Evanston: THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS;
Captiaterraphobia revisited
Evanston: THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS;
Captiaterraphobia revisited
Consider this a public service announcement.
Most of you are here not because of my wit and charm--though you should be--but because I sail; and if you are interested in sailing--and probably even if you aren’t--you will enjoy THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS. I’m presently about two/thirds of the way through it for the third or fourth time over the decades, having been reminded of it a month ago by Roger, for which I thank him.
First published in 1903, Erskine Childers’s novel tells of two young Oxford graduates, Carruthers and Davies, who were only vague acquaintances in school and have since gone different ways. Carruthers has begun a promising career in the Foreign Office, while Davies failed the examination for the India Service.
Late one summer Carruthers receives an unexpected telegram from Davies, inviting him to join Davies for some sailing aboard his boat on the German coast. In the absence of better invitations, Carruthers accepts, although he notes that it is late in the season, a time “when most owners are paying off their crews.” He thinks he is going “Yachting” and arrives with dress clothes in a portmanteau too big to fit through the hatches of Davies’s, DULCIBELLA, a thirty foot long yawl rigged converted life boat, which Davies normally single-hands. One of the pleasures of the book is Carruthers’s adaption to life aboard the DULCIBELLA.
Carruthers notices a page missing from the ship’s log. A spy mystery unfolds, along with a romantic interest, amidst the sands that cover and uncover with the tides on the shallow German and Dutch coast.
I am not going to tell you any more, except that this ranks with Slocum as one of the true classics of sailing literature.
I’m reading a Kindle edition. THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS is still in print and available as a free download at Gutenberg.
----------
After the most recent forced two week hiatus, I resumed working out yesterday and took a bike ride this morning.
I’ve been cycling again for a few months, but it was the last activity I resumed after my eye failed. Being one-eyed has affected my balance and I didn’t want to run into anyone, or fall off and look like an old fool, much less break a bone. I note the “look like an old fool,” and have acknowledged before the incongruity of seventy year old vanity, which I do not deny possessing.
As you can see from the photos, today is beautiful.
I have my weekly doctor’s appointment tomorrow and may get back up to GANNET on Thursday.
----------
Were I given to paranoia--and as Woody Allen has said, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t persecuting me.” I might feel that the land is scheming against me.
Drought has blocked two of the ways out of here this summer. The Erie Canal has just reopened; but the Mississippi River is closed. More than a hundred barges are backed up on the southern reaches of the river, where in places the Corps of Engineers is struggling to maintain a 9’ deep channel. It is not quite true that you can’t get to the ocean from here; but almost.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012