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November 2017

Freeman on Sail cover

Return, part 2

About a year ago, I wrote a three-part story about the life and death of my friend Freeman. The story struck a chord with a lot of you, so in case you missed it the first time around, I’m posting it again. This is the second part. To see the first part, see Return, part 1, in the Blog section of briontoss.com.

 

He was married to a woman who could be taken as an embodied definition of ebullience. He had two very young daughters, icons of zest and curiosity. He had a job as technical editor at Sail magazine, where he got to study, use, and write about cutting-edge sailing gear, as well as to interact with the amazingly skilled, knowledgeable, and often foolhardy and ego-driven people who used that gear. He had a life, in other words, comprising stability and adventure, romance and pragmatism, poetry and tech-head tinkering.

If this all sounds like a eulogy, it is, at least in part. Freeman died twenty-one years ago, of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). As a friend of mine once said, it is hard to imagine a more horrible way to die. Nerve by nerve, your body goes away from you, so that you lose control first of fine motions, then gross, and then ultimately everything, including breathing, and all the while your mind is perfectly fine, utterly aware of the ceaseless erosion of mobility, of expressive ability, of action. If ever there were a test of courage, this is it. Not the kind of courage it takes to run into a burning building, but the kind it takes to hold on to good-heartedness, generosity, optimism, and patience, in the face of an implacable, unbeatable enemy. There are many stories of people who have faced this killer with stalwart grace, including Mr. Gehrig himself, but surely none surpassed Freeman in his final months. I will not even attempt to give you examples; instead, just imagine the most gracious, dynamic, caring, intelligent, and attentive friend you could ever have, and then somehow try to imagine that friend staying that way, while losing everything.

If I believed, as many people seem to, that Heaven were a sure bet, or knew without a doubt that it at least existed, I might be able to manage that kind of nobility. And likewise if I were certain that my last breath will truly be the end of me, I might be able to muster  a moment-by moment appreciation for life. But Freeman had neither of those things. Nor did he have a tepid agnosticism, nor a powerful sense of denial; his fine-grained intellectual honesty precluded that, as well as belief and disbelief, both of which are enemies of exploration; when you think you understand something, you limit what it is. What he had instead was an ongoing quest, and an ongoing delight in the quest.

In short, I never met such a wholly spiritual being who more stoutly refused to acknowledge his spirituality. Which brings me to one of our last conversations. He had long since graduated from walking, to wheelchair, to powered wheelchair, with a little joystick that he could just manage to move with his fingertips. Breathing, for him, was an aerobic activity. We took a stroll down the block and talked of many things. The topic of an afterlife came up, and he promised me that, if there was anything beyond this life, he would do his best to let me know. As I recall, his words were, “I’ll try to make it unmistakable. I’ll lay it on thick, so you’ll know it’s really me.” And then we laughed. A few monthss later he was dead.

Time goes by. Grief turns into fond sadness. And then, one year later, the January 1996 edition of Sail shows up in my mailbox. The photo below is the cover to that issue. It shows Freeman on the deck of a boat at sea. He is walking aft towards the camera, eyes closed, arms raised, and caught in mid-stride, so that he appears to be rising from the deck. He is not hanging on to anything, he is not tethered. Behind him, a reinforcing patch on the jib makes a halo around his head. A serene smile is on his lips. The boat is a Freedom, and it is running wing-and-wing.

 

 

Photo courtesy of Billy Black

To be continued.

Return, part 1

My friend Freeman lived for an unlikely outcome: that things, despite all the evidence that his restless, skeptical mind made regular and thorough note of, would somehow prove to be wonderful; that the Universe would be incontrovertibly revealed to be in balance; that it would be shown that there is a reality greater and holier than we can see; and that there is even room for restless, skeptical minds in the nest of Creation.

This was a quest, the patient and rigorous adventure of a sweet, brave soul that happened to be harnessed to a merciless, razor-sharp intellect. He could not abide the tragic stupidity of cruelty, of greed, of unfounded bias. But he could no more abide the airy assumptions of people – and I could, at times, count myself among their number – who are so eager to believe that everything is metaphysically harmonic that they will accept the most amazing shams of reasoning. We all want to feel like we understand how things really are, because it is so difficult and scary and confusing to acknowledge that we don’t, in general, have the slightest idea of how things really are. Most of us content ourselves with a few talismans of belief, and do our best to ignore or rationalize the inevitable discrepancies. Freeman just kept looking, kept himself moving forward, not with a story told in scripture, and not with the “that’s it” arguments of atheism, but with a kind of ongoing measurement of, and comparison to everything he saw, and thought, and felt.

It is difficult to describe how this manifested in daily life. Watching a horse run, Freeman was as likely to comment on vectors and evolutionary adaptation as he was to recite a poem, or break into a run himself. Once when I arrived in Boston after sailing there from Maine, he was happy about my exhilaration, serene in assessing my short voyage in the context of the vast history of voyaging, and curious as to the quality and effectiveness of my foulweather gear. In other words, he tended to treat any event as an opportunity to explore and find meaning on many levels.

Once, he and his spouse Susan and I went out for supper at a classy little Italian restaurant that was buried deep in the heart of old Boston. We returned to the car to find it wedged so tightly between two other cars that you could barely fit a hand between the bumpers – it was obvious that we would have to wait for one of the other drivers to return. But then Freeman said, “Wait a minute…”, and began looking closely. Then we all looked, and saw that each of the three cars was parked at some slight angle to the curb, and that the curb itself described a slightly convex arc, and that these factors, plus the ludicrously small space between cars, appeared to provide a way out. And sure enough, after a lot of forward and reverse, and a great lot of aerobic steering wheel activity, plus a bit of judicious bumper-nudging, we managed to get the car out of its space. And onto the sidewalk.

It was a very narrow sidewalk, but we were able to get to an opening at the corner with only minor loss of paint. Giddy and elated beyond all reason, we drove away. After a while Freeman said, “Sometimes the only way out, is in.”

To be continued.

Going Through

First there’s the waiting for admittance, then waiting to be called, then everything happens rather quickly. I am checked, briefed, and queried by at least one representative from every medical specialty. They are reassuringly thorough, and their questions have a reassuring amount of overlap; this is a team, and they all need to be in the same game.

Still, it is a lot to comprehend, let alone assimilate. I have been preparing for this for years. Every time I couldn’t dance with Christian, or walk more than a short distance, every time that the pain would wake me, I would think about how and when to get this work done, how to organize life, and put enough aside to have any hope of taking this leave of absence. In the end, of course, I was neither particularly organized nor solvent; the ankle just wouldn’t wait any longer.

The anesthesiologists arrive and start setting up, even as they conduct their part of the assessing/educating. One of them gives me an injection,and I start naming the epochs, counting back:
Cenozoic
Quaternary
Neogene
Paleogene
Mesozoic
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
Paleozoic
Permian…
I might have made it as far as Carboniferous. I definitely never got to Cambrian. And then a moment later my eyes pop open and a calm, attentive nurse is there, and beyond her a clock is claiming that five hours have passed. And then another nurse goes to get Christian and then she sweeps into the room, smiling that smile.

Discharge

In a hospital there are two major usages for the term “discharge.” One is a bodily effluent, often putrid or otherwise unpleasant. The other is a patient who is leaving the hospital. Both categories involve the patient’s getting cleaned up, checked over, and reassured. I am now a discharge.

My clothes have been returned, so I am rid of the silly gown. In a few minutes someone from physical therapy will come by to make sure that I know that I can’t go bowling tonight, or maybe even tomorrow. They will instead tell me, I hope, how to push myself physically, without endangering my recovery. I know that the coming weeks will be spent mostly in bed, but I do not want to waste away; I want to get back into the world, I want to dance with Christian.

Purchase

A typical CT scanner weighs 4,400lbs and costs about $450/lb. It is a huge, glossy donut sculpture, with the hole being just big enough to allow the passage of a human being, lying flat on a special table that slides on rails. The whole thing looks like a prop for some ridiculously overproduced magic trick, but it is in fact a magical camera. It cannot see into your soul, but it can certainly pick up some adjacent, nearly-as-hard-to-detect details.

The problem faced by ankle surgeons is that bone alignment shifts markedly when weight is applied. So while you can get wonderfully clear pictures, from all angles when the patient is lying on the table, you can’t use those pictures to determine how all the parts of a repaired joint will fit together after surgery. You can end up with a joint that won’t quite articulate, or one that is longer or shorter than it is supposed to be.

An obvious solution is to turn the donut on its side, with the patient lifted on a little pedestal in the middle, like Venus Rising from the Sea Tee. This is actually in the works for the Clinic, but meanwhile they have been making do with an ingenious,wonderfully low-tech assembly involving sailboat rigging.

They place a plexiglass “sled” on the bed. It is in two pieces, with rails connecting them so you can adjust the length. There is a vertical footboard at one end, and a low transverse stop or fiddle at the other. The patient sits on the sled, straight-legged, with feet planted square against the footboard, and takes hold of a small-boat trapeze handle, held to the footboard end with actual rope. The tech then takes up on two block-and-tackles, made up with ratchet/cam blocks, mounted low on either side, to draw the two sections together. This pushes the patient back, but their travel is arrested by the butt fiddle. The tech continues to haul away, balancing the two purchases, until a couple of Edwardian-looking brass cylindrical scales, in line with the blocks, show that the equivalent of the patient’s standing weight is pressing evenly against the footboard (assuming that weight can be borne).Then the tech fires up the stupendous computers, gets the table under way into the donut, and takes the pictures.

It is fair to say that the marlingspike work is not up to Bristol standards, and that the cordage is very much from the Home Depot end of the spectrum, but it is delightful that this gazillion-dollar pile of x-rays and algorithms could be informed by the efforts of a human being whose actions and hardware are nearly identical to those of someone taking up smartly on a main sheet. Can’t wait to hear the shanty.

Scrubs

Karn, the CT tech, in scrubs
Karen, the CT tech, in scrubs

Seattle is a hilly place. If you head east from downtown, the first hill you come to is First Hill. That is the official name, but although I grew up in Seattle I never heard it called anything other than Pill Hill, which is as accurate as it alliterative; the place is infested, drenched, chockablock, laden, dense, encrusted with all things medical. There are clinics, offices, labs, supply stores,research institutes, etc., and of course there are hospitals, great grand multi-story hives of allopathically-intensive activity.

Nurses work here. And surgeons and orderlies and lab technicians. Phlebotomists, anesthesiologists, optometrists, and all the other ists. Specialists, and generalists (but especially specialists), an army of people who work, right down to the molecular level, on human bodies.

Here you will also find people who manage all of those people, who do their accounting, keep their records, order and deliver the things they need, and who feed, clothe, transport, and clean up after them. The people and the structures comprise an ecosystem that is immense, complex, dynamic, and yes sometimes hideously expensive for the customers. I have no desire to go into the socio-economic mess that is US medicine, other than to say that because I have attained a certain age, and because we once had a rational, compassionate President, I will be able to get my ankle fixed, and thereby continue to lead a satisfying, productive life for longer than I otherwise would have. For the moment, though, I’d like to talk about scrubs.

People in Seattle typically wear colors that can be a found on the underside of a mushroom. But as you go up onto the Hill the palette shifts to the industrial pastels of surgical scrubs. At the center of things, at certain times of the day, regular street wear can seem out of place, because you are surrounded by people wearing the only uniform I can think of that doesn’t try to emphasize aspects of physique, or give an impression of competence and efficiency. It is a shambly, shapeless excuse for a uniform. If you had never seen one before, you would laugh and say, “Why are these people walking around in their pajamas?” But no one laughs, because these loose, thin garments proclaim that the wearers keep human metabolisms running. The sight of these garments elicits an instant, if queasy respect for the wearers, reminds us that we are fragile, mortal creatures, and that a test or an injection or an incision or a focused blast of energy from one of these people might restore our health, or even save our life.

One thing that scrubs have in common with other uniforms is that they are suited to a particular work environment. So they are loose-fitting because the work can make serious demands on physical exertion and range of motion, and thin because a hospital is a climate-controlled environment, and one in which exertion and mobility can cause one to work up a sweat, which is not always avoidable but which is discouraged, Patients, of course, are expected to sweat — and bleed and produce assorted other effluents and exhalations that compromise the overarching need for obsessive cleanliness — which is why scrubs are also easy to remove, cheap, and able to stand up to repeated, harsh washing.

One other way that scrubs are like other uniforms is that they mark the wearer as a member of a group. This can, it is true, diminish the significance of individuals, and encourage conformity, detachment, a cold uncaring. But it is at least as likely to engender a feeling of purpose, of belonging to something larger than oneself. People can achieve competencies and autonomies in the right group, things not available to loners; when you act in isolation, you lack context. When you have a rich context, you can become more fully human, and therefore humane. This matters in the world of medicine, an art so profoundly intimate that it becomes literally — but not, we hope, emotionally — sterile. You don’t want some heartless cypher in charge of your well-being.

This morning my legs will be the subject of a hyper-computerized portrait, a template for the surgeons who will be rebuilding my ankle. The machinery for this will take center stage, but the people who guide me to it, and tell me where to stand, and operate it, and analyze the results, will provide every bit of meaning to the exercise. They’ll be members of a modern tribe of healers, and they will be wearing scrubs.

Falling

48 years ago I was at the top of a 45-foot-tall scaffolding tower. It fell over. As I was about to die — it was obvious that I was about to die — my last words were, “Oh no, oh no.” Some time later, from a great distance, I heard someone saying, “Oh no, oh no,” and realized it was me, not dead yet. My right knee hurt, my back hurt, my head and a few other things hurt, but mostly my left ankle hurt.
A deputy from the nearby town of Tenino came rushing up to where I lay amidst a tangle of torn and fractured steel. He had been there to monitor us as we cleaned up after a rock festival. Until that moment it had been boring duty, but now he had an actual emergency to deal with. I told him that I thought I’d broken my ankle. Whipping out a huge, very sharp knife, he prepared to cut off my ridiculously expensive, much-beloved hiking boot. I pointed out that it laced down to the toe, and that he could just untie it. He was crestfallen, but he put away the knife and eased the boot off. Then he went to pull my sock off, but my ankle was now grapefruit-sized, visibly expanding, and pulling on it made for passing-a-kidney-stone levels of pain. Granted, I have never passed a kidney stone, but it seems likely that one’s pain meter is pretty well pegged when you get to the gasping-as-you-almost-faint level. I pointed out that he could cut the sock off. This really made his day. Out came that knife, and off came the sock.
What followed, in the short term, was a cast on the ankle, bandages on assorted other body parts, and slow recuperation in my parent’s basement. I taught myself to juggle, studied knots, read many books, and thought a lot about mortality.
What happened in the long term was a life: a series of ludicrous mistakes tempered by love and education. Along the way the ankle decayed, little by some, until it felt like that sock was being pulled off every time I walked on it . Eventually I had it fused, which, interestingly enough, involved someone approaching it holding a very sharp knife. The good news is that the pain went completely away. The bad news is that the adjacent joint (the subtalar, for you anatomy nerds) now took up the slack in stress, which it was not even remotely designed to handle, until it, too, became seriously decayed.
I recently had my foot X-rayed. The technician took one look at the picture, then turned to some nearby colleagues and said, “Hey guys, take a look at this!” They all crowded around, marveling. I stood on my little pedestal, in one of those charming hospital gowns. One of the techs said to me, “How can you walk on this thing?” In that moment, it occurred to me that I might have been being just a bit too stoic.
No ankle has an easy life. We expect it to bear up under our entire body weight (okay, minus the foot), and to articulate in all directions, dealing with major levels of impact and static loads, in torque, shear, tension, and compression, sometimes simultaneously, and to do so utilizing a laughably small surface area, with amusingly short lever arms. Accordingly, it is a very easy joint to damage, and a very difficult joint to repair, which is why surgeons are much more likely to recommend fusing a badly-damaged ankle than installing a prosthesis, unless the owner of the ankle is a particularly lethargic couch potato. To an active person, they are likely to say, “We could give you a new ankle, but compared to a hip or knee replacement, the hardware is flimsy. You would probably break it.” That is what they told me, hence the fusion. After the passage of years, with the doctors working on the I-hope-mistaken assumption that I am less active and/or more careful than I used to be, plus advances made in hardware, they are now graciously willing to install a new ankle joint.
Which brings us up to date. Christian and I have just finished one type of journey, and now I’m about to embark on a different type; in about a week I’ll be in an operating theater in Seattle, having some hardware installed. It is apparently a tricky operation, and this version of it has been done only a few hundred times, anywhere. I am not looking forward to the operation, but I am looking forward to writing about it.

Coming Home

'We have been away from home, away from our lovely and familiar home. Unlike some places I could name, Port Townsend is not a nice place to leave; it exerts a gravitational field that tends to keep one close, keeps one wanting another day here, and another, and another. It is not exactly a paradise -- the police have plenty to keep them occupied, greed and short-sightedness are an ongoing threat, etc. -- but when we came back, after a month away, I was reminded how delightful my life is here, how the sail loft and the shipwrights and the smart-ass baristas and the Rose Theater and the whale-watching boats and all the other features and activities and personnel here add up to a town that is worth staying in, worth celebrating and savoring, and I found myself wondering why we had left in the first place. It is true that other places have charms of their own, and that one must leave home to experience those charms. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But there is something intrinsic to humanity that leads one to wander. When I was young, my family moved nearly every year, driven by my father’s restlessness. And he wasn’t exactly an outlier; post WW II it seemed the whole country was uprooting itself, in search of a fresh start. In any event, the lifestyle suited me. In the words of a song, The road was like a dream, The arrival an awakening, And into a new neighborhood I ran. But it soon lay all discovered, And I began to yearn For an unfamiliar light On an unfamiliar land. Some people, it seems, never lose that urge to wander, but for me it became an exhausting process, especially as I began to discover that staying in one place for a while could reveal virtues and verities that are invisible to the nomad. Engaging, rich duration can be fulfilling in a way that brief intensity never can. Of course, staying put is an infamous path to a stultifying life. Many people escape from the hamster wheel of constant travel, only to find themselves on a suburban treadmill. And many never give into the urge to wander in the first place. Too much of either, and what should be a setting for mutual support and affection can take on overtones of mutual bitterness and resentment. Robert Frost was thinking of this kind of place when he said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I think there must be an algorithm for human social equilibrium, with variables like history, age distribution, population density, etc. If such an algorithm exists, then some degree of novelty, or uncertainty -- or even outright instability -- must be included. If we occasionally cast ourselves into the strange and wild outlands, it is at least in part because they inform and define our places of shelter. So we are back at home, having done our part to unsettle ourselves, and this place, and now we resume doing our best to conserve it. We vote, we attend a crowded Power-Point-intensive meeting on the Port’s budget, we attend an equally crowded slide show by “Spawn Till You Die” artist Ray Troll. We do laundry, tend a sick old cat, put rigs into boats, have tea with friends, go to the dentist, check mooring lines. We do the things that help bolster and preserve this place we love, and all the while, in the background, is the memory of the road. Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home. - Ursula LeGuin'

We have been away from home, away from our lovely and familiar home. Unlike some places I could name, Port Townsend is not a nice place to leave; it exerts a gravitational field that tends to keep one close, keeps one wanting another day here, and another, and another. It is not exactly a paradise — the police have plenty to keep them occupied, greed and short-sightedness are an ongoing threat, etc. — but when we came back, after a month away, I was reminded how delightful my life is here, how the sail loft and the shipwrights and the smart-ass baristas and the Rose Theater and the whale-watching boats and all the other features and activities and personnel here add up to a town that is worth staying in, worth celebrating and savoring, and I found myself wondering why we had left in the first place.
It is true that other places have charms of their own, and that one must leave home to experience those charms. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But there is something intrinsic to humanity that leads one to wander. When I was young, my family moved nearly every year, driven by my father’s restlessness. And he wasn’t exactly an outlier; post WW II it seemed the whole country was uprooting itself, in search of a fresh start. In any event, the lifestyle suited me. In the words of a song,

The road was like a dream,
The arrival an awakening,
And into a new neighborhood I ran.
But it soon lay all discovered,
And I began to yearn
For an unfamiliar light
On an unfamiliar land.

Some people, it seems, never lose that urge to wander, but for me it became an exhausting process, especially as I began to discover that staying in one place for a while could reveal virtues and verities that are invisible to the nomad. Engaging, rich duration can be fulfilling in a way that brief intensity never can.
Of course, staying put is an infamous path to a stultifying life. Many people escape from the hamster wheel of constant travel, only to find themselves on a suburban treadmill. And many never give into the urge to wander in the first place. Too much of either, and what should be a setting for mutual support and affection can take on overtones of mutual bitterness and resentment. Robert Frost was thinking of this kind of place when he said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
I think there must be an algorithm for human social equilibrium, with variables like history, age distribution, population density, etc. If such an algorithm exists, then some degree of novelty, or uncertainty — or even outright instability — must be included. If we occasionally cast ourselves into the strange and wild outlands, it is at least in part because they inform and define our places of shelter.
So we are back at home, having done our part to unsettle ourselves, and this place, and now we resume doing our best to conserve it. We vote, we attend a crowded Power-Point-intensive meeting on the Port’s budget, we attend an equally crowded slide show by “Spawn Till You Die” artist Ray Troll. We do laundry, tend a sick old cat, put rigs into boats, have tea with friends, go to the dentist, check mooring lines. We do the things that help bolster and preserve this place we love, and all the while, in the background, is the memory of the road.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
– Ursula LeGuin

By generous permission

The Sea Chest

The ABK

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In the middle of WWII, Clifford Ashley traveled from his home near New Bedford, Mass. to New York City. He took with him a sizable manuscript, which in addition to text comprised about 7,000 drawings describing 3,854 knots. He presented this unlikely assemblage to a substitute editor at Doubleday and Co. (his boss was away in the Army). This editor happened to be something of a knot enthusiast, something of a sailor, and a world-class sucker for absurdly unlikely book projects.
All three qualities were, I think, essential for him to say, “Yes, we will publish this.” He might have been influenced by the modest success of The Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Ropework, published a few years earlier, but that book, which manages somehow to be both harsh and murky, stands in sharp contrast to Ashley’s effort, which is a marvel of warmth, lucidity, and thoroughgoing scholarship. In any event, production was under way and the presses were running when the chief editor returned from the war. “You did WHAT?” he said. “You published a book of 3,854 KNOTS!?! Who is ever going to read that?” Somewhat in desperation, the art department chose, for the dust jacket, a picture of some kind of faux yachty in a captain’s cap, holding up a Tom Fool’s Knot. Mr. Ashley, a student of Howard Pyle, was one of the country’s premier artists at the time. His book is literally full of his wonderful illustrations. Aargh.
You can imagine the editor’s surprise when the first printing instantly sold out. As did the next, and the next…
Fast forward 70-some years. We are at the annual meeting of the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT), held this year at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The Guild chose the location because the museum has mounted a major exhibit, “Thou Shalt Knot,” about Mr. Ashley’s unlikely book, still in print after all these decades. The Guild probably wouldn’t exist without the Ashley Book of Knots (ABK), any more than country music would exist without Hank Williams, or martial arts movies without Bruce Lee. Oh, we’d have something in those categories, but they — and many others — cohered around a compelling, genre-defining individual. Clifford Ashley is the Elvis/Jesus/Hemingway/Kurosawa of Knots.
Yes, I have just revealed myself as a hopeless knot geek, an ABK acolyte. My tattered copy was a Christmas present from my family in 1969. I once traveled to England to participate in an IGKT event at which we displayed every knot in the ABK — and hundreds of others developed after its publication. I have a pile of back issues of “Knotting Matters,” the Guild’s quirky newsletter. So I am one of the devotees shuffling reverently past the museum’s exhibits. There are sinnets he made for chapter 39, buttons for chapters 9 and 10, a priest cord from chapter 30. Here is the actual pilot’s ladder that served as a model for Figure 3841, and the needle case that showed up as figure 3544, plus tools, chest beckets, cats-o-nine-tails, and scores of other artifacts, either from Ashley’s collection, or from those of the generations of knot tyers he inspired. Utter heaven.
There are also lectures, in an adjacent auditorium, on Ashley’s influence on literature and science, and his place in the context of works that preceded and followed his. In a central space, Guild members exhibit samples of their own creations, everything from belts to bellropes, from Turk’s Heads to lanyards to mats. Wandering through it all, usually trailed by a cloud of admirers, is Des Pawson, M.B.E., our own Gandalf of Knots, who co-founded the Guild, has produced numerous books and monographs on knotting, and who gave the keynote address at the event.
But as big a presence as Des was, I think he would happily acknowledge that he was put into the shade by the quiet, diminutive Phoebe Ashley, who greeted everyone with utter graciousness, sat through every lecture, admired every exhibit, and in general displayed a charm and genuine kindness and attentiveness that did her father proud. Our own Queen Elizabeth II of Knots.

Painting: The Sea Chest, by Clifford W. Ashley

Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum

 

To find out more about Ashley and his influence on rigging — and much more — you might want to see This Post. 

The Ashley Book of Knots can be found in any bookstore worthy of the name, and it has recently been made available as a Free PDF Download.

The Constitution

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'A deckload of passengers'

By wonderful chance, I was invited aboard the USS Constitution for its annual tug-powered turnaround. This is ostensibly an utterly mundane exercise, meant to assure the even weathering of the wooden hull, but it has become an occasion for a party, involving a fireboat escort, 17-gun salutes, and an impressive number of admirals and other VIP’s, along with enlisted personnel, civilian workers, and assorted fans of square-riggers, history, and all things nautical.
This year marks the 220th anniversary of the vessel’s launch. That, plus the fact that the vessel has been undergoing restoration in drydock for the past two years, made for an extra-lively party. Here are some impressions of the day:
Amidships, I learn, from a fighter pilot, that ticks do not climb trees; they only get as far up as bushes. And tick-borne illnesses – of which there are hundreds besides Lyme Disease – are frequently misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue.
By the foremast, a passenger holds forth on the technical requirements for producing gluten-free beer, including how many parts per million can be present without passing the threshold for celiac disease.
There’s an actual purser aboard, with actual purser’s “slops,” only instead of the garments that his predecessors provided for the crew, this purser has boxes of coins, T-shirts, flags, and other memorabilia for sale to visitors. I obtained a flag, which one of the crew helped me to hoist, strike, and fold, as a keepsake. Yes, I now possess a U.S. flag that was flown, for about 5 seconds, from the mizzen of the U.S. Constitution, under way.
A former captain describes how his daughter was christened in the ship’s bell. They took the bell down, inverted it, filled it with water, and held the ceremony back by the wheel. Apparently this is a common practice.
Officers discuss the effects on the human body of the sounds of 40mm cartridges of the Constitution’s signal cannons, vs the 45mm cartridges of the guns at Fort Point and the Boston Coast Guard base. There really is a difference: the report from the smaller shell is definitely loud – ear plugs were handed out to all aboard – and you can feel it as well as hear it; but the 45’s, even at some distance, have a notable concussive effect that is almost like a physical blow.
Jose Hernandez-Juviel, who describes himself as the Constitution’s first Cuban rigger, raised 7 mice in the topmast and t’gallant rigging during the refit. No, he was not a foster parent for rodents; mice are fattened portions on some stays, that act as stops for sliding eyes, for reasons of obscure antique rigging architectural design.
One of the volunteers speaks of making leather cartridge bags by hand, while seated in front of his TV. Volunteers are very much a part of the ship, providing support at the museum as well as aboard. Some of them participate in an historical reenactment group, as uniformed and suitably armed members of an 1812 honor guard.
Bruce, one of the shipwrights, speaks of the challenge of making a 25-foot-long cutwater during the recent rebuild. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it is the outer curve of the stem of a ship. On the Constitution it is not only massive, but fantastically complicated to make, and tricky to install (this involved throughbolts 12ft long).
Bruce’s buddy Tom talks about the strenuous delight of replacing over 3,400 pieces of copper sheathing below the waterline.
John, another shipwright, points out a heart he recently made for one end of the main lower stay, from a block of lignum vitae about 18” x 12” x 12”. It is nowadays very difficult to find blocks of this wood of any dimension, but the Navy has stockpiles of it, probably because they also use it for shaft bearings in nuclear submarines.
And Billy Rudek, who invited me for the event, talked about how planks in need of bending should be steamed for one hour per inch of thickness, so for the 7” thick(!) planks, they started steaming the moment they got to work, and then ran with the 40-foot-long pieces to the bending jig, to get them formed before it was time to go home.
One of the enlisted crew (aka docent’s mates), while leading a tour, said that the vessel’s masts were raked aft in order better to bear the force of the wind from astern. I have heard similarly bizarre and unfounded proclamations from other crewmembers, and am not really sure if they are just messing with people, or their instructors are not well-informed on some topics, but I do know that many of the crew are genuinely enthusiastic about the ship, and their enthusiasm is infectious.
There were many more conversations that I heard snatches of while drifting around the deck, involving climate, anthem-kneeling, traffic jams, college tuition, restaurants, a funeral, home prices, computer programs, health care, horses, promotions, etc., and of course I heard only a tiny fraction of the conversations going on amongst this deck-load of passengers. This was a microcosm of our society, a sampling of a free people who, for various reasons, ended up celebrating together the birthday of a beautiful/archaic artifact. As I am opposed in principle to needless violence, you might suppose that I would be conflicted about such attention being paid to a warship. But consider: this vessel, even if it had working cannons, would be utterly useless in a modern naval battle. It is not, I think, primarily a symbol of military might, but of integrity, liberty, and community. It is as though the furious destructive force that it was made for has largely distilled away, leaving behind the grace and artisanship and elegant engineering that previously were at best secondary considerations. It has come to represent, not our power, but our aspirations.
There are several definitions for the word “constitution.” Here is my favorite: The structure, composition, physical makeup, or nature of something, i.e., the constitution of society.

The Eastern Shore

'Chestertown parking meter'

The parking meters in downtown Chestertown, Maryland have “free parking” written on them. All of them. I am guessing that, when bloated big box stores sprang up outside of this classic colonial-era town, sucking all the zest and commerce out of the place, the demand for parking spaces plummeted, the meters became just another excuse to visit Walgreen’s, and free downtown parking was adopted as one tactic designed to lure people back. But Chestertown went one step further; on the sidewalk side of the meter there’s an invitation to drop in your spare change, to support local arts organizations. So every few feet, on both sides of the street, visitors have a painless way to support the kind of vibrant, varied, and enriching experiences that make this a great destination in the first place. Plus, it is weird, giddy fun to feed a parking meter without seeing the act as an odious necessity. Christian and I laughed as we pumped in all our quarters, dimes, and nickels. We searched the car for more. We returned a second day, partly in order to stuff ourselves with crab (see below), but largely in order to giggle while stuffing the meter. Good idea, Chestertown.
A note on cuisine: the national dish of Maryland, at least in the summer, is crab. Crab cakes, crab salad, crab omelets, crab melt, crab sandwiches, crab Benedict, crab hash, crab soup, crab-stuffed mushrooms, crab pizza, crab imperial, deviled crab, and for all I know crab ice cream and crab whiskey. Other foods are available, but basically they are a garnish for crab.
I was on the Shore, for rig surveys, including one in Solomon’s Island This one went okay, in a these-five-things-will-kill-you-it’s-time-to-rerig sort of way. In the process of delivering the bad news, I got a chance to watch Actual Chesapeake Working Watercraft in action. By “action” I mean one of the most demanding tests of handling small craft under power: backing into a ridiculously tight space, with a foul breeze, with everyone watching, and doing so with utterly unaffected, industrial-grade insouciance and skill. The boats were of a type called a “Deadrise.” They are narrow, low-slung, 20 to 40ft long, an evolution of the Skipjack. They are named, with complete lack of irony, things like “Shady Lady,” “Aquaholic,” and “Some Beach.” They go out for crab in the summer and oysters in the winter, and I am sure that the Chesapeake is capable of making life in a semi-open boat really interesting; the skills required for this work run well past mere parking.
Survey done, I headed down to St. Mary’s to visit my wonderful old friend Will Gates, with whom I worked during the rerig of the barque “Elissa.” That was 35 years ago. No, that can’t be right, because that would make me way over 50, which is ridiculous. But through some oddity of space and time, Will and his spouse Tara have managed to acquire 3 grown children, and Will claims to have been skipper of the 17th-century replica “Maryland Dove” for 28 years. I will humor him in that claim, but I have no doubt that the ‘Dove” is a beautiful boat, beautifully kept. Volunteers as well as paid staff host hordes of schoolchildren all year, and the boat gets out for sails on the Bay several times a year.
As the day was drawing down, and my in-depth tour of that splendid ship was done, we stood by to catch the mooring lines of a contemporary sailboat with engine trouble. It was a 40-some ft cruising yawl, with a man at the helm who wore a look of mixed determination and sadness. It was a warm, calm, lovely late afternoon. While fussing with mooring lines we made our introductions. I then asked him what design his boat was. He looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “I don’t remember,” he said. “That is why I have to give up this boat. I am out for one more cruise.” Then he told me his name, and asked me what mine was.
As darkness fell, I drove back to Chestertown. We are so briefly in this world.

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