Dog Star Omnibus: Atlantic High (1982)

“As the sun went down the sky turned white, then mother-of-pearl. Off to one side was a shipwrecked shrimp boat. It caught the sun, and the rusty hull turned golden. We ate the fish Reggie had caught late that afternoon, and then, with the cassette player beginning with Mozart and regressing to rock as the younger generation quietly asserted itself,
we played poker.”

I guess I did Overdrive before I did this one, eh? Whoops.

The second transatlantic crossing (this time west to east, from St. Thomas to Bermuda (1000 miles), from Bermuda to the Azores (1900 miles), from the Azores to Spain (900 miles), came about after Bill saw the documentary The Endless Summer. That might be too pat – seeing the movie gave him the idea of a similar documentary about sailing, which led to a discussion with friends Van Galbraith, Dick Clurman, and others about a “symposium at sea” which eventually became sailing the Sealestial (described in Windfall) from pts. a, b, and c described above.

The documentary did not come together the way Bill envisioned. I think part of it was shot and shown on TV somewhere – it’s in the book, but I can’t remember. Neither did the symposium, at least not the way Dick Clurman envisioned. Which disappointed Dick enough to only sign on for only the first leg of the journey, a decision he’d come to regret by the time they got to Bermuda.

MEET THE CREW

Pretty much the same as the Airborne crew, except new boat/ new captain (Allan Jouning), and Tony Leggett and Christopher Little, who we (us DSO readers) met in the aforelinked Windfall but we (the proverbial first-time reader of Atlantic High) meet for the first time here.

Chairman Bill, of course.

No Christo this time alas. The book opens with Cyrano's last cruises in the Caribbean, though,
and Christo is there for that, so he makes an appearance.

Van again agreed to serve as the voyage's meteorologist. Dick's idea of a symposium at sea ("a co-mingling of pre-eminent perspectives") might sound a little much, but anytime you gather the varied experience or intellectual firepower of such a group, that's bound to happen on its own anyway. Dick is a character - lots of fun and his book Beyond Malice is a great, important read. Definitely needs an annotated new edition to cover any/all case law since its original publication. At one point Bill mentions that Dick started The Winds of War by Herman Wouk in the morning and finished it by the next evening - it may even have been the same evening - all while carrying on a dozen other conversations, chain-smoking, and remembering every word. One of those types, then - no wonder he got along with Bill so well.

SCENES FROM THE VOYAGE

The voyage is supplemented on all sides by the various correspondence sagas of Bill’s life at this time, as well as the just-mentioned cruise to Cozumel and negotiating Cuban territorial waters. Interesting snapshot – after eating an “utterly forgettable lunch under a thatched roof on the beach, looking out over the Yucatan Channel (to the south we see) the new resort of Cancun opening up, with its Atlantic-City-sized beach.” I love the glimpses of places before they become the Disneyworlds they become. Not that I am anti-Disneyworld, only pro-glimpses-of-marked-contrast.

It strikes me just now that Bill was a big Evelyn Waugh fan, and Waugh's attitude re: travel and the places of the world (as expressed in works like When the Going Was Good) likely influenced him. I should keep that in mind the next time I go through his travel nonfiction. Just as a fun thing to do. (Well, "fun.")

Just prior to leaving, there is the wine tasting, which they take very seriously. It's noted that for three or four dollars you can get, with very little effort, some of the best or worst wines in the world. (Adjusting for inflation, still true today) So they line up hundreds of candidates and have at it. This section is great and is too much to reproduce, but I liked Van’s pronouncement on a losing candidate: “This horse has diabetes.”

MORE TECH STUFF

The Plath celestial computer ie the Navicomp, and just as we did in Airborne (and as we do on each subsequent crossing) we experience vicariously the test runs and consider the problems of a pre-GPS grid.

“This sunset-sunrise business (i.e. the variable effects of barometric pressure on refraction are such that the almanac rounds off sunsets to the nearest minute) is the single failing in the Navicomp (other than the unfortunate neglect of Jupiter and Saturn.) Correction – there is a second, intensely annoying feature, which that notwithstanding the highly touted Polariod case, which protects the instrument and is designed to permit you to read the red figures simultaneously, in fact, you can’t do it. The sun’s brightness completely obscures them, and so you need to duck into the shade to see the numbers. The engineers should never have used LCD (black numbers on a gray background) instead of LED.”

Some of that is slightly impenetrable, but I can relate to eye sensitivity to such things. He has some interesting insights into radio frequencies with the exact time and the difficulty of getting them. (Although he’s philosophical: “these things are not published in yachting magazines, or the books of dilettantes.”) They land at the US Naval base, and Bill has to bite his lip when he discovers their chronometer is giving out the wrong time on the channel vessels use to synchronize, i.e. vital to all operations. He broods on this. “(They are off), twenty five seconds off to be exact. Four seconds equals one mile. If our ICBMS land six miles north of Red Square, I’ve got a scoop.”

There’s probably some fun in knowing the President (Reagan at the time) was going to read your book, or call and ask about your trip before it even came out. I bet that base got a call.

FOUR LAST ANECDOTES

“I belong to a club in California whose motto is “Weaving spiders, come not here.” Indeed the (quite extraordinary) Bohemian Encampment begins with a rococo ritual in which the members witness a pageant wherein wordly concerns are first corporealized, and then eliminated. It called the “Cremation of Care” and came to use right from the golden age of Victorian optimism. Bah humbug, it was at the Bohemian Grove that I first saw Ronald Reagan and George Bush pawing the ground as hey greeted each other, two years later they plighted their troth so happily. And so forth.”

Interesting he hears from Ruben Carter. I don’t know all the details of this stuff, but he had planned to meet with him before his retrial re-committed him to prison for murder. Both for Carter and another person convicted, then released, then re-incarcerated, reading his back and forth over the years (both with the folks in question and his revising his own position as things develop or retract) is fascinating. Here we catch the barest glimpse, but the full(er) story is told over all the collections (The Governor Listeth, Execution Eve and all the rest).

There is the rescue of a man at sea. I should've written more details on that.

Which leads to another anecdote worth sharing. Bill once lent the apartment above his garage to Charlie Blair, either a CIA acquaintance or just one of those coincidences, I don't know. Blair later married the actress Maureen O'Hara. Onetime while the Buckleys were eating lunch they saw a tall man sauntering up their driveway. It was Charlie, just in town to say hello. He came in and stayed for hours, telling stories, etc. At some point he realized how much time had passed and said "I'd better go and get my wife." Which he did and then in comes Maureen O'Hara. Stuff like that must've done a number on Christo's head as a youngster.