Anatomy Trains

It had been blowing at 20 knots from the north all day, and it was forecast to blow from the northwest all night.  Most harbors are protected form the prevailing southwest, but Georges Harbor, between Allen and Benner – awful in a southwest - would provide good protection in this wind and sea.  We rounded Old Cilley Ledge, bouncing over a cross-chop in a shiny metaled sea, but it settled down immediately we entered the narrow passage of the harbor.

Andrew Wyeth bought these islands many years ago from a group of owners who included my father.  Since, he cleared the north end of trees and built a series of buildings in various New England architectural styles.  At first, they looked a bit Toytown, but with age they have mellowed into the island landscape.

A woman with gray hair on the dock, I presume Betsy Wyeth, offered us a mooring on our way in, and we gratefully accepted.  The afternoon waned in peace, the goats who keep the brush down wandered onto the high pier, the evening descended upon us; we and the Wyeths, judging by lights out, went to bed at the same time.

In the morning, after a good breakfast to shore us up for the long sail home, I raised the main, left it loose and backed the jib to turn us on a dime, slipping off the mooring and up the slender harbor between the other boats.  The screen door of the perfect, spare, silvery gray Cape opened, and a spare old man with silvery hair and wide shoulders lifted his arm and said “Beautiful!”  We lifted our arms in return salute, too floored to speak, until we thought to offer a belated “Thank you” for the use of the mooring.

It’s not often you get called beautiful by the most understood painter in America.

I traversed the country on my thumb in the 60’s and 70’s, but circumstance threw a 60-year old out on the highway, just a couple of hours drive from Belfast to home.  No rental cars, bus already gone – what choices did I have?  It took about 4 hours – a sampling of who picks you up:

The first guy pulled over in his pick-up, with his angelic face and gut spilling over his belt, he cheerfully maneuvered a computer out of the front seat into the back of the cab to give me room, and offered a critique of my sales job as a hitchhiker.  “Button up your shirt, and the sunglasses shouldn’t even be up on your head, and you’ll do better with a sign saying ‘South, please’.  And a book – ax murderers don’t read books.”  A full-on marketer:  “You only have a couple of seconds to make your impression.”  McCain.

He dropped me at a store, and armed with a sign and reading my book, I awaited the next ride, which came from a young man, whose bandana sloped his hair straight back from his forehead while his goatee, in the manner of kids these days, pointed straight ahead.  Obama.

Next came a blonde in a white summer dress, maybe a doctor as she said she worked at the health center, who made me sit in the back of her SUV and wasn’t inclined to conversation.  Obama, I guess.

The next ride was also from a woman, a Subaru with a couple of huge white dogs “Hope you don’t mind hair!”, who had just spent ‘four hun-dred dol-lars’ on stuff to send her 14-year-old to school with.  Obama.

Another woman, traveling secretly down to Brunswick to buy music while the rest of her family camped for the weekend, took me the rest of the way down the coast to Damariscotta, where an older couple looking over brochures for pumps lifted me from the bypass into town (Obama, they had a sticker), and here I broke down and asked Quan to come fetch me.

Slow way to travel – I spent about 15 minutes between each ride waiting, but I was surprised at how many women were willing to give me a ride.  I suppose, with my gray hair and unprepossessing manner, I am not that threatening, but excepting the doctor and the old couple, nobody who stopped was moneyed.

I put the 2nd edition book galleys to bed in Jonesport, the manuscript spread out on the boat table, on the cell phone with Joannah’s lilting brogue from Edinburgh, we leafed our way through the final changes in each chapter.  With this year-long project finally in the bag, we leapt out of Moosabec Reach on a singing north wind, with only jib and jigger (two of the three sails) up.  Two were enough – we roared around the corner in gulps of air, the rigging keening in the wind, up into Chandler Bay, pausing only because we caught a lobster pot on the rudder, which in the end we had to cut.

My dad used to chant “Robert Augustus Gardner Monks carried his money around in trunks”.  The Gardners (or the Monks, don’t know, they married) own stately and beautiful Roque Island, the easterly goal of our cruise.  I had been there once, years ago, and had put my boat on a rock and otherwise not acquitted myself well.  My father, alive at the time, had been philosophical about my troubles, having gotten himself into many scrapes in his sailing days.  I hated sailing with him when I was young – he was a yeller, which I now realize from my own tendencies happened when he was scared – but had reveled in it since I had grown and become the captain myself.

As we rounded from Chandler’s into Englishman’s Bay on the north point of Roque, the Gardner-Monks compound revealed itself – house after large house on a beautiful green sward, surrounded by the grey granite cliffs of Roque, to which the trees cling with Maine tenacity.  As we changed tacks in Shorrey Cove, there was a strange thumping roar we didn’t understand, and then a helicopter lifted out of the trees, and tilted off through the thick northerly air toward Bangor.

We worked our way up the bay to Roque Bluffs, where we anchored of  frigid beach, and I went overboard to check that the lobster pot and all its line was well and truly out of the propeller.  The water was so cold that after surfacing I could not find my testicles for some time, except by the ache.

By the time we left, the wind had risen to a shriek, and we roared down Englishman’s (past a castle – three stories complete with crenellations, the whole Rapunzel bit, on a small island that marked the border between the two bays – like an English folly.  Who pays to cart an entire castle – every worker had to be imported, every stone would have to be loaded into a boat and unloaded again – to be carted out to a small, remote, treeless island?  Another Monks?) into Machias Bay, with the huge round antennae of the sinister Cutler naval base.

The sky was grey, the sea was up to a steep chop, and the boat was straining downwind at 7+ knots, but we were exhilarated – this was as far east as either of us had been, and certainly the farthest east I had been with a boat under my command.  At that moment I decided “This is enough”- as modest an easterly run as it might be for real sea sailors - and shaped around the Libby Islands to turn back to Roque for the night.  Just as I uttered that order to myself in my head, a large dark blue dragonflty flew under my arm, around between Annie and I, and then disappeared upwind.  We are talking a mile or more offshore, with a heavy wind – what’s a dragonfly doing out there?

My father always appears to us in dragonflies – even when he was alive, it was his totem – he often commented on them and their colors and their flying ability, and a dragonfly swept similarly through his hospital room at the moment of his death.  So forgive me, it’s unutterably New Age, but I believe Edward paid us a congratulatory visit, toasting our easterly achievement.  I am glad he’s still around.

Now, it’s not like that barge hanging up on a bridge abutment in the Mississippi, but:

The Beals Island bridge over Moosabec Reach way Down East by Jonesport is on the chart at a 39’ clearance.  Although I have never measured my mast, I approached this bridge with a measure of confidence, born of my previous experience.  That first time, 10 years ago, I looked at the bridge with trepidation, and my sailing companion took the outboard dinghy and went well away from the boat as we approached the bridge, and came back reporting that he could see light between the top of my mast and the bottom of the bridge.  Not being a geometer, I pressed him on the math until I was convinced, and we passed under the span with several feet to spare, as he promised.

So this time, as I neared the ominously low-looking span, I was blithely assuring my sailing companion of this time that there was plenty of clearance.  Even so, we reduced sail and put the engine on in reverse to slow our hull caught in the fast moving tide that was shooing us down the reach.  Turns out my confidence (oh, it was ever thus) had about a foot of arrogance in it, and the top of the mast struck the bridge with a clang, crash, and then a series of scraping, sickening metal noises.

My utter surprise and Annie’s utter shock stopped us for a second.  The very upper part of the mast has antennae, instruments, and a light on it, and bits of plastic and metal clattered onto the deck, followed by flakes and almost sooty stuff that I though was part of my boat, but turned out on later inspection to be shards and flakes of bridge paint – apparently we gave nearly as good as we got.

We caught on the first girder, turned sideways under the bridge, freed that one and caught the second, and then (the crashes!) the third, but the fourth was lower than the others, and there we caught more solidly.  We were in a pickle – if we tried to go upstream we would have to pass under the three girders we had already buckled under.  To stay where we were would slowly, as the tide rose another 5 feet, poke our mast up through the roadway, or (more likely) down through our boat.  Every minute the tide rose (13 feet in six hours around here) would mean we were more stuck.

Using the engine, backing and filling between the two girders penning the mast above us, I got the boat sideways to the current, parallel to the roadway, and let her float back into the girder (crash, again).  Then I cut the engine, and the strong tide carried the hull out from under the bridge, tilting the boat and the mast until it slipped under the girder and with a shudder we were free.

Within minutes we were laughing between adrenalin bursts.  We are now sailing without a wind vane or a masthead light, but luckily the radio antenna was a whip, and survived, and all the truck that holds the top of the sails is scraped but intact.

Never again will I assume. (I assume I’ve said that sometime before.)

Sometimes life is to be lived, not written about. The past few weeks have been fully experienced, so no posts to this blog. But now let’s start again.

Cute

At the moment, I am surrounded by the child-like energy we identify as ‘cute’, not the usual aura for us old fuddy-duddies with grown children and no grandchildren, a harried lifestyle, and anti-social tendencies.

The word comes from a shortening of ‘acute’ - implying quick-witted intelligence and perception, relating it to the word ‘cunning’, which has two interestingly dichotomous meanings, both of which are related to the word ‘know’ – connaitre in French, gnosis in Greek – a cunning politician and a cunning baby.

Our 12-year-old nephew has been spending some time here this summer, and he is cute in the smelly sox, hair-across-the-eyes, finding-his-way manner of that age. Actually enthusiastic but trying to be cool, he is cute to us knowing adults because his nascent social stratagems are so obvious. Loves sports, hates to lose, loves to fish, hates ‘girls’ (Riiiiight – actually his sexuality, just cracking the husk of latency, has a hidden, almost predatory nature to it – we hate girls at that age for the power they have over us.).

Different from the ‘cute’ of the five and a half year old who showed up last week, a Chinese adoptee, whose sensitive but earthed father came to help me teach a class. He is totally besmitten, and why not? Mya is sma-art, a gifted mimic, disarmingly frank about her weaknesses or yours, and totally comfortable in her body. This is a kid to root for, one of the ones who will save the world.

Put them together, and Mya drove Joseph. When we stopped the boat at the picnic spot, she was the second over the side after her father. Though Joseph was unfamiliar with the sea, expressed a fairly profound fear of sharks, and clearly was opposed to exposing his body, he could not be outdone by Mya, and jumped in grumpily only to enjoy himself thoroughly.

(Another day, we took Mya out again, without Joseph, and she wouldn’t go in the water at all – the drive works both ways, I guess.)

But can anything compare with a kitten for cuteness? Hermes is the first animal I‘ve ever chosen for any house I share with Quan. Angelina was ostensibly ‘my cat’, but actually Quan brought her by when we were still just friends, 16 years ago: “You have Misty here sometimes – she has to have an animal.” I travel so much, I didn’t want the bother. Quan didn’t so much insist as simply act as if I hadn’t spoken – a trait I should have recognized before I married her, though it is one I have come to adore, and have watched her use on many other people besides me. It’s surprising how often she gets her way, and how often her way was better than what she didn’t bother to oppose.

Anyway, Misty is four and up for a visit, Quan shows up with three kittens, saying I can choose any one, but that one’s spoken for already and anyway you should really have two to keep each other company, and drives away leaving Misty and I with the impression that we had ‘chosen’ Angelina and Josefina, whereas Quan had simply delivered the cats she chose for us.

We have had a succession of maybe a dozen cats since then, sadly lost to old age, cars, and woodland predators, including Josefina. As well we’ve had horses, a hundred plus rabbits, a couple of chinchillas, the occasional wounded bird – not one of which have I had a hand in choosing. So when the doddering Angelina finally lost it and died this spring, I determined I would choose my next cat.

Quan tried to steer me, but I am by now hip to her ways, and went to the shelter myself. She still tried handing me one she liked. I saw Hermes right away, but you want to be fair so I checked out all the cats, a heart-rending parade of cages with cats showing all the five stages of grief, the newest giving their best ‘take me!’ silent appeals, hard on a cat’s dignity.

You can’t take them all, so I took Hermes – the Greek messenger god, associated with Loki in Norse mythology, Coyote in Native American lore – and what a love he is turning out to be. No point in detailing how he crawls up your pant leg (or, for a short time until he learned, your leg if you’re wearing shorts) or tears around after a feather, or how he won over the other cats – it’s all familiar.

Mya and Joseph both loved Hermes, so they were all cute together. Cute implies innocent – in its original sense of ‘no harm’ – and – every parent’s fervent and useless prayer - may none of these cute beings come to harm themselves. We can’t expect cute to survive – Hermes is growing out of it in cathood, and both of the children will hit puberty and become explicit about the inherent sexuality in their nature, and the long journey upwards to conscious use of sexual power begins.

Childhood sexuality is a hard subject. Of course we also describe our first sexual honeys as ‘cute’, but we don’t mean it in the same way as I have been using it. The British tabloids – I am told, we don’t see them here - have had Gary Glitter’s guts for garters for his having sex with pubescent girls in foreign climes (aging glam rocker – think a cross between Boy George and Paris Hilton 20 years from now).

While Hermes is definitely asexual, and Joseph stands on the edge of explicit sexuality, what are we to make of Mya? She is not asexual, she simply has a different relation to sexuality. All human energy is at base sexual – read The Selfish Gene. I have certainly seen young children with a high sex drive – disconcerting, how do you handle it without either playing into it or squashing it? I can understand an attraction to it, meaning I could find some resonance with it in myself, though I have zero desire to act out, and haven’t since I played doctor in 4th grade.

Then of course there’s the other side: Are these girls being sold or duped into sexual slavery, or are they choosing among options? It is very difficult in that pubescent age (people mature earlier in 3rd world countries, they have to) to determine what’s ‘choice’. I am told that each of the prostitutes in Bangkok supports an average of 22 Thais in the countryside, often their families of course. What would they say about the sex tours that provide the money that they send back home? It is easy to be righteous from the safety of our Calvinist homes.

Mya, growing up in America with the very best of parents, will escape this choice which some of her Asian sisters will have to make. May nothing or no one violate her trust of the world, but may no one stifle her natural energy either, as mine was carefully curbed, snuffed, and buried by my well-meaning parents.

In the course of my career as a therapist, I have treated many survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Here’s the surprising thing: for many of these women (it is predominantly women), it is not their relationship to sexuality that is disturbed by these early events – many of these women are orgasmic and perfectly normal sexually. What is always disturbed is their relationship not to sex, but to power. Every one of these people has a problem relating to power, wounded in either responding to it or wielding it, though how it manifests differs markedly.

The problem with sleeping with your clients, or children, or your groupies is not the sex per se, but the power differential in the relationship. Here’s where my own sexuality reaches its natural curb: I can find no desire in myself for a sexual relationship where I have to overpower. The heat for me comes with the joyous mutual consent – fully-informed consent as they say nowadays – and without it I would be a limp puppy.

Last week, while the entire world was experiencing a loss of liquidity in the strange but useful energetic metaphor for love called ‘money’, I took off for as much literal liquidity as I could manage.

The one part of it you don’t want liquid is the boat itself, 35′ of ‘frozen spit’ (fibreglass) designed to keep the water out, but otherwise designed to dance between two fluids, wind and sea.

Here are a few images from the time I spent on the ocean:

The first few days, while the landlubbers were hot, we were in a grey dome of fog, a couple of hundred feet wide, like the grey dome of my brain, fried from assembling the book. Islands and rocks and the occasional fishing boat would loom up out of this greyness - reassuringly on schedule due to our radar and GPS - and then fall away again. The sameness, hour after hour, gets to you, but the water itself is in constant motion, even under the fog.

The huge seals of Matinicus Rock, sensing us somehow in the fog, set up a racket, shuffle into the water, and soon their heads are around the boat - curiously doglike in their confident wariness. Overhead, sea ducks (guillemots?) shoot out of the fog like bullets with wings, careening purposefully across our brief field of vision in straight lines.

Add the liquidity of night, slowly weaving itself into the fog in these summer evenings, long after the fog itself has gone orange and purple with the sunset.

The wind makes the air liquid, suddenly coming up on our second day, the mountain of Isle au Haut bouncing the fog into the air above us, the sails sculpted into shape by the fluid flow of the air molecules. The scud, tattered remnants of the fog, flies above us like the grey flags of a retreating army.

The boat is in constant motion, and the only time I stepped ashore in those first days - onto a dock in Frenchboro to find some eggs we missed packing - it is the solid dock whose floor seems to be undulating, not the boat. This illusion persists after the cruise - my house’s floor seems liquid too as I walk on it.

The tide brings another aspect of liquidity, that of pouring. The tiny motion occasioned by the moon (mostly) on the meniscus of the ocean means that 10 feet of water pour in and out among these islands twice a day. Sailing with the tide is a joy; sailing against it a challenge. As we round Ironbound, with its tall cliffs of granite looking in the afternoon light like a set of Easter Island faces, stone giants locked into the cliffside, waiting perhaps for their king, since there is a huge throne at the end of the island, an absolute straight ‘chairback’ (natural, not quarried) with a rounded back and arms of stone on either side …

Ooops, got pulled off into solidity - we were describing the liquidity of the tide - when we rounded between Ironbound and Jordan, we could literally see that the water was higher on the other side of the passage, and we were fighting that pouring water for every inch. But Tycha is true, and we made it uphill to the Porcupines and Bar Harbor.

The stark, shardy liquidity of the seawater when we drop into it on the next hot morning from the ten-million year liquidity of Penobscot’s soft-edged tawny pink granite rocks, the velvety liquidity of the quarry pond we dive into on Green Island to rinse off the salt.

The next day, sailing past Placentia, we see a strange shape on the shore that looks like a round orange tent or something.  We tease the boat toward shore to see more closely, and it is the body of a baby humpback whale.  About the size of a pick-up truck, this poor unfortunate is upside-down on the shore, its flippers and flukes akimbo, the hydrodynamic streaks of its underside visible on top.  The underside should be white, but the sun has tanned most of it a vivid orange. A bird perches atop the carcass, which seems to have dried rather than bloated, although liquefaction in the heat of July and August is an inevitability.
Sad death - why? - of a fellow mammal.  We tease the boat in close, but due to tide rips, the bold shore, and fluky wind, we cannot disembark to offer more than a hail and farewell across the water.  It reminds me of my earlier encounter with the whales on the Stellwagen Banks (see the first entry in “Sea Stories” under Tom Myers in Explore).
The last morning, we awaken to a tumble of the heavy humid air you find in the morning in the tropics. We know we’re in for some wind. Today the dance between the wind and water is passionate, heavy breathing, sweat, and the occasional uncoordinated bump and grind. The waves - the swells from Bertha, the cross chop from today’s wind - look like pewter mountains coming at us, but we rise each time to their peaks, only to find a hole in the ocean on the other side. The boat drops into the hole, the spray flying over us, the shrouds whistling, and the boat, bucking like a horse, must be reined into position second by second, a totally Zen exercise that keeps us in the very moment for hour on hour, while the sun and wind burn the skin off my face.

Gone is the yielding, accommodative liquidity of a calmer day. Pushy, solid, metallic, with a jarring, slapping force, water becomes another element. Thales thought everything was made from different forms of water, and in the middle of this run I believe him, as everything around me seems water-born.

By the time we turn into our bay and the still-building wind chases us up the river (”And stay out …”), we see the result of another form of liquidity: Fire. While we were gone a freak fire took out one of the last local shipyards, the huge wooden building going up quickly in a series of explosions - propane, varnish, paint cans, acetylene. As we rounded up in front of it, there was a gap in East Boothbay like a kid with a missing tooth, a couple of tug-boat hulls still smouldering among the wreckage. No one was hurt, but a lot of folks are out of work.

By the time we are at the mooring, the wind is over 30kn, and has a solidity that makes it hard to speak into. White caps like a Barbara Cooney painting keep us from the mooring, and we have to seek the shelter of an island to get the sails down and creep ignominiously back to the mooring under engine. The wind is so wild we must leave everything aboard for tomorrow and we barely make it to the dock in the little dinghy, so insistent is the wind.

One more liquid: the absolute gratitude of a hot shower after all those days at sea.

(more…)

All week I have had to be ‘good’ in that sense of being ‘on’ with a lot of different people. Not much refuge for a recluse. Tonight, with the last of the meetings wrapped up and Quan taking off with friends to ride in the moonlight, I took a large slug of rum - two, i’sooth - and with my jaw thus loosened, I set off rowing. The night was exquisitely still, the river flowing glass, the pentacle moon wraithed in vapor, the trail of swirls fractaling out behind me as I cleared the boats of the cove out into the river proper. With one of Enya’s slow Gaelic carols on the iPhone, I am in the middle of a Scottish loch, magically cold within the hills and almost solid under a winter sky.

One of Mark Knopfler’s sea shanties paces the run across the channel, the rhythm marred occasionally as an oar hits a lobster pot. On the other side a long inlet runs up for a couple of miles. James Taylor’s steady picking and warm chords take me into its funnel, narrowing like some lazy southern river heading for a rapid, the oars rising and falling in time to the music, the bow singing as it broke the water ahead of us.

As the banks narrow down and I must pick my way more carefully though the curves, Etta James makes it a hot Louisiana bayou, schools of little herring sizzling out of the water ahead of the boat with each stroke, the overhanging branches closing out the moon until finally - no headlamp in the iPhone - bumping into the end of the salt water tide in total blackness.

Headphones off, I let the silence sink in until it was no longer silence but a rich blanket of sound - the plops and clicks of nearby insects or fish or birds, way up in this isolated, people-less cove. It is a little creepy, a little Stephen King, but wonderfully my own at that moment - ultima thule for this night’s journey. There is nothing to harm me, but my ancient self hidden under the social veneer doesn’t know that - my imagination puts anacondas in the black branches, and giant squid under the black surface.

I reverse the oars to align the boat back up the funnel, pumping out of the miles to the bouncing steel ball of Ry Cooder’s guitar. It feels so good - my feet are planted wide on the thwart before me, and I yield into my legs as I reach down and forward with my arms, not bothering to feather in the windless night. My pelvis rocks over the sitz bones, riding up along the ramus toward the pubes, arching my back. As the oars dip into the water I lean away from my arms, feeling the back of the arms engage right up over the shoulder and the bones elongate within the flesh. My legs push me back, twisting all those bones together from foot to hip into one piston rod, rolling the pelvis the other way on the seat toward the tailbone.

Push-yield-reach-pull - I’d been teaching it all last week, and now the tensegrity feeling of this frog-like movement overtakes my body as if I am leaping over the water - hands, then feet, hands, then feet. My breath falls into the easy rhythm, the movement creeps into the stiffer areas of my spine, especially the chronic panicked flexion behind the kidneys. Suddenly, with a fluid rush the kidneys open into the movement. The spine creaks into action, old water flushing, mossy shingles of locked open facets closing, adding to the movement as the enclosing X’s of the Functional Lines links the upper and lower parts of me in a new but familiar way. The arms reach as if pushed from the adrenals and the arching kidneys; the push of the feet linked all the way to the psoas to embrace them again.

It all feels wonderful and effortless, but like any new movement of course it isn’t, so I am grateful when the music fades to allow me to hear the ring tone, and I stop to drift as I talk to Misty, excited about her impending leap into college, the headphones doubling her lilting voice in stereo. As I drift I pass a wonderful scene of the moon shining through a row of trees and lift the phone to take a picture while I am talking to her. Everything on this little hand-held computer is so intuitive - I haven’t needed to access the manual yet. Within a very few clicks, you can get from any one thing to any other thing. An easy on-and-off switch avoids mistakes and saves the battery. The map bit alone is worth the price of admission.

Bending to it again with Roslyn Turek wailing out Bach’s English Suites, I fly through the warm August air toward our cove, where I finally turn to see Quan waiting anxiously on the dock with a light, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over. What if something happened to you? It’s eleven o’clock!”

I pluck out the earphones. “Why didn’t you call?”

Finally I got out of the river for a week, sailing Tycha with Annie then Quan on Penobscot Bay.  Making my way home on my own for a few days, the winds were light and variable so I made my own adventure.  On the last morning though, the dawn flew in from the north, driving silver scud like scrubbing brushes across the sky above Monhegan.  By the time I finished breakfast the boat was pitching fore and aft.  I set the jib and mizzen only, leaving the large main furled, sailing upwind in long tacks straight into the wind over Pemaquid Point.  On my side in the sea of heaving green, I was quite comfortable though unable to leave the wheel for more than a few seconds for the three hours it took to make it to the Hypocrites.

It seemed to be abating, so I put up the main to sail up the river to home.  Immediately regretted it. The northerly funneled down between the banks of trees, slapped me sideways with water coming into the cockpit over the coaming.  Every tack was a mind-rattling fight for control of the sheets.  The water was tropical green now, but with white spume coming off as gusts topped 30 kn. in gusts.

I veered off the wind a little and limped into Jones Cove - rested, ate, shortened sail, and skittered up river on the last of the flood at 7 knots with no more than a working jib and the mizzen.

Needed a minute to stop shaking after I made the mooring - such was the nature of the exercise.  The wind is quite solid at that speed, and it’s good enough if nothing goes wrong.  But my boat is old and that’s a tall order.

But funny to have made a cruise where I first time soloed my way onto Brimstone to collect rocks, and explored the coves on the swelly east side of Ragged, and did the Turnip Yard upwind by sail (that was with Annie - wouldn’t have done that alone).  Finally, after a full summer of doing nothing but going up and down the river, I have a cruise - and the biggest challenge of the week is coming back upriver.

I have taken to scything in the morning.  It is so much better than that efficient but horribly American invention, the weed whacker.  Small petrol engines are my nemesis in any case, and with my rural life, I cannot avoid frequent fights with chain saws, lawn mowers, outboards, pumps, cultivators, generators, drills … and the early summer demands the weed whacker.

But last autumn I picked up a scythe at the local organic fair, the Common Ground, loving the concept but afraid it would lie fallow.  It hasn’t.  I chose a tougher blade for the stemmy weeds I need to keep down.  The scythe comes in a kit, and I used it for a while before I glued the handles into their final position just right for my proportions and motion.

Part of the kit is a fared sharpening stone, which sits in a plastic holster on your belt.  The holster has water in it to keep the stone wet.  Every fifteen minutes or so, you stop scything and wipe the wet stone down across each side of the blade to keep it sharp.  It’s a moment of rest, to survey your work and plan out the next sally.

If you hit a stone or a root, the blade will get a bad nick, at which point the iron blade must be peened out with a small hammer and sharpened again.

Scything itself works better in the morning, when the plants are wet with due.  The thin blade sings, lovingly gathers an 8” swath of grass and weeds, cuts it at the shin so it swishes down into a neat row.  (Which brings us to Capricorn - the Grim Reaper is Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, who cuts us off at the knee when he harvests us for the underworld, where we will all go one day.  Therefore, in esoteric anatomy, fear of death is associated with Capricorn and located in the knees.)

The surprise is the depth and soothing nature of the movement: The motion is calm and old, a rotation that begins in the rolling of the feet and rises easily to the inner thigh and pelvis, producing a twist of the torso with the elbows held close to the sides, like in 50’s dancing.  Once the motion is achieved, it is  effortless.

When I ‘end gain’ – stop staying in the process and start thinking about how much I have to get done or what’s next – I start working with my arms, and the motion and results become hectic, chaotic, and tiring. When I am in the groove, I feel like Tolstoy’s peasants, marching across a field with the wheat sighing and laying down for the harvest.

Although I do cut some grass every morning for Quan’s rabbits, my main job is to get to the weeds along the edges where the mower cannot, and in this I have become adept at sliding the blade between rocks and trees to snicker out the weeds without scouching its edge.

The whole process is very slow and satisfying, and can be done around houses in the early morning without the nasty mosquito whine of that damned weed whacker with its flying string.  Donna emerges to put the horses out to pasture. I wipe the wet blade gently with thumb and forefinger and set the scythe on its nail to shower and face the emails.

After careful consideration and a number of comments – including an interesting email concerning blog ‘outing’ by a gay prostitute from a distant but trusted old friend (surprised again by the readers this blog had) – I have decided to set this blog in motion again – more aware, I hope, of possible ramifications, but undeterred by comments, or offense these entries might cause.

Though unfamiliar with other blogs or the blogosphere, this new manner of diary / essay so appeals to me that I decline to stop – or even to bury these entries, as I promised in my last post, under layers of electronic obscurity.

That a few of these little jaunts apparently hurt other people’s sensibilities was my cause for stopping, and I am deeply sorry for dragging those of my acquaintance into a public eye, but you are hereby on notice: Association with me bears this risk: you might show up here in a less-than-flattering limelight.

I also understand that this mode of expression may work to my own detriment, but that risk was worth taking from the beginning.  After this month off, I feel that the risk of hurting others is worth taking as well.  I hope for, but do not expect, understanding that the only person I wish to make fun of here is myself.

Those who bruise easily are probably better advised not to read this blog.  I welcome comments – you may post them by clicking the link below – but the spirit of this experiment requires unvarnished observations.  This is not an attempt at objectivity or informed opinion, and likewise no sarcasm (“flesh-cutting”) is intended, but merely a comment on the strange and meandering paths life offers.

The month in between the last post and this has been a very low time for me.  With my business, my family, and with Quan’s animals, we have been dealing with loss, blockage, and disappointment.  The innocent suffer, while small-mindedness and lack of imagination infect those who should know better.  One cannot act, it seems, without causing some hurt.  J’espére qu’il vaut la peine.

And yet there are a lot of hopeful encounters as well.  These lead me to reinstate this blog.  Back into the fray: Laissez les bon temps roulez!