Opua: lows; why; Carol’s hat
Opua: lows; why; Carol’s hat
For centuries the dream of escape from Northern latitudes has been tropical. The best thing about the tropics to me is snorkeling in warm clear water; otherwise I much prefer more temperate climates such as found here where days are warm enough for shorts and the nights cool enough for sleeping.
Last night I woke, as I often do around 3:00 a.m., and looked up through the open hatch above my head to a clear and starry sky. I lay there for a while, thinking about how to install lee cloths on GANNET’s quarterberths, and had just fallen back asleep when it rained on me.
The rain did not last long, but more is on the way, intermittently forever. The New Zealand Bay of Islands Met page forecasts 30+ knot wind for three of the next four days, brought by two separate lows. And a third low is due early next week.
I did my laundry yesterday. I ferried water out to HAWKE this morning. I’m ready to go sailing. I’d like to go sailing. But I don’t know when I’m going to go sailing.
I fly back to Evanston three weeks from today.
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In ILIUM, a good, but not great science fiction novel I recently read, the Trojan War is being refought on Mars, and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, a poem I have long admired, is quoted.
Both Tennyson and the Greek poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, write of a Ulysses who grows tired of Ithaca after his return and, true to his nature even when old, sets out again. In Kazantzakis’s poem, three times the length of Homer’s original, Ulysses walks the length of Africa and when he runs out of land, pushes on toward the South Pole.
It was not by chance that I wrote my senior honors English thesis on Kazantzakis.
ILIUM caused me to reread Tennyson’s much shorter poem. Some don’t understand how I can leave ‘the world’s best mooring’ for the challenge of sailing GANNET.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
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I don’t recall why Carol has her hands on her hat in the above photo taken while we were anchored at Roberton Island. Maybe she is just laid back. Maybe she has surrendered to the enemy. Maybe her hat was going to blow off. I sort of recall that the hat itself is made of paper and that she bought it more than a decade ago in Portugal.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012