After days of overcast skies, it was refreshing to be awoken by sunlight streaming through a porthole on a bright Sunday morning. It was hardly refreshing to watch the usual Sunday TV Godblathering over breakfast. The Something Or Other ministries was appealing for last minute funds to fight the coming national disaster: the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who would, because she is ethnic and her record notwithstanding, bias the court in favor of Hispanics in direct contradiction to God's will. It's nice to live in a country where such bigots get special tax status because they wave Bibles now and then, even if it's only to bludgeon people with.
We cast off and pulled out into the Intra-Coastal waterway just in time to wait 15 minutes for the Atlantic Avenue bridge to open and looking around the cloudless sky, I spotted something I haven't seen for a while - a skywriter. U + GOD was soon spread against the sky like an idiot screaming from a window.
An hour later. with an extra hundred gallons in the tanks and some $330 poorer; we were booming out of the Lake Worth inlet at 22 knots into the open and turquoise sea. It felt almost like an escape into a fresh, clean and fragrant world -- and not an easy one with all the small fishing boats who seem to think the middle of a shipping channel is a perfect place to spend the morning fishing. Switch on the radar, check the proper waypoints on the chart plotter and push the red button on the auto-pilot. Heading due North, the blue hull cuts through the swells and we're free of the land and its barbarism for a while.
If only it were as easy to escape the smell of religion, the reek of stupidity and the stench of bigotry.
Captain: "I even prefer my gasoline without ethanol."
ReplyDelete$330 in gasoline and not a drop of ethanol ... what fun is that! But I saw those bottles, I tell you, and they are mine, mine, mine!
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteThis dinosaur commends thee on thy writing style – enjoyed the maritime post, and especially appreciated the line "spread against the sky like an idiot screaming from a window."
I think that aside from the desert, the sea is a place one can still go to catch the full power of Homer's excellent line in The Odyssey, "the sun sank and the roads of the world grew dark" (in transliteration, "duseto t' eielios skionto te pasai aguiai"). How much one little verse can reveal about the difference between an ancient understanding of nature and our own, with its distressingly binary incantations "save the whales" and "a tree is a tree is a tree."
Just got back from the dermatologist, who seems to have confused some of my khaki-colored camouflage mottling for moles that needed to be frozen into oblivion. So, the deed accomplished, I now fade into the night in which all dinosaurs are a uniform, boring light brown. A biopsy of one troubling spot had previously turned up no bad results, so I suppose my hide won't be the end of me in the near future.
. . . as they reached Port Salerno, pulling up to the yacht club halls, the son of the St Lucie River, he gave them a royal welcome -- but they went home anyway.
ReplyDeleteDon't ask me to try it in Greek.
But thanks, a complement from il miglior fabbro is quite appreciated.
Capt - I love reading your posts. The problem is they are so complete and eloquent, adding a comment is almost like sacrilege. :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to respond to that, but thanks. Now if the Republicans would only stop calling me a subversive idiot and a liar. ;-)
ReplyDelete