddled along like a duck, in the crouching position, out the door and into the street.

When Tim and I left at noon we found him hunkered down in the gutter across the road. He waved to us, and after a bit of sign language we understood that he wanted us to carry him down the street to a bigger piece of shade. The noonday sun in May is broiling in Calcutta and I wondered if he might already be reconsidering his impetuous exit. We moved him, gave him a couple of beedies, and left him crouched there with a scowl on his face. At four o’clock he was nowhere to be seen, but the next morning he came back to his bed under the ceiling fans and if not mellow he was at least quiet for a change, having lived through a night in Kalighat, where things go slightly berserk after sundown. Whatever hardships he may have suffered that night, it must have been a bit of a thrill, a last gesture of independence, and in that sense Sister Luke’s efforts were fruitful even if his gesture consisted mainly in thumbing his nose at her.

Sister Luke figures now that they have the drugs at their disposal, what can they do but use them? I guess what I wonder is, why can’t they do both: cure the sick and comfort the dying? The latter was the raison d’être for Nirmal Hriday’s creation — why has it been abandoned?

THE MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY and the volunteers only spend six to eight hours a day at Nirmal Hriday. A small resident clan of Indian helpers live on the roof and the three most visible of these are James, Lucky and the “Speaker of the House.” If Sister Luke is the brains of the place, James is the brawn. Built along the lines of a gorilla with broad, hunched shoulders and skinny, knobby legs, James is always smiling. Nothing can disrupt James’s toothy grin, not Sister Luke’s barking, not even 100 kilos of rice on his back. When heavy bundles arrive, like sacks of rice, flour or sugar, or huge baskets of vegetables, it’s James who carries them in. Anyone who can smile while staggering under a 220-pound sack of rice is a hero in my book. Contemplating some of the morbid and gloomy sects loose in the world today, I have thought about starting a new religion with James as the prophet — a sect dedicated to imperturbable cheerfulness.

Lucky Ram looks like an Indian version of Tweedledum or Tweedledee: well under five feet tall, chunky, and always combing his hair. He does whatever needs doing including the worst of the dirty work: emptying bedpans and cleaning the toilet. When it’s mealtime he helps serve the food, at morning bath time he helps carry patients who can’t walk to the washing place. It’s usually Lucky who sweeps up all the spilled rice, rejected vegetables, fish bones and banana peels after lunch, possibly because he’s built so close to the ground. He can sometimes get deaf but never grouchy, and has a good sense of who needs a bedpan right now and who can wait a minute.

With Lucky Ram and James — the “ATLAS” shirt is so right-on!

One other Indian fellow who lives in the building, although I rarely saw him do any work, I call The Speaker of the House because the one activity that makes him impossible to overlook is his daily recitation. Every morning at about ten-thirty he takes a seat on an empty bed at the end of the ward and starts reading in a loud voice from a collection of technical manuals in English. He drones on for nearly an hour with a robotic style of delivery: syllable by syllable, without punctuation, steady, monotonous, and loud enough to be heard all over the building. The effect is diabolical — a filibuster designed to drive you out of your everlovin’ mind:

. . . the-pow-er-train-must-be-a-ligned-with-the-
trans-mis-sion-gears-be-fore-the-ma-chine-is-put-in-
to-o-per-a-tion-the-clear-an-ces-must-be-checked-
with-a-mi-cro-me-ter-and-the-man-i-fold-re-moved-
for-in-spec-tion-care-must-be-ta-ken-not-to-dis-turb-
the-high-pres-sure-re-lease-mech-an-ism . . .

Tim claims that two years ago The Speaker was reading the same stuff and doesn’t understand a word of it. My fiddle playing never fazed The Speaker and so “Oh Suzanna” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” were often accompanied by “How to Overhaul Your Bulldozer” along with the sound of conch-shell trumpets and drums drifting over the wall from Kali’s temple. In India you learn tolerance or soon go bananas.

TUESDAY WAS A DARK DAY FOR CHRISTIANITY at Nirmal Hriday. Occasionally we get groups of tourists — I don’t know what else to call them. They come, look around, and leave. This bunch had a movie camera and a whole battery of lights.The sisters discourage picture-taking in the Home but these visitors were permitted to make a few passes through the ward in a great blaze of light. Then most of them evaporated, leaving only a pair of young men who looked like they’d stepped out of the Sears catalog: handsome, clean-cut and coiffured, and immaculately dressed in sporty polyester.

I was shaving patients as they began to work their way down the aisle, stopping to chat with each patient. As they got closer to me I began to hear snatches of their rather one-sided conversations (few of the patients speak any English). I looked up and caught the following: (hand on shoulder, eyeball to eyeball) “Jesus loves you, did you know that?” (no answer) “Do you know who Jesus is?” (no answer, polite smile) “Do you speak English? ” (no answer, but enjoying all this attention). As I turned back to my shaving, from the other side I overheard: (hand on head octopus-style, bent over murmuring) “Jesus . . . Jesus . . . health . . . Jesus . . . health . . . Jesus . . . .” Suddenly he straightened up and said brightly, “There! Feel any better?”

“Sonofabitch!” I said to myself, “They’re trying to heal our patients! Now how do you heal someone who’s suffering from malnutrition? Not only that, they’ve brought along a movie camera just in case one of the old boys leaps out of bed and starts shouting ‘Hallelujah!’” As they neared Gopal I looked up again to catch the action. I had learned only a few words of Bengali, working words for nouns like water, bread, and blanket, but the Indian brothers had told me that when Gopal got excited (which wasn’t really that often) he tended to use rather rude language. One of the Sears mannequins sat down next to Gopal, clamped onto his shoulder and began to preach. Unfortunately he used his left hand, something of an insult in the East where that’s the hand you use to wipe your ass. Gopal flung off the offending hand and began to preach right back. The would-be healer retreated to the end of the cot and tried again, but Gopal matched him verse for verse in what must have been unprintable Bengali.

When the two of them had made the rounds of the entire male ward, having failed to effect any miraculous cures or conversions, they produced a 35mm camera and began taking pictures of each other with various patients (not Gopal). “I’ll sit by this one. Be sure to get the window and the picture of Mother Teresa.” “Put your arm around him . . . that’s it.” “Get one of me talking to him, okay?” “Now take his hand . . . right. That’s good, but don’t talk.” I finally stood up and asked them, “What are you doing?” They told me they were members of the “Celebration Singers,” a gospel choir from the States in Calcutta for a concert to be given at the YMCA. One of them asked me something about the work and then gushed, “Well it certainly is a wonderful opportunity to be used by the Lord.”

Tim was away that particular morning and when I described the action he said, “You should have run them out of there or spilled a bedpan over their heads. They were just using the patients.” I can just see them now, passing those photos around at the old prayer meeting, and all the sweet girls in their spotless gingham frocks trembling in awe of these brave young soldiers of the Lord who ventured even unto the very gates of Death to preach the Gospel to the heathen.

When the evangelists finally decamped I finished up my shaving rounds. Some departing volunteer had left us half a bottle of 1117 aftershave lotion, and I splashed some on old John Smith. “There you go John, now you smell just like a ten-dollar whore.” He grinned and raised his right hand to his forehead in the typical Indian salutation. I looked down the room of freshly shaved and perfumed men and thought, “Best looking bunch of dying destitutes I ever saw.”

MOTHER TERESA IS OLD NOW, and mortal like the rest of us. Starting off alone, faced with the staggering dimensions of poverty and human misery that have swallowed many a do-gooder in India, her work has prospered and spread to the far corners of the globe, encompassing even the “poor-in-spirit,” who despite material advantages strive to end their lives with drugs and alcohol in the wealthy capitals of the world. Thousands have joined her, and millions have felt the touch of her love and concern. Today she is a media figure, a symbol of the helping hand extended to all. Though she denies that she is any more than the willing instrument of God’s love and mercy, she no doubt understands the value of her image as a rallying point for those who wish to help the needy but don’t know where to begin. Governments hang medals on her and she in turn hangs them on Mother Mary, “source of our joy.” Many like me have heard her name flashing across the wires and one day turn up on her doorstep to offer our services. Others donate money, food, medicine and shelter.

Mother has her critics, even within the Catholic Church, who accuse her of a pre-Vatican II “pray, pay, and obey” attitude. She says, “I’m not trying to change anything. I am only trying to live my love, [meet] the need that the person has then, that moment. Somebody said to me, ‘Why do you give them the fish to eat? Why don’t you give them the rope to catch the fish?’ And I said, ‘Our people, they cannot stand. Either they’re hungry or they’re diseased and disabled. They cannot stand. Still less are they able to hold that rope. What I do, I give them the fish to eat, and when they are strong enough we’ll hand them over to you and you give them the rope to catch the fish. ”

As with followers of every visionary, Mother’s successors will not always see things in exactly the same light, nor be sustained by the same depths of faith, energy and love. Time moves on, conditions change, and the original spirit is gradually diluted and mechanized. This is evident at Nirmal Hriday today, partly as a result of the inevitable effects of worldwide expansion and partly because of changes in Calcutta itself. As in government bureaucracies, when problems a body was constituted to attack are alleviated, the committee looks for other work to do.

There is no one to fill Mother Teresa’s shoes when she is gone. The institutions she founded will live on no doubt, but they have already begun to slip away from her direct control and things will likely never again be quite the same. The sign just inside the door at Nirmal Hriday, “Welcome to Mother’s First Love,” becomes a poignant reminder that she no longer has time to come around, even though she lives only a few blocks away.

TO THOSE WHO LOOK TO HER FOR INSPIRATION, Mother Teresa says that if you feel called to the work, begin at home and in your own neighborhood. Are those under your own roof truly bound together in a spirit of unselfish love and kindness? Many modern urbanites don’t know their own neighbors, don’t wish to know them, have no time to take from their own affairs. How much luck do these people, their families and neighbors, have in their quest for happiness? Is this not the root of human alienation and injustice?

Misery is a relative thing, the world will never be free of it. One day you are face-to-face with death, with the rats already nibbling at your toes; a week later your misery is no fish for lunch. American teenagers are miserable if they have no car, and their parents suffer if they have only one. The world is an open text, and if we would truly live and touch the highest peaks, we must look and learn. Loving service is an education and teaches us the meaning of words we have always known.

The work at Nirmal Hriday is exhausting, every muscle is taxed: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. I discovered some of these muscles to be puny, others appeared that I didn’t know I had. Sister Luke has to be forgiven her short temper and the novices their discipline of studied detachment. I worked for two months; they have dedicated their whole lives to serving others. The last time I visited the Home, I saw Sister Luke, The Crocodile herself, sitting by the patient under the Madonna, peeling a large pink grapefruit and popping the pieces into his mouth.

■ ■ ■

Postscript 2018

It is 36 years since I wrote about Nirmal Hriday. The original was handwritten by lamplight in the West Bengal countryside and then copied on an ancient borrowed typewriter. I have left everything in the present tense and done only minor editing, mostly removing about a thousand commas; I used to sprinkle commas everywhere. The piece was published by Stewart Brand in the Fall 1983 “Co-Evolution Quarterly, “ the periodical offspring of his Whole Earth Catalog, later re-branded as the Whole Earth Review. Stewart, an eco-technocrat who had a huge impact on the cultural revolution of the 60s, is now 79 and still breaking new ground, peering into the future with his “Long Now Foundation” — something too complex and fascinating to start talking about here. Suffice it to say that it is a point of pride for me to have his name on a piece of mine.

As for Nirmal Hriday, it apparently still exists in Kalighat much as it did when I volunteered there. Over the years it has come in for criticism at times for the practice of baptizing non-Christian patients (described as “giving a ticket” in my account), for poor sterilization protocols and for deficiencies in the treatment of pain, though I was not aware of these latter issues when I worked there. I was not involved in the medical side back then and had no thought of a medical career, but lo and behold 18 years later I woke up to find myself working as a hospice nurse in Astoria, Oregon. Funny how things happen.

As for the Missionaries of Charity, in the 20 years since Mother T died in 1997 the order seems to have dwindled considerably. They may be working quietly under the radar, but a cursory search online does not turn up much. Several of their facilities have been attacked by Muslim radicals who willfully slaughter both patients and caregivers, generating much of the news you can find online about the Missionaries of Charity today. Evil takes center stage as always.

Lastly, I can’t send this back out into the world again without saying one thing about meeting Mother Teresa, one of two Nobel Prize winners I have had the honor of shaking hands with. It happened on Christmas 1982, after I had already written this piece. I’d come back to Nirmal Hriday and had been playing Christmas carols on the fiddle in the men’s ward when she came over to me and asked me not to forget to play for the women as well.

Shaking her hand was an experience. It was the hand of a hard-working peasant: large, leathery, and warm. My hand sunk into it like you sink into a soft leather easy chair at the end of a hard day. When I met her she was still reportedly scrubbing floors on her hands and knees several hours a day as a spiritual practice of humble service, and it was that hand that enveloped mine and spoke of a lifetime of hard work and great love. It was a moment in time that I was not expecting and will never forget.

Joseph Stevenson • Astoria, Oregon • March 2018

Apprenticeship

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Joseph Stevenson

Astoria, Oregon to Hawaii to Samoa • June 1979 – December 1980

Thirty-seven years ago I left my home on the Oregon coast with a one-way ticket to Maui and $200, looking to see if a guy could still make it around the world on a shoestring. I was old enough to have some survival skills, and young enough to put up with a lot of discomfort. Did I make it? Stay tuned. “Apprenticeship” describes how it all started.

As 36 years later I reformat this piece typed out in 1980 in New Zealand, I must point out that I am describing my experience as extracted from my journals. My perceptions of life in Hawaii were largely negative, partly due to the fact that I was what we would now call homeless and broke. On the other hand my impressions of life in Samoa were largely positive and my situation there was largely the same. Times may have changed in both places since 1979; I know that I have changed. Things may be better in Hawaii now, or worse in Samoa. I calls em like I sees em…or saw them at the time.

Astoria, June 2016

I arrived at Honolulu airport just before sunset, June 19, 1979, and stepped out into the muggy tropical air somewhat fuzzy from too many drinks on the plane. Underneath the intoxications of the moment I was exhausted. For a solid year I had been working full tilt towards this moment, the dawn of a dream I’d nourished for so many years: to circle the globe with a pack on my back and see as much of this world as possible. I had no major motivation other than curiosity, a persistent curiosity that has led me down many strange and various paths in my 37 years. The fact that it hasn’t killed me yet I can only attribute to dumb luck. If it does tomorrow I’ll have no complaints.

Honolulu airport has no walls. It’s your first look at a phenomenon that will confront you constantly in the tropics. There is a roof that keeps out most of the rain. I suppose a hurricane would blow rain right through the place, but who goes flying in a hurricane? I walked to the baggage area past gorgeous girls with arms full of fragrant leis. They were apparently not waiting for me.

You soon find out that for the visitor there are three Hawaii’s, depending on whether you are (1) rich and there to indulge your every whim, (2) not rich and there on a tour, doing the best you can on a limited budget, or (3) a poor adventurer intending to live by your wits. In the first case you will travel everywhere by taxi and rented car, stay in plush hotels, eat in restaurants, shop in exclusive establishments where quality and taste are exceeded only by the price, rent yachts to take you sailing and helicopters to take you flying, and be able to command any conceivable service for your comfort and amusement at the wave of your hand (and checkbook) in the warm and languid embrace of one of the world’s most strikingly beautiful and cosmopolitan resort areas. You will also spend enough money in a week’s time to send traveler #3 around the world at least once and by plane yet. (In 1979 one could still buy a ticket for about $2000 that would fly you around the world with some flexibility as to route and a year to complete the trip.)

If you are traveler #2, the gorgeous girl at the airport will give you a lei, a handsome man will escort your group to an air-conditioned bus, and for the rest of your trip you will rarely lose sight of those smiling hosts or that air-conditioned bus as they ferry you from one site to another and then back to the hotel. If you can afford to go out at night you will tend to stay in a large group to discourage muggers. You will end up spending at least $100 a day without doing any shopping. You’ll have a fine time (unless you get mugged) and when you get home sunburned and friends ask you how it was, you’ll say, “It’s beautiful!” Which it is, except for all those hotels and air-conditioned buses.

If you are traveler #3 and not an attractive young lady, you are in for a rough time. Aloha is not for you, for you it is dead and buried. People will look past you, around you, over you, through you. They will not answer your hello. If you have no money, most people you meet will take an interest in you only if they can get you to work for nothing. There are still some beautiful beaches accessible to all, but if you linger there after dark you stand an excellent chance of being hospitalized by young Hawaiians angry at being cut out of the island’s grandiose economic pie, having long since sold their lands or had it given away for them by the last Hawaiian kings and queens anxious to fill their palaces with Victorian bric-a-brac. In short, nobody wants you around. The “haves” will ignore you, and the “have-nots” will cut your throat just for sport. You are not the first naïve adventurer to come down this road.

But I hadn’t a clue to all this as I threaded my way through the tour groups already lining up in bunches here and there. Besides I had friends expecting me on the island of Maui, and I was planning to sleep for a week. My flight to Maui wasn’t until the morning, so I threw my bags in a locker, grabbed my fiddle and walked out of the airport. Someone had told me that the airport was close to downtown Honolulu, and I had visions of walking around those towering hotels, perhaps sitting by a fountain and fiddling a 16th-century tune as the beautiful people floated past…a world away from my homestead in Little Walluski. It soon became obvious that nobody walks out of Honolulu airport. There wasn’t even a sidewalk. I hardly got a mile when I ran up against a seemingly impenetrable barrier of freeways and chain-link fence. Downtown Honolulu was nowhere in sight. At this point the Spirit of Adventure finally ran out of gas, and with my fiddle for a pillow I went to sleep on a plank under a scaffold in an empty lot.

* * *

The road is an old friend of mine and has sustained me in the best and worst of times. I think of the sky, the land, and the sea in somewhat the same terms, but their’s is a more passive companionship. I feel good with one above and the other below much as one feels good when standing between two old friends, but it’s the road I turn to when I need help, to get into a good place or out of a bad one. There is poetry in motion, time becomes visible. The landscape flows and changes like clouds in the sky, like a pinecone in the fire. Nine months earlier the road had led me like a seeing-eye dog to a little hilltop apple orchard near Hood River, Oregon where, against wild odds, the clouds opened up for half an hour and I enjoyed an unobstructed view of the total eclipse of the sun.

The Spring of 1978 found me testing out the road again after some years absence. I had been traveling around the Pacific Northwest all fall and winter with an itinerant old-time banjo and fiddle band called the Famous Potatoes and I loved it. When the lure of a fishing job on a salmon troller took our banjo player and reduced our ranks from 4 to 3, the remaining Potatoes decided to drive our panel truck to Maine, as usual playing in taverns and passing the hat for food and gas money as we went. In New England I took off on my own and spent most of my time going to contra dances, the old-fashioned figure dances from British and Yankee tradition, still danced for social recreation in hundreds of New England communities as they have been for the past 200-300 years. In New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine, for five weeks I averaged better than a dance every three days. I returned to Astoria the last week of June, having spent nine months on the road and found it still to my liking.

I went to work on my homestead with the idea of tying up loose ends, bringing things up to a level where I could absent myself for a number of years without worrying unduly that 10 years of effort were coming unraveled behind me. My friends didn’t see a whole lot of me in my last year at home, and the few who ventured out to see what was going on were no doubt startled to find that not only had I finally finished the roof, but running water, half an acre of grass, and a real telephone had suddenly intruded on my formerly pioneer lifestyle. I felt badly about having to seclude myself in the interest of getting things done. Astoria is my home, and I love it dearly. Some may think that I left to find another, but it isn’t so. In the past 18 months I have landed in some of the world’s most prestigious paradises and have never in the least been the least been tempted to forsake my home in the Oregon woods. The reasons for this are various and will crop up in the narrative to follow.

In any case Astoria has been my home for about 15 years now and I have many friends there in all walks of life whose paths have crossed with mine at some point along my erratic course. I wanted to leave something behind me in their midst until such time as I should find my way home again. I had been impressed with the old traditions of country dancing in New England. For four or five years some of us had attempted the same type of thing in Clatsop County, but it tended to be a sporadic business depending largely on the availability of musicians and dance callers, and often suffering from disorganization and last-minute-itis, but I noticed that we seldom suffered from a lack of dancers. When the music was good and the instruction clear, the dancers came out of the woodwork and some incredible evenings ensued. Credit is due here to Jeannie Darlington [now McLerie] who gave the initial push, and to her sister Susie Holden [now McLerie] who carried it on.

I liked the fact that people of all ages participated. I liked the fact that many of the dances involve switching partners, and as a result one had soon danced with every potential partner in the hall. I liked the idea of live music played by your friends and neighbors, especially when it came naturally and un-amplified. I liked the New England tradition of “prompting” with brief directions to the dancers and letting the music provide the energy, rather than the incessant stream of verbal patter against the background of recorded rhythm that characterizes a lot of modern square dancing. The dances are set right to the music and it is often possible, even with inexperienced dancers, to eventually stop prompting entirely and let the dancers take their cues from the music and from each other. In New England I experienced myself what it’s like to step out on the dance floor without any clear idea as to what you’re doing, to let your partner and dancers around you whirl you about and set you down pointed more or less in the right direction, to swing around and around until you nearly forget who and where you are, only that you’re part of a swirling pattern, one moment hand-to-hand with somebody’s grandmother, then with a tiny child who only comes up to the fourth button on your shirt, and then…why it’s your original partner, the girl who dragged you out on the floor against your will just a few minutes ago!

These dances are ancient and hearken back to a time where dancing was not primarily a recreation or a form of courtship, but a more a celebration of community. Everybody danced on the feast day, and took their place in the dance as they took their place in the community, each a necessary part of a larger pattern that ensured that there would be food for another year, shelter and clothing for all, and children to follow after. There is little in modern life that serves to bring out these deep-rooted aspects of community life. A parade or a festival now and then, the Christmas season, occasionally a local or national disaster may make us suddenly feel the ties that bind us together as neighbors, rather than pick at the differences between us and blow them all out of proportion.

I devoted most of my spare time in that last year of labor on the land to putting together the Green Country Dance Band and the monthly dance at Netel Grange, doing what I could to see that it might survive my departure. The last I heard [in 1980] there was still a dance on the third Saturday of every month ringing the rafters of that lovely old hall, and you better believe that some of my spirit is ringing in those rafters too and grinning down on all those good friends I had to leave for a while. But it was work, lots of it, the land and the dances, and I was tired. My last Green Country dance was two or three days before my departure. With one day to go I started packing and of course I was up all night. Around sunset I was whisked off to a goodbye party. Dick Johnson gave me his address in Tonga. Rosie Holden [age 8] gave me a big poster of her own making that said “Happy New Year Around the World!”. Michael DeWaide gave me a compass. Everybody wished me luck and then I was back to packing again.

What would you take with you if you were going to wander the world for several years? I took a tape recorder, I took a camera, I actually thought of taking a typewriter. I took long underwear and wool socks, I took a Mexican blanket – I was headed for the tropics, remember? All of these items were soon dispensed with, but I’m getting ahead of myself. At dawn I was up on the roof putting last daubs of silicone sealer around the chimney. I was starting to see spots. At 7 AM I staggered through the woods to my mother’s place under the load of a full pack, a fiddle and a fat suitcase. There my friend Pam Jaasko scooped me up and deposited me two hours later at Portland airport. As I dozed in the car headed up the Columbia River I imagined flat tires, traffic accidents, even violent illness. It seemed only dimly possible that I was actually going to catch that plane. I caught the plane, and at the first opportunity ordered a drink.

* * *

By two the next morning I was back in Honolulu airport after my nap under the scaffold and spent the rest of the night searching for the airline that was to fly me to Maui in the morning. By daybreak I had found the right place and succeeded in hauling my by-now-obviously-excessive baggage from the overnight lockers some half a mile away. I had extracted a concertina from my backpack and was sitting there noodling when far down the sidewalk I had just traveled with all my gear I saw a strange figure coming my way. He was dark-complected with a full black beard and hair in long braids, clothed from head to foot in bright Guatemalan weavings, decorated with rings, feathers, bells, bracelets and necklaces, riding briskly along on a unicycle carrying a large suitcase in one hand and a guitar case in the other. Amazed I watched him ride up to the counter, check his baggage and his vehicle. His name was Razul and he turned out to be a neighbor of my friends Angelo and Gigi, returning to his treehouse home after travels in Central America. Our plane turned out to be a tiny 10-passenger Cessna that shook and shuddered as we took off, and bounced around considerably in the updrafts. The lady who preceded me into the plane was so broad in the beam that two men had to jump up and give her assistance to get her through the door. As we came in for a landing at Hana airport, a tiny strip on the northwest coast of Maui, Razul tried to point out Gigi and Angelo’s place but it went by too fast and we missed it. I could see though, looking at the high cliffs battered by the windward seas, that my dreams of sleeping on the beach were not to be.

As we waited at the airport for our respective friends to show, I played the fiddle and Razul clowned around on his unicycle. Then he took up a flute of his own devise and played, at the same time trying to keep the cycle as much as possible in one spot. It is no more possible to balance in one spot on a unicycle than it would be on a bicycle, but by going forward and back a bit and using a lot of body english it is possible to stay within a 3 or 4 foot circle. The net effect was an incredible dance, a remarkable demonstration of physical coordination and musicianship. Razul could obviously make a living on any street corner in the world.

At last Angelo and Gigi arrived in a rattletrap pickup with their four kids, and after hugs and kisses all around I jumped in the back and rode standing up through the fragrant tropical air past coconut palms, papaya, guava and banana trees, flowers everywhere splashing the green landscape with color and perfuming the breeze. At the Hana store Gigi took the $20 bill I offered and handed me a Macadamia nut ice cream cone. I had $100 left, and much too much crap, but the initial plunge had been made, and in one giant step I was halfway across the Pacific.

* * *

I have been referring to Angelo and Gigi as friends. In point of fact I had never met Angelo, and had not laid eyes on Gigi in 10 years. Over the years she had kept in touch with an occasional Christmas card or note to the effect that she had had another baby, and always the invitation to visit them in the islands. I always wrote back to say that I would be coming…someday. They were no doubt surprised when I actually appeared. In the course of my brief stay with them I was introduced to a bizarre lifestyle the like of which I had never seen before in all my wanderings.

Angelo and Gigi, along with most of their friends and neighbors, lived like tropical hillbillies in ramshackle shacks, collected food stamps and welfare checks, and instead of brewing whiskey on the sly like their Kentucky counterparts, they grew marijuana or “pakalolo” as it is known in the islands. Some of them were making $50,000 a year and more on their cash crop. Most were health-food devotees to some degree and there was much interest in various spiritual philosophies, though it seemed to me more posture than practice in most cases. Numerous children ran brown and naked through house and yard like beautiful butterflies. Angelo and Gigi had never bothered to marry, hence she was technically an unwed mother and collected about $400 a month in food stamps. This was the favorite ploy amongst these Hawaiian hillbillies though some still used the claim of being “psychologically unfit to work”. Ten years ago apparently one could come to Hawaii, register as a “crazy”, and immediately start collecting very generous benefits. Nowadays it’s not as easy as it once was, but some still pull it off. In any case it is interesting to note that 20% of the resident population of Maui receives public assistance. Perhaps to maintain the appearance of poverty, dwellings are makeshift and flimsy and the yards not much to look at. The previous winter my hosts had lost their roof in a storm. Most of the family’s energy went into the cash crop.

Pakalolo farming on Maui has reached such proportions that even by official government statistics it ranks as the #1 industry on the island, outstripping even the tourist trade which takes in hundreds of millions a year. Carefully manicured buds of “Maui Wowie” have become world famous and bring as much as $200 an ounce even on the island itself. The government has responded with a massive ground and air assault during the harvest season dubbed Green Harvest. Military helicopters fly low over suspected growing areas looking for pakalolo fields. If plants are spotted they will either radio for ground crews to move in or actually land and hastily harvest the crop. No one is arrested in less he attempts to intervene. A typical green harvest will net many tons of the weed, but seem seems to have little effect on the traffic except perhaps to drive up the price.

Marijuaneros living in “hot” areas such as that I suddenly found myself in took various precautions to protect their plants from these commando raids. As a newcomer I was counseled to take cover whenever I heard the sound of an aircraft of any kind. Plants were almost never grouped in fields or gardens easily spotted from above, but grown in individual holes, two or three plants to a hole, scattered through the underbrush. Another popular method was to plant in plastic buckets or bags, allowing the plants to be moved at will. When a Green Harvest operation was anticipated (and it was not a well-kept secret), the plants could be hidden under the big mango trees until the helicopters were gone. This was a lot of work, but with each bucket representing perhaps several hundred dollars of finished product these underground farmers pursued their tasks with considerable energy. Most were still paying for the land they lived on, which is incredibly expensive there and getting more so by leaps and bounds, and I presume that’s where a lot of their profits went. This is some of the world’s most prestigious real estate, and while I was there the mad scramble for a piece of it was one of was the most prominent feature of island life. George Harrison of the Beatles had just bought 100 acres adjacent to Gigi and Angelo, and most of these people went around with cash register eyes mentally totaling up the millions they would make some day wheeling and dealing in property.

After only a few days on the north shore of Maui I found myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with the life there. My own life is so vastly different from that of most Americans that I tend to be pretty careful about criticizing others without walking a mile in their moccasins. While I do not condone welfare cheating, I do not see it as such a heinous crime as some. Vast sums are spent by our elected representatives to bail out failing corporations, shoot men into outer space, and above all to arm ourselves for Armageddon. A puzzling gap between our expertise and our common sense has resulted in this strange world I am grown up in, with the sword of nuclear destruction hanging over our heads and millions around the world still starving every year. I reckon that if the leaders of our world had devoted as much energy and resources in my lifetime to food production and population control as they have to weapons and war, that we might live today in a more peaceful and beautiful world, a world we might be proud to extend into the depths of space. No it didn’t shock me unduly this living on the dole though I think it a debilitating life, and unless one is making a social or artistic contribution to the community, unjustified. Oddly enough none of the folks I met on the Hana side were involved in the arts except for Razul, and he was regarded by his neighbors as “pretty weird”. Nor was I especially disconcerted by the pakalolo growing which in this day and age goes on nearly everywhere to some extent.

I see marijuana as a fairly innocuous substance, and the principal consequences of its abuse as lethargy and forgetfulness. In the hands of the mentally ill can trigger frightening and dangerous episodes, but so can kitchen knives, automobiles, and alcohol. The law seems to be coming around to my point of view but still incorporates a major contradiction. In most of the US these days, it is either implicitly or explicitly legal to smoke marijuana in the privacy of your own home, but illegal to buy, sell or grow it. Hence all pot smokers, and there are many from Bond Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, must still commit one of these illegal acts in order to have a smoke. Of the three I find growing the least reprehensible. Compared to alcohol or tobacco, marijuana is quite easy to produce. Once the ban on growing is rescinded the price will plummet, and the present flow of dollars by the billions to the crime syndicates which distribute much of the supply, especially that which is imported from foreign countries, would cease. Those who abuse the substance could be counseled by friends, parents or public agencies without the specter of courts or prison hanging over the proceedings. It is the considered opinion of many longtime smokers that were marijuana made legal many users might very well give it up, the excitement of committing a furtive and illegal act having been the most stimulating part of the experience.

It wasn’t any one aspect of this strange lifestyle that soured me, it was the whole picture riddled with so many odd contradictions. On the one hand espousing high-minded spiritual philosophies and on the other raking in the bucks by any means at their disposal. On the one hand displaying considerable concern that a food item be organically grown or without preservatives while living in dangerously rickety houses with minimal sanitary facilities, and in some cases abusing themselves regularly with drugs and alcohol. On the one hand taking pride in the fact that they produced and gathered some of their own food, built their own shelters and tinkered with their own vehicles, but at the same time talked incessantly of the real estate boom and how they would buy and sell until they made their millions and never had to work again. Sometimes I felt that the children, who were by and large healthy, well behaved and beautiful, could see through all this better than their parents who they sometimes watched with curiously sad eyes.

When the helicopters started buzzing the house I decided to move. I heard Gigi trying to explain to her little ones…but how do you explain something like that to a three-year-old? When reprimanding a child for bad behavior Gigi constantly used the phrase “that’s not happening” to mean “don’t do that”. There was a heavy pall of unreality in the air, and a lot of insincere posturing. Angelo was building a 46-foot ferro-cement sailboat on the other side of Maui, and when he went over to work on it I went with him. I had been gone from Astoria less than a week.

* * *

The island of Maui is formed of two volcanic peaks joined by a low flat valley. The easterly peak is called Haleakala and rises swiftly from the sea to a height of just over 10,000 feet. The westerly peak is perhaps half this tall, and the intervening valley no more than a couple of hundred feet above sea level and now virtually solid with sugarcane. As the northerly tradewinds that encounter these peaks are forced into higher and cooler altitudes they begin to precipitate moisture, just as the northwest winds on the Oregon coast bring moisture from the offshore waters warmed by the Japanese current and deposit it over the colder coastal waters and mountain ranges. On the northeast coast where Angelo and Gigi live they get about 70 inches a year, roughly the same as Astoria. As you go up the hill the rainfall increases with altitude until you come to areas on both peaks when the rainfall reaches 400 inches yearly. This windward side of the island is covered with dense jungle broken only by the cliffs at the edge of the sea.

By the time the weather reaches the other side of the island, all the rain has been spilt, and on the south and west coasts there there is as little as 7 inches all year. Except for sugarcane fields fed by irrigation, the lee side of the island is as dry and barren as a desert, with dramatic outcroppings of rock, range cattle, prickly pear cactus and most importantly, beautiful beaches. Here is where people come for fun in the sun and indeed the climate is hard to fault: lots of hot sun tempered by nearly constant breezes and occasional puffy white clouds sailing over. The contrast between the wet and dry sides of the island is most startlingly experienced in some of the in-between communities on occasions when gusting winds will blow rain over the ridge to fall in places where there’s not a cloud to be seen in the sky. In Maalaea Bay where Angelo kept his boat it never once rained while I was there, but it was not unusual when we had to go shopping for a tool or something to find it pouring rain a few miles to the north. In short, somewhere on Maui is a climate to suit anyone, from wet jungle to dry desert to cool forest high on the slopes of Haleakala, and all accessible in less than a day’s travel.

The scientific theory for the formation of the Hawaiian Islands postulates a hotspot down in the Earth’s molten core. As the solid crust of the ocean floor drifts slowly northwest at the rate of a foot or so each year, this hotspot periodically bursts through creating this chain of volcanic islands, the oldest being Kauai to the west, and the youngest, Hawaii, the big Island on the east end of the chain where eruptions are still taking place. As Hawaii drifts away west of the hotspot, presumably a new island will form. The last lava flow on Maui occurred early in the 20th century on the southeast coast and didn’t amount to much. The older islands gradually lose their jagged contours by slow erosion and an eventual blanket of greenery. Maui is a veritable youngster as islands go, and the most physically spectacular I have yet seen: from the dramatic cliffs of the north coast to the sunny beaches of the South, from the rain forests around Hana to the moonscape crater of Haleakala it is indeed as everybody tells you “a magical place”. “The trouble is,” Peter Cook used to say, “the people…”

* * *

Angelo’s boat “Arcturus” sat in a cradle, high and dry on the wharf at Maalaea harbor. Though still just a hull and decks, he had been working on it for 5 years, having framed and plastered the hull in a warehouse on the north coast and then trucked it down to Maalaea where he dropped in a Chevy 289 V-8 engine. Virtually nothing else had been done inside except for a few planks under the stern deck where Angelo slept. I slept on the foredeck wrapped in a blanket with the brisk northeast trades keeping the mosquitoes off.

One evening soon after our arrival in Maalaea, Angelo took me over to the resort town of Lahaina 20 miles to the west where we could watch the sunset. I took along my fiddle and played as we stood on the dock looking out at the celestial fireworks spread out behind the islands of Lanai to the west and Molokai to the north. What a luxury that seemed: to play music in the open air. Back on the Oregon coast it’s a rare day that you can play out-of-doors without cold fingers, and never at night. I made up my mind to come back in the daytime and play for change in the street. The Famous Potatoes used to play in the street quite a bit, weather permitting, and I was rather fond of that venue. Playing in clubs and taverns can be such a struggle at times with so much extraneous action going on. An audience in the street gathers for no other reason than that they are enjoying your music and donations are entirely voluntary. Many merchants, lawmakers and law enforcers would like to see the city sidewalk as a path of commerce and nothing more, but I hope there will always be room for musicians, orators, clowns, peanut vendors, sword swallowers and the like.

Anyway it was becoming obvious that I would have to generate some income. My money was running low and Angelo was more inclined to buy beer than food for his floating population of volunteer helpers of which I was the only full-time member. About this time I made a conscious decision to try to keep as much of my activity as possible in two areas: music and boats. It seemed to me at that point, and 18 months later my opinion has not changed, that music and boats were going to be the keys to my trip. Airplanes are fine for those who can afford them, who have little time and like to move fast, but boats on the sea have long been closer to my heart. Although at that point in my life my experience with sailboats was meager, I had spent many months at sea for periods of 3-5 weeks at a time as an albacore fisherman out in the Japanese current a hundred miles or more off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California. Both by choice and by necessity I wanted to travel by boat, and behooved me at this point to learn as much as I could about sailboats and sailing.

By the same token music had over the years played a larger and larger part in my life, growing from a personal pastime to an occasional profession, but most importantly as a way of communicating with other people. I have always held that the best music happens in the living room. The best music is free and priceless, travels from heart-to-heart with great joy and then vanishes into thin air forever. During my last year at home some friends had given me a fascinating book entitled Music of the Whole Earth which further impressed on me the universality of musical activity in every corner of the globe. In contemplating my travels I came to see music as a “key in the door” to the real life of people everywhere, and (except in Hawaii) so it has proved to be.

At the same time it gradually became clear to me that I had arrived in Hawaii at the worst possible time to look for a passage south. Because of seasonal weather patterns most boats headed for the South Pacific left in April, May and June. I had just missed the boat so to speak, and I could foresee problems getting on with my travels. There was plenty of boat work around — a la Angelo — as long as you didn’t expect to be paid. If worst came to worst a guy could always wash dishes in Lahaina for $4 an hour.

I decided to stick to music and boats as long as I could without starving, and so each morning at dawn I used to hitchhike from Maalaea to Lahaina where I had breakfast at McDonald’s. For $2.17 I got a couple of eggs scrambled, an English muffin with butter and jelly, hash browns, sausage, orange juice and coffee. Without this $2.17 breakfast at McDonald’s I’d have starved in Hawaii. After my meal I’d stroll down to the waterfront and setting out my open case, salting the kitty with a few quarters and perhaps a dollar bill if I had one, I’d fiddle my way through the mornings under a little tree between the Pioneer Inn and the Coral See glass-bottomed boat, across the street from the city square shaded by one enormous Banyan tree, the largest on the island.

At first I hung out a small sign requesting donations of spare change, mangoes (my favorite fruit and just come into season), and any help or information concerning a job crewing on a boat headed for the South Seas. On my first day of this a plainclothes policeman came by and told me to put the sign away, otherwise the authorities gave me no problems. I found I could make about $10 a day playing about four hours. Morning was my favorite time before the heat, the flies, and the air-conditioned buses got too thick. In this fashion I found I could survive although my cash in hand was all gone and I was living literally hand to mouth. In the afternoons I hitched back to Maalaea to give Angelo a hand. Occasionally the bonito boats that docked in the harbor would throw us a fish and we’d cook it over an open fire on the lee side of Arcturus’s towering hull. Otherwise it was beer, an occasional sandwich, and a jar of roasted soy beans I kept hidden under a pile of junk in case of dire nutritional emergency.

One day I finally tracked down Bill Holmes, a former Astorian once a high school teacher in the Dalles who’d been fired for defending the editor of the student newspaper in a dispute with the school administration. The experience soured him on the teaching profession and he’d taken to working with his hands in the open air, content with a life in the country free from intellectual strife. The last I’d heard of Bill was the news that he had disappeared into the high Sierras on horseback. He surfaced again on Maui, working on a cabbage farm about 2000 feet up the west slope of Haleakala, and at least one old Clatsop County friend had visited him there the year before my arrival. Over the phone Bill volunteered to pick me up in Lahaina “at the office”, and bring me up to the farm for a visit. He arrived just as I was raking in a fast five dollars playing “Dixie” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” for a bunch of good ol boys in aloha shirts and cowboy hats. I spent several days on the farm with Bill before returning to the seashore, reveling in the fresh vegetables the farm had to offer though he himself was clearly sick of eating the stuff. He had recently purchased a 16 foot Prindle catamaran and we made a date to go sailing.

On the appointed day, July 23rd, Bill picked me up in Maalaea towing the boat on a trailer behind his pickup truck and we drove to a beach roughly halfway between Maalaea and Lahaina on the south coast. He’d had some trouble with the trailer coming down the hill and we were running late. By the time we got to the beach an offshore breeze was blowing pretty hard, and Bill’s friend Bob, a neighbor and fellow farmer, had already pulled his Hobie cat up high on the sand. We set up the mast on Bill’s boat, stepped back to take a look, and the wind blew the boat right over! I thought that would put an end to our sailing plans, so I borrowed gear from somebody and went snorkeling for an hour around the coral heads. When I came back the wind had died down somewhat and Bill was eager to try out the boat. I thought about the wind, I thought about the boat, I thought about some of Bill’s ill-consider boating adventures on the Columbia River in years past. I knew he was risking his boat. If anything should go wrong the boat would be blown straight out to see, but I had faith in my ability as a swimmer to make it back to shore if necessary even from a distance of a mile or more.

So I told Bill “If you want to go for it, I’ll go with you.” Bob was oblivious to our conversation, staring spellbound into the dark eyes of his betrothed and pregnant vahine as Bill and I caught the breeze and went skimming off toward Lahaina. About a mile down the beach and a quarter mile offshore we tacked back and we were actually inside the breakers, close to our point of departure, when suddenly in a puff of wind the boat capsized. Twice we got it upright again only to have the freshening wind blow it right over on the other side, all the time moving us steadily offshore. The last time she went completely belly up and I figured we were done. With the shore now about half a mile away, suddenly Bob appeared in mask, fins and snorkel to give us a hand. With Bob’s help we got the boat upright and sailed it through some wild wind and whitecaps to within a quarter mile from shore when a bolt holding the mast stay broke and the mast fell over, leaving us at the mercy of the winds. At this point Bill waved his long arms back and forth over his head. Someone on shore took the hint and went to call the Coast Guard.

Bob gave me his fins and said, “swim for it.” Bill had brought his own. Bill asked, “Aren’t you coming with us?” Bob replied, “You kidding? Just get my boat on the trailer and tie it down good. I’ll try to hit Kahoolawe. See you tomorrow.” (Kahoolawe is a small island about 7 miles away used by the U.S. Navy for target practice.) There was no time to argue. I gave Bob my sneakers, put on the fins, and Bill and I started swimming. It took us about half an hour, going into strong winds and cresting swells. It was further than I expected and my legs got tired, but I was never seriously worried. I did think about Bob and it occurred to me that he might have stayed on the boat and given me his fins because he didn’t think I could make shore without, and that thought continued to bother me throughout the coming night. By the time we hit the beach, Bob and the disabled boat were clean out of sight.

The Coast Guard’s only boat turned out to be off on a three-day maneuver near (perhaps in?) Honolulu. The Maalaea Coast Guard station was deserted except for three Marines watching a baseball game, who hadn’t the faintest idea what to do in an emergency. Finally a call was made to Honolulu and they promised to send a helicopter, but it was doubtful that they could get there before dark. And so we stood helpless on the beach as the sun went down and the wind continued to blow a good 30 knots turning the water into a froth of whitecaps. Somewhere out there was Bob with only a mask and snorkel, a bathing suit, my sneakers, and a disabled 16 foot boat.

Soon the volunteer rescue squad arrived with radios and spotlights to help direct the search, and before long a helicopter began to comb the 7 miles of ocean with a powerful searchlight. Then the Navy began bombing their island, dropping brilliant white flares that lit up the whole horizon. This had nothing to do with our situation except, as it turned out, it gave Bob something to steer for while it lasted. By this time Bob’s girl was in tears as her parents arrived at the beach to take her home. At about 10 PM there being nothing more we could do we drove back to the farm, quiet and heavy hearted, thinking of what Bob must be going through and what his chances of survival might be.

After a restless night the dawn brought no good news. The helicopter had given up at about 1 AM and was preparing to resume the search come daylight, but so far no traces been found of the boat or Bob. Then about 8 o’clock the news came: Bob had been found on Kahoolawe Island, a man was with him on the ground, he seemed to be in good health and spirits, and a Marine helicopter was preparing to land and pick him up. Needless to say a great cloud lifted from the household. The wheels of life began to turn again. We drove to nearby Makawao for shopping, and somebody had to see the eye doctor. By the time we got back to the farm there was Bob, showered and shaved with a beer in his hand, his relieved and smiling fiancé by his side, telling his tale to the assembled farm folk and looking as if he’d been through nothing more strenuous than a morning round of golf.

Bob had spent the night wrapped in the sail, lying on a 4 inch aluminum crossmember as the canvas “deck” had been ripped away by the waves, trying to steer toward Kahoolawe through 10-foot seas and wild blowing spray. At times the boat just spun crazily out of control, at times he passed out and the wind would start to carry him toward the open ocean between Kahoolawe and Lanai. Just before daybreak he heard breakers and stuck his head out of the sail to find that he was about to be blown up against a cliff. He managed to turn the boat by paddling frantically, and then moved along the shore until morning light enabled him to slide into a little bay past the Navy sign that said “NO ENTRANCE”.

Everyone took the day off. We drank beer and played ball with the kids all afternoon, everyone uncommonly conscious of the gift of life, and Bill was further cheered by the news that his boat could probably be retrieved and towed back to Maui. That night at Bill’s place I cooked up a beef stroganoff and we had a big dinner with Bob and his girl, laughing, celebrating and swapping near-disaster stories. The next day I washed the salt from my hair but never the memory of that long swim, or that long drear night wondering the fate of Bob Douglas.

* * *

I spent a lot of time thinking about this whole incident, the first of what I hoped would be many sailing trips on my way around the world. It did not augur well. Nor had my last trip on a sailboat some nine years previous. I had accompanied my mother and stepfather on the first leg of a trip from Astoria through the San Juan Islands up near the Canadian border. I had gone with them as far as Neah Bay including one tack 100 miles or so out to sea, my one and only offshore experience in a sailboat up to this time. I loved it out there, as I had on the tuna boat, but now with no motor grinding away, no lines to tend, and time to nap and dream as the wind carried us along. But two months later on the way home their boat was capsized by a sneaker wave at the mouth of the Columbia River and my stepfather lost his life.

It is in the nature of water and weather that once you cast off your lines your life hangs in a delicate balance. The risks are not necessarily greater than say driving on a freeway, but it is a liquid not a solid world and the skills necessary for survival are of a different order. For me the difference is best symbolized in the experience, when afloat, of being carried slowly but inexorably away by wind or current from something or somebody that you can almost reach with your hand, when even a slender fishing line would make the difference between coming alongside and drifting away. Have you ever experienced that sensation? Generally in such situations we can make use of an oar, a motor, or perhaps undignified mad paddling to bridge the gap, but lacking a throw line and something or someone to catch it, or an anchor…without a line of some kind or adequate means of propulsion you are caught and at the mercy of this liquid world, faced with the choice of swimming for your life or hoping that you can make a landfall somewhere. Have you ever had something that you treasure accidentally fall from your hand and sink slowly out of sight in deep waters? In either case were you on the land there would be no problem. It’s a different world on the water.

In the case of Bill’s boat, a 5 pound anchor and 50 feet of line would’ve made the difference between a harmless capsize while beaching the boat and a major emergency operation putting one human life in extreme danger and two others in doubt, costing many thousands of dollars in motor fuel and man hours during the search and rescue, and getting all our names in the paper. As for Bob, I consider his decision to risk his life to save a $1500 boat to be a foolish one. He knew the risks and he knew that swimming, even without fins, was a far safer course than staying on a disabled boat trying to hit a distant island in a night of foul weather. But Bob is one of those people who lives to take risks, to pit themselves against the forces of nature when the odds are even to see who comes out on top. This was not the first time, I found out later, that the Coast Guard had been out looking for Bob. I’m grateful to Bob, both for his concern in coming to our assistance in the first place, and for the fact that it would have been an even longer swim for Bill and I had he not helped to get the boat somewhat closer to shore. But I am not the one to tempt fate in that fashion, I am still learning the ropes, and perhaps it was well that my first sail in nine years turned out to be a sobering reminder that you don’t fuck with the fuckin ocean.

* * *

In the week following the above incident I stayed at Bill’s and planted a vegetable garden around the vestiges of one planted the year previous by our mutual friend and Clatsop County native Toivo Lahti. Some corn, mint and rhubarb survived from his efforts, and I added beans, snow peas, radishes, beets, cucumbers, carrots, spinach, parsley and marigolds. Wherever I watered, little broccoli plants appeared, no doubt from Toivo’s plants gone to seed. I transplanted many of them and had a large and prolific broccoli patch. It was the first real garden I’d ever had, and in the tradition established by Toivo I spent many hours there naked in the warm sun, weeding, watering and playing music for my little vegetable friends. It was an instinctive turn towards the earth after all my involvement with watercraft, and remained a touchstone for me during the remaining months of my Hawaiian odyssey. I made a special effort to plant things that Bill and his family like to eat, knowing there was a chance I’d be over the horizon by the time the garden started to produce.

Back in Lahaina I was beginning to get tired of playing in the street all by myself. Before Hawaii I had always had at least a couple of friends along for street music. Playing solo is very demanding, especially on a melodic and somewhat piercing instrument such as the fiddle. There is no place to hide, and your every mistake and uncertainty seems to stand out like a sore thumb, thus the concentration required is significant. I kept expecting that sooner or later, standing out there in the street with hundreds of people passing by every day, some kindred musical soul would appear to join forces with me. Hawaii is pretty famous for its music, especially for its skillful guitar players. It didn’t seem unreasonable to expect that somewhere on the island there was a guitar player who might like to play fiddle tunes and do some singing in the street. With the right partner I knew we could make many times the $10 a day that I seemed to average. At this point my best day had netted $14, my best biggest single tip was $5, and my worst morning ever I had packed it in after a couple of hours having collected only three pieces of root beer candy. But in the course of several months on the streets of Lahaina I met only a handful of musicians and not a single one with whom I could establish the easy the kind of easy-going, good-humored rapport that had seemed so easy to come by in the green fields of Oregon. If you turn up on a sunny Saturday in Cannon Beach, Oregon for an afternoon of busking, you’re sure to be joined by Chili Willy the washboard player, more often than not some itinerant guitarist or banjo picker will join in, somebody will buy you a six-pack, and a passing tourists will request a tune and perhaps even sing it for you. Well don’t look for anything like that in Hawaii. There are lots of musicians obviously, but they are all engaged in a dog-eat-dog struggle to break into the clubs and hotels. They do little or no jamming or playing for fun, they treat strangers as potential competitors and work incessantly on their “act”. Music, like everything except the sun and the wind, is bought and sold in Hawaii to a degree that depressed me no end. I had looked forward to meeting Hawaiian musicians and enjoying a bit of musical dialogue, but in walking around I heard no sounds of live music floating out from people’s windows or front porches, only disco and television. Even Maui’s only radio station played no Hawaiian music whatsoever, only the worst kind of polyester pop music from the mainland.

I consoled myself with the thought that hours of playing solo for an audience was excellent practice, and took the attitude that my sessions in the street were not only my only source of income but training of the most rigorous kind. But there’s no denying that the musical side of it had lost its charm. I have always been a great people watcher, and the never-ending flow of new faces past my office under the little shade tree was my main source of satisfaction. I soon discovered that the small army of young people who worked on the tourist excursion and fishing boats in Lahaina harbor, and whose faces I saw passing by every day, were never going to speak to me or even look in my direction. They never did, except once, later, and in writing.

My only friends on the job were Ruben, the Portuguese garbageman who often spent half his working day sitting under my tree listening and occasionally chatting with me over a cold beer, and Michael the harbormaster who often said hello, sometimes picked me up hitchhiking, and occasionally brought me gorgeous Hayden mangoes from his yard. Sometimes small boys from Lahaina would hang out with me selling mangoes from a cardboard box for 25₵ apiece. They liked my music, supplied me with mangoes, and at their bequest I learned to play “Puff the Magic Dragon”. The Coral See came and went with its cargo of traveler #2s who sometimes lingered awhile with me between the boat and the bus. They were my best customers, and the only class of people I met in Hawaii who exhibited even a modicum of manners. Even the occasional traveler #3 I ran across was generally cold eyed and paranoid, from bitter experience no doubt. Sometimes an air-conditioned bus would park itself right next to my tree and sit there idling its big diesel engine for an hour to keep the air-conditioner going while its passengers went for a boat ride. When the buses got too thick it became impossible to either hear or breathe; there was nothing to do but pack up and leave.

Around this time I came up with two ideas designed to boost my earnings as a solo performer: one a fiddle made from coconut shells, and the other a foot-operated dancing doll. I started building the fiddle in Hawaii but didn’t finish until 10 months later in Samoa. The result makes a nice conversation piece but is musically disappointing. [The dancing doll happened later, in Europe.] All the same I did make a steady $10 a day, and by judicious living I could sometimes save a few dollars. And so it was that in the first week of August I was able to buy a bit of food, and with a lift from Bill up to the 10,000 foot summit, spend two days and nights hiking through the gigantic Haleakala crater.

Though I have chosen to make my home in the forest, oceans, deserts and mountains tops have always called to my spirit. It’s the big sky that draws me I think, the vast empty spaces into which you can expand your consciousness and your thoughts — psychic elbow room so to speak. I guess I believe that our personal limits extend as far as our senses can reach, even to the distant stars that glow so brightly in the crystalline air of the wilderness. I have actually experienced something like that and found there the highest wisdom and the only true peace it is been my privilege to know. Even in my forest home I found it necessary to clear half an acre of trees, allowing myself a generous slice of sky and a look at the next ridge or two. Volcanoes are the acne of the earth, and while inorganic of content are most organic in form, suggesting that the earth is indeed a living thing, perhaps the tiniest electron in a single cosmic molecule that we only dimly perceive with our most sophisticated instruments. The empty crater of a big volcano — and Haleakala’s crater is 7 miles across — is a place to feel as wide as the earth and as tall as the stars, a place as dead as the moon, yet throbbing with echoes of geological thunder and pictographs of cosmic life.

To travel from sea level to 10,000 feet in an hour’s time is a dizzying experience. You feel lightheaded and everything shimmers. I stood at the top of the Sliding Sands Trail that leads down into the crater and played a tune called “The Road to the Happy Isles”. As I finished, a curious sound drifted up the slopes to me. It turned out to be the applause of hikers scattered along the mile or so of switchback trail that lay at my feet. Acoustics aside, Haleakala is famous for bizarre atmospheric effects and I saw my share: rainbow sunrises, orange streamers radiating from the full moon, planets shining in daylight, and clouds pouring endlessly into the crater from the north but never filling the bowl. I walked between red cinder cones and black cinder cones, the two contrasting colors of lava stones meeting in the valley between without mixing, as if some meticulous Japanese gardener had arranged them by hand, not a single black stone on the red side nor a red stone on the black side. Some parts of the crater are as desolate as any place I’ve ever seen with the possible exception of Death Valley, California. Long sweeping slopes of lava with no hint of life except for an occasional silver sword, a plant that occurs only in Haleakala and which looks something like a large silver porcupine, of a hue so bright that it fairly glitters in the sun. After two glorious days and freezing nights I walked out to the highway and thumbed a ride to Bill’s farm, vowing to return again, a promise that I was unable to keep.

The next week Bill hired a motorboat in Lahaina, got special permission from the Navy to land, and we headed over to Kahoolawe to retrieve his boat. On the same deserted beach as his boat we found several boxes of US military C-Rations, and since we had neglected to bring any food we snacked on canned spaghetti, peanut butter, crackers, chocolate, spiced beef etc. From the date on the cartons I guessed this stuff had been lying on the beach for at least a year, but we didn’t suffer any ill effects. I remember laughing to find that the peanut butter had been packaged by the “Real Fresh Company”. Later in the South Pacific I saw lots of canned milk and other foods from Real Fresh, an Australian firm. It was around this time, spending the night at Bill’s, that I was awakened by an earthquake in the middle of the night. “Hmmm, there goes California…” I thought drowsily and went back to sleep.

Checking in with Angelo at Maalaea harbor, I found that he had received a final ultimatum: get the boat in the water and tied up by August 31, or lose his wharf-side mooring spot. Many deadlines for this had come and gone but it looked like this one was for real. The waiting list for mooring spots was a good five years long, and they were rumored to change hands for $20,000, maybe even $50,000. We had 30 days to launch Arcturus. She needed paint, through-hull fittings installed, a rudder, and final adjustments to the power plant. I told Angelo that I would give him all the help I could, but I was flat broke, beginning to feel the effects of malnutrition, and not at all sure that working for nothing was a wise move at this point. Sick and broke in Hawaii was not where I wanted to be.

I applied for a job as floor mopper at the big Wharf shopping center in Lahaina. I filled out two long application forms that asked for my entire personal and employment history, and was told to report at 10 AM the next day for an interview. At 10 AM the next morning I happen to have a sizable crowd gathered under my little tree, and so I fiddled on for a while in hopes of a few more tips, consequently I was 15 minutes late for my appointment. When I appeared at the office I was told, “You’re late.” The man I was to see was reportedly gone from the office, and it was made pretty clear to me that there was little use in my making another attempt to see him. I had blown it. That was my first and last attempt to plug into the system. Sometime later I did take an application from my beloved McDonald’s, but I filled it in with surrealistic fantasies and sent it to a friend in Portland.

I went back to my routine of playing music in the mornings and working on Arcturus in the afternoons with occasional trips up the mountain to putter in my garden. The most troublesome project on the boat was the rudder. Angelo had had a rudder cut, according to the designers plan, from 3/8 inch steel, and then had reinforcing strips welded across it horizontally. Unfortunately in the process of adding these reinforcements the rudder itself had been badly warped, distorted into a bit of S-curve when viewed from the rear. After trying unsuccessfully to take the bend out, and listening to a number of ideas on what to do about it ranging from “nothing” to building an entirely new rudder, Angelo decided to fair out the existing rudder with body filler, a two-part quickset putty more commonly referred to as “bondo”. We tacked small pieces of rebar and wire in the deepest valleys, encased the whole rudder in a tight-fitting layer of chicken wire and began laying on the bondo. After some 22 gallons of bondo the rudder was not completely fair, but fair enough, and by now probably in the neighborhood of 600 pounds. With the deadline rapidly approaching many of Angelo’s friends appeared to help out, and much merrymaking went along with the work. Angelo acquired the title of “General Bondo”.

August 23rd I was offered a second opportunity to go sailing. In Maalaea harbor lived a carpenter named Dick McClure aboard his venerable gaff-rigged Tahiti catch named “Tahiti”, a classic 30 foot double-ender cruising design. Dick used to drop by Angelo’s boat periodically to see how things were going, snicker at the rudder, and shoot the breeze. One day he asked me if I’d like to sail with him to Lanai, the pineapple island, for a couple of days. Angelo seemed to have plenty of help at the time and advised me to go for it, and so on the morning of the 25th after a slow and uneventful overnight sail through the light and variable winds in the lee of mighty Haleakala, I set foot on the 4th and last of the Hawaiian Islands I was to visit. Lanai is a low, fairly symmetrical island with a large gently sloping crater in the middle now filled to the brim with pineapple plants. The entire island belongs to Castle and Cook (formerly Dole), hence there is none of the mad land speculation and tourist trade of the other islands. It was Saturday and the pineapple workers had come down to the harbor at Manolo Bay with their families to angle for little silver fish with long buggy-whip bamboo poles. There were no high rise condominiums, no souvenir shops, no bars, in fact no structures at all except for a public toilet. Just outside the seawall of the little harbor I found the greatest concentration of these famous technicolor tropical fish I’ve seen yet. The bottom was about 15 feet down and consisted of unspectacular coral formations, but once you got down there you saw the swarms of amazing fish. I soon developed the method of grabbing onto the coral to hold myself in place and reduce exertion, and after a few seconds without any swimming movements from me the fish would come right up and peer into my face mask. I could examine them as closely as if I had them in an aquarium, just the way they look in those $30 coffee table books — truly amazing.

As a teenager I was an avid skin diver though it was always an ordeal fighting the cold and somewhat murky waters off Southern California and Baja. The underwater world is like another universe and there is truly no substitute for a firsthand look. Later I moved away from the sea for a time, and then further north where the water was really forbidding; it had been fully 20 years since I had done any diving. Older, stronger and with the advantage of these warm waters I found that I could far exceed the limits I’d known previously, free diving to depths of 50 feet and staying down much longer. I also found that I’d outgrown the urge to spear fish.

In the afternoon I accepted an offer from the young harbormaster of a ride to Lanai City, the only town on the island. Dick and his friends were running low on beer and I was glad for a chance to look around. Hitchhiking back to Manolo Bay with half a case of Budweiser under my arm, I had my one and only close encounter with a Hawaiian musician. This fellow, roughly 50 years old, stopped for me in his pickup truck and when the conversation somehow turned to music he produced a ukulele from under the seat. It wasn’t a glamorous looking instrument but it had a lovely sound, and when I began tinkering with it he seemed pleased. When he pulled to a stop back at Manolo harbor he took the instrument and to my amazement played a beautiful and sophisticated rendition of Misty. With that he said goodbye and went to join some friends fishing down the way. Back on the boat I practiced Misty on the fiddle for half an hour and then rejoined the ukulele virtuoso on the wharf. He seemed unimpressed with my Misty, also with Road to the Isles and one or two other numbers I tried. He made no move to pick up his instrument and finally I excused myself and beat a hasty retreat.

Two days later back on Maui again after that delightful respite from the rat race, everything was rapidly coming to a head. On Tuesday at the office I was handed a petition with some 20 names, mostly Coral See crew, suggesting in fairly polite language that I cut down on my playing time or move a bit further away as they were by now somewhat over-familiar with my repertoire and, especially on Monday mornings, took little pleasure in my music. At the same time they invited me for a trip on their boat which I took them up on, and discovered in the process that the fellow who handed me the petition was a former logger from the Olympic Peninsula who used to hang out in one of the Famous Potatoes’ favored dives, the Bear Creek Tavern. Small world. Part of me didn’t blame the crew of the Coral See. Frankly I wouldn’t have cared to listen to myself day in and day out either. On the other hand I might have preferred it to the smell and the roar of the Coral See’s big diesels, not to mention the ever present flock of air-conditioned buses. And why had this fellow, who knew Rick and Scotty and all the musicians we used to hang out and swap tunes with around Forks, Washington, never in two months so much as said hello to me sawing away for dear life out there on the sidewalk? These people were not all born assholes, you just get that way in a tourist town.

I hearken back to 1964, my first summer in Oregon, working as a deckhand or “boat-puller” on a Depoe Bay salmon charter, known in the trade as a “puke boat”. I loved being on the ocean every day, I loved taking people who had never even seen the ocean before out there and maybe helping them to catch a salmon. I didn’t even mind mopping up all the puke, but I was genuinely appalled at the attitude of those who ran the tourist businesses of sleepy little Depoe Bay from the charter fleets to the salt water taffy shops. The people who provided their livelihood were universally regarded as suckers and turkeys, sheep to be fleeced. This attitude always lurks behind a demeanor of studied friendliness, good cheer, and sincerity. Not only had these people long ceased to see their customers as human beings, but their private conversations consisted entirely of wild braggadocio concerning their own characters and exploits, and unrelenting putdowns of everyone else. There was obviously a spirit of play at large in this banter, but I was a serious young mystic and in no mood for this game. I saw very little going for these people, who if they had possessed half the fine qualities they claimed for themselves would obviously not have had to pick pockets for a living, quickly grew tired of their company, and spent the majority of my free time reading and walking the cliffs of the coast.

I think you find this attitude to some degree in nearly any commercial enterprise, but next to snake oil vendors and the like, the tourist industry is easily the most cynical. That is why I would never care to live in say Cannon Beach or Seaside, no matter how seductive the thought of miles of beach at your doorstep. Astoria, while it admittedly derives some income from tourism, most of it in the form of an overnight stop at the crossroads of river and sea, or even just a meal and a tank of gasoline, is primarily a working-class town servicing a fishing, logging and farming community, with a small but active seaport. Acting in 1970 to derail the proposed construction of an aluminum smelter in the county, local residents have indicated their preference for things as they stand over sudden changes wrought by industrialization. The weather practically ensures that there will be no great influx of people in the future merely for the sake of getting away from it all, and those with ambitions for a lucrative career will usually go elsewhere. The population of Astoria today is virtually the same as it was 15 years ago and I do not expect to live to see a row of cracker-box houses across the canyon from my A-frame cabin. Nobody is born an asshole, but when you observe a steady stream of people day after day glad to pay $15 a piece for the privilege of going out on the ocean and throwing up their breakfast, I guess after a while you begin to develop a distinctive pucker around the edges.

On Thursday we launched Arcturus with a 50 ton crane. Gigi didn’t come, I ended up breaking the bottle of Cold Duck across her bows. That morning I had awakened to a gnawing hunger in my belly, having worked hard all the previous day on three ears of corn and a potato. When Angelo arose I jokingly threatened a wildcat strike unless food materialized in short order. Five of us went to the Lahaina Travel Lodge for omelettes, and the conversation turned inevitably to real estate. Angelo had a scheme worked out to corral some more property, a scheme that required a couple of grand in a hurry and the rest later. He was trying to sell this idea to the others whom he suspected of being good for the money, and as he waxed more and more enthusiastic I suddenly heard him say, “I’d hock this boat in a minute if I could get my hands on that land.” As we drove back to Maalaea to put Arcturus in the water at last, that sentence kept ringing in my head. I realized what Arcturus really represented to Angelo: an investment and a convenient excuse to leave his family in the Hana rains and hang out with the jet set on the sunny south coast. Angelo had long since ceased to love his boat, or seriously intend to sail it anywhere. I observed that in all the time I’d been around him only once had I seen him go sailing. I don’t think he particularly liked to sail.

When the rope contraptions somebody had rigged up to break the christening bottle didn’t work, the bottle was shoved aside. I picked it up and smashed it over the cement snout that would one day support the bowsprit. I watch the straw-colored bubbly run down her flank and thought, “Have a drink Arcturus, you’ve got it coming.” I felt like the Lone Ranger: “Our work is finished here… Heigh ho Silver away!” I’d come to realize that I’d done what I’d done for her, not for Angelo, to help her into the water and on her way. She was a good boat; I had confidence in the integrity of her design and, except for that ponderous rudder, the quality of her construction. I hope that she would have a good life, loving care, and carry many souls safely to many of faraway shore. Now I realized that I had come to love Arcturus, even if her owner did not, and that it was time to say goodbye. She would doubtless pass out of Angelo’s hands in time and I would probably never get to sail on her, but still she went with a bit of my sweat, my blood and my love absorbed into her hull. The only other person who saw any of this was Dick from “Tahiti”. Shortly before the crane arrived Dick came up to me, peered into my face and said, “You’re the only one who actually knows what’s going on aren’t you?” I suppose Angelo and the boys went out in Lahaina that night, I don’t remember. Dick fed me a barbecued steak and a big salad, and talked in a general way about his plans to cruise down to Tahiti in the spring of 1980. I spent the night on the porch of a little Buddhist church looking down on Maalaea Bay. I had a peaceful Buddhist sleep and awoke feeling peaceful.

I accepted Angelo’s offer of a couple of days rest and recuperation over on the Hana side. The long narrow road to Hana winds through a wonderland of jungle and forest, bamboo groves and majestic old mango trees, sudden deep ravines and lovely waterfalls, with views of the rugged north coast and the taro farms of the Keanae Peninsula spread out below. Though the buses rarely attempt it, the Hana Road is typically full of tourist rented cars loping along at a snail’s pace and infuriating the local residents who are trying to get to and from their homes. Some of the little bridges are strictly one-way affairs, and the road is so windy that safe passing areas are few and inpatient drivers take chances — driving the Hana Road can be hairy. At Angelo’s I fell into a coma and slept most of the next day. In the afternoon I filled up the outdoor bathtub, let the sun warm the water, and spent several hours soaking in there wearing a big Mexican sombrero while the children popped in and out keeping me entertained. I filled up on rice, buckwheat and chapatis — there was nothing else to eat. The next day I walked out and hitched up to Bill’s to garden for a couple of days. My radishes were ready to harvest, and I gathered enough young spinach and beet greens for a salad with some coconuts I had picked earlier and a few other things from the farm. I lived strictly off the land for a couple of days resulting in brief but violent diarrhea.

I decided to give up street music for the time being and see if I couldn’t survive on boat work alone. The joy had gone out of my music, and what amounted to incessant practice had begun to grate on those in the neighborhood of my Lahaina office. I saw no point in persisting alone. In Maalaea there is a haul-out slip for boats that need to paint their bottoms and do hull repairs. These boats are usually in a hurry to get back in the water and appreciate any help with the work. I was hoping they’d appreciated it enough to keep me from starving to death. I moved into a cave about half a mile west of the harbor. Angelo told me I could stay on Arcturus but I had a strange reluctance to do so.

My cave was about 25 feet from the water’s edge and looked out across the bay to the slopes of Haleakala. Everyone warned me that should I be discovered there by “locals” that I would eventually be beaten and robbed. Robbed…that was a laugh! (“Local” is a term meaning “dark-skinned native”. You hear it even in radio police reports: “The bank robber was described as a local male…” A light-skinned non-native is known as a “haole”, and is considered fair game by the locals.) Nevertheless I had no wish to lose my head or my cave so I took careful precautions. I stayed there only at night, never in the daytime when fishermen or picnickers from the nearby beach might wander through. At dawn when the sun peeked over the north flank of Haleakala, I rolled my blankets tightly in a piece of heavy plastic and concealed them carefully in the underbrush. My food stash, which consisted of crackers, nuts, peanut butter and a few tins of fish or “potted meat food product” was all kept in jars to keep out rodents, and stored in a cardboard box in plain sight but studiously arranged to look like trash.

There is, by the way, a great deal of trash along the beaches and roadways of Hawaii. They could do with a bottle bill. Everything is “no deposit” and everyone drinks a great deal of beer. The locals blame the haoles for most of the problem, and the haoles blame the locals. At one beach Bill took me to there was a pile of empties 4 feet high. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a mess, even in the vacant lots of South Chicago.

Impersonating a jogger, I trotted to and from my cave mornings and evenings, and made a point of never carrying anything in my hands. In the evening I would spread out my blankets and have a snack before sleeping. One night I neglected to wipe off my fingers after eating some peanuts and as I lay back listening to the water lapping on the rocks, little waves cresting out on the reef, and losing myself in the stars, suddenly OUCH! — a tiny mouse bit me hard right on the ball of the finger. He must have thought I was a peanut! The mice scampered around me from time to time, but as long as I was careful not to leave any crumbs of food around they did not disturb me unduly. I thought to myself that indeed my little cave was the most wonderful place I had ever lived, and it struck me how beautiful the world can be for someone who is “little more than a beggar” (as I had once been referred to by a well-to-do Lahaina artist), who is forced by circumstances to seek out such holes in the wall and sleep all night with the symphony of stars and sea.

Down at the harbor I found a job of sorts helping a lady who lived on board her trimaran with her two baby daughters, and was presently hauled out and painting the bottom. She agreed to feed me if I would help and take me for sail when the job was finished. Lori had built the boat with her husband and for some reason had made the unfortunate decision to have two babies in quick succession just as her marriage was falling apart. She was left in something of a pickle, trying to support a sailboat and two children on a welfare check. She had many of the same character traits as Angelo’s crowd but of course no place to plant a cash crop. She maintained an avid interest in any number of mystic philosophies, sometimes gave Tarot card readings for people in the local bar, and consulted her crystal pendulum on every conceivable question. She was a strict vegetarian and health-food believer (which had the usual unfortunate effect on her budget), while maintaining a keen taste for alcohol, drugs and tobacco. Her little girls were of the habit of going naked and peeing wherever they happen to be standing which drove Charlie the haul-out manager, a blustering little potato of a man, right up the wall. Charlie countered by spreading rumors that Lori was a whore, and just because I was helping her it was a long time before Charlie would be civil to me.

On the 25th of September we had a lunar eclipse. Having caught the solar eclipse in Oregon earlier in the year, I was excited at the thought of seeing the reverse in such short order. In Oregon, where by rights it should have been overcast, the clouds had parted miraculously at the right moment, and half an hour later it was pouring rain. On the south coast of Maui, where the skies are always clear at night, clouds rolled in just as the earth’s shadow began to creep across the disk of the moon. Rats.

Back in August I had seen a mimeographed flyer in a store window advertising a music band for hire, available for “parties, luaus, barn burners etc.” It read: “You won’t believe…” and in big black letters “THE CORNHOLERS“. It was the funkiest name for a band I’d heard since the Fuckin A Blues Band and stirred my curiosity, especially since they claimed to play among other things “hillbilly hoedown music”. I gave the Cornholers a call, introduced myself as a fiddler, and asked if they’d like to get together sometime just for fun and kick a few tunes around. Well they didn’t do that sort of thing very often, some serious rehearsing you know, working on their act, but keep in touch you know… “Where’d you say you were playing??” Actually one of the Cornholers did stop by and play a couple of tunes with me in the street, a paper-thin dude named Jeff with a face like a rat. He thrashed away at a mandolin — “Tryin to learn…” — he said, but he was a real musician and could keep time. I was sorry he never came back.

During the time I was working for Lori I saw in the paper that a band called the Cane Haulers was scheduled to play a free evening gig at a shopping center over in Kahului. I suspected that name to be a euphemism, and so I hitchhiked over to see them. The band consisted of two couples. Jeff played electric guitar and was obviously a veteran of many a bar band and too much amphetamine. His girlfriend Carol Joy, a bosomy blonde with curly hair, played bass and sang, neither particularly well. Bill was a tall, studious looking haole who played acoustic rhythm guitar, but who really shone on Hawaiian steel. He had evidently studied the old masters and played with the pace and precision of a bluegrass banjo picker. The several instrumentals he played with Jeff’s backing were probably the best music of the night. But the heart of the band was his wife Darcy, a 5 foot tall, beautifully proportioned Asian with a full, rich contralto voice, all the more astonishing coming from such a tiny person. Darcy could sing anything from Bessie Smith to Dolly Parton, and her duets with Bill were well-wrought and solid, the fruit of many years of making music together.

I could see that the band was Jeff’s idea, and he had woven a variety of old favorites in and around Bill and Darcy’s music, stuff from the golden days of country, rhythm and blues, and early rock ‘n roll. It was altogether a pleasant combination, much of it good fun, and some of it moving when Darcy turned it on. I saw that I could come in handy in their band, but I could also see that it would never happen. I could’ve played fiddle on the country tunes, relieving the monotony of nothing but guitars all the time, and take over on bass from Carol Joy who needed to concentrate on her singing. Carol Joy could have played some rhythm guitar leaving Bill free to play more steel, and I’d have been surprised if he didn’t play a few other instruments as well. I don’t know that we’d have been a commercial success on Maui, which was not particularly into nostalgia, but even without a drummer we might have found a home. But all this was just idle dreaming — I was lonesome for a band.

I tried to say hello and tender congratulations on this their first public performance to Bill with whom I’d spoken on the phone a few times, but I couldn’t seem to get through. It started to rain. I asked Jeff if they could possibly give me a lift to Maalaea on their way back to Lahaina where he and C.J. were staying on somebody’s boat. Well, uh…they weren’t going home right away, uh…there was a party somewhere, and uh…there wasn’t really any room in the car anyway… I watched them drive away. When the rain let up I walked out to the highway and hitched back to my cave.

I didn’t like to hitchhike at night. At first it was unconscious, I just always seemed to make sure that when the sun went down I was where I wanted to be or had a ride. People who knew what kind of life I was leading kept saying “be careful”, and maybe it was slowly sinking in. That night I realized that I was afraid. I have always liked to hitchhike and have traveled many thousands of miles that way. Never before had I been afraid, though I’d always known that hitching has its dangers. That night I made it home safely. The next time I got caught out after dark I was not so lucky.

It was also during these days of working for Lori that I had the extreme misfortune to suffer an umbilical hernia while helping somebody move an engine block. Several days after, I noticed this little bulge just above my navel. When I poked at it with my finger it disappeared, but when I tensed my abdominal muscles it came back. This was perhaps my most depressing moment of the entire trip. There I was 3000 miles from home, broke, and in need of surgery. I fretted. I wrote for information to an ex-schoolmate now a doctor. I kept telling myself that I’d better do something before I got too far from civilization, but other than trying to avoid further strains there was really nothing I could do except keep poking it back in with my finger.

September 10th Lori’s boat went back in the water. Charlie was hopping mad as usual as she was mucking up his schedule, having taken 3 or 4 extra days. If he’d gotten any hotter he’d have been a cooked potato. He told me that Lori was “a flake who depends on other people to keep her afloat”, and I couldn’t really argue with his assessment. Lori used to rail at her critics, declaring that they only gave her a hard time because she was a woman, that they just didn’t think that a woman could “get her shit together”. I was certainly not of that opinion, but I had to admit that Lori was a perfect example of why someone might feel that way, and if some people badmouthed her, many more pitched in to help.

We set sail for Lanai a few evenings later in the same kind of offshore breeze that had blown Bill’s little catamaran clear to Kahoolawe. Multihull boats are fast, especially with the wind on your tail, and surfing down the swells at 10 or 12 knots was a new and exhilarating experience for me. Dick’s “Tahiti” had managed three or 4 knots at best. But after a couple of hours the wind died as it often does in the lee of Maui, and there we were, rocking in the swell with the sails flapping back-and-forth uselessly. Lori’s motor was an old outboard and cranky in the extreme. All night we struggled with the motor and the fickle winds, and when we reached Manolo Bay the next morning we were exhausted. Lori’s little girls, of course, had slept soundly all night, and now ran around the boat doing their best to keep us awake. I never really recovered my energies, and when we set sail the next morning for the return trip I had, except for an hour of snorkeling, done nothing but sleep or try to sleep. On the way back we encountered the same light and variable winds, and this time the motor gave up the ghost. I shall never forget the sight of Lori dangling her pendulum over the stricken motor muttering, “The trouble’s in the coil…it points right to the coil…now try it again!” And it would run begrudgingly for another minute or two before requiring more vibes from the pendulum. Finally it stubbornly refused to start and we were faced with a problem because even though a bit of wind had finally come up, Lori admitted that she was not enough of a sailor to sail in and pick up her mooring without the motor. In the end we were able to anchor elsewhere long enough to pick up somebody else’s mooring with the help of a passing dinghy. I caught a ride to shore and breathed a great sigh of relief.

Lori’s boat was a floating disaster just waiting to happen. Besides the broken down motor she had: no lifelines (safety railings), no navigation lights, an anchor line too short to hold in more than 10 or 15 feet of water, no lifeboat or dinghy, and if she had a fire extinguisher I never saw it. Both of her sails were torn, the halyards and sheets badly worn, and the steering in very delicate condition. Her children, one of whom was still at the breast, wandered around on deck without life preservers even when the crew was working the gear under sail. Lori spoke of the time when she used to be afraid, before she and her husband survived some rough seas off Molokai a couple of years back. Now she figured she’d seen the worst and could handle anything. No, she had never tried a “man overboard” drill.

I worried about Lori and her children. I tried to talk to her about safety but she accused me of lacking practical experience and preaching to her out of books. She lumped me with those who thought she couldn’t get it together because she was a woman, taking what I intended as common sense advice as a personal attack. I never managed to penetrate these defenses, and in any case what could she do? It was like somebody advising me to get a hernia operation. One friend of Lori said to me, “What that boat needs is a sizable injection of financial aid.” And that was the simple truth. Lori was caught in the welfare trap without a cash crop, and by the time I left the island she had put the boat up for sale to the vast relief of all those who actually cared about her.

Before the sail to Lanai, Lori had introduced me to a friend of hers named Barbara who was about to haul out her trimaran at Maalaea for bottom painting and a variety of small repairs. Barbara drove a tourist bus in Lahaina and had purchased Seabird earlier in the year with the idea of living on board with her two children, but there was considerable work to be done before the boat would be ready for this. Some work had already been done by a portly young man named John who claimed to be a boat carpenter and to whom she had already paid out several thousand dollars at $5 an hour and she was rapidly running out of money. Barbara seemed anxious for some extra help, but we hadn’t discussed any definite arrangement. The day I got back from Lanai I went to work on Barbara’s boat, explaining to her that I was broke, that I was trying to learn as much as I could about sailboats, that I would work for her if she saw to it that I had something to eat, and that if she could afford to pay me anything so much the better.

Barbara was another divorcee in her early 40s with a 13-year-old son — overweight, argumentative and extremely lazy, and an 11-year-old daughter — cute and sweet but not very bright. That first day I got down on my hands and knees in the hot sun and scraped loose paint off the deck. I was anxious to demonstrate my worth and the sweat was flying off me, my knees red and raw from the nonskid grit in the deck paint. Brian the 13-year-old, parked his fat ass a few feet away and drank Pepsi after Pepsi as he watched me work. Few people enjoy being watched as they work unless they are doing something quite spectacular that they do extremely well. To have someone sit idly by and watch you scrape paint is always a drag unless they happen to be entertaining you with a great story or passing you cold beers that you didn’t have to buy. Brian spoke not a word, nor did he move a muscle as my scraper moved ever closer to his foot. There was no sound but the rasp of my scraper and the slurp of his Pepsi. The tension mounted. I lunged at his foot with my tool, but he moved in the nick of time and parked himself just out of reach. Three times I narrowly missed Brian’s foot before he lost interest and went off to find a bit of shade.

The next morning I woke up extremely hungry. There was no one around the boat and nothing to eat. I hitched to Lahaina and spent the last of my money on the now-famous $2.17 breakfast at McDonald’s. Then I walked into a supermarket and stole a porterhouse steak. On the way back to Maalaea I got picked up by Barbara and the kids. That idiotic slug Brian turned to me and said, “Mom says all she has to do is feed you and you’ll work for nothing.” The coroner called it “death by strangulation” although in truth it was that steak I shoved down his throat.

Actually, over breakfast I had decided that I could not live entirely without money, and that if I was to work for Barbara there must be some cash involved in addition to the food business which so far wasn’t working out at all. I wrote out a little proposal in which I asked for breakfast and lunch supplies which I could prepare for myself in the boat’s galley, and the sum of $4.75 a day for eight hours work. To the best of my recollection I arrived at the $4.75 figure because that’s what Barbara had told me she made per hour of driving the bus. I figured under this arrangement I could supply my own dinner and even save a few dollars, and I didn’t see how she could begrudge me such a small amount, especially considering that John was still around, competent but extremely slow, at $5 an hour.

Barbara dropped me off at the boat and I handed her my proposal as she drove off to pick up our electrician in Kahului. As I sat under the trimaran and waited for her to return Jack Russell turned up. Jack is a sailor who really looks the part with his cap and beard, bellbottoms, sea bag, and a wicked glint in his eye. We had met one day as I played on the street and he joined in on his homemade dulcimer. Jack was a beginner at music and only played a couple of tunes, but he played them well and we had a good time. Jack had sailed a 25 foot boat to the South seas several years before, finally lost it and ended up in New Zealand where he decided to settle. However the New Zealand government didn’t see eye to eye with him on this and had eventually shipped him back to Hawaii. Jack was like a fish out of water, constantly on the lookout for some way he could get back into a boat of some kind, or at least back into New Zealand. He has a crazy sense of humor that I always find refreshing after arduous struggles with constipated people, and it felt good to laugh with him after such a strange beginning to the day.

After an hour Barbara returned, having looked at my proposal and gave me the go-ahead. For the first time in nearly 3 months I had a salaried job! With her came Mark, a 15-year-old electronics whiz she had put in charge of wiring the boat. A few years previous I had shared a household with a younger version of Mark who tinkered endlessly with torn-apart radios and TVs and pestered anybody who would pay attention with a steady stream of questions about electricity, or just about anything. At first it was very appealing, this thirst for knowledge, but after a while it took on the proportions of a disease or slow torture until you wanted to tear out your hair and stuff it in your ears. The difference with Mark was that instead of all the questions, he had all the answers. No subject came up but that Mark had an opinion, and he could not manage to pass by anyone engaged in a task without criticizing their work.

Meanwhile Brian had gone back to watching me work and slurping up Pepsi (I found out later that Barbara got it wholesale through her job). At one point I was leaning over the stern doing something to the rudder and when I got to my feet I found that Brian had parked himself right behind me. Pretending not to notice him there, I bent over while standing and tinkered with some fitting on the deck, my ass no more than 6 inches from his nose. I wanted to see how long he’d be willing to sit there with my ass in his face. Friends, it took at least a full minute I swear to you before Brian was able to gather his forces sufficient to move off.

Eventually he was assigned to fetch and carry for Mark, and Mark made the most of it. Once as he went off to find a tool I heard him call back to Brian, “Look for my hat while I’m gone.” Meanwhile sweet Lauralee lay in a deck chair and did absolutely nothing all day but drink Pepsi. By lunchtime all three kids were bickering and putting each other down with Barbara occasionally joining in. John insulated himself in the bow working on a samson post. I refused to get involved, absorbed in applying fiberglass cloth over wood for the first time in my life. It was a dreadful circus, and when Jack appeared later after everyone had gone it was a great pleasure to sit quietly on the seawall and play tunes for an hour. That night I ate the porterhouse steak. It was delicious.

A week later Barbara made me an even better offer: to live on the boat and finish up the necessary work before they moved on board. I would be paid $10 per eight hour workday and provide my own food. She figured this would last about a month, and she might have been right if I hadn’t found the termites…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Anyway the bottom got painted, Barbara pulled the plug on John, and we prepared to launch and return the boat to her mooring in Lahaina. We motored Seabird from Maalaea 15 miles up the coast to the anchorage next to old Mala Wharf, condemned since about World War II but still intact, serving the needs of fishermen during the day and low-budget backpackers at night. I rowed everybody to shore in the big inflatable Avon dinghy and returned to my floating castle, my new home on the rolling sea, my escape from the onshore crazies, slobs and cutthroats, MY BOAT!! I was stoked.

After a week of riding at anchor I decided to take a little weekend trip. I was only supposed to work five days a week, and I’d been thinking about a fellow who’d picked me up hitchhiking once, back in the days of commuting to Lahaina. His name was Bud and he played music and so did a lot of his neighbors in the Honokohau Valley around the northwest tip of the island. It sounded something like the get-togethers we used to have back in Oregon, and oh how I missed that sort of thing. Bud said just to come on out sometime. “Ask for Aunt Vicki’s Taro farm, you can’t miss it.” I had never been any further west than Lahaina and besides, Mark and Brian were allegedly going to work on the wiring over the weekend and I knew there wouldn’t be a moments peace on the boat. So on the last Saturday in September, after breakfast I set out with a light pack on my back and the fiddle slung over my shoulder.

Hitchhiking on Maui is usually not too bad, although you’re not allowed to stick out your thumb. You just have to stand there looking stranded. The volume of traffic is enormous, and though you might watch 500 cars go by before your ride comes along, that might not take very long. As anywhere there are always a certain number of ex-hitchhikers out there behind the wheel who remember what it’s like, right? Wrong. There are no ex-hitchhikers west of Lahaina. Not since my buddy Jeffrey and I spent six hours stuck in the hot Oklahoma sun in the spring of 1963 have I seen such a hitchhikers wasteland as the west end of Maui. There is a brand-new highway and a stretch of condominiums along the beach that must run for 5 miles, you see the ocean in little slices as you pass by. Thousands of people live out there, there is lots of traffic, and nobody picks up hitchhikers. It took me half a day to travel 10 miles or so past the condos of Kaanapali and Napili. My last ride was with a surfer who was scoping out the breaks along the cliffs of the north coast. This is the weather side of the island, comparatively uninhabited and spectacularly beautiful. I stood on a cliff and fiddled a tune while 100 yards below me half a dozen surfers rode the big swells. I was still a couple of miles from the Honokohau Valley but I didn’t mind walking — there were no condos, no houses whatsoever, just the cliffs and the ocean’s pounding roar. When the road finally wound down into Honokohau Bay I had recovered my good humor and looked forward to what I might find up the valley.

Saturday was a bad day to find musicians at home. Aunt Vicki was a love, an old Asian-Hawaiian lady with sparkling eyes who immediately showed me to Bud’s room, but Bud was gone for the day and so were most of his music-playing friends. A lot of them had gigs on the weekends, and there was little chance of any music in the valley that night. It was getting late already, Bud was not expected back until late in the evening, and so I decided not to take Vicki’s offer to camp out in his room, after all I scarcely knew the guy and the chances of him even remembering me were not that good. Another taro farmer named Bob offered me a ride to Napili where he worked part-time in a hotel. The sun was going down and there I was back in Condo City. I started walking.

Several hours later something hit me hard in the left shoulder. A bottle of Michelob lay foaming in the road. An old blue Valiant with one taillight missing rounded the next curve and was gone. I picked up the beer — I was thirsty but it was too late. The bottle had missed my head by a foot. It was the only encouraging thought I could muster. There was nothing to do but keep walking. I thought of moving to the other side of the road, but that would mean getting it in the face instead. Needless to say there are no sidewalks in Napili.

As I walked on I analyzed the incident. The blue Valiant had been rounding a curve when it caught me in its headlights. I estimated that whoever threw the bottle at me had at most 3 seconds to think it over. It was no accident, the bottle had been full. All that person knew about me was that I was walking the road at night with a pack on my back, and because I was wearing shorts they could see the color of my skin. Under the circumstances I doubt whether it would have been possible to tell if I was male or female. Slowly it dawned on me that I had been the victim of what they call racial violence: somebody’s hate had fallen on me just because of the color of my skin and because I was there, an easy target. How infinitely depressing. Has this ever happened to you? I was lucky of course. I could have been left lying in the ditch with my head split open. But the cold reality of racial violence is more painful in some ways than a lump on the head or a bit of blood. Tired, hungry, afraid and most of all sad, I tramped along through the billion-dollar wasteland. Sometime after midnight I found shelter in a little beach cabaña and slept for several hours in a deck chair. An hour before dawn I started walking again, reaching the eastern end of Kaanapali after 3 hours or so. Here I sat down and after awhile, just as it began to rain, somebody gave me a lift to Lahaina.

When I got back to the boat Mark and Brian were sparring as usual, Brian with the upper hand for once. It seems that faced with the necessity of shitting into a bucket (there was no toilet on Seabird) Mark had shit his pants instead, and Brian was giving him no mercy. Little work had been done and the cabin was a hideous mess. I told Mark to wash out his pants, clean up his mess and go, never to return. Later I was able to convince Barbara that I could take over the wiring job, and thus removed at least one thorn from my side.

After this I stayed pretty much on the boat. I recognize the reasons behind the intense frustrated anger that boils over into attacks of the kind I suffered, but the energy is misdirected. Better to rob banks or sabotage condominium construction than to beat up hitchhikers. Sometimes I didn’t leave the boat for days at a time, and then only for food, water or laundry. Even walking to the store an 11-year-old on a bike turns to shout “FUCK YOU!” as he pedals by, an old man goes berserk in the park yelling “FUCKING TOURISTS! FUCKING TOURISTS!” It was not my fault, a lot of it was really chickenshit and I didn’t care to be the target. On the boat, a hundred yards from all this, it was quite peaceful.

I rose with the sun and worked at my own pace, doing the kind of thorough, meticulous job that I like to do, and which is generally the order of things on a boat. Hot sweaty work in various cramped corners of the boat or even out in the sun was made so much less arduous by the fact that one could jump overboard at any time and float around in the clear blue water for a few refreshing minutes. With a few more minutes to spare one could don a diving mask and get eyeball to eyeball with the spectacular fish around the coral heads on the bottom, seemingly 1 million miles away from the paint bucket or Marks birds-nest wiring. In the evenings I sat in the cockpit and played the fiddle as the sunset spread out behind Lanai and Molokai. After dark I lay on the deck and studied the stars and constellations using charts from a book on board called “Bowditch on the Marine Sextant”.

After three months in the islands I had finally achieved a space of my own, a measure of security and the freedom to enjoy the spectacle of my surroundings. For all my disillusionment with the social climate of Maui I have yet to find anything to compare with its awesome and various beauties. At the same time, it was the wrong season to find a crewing job to the South Seas. I didn’t realize it at the time but most crew on such trips end up paying $10 a day for the privilege. Besides, the yachting fraternity around Lahaina seemed to me the most snooty bunch of people I’ve ever met in my life, and asking around the docks was a miserable chore that I tended to avoid at all costs. I reasoned that these people would be easier to get along with further down the line, and whether they change their ways or the assholes all stay in Hawaii, the yachties I’ve come across south of the equator have indeed been much easier to talk to, even friendly at times.

I wasn’t able to save much of my $10-a-day wage, certainly not enough to fly south. It began to appear that I would have to find a real job, save up $200 or $300 and catch a plane. But for the time being I was enjoying myself and in a sense recuperating from the difficulties of my first couple of months on Maui. Every other weekend or so I went up to Kula to visit with Bill. My garden was producing vast quantities of delicious vegetables, and when I returned each time I rode around the anchorage bestowing gifts of broccoli, cucumbers, corn, beans, snow peas, rhubarb and marigolds on my boat dwelling neighbors. The only note of disharmony in my little world was Barbara and her children who came out to the boat occasionally to deliver materials, shoot the breeze, inspect the work, drink Pepsi and occasionally to help.

* * *

The one distinctive feature of Barbara’s family life was the Running Argument. It apparently began as soon as any two of them were awake in the morning and continued uninterrupted until two of the three had fallen asleep at night, punctuated only by unavoidable separations of the combatants during the day or by slurps of Pepsi. A sample: Brian: “Mom, where are my swim fins?” Lauralee: “I told you not to leave them on deck.” Brian: “I’m not talking to you, half pint.” Barbara: “When I bought you those fins you promised…” Brian: “Oh forget it. Lauralee, look behind you in the cockpit.” Lauralee: “Look yourself ya big dummy.” Brian: (grabbing for Lauralee but missing) “C’mere you little creep!” Barbara: (too late) “Watch out for the wet paint! Now look what you’ve done!” Brian: “God dammit why didn’t you tell me you were painting?” Barbara: (waving paintbrush) “What did you think this was? Why do you help once in a while?” Lauralee – (from deck chair, with Pepsi) “Yeah, why don’t you help once in a while?” Brian: (grabbing her Pepsi) “Shut up, twerp.” Laura Lee: “Mommy, Brian’s got my Pepsi!” Brian: “That’s mine, you took it off the cabin top.” (Slurp slurp finishes Pepsi) Lauralee: “I did not, you knocked that one over when you sat down.” Barbara: “Shut up both of you!” (Looking around) “Where’s my diet Pepsi” Lauralee: “I’ll bet Brian drank it.” Brian: “You mean you drank it!” Barbara: “Well Brian there’s plenty more Pepsi in the cooler, get me another diet Pepsi and then please row in and fill up the water jugs.” Brian: “Jeez, I just did that yesterday.” Barbara: “Last week you mean.” Brian: “It was Tuesday!” Lauralee: “Thursday!” Brian: “Thursday I was sick, remember?” Barbara: “You weren’t sick, you just wanted to stay home from school and watch TV.” Brian: “There are my fins under Laura’s chair! What’s the matter, you all blind?” Barbara and Lauralee: (in unison) “Oh shut up!!”

I have known couples or families whose habit it is to maintain a competitive or argumentative stance much of the time, running the gamut from gentle banner to all out war, but never in all my days had I observed such unremitting conflict. It just never let up, and to fill a lull they would grasp at the wispiest of straws, conjuring up arguments out of thin air. It was as unpleasant to be around as a dog who has just rolled in rotten fish. In retrospect I think it was all that Pepsi…

Barbara had borrowed $10,000 from the bank to buy the boat, and John had soaked her for what little she had left over. I guessed there were two main reasons for her decision to cast her fate upon the waters. First of all she had become acquainted with Lori, and while Barbara was as “straight” a person as Lori was bohemian, she liked Lori and admired her gumption in going it alone on a boat. Barbara wanted to get in on “the action”, to be one of the “cool” people. Of course she knew nothing about boats or sailing. Lori was probably telling her “Never mind what people say, never mind what the books say, just go for it and sort it out the best you can along the way…” and she took the plunge. She imagined that living on a boat would be simpler than living on land, to have everything you owned right there (this included a large dog and nine cats she kept in her bedroom because they weren’t allowed by her apartment manager), free to up-anchor and sail away to wherever the four winds blow – this is what Barbara wanted.

The other side of her leaky logic was that by putting her over-argumentative and incredibly lethargic family on a boat together that they would somehow be motivated to put petty grievances aside and pull together. Since Barbara seemed to enjoy the family quarrels as much as anyone this reasoning was a bit suspect, but it was praiseworthy in my eyes and certainly worth a fair trial. So I tried to find ways to involve family members in the ongoing work and to somehow discourage the constant bickering that seemed to absorb all their attention and energy when in each other’s company. All this came to a head in the Great Deck Painting Project.

By this time Jack Russell had moved on board with me for 10 days or so while he waited for a flight to Australia from whence he hope to get back into New Zealand by hook or crook. Jack and I painted all the trim on deck: around the stanchion posts, around the windows, around the mast and rigging, the hatches and so forth, leaving only large flat areas that could be covered with a roller in no time at all. This took us the better part of a week. My plan was to have the whole family come out, pick up the rollers, and two hours later it would look as if they’d painted the whole boat themselves. The psychologists tell us that when motivating human beings it is important that in the beginning there be some immediate visible result for effort expended to encourage further effort. For example, a beginning gardener does better with radishes than with Sequoia trees. I hoped that having worked together to achieve such a dramatic effect, everyone would start to think of the boat as theirs, their future home, the fruit of their own labors.

Come the big day Jack wisely jumped ship. When the family arrived Brian put up his back and even the call of cold Pepsi couldn’t lure him out to the boat. So he sat on the dock for two hours while Barbara, Lauralee and I rolled the deck. It was relatively peaceful, and the work went well. Afterwards I rowed them in, and as I pulled away from the dock I heard the Running Argument rising in my wake. Back on Seabird I put rum in my coffee with lots of sugar and said to myself “Well I tried.” At that moment, big black clouds came rolling over the ridge to the northwest and for the first time since I’d been around Lahaina it rained, it literally poured all over our fresh paint. As I sat inside and listen to the rain spatter on the cabin top the radio was cheerfully chirping: “Mostly fair skies today…”

* * *

These were days of solitude and introspection. My boat neighbors kept to themselves, and except for Jack I had no visitors other than Barbara and the kids. There was the World Series on the radio, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and my work to keep me busy, but my thoughts seem to dwell on my own sins and shortcomings. It seemed to be getting harder and harder for me to reach out to other people, a problem that probably affects most people who spend a lot of time alone. In my journal I remembered the remarks of two Oregon friends. Michael DeWaide, playing pool in the Earth Tavern and approached by a guy he hadn’t seen in five years or so with the question “How’ve you been?” snorted, “Huh! You want it all at once?” And one evening when I’d been complaining that everything I put my hand to lately seem to turn to shit, Ann Hill said simply, “Just keep puttin’ it out there.” The I Ching commented: “Decrease shows the cultivation of character. What is below is decreased to the benefit of what is above.” And cautioned: “The mountain stands as the symbol of stubborn strength that can harden into anger.” By the 15th of October I had saved up $25.

Around this time we took Seabird out for the first day of actual sailing. I had expected the family to show up with a sailor friend in tow, but on the appointed morning in the usual welter of controversy that accompany their arrival I didn’t really take note of the fact that there wasn’t a seasoned sailor amongst us. At first I kept asking Barbara where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do; finally I realized she didn’t know and stopped asking. There was a wind line extending out from the west end of Maui and stretching south. On one side of the line there was almost no wind, on the other side a good 20 knots. We waltzed in and out of the wind for several hours, anchored at a beach west of Lahaina for an hour’s swim, and then motored back to Mala Wharf where we picked up our mooring without incident. When they had gone home and the Running Argument had faded away on the evening breeze, it suddenly dawned on me that I had been, for one afternoon anyway, the skipper of a 36-foot sailing boat and had sailed her safely if somewhat cautiously out to sea and back. At a time when I was devoting much space in my journals to my failures and shortcomings I took special pride in this accomplishment that I had never even thought of attempting, it just happened.

A few days later I gave Barbara a week’s notice. My month was up and the end was nowhere in sight. From areas of dry rot in the cockpit I was finding termite tunnels heading for where I could only shudder to contemplate. I began to get the feeling that I was doctoring a dead horse. I had had enough of Hawaii and I was ready to forsake my vow to work only on music and boats for the sake of escape. Dishwashers in Lahaina made $4 an hour, and I was ready to don the white apron. I knew Barbara was going to offer me the aft cabin when they moved aboard, but I knew I couldn’t stand the continual bickering much less nine cats. I had to make a clean break, go back to my cave if necessary, or camp out on Arcturus. Barbara was unhappy. I explained that I had to get on with it. “Where do you want to go?” She asked. “I don’t know…the South Pacific I guess.” The next day was my 37th birthday and Barbara asked if there was anything I’d like especially. “A hot bath.” I replied without a moment’s hesitation, something I hadn’t enjoyed since I’d left Astoria. Barbara said to come by the apartment after work.

I was up at 5 AM. Rivaling Sirius in the morning sky was a bright planet in the constellation of Taurus. Checking my star maps I found two more planets in the same area. When you find a bright star where there is nothing on the star map, that’s a planet. Since the planets move around in relation to the stars, they’re not included on the charts and are found in this way unless you happen to know where and when to look. These turned out to be Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, and gave my day cosmic start. The dawn was mostly clear, with a few feathery pink cirrus clouds and a dark radiance blazing up in the West like a false sunset. At 6 AM there was the boom of a cannon and the fishing fleet took off from Lahaina harbor at full throttle for the $40,000 jackpot fishing derby. A few minutes later 100 boats must have roared past Mala. After my usual breakfast of fried mush I went to work. There was football on the radio, Notre Dame versus South Carolina.

Lauralee was still cleaning cat shit and general scum from the bathroom when I arrived, and as I sank back in my birthday hot tub the air was heavy with Glade. On the way out, Barbara and I had a conversation in the parking lot. She explained that she had no money, but she did have a Visa card on which she could charge a plane ticket. Would I stay two more weeks in exchange for a one-way ticket to Samoa? Why Samoa? It happened to be the cheapest place to fly south of the equator. As it turned out it was a most fortunate choice for a number of reasons, but at the time the only important fact I knew about Samoa was that it wasn’t Hawaii. I said I would think it over and went off to McDonald’s for supper on a five dollar gift certificate from the folks back home.

I combined two fish burgers into one giant sandwich with lots of fries, two milks, a hot apple pie and a hot fudge sundae — oh yum! — then I walked down Front Street to the harbor where the sportfishing boats were packed in like sardines. The atmosphere was rank with drunken fishermen and garbage piled up everywhere. Two Hawaiian women sat on a bench playing guitar and ukulele for their own amusement, the first and last time I observed anything of that kind on Maui. After a few minutes they disappeared and so did I. I had planned to hear some music in a club but I was very early, and rather than wait around for two more hours I bought a pint of Myers rum and a liter of strawberry-coconut juice and went back to the boat. As I walked along the road towards Mala Wharf a girl screamed from the backseat of a passing car. The next day I told Barbara that I’d stay for the ticket and $100 in cash, and we shook hands on it.

A few nights later the Barking Sands missile testing boys on Kauai sent up a rocket that exploded three barium flares several hundred miles above the earth. I was stargazing at the time and stared dumbfounded as one after the other, three florescent green circles spread across the sky. Finally I had the presence of mind to turn on the radio, and as they were being deluged with calls they quickly identified the source of the cosmic fireworks. For a moment as I watch the slowly-widening green circles, I thought maybe the flying saucers were coming for me at last. Never mind Samoa…

By November I had finally broken the ice with the string band musicians of Mala Wharf and we were getting together regularly for music in the evenings with fiddles, guitars and a hot banjo player. Marina Beebe, owner and skipper of West Coast Lady used to host our little group, known variously as the Mala Wharf Yacht Club String Ensemble, or just the Rakes of Mala. One night at my urging we had put out the word that there would be a country dance on the wharf, but two of our musicians were bent on dragging their heels and by the time they finished fussing over a late dinner the 20 or so dancers who turned up had tired of waiting on the wharf and split. Marina eased my disappointment by inviting us over for music and gingerbread, and during the course of the evening we decided to have our dance the following week when she opened a show of her paintings at a Kahului sail loft cum art gallery. Marina and all I always had a great time together. She was nursing a broken heart over a divorce after 20 years of marriage and had taken a lover about the same age as some of her own children. I had my “Whatever Happened to Aloha Blues”, and whenever we got together we generally got pretty silly. After awhile we’d be collapsing with laughter over nothing at all while the others eyed us apprehensively.

Marina’s opening was a fine evening. There was lots of wine, a beautiful big spread of food featuring Marina’s bread sculptures, congenial people, and lush green jungle paintings on the walls. Before everyone got too drunk I managed to call a couple of dances, after that the music and dancing went on free-form for most of the night. Someone had brought a quantity of local magic mushrooms and by the time I got to the sail loft Marina had already come down with uncontrollable giggles. I spent nearly an hour with my arm around her waist, literally holding her up as serious Art Appreciators asked her serious questions about Art. Each question brought fresh gales of laughter until my knees began to give way and I had to deposit Marina in a chair. The giggles didn’t really hit me until I was about halfway out to Seabird, rowing the big inflatable dinghy through the anchorage in the wee hours of the morning. There between the sea and the stars I began to roar with laughter, all of the grief and doubt and hard times forgotten, so glad to be alive!

Then I found the termites, nesting in the plywood box beam, the main structural member in a Piver-designed trimaran that joins the three hulls together. There they were by the hundreds, an ugly writhing heap of maggots devouring the heart of the vessel. By this time I had chopped away much of the cockpit and a portion of the deck. Barbara talked me into another two weeks. My reservation was set for November 27, and I promised myself that I would go on that date come what might.

One afternoon I rowed from Seabird to Lori’s boat in the Lahaina roadstead, a mile or two to the east of Mala. Lori had invited me for an afternoon sail and dinner, and I’d calculated the tides to assist me in making the trip back and forth in the dinghy. One never knows when a squall is going to roar over the ridge so such an expedition is not without risk, but I made the journey in about an hour without any particular difficulty. I found Lori painting the cabin top which ruled out sailing the trimaran, but someone had lent her a sailing dinghy and we had a bit of fun tacking back and forth around the roadstead. After supper Lori read the Tarot cards for me, and what she saw in the cards I thought rather remarkable, both in the accurate picture painted of my current situation and things it suggested about my future, about which I had at this point not an inkling.

The present was the 3 of cups: 3 ladies dancing with cups raised, signifying fellowship and good times; indeed I had been invited over for a friendly visit. My “current endeavor” was the 8 of pentacles: the Apprentice, a term that I thought defined very neatly my time in Hawaii. I was indeed serving time as an apprentice, working virtually without pay to learn skills that will enable would enable me to successfully negotiate the long road ahead. Crossing this card was the 9 of swords depicting a person sitting up in bed alone, face in hands, swords hanging on the wall behind. Lori said that this was a great sadness crossing my life, and clearly represented to me my loneliness. This was indeed the one great sadness of my life, compounded of a whole complex of problems: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual, and which, despite insistent probing, I declined to discuss with Lori.

In the immediate future was the 10 of Cups, depicting a couple with 2 children standing underneath a rainbow and signifying family, hearth and home. In my journal I wrote “It’s hard to see how this applies to me unless I make some fabulous connection in Samoa.” Family, or in Samoan, “aiga” turned out to be the touchstone of my nine months there, right at the heart of my long and lovely stay. In the future also was the 7 of wands, a man fighting his way through a barrier of staves, grappling with many problems.

In the physical present was the Hermit, holding up a light for others. My existence in the Oregon woods has always been somewhat hermetic, and so indeed was my life on Seabird. There is a spiritual side to this card that rather puzzled Lori, probably because I was always ribbing her about her various mystical bents. My “spiritual goal” was the 4 of wands, a house in the woods. The emotional situation, or how others see me, was renunciation, the 8 of cups, showing a fellow walking away from 8 big ones. I related this both to my act of leaving home just when I brought the place up to civilized standards after years of hard work, an act which no doubt confused a number of my friends, and also a certain sense in which I had consciously turned my back on the companionship, good intentions and even love of my friends and family in order to accomplish things that were important to me. The last card was the 6 of cups, showing a boy handing a cup to a girl. According to Lori this indicated involvement with memories of the past and relating them to present and future, a natural enough preoccupation for a lone traveler. As I took my leave by starlight Lori gave me a pendulum and took a lock of my hair.

[In reviewing this memoir I have looked online at some information on Tarot that seems at odds with Lori’s conclusions, and I do not see any card depicting a house in the woods. I really know nothing about Tarot; I am only relating what Lori told me as I recorded it at the time.].

After rowing back to Seabird I wrote in my journal: “There are odds against my making it all the way around the world. I need help on my way so I work on boats and play music – things that exist and need doing everywhere – and avoid old traps that have caught me before. There is a sadness crossing my life to be sure, but I must go on — that too will pass. I receive a great deal of love and welcome from the creatures and forces of nature these days upon the ocean. I study the night sky, tracing the constellations, observing the brilliant red of Mars and the blue of Vega, feeling the rotation of the earth and the vastness of the universe. Orion, Sirius, Antares, Arcturus, Pegasus, the Pleiades, Pollux, and Capella have all become friends of mine and visit every night. The bright fish, the laughing lizards, the wind and the water, the sudden rainbow blowing over the hill, the impulsive plunge into the warm blue ocean, the mysteries of the weather, and the great mystery of the sea swaying now so gently now a yard below this paper. There have been so many fine moments, so many fine sights, and always the music of nature. I have learned a great deal not only in the way of skills that will undoubtedly be useful to me later but about myself, my vices and virtues and the patterns of my life. While I may have been reluctant at times to reach out and touch others, I have tried to be sensitive to their needs and help when I could. I have seen people here and elsewhere who touch and hug like crazy, but who always take and seldom give. I do not welcome their embraces and choose to express my feelings in my own way. My way is different and many will misunderstand no doubt, but I am on my way and perhaps better involved in understanding this way of mine than in changing it at this point.”

By November 14th I had tracked down all the termites, following each individual tunnel to its end to make sure none had bored their way into other parts of the boat. Then the weather turned foul. It blew 30 knots and more all day. I ran around tying everything down as the seas steadily built up. About 5 o’clock a power boat broke loose from its mooring and started beating itself to death against the wharf. Then two windsurfers shot through the anchorage and headed straight out to sea! I hadn’t seen as much as one sail out there all day. These guys went straight out in gale winds, leaping through the waves and spray. I watched until they were just specs on the horizon. It was the most impressive physical feat I’d yet witnessed on this trip. By 5:40 the powerboat had sunk, and at 6:10 the Coast Guard arrived, a typical sequence of events. That night I read in “Modern Small Boat Sailing”: “Theoretically the trimaran is the safest and fastest craft afloat, but few British builders have regarded tri’s as a sound investment and most of the well-known classes have come from America and Australia, designed by Arthur Piver and Headley Nichols both, alas, lost at sea, a circumstance would which has also had a rather adverse effect on trimaran popularity.”

The next two weeks went by in a blur. I sorted out and neatly tacked down all Mark’s god dammed wiring, “The Man of a Thousand Splices”. I swabbed deadly Penta over the entire area where the termites had been. I rebuilt the box beam, the deck, and the cockpit as best I could. Dick came by and told me he wanted me to sail his boat to Tahiti with him next May. Marina fed me sometimes…what fun we had! Gordon on “Akahi” arrived and parked next to Seabird after year and a half in the South Pacific. He showed me postcards of Pago Pago Bay, and told me to go to Rosa’s for cheap lodging.

On the 26th I started at 4:30 AM and worked for 27 hours straight until Barbara arrived the next morning to take me to the airport. I had finished everything but the left side of the cockpit. Someone else would have to finish that and fiberglass the whole thing. In the interest of completing as much work as possible I had not stopped to clean up for the last two days, and the boat was, at least superficially, a shambles. I was a shambles. As I came by in the dinghy Marina leaned over the rail in her nightgown to kiss me goodbye. Waiting at Kahului airport for my flight to Honolulu someone offered me $50 to let them have my seat on a plane that was apparently all booked up. $50 wasn’t enough.

On the DC-10 southbound I tried hard to think optimistic thoughts about Barbara’s chances of surviving on Seabird with two children nine cats, one dog and a Running Argument. Up to this point I had always taken heart in the fact that she had stuck with it this long, hung in there doggedly through a long series of difficulties, but now I had to admit my own grave doubts. Perseverance can lead to success, but in other circumstances it can lead to disaster, injury or death. Sadly I wrote: “I’m afraid they won’t make it through the winter, maybe not even till Christmas. Barbara is not strong enough to (kick Brian’s ass) keep it together.”

Something woke me from a long doze as a green island swept under the plane and in a minute we had landed at Pago Pago International. At Honolulu airport there had been many Samoans in the lounge waiting with me for the plane, all decked out in leis made of flowers or candy, the old men in their kilt-like “lava lavas”, their leathery brown faces reminding me of Navajo Indians. Here in Pago Pago the lava lavas were everywhere, and the mellow music of the Samoan language filled the air. I found a van to take me to Rosa’s for two dollars, and my Samoan adventure began.

“Rosa’s – Pago Pago – 11/27/79. Oh my what a difference here, so clearly evident in the 5-mile drive from the airport: houses, yards, fruit trees, kids, dogs – people actually living instead of the horrible Hawaiian hustle. Rosa’s is $5 a day for my own room, right across the road is a park and then the bay. Everybody asks me where I’m from, where I’m going, will I play a tune? I walked down to the bay and was instantly surrounded by half a dozen boys as I played a few tunes, the first quarter moon straight up with a big ring around it. It’s so much like what I expected to find on Maui and was so sadly disappointed. I feel as if I’ve finally arrived. From here it can only get better. Footsteps overhead, the sounds of children playing drift through the open window, little puppies scamper everywhere. I’m back in the real world!!” After writing this I fell into a coma and slept till noon the next day.

In the afternoon I walked into what passes for downtown with the post office on one side of the street and the territorial legislature or “Fono” on the other. Samoan society is organized into villages, almost always on the coast and sometimes no more than a half mile apart. Tutuila Island is about 25 miles long and is nearly bisected by the huge Pago Pago Bay, actually the crater of an ancient volcano and probably the most sheltered harbor in the Pacific. There are at least 10 villages along the shores of the bay alone, of which Pago Pago is only one, but the whole area is commonly referred to as Pago. Rosa’s is actually in the village of Fagaalu, and the post office is in Fagatogo. Looking at things from Western Samoa (an independent country) or even further afield, to say that you’re going to Pago means you’re going to to to Tutuila Island. Pago Pago village lies at the extreme end of the bay, and the name is so old that nobody knows what it means.

At the post office was a letter from my mother with the news that the Kneubuhls, a family who had been our good friends and neighbors during my childhood in Southern California were reportedly living somewhere in American Samoa. I found the name in the phone book but they had reportedly moved without leaving word as to where. Back in Fagaalu Park I got invited into a basketball game with some Samoan guys. When the game broke up there were handshakes all around, after which I went to my room and got my concertina. Once my usual flock of children got called home for supper I was invited over to a picnic table where a group of fishermen were drinking beer. Earlier I had watched as they beached their little outboard-powered catamarans and proceeded to cut up a 5 foot shark. They fed me several large bottles of Vailima beer, brewed in Western Sanoa, which I found quite tasty and very strong. Then they pulled out a 5-lb bonito which we devoured raw without benefit of soy sauce, lime juice or sliced ginger. When I dived into the raw fish with them I the ice was broken for good, and Joe, who seem to be dominant in the group asked me if I would like to travel with him the following week to visit his family in Western Samoa. Of course I agreed, and we drank and made music on into the night. In the morning I rose early to go fishing with Joe and his friends but apparently I was too early, and when I walked down to the bay later the boats were already gone.

As the dawn broke over Fagaalu Bay, a little side pocket near the mouth of Pago Bay, I watched a tug heading out and a big cargo ship heading into the harbor. Close by within the shelter of the reef two cruising yachts rode at anchor, a cutter and a trimaran. Chickens were crowing behind me where houses line the bottom of the steep green hill covered all over with thick vegetation. Colorfully painted little buses with stereos blasting scooted back and forth to town. A fisherman paddled his outrigger canoe here and there, checking traps of some kind. My friends Jupiter, Mars and Saturn were fading fast as a heron slowly walking the beach took off in fright when he nearly bumped into me and the little boy who’d joined me. To the east was a view of the open ocean, and tinting the scattered clouds with orange fire, the sun rose straight out of the sea. Then the tug came back into view towing…The Love Boat!! So this is paradise…

That day I finally tracked down the Kneubuhl family. John and Dorothy Kneubuhl had a son and a daughter about the same ages as my brother Ted and me, and some 25 years ago they lived just up the street from the Stevensons in Laurel Canyon, between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Their son Pritch was my brother’s best friend and they shared many musical interests from classical guitar to folk music and barbershop quartet singing. I took their daughter Robin to my senior prom at Hollywood High School, and later she and and Ted were “steadies” for more than a year. Dorothy was born and raised in Hawaii. She met John at school were he’d come from Samoa where he was born of Samoan-European ancestry. At the time they met John was training for a career as a concert pianist, but somehow he ended up in Hollywood writing scripts for movies and later TV. Here through some mutual friends they met my parents and so began a friendship that was about to be revived after a 20-year hiatus when our families moved off in different directions in the early 60s.

About 10 years ago John had suddenly announced to his bride that he’d had enough of the rat race in the States and they moved back to his childhood home in American Samoa, and eventually to Tonga, a group of islands several hundred miles further south where John worked for several years in the school system. After some conflicts with traditional chiefs over whether or not they had the right to beat their own children in the classroom, John moved back to Tutuila and went to work as the director of the bilingual program in the schools of American Samoa. Here John acted as a thorn in the side of those who wish to eliminate the Samoan language from the public schools.

I found John in his little office at the Department of Education. His hair had turned white and he dressed comfortably in a lava lava, otherwise he looked very much as I remembered him from 20 years ago, with the same wicked twinkle in his eye. He greeted me warmly and insisted that I move in with them and their adopted Tongan son Sione in a little house by the sea in Leone village out the west end of the island. He drove me to Rosa’s and I quickly packed up my things, and soon we were headed west along the beaches and through the villages, the coconut groves, the mango, breadfruit and banana trees, past pigs, dogs and chickens, tidy yards and houses ranging from old Samoan fales to modern stucco and cinderblock. A travel brochure I’d picked up downtown said, “Here you can see how the Hawaiians lived 100 years ago.”

A traditional Samoan house or “fale” consists of a raised floor of earth and stones, and a thatched roof supported on wooden posts around the perimeter. Fales are sometimes circular but more often elongated, like a rectangle with rounded ends. There are no walls, only blinds of woven matting that can be lowered in bad weather. The temperature rarely strays far from 80°, making clothing somewhat superfluous, and though the Samoan islands embraced Christianity wholeheartedly in the mid-19th century, it took the missionaries nearly 100 years to get all the Samoan women into blouses. More recent commercially-inspired attempts to popularize such unnecessaries as trousers and shoes have succeeded only in far as Samoans have money to squander on frippery. In American Samoa there are quite a few yankee dollars floating around and hence you see some Samoans dolled up in hot, uncomfortable and expensive Western clothes, but this is mostly for show in the downtown area and most Samoans dispense with such outfits in their own homes and yards. Men and women both love to put flowers and fragrant leaves in their hair, behind-the-ear, or around the neck, and in general tend to adorn themselves colorfully.

The Kneubuhl’s filled me up with big American-style meat and potato meals with side orders of tropical fruit and Vailima beer. I had arrived from Hawaii somewhat emaciated and obviously exhausted, and in their care I began to recover a sense of well-being. John lent me a lava lava and showed me how to tie it, and from that time on I rarely resorted to trousers. There are a multitude of ways to tie a lava lava, none of them foolproof, and to re-tie yours in public is no cause for embarrassment, everybody does it. It wasn’t until many months later, when I realized one evening that I had gone the entire day without re-tying once that I felt I had finally mastered at least one method.

Sione took me to drink kava and play music with his Tongan friends. Kava is a drink, popular all over the Pacific, made from the ground-up root of a type of pepper plant. The first cup numbs the mouth and lips, but this numbness soon passes and with subsequent cups this effect is not repeated. I have drunk as much as 20 or 30 cups in an evening and never noticed much effect other than a general relaxation, although serious drinkers will drink many times this much in a session that may last till dawn and, I am told, experience some difficulty walking home. [One heavy kava drinker told me later that for best results he would walk home backwards.] It is very nice for making music, and music seems always to be an integral part of the kava circle. In Samoa kava is generally served only on important ceremonial occasions and with a rather precise and complicated etiquette, but in Tonga it is an everyday thing for many and in Nuku’alofa the capitol there are even public taverns where it is served. Simone’s friends played guitars and ukuleles and sang beautifully in the plaintive high falsetto harmonies that are typically Tongan. They were quite nice to me, insisting that I play a tune on the fiddle after every tune or two from them. They quickly picked up the tunes and played along with me, but embellished my straight-ahead major key dance tunes with the lighthearted sixth chords that give island music it’s breezy feeling. I had been in Samoa less than a week and already my dreams were coming to life right and left. This was truly what I left home to find.

A few days later I took a bus into Fagaalu to look for my friend Joe the fisherman. I found his buddies in the park working on a case of Vailima. They explained that Joe was in town getting his ticket for the boat to Western Samoa, and they were celebrating somebody’s birthday. (I later was told this is the all-purpose Samoan excuse for drinking.) As I hadn’t had any breakfast the beer went quickly to my head and when a fight broke out I left to pack my things in Leone. I figured I’d meet Joe at the boat. I arrived at the dock in the nick of time, the boat was ready to cast off. Hurriedly I brought a ticket, jumped on board, and with a fiddle, a pack and maybe $35, I left the United States and its trust territories for the first time on the trip. There were about 40 passengers on the boat, a 60 foot motor launch, but Joe was not amongst them. I was the only palagi aboard. In Hawaii I would’ve panicked, but I had already learned to trust in Samoan friendliness and good manners, and so I took out my fiddle, the old key in the door, and began to play.

[Palagi is a Samoan word meaning a Caucasian or European person. The only peculiarity of Samoan pronunciation is that “g” is pronounced like the “ng” in “ring”. Therefore Pago is pronounced “pong-o” and palagi comes out “palang-i”, but not “pong-go” or “palang-gi”. The vowels are all pronounced like Spanish: a as in “ah”, e as in “red”, i like the ea in “heat”, o as in “for”, and u like the oo in “boot”.]

I should explain here that for some reason violins are completely nonexistent in Samoa. I never did meet a Samoan who had even seen one before except in pictures. Therefore not only was my music a curiosity of the first order but perhaps my playing was received with a less critical ear than if I had been playing a guitar or ukulele. Be that as it may, it was close onto the Christmas season and I had been playing Christmas carols all week at the request of the children back on Tutuila. I proceeded to do the same on the boat until spray over the bow forced me to quit whereupon I got into a conversation with a young man who, hearing of my predicament, quickly invited me to stay at his house. No sooner had I breathed a great sigh of relief than his friend began to interrogate me as to whether or not I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and related subjects. This interview lasted a good hour and a half until finally I excused myself, found an empty corner below decks, and curled up for a couple hours sleep before we arrived in Apia, Upolu Island, Western Samoa.

* * *

As we cleared customs on the dock under a purple sky and a full moon my ardent Christian friends quietly deserted me. I walked somewhat uneasily through the wharf area and down the street facing on the bay. It was around midnight and I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what I was going to do…just keep walking until I found some place to sleep. Within a few blocks I came upon Aggie Grey’s Hotel, a famous name in the South Pacific, and just for the hell of it I went in and asked how much for room. It was $36 for the night. Half a mile further down the road I was hailed by some fellows lounging around in front of the fire station. They asked me where I was going. (This is the standard greeting in Polynesia and does not carry the nosy implication that such a question would contain in the States.) When I explained that I really didn’t know, they offered to let me sleep on the floor of the fire station. When I played some tunes for them, several passing taxis pulled over to listen and one very fat cab driver promised that he would come back in the morning to take me to his house.

In the morning there was no sign of the fat cabbie, and I sat in the fire station writing in my journal and wondering about these Samoan invitations, so easily given and apparently as easily forgotten. Perhaps there was nothing to do but catch the next boat back to Pago. What a drag. On this gloomy note I filled the last page of my first journal. Fortunately it turned out to be the proverbial darkest hour just before the dawn of my incredible voyage into the heart of ‘fa’a Samoa’, the traditional Samoan way.

When the morning shift arrived at 8 AM I left the fire station and moved to a picnic table across the street and waited another half hour. Two sailboats lay at anchor in the bay, a ketch and a small schooner. I watched a Samoan businessman with a briefcase casually scraping his face with a Gillette as he waited on the curb for a bus. Apia looks…well, “old-timey”, a bit reminiscent of the Old West or Mexican border towns: a mixture of dirt and paved streets, ramshackle buildings interspersed with imposing churches and official looking structures and monuments, plenty of life on the sidewalks, lots of rattletrap buses and taxis.

Finally I gave up on the cab driver and moved a block down the street to another table, this one in the shade. As I sat down, up walked a boy with whom I’d spoken briefly on the boat from Pago Pago along with four friends and a fifth of Bacardi 151. They turned out to be nursing students living at the hospital in Apia. They were not in a position to offer me shelter but they did buy me two sandwiches which I devoured as they began mixing themselves drinks of rum and cream soda. Just at the point when they were beginning to get silly and I was tuning up my fiddle, who should walk up, decked out in a jaunty red, white and blue cap and a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt, but Joe the fisherman! Joe, it turned out, had made the trip from Pago on a different boat and had arrived several hours after me, having no idea of course that I was already in Apia. He had drunk the better part of a quart of vodka on the boat and had ended up spending the night sleeping on a table in the Apia public market. It was fortunate that neither the Bible students nor the cab driver had come through for me; things have a way of working out for the best sometimes. A drink or two, a couple of tunes on the fiddle, and we took leave of the already tipsy nurses. We ended up at the movies, killing time until we could catch a pickup going to Poutasi, Joe’s home village on the other side of the island. Most of the long distance travel in Western Samoa is done in little Japanese pickups with benches in the back and a canvas covering in case of rain. Twelve passengers is an average load. The benches are tough on a skinny ass like mine but it is extremely cost efficient travel.

The Starlight movie house is a long tin shed roughly 50 X 150 ft with a line of fans along the side walls to ease the heat. Seating is on backed wooden benches without padding and the films are shown every two hours from 10 AM till midnight. Easily 50% of the movies are kung fu. An hour after Joe found me we were settled in the Starlight watching the Hong Kong Chinese heroes being assaulted by gangs of evil Japanese, some wearing little Hitler mustaches. The film was little more than one continuous fight using the identical sound effect for every blow, and as in American westerns, all the combatants absorbing an incredible amount of punishment. I’ll bet the old westerns were popular here. At least there’s not so much killing in the kung fu movies. The audience didn’t seem to be all that into it, but then it was early in the day. They never cheered or carried on particularly when the tide of battle turned to the good of the heroes. The biggest reaction was to a comic scene featuring a keyhole view of a couple, fully clothed, writhing on a bed. In between movies they played American oldies: Sh-Boom, Green Door, The Happy Wanderer, Only You etc. The next movie was a dreary British WWI movie called “Aces High”. When we were both on the verge of falling asleep, Joe and I split.

We secured a ride in a pickup bound for Falealili district, and within five minutes we had left the commercial center of Apia behind and started up the hill past some beautiful houses and gardens, from fancy palagi-style estates to thatched fales with pigs in the yard. We whizzed up the road drinking from a case of Vailima beer that Joe had bought and handed out among the other passengers, past Vailima village where Robert Louis Stevenson had lived out his last years, died, and is buried. As we rose in altitude the air temperature dropped to a refreshing coolness I had not experienced since my days in Haleakala crater. But with the cool air came rain and we had to roll the canvas down over our heads.

Over the mountain top and down to the south shore of Upolu, we soon came out of the rain and back into the heat and none too soon for this by-now-thoroughly-corrupted Oregonian. This is the “old country” side, almost no palagi houses. The old fales were all open, and as the truck passed you could see people napping, old ones sitting, children playing. Though less munificent than the gardens on the outskirts of Apia, these homes were always tidy and well-manicured: no junk piles, falling down structures, unclipped grass or shrubs, or roadside trash.

When we finally disembarked from the pickup we walked to a nearby fale with Tavita a fellow passenger. Thinking that we had finally arrived at Joe’s, I solemnly presented a can of corn beef and a can of tuna fish, the remains of a small stash of canned goods that Dorothy Kneubuhl had thrown together for me as presents for Joe’s family. The rest had been eaten by the Apia firemen except for one can of fruit cocktail that I had wolfed down with the sandwiches the nurses had bought me that morning. Oh well… I tried to explain to Joe as we walked down the rocky road to Poutasi. He said it didn’t matter.

The way wound through plantations of tall coconut palms with a few cows and horses grazing underneath. As we neared the beach a side path led us into a yard of neatly trained trimmed grass with a flower garden featuring real orchids. Joe put his finger to his lips and we sneaked in quietly in order to surprise everyone. After the double surprise, first of seeing him and then of seeing me, Joe’s mother greeted me warmly, squeezing my hand in her big, warm brown one, taking me into her big, warm brown family.

Trekking the Khumbu in Nepal

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Posted on January 15, 2015 by Joseph Stevenson

Trekking the Khumbu in Nepal

September 14 – November 29, 2013

by Joseph Stevenson

Joseph with Everest and Lhotse – from Gokyo Ri.

In the fall of 2013 I spent 9 weeks in Nepal, most of it up high in the valleys around the Mt Everest region — the Khumbu as it is known. I whittled my pack weight down to 35 lb and carried my own gear throughout the trek with the exception of one day when I was just too sick and needed to quickly retreat to a lower altitude. Carrying no camping gear except for a warm sleeping bag, I stayed in the many “tea houses” that dot the popular trekking routes at an average cost of less than $25/day for an unheated room and 3 meals a day. I spent at least 6 weeks at elevations above 11,000 ft, getting as high as 18,500 ft.

I knew before I left that from time to time I would encounter internet access and had promised to send emails to folks back home when possible. What follows is a digest of those emails, sent from various locations often under difficult circumstances: cranky keyboards, bad connections, freezing fingers etc. Not a polished piece by any means, it does paint a picture of the scene at the top of the world, the people who flock to see it, and the thoughts that swirl in the mind as you trudge through what seems in retrospect a gorgeous blur.

September 14 – Astoria, Oregon (before I left home)

Dear Friends & Family,

By now most of you know that I’m going to Nepal to do some trekking in the high Himalayas. I’m scheduled to leave Seattle on Sept. 18th and return on Nov. 22nd. I will enter and leave Nepal via Kathmandu, but will spend most of my time on the trails. The first plan is to fly to Lukla (this landing is worth a search on YouTube — look for “World’s Most Dangerous Airport”) and then walk north on what is called the “3 Passes Trek” through the Khumbu region. This should take maybe 4-6 weeks, taking my sweet time. Upon returning to Kathmandu, if I haven’t had enough of trekking my plan is to head north into the Helambu and Langtang areas for the balance of my time. If you want to know more you can Google some of those names. No, I am not going to be climbing Everest or any other mountaineering peak, but they will be on display all around me, and the 3 passes on my proposed route are all over 18,000 feet.

You are getting this little fare-thee-well because I have put you in a group email that my brother Ted will manage. It will rarely be possible for me to send emails (and I’m not even bothering to take a phone), so when I can get a message to him he will forward it to you. That’s about all the communication there’s going to be until I get back to the states.

I’m going alone, which has it’s pros and cons. It’s not my first choice but was dictated by circumstances — could’t find anybody. The pros include complete independence as to where I go, stop, or linger. Therefore all plans are tentative and subject to change except for the departure date which is fast approaching. I will try to be more judicious in the mountains than I typically tend to be, and hope that all goes well. This is obviously bucket list territory, so if I end up in a bucket, know that I went out on top of the world, and thinking of you.

September 21 – Kathmandu

Arrived Kathmandu (henceforth to be known as ”Ku-City”) yesterday after a series of flights totaling 45 hours start to finish. My Sherpa family met me as arranged previously by Nawang Furba who works as a chef in Astoria. I was carrying a suitcase with 44 lb of presents he bought for his Ku-City family, making me a sherpa for the Sherpas. As best I can figure it out I am 12 hrs 45 min ahead of PDT, so my bio-clock is turned on its head. As tired as I was from the trip I had no trouble sleeping.

Tomorrow another member of the family is going to take me on a whirlwind (motorbike) round of errands for bank, maps, permits, etc. and I’ll fly to Lukla on Tuesday the 24th. This 24-yr-old Sherpa has summited Everest 7 times already and showed me a photo of himself on top with the record-setting 80-yr-old Japanese guy earlier this year. Fate has delivered me into the hands of experts. Too bad he can’t go with me. My biggest problem is the heat, in the 90s when I arrived, today a breeze made it feel cooler. I washed clothes earlier today, hung them on the roof, and in 2 hrs they were dry, even the wool socks. The staple diet seems to be white rice with vegetable curry, a yellow lentil soup poured over it, served with a side dish of deadly chili sauce — 1/2 tsp is plenty! — plus many little snacks and treats.

Before the heat of the day, Nawang’s daughter Futi walked me to the big Buddhist temple of Boudanath where I turned many a prayer wheel, bowed to many an image, and did 3 full (flat-out) prostrations to the great stupa on well-worn wooden planks. The streets are a chaos of people & honking vehicles, shops and sidewalk vendors, dust, smoke and exhaust. Pigeons dominate the temple grounds, ravens seem to rule elsewhere. I’ve seen this brand of chaos before, some 25 years ago, but then it took 2 years to get that far down the road — this is pretty sudden. The heat should take care of itself once I get to higher ground.

I’ve already met some great people and had some great conversations on the planes. The family just called Nawang via Skype — he tells me it’s 12:30 am in Astoria, it’s 1:15 pm here; you figure it out.

September 29 – Namche Bazar

Due to various complications it has taken me a long time to get another email out. This computer makes corrections very difficult — it took me 1 1/2 hours just to get into my email account.

I escaped the heat and tumult of Ku City on 9-24, flying to Lukla in a 2-prop plane, viewing a few sky-piercing peaks along the way. At the Ku airport I met a British couple with 8-yr-old triplets. I watched as Daddy leashed and carabinered each darling girl to her Teddy bear — what a good Dad! Today 5 days later I ran into them all on the trail heading uphill.

Anyway no sooner I got to Lukla it began to rain and it went on all night and next morning. A headache that had started in Ku City continued to blossom and I was keen to lose some altitude but didn’t want to trek in the pouring rain. The lodge I stayed at was run by a majestic Sherpa woman who’d been there for at least 30 years; there were photographs of her with Edmund Hillary on the wall. I asked her about cheaper alternatives to flying out of Lukla for the trip home. I’d heard that recently a bus route had been established to a town about 2 days hike to the south of Lukla, making it possible to ride a bus back to Kathmandu at a fraction of the cost. “No no no you mustn’t ride the bus,” she exclaimed, “the bus is hódeeble, hódeeble!!!” I loved the way that came out, spoken very quickly at high volume and pitch, peaking on the first syllable. It became a little mantra for me later when things went bad on the trail and I needed cheering up.

Finally around 11 it cleared a little and I headed up-trail (downhill) for Phakding where I spent the next two nights until the headache lifted. On the 27th I climbed to Namche at 11,400 feet where I stayed at a place recommended by a friendly policeman:

“You stay at the Hilton,” he said.

“What??” I said, “In America, Hilton veeeeeery expensive!!”

“Yes, in America but no the same here — Heeeelton!” he stressed. After some hilarious back and forth he finally wrote it on the palm of his hand — “HILL TEN” and we both had a good laugh. The Hill Ten turned out to be just fine, anything would have been fine after that climb, I was toast.

In the morning I called my Sherpa friend Tschering (the motorcycle riding, Everest climbing 24-yr-old) and he insisted I move to another place run by his friend (also Tschering). So here I sit trying to write on Tschering’s MacBook which freezes about every sentence and you have to play with the scroll bar to get it moving again.

Today I did a dayhike to Kumjung (12,560′) where I had noodle soup in the kitchen of a tiny teahouse that caters mostly to school kids from the Hillary School across the road (trail) and porters. On the way up I caught two glimpses of Everest itself and lots of great views of the much more elegant Ama Dablam. Again I ran into the triplets with their parents. All had suffered various forms of altitude sickness but like me they are all recovered and adjusting their plans towards the more ambitious. One of the triplets had actually thrown up in the dining room when they got to Lukla. The girls are all carrying small packs and flying small Nepali flags somebody gave them, but the family did hire a porter to help out with their gear. Their goal at this point is to hike up the central valley to Gokyo with its emerald lakes and alpine vistas. They are posting to a blog at <www.travelswithtriplets.com>, check it out.

[Note: I did when I got home — it’s awesome! Beautifully done, lots of photos, even some video, and all of them write for it including the girls. One broke her leg later in another part of Nepal but they are soldiered on, and didn’t return to England until September 2014, nearly a a year after I met them at the Ku City airport. There’s even a detailed account of what they spent — you’ll be surprised how little it cost!]

Tomorrow I will head up to Tengboche (13,000 ft+) and see how I feel. Oh…I have to tell you, some of the best Nepali humor happens in the toilet. At Lukla: “Gentlemen: You aim will help, stand closer it’s shorter than you think. Ladies: Please remain seated for the entire performance.” And at a small teahouse john in Monjo: “Keep me clean and treat me well, and what I’ve seen I’ll never tell.” That last one sounds vaguely familiar…

And a word about the porters, the 18-wheelers of Nepal. In Lukla I saw a porter dwarfed by 5 mattresses on his back, a boy carrying a full-size couch on a sheet of 1/2″ plywood, an old man carrying 2 cases of whiskey and 2 cases of beer, and a very small boy toting 2 cases of Mars bars. According to the airport scale I am carrying nearly 40 lb, and after the ass-kicking I got between Phakding and Namche I realize that some of that has got to go. I’ll be leaving some things with Tschering in Namche if I’m to have any hope of doing half the route I want to do. But those porters…they keep you humble.

I hope that life is being good to you whatever you’re up to. Please send me whatever psychic/spiritual/telepathic help you can. I walk clockwise around every stupa and mani wall, turn every prayer wheel — I need all the help I can get.

October 4 – Dingboche

Where were we — Namche last time? I’ve done two days of hiking up since then — now at a little over 14,000 feet in Dingboche after spending two nights in Tengboche at 12,000 something. I’ve got another altitude headache but I did have an actual HOT SHOWER today! It would take too long to describe how that was accomplished but I will say that the water was heated by bottled gas, I did not contribute to the further deforestation of the Khumbu.

Tengboche is the home of probably the most famous Buddhist monastery in the Khumbu. I attended a chanting service in the ceremonial room, probably the most ornate room I’ve ever seen ever. The monks were outnumbered by the trekkers. On each side of the central alter were two Jizo bodhisattva figures about 10 feet tall, pretty much identical to the Jizo figures at the Great Vow Monastery in Clatskanie, 40 miles up the river from Astoria. Jizo gets around.

There was a monastery information center outside the grounds. I paid 100 rupees (about a dollar) to look at the exhibits and watch a short film. When I asked about the film I was told the DVD player was broken and wasn’t likely to be fixed anytime soon. I did really enjoy the exhibits, really informative on many aspects of Buddhism and the ecological challenges in the Khumbu. Here are a few quotes I copied down:

“The Tibetan name for Everest, Chomolungma, is a reference to Miyo-Langsangma, the Sister who gives food. She rides a tiger and is very beautiful. In her right hand is a bowl of food, and by her left side is a mongoose spitting jewels.”

“Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion. We are demolishing, poisoning and destroying all life systems on the planet. We are signing IOUs that our children will not be able to pay. We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind and vision, the earth will end up like Mars, charred and dead.” J.A. Lutzenberger – The Sunday Times.

And this on the preciousness of this human life we’ve been given: “To be born a human being is said to be more difficult than for a blind turtle in a vast ocean the size of a universe to surface accidentally with its head poking through the single wooden ring floating on the surface.”

Well that will have to do it for now — I need to go rest my aching head. I should tell you that I have been in the clouds for three days now and have not had a glimpse of the mountains since I got my peek at Everest. No hurry, my time will come.

October 14 – Pheriche

Coming down from Everest base camp (EBC) I have hit unexpected snow, very unusual for October — there’s a foot on the ground and its still coming down hard. All of this thanks to a cyclone that brushed the tip of India, enough to ruffle the weather up her in what’s supposed to be the best month of the year. Actually I’ve seen more wet, or at least cloudy days than clear since I got to Nepal. Luckily I have lots of time and living up here (room and meals) is costing me less than $25/day.

To catch up, after my last email I hiked up to Chukung at about 16,500 ft elevation and had more headache. I spent 3 nights there and only on the last day did the skies clear for the first time. With a daypack I scurried up nearby Chukung Ri (18,000 ft) for splendid views in all directions, looking right at Ama Dablam, perhaps the the most beautiful of the Khumbu peaks, and so close to Nuptse (actually just the highest point on a steep snowy ridge) that it blocks the view to the NW and Everest. Having suffered no further problems with headache after 3 nights in Chukung and my side trip up Chukung Ri, I thought my altitude problems would be over, but alas it was not to be.

The internet is so slow here (no wonder with the weather and the satellite connection) that I think I will have to leave off here and pick up the narrative under better conditions later. Juan from Spain has been kind enough to loan me his MacBook, and with a half hour just to load my email account this much has taken an hour. So much more to tell….

October 15 – Pheriche

Picking up where I left off when the net went down yesterday: personalities. You meet so many interesting adventurers up here. For my hike up Chukung Ri I brought plenty of water but only one hard boiled egg to eat. When I got to the top I groped fruitlessly in my daypack for the egg, finally turning it upside down and dumping out everything. No egg. The raven sitting 10 feet away up on top of the summit shrine laughed at me. (Turns out I left it in my room.) So on the way down I met a young Austrian woman and her guide practically leaping up this steep rocky trail I had just dragged my ass up with both hands. When she heard my boiled egg story she broke out a tin of delicious Austrian chocolate and gave me 3 or 4 big chunks….like an angel straight from heaven! Later back at the lodge I learned that she was with a group aiming to climb Island Peak, a 20,000+ ft “trekking peak” (meaning some mountaineering equipment required but not a full-on mountaineering climb). But for her, Island Peak. was just a tune-up for climbing Ama Dablam, a much more serious mountaineering venture. I’ve never hung out with people like this or seen them in action (cept maybe my friend Mort), but Sabrina was as sweet and humble as they come.

Other notable personalities I got to know:

Rafaele, a 30-yr old stereotypically outgoing, friendly and dramatic Italian social worker who works with autistic children on a farm/school. Two weeks after meeting in Chukung I ran into him again in the dark outside a tea house in another valley, recognizing him by the merry sound of his voice.

Tony, a 64-yr old German retired hospital administrator who, like me, likes to travel alone. Tony travels a lot — this is just the early phase of a trip that will go on into next spring. He sizes up every woman he sees hoping to spot wife #3.

Julie & Pascal, 30-something palliative care nurses from Switzerland, again stereotypically the diametric opposite of Italian Rafael — perfectly sweet and responsive if asked direct questions, but apparently no actual curiosity about anything or anybody else.

Dan & Lynn from Wash. D.C., government employees whose paychecks stopped abruptly about a week earlier, which is how I found out about the 2013 American government shutdown. “What about congress?” I asked, “Are they still getting paid?” somehow knowing the answer already before they told me “Oh yes, they passed a bill exempting themselves.” That’s our Congress for ya!

From Chukung I gingerly worked my way higher, but when I hit 17,000 ft near Everest base camp (EBC as they call it up here), the headache was back. By now the trekking season is in full swing, nearly everybody headed for EBC, so the last lodging on that route was so full of trekkers that I ended up spending quite the “hódeeble” night with my headache outside in a tent in sub-freezing weather.

Well dear friends, this emailing from cafe computers is not working out so well. Unfamiliar keyboards, antic jumps of the cursor, letters that don’t work half the time (“t” on this particular laptop), make it a slow, frustrating, and expensive proposition when it is possible at all. Hate to leave it hanging but there you are, my hour is up.

Appreciate your life!

October 17 – Namche

I’m back to Namche after an 11-hr marathon day on the trail yesterday, covering the same distance it took me 3 days of hiking to go up — and not because it was all downhill. Up high (over 14,000 ft) the trails pretty much go up or down, but below Tengboche the canyon walls are so steep and the river crossings frequent enough that you do nearly as much up as down when going “downhill”. I read somewhere that getting up as high as I went involves 24,000 ft of climbing and 12,000 ft of downhill. Anyway Pheriche to Namche in a day is unusual for a laden trekker.

I had my first fall of the trip on a long steep downhill amid some heavy traffic of trekkers heading up after all the bad weather delays. I slipped on something, rolled down the hill hitting my head on something hard and crashing into a terrified Chinese girl as I came to rest against a big rock. She managed to stay on her feet, uninjured, and I seem to have escaped with only a lump in front of my left ear that only hurts when I try to eat. No blood lost.

My last email left you hanging with me in a tent with a headache at 17,000 ft as I recall. I woke up the next morning with the same poison headache and decided to head downhill. On the way up I’d spotted a peak in the distance that looked just like Everest, so I figured what the hell, I’ve already seen Everest several times, no need to hike to base camp or the famous Kala Pattar viewpoint just to get a little closer view of the top of the world. So I hiked back down to Lobuche at 16,000 ft and indeed the headache relented.

But the next morning, just as I was about to head down from there, I found out that the Everest look-alike I’d been admiring for days was not actually Everest. So I immediately grabbed a daypack, scampered back up to Gorek Shep and on up to Kala Pattar (18.000 ft) for the Everest view, and back to Lobuche in less than 8 hours. Without the heavy pack I was suddenly transformed into the fastest trekker on the trail — a great ego boost for Mr. Slow. Next day I went down to Pheriche where I was snowed in for three days, and I don’t think anybody’s seen Everest since, so I was very lucky.

Now back in Namche for my first hot shower in about 2 weeks, clothes washed for the first time since home, oh yeah. I’ll be here 2 or 3 days then head up the western valley, leaving behind the crowds of Everest-bound trekkers, and see more of the old-school high country life the way it was before the invasion of the trekker army. I’ve pretty much decided to spend my whole trip up here exploring one valley at a time — no passes for me, too high and too long a day for me without hiring help. I’d say maybe 1 in 10 trekkers I’ve seen appear to be operating without guide and/or porters. Oh that reminds me, apparently Jimmy Carter and Roselyn were up here in 1985. I saw a signed photo at Tengboche monastery and some horribly spelled bragging on the wall of a place in Pheriche; I don’t know if they made it to Kala Pattar, but I’ll bet they had some porters and guides.

[Note: Later, in a book at Powell’s I found an account written by Carter of his climb up Kala Pattar. Sounds like his guide had him continue up the ridge to a slightly higher peak than the one I was at, and in much worse weather. Good for Jimmy.]

Coming down my only stop other than lunch was at a Buddhist nunnery on the outskirts of Deboche, just above the more famous Tengboche Monastery. I left my pack at the gate with the beaming old man doing chores (every monastery in Asia seems to have one, the beaming old man that is) and entered the modest front gate. Inside the first yard I turned the giant prayer wheel which rings a bell with every revolution, and a shy young nun appeared. After a great deal of sign language back and forth she ushered me, now bootless and hatless, into the main shrine room/meditation hall, very like a miniature of the larger and grander Tendboche up the hill. She bent over a long narrow book and appeared to be studying/reciting the text while I did my prostrations on the plank floor worn smooth with a century of barefoot traffic, and then explored the room in the profound hush. The walls, ceiling, posts, everything covered with paintings of Buddhas & Bodhisattvas, demons and saints. The images (statuary) on the far wall all behind glass, the rest of the wall covered in tiny cubbyholes — 44 on each side of the central images. With more sign language I determined that each contained books, presumably similar to the one she was reading, as all you could see from the outside was folded cloth. On the way out I left a donation — apparently they are very poor cousins to their brethren on the hill.

Well it seems I am finally getting the hang of using other people’s computers — last time I used this one it drove me crazy. Anyway I like this high country tho I wish the weather would get better. Out of about 24 days above Lukla I’ve had maybe 7 nice days. Even now we never really got sun here. The moon is nearly full but who can see it? Still I’m happy to stay up here as long as I can and return to the hell of Ku City only when it’s time to fly home, roughly 5 weeks from now.

Blessing to all from the top of the world.

October 26 – Namche

Back in Namche for the third time, the gateway to and grand central market for the whole Khumbu region. There is much to say about Namche but I didn’t come up here to see gateways or go shopping, so if you want images of its spectacular setting and colorful markets (as with any of the place names I drop into these letters) there’s alway good ol Google. I came to get close to these sky-piercing peaks and get a taste of Sherpa culture and meet these gentle-natured and physically remarkable Buddhist people.

Originally from Tibet, the Sherpa began to come into Nepal from the north 300-500 yrs ago, and things accelerated in the 20th century with the Chinese occupation. The earliest migration began possibly because of religious persecution by other younger and more aggressive Vajrayana sects. Even today the Buddhist monastics here are trying to get the lay Sherpa to turn away from the old Bon (pre-Buddhist) animistic spirit traditions that got folded into the new faith that reached the Himalayas over 1000 years ago. Outside of the monasteries the Sherpa still cling stubbornly to the old land spirits, water spirits, tree spirits etc, one reason the landscape — the hilltops and passes, every bridge, certain trees, all monuments and memorials and every house are decked with prayer flags. Long lines of them, some at least as long as a football field, can be seen running from peak-let to peak-let, across canyons and rivers. As they flutter in the wind the prayers are sent flying across the land, and they say that anyone who breathes that air is blessed. If that is so, then Nepal in general and Khumbu in particular is a great place to receive abundant blessings.

From the summit Everest on down it’s hard to find a view w/o prayer flags. I thought I had found one the other day, but putting down my load and sitting for 5 minutes, at the top of a ridge miles away I made out the silhouette of a line of flags against the bright blue sky, strung between two rocky points on the ridge. Then I saw another string lower down across a gully, and then another over here, and two over there…

The Sherpa believe that saying prayers, making offerings at the home alter or the monastery, just breathing in this well-blessed air and many other rituals that I don’t see and am not aware of, takes away their sins. However one prayer does not erase one sin, it’s not that easy. Therefore various mechanized systems of praying (eg: the flags and prayer wheels etc) are employed for mass-production purposes. Here and there you see elderly Sherpas repeating their prayers using a rosary or mala to keep count, sometimes sitting in a doorway, or even walking up a trail, presumably trying to make up for all the drinking, gambling and fooling around that Sherpas love to do when they’re young (don’t we all?) before their time runs out and they get reborn as a dog or a chicken or worse.

Sherpa children are the cutest. In the shops of Namche glossy calendars of Sherpa or Nepali children rival those with images of these world-famous peaks. Sherpa men dress pretty much like a Western working-class Joe, while Sherpa women, at least after they marry, almost always wear a long heavy black skirt with an apron almost as long with horizontal stripes so fine you have to be pretty close to see that the lines are multi-colored. I have not seen these aprons for sale in Namche but I will ask — I’d like to see this cloth up close. And Sherpa girls….what can I say, many are just drop-dead beautiful, take an old man’s breath away.

I just returned yesterday from my journey up the westernmost valley of the Khumbu, a ‘road less travelled’ for sure. Gone were the traffic jams of yaks, dzopkio (a yak-cow hybrid), and trekkers. In 3 days I got as high as you can go without crossing the Renjo La pass (18.000 ft) to the next valley to the east, still closed due to all the snow last week, or the Tashi Labtsa pass north into Tibet, closed by the Chinese. At my first stop in Thame I met young Jacob, a mountaineering EMT from Colorado who was trying to get down the valley from Gokyo after the big snow started when he witnessed an avalanche on the narrow trail that killed 2 dzopkio and swept their herder into the raging river below. Luckily no one was killed, but a lot of trekkers around him needed a change of underwear afterwards. Or at least that’s how Jacob told it. He told me he’d spent the next several days assisting with the rescued victims at the Machermo clinic before continuing with his trek.

Later, when trekking up the Gokyo valley, I attended another altitude sickness lecture at the rescue post in Machermo, and afterwards asked the doctor about Jacob’s story. She told me that Jacob had arrived at their clinic after the avalanche in a state of traumatic shock. The accident he described caused them to mobilize for a major emergency with dozens of victims. This turned out to be a huge overreaction, and she remarked that in the days that followed Jacob had been more of a nuisance than a help.

In Thame I stayed at a lodge owned by Apa Furba Sherpa, renown as the man who’s climbed Everest more times than anyone else, something like 19 times now. He currently lives in New York but his brother is running the lodge. There is TV in the dining room and the porters sit channel surfing, switching the station every time a commercial comes on. At one point the movie “Mr Bean’s Holiday” came on and I found out once again how many people can’t stand my idol Mr Bean.

One night a man with no fingers or thumbs came into the dining room selling his paintings. A former climbing guide he lost his digits to frostbite but apparently can still hold a brush somehow — how I never was able to determine. I did buy a painting and managed to get it home in one piece, a sweet portrait of two danphes, the pheasant-like national bird of Nepal, with amazing detail, a lot of it edged in gold.

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[Years later I found an account from another trekker of meeting this same artist In Thame in 2015. He reported his name as Pasang Nuru and that he lost most of his fingers and toes crossing the Nangpa La pass from Tibet in 1975. Yesterday I photographed the painting that I bought in 2013 and I managed to insert it here. The style is very typical of traditional Sherpa art. It measures 30″ X 8″ and is the loveliest piece I have ever brought home from an adventure. — June 2024]

Also in Thame I hiked up to the regional monastery clinging to the side of a canyon looking across at a magnificent wall of 20,000 ft peaks. Moving on, I hiked from Thame up into the snow-covered village of Lungden, where a double-whammy dose of headache and nausea confirmed that on this trip I have to go slow and re-acclimatize every time I gain altitude. For one day I was too sick and weak to do anything; the next day I realized I needed to get down to lower altitude no matter what, so I hired a porter to carry my pack down to the next village Marlung, the only time I was to hire help. After a night in Marlung I felt better and got myself down to Thame, and back to Namche a day or two later.

I’m sitting in the Danphe Cafe (serving Starbucks coffee) as the afternoon fades once the sun disappears behind the towering peaks, music blasting both inside the cafe and through the open windows from the Irish pub (“the world’s highest”) across the alley. My fingers stiff with cold, my ears ringing with John Lee Hooker, Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin…

I contemplate my next move. I’m getting tired, and I get sick every time I go up, but I’ve got to see Gokyo if I possibly can, with the emerald green lakes and great views including 3 of the world’s 10 highest peaks. I’ve got nearly 3 weeks before I need to fly back to Ku City, I can take a week getting up to Gokyo and still have plenty of time. And if it gets too painful I can bail anytime, I’ve had my fun….but I’m goin’ for it. Now I’m hearing B. B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone” — but it isn’t, not quite yet.

November 4 – Gokyo

I had accepted the likelihood of failure when I started up the third and last valley in the Khumbu. What with all the headache problems seemingly triggered by altitude over and over again, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to kill myself getting up here. I planned to take a leisurely 5 days, ended up taking 7, but yesterday morning I cruised into Gokyo with nothing more than half-frozen fingers to complain about. You need to Google “Gokyo, Nepal ” immediately — there’s no way to adequately describe the scenery up here. Suffice to say that there’s a huge turquoise green lake at my feet and if you climb the small moraine behind the lodges you look down on the Ngozumpa Glacier, a seemingly endless river of rubble-covered ice running down from an immense snowy ridge to the north with Cho Oyu (the world’s 6th highest mountain) at one end and Gyachung Kang (the 16th highest) at the other. There is still snow everywhere from the big fall — 3 weeks ago now? — and some of the day trips are impossible for someone like me who did not come to Nepal prepared to trudge through snow. It’s not supposed to snow in October…

A few notes about the journey up: my first day was longer and harder than I planned and once I was ready to take refuge in a lodge I was told “no room”. There was nothing else in sight, but after an hour’s search I found probably the worst lodge ever, and I would have been turned away from that one too if Yuri, a 53-yr old mad Ukrainian athletic coach hadn’t agreed to let me share his room. Yuri had just 2 days before climbed about 7000 ft in one day, camped in a tent in the snow at 18,000 ft , crossed a pass and then came down quick, and now he wasn’t feeling all that great. We communicated mostly with sign language and the few words of English he knew, but he was full of enthusiasm about everything. In the morning he pulled out a harmonica and played a basic version of the Happy Birthday song. I’m not sure that tune means ‘happy birthday’ in the Ukraine but it was apparently the only song he knew. I did manage to get across that I’d had a birthday 2 days before (and the significance of the song he played) and before he took off to run up another valley he presented me with a Ukrainian Snickers bar.

The food at this lodge was mostly inedible, and for breakfast I had 2 bowls of muesli with hot milk — hard to ruin that — but it failed to really start my engines, so faced with some tough uphill first thing (stairs really), I soon stopped by a waterfall and ate my Ukrainian Snickers which got me to the next village. Here I stopped to nurse a small headache but by the second morning I was ready to rumble again. The next 3 villages were pretty much the same altitude, each with it own attractions, so I spent a night in each, and one more a little higher before making the final push to Gokyo. This last section was where the avalanches had occurred in the early days of the big snow.

I was apprehensive about this steep, narrow, icy section, now very muddy lower down, so I set out very early without a real breakfast hoping at least the mud would still be frozen. The sun reached down into this gully just as I was about give up that my fingers would ever be warm again — then came a little bridge, and the first of the 6 Gokyo lakes appeared. Cold to the bone, I marveled at the dabbling ducks paddling on it’s surface, but I guess that’s what ducks do isn’t it? Soon after that I saw a fat little pika (rather like a big hamster) who looked like he was expecting treats from me. Then a second lake, and then the third, and Gokyo. Later, after finding a lodge with edible food, I hiked up to the ridge and nearly tripped over a flock a the Tibetan Snowcocks who paid me not the slightest attention as they went about their business, pecking at the thawing turf and seemingly extracting something they thought was yummy. One other wildlife note– I finally saw an actual danphe (the beautiful pheasant and national bird of Nepal) pecking away in a garden at the top of Namche on my way out of town. So except for the mule deer and the very rarely spotted snow leopard, I’ve now seen about all the high altitude wildlife there is. At first glance at least it’s about 95% crows and ravens.

Tomorrow AM I will try one more 18,000 ft peak across the valley from the top of which you can see half the world apparently, and then a lazy day and it’s time to turn my footsteps homeward. I should be back in Ku City by the 17th, and flying out the 19th I think. I may dilly-dally along the way if Qatar Airways will let me, but I should be back in my own bed by the first of December at the latest. It’s been a fabulous trip; I’m glad I did it alone without guide or porter, the freedom to go at my own pace without any pressures was key.

But it’s almost over, and I feel I’ve had my fill. I hope never to be cold again.

November 6 – Gokyo

Yesterday at noon I made the summit of Gokyo Ri. It turned out not to be another “18er”, but only 17,500 ft. I love it when that happens! As it was it was climb enough, a 4-hour unrelenting steep trail through turf, rock, mud and finally snow. For the very first time in 6 weeks I had a trail companion Connie, the charming wife of an equally charming 81-yr-old who’d really hit the wall getting up to Gokyo and stayed back at the lodge trying to wheedle a doctor into signing off on a paper that would justify (to his insurance) a helicopter evacuation to Kathmandu. Frank & Connie live in Canada and have somehow managed to raise 3 children and still spend about half their lives traveling the world. They’ve trekked in the Khumbu six times since 1985, when they met Jimmy Carter on his visit with Rosalind and Amy. When Connie and I got to the bottom of the hill we were met by a chatty English doctor who’d been sent out to look for us — seems Frank had gotten his ticket to ride and a helicopter was scheduled to scoop them up in about 90 minutes.

Earlier, as we began our descent it suddenly dawned on me that this was the turning point, that every step from now on was a step closer to home. The climb is over, I will never ever be this high again. No more agenda, just a safe return, still having to scrutinize every footstep.

Last night as I was engineering my old fork, toothpick and salt cellar stunt in the dining room, a Chinese-Australian engineer asked me what was the most interesting thing I’d seen in my 6 weeks up here, and I didn’t really have a good answer. What there has been is a long haul through some of the world’s highest mountains, unique wildlife, great conversations with adventurous people from all over the world (27 different countries so far), peeks into the the world of the amazing Sherpa people and the high monasteries of “Red Hat” Vajrayana Buddhism, freak weather, wild-ass card games, the jingle-jangle of the yaks and dzopkios, tiny fragrant rhododendrons perfuming the breeze….a gorgeous blur.

I’ve loved every bit of my time up here, well maybe not so much the headaches or the constant battle with the cold… The greatest lesson is the one I’ve been taught over and over again in this oddly blessed life of mine: have a dream, a goal, a plan — adjust it if you need to — but JUST KEEP GOING and it’s astonishing what you can do. On this trip that stubborn perseverance has been tempered a bit by an awareness of how threadbare my safety net is. It’s a tightrope I’ve walked before — but never this high off the ground as it were.

So from the heights back to the seashore and the home that I love so much there are many steps, but there is a special quality to the steps that are bringing you back to the people and the places that you’ve loved so long. Still you have to be watching for that loose rolling rock that wants to break your ankle or your neck as a parting gift…

The other piece, which I speculated about on the way to Gokyo and seemed to have confirmed this afternoon, is that I am about exhausted. I think when you’re young, acclimatize easily, and in shape, you will get stronger as time goes on, however age takes it’s toll and even seasoned climbers start to deteriorate after some time at altitude. I took my third hot shower in 6 weeks a few hours ago and afterwards climbed about 300 feet up the moraine to say goodbye to the Ngozumpa glacier, see the afternoon sun glinting off the green waters of the 3rd Gokyo lake and maybe warm up a little, and I swear to you I didn’t think I was going to make it. The gas tank is about empty and even the deeeelicious chicken cutlet that you can get at this lodge for about the same price as at home doesn’t seem to fix the problem (and I had two). There’s some up and down on the way out, and my pack will get heavier once I get back to Namche and all the gear I jettisoned there, but I have plenty of time and I seem to know how to KEEP GOING.

And for a good news closer, I just found out from the lodge owner that yes, the 8-yr-old triplets — Scarlet, Evie, and Jemima — did make it up to Gokyo about a month ago. I was reminded to ask when a 10-yr-old girl walked into the dining room today. And did I mention the Swiss guy with the “alp horn” playing on top of Gokyo Ri?

November 17 – Kathmandu

Between Gokyo and Namche (after the ‘turning point’) I met 3 more diverse but kindred souls. Here are their stories.

Emma: I think I mentioned that in Gokyo I was reminded to ask about the triplets by the arrival of a 10 yr old girl. Later that day I struck up a conversation with her — Emma — and she turned out to be from California and one of the friendliest most outgoing people I met on this whole trip. She and her hot teenage sister Henna were both dark Hispanic beauties like their mother, their father Steve was straight-arrow Americano. All of them were sweet as pie, but Emma and I had some especially great conversations about words and language such as tricks to employ to best communicate with someone who speaks only a little of your native tongue, which languages are easier or harder to learn and why, and why visiting a country just because you like the sound of it’s name is a great idea.

Emma is at that perfect age when she is looking out at the wider world and still full of curiosity, but not yet to the stage when all adults are suddenly stupid and not worth talking to. In my experience it’s usually a narrow window, but thanks to parents who took the trouble to take their daughters to the top of the wider world, Emma and Henna may be able to hop, skip and jump through the more self-conscious phases of growing up. Talking to Emma was having someone’s complete attention, compelling you to give the same — it felt wonderful, like a foot massage at the end of a long hard day.

Piran: Piran grew up in Cornwall, near Land’s End, the peninsula at the SW tip of England. He was named after an Irish saint who was beheaded on the beach rather than renounce his faith. Back in the old days the quickest route to sainthood was to endure some sort of gruesome death, nowadays it takes a bit more of a resumé. Look at poor Mother Teresa — still on the waiting list isn’t she?

Like me Piran never cared for school and gave it up early, but unlike me he was soon out in the wider world and has spent over 20 of his 42 years headquartered in Bali where he designs handicrafts for export, executed by Bali’s myriad fine craftsmen, and then ships to his distributors all over the world. He told me he works just enough to support himself and allow plenty of time for travel and surfing. Like many an ex-pat he seems to have a bit of a substance abuse issue, and confided that one reason he was up in the Khumbu was to “try and get off the booze.” To assist in this he showed me a iPod-sized chunk of “Nepal’s finest black hashish” that he fished out of his pocket, also a small ball of opium. As I was packing to leave he knocked on my door and offered me a piece of the hashish. I told him I appreciated the gesture but “that’s a piece of my life I left behind 12 years ago and have no interest in revisiting now.”

Piran and I talked and talked, and shared much the same outlook on the world. He was encouraged to hear that I was 45 years old before I ever knuckled down and worked in a more or less diligent fashion for 21 years. He was about halfway through training to be an occupational therapist when he finally flew the coop and hit the road We exchanged emails and promised to stay in touch. He’s the first person I’ve met in the 30 years since I left Bali who knows the place better than I do, and names of places that haven’t passed my lips in all that time came popping out of the dusty overflowing file cabinets in the back of my musty dimly-lit old brain just like magic, like pulling rabbits out of a hat. I wouldn’t be that surprised to see Piran turn up in Astoria one of these days.

Willi: Born in the Austrian alps in 1947, Willi came to Canada in the 60s and settled in the same area as Frank & Connie. As a teenager he began climbing in the nearby mountains, and as the years went by branched out into just about every avenue of outdoor adventure, on the ground, on the water, and in the air. Until he got married he worked for years as a bush pilot in Canada and Alaska, then he built an ultralight aircraft at home from a kit he bought in Beaverton, Oregon, and flew it for 10 years as far south as Texas and back. When his young son began bugging him to fly it as well, he got rid of the ultralight and took up flying gliders. His favorite route is to start in Minden, Nevada, get towed up to 3000 ft and then “catch the wave” as it were, soaring up as high as 18,000 ft over the Sierras, flying down to the Mojave desert, and if the conditions are right, return to Minden, a round trip of over 400 miles of sailing through the heavens with no motor to intrude on the ambiance. I had no idea you could do that — but Willi can and does.

When I met him in Namche he was quietly celebrating his 65th birthday with a nice supper and a pint of rum, having just completed the long walk in from the town of Jiri (the “hódeeble” bus ride from Kathmandu) instead of flying to Lukla as I did, a tough up and down route that takes most people 9-12 days — Willi did it in 6. As it happened I had just quietly celebrated my 70th birthday, and when we parted he said “I just hope that when I’m your age I’m in as good shape as you”, which I took as a huge compliment tho I’ve never ever been in the kind of shape Willi’s in at 65. Hunting, fishing, climbing, backpacking, trekking, flying, gliding, kayaking — Willi does it all, usually alone and unassisted. About the only thing I’ve done that Willi hasn’t (yet) is jump out of an airplane. For all his years of flying ultralights and gliders he’s always worn a parachute as there’s always the chance that rogue turbulence might rip yr craft to shreds, but never had to deploy it. As for me, a lot of my adventures were intellectual, spiritual or artistic, and it’s only as I’ve aged (and especially retired) that I’ve returned with a vengence to exploring the outer world, much as I did with my dog when I was 10. If I had been raised in Alaska instead of Hollywood I could well have turned out more like Willi, but again, as with Emma and Piran, there was seemingly an almost immediate bond between the two of us, lone-wolf grandfathers (“baji” the Nepalis call me) meeting on the road to the top of the world — no need to ask why.

November 19 – Kathmandu

6 AM

I scribble in my journal so much it’s hard to remember what I’ve already shared with you. I have no memory of talking about the trip down from Namche but it was pretty uneventful except for the departure of a cold virus and headache that kept me away from computer screens for awhile, and a noticeable increase in political activity on the trail. It all comes to a head today, election day, and I will add little updates to this as the day unfolds. I hope to follow my hosts to the polls and do some additional wandering explorations of the general atmosphere.

First some background as best I can scope it out. A ten year guerrilla war waged by “Maoist” (whatever that means) fighters ended in 2008 with a peace deal in which the king stepped down and a democracy of some sort was promised. In the elections that year the Maoists won an overwhelming majority of seats in a “Constituent Assembly” charged with writing a constitution. This they’ve been unable to do in 5 years tho the reasons why, the contentious issues, remain a complicated mystery to me. As a Nepali who sold me a wonderful singing bowl yesterday put it to me, “If they really wanted to get it done it would be easy: just take India’s constitution (India and Nepal are neighbors of course and the Nepali rupee is tied to the Indian rupee so their economies are in sync), erase the word India and write in Nepal.”

In any case, there are now something like 33 communist parties of one stripe or another, and they are doing their best to undermine the election by declaring a general strike for election week paralyzing transport in most of the country and throwing fire bombs at vehicles defying the ban. So far one driver has died of burns and dozens of others including innocent passengers on buses trying to get back to their home villages to vote have been hospitalized. In addition some of the communist factions have been attacking each other, so when you condense all this into the newspaper it looks pretty grim. I haven’t seen any fighting but you certainly see well-armed police and military on the streets. It seems clear to me that the reason for this resistance to democracy is probably the natural reluctance of the party (or alliance) currently in power to allow an election that is certain (due to their failure to deliver a constitution) to be voted out or at least have their influence severely curtailed.

Meanwhile back in the USA we have a comparatively orderly “democracy” where it’s all about the money, and regardless of how you vote elections and politicians are bought and sold to the highest bidder…oh don’t get me started. Getting rid of a king is real change — when are we at home ever likely to see real change? And for a last footnote on Nepali politics, a few more party symbols to add to the list: the bird party, the praying hands party, the umbrella party, the drum party and yesterday I was told about the dog party, a tongue-in-cheek outfit headed by a 25-yr-old student that doesn’t put up posters, talks to people one-on-one, and makes a point to not use motor vehicles, they do all their campaigning on bicycles. The guy who told me (same guy I quoted above) thought they might win an assembly seat in his neighborhood at least.

2 PM

Just returned from a stroll in the neighborhood up to the local polling station located in Janakalyan Higher Secondary School. On the third floor balcony is painted:

“Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead. — Aristotle”

Well I don’t know if Aristotle ever said such a thing — I wouldn’t go that far myself — but if it keeps you in school it’s probably for the best I suppose. Anyway there were about a hundred people chatting outside the gates of the school, some of them had probably already voted, other hadn’t gone in yet. At the gates were several APF (Armed Police Force) in blue camouflage clearly tired of holding their AK47s at the ready. Any prospective voter had to show their voter ID card and undergo a brief frisk before entering the school grounds. If there was a purple finger system to identify people who’d already voted I could not detect it.

At several intervals I noticed sizable groups of young men dressed in dark blue jackets looking very purposeful as they walked briskly down the road past the voting place. They looked very much like the groups I saw marching along in my last days on the trail in Khumbu except then those had the amplified bullhorn and the red hammer and sickle flag. There were always a number of other people in ordinary dress traveling with them and I guessed that perhaps they were party workers escorting their particular voters to another polling place. They never even looked in the direction of this polling station so the whole thing remains a mystery. A man who engaged me in conversation clearly didn’t know either tho we watched one of these groups go by as we talked. He ventured the opinion that maybe they were undercover police but this made no sense to me — if you are undercover you do not march around in large groups.

The only other mildly remarkable thing I saw was when I returned from a short wander down the road to buy myself a Kit Kat bar: one of the ways back into the polling place was seemingly blocked by 4 sizable men in dark clothing with their arms folded across their chests and menacing looks on their faces. I walked right at them as if they weren’t there and they parted to let me through. There was nothing overt about it, but they didn’t not look like the welcome wagon staff either. The fellow I talked to said that this place was very peaceful and that other polling stations were likely not so mellow, and that 5 years ago apparently things got really hairy. He was one of those stranded in Kathmandu, unable to get back to his home village in another province to vote.

Back at home and up on the roof, the air in the huge flat valley that is greater Kathmandu looked cleaner than I’ve ever seen it before. To the north there is a low spot in the nearby mountains through which you can now see a ridge of 3 snow-covered peaks looming large. Judging by what I saw in Khumbu these would have to be over 20,000 ft — Denali size mountains — and probably on the Tibetan border. You could hike right to the foot of those mountains from Ku City if you had a couple-three weeks, I actually had planned on something like that before I fell in love with the Khumbu and decided to spend all my time up there. Down on the street the lack of vehicular traffic is a bit of a miracle, and today the streets are full of children with jump ropes, hula hoops, and improvised cricket games. What few motorbikes there are are not in a hurry or kicking up dust, using the horn sparingly. Kathmandu is not a hell-hole today as I think I characterized it in one of my early emails. I’m glad I got to see its brighter side.

8 PM

Voting was over at 5 but most of what I know I found online. The TV in the next room doesn’t speak to me, mostly it’s news anchors chatting endlessly in Nepali and if there’s video there’s not much going on and it loops endlessly. What I read online is that there was 70% turnout in Kathmandu where the general strike was largely ineffective, elsewhere it was probably lower than that, but not bad for a new democracy with bombs going off. No reports of fatalities but bombs exploded in a number of locations including at least one in Ku City near a polling place when a child picked it up thinking it was some kind of toy. On TV earlier I saw a 90 yr old at the polls, and later a old guy 101 yrs old who looked a bit lost and didn’t have much to say. Two old folks keeled over and died after voting, ages 67 and 73 respectively, their last act in this life.

I spent a lot of the day starting to organize my gear. Because I brought a whole suitcase packed to the brim by Nawang Sherpa for his family, and I haven’t acquired much stuff myself, I have a lot of empty space to fill. I’m thinking about buying a large case of Wai Wai, Nepal’s version of Top Ramen, and stuffing all available space with the packets. They’re light and if they get crunched a little it won’t matter. I talked to Nawang via Skype today and he showed me the same Wai Wai noodle packets — he managed to find some in Portland — they’re much better than Ramen and not so salty. My project for tomorrow is to buy some presents for his family here, they have been so sweet to me. I have everything scoped out, I just need to make the buys and get it all home in a taxi. It’s so much fun to play Santa Claus — I actually look a lot like him these days.

POSTSCRIPT

To underline the international character of the trekking experience, here is my final list of countries I met people from. I didn’t quiz everybody I met so this is just a snapshot from one trekker, roughly in order of how many there seemed to be from particular countries starting with the undisputed champion trekker nation: Germany, followed by the UK, China, France, India, Nepal, Spain, Korea, USA, Japan, Italy, Australia, Israel, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela, Austria, Brazil, Slovakia, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Canada, Russia, New Zealand, Holland, Ukraine, Ireland, Norway, and Singapore. The last on the list was added as I came down the homestretch from Gokyo. A bubbly little straggler from her group, moseying along with the ‘sweeper’ guide stopped me and asked me a number of questions. When she found out how old I was I instantly achieved celebrity status. She had the guide take several photos of us together — I might as well have been Jimmy Carter or Methuselah himself. Unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to give her my email address or I might be able to show you a photo of Nini from Singapore, my biggest fan.

So that will have to be the last word from Nepal — tomorrow I’ll need to focus on pulling myself together and getting my ass on the big airplane the next morning. It was great having one last look at the other side of the world. I think it’s unfortunate that so many people experience the world pretty much exclusively via books, TV, movies, the net and so forth, and never get out and see it for themselves. We all have our own paths and our own choices to make, I can only recommend the direct experience as worth a try, and hope these letters have whetted a few appetites out there.

May the long time sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you guide you all the way on.

November 29, 2013 – Astoria, Oregon

Hearth and Home

A few of you I’ve seen or spoken to along the long road home, but for most of you this will announce that I have officially come to rest in Astoria. After so many recent evenings warming my cold soggy feet around oil drum stoves fueled with yak dung, my project for the year ahead is to make the “hearth” part of the above subject line a reality and get a wood stove installed in my current “home”. I lived for many decades cooking and heating with wood (out in the woods), and having moved into town 5 years ago I miss that glowing radiance. With age the chill seeps into the bones and cold feet seem to be unavoidable especially when life gets more sedentary. And sedentary is what I’m craving right now, I’ve had quite enough adventure — for this year at least.

I did not take a camera to the Khumbu — I wanted to be there rather than photographing there. Besides it would have meant an extra pound of gear. Connie from Canada sent me the photo she took (featured at the top of this blog post) from the summit of Gokyo Ri of me with Everest over my right shoulder and Lhotse above my head. You may remember that Connie and I climbed Gokyo Ri on Nov 5th just before Frank got a medical 10-4 to fly out in a helicopter at the expense of his insurance company. While I was waiting for my flight out of Lukla a week later I ran into one of the docs from the Machermo & Gokyo clinics flying home to the UK after a 2-month tour of duty in the Khumbu. She told me, “That guy Frank was a tough call. He was stumbling around, showing all the cardinal signs of AMS (acute mountain sickness), but I happened to see him when he got on the helicopter and he practically skipped on board.” Well Frank is 81 yrs old and the only previous occasion that he ran up a travel insurance bill was about 20 years ago when he accidentally fell down a well in the dark near Lake Titicaca in the Andes and shattered his collarbone. This photo represents documentary evidence of “The Turning Point” and the beginning of the descent towards home as described in an email from Gokyo. The rest of the pictures are in my head, and in yours if you read all the way through this account.

So I wish you all well, happy holidays and all that, and remember, like Obama says: “Yes we can!” Even if he can’t, we certainly can.

Love, Joseph

Joseph Stevenson

I don't know where I'm going, but I know where I've been.

Category Archives: travel

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Trekking the Khumbu in Nepal

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