Atlantic High Read online

  “EYE TRULY SAY THAT EYE DAILY THOUGHT ABOUT THE MERRY BAND EYE LEFT BEHIND IN BERMUDA AND MISSED YOU ALL AS WELL AS THE SEA THAT SURROUNDED US. ALONG WITH ITS BEING AN EPIPHANY FOR ME, THE FIRST LEG OF OUR TRIP PROVIDED ME WITH A CREDENTIAL IN ISRAEL VERY FEW OTHER INQUIRERS HAVE EVER HAD. THANKS TO OUR VOYAGE TOGETHER, THE PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABINET VIEWED ME WITH THE KIND OF DISTANCE EYE PROFESSIONALLY WELCOME. THEY HAD NEVER BEFORE MET A JEW WHO ARRIVED IN ISRAEL FROM A SAILBOAT UNLESS HE WAS FLEEING FROM SOMEONE, WHICH EYE PLAINLY WAS NOT EXCLAM.

  “SAIL ON. BE WELL. EYE DEEPLY MISS YOU ALL AND EVERYTHING.”

  The following day was busy and we occupied ourselves with the usual chores. Tony’s special commission, this time around, was to find some edible bread, which we hadn’t had since leaving St. Thomas. What we brought from there was so mangy and bleached it might, with a drop or two of water have been served as vichyssoise. In Bermuda, Van had gone to the biggest and best bakery in Hamilton and ordered twenty-seven different kinds of bread, of every size, shape, and color, whose only common denominator was that they were every one of them tasteless. Tony secured for us, at Horta, and again at São Miguel, heavenly bread, which is the way bread tastes before you take the flavor out of it. Years ago Murray Kempton remarked that the United States had succeeded in taking all but a bit of the flavor out of our bread, and when we were through developing the peacetime uses of nuclear energy, we would succeed in getting that last bit of flavor out. Actually, pace Mary McCarthy, whose King Charles’s head in her penultimate novel was the tastelessness of American bread, America is teeming again with edible bread.

  We took a little tour of the island which included an inspection of the only functioning windmill I have ever seen; I mean, it was not a Disney World reconstruction, but a genuine survivor, with the old grandparents inside making flour, and the blades turning at a fantastic velocity, rather like propellers on an airplane. We drove past the forlorn northern end of the island, which in 1957 was smothered—the lighthouse included—by a great eruption that buried tens of thousands of acres in a sooty ash. That was the explanation for the mysteriously missing lighthouse signal, though it is no explanation of why a new lighthouse, somewhat to the south, didn’t reproduce the antediluvian signals; and certainly no reason why charts purchased in 1980 should not have been corrected for what happened in 1957. From the ashes we drove back into the lushness of Faial to the airport, leaving Van there, all of us feigning stoicism at his departure; and on to dine at a little restaurant recommended by someone Tony had run into during his bread-searching—one Otto, as we called him.

  A native place—and there, seated with friends in the far corner of the thoroughly utilitarian restaurant, was Otto (Othon Rosado Silverra), whose mission in this world is to serve. He dashed overto describe the kitchen’s alternatives, translate our orders, and expedite the service. Basically it was roast meat, potatoes, wine, and vegetables—every item superior in every respect.

  We were to see more of Otto who, it turned out, was by profession a scrimshander, which is a fellow who takes whales’ teeth and carves designs on them, as in the days of yore when sailors, spending two or three hundred days on boats without sight of land, sought out means to divert themselves. We were invited to see Otto’s collection the next morning, amassed during the winter for a single purchaser who had bought the yacht America and would soon come around to collect the scrimshaws. Wonderful pieces, two or three dozen, of various sizes and decorations. Otto was working in his atelier, the size of two pullman berths.

  He is active, to be sure, in every capacity, but a specialty is his ham radio, and as he sat at his workbench etching figures on his whale teeth (the teeth are covered in black tincture of sorts, and after the etching is done, they are buffed by an electrical device that looks like the revolving bushy things you shine shoes with, and the dye remains only in the little cracks, and you have your scrimshaw), he diddled with his radio. Throughout the operation he was interrupted by calls on the radio, of which he kept dutiful record in his logbook, patching in calls here and there, uttering pleasantries to his friends in half a dozen languages.

  He invited us, as we waited for the three scrimshaws we had commissioned and for the earrings for Tony’s girl and for Gloria, to survey his scrapbooks. There were six of them, and on the odd pages were pictures of beautiful yachts, opposite which was an inscription, of which a typical one would be, “To Dear Othon: How can we ever repay you? If you hadn’t stood by us during those terrible weeks, everything would have ended for us. Come to us in Newport. Come to us in Palm Beach. Come to us in Monaco. Forever yours, Gloria Merrill Vanderbilt Auchincloss Gibson”—but literally dozens and dozens of people whom, over the years, Otto had apparently taken in hand, quietly attending to their problems, ordering their meals, getting their boats fixed, arranging their communications, making them a scrimshaw or two for peanuts. If I had had handy a picture of Sealestial, I’d gladly have added to his collection, but Otto is overburdened with gratitude.

  We headed for the boat, hoping to recapture an afternoon five years earlier at a bight on Pico Island. The wind was bracing at first, from the east, which suited our southerly purposes perfectly, but—unaccountably—I slid past the deserted village I was looking for, and we settled instead for an undeserted village, of probably a hundred fishermen. We threw out the anchor and set out for a two-hour walk up the steep hills, during which Tony spoke of his immediate plans, and of his intention to sell the hacienda on Majorca he and his cousin had inherited from his great-aunt, a friend who first gave me Tony’s name as a qualified sailor. It is unlikely anyone had ever before parked a yacht in this little half-bay. The natives were typically five feet two in size, and friendly: they insisted we ride their burro, and the children giggled, in their rumpled white cloth skirts and pants, and ran off to hide.

  Danny would cook again, and as he laid on the coals, two fishermen approached us in their dory. I called for Allen to ask whether he wished to purchase fish. Only on the condition, he indicated to the fishermen with gestures, that they clean the fish first, which the two men—one of them young, the other perhaps his father-proceeded industriously to do, devoting half an hour to the enterprise.

  What followed will live in the annals of humiliation. Allen took the fish—twenty of them—and asked how much did we owe them? The answer came back, with smiles: “Nada.” Nothing. The news was flashed to me below, and I said that they must be given a twenty-dollar bill, if necessary tossed to them in their boat in a receptacle of some sort. After much arguing, they consented to take the money—but only after handing up a bottle of white wine. They left then, waving. But ten minutes later they came back. This time they did not reduce their speed as they approached our stern. They rounded us closely, in elegant stride, and having signaled to Danny, standing astern tending his coals, to prepare to catch something, tossed over to him a bottle—and, waving and smiling, sped off. They wished to make us a gift of a bottle of brandy, and would not, this time, expose themselves to the ignominy of being offered money for it: I mean, what would these Americans, on returning home, otherwise say about Portuguese hospitality?

  We drank the brandy, after Danny’s chicken and the roasted fish, and felt truly welcome. At ten, we hauled up the anchor and set out the 150 miles east to the island of São Miguel, which favorable winds put us in sight of at eight in the morning, when I took the helm, remaining with it—such is my inclination on nearing land—until, shortly after noon, we pulled alongside the quay at Punta Delgada, the busy little harbor with the wide Mediterranean avenue arcing opposite the great breakwater, marred now by an abortive skyscraper-bound hotel. Begun since we were last there, it had never been completed, serving now only to profane the city’s silhouette. It is a scar on an otherwise engrossing and stately harbor, once much busier than it now is, when the cruise boats don’t even call—there being, really, no cruise boats left that cultivate the Atlantic, let alone the Azores, which from my brief knowledge of them are, quite simply
stated, the most beautiful group of islands in the world.

  Again we had a suite reserved, to act as headquarters, from which everyone received what Tony calls in his journal “our petites commissions.” I knew I would need a little official cooperation here, as my vacation from column writing was over; so before leaving the United States I had telephoned Hodding Carter at the State Department and asked him please to inform the Consul General at Punta Delgada that I was the nicest person Hodding knew who would be voting for Reagan. Whatever the message, it worked, and Consul General Ruth Matthews, whose charming husband Glenwood is a retired Foreign Service officer, took wonderful, motherly care of us, which included conveying two invitations, one to lunch the following day at a picturesque, flower-besotted villa a few miles from town, the second to join for cocktails, that very night, the captain of the Knorr, an official ocean-research vessel from our Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

  Doing this turned out to be very convenient, because moments after leaving Sealestial to go to the hotel, our vessel had been evicted by the harbor police—we were occupying space reserved for commercial traffic, and there was no place to go …except? Allen Jouning approached the skipper of the Knorr, identifying our vessel. Might we berth alongside? Not as easy as all that, because already aberth, alongside the Knorr, was the U.S. Naval ship Wyman, so that the permission of a second captain had to be got; but all this was in fact accomplished by the time we showed up, at seven, for cocktails.

  While the others attended to their chores, I took a rented car and went to the airport to meet Tom Wendel. Meeting a plane in the Azores (or catching one) is half a day’s activity, because the planes are regularly late, though not predictably enough to make it safe simply to arrive late. No matter—I had brought with me four back issues of Time and Newsweek, which I would need to go through thoroughly before resuming my profession as a seer. Besides, waiting for Tom is itself a pleasure because, eventually, Tom arrives; and when you first see Tom—or when you last see him, or for that matter any time in between—it’s good for uninterrupted laughter. We have primarily in common that we find the same things funny, and he is one of those people whose laughter is catalytic. Moreover, we know each other’s reactions so well that we often skip right over the normal catalyst, and simply begin laughing right away.

  You would not, from the above description, have any intimation that we are both very serious men. I am, among other things, the kind of person who gives Commencement Speeches, in the unlikely event this is not known about me. Tom is a very serious historian, an authority on Colonial history, author of a life of Benjamin Franklin. When I first knew him at Yale I half expected that he would become a performing pianist, so gifted was he; is he. His father, a businessman of great civic spirit, widely admired and beloved, in 1957 was officially designated as the “First Citizen” of Portland, Oregon, and when Tom graduated from Yale, the senior Wendel had it all set for young Tom to follow in the family footsteps and, if memory serves, had a little vice presidency or whatever cut out for him in the department store. Tom summoned all his courage—he practiced for weeks—for the dread moment.

  “Dad, I’m not going back to Portland to business.”

  Stunned silence. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve accepted a job as an American history teacher at Putney School.” “What is the Putney School?”

  “It’s sort of an advanced preparatory school in Putney, Vermont, for boys and girls, very good academically.”

  “What will they pay you?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars every what?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars every year.”

  Stunned silence. “Tom, have you no …pride?”

  We lost touch with each other during most of the fifties and early sixties, but I rejoiced to get a note from Charlotte, Tom’s superb wife, the development director of the museum at San José at whose university Tom teaches, advising me ten years ago that Tom was coming east for a sabbatical during which he would live at Swarthmore. He brought his two boys, Hal and David, in their early teens, and one afternoon, with Clare Boothe Luce and Pat, the lot of us boarded the Cyrano on the East River and sailed to Stamford—which I think was about eighty-five percent of Tom’s sailing experience when, learning finally that Van couldn’t make it on through, I wondered who might be the next best thing, and happily thought of Tom.

  He had been much excited by the invitation. His older son Hal, a senior at the University of Washington, an avid sailor, a tournament tennis player, had taken to writing letters to the student newspaper, copies of which Tom would from time to time with paternal pride pass along to me. “Dear Bill [Tom had written me in May]: I am not at all sure that you are thrilled by having another example of my son Hal’s prose—but just in case, I quote a bit of it. At least it’s not another letter to the editor:

  ‘“I’m still exceedingly jealous over your upcoming adventure. In fact so much so, I’ve been ripping my hair out [Tom is nearly bald] and reading up on Benjamin Franklin. I have also been attempting to develop a potbelly [unfair: Tom’s stomach is flat]. As you can surmise, I’m trying to impersonate you so I can go. I guess regardless of what I do, Buckley is sure to see right through my disguise. First, he will undoubtedly say, “My gosh, Tom, how did you get so handsome?” I’ll have to quickly, and I might add slyly, reply, “Well, Bill, you’ve heard of the fountain of youth? … I drank the whole thing.”’”

  Just as Charlotte is a born helper, Tom is a born helpee (the immutable division, taxonomized by the late Sir Arnold Lunn, to assert the principal, extra-sexual cleavage in human beings. Marriages don’t work, Lunn said, when helpers marry helpers, or helpees, helpees). At any rate, my office undertook to make Tom’s travel arrangements, which required that he go to Boston after pausing at my office to pick up a sack of mail for me, fly thence to Santa Maria in the Azores, wait there four hours, and take that flight down to São Miguel where I now awaited his arrival. Tom’s reply relayed a vague skepticism about the proposed arrangements, in the tone of, “Why-can’t-I-just-fly-from-New-York-to-Säo-Miguel?”

  MEMO TO: Tom Wendel

  FROM: Captain Bill

  It is not plain to me what it is that you have against Boston. If you would like to persuade TAP Airlines to institute a flight from New York to the Azores in the place of their existing flight from Boston to the Azores, you are most welcome to do so.

  The Captain most politely rejects the suggestion that it is more convenient for him to transport First Mate Wendel’s gear from New York to Puerto Rico to St. Croix to St. Thomas to Bermuda to Horta to São Miguel than it is for First Mate Wendel to transport same from Boston to the Azores. Next question?

  Eventually Tom arrived. I drove him straight to the Sealestial, introducing him to those who were there and turning over to him Van’s bunk in my stateroom, which Reggie, though senior, had gallantly volunteered to give up in deference to the predictable nervousness of the New Boy. We went, then, to the Knorr, which, particularly below, looks like a boat that began small, but was added to, section by section, warren by warren, trying to keep up with the desperate pace of U.S. technology. Actually, it was launched as late as 1968, 245 feet long, displacing 2,000 tons, with fuel enough for sixty days at sea. Eventually we were deposited by our guide in a cozy room, the captain (and his wife’s) stateroom-living room, the kind of room you would expect to find inhabited by a clubbable couple given to much reading and eclectic collecting. It required something of a production to come up with the requisite number of chairs to accommodate Captain Emerson Hiller’s hospitality. I think Tony and Christopher sat on the floor, but the conversation was convivial, and soon the tall craggy Yankee master of the research vessel Knorr got around to the adventure of three and one-half weeks earlier….

  The next day I got from Captain Hiller the transcript of the log of his vessel for the dramatic day. I reproduce it, with high regard for the spareness of the
style by which dramas are routinely recorded on shipboard:

  R/V KNORR

  At Sea

  24 May 1980

  KNORR departed St. George’s, Bermuda at 1630 (+3) [This parenthesis, and others like it, are for the purpose of indicating what adjustments are necessary in order to transform local time into Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)] 23 May 1980 for work site in Lat 24° N, Long 45° W.

  Master’s Statement Re: Rescuing man in lifeboat this date. 24 May 1980

  0035 (+3) Full ahead at ten knots steering 117° T.

  Flare sighted by 2nd Mate about 2½ miles on port beam.

  Course changed to 020° T and Master called.

  0040 Master on bridge.

  0042 Course changed to 030° T.

  0045 2nd red flare observed. Between flares white light observed.

  0046 Course changed to 040° T.

  0050 Various courses to pickup life raft with one man on board.

  0100 Raft alongside and man climbs ladder without assistance.

  0117 Raft brought on board with heavy crane.

  0120 Full ahead 117° T.

  0145 Advised US Coast Guard, Portsmouth, Va.

  0230 Advised Bermuda Harbor Radio.

  Requested airlift to take man to Bermuda—100 miles to N.W.

  Airlift not available and man agrees to remain on board to Azores.

  Rescued Man’s name: François Erpicum 27 years old

  Address: 107 Ave des Martyrs 4620 Fléron, Belgium

  François’s Statement: Sailed from St. Martin Isl. in Windward Islands 12 May 1980. At 0300* (+4) heard odd ringing sound outside, went on deck and at that moment something shook the boat. He went into cabin and found it half filled with sea water. Launched his six-man rubber life raft and boat sank, stern first almost at once.