Evanston: 11 ∙ 11 ∙ 11 = 70
Evanston: 11 ∙ 11 ∙ 11 = 70
I don’t much believe in holidays, particularly birthdays; but I must admit that I have been looking forward to this improbable one. “Intensity not duration” I wrote long ago, and I believe that’s the way I’ve lived. Yet today I am seventy. How odd.
I’ve thought back to where I was on each tenth November 11. I don’t recall any of those days specifically, except 2001.
1941 St. Louis, Missouri. I was born around 2:00 a.m. in Mercy Hospital.
1951 Kirkwood, Missouri. I was living with my mother and stepfather, and my mother’s mother and stepfather, in a small house on the edge of St. Louis suburbs.
1961 Dubuque, Iowa. Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River. I was a junior in college, majoring in philosophy. I knew that on the day after graduation, I’d start driving for California; and I did.
1971 San Diego, California. I was living aboard the Ericson 35, EGREGIOUS, at Harbor Island Marina, in a countdown to my first circumnavigation.
This was not the boat on which I made that voyage. I traded the Ericson 35 in on an Ericson 37, which I also named EGREGIOUS without adding ‘II’.
1981 Mission Beach, California. I was at my grandmother’s tiny beach house, Suzanne and I having flown back from Singapore, where CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE was on a mooring.
I returned to Singapore just after Christmas.
Within a few months, my grandmother was dead, Suzanne and I separated, CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE ashore in Saudi Arabia, and I jailed as a spy.
1991 Auckland, New Zealand. Jill and I had sailed RESURGAM down to Westhaven Marina to prepare her for a passage around Cape Horn.
For my fiftieth birthday I decided to do all the things on my eternal boat to-do list, which included buying my first GPS, a handheld unit made by Sony that cost $2000. GPS was not officially in service, but it was active.
I immediately put a waypoint just off Horn Island in the Sony. After unexpectedly beating almost all the way from New Zealand to Cape Horn, we crossed that waypoint the following February.
2001 Atlantic Ocean. Carol and I were on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA in a gale off the African coast, near the Canary Islands, during a passage from Gibraltar to Dakar, Senegal.
2011 Evanston, Illinois.
In 1971, 1991, 2011--every twenty years as I’ve just realized; and maybe always--I’ve been moving toward Cape Horn.
Until it is a reason, old age is not an excuse.
So open a bottle of Laphroaig--real or imaginary, play “You Can Never Hold Back Spring,” and raise a glass to the improbable.
Friday, November 11, 2011