The Dogs and the Detritus of War: When Will We Ever Learn?

Ah, the dogs and detritus of war. Here on Guam, it's everywhere, the rusty, the broken, the remnants of the late, great struggle between Imperial Japan and the Allies. And we live, on our sailboat, in the middle of it. In the middle of an old battlefield, in fact--the battle for Orote Point was fought all around where we now live so peacefully. Above is the memorial to the twenty five dobermans who died working with the Marines and a Japanese midget sub, designed to carry two lucky sailors and couple of torpedoes. It was found washed up on a local beach.

On the right, we have some anti-aircraft guns, or what's left of them. You can see the first one is still pointing up, just as the Japanese gunners would have left it as they died blasting away at American planes.

Below are the remains of the house where a family lived that manned the overseas telegraph cable station. It stretched across the Pacific and was a prime target of the Japanese when they invaded on December 8, 1941--the same day (it was December 7th on the other side of the International Dateline in Hawaii) that Pearl Harbor got hit. There's another house in pretty much the same shape as this one, back farther in the jungle.

Ever wonder what is inside those caves the Japanese were famous for dying in in the Pacific operations? Below, is one view of one of them.

And to the left is the inside of it. Probably a storage area for munitions. Just some Marine graffiti from 1977 in there now. Now that I think of it, the soldiers who left there mark here were fighting another American war at that time. Barney and James Cagney, wonder where they are now. Would be my age, probably.

In any event, there is peace here now. To the right, is Terry and her black cat, Zeke, in the cockpit of our boat, VATNA. Behind her, up in that green you see, is where the caves are. This was all a hell hole in July 1944 when the Marines took it back from the Japanese.

The Agonies of Aging: 61 in Paradise

When it came down to it, facing 61 years wasn't too tough, really. Terry and I got off the boat for the weekend and went to a nice hotel on this beautiful bay on Guam. Had a too-expensive dinner accompanied by a nice Scotch, a good bottle of Cab, and then a great night's sleep in a king-sized bed (the berth on the boat is queen sized and tapered at the end). In the morning we lounged around in the room drinking coffee, eating chocolate chip cookies, and reading on the small balcony off our room (I got into an article in Psychology Today about dream research that says we dream to rehearse our defensive moves on potential attackers, which is why most of our dreams are violent or involve running or escaping, etc. Can we escape aging? I'm running hard, but, dream on, Dougie, dream on).

Then down to a very fine, all-you-can-drink champagne brunch with good friends. So, blood pressure problems, heart arrhythmias, colonic disorders--the disheartening fruits of living to 61--were forgotten for the day as were nagging questions about what to do with the boat when I retire in June (sail it back to the Chesapeake? Sell her here?), what about Book II in The Eye of the Stallion trilogy (the person at my publishing house in charge of producing the book is very ill and now the publishing date has been pushed back for at least a month, maybe longer), and what about the stress at work where I manage a special education program and have 30 students on my speech-language pathology caseload? We have talked all these issues through, over and over and over and finally, I think, come to some reasonable options which is a huge relief. Now it's Sunday night and tomorrow begins the four-week stretch to Christmas break, during which we'll fly to Tasmania for 10 days. Now that I write all this down, it seems pretty stupid to complain about anything as inevitable as aging when life is so rich.

Searching for the Next Book: A Sweet Sunday Morning

Here' s my study carrel last Sunday morning--the cockpit of my sailboat Vatna across whose combings I saw this scene of turquoise water and topical skies. I'm starting the reading part of researching my planned young adult adventure novel (working title: The Spirit of the Voyage). Here's a picture of one of the books I found in a local bookstore and I've got a small stack of other to work my way through before I start writing.

It will concern two boys of different backgrounds/races/cultures who struggle to survive among the Pacific Islands torn by war. To do so, they will need to cooperate and share their knowledge and skills. But they must get along, must be able to accept their differences. Sailing traditional canoes, navigating across hundreds of miles of open ocean using only stars and wave forms and sea life, and living off the ocean and what food the islands have to offer.

At first, I was a bit shy about attempting this project. I'm not a native-born islander and so, there will be some questions about authenticity/spirit/depth of understanding, etc., etc. But, I've put those concerns aside. Look at Stephan Crane who wrote the Red Badge of Courage. It's a fine and authentic war story and yet Crane never set foot on a battle field during a real battle. There are lots of examples of writers who did well writing out of their milieu or beyond their culture.

I have lived and sailed among these islands for the past ten years, and I was once a boy who wandered around the woods practicing how to survive by "living off the land." In a profound sense, the experiences are the same whether they be set in the tropical pacific, or the Bershire hills of Massachusets. So, we'll see how it comes out. I've got good friends who are native to this island experience and they'll help out.

World Series Watching On the Other Side of the World: A New Englander in Paradise

Finally, a break in the incessant rain, and just in time for a great Saturday sail with friends. Friday afternoon, we started getting the boat ready for a day out on the water, and this means taking off storm lines and scrubbing rainy-season moldy decks. Saturday morning, we finished up the preparations (the TV gets packed away, off comes the air conditioner and the rest of the lines, up went the sails) and off we went with very light winds but plenty of sunshine. In the photo above, Terry sits on the foredeck. I've got the big genoa, which is not designed to go to windward, furled up to about a third of its full size so that is doesn't smother the staysail and with this configuration we did just fine tacking back up the harbor.

Good timing, weather-wise, because the Red Sox are playing today, Sunday, and so we get the best of all possible worlds--a great day on the water, and a great day watching baseball (sixth inning, Lugo just snagged a line drive and ended the Rockies attempt at a rally).

Later, I'll cook a leg of lamb and we'll drink a bottle of pretty good red wine and enjoy another perfect day in the tropics while, back in New England, the rumors of winter being just around the corner persist (it's now the bottom of the seventh and the Rockies have managed to rally after all--yikes, this series might get interesting).

What about the writing? I'm still slowly working my way through the final edit of A Drop of Wizard's Blood, Book III of the Eye of the Stallion trilogy. No rush. Book II, The Mirrors of Castaway Time, will be out sometime in November (Red Sox just won--hot damn).

A Stitch in Time Saves a Blow Out at Sea

A torn sail is a good excuse to sit down and do something I rather enjoy: stitching things up. I guess it goes back to my childhood when my mother showed me how to thread a needle and sew on a button. I've never minded taking care of my own sewing needs as long as they were simple.

Repairing a small rip in our old main sail last weekend was done with a piece of sail repair tape and a few big (too big, my wife said) stitches with a sailmaker's needle and thread. Pleasant enough work when your in the harbor or at sea on a nice day running down wind. Here we are tied up on our seawall and were spending the day getting ready for our first sail in a long time--too long. But, VATNA is in good shape, her decks scrubbed, and now her sails are on. We should be able to get out this Saturday between World Series games (Red Sox are in and that make this New England farm boy happy).

As far as writing goes, here I am on the boat doing my usual evening thing: writing/editing. I'm about half way through the process of reviewing the edit my editor did on the A Drop of Wizard's Blood, the last book in the Eye of the Stallion trilogy. This is the third time I've used my editor, Linda Morehouse of webuildbooks.com. As usual, she very thorough and I'd recommend putting out the money for a professional reader/editor when you're preparing a manuscript for submission to publishers or agents. In any event, I'm now going though the manuscript line by line, comment by comment (I love the Microsoft Word editing feature), and mostly accepting her recommendations and learning, too, as I go along. It's slow going to be sure, but instructive to see the kind of grammatical mistakes I habitually make or words I over use and it takes an editor--another set of eyes--to find them.

In any event, I hope I'm a better writer than sail stitcher and I hope Josh Beckett, Big Poppy, and the rest of the boys get the job done this week.

Research for the Next Book: A Sacred Island Ceremony

I'm getting going now, rather tentatively, on the next book, The Spirit of the Voyage. On any voyage, casting off the lines is the most difficult thing to do--actually committing yourself to such a grand adventure. An entire manuscript has to dangle from, or grow from, an initial insight, sort of like how the crystals in a snow flake have to find a tiny particle of something in the atmosphere to grow around. No particle, no snow flake, no germ of an idea, no book.

Of course, the atmosphere is full of particles for snow flakes to grow around, just like life is full of ideas. Whether you live in suburban New Jersey or on an island in the Pacific Ocean, there are an infinite number of possibilities around which a work of art can coelesce. The old man in the picture above is me with my friend Manny Sikau. He's master navigator from the island of Puluwat in the Caroline Islands. We are standing in front of a canoe that his father built and Manny sailed from Puluwat to Guam, a distance of about 500 miles of open ocean. He navigated using only the stars and the waves, the wind and sea life--no compass, no sextant.

In these pictures, Manny, his uncle, and other people from Puluwat are performing a ceremony prior to launching a small sailing canoe that Manny and others carved by hand from a breadfruit log (an interesting note about this picture is that Manny's uncle lost the bottom part of his arm to a shark one night while spear fishing). The ceremony involved chanting over the canoe and offerings of food.

Decisons, Decisons, Decisions: Consequences Roll Down Hill

The first of October finds us at a crossroads--within the next seven months we are going to have to make a couple of major life choices. Terry is going to run for a big teachers' union position and if she wins, we would move back to the Mainland U.S., back to our house in Onancock, Virginia.

This forces our hand on a second major decision: what happens to the boat, to our sweet VATNA, our home for the past nine years? I would love to sail her back, but Terry would not be able to go with me, at least for most of it, and it might take a year as we must sail with the seasons if we do a west-about (Guam, Malaysia, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Med, Atlantic to the Caribbean, and up to the Chesapeake). I can't fathom being away from my wife for that long. And I would need to find a crew, at least one other capable sailor and preferably, two. The other option is to sell her and just move back and buy another boat more suitable to the Chesapeake with its light winds and thin water. This would be easier, smarter, and infinitely easier on the marriage. But I've dreamed of doing a long voyage like this all my adult life.

Still, men (and women) have done worse--or better--as regards leaving a spouse at home while they go off adventuring. My reflective mind, though, asks itself when does going off on an adventure and leaving loved ones behind to worry become a selfish stunt? Just how you look at it, I suppose. So, we'll talk about it. Terry will not say no. She doesn't work that way.

Meanwhile, we've been sailing with our friends (in this photo, I'm not on Vatna, but a very fine Tayana 43 named Carpe Diem that lives just a few yards down the seawall from us. She's owned by some very close friends and we have had some wonderful day sails on her, catching fish, sipping wine, and laughing a great deal at our good fortune, living well being the best revenge.

The writing? It's on hold for a bit as I get my brain organized to start the next project. Pretty busy and preoccupied by the aforementioned.