No Exclamation Points for You

Probably when you and your friends gather around the campfire, warm your hands over the Buffalo wings, and slake your your thirst with a cold Ballantine Ale, the talk is not about punctuation. That’s all right. You’re fine. Whatever you want to argue over is up to you.

In the circles in which I revolve, my crowd has spent many an evening in hot dispute over the use of exclamation points. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. Or, it might be semi-colons, even commas.

Daily, one confronts the prose composition eccentricities of the many-headed. Over the years these have included not only language, grammar, punctuation, vulgarities (especially common these days), and topic anomalies, but even excursions that aren’t prose at all. Among the weirdest of these is the devotion to the most self-effacing kind of expression, which does not use capitalization to signal the beginning of a new sentence, or to distinguish proper nouns. They are grammatically modest, to a confusing degree. For these, I is i, and God (or god) forbid a reader might conclude that the writer’s opinion of himself is exalted. Strangely, the use of that un-capped i in sentence after sentence may infiltrate some ambiguity into the reader’s assessment of the writer’s apparent humility, but each of us is free to make up her own mind about that.

For reasons that I think are wholly unrelated to the no I in i impulse, other writers omit periods at the ends of sentences, preferring the mark for ellipses instead. Thus “john visited judy this evening … they watched some tv then ate some ice cream … then …  “

The sentence pretends to explain what john and judy did, but what did they do, really, especially after the ice cream? Inquiring minds want to know. The three dots don’t indicate the end of a sentence, as some letter writers imagine that they do. The period, acting alone, does that. The three dots can indicate an elision or omission, something left out, and not by accident. It may also suggest that the writer merely lost the thread and, instead of searching for it, set down an unwritten “what the hell” and went on.

Oh, and then there is the absence of periods altogether. Some writers compose one long utterly unpunctuated sentence. Their view, I think, is that the reader deserves a challenge and will somehow make sense out of what they are trying to say.

Or there is the apparently irresistible urge some writers, commenters, tweeters, and others have to add some pop to their message. They bring out the all-caps big guns, figuring that they will give whatever they had in mind to disparage a sound beating. “THAT STUPID BASTARD GOT THE THUMPING HE DESERVED,” as if being called a no-caps ‘stupid bastard’ who got a ‘thumping’ wouldn’t sting.

For all these compositional miscreants, semi-colons, capitalization, and even commas are the least of their failings. And, I won’t torment you with spelling.

Turning to semi-colons, I’m not a fan. Of course, they have a job to do in written expression more formal than tweets. But in everyday communication commas, on the other hand, are useful, and they enhance expression by adding clarity – if clarity is what the writer is after. Sometimes, obviously, it is not meaning or clarity he is after but clamor. Commas don’t lay there on the page being merely grammatical, even puzzlingly so. Their job is to say, “Pause a beat, take a breath, here’s a supplementary idea, now go on.” They are especially useful to brighten a complicated but murky idea, particularly when it began for the writer as a treasured thought but was on its way to being a jumble.

Anyhow, what are really on my mind are exclamation points. I hate them. The problems are duplication and excess. When someone writes “Wow,” the word is an exclamation. Adding !!! doesn’t add a thing, except perhaps the suggestion that the writer is feigning an enthusiasm and disguising insincerity. After all, no one is really three exclamation points worth of eager, and if someone is, do we want have written communication with such a demented soul?

If one writes “Thanks,” or even “Thanks a lot,” will the addition of a ! or even three !!! enlarge one’s gratitude or make it more heartfelt. If it was not heartfelt when it was represented by by the word alone, how can it be made so with a punctuation mark?

My theory – and you may conclude that it derives from my view that everything was better years ago, although that is not exactly or completely my view – is that when we moved from typewriters to computer keyboards, writers embraced the license to clutter one’s prose with exclamation points, and now (the horror) emoji. In the days of the Underwood, you could bang on the keys all you wanted, but you couldn’t find one labeled exclamation point. There were commas, apostrophes that could double as quotation marks, even semi-colons, but no exclamation points. Writers kept their enthusiasms in check. They committed more modest prose. If you wanted to inflate your emotion with an exclamation point, you had to type the period, then backspace, then type the shift-apostrophe. It was a nuisance, so writers restrained themselves. If they wanted to fly their emotional freak flag, they had to find the words.

 

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Father’s Plot

Home from World War II, my father became the production manager for a Goodyear tire plant, a job he held until retirement at 62. The plant did not make car and truck tires. His job was to keep the bicycle tires that were the factory’s main product rolling off the line, to make sure the inbound rubber was on hand as needed, and to slide around inside barrage balloons checking the quality of the work he oversaw. He was not a slave to fashion, not at work nor at home, so instead of standard issue dad slippers around the house, he wore special purpose, indestructible  leather moccasins designed for the folks who walked around on the outside and inside of the balloons as they built them.

He was a clarinetist, a disciple of Benny Goodman, a member of a widely unknown dance band that entertained guests on small cruise ships. He was also an un-Lebowski-like social bowler, an avocation that I eventually concluded had an embittering, destructive effect on his marriage.

Unsurprisingly, I was only dimly aware in real time of this varied roster of his activities, all unrelated to raising his only child. They were puzzle pieces that I began to organize into a speculative family history, but only long after Father’s Day was no longer an occasion to celebrate with him. When he and my mother moved from the house they bought when the war ended, they did so unenthusiastically. The Vineyard, where they died, did not suit them.

I found in the bookcase beside his reading chair, the one he refused to relinquish even as the movers were packing away the furniture around him, one volume that was not like the others – not like the leather bound Shakespeare’s plays, Orwell, Ayn Rand, Jules Verne, Henry James, Dreiser, Forster, Conrad, and on and on. It was a dusty, cobwebby bookcase. Great books, in the historic sense, though seldom bothered about these days.

My father was a reader, though mysteriously and retrospectively worrisome to me, his taste diverged from classics when I was a kid to sci-fi and dystopian gothic as he got older and grumpier.  But, readers often imagine themselves writers. If they are reading something that does not imprison their attention, their thoughts wander. They wonder, Could I do better? Could I be the next John Grisham, the next Dennis Lehane, the next Styron, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, or Katie Roiphe? If they are reading something exquisite in its soul capturing authority, when it’s done they wonder, Could I ever write something so riveting, so meaningful? Could my book make it to the top of the bestseller list? Of course, the answer is, Don’t be silly. Get back in that balloon.

Among my father’s legacy collection of nearly forgotten volumes the one I have in mind yielded a clue to who he was and what he dreamt of, none of which I had divined during eighteen years living at home. The mystery my sleuthing discovered that he had had a writing career in mind. The beginnings of his stories, along with letters from England where he served as a cryptographer in the Army Air Corps, he had secreted in a fragrant, red cedar box hidden in the back of a closet under the eaves in the bedroom he and my mother shared. He wrote in a swooping, stylish, graceful hand. The letters were finished, the stories were not. I guess the balloons got in the way.

It was the Plot Genie, with its  faded maroon cover and occult embossed illustration, was the book that surprised me and illuminated my ancestral research. It was not fiction or nonfiction, not history or science, pseudo or genuine. It was a Depression era self-help reference my father had handled often. The Genie was a nuts and bolts guide to plotting the story you aimed to write, complete with a wheel you spun to move the composition along by matching a character with a location, a murder weapon, a motive, and a scene. To be sure, it left the writer to fill empty spaces with life or rather its fictional facsimile, but the Genie promised to give a desperate, untutored first-timer a leg up.

You might find the wheel unsettling. The thought of spinning a wheel to select among nine general categories of plots, say, using motive 27, with character 29, and scene 42 may suggest a self-help hoax or a board game, a Cards Against Humanity approach to writing fiction. The Plot Genie was copyrighted in 1931. It’s worth noting that it was copyrighted not written. Invented by Wycliffe A Hill, the copy my father kept was published by Ernest A. Gagnon in 1935. Mr. Hill explained that his book resulted from “sixteen years of effort to perfect a formula, and a means of its application, which would enable student writers to inject plots into their stories” – a sort of injection molding fiction technique. I’ve no idea whether my father took the Genie seriously and used it to organize the plots of his unfinished manuscripts. There is insufficient evidence to decide the question, but I am satisfied that he harbored ambitions beyond the rubber industry, even dreams.

Mr. Gagnon was not modest about the utility of The Plot Genie. “I sincerely share the opinion of other publishers who have expressed themselves as believing that this invention of The Plot Genie will have a definite bearing on the character of story plots around which much of our future fiction and drama will be built, to the end that stories in general will be improved in merit because they will be better plotted. I further feel that such a scientific system as is applied to the building of dramatic plots with this method is distinctly in line with the modern trend in all things toward efficiency and economy of effort.” Mercifully, Mr. Gagnon was dead wrong on all counts. The trend he saw coming in 1931 petered out quickly, efficiency and economy of effort giving way to shameless, extravagant, egocentric memoirist wallowing, and of course, now and again, some awfully good fiction in the gloriously fruitful post-war years.

If by now in this story you find yourself smirking, I must add that Mr. Hill developed his Plot Robot, as he called it, out of the most common stimulus known to would-be writers, to wit, a rejection notice. “Sixteen years ago,” he explains, “ I was started on a rampant search in an effort to track the thing called ‘Plot’ to its lair when the famous motion picture director and producer Cecil B. DeMille rejected one of my pet stories with the kindly criticism that ‘although an interesting narrative, it contains no dramatic plot.’”

Mr. Hill plotted his own revenge with The Plot Genie. Don’t think for a moment that the spinning wheel, decorated with the image of Aladdin himself, has only a few story ideas to suggest. In fact, Mr. Hill’s formula is amazingly exhaustive. It lists and classifies dozens and dozens of dramatic situations, describes plot building, and gives examples of plot outlines and a complete plotted story, developed with the mindless efficiency of the slide rule-like Genie. There are lists of locales, common and unusual male and female characters, fictional problems, obstacles to love, complications to thicken the stew, predicaments to challenge the characters, crises, climaxes, and surprise twists. It’s a feast for the novelist with a hobbled imagination.

You begin with three turns of the wheel on the Genie. That will yield a locale or atmosphere. Then, three more turns and the first character will be revealed, three more and the beloved appears. Each of the results is a number on the Genie’s wheel, and each number refers to a list in the pages of The Plot Genie. “The object,” Mr. Gagnon writes, “is to have the mechanical device select a series of nine numbers which call for the requisite plot elements, one from each of the nine lists in the book.” That’s it, you’re done.

A few revolutions of the Genie’s wheel could yield – as one example does – a story Mr. Hill says he sold to movie studios, but perhaps not to Mr. DeVille. The story is about Elwood Parker, the elderly publisher; Keith Durant, the wealthy sportsman; Zenda, an aging mystic; Pamela Wynne, the daughter of Zenda; George Barry, a moonshine mogul; Anna Meggs, a farmer’s wife; and Dulcy, the redbone girl. The collision of these characters creates a detective story, whose motivation is a $100,000 reward that the federal government is offering for information about bootlegging operations that market alcohol for sale in Chicago. The action takes place on a hunting trip, set in the hills of Kentucky.

Never seen the movie based on this plot? Neither have I. In the end Pamela and Keith get the reward and fall in love.

Examining The Plot Genie’s faded, mildewed pages, I made out on an endpaper the faint record of some notes. Dim as they were, they were certainly my father’s. Barely legible after so many years, I read a few lines. “The mystic’s daughter tells him that the publisher is a frequent visitor to the restaurant. She is overheard, and the gang leader attacks them. After a furious battle, he overcomes the enemy and delivers him to the police.”

There is nothing more.

 

Everything Is Up to Us

The beauty part of the term “fake news” is that it welcomes all comers. It is inclusive. Whatever your motive, you can spread it. The president wields it to criticize and provoke the press, as well as his legion of other antagonists. He does it to rev up his base, and because he is foolishly, tastelessly impulsive. The press and the president’s opponents wield it to criticise him, his behavior, his policies, his person, and doing so stumble into the tasteless gutter with him.

It’s become one of those terms with enormously wide currency, used every day by folks of all sorts of opinions. It’s a phrase, such as “unbelievably great” or “incredibly smart” or “iconic American” that may be applied to whatever one chooses, and that can mean to you whatever you want it to mean, and to others perhaps something else, or nothing at all. It is undefined and mostly meaningless.

And brilliantly, as if it were a mechanism invented by some diabolical linguist, everyone who uses these empty words and phrases comes to believe he or she has communicated a concrete, immutable idea that everyone else completely understands and with which they all agree. So, as time passes, with each use, meaning drains away. Such phrases and fake news are empty vessels that each of us fills in ways that suit us, believing that everyone else is filling the meaning void in the very same way.

Consider the labels, Democrat and Republican. Think of each of these terms as representing a variously wide spectrum of people and notions. Among Democrats, some are left wing, some right, some deeply invested in issues surrounding money in politics, others in gender equality, others in Bernie, others in Hillary, immigration, or race, others in something else, and these issues may dictate their voting choices.

Or Republicans. Along their spectrum, there are right wingers and centrists. Some want to hollow out the federal government, starve it of funds, attack the national debt head on. Others want to work out a deal with their Democrat colleagues to spend more on defense, attack climate change forecasters, destroy labor unions. Some think President Trump is a conservative, a Republican, a moderate, a liberal in borrowed conservative clothes, or a would be emperor.

Where there is agreement and common bipartisan enthusiasm, it is among the politicians who march under these various banners, always joining up. At both ends of the spectrum, they agree to wanting, no matter what, to be reelected.

Each of these party labels represents some sort of core commonality, I suppose, though it defies definition, which means it is nearly useless. Neither helps us much to understand what’s going on in the political world  around us.

My wife is a guidance counselor. One of the problems she encounters in youngsters is that some of them are “on the spectrum.” Autism. High functioning at one end, not so high functioning toward the middle, severely challenged at the other end. She looks at me strangely at times, so I think maybe she sees me on that spectrum somewhere.

There is a fake news spectrum that runs from news articles and on-air or cable discussions that seem like news but are actually flimsy analysis, baseless predictions, or worthless, common opinion, usually driven by a hardened bias, sometimes declared, sometimes not. It continues through errors, mistakes, and attacks that people including politicians post on FB, Twitter, and other social media, and in comments to news sites. It is endlessly uninspired, repetitious, and unhelpful. And sadly, one must add the intentionally deceptive commentary or posts, made by everyday folk, crazed partisans, attacking politicians and foreigners, and ordinary people like you and like me who tweet or retweet for the atta-boy reward that we covet. Each of these fits the fake news rubric. None is original or insightful.

At a party, a frustrated someone said, “All I want is to have some TV channel that I can look at each morning, and that only broadcasts facts, the truth about everything.”

Which brings me to the First Amendment, the absolute bedrock, unique and unambiguous distinguishing feature of American government. It is ours alone.

The First Amendment is a reminder of our most precious rights as Americans, and as humans. And it reminds us of our unnumbered responsibilities. It bars the government – any government, local, state, national – from meddling with what each of us possesses merely because we are human, we  have been born, and we are American citizens – namely, the right to speak our minds, write what we think, worship a god as we like or not at all, assemble peacefully and petition the government. These rights, we believe, were not given us by a king, queen, or even a democratically elected government. They preceded all of those. They inhere in us and are ours just as our eyes are blue, or brown, or black, or we are tall or short, fat or thin, American-born or naturalized. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights did not give us this supreme gift. Instead these three documents told the government “Hands Off, This is Ours.”

What the First Amendment does not say is that the use, the benefit, the protection, and the responsibility for enjoying and maintaining all of these rights fall to us. To you and to me.

You can’t palm the use and protection of your inherent rights to Facebook, or Google, or Instagram, or Twitter or the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, or Breitbart or Fox, or MSNBC, HuffPost, or even government itself  – or to some imaginary TV channel that will fill you up with facts each morning with your coffee, granola, or eye opening belt of tequila.

Each of us is the designated curator of the information we find, gather, think about, evaluate, and decide upon. Hallelujah.

 

Haulout

I don’t think there is a commonly observed annual moment when one takes a whole week to make a personal assessment. There ought to be.

There may be cursory moments when one looks around at the wreckage, the disrepair, and the battered relics of a year gone by, then shrugs, and staggers on. But I don’t mean those familiar sorts of mercifully fleeting jiffys. I mean an occasion when one stares unblinkingly at the deterioration that a year has wrought on one’s plans, one’s ambitions, one’s treasury, and one’s own sorry carcass, then calculates the toll, rolls up the sleeves and puts things right, or at least as right as the natural course of things allows.

New Year’s Day is a possibility. You know, the resolutions, the sloppy sentiment, the sense that with the new year, everything’s fresh. But the track record of permanent effects resulting from resolutions made at New Year’s is poor. No one feels very well on Jan. 1, and who has the energy to make big plans when one has such a jackhammer headache?

April 15 is another possibility, but that’s all about trying to defeat the taxman, who has his own very detailed calculation of the condition you’re in, and he wants his generous piece of your action. You may not know what happened to all that money, but he does. You may not have made an unflinching analysis of your income and spending, but he has.

Now, if you happen to have a boat, big or small, there is a perfect, inescapable annual moment for assessment and repair. That moment is now — spring. It’s time to haul the boat out of the water, set it on the land where you can get in touch with all its parts, including those that are hidden most of the time, to see what wind, weather, water, tides, and your own occasionally monumental stupidity have done.

Slime, grass, and barnacles have taken hold of the bottom. The paint on the sides is cracked, and what’s worse, the errors you made the spring before in preparing the hull for painting have endured. The rouge and blush you hoped would disguise all the dings and scrapes have washed away. The varnish is utterly missing in places — many places. She looks, and you feel, a long year older.

On the other hand, if you are lucky, and at times I have been, no planks will be popping off, water won’t be rushing through the seams, and another year afloat may be assured with the application of some sandpaper, putty, paint, and varnish. And, most important, the haulout means that nothing is hidden any longer. You know where the soft spots are, where the blemishes have revealed themselves, where the accumulated dents and scratches of years announce that the old girl’s got some age on her, but with your diligent help, she’ll totter on.

And, if you’re even luckier, one of the boys you’ve grown expressly for this purpose will be on hand to scrape and sand and paint. You are reminded that it was real foresight to have fed and clothed those boys, knowing that, as the years have passed, you would accumulate some leaks and wormy parts yourself, and need their help.

Besides, getting together with one or both of the boys to do the scraping, painting, cleaning, mending, chivvying, and general boatkeeping work is pleasing beyond words. And anticipating the fun that will follow the work is pleasant too.

The chores fall into two categories. The first is demanding and very important work: You have to sand the topsides and the bottom, then paint both. You have to grease the propeller, which has these tiny set screws and tiny grease fittings that try their best to get lost. If a tiny set screw finds its way into the beach sand, it’s gone forever. No two ways about it.

Plus, almost every substance you work with is toxic to some degree, even lethal in the most extreme circumstances. During the annual haulout, your life is on the line.

Among the worst jobs is changing the engine’s four filters — one an oil filter, the other three for fuel. There’s a sequence of events that must be followed, or else the engine won’t fire off when you’re done. I’ve only rarely got the sequence right. When I screw up, then it’s a matter of draining this and bleeding that before the engine finally clatters to life, signaling the end of the tough stuff.

Back in the water, the work becomes less onerous. Bending on sail. Cleaning the smelly bilge. Cleaning the mossy woodwork. Cleaning the sink and the dishes and the toilet. Washing the towels and the settee covers that spent the winter aboard, and smell like it. But afloat again as spring becomes summer, we can set up the awning over the cockpit, so that it is cool and breezy as we work.

Still, there’s the matter of where I put all the little pieces of hardware and the specialized lines when we put the boat away in the fall. Then, I could have put my finger on each and every bronze this and Dacron that. By spring, that treasure trove of clarity has been depleted. I hunt in the cellar, the garage, and every nook on the boat. It takes more time to find the stuff when you need it than it takes to do the stuff you’re trying to do. And sometimes, besides forcing you to acknowledge your negligence, the search leads you to food you left aboard by mistake, food that’s now metastasized into a gruesome, unrecognizable, hitherto unknown life form that can’t be merely tossed out but must be scraped off the joinery. As the days stream by, the annual assessment threatens to overrun spring and cripple early summer.

Eventually it’s mostly cleaning and deciding what can be kept and what must be tossed. In a fleeting but brilliant moment a few years ago, I settled on a new strategy for keeping track of the boat’s vast and elusive inventory. I got a collection of plastic tubs and toolboxes from Shirley’s, plus a Sharpie. On the outside of each container I listed what’s in it. Sometimes there were tough decisions. Should the electrician’s tape go in the Electrical box, or should it go into a box with other kinds of tape — sail repair tape, rigging tape, mast boot tape, duct tape? Such issues often require coffee and a long period of contemplation before the most efficient outcome becomes obvious. Then there was the problem of storing all these containers, out of the way but accessible. There isn’t much storage space aboard the boat, and all the available space is curvilinear. All the containers are rectilinear. More contemplation, more coffee, and more sitting around is called for.

Such a pause often refreshes. Once, sitting around rewarded me with the memory of an occasion, years ago now, when the two boys and I went on a brief sailing cruise during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was crisp, bright, and windy, temperature in the low 30s. We cooked our meals in the pressure cooker, a small-boat culinary mainstay. We had pot roast, lots of it, and corned beef and cabbage. The steam expelled by the cooker supplemented the heating system, which is a tiny wood stove mounted on a bulkhead at the forward end of the main cabin. It heats the cabin atmosphere so that we could sit around in our shirtsleeves, telling stories and admiring our hardiness, but no heat reached the cabin floor, where frostbite conditions threatened bare feet.

I recalled E.B. White, a sailor himself, writing in “Trumpet of the Swan,” “Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.” Freedom and boats are entangled for me.

So, in this annual moment, or month as may be the case, even as you are consumed with preparing to sail when you should already be sailing, even though it would be splendid to get out sailing on each tender spring day, it turns out that, in its own way, it is splendid enough to haul out, to clean and reorganize, to sift through the remains of last season, to welcome memories that revisit, and to look ahead — pleased that nothing is hidden, everything is properly attended to once again.

Published May 17, 2018 in The Martha’s Vineyard Times.

 

A Fine Man

Politics is a noble calling though its practitioners rarely meet that standard. When Greg Mayhew and I met in the early 1970s, we discovered that we were the same age. He was a politician, and I was in the newspaper game. We ought to have been genial or perhaps contentious adversaries, and he ought to have prospered in his safe State House seat as the representative for Dukes County. But, when we saw one another on his political rounds, we talked boats, fishing, Fairhaven where I was from, Vineyard life and people – not bills, not votes, not elections.

Greg had no windiness, no hollow conversation, no self-satisfaction, no arrogance. He kept at the job, but it didn’t fit. When he had served a decent while, he stepped aside and went home to make a life fishing with his Chilmark family. Had he continued in his inherited profession, would the clatter and toadying native to the species have transformed him? Not a chance.

He was a fine man, fun loving, plain spoken, kind, and determined to be himself and to live life as it fit him. In recent years, before his death this week, when he and I met, we talked admiringly about our children.

Empty Words

You must have heard someone say, “I want to thank you for blah, blah.”

Or, “May I  take this opportunity to just say blah, blah, blah?”

Why don’t they just say, “Thank you for blah, blah” or, even more simply, “Blah, blah.”

If they want to say it, why don’t they just say it?

A small but crucial distinction must be drawn between “I want to say blah, blah” and “I’m just saying blah, blah.” The latter, heard often in spousal conversation, is a reflexive/defensive technique, allowable in all circumstances where a husband has ventured an opinion that has identified him as the bonehead his wife always knew he was.

“I’m just saying blah blah” is a sort of respectable verbal retreat, to which a typical beloved might reply, “You’re just saying you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Not a Joiner

To many of you it will not be a surprise to learn that Henry David Thoreau, he of the Walden Pond Hermitage, was not only a naturalist but a fierce exponent of civil disobedience, in the traditions of Gandhi, King, and the Tea Party. And, to most of us, Thoreau shares a naturalist’s kinship with Henry Beston, John Muir, Mary Austin, Verlyn Klinkenborg, or maybe Audubon or even Teddy Roosevelt. But really, he traveled a fiercer, more anarchical path all his own.

It’s not that the one devotion contests or supersedes the other, what is interesting is the way the two were united in the man, along with his fervent embrace of abolition and transcendentalism. “Walden, or Life in the Woods” was published in 1854, eight years before Thoreau’s death and about 10 years after his solitary two years at the pond. It is his story of living alone and intimately engaged with unmolested nature as it surrounded him. Although he might have been remembered as a pencil maker, a transcendentalist, or a philosopher, that book marked the man.

And to be marked that way can be a problem, not only for historical figures with trailblazing legacies, but for any of us. Don’t pigeonhole me man, we cry.

John Updike, who avoided the novelist’s pigeon hole that had his name on it by writing penetrating and surpassingly graceful essays about books, art, artists, politics, golf, eczema, and and poetry besides, considered Thoreau and his masterwork sympathetically, though obliquely.

“A century and a half after its publication,” Updike wrote, “Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”

Thoreau was inspired to his take on civil disobedience by a tax collector who knocked on the door of his shack at Walden Pond. The collector, just doing his duty, wanted Thoreau to pay his delinquent poll tax.

The intrusion and the demand put Thoreau’s hackles up: “But in this case,” he wrote, “the state has provided no way [to redress the wrong against him]; it’s very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.”

He saw no sense in petitioning the government to see things his way and leave him alone, Unjust laws, Thoreau thought, survived patient lobbying far too long. Better to “transgress them at once,” but civilly.

What Thoreau reveals is in astonishing contrast to the modern impulse toward mass civil disobedience, typically framed as a movement to change the world, or to save the planet, and to do it collectively armed with Facebook and Twitter. Rather, his motives and objectives were unique to him.

“As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil … they take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone,” Thoreau wrote, “I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”

Gandhi wrote that this essay of Thoreau’s, the Duty of Civil Disobedience, was his bedside book. “We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another,” Thoreau wrote.

Not a joiner, he looked for space to do not everything, but something.

 

They Weren’t “Nor’easters” – That’s Not Something We Say

I don’t mean to make this a big thing. To me it’s pesky, a bugaboo. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Maybe you have an aged father who says dungarees when he’s talking about jeans, and you correct him repeatedly, but he doesn’t wise up.  Or, he calls cars automobiles and tells you again and again that his grandmother – God rest her soul – calls them machines, as in “Did you bring your machine today?”

This is the same thing. We have had two northeast gales in a week, and a third is on the way. All we hear from TV reporters or read in newspapers is nor’easter. Nor’easter coming, nor’easter caused flooding, battered New England awaits a third nor’easter.

I have tried to correct this nonsense before. In a column I wrote in 2009,  I reported that I had been taken to task by none other than Everett Poole of Menemsha.

“You blew it again, Cabral. There is no such contraction as ‘Nor’easter.’ The correct contraction for northeast is ‘no’theast.’ Nor’ is used only when proceeding west as in ‘nor’west.’”

The author of this love note was Everett Poole, fish impresario, former Chilmark selectman, and current Chilmark town moderator, who in many immoderate moments over the years has jumped with both hip boots on something he’s found in my newspaper, the Martha’s Vineyard Times. and especially on something I had written. Every time I put finger to keyboard, I knew that Everett, pipe fixed between his teeth, long-billed swordfishing cap perched firmly on his gleaming head, would examine the result, ready to gaff me. I’m out of that business now, thank goodness.

But, on the occasion I’m remembering he had  overplayed his hand. He had played right into mine. He had taken the bait. Finally, I was the one with the gaff.

Everett referred to a front page headline in the print edition of the newspaper, “Persistent nor’easter claims victim.” The headline accompanied a news story and front page photograph of a sailboat thrown up on the beach in Vineyard Haven. I often wrote headlines in those day, but I didn’t write that one. I had written “Persistent easterly claims victim,” but in the late stages of production someone substituted “nor’easter” for “easterly.”

When I saw “nor’easter” the next morning in print, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. When I saw it on the website, I had it changed to “no’theaster.” Everett is an ink on paper sort of fellow so he didn’t see the change on the website. He figured he’d drag me gasping over the rail, club me, and shove me in the fish hold. Instead, he had to face the fact – and this was hard for him – that we agreed on something.

Indeed, wrong as he was to abuse me the way he did, Everett was right, well, almost right. There is no such contraction as “nor’easter.” Or to be precise, there is one that’s often used, but it’s not authentic, not in any sense of the word. It’s pretentious, a silly affectation. It’s a pronunciation whose users pretend to an unearned saltiness. It’s falderal that’s caught on.

To force a change in this settled “nor’easter” nonsense the right minded will have to fight stiff headwinds and a roaring head tide. Even as I type this, Microsoft Word says okay to “nor’easter” and underlines “no’theaster” in red. As historically, linguistically, and aurally baseless as “nor’easter” is it’s common among dilettantish New Englanders, writers, journalists, and poets, and it’s accepted in dictionaries. “No’theaster” isn’t in the dictionary.

It’s a non-word that no genuine New England salt ever uses.  It’s like Manhattan clam chowder, not chowder at all. It’s like asking for scallops (sounds like gallops) when you want scallops (sounds like polyps). It’s like sailing up-east. It’s like me saying whuddup to my sons. It’s like saying hookup when you mean, well, falling in love.

And, although for me, the opinion of one crusty old salt is all the etymological authority necessary to pronounce “nor’easter” out and “no’theaster” in, I can refer you to people who study words and agree. For instance, Mark Liberman, trustee professor of phonetics in the department of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, writing in the Language Log, on January 25, 2004 entitled his commentary “Nor’easter considered fake.”

Professor Liberman cites Jan Freeman, in the December 21, 2003 The Word column in the Boston Globe.

Professor Lieberman writes, “Jan Freeman cites an interesting alleged mispronunciation: ‘nor’easter’ … The Globe doesn’t (wittingly) use nor’easter for a disturbance blowing from the northeast, but in other newspapers, and especially among TV weather people, it’s common. How, asked reader Bill La Pointe, did this “bogus term” gain acceptance? It’s not, after all, a regional pronunciation, as many journalists outside New England now believe. ‘I grew up on Cape Cod when there still existed a pronounced local accent,’ wrote George Hand. ‘The word – spelled phonetically – was nawtheastah.’ Sailors disclaim it too. They may say sou’wester, but never nor’easter.”

Really, just take a moment to think about it. What’s the letter that Bostonians and New Englanders are notorious for forgetting in their speech. It’s “r.” They drop their “r’s.” They don’t drop the “th.” And, the “er” sounds like “ah.” So, it’s no’theastah, if you actually want to be authentic.

“The facts, however,” Professor Lieberman continues, “have not slowed the advance of nor’easter: Even in print, where it’s probably less common than in speech, it has practically routed northeaster in the past quarter-century or so. From 1975 to 1980, journalists used the nor’easter spelling only once in five mentions of such storms: in the past year, more than 80 percent of northeasters were spelled nor’easter. It’s no more authentic than “nucular” for nuclear or “bicep” for biceps, but it would take a mighty wind, at this point, to blow nor’easter back into oblivion.”

The professor went on to report that the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) cites examples of the use of the bastard contraction from 1837 onwards. But, he does not relinquish his position. He explains that the references are from British, Scottish, Canadian, and Carolinian sources and, naturally enough, they don’t carry water in New England.

“Subject to correction,” he concludes, “the picture that seems to be emerging is that nor’easter is a literary affectation.”

(This was adapted from a column I wrote and published in the Martha’s Vineyard Times in July of 2009. DAC)

A Nifty Bit of Salvage Work, and Some History

Except for the hard north-northeasterly wind, the gray skies, the spitting rain, the submerged dock, and the four yachts driven ashore along the beach, it might have been a July Saturday at Owen Park. There was a crowd, cars squeezed into every parking space up the hill almost to Main Street. Folks gathered in small groups, walked along the beach, and their dogs ran back and forth, exulting in the wind and the commotion.

A doozy of a storm had done a lot of damage alongshore and inland, and it had not blown itself out on March 3, but the day’s higher than normal high tide was due sometime before noon, and the effort to refloat at least some of the stranded sailboats needed to happen.

Fortunately, the ingredients needed to do the work had assembled themselves, as they had many times over decades. Word got around, and help showed up.

Bob Douglas was there of course, because McNab, his wife Charlene’s handsome sloop, nearly 50 feet long, had parted her newfangled and inferior mooring, which was not up to its job. Captain Douglas called it a “rubber band mooring,” and his description got around. Many of those gathered at the beach might qualify as disciples of the captain’s long and influential career as a marine historian and wooden boat enthusiast. His 1964 topsail schooner Shenandoah, along with his evangelical devotion to wooden boats and the history of American sail, had its way with a cast of young men and women, many of whom sailed with him and then sailed their own wooden schooners, ketches, and sloops.

Ralph Packer was there because he loves boats and Vineyard Haven Harbor, and because whenever marine crackups occur, his tugs fire up to help with the difficult work of salvage. He remembers 1967, also March I think, when Shenandoah went ashore in a northeaster at the bend in Beach Road behind the service station. Ralph’s tiny tiger, the 28-foot tug Ursa, pulled on her for hours before she came off the beach.

Saturday it was Ralph’s tug Sirius, 65 feet, usually towing fuel barges or deck barges loaded with gravel for Island road building, or modular houses for Island residents, that got two of the stricken sailboats off the sand.

With the wind blowing 30, with gusts higher, Sirius’ crew did a brilliant job. Captain Paul Bangs first hauled Heart’s Desire, a schooner owned by Matt Hobart and his family of Vineyard Haven, from the beach across the harbor near the Tisbury Wharf Co. Matt is a master boatbuilder at Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway. Several of the G&B work crew joined in the salvage efforts. Captain Bangs drew Heart’s Desire off the beach, towed her to a safe anchorage, then gently put his tug alongside the little schooner to retrieve her crew, a delicate bit of work in a small gale for such a large, heavy, powerful, but not so nimble towboat. Captain Bangs left not a scratch behind.

Next, Captain Bangs threaded the big tug through the mooring field behind the Vineyard Haven Harbor breakwater to help McNab. The crowd on the shore included sightseers, but it also included a collection of experienced marine operators. Of course, the core brain trust was Captain Douglas, Ralph Packer, and Captain Bangs, but there was a lot of advice available to them: Bill Mabee, a former Shenandoah mate, who made a career sailing tankers and freighters. Fred Murphy, owner of the Vineyard Haven schooner Ishmael, also a merchant seaman, was at hand. There was Rez Williams, the painter who sailed his small boat to New Bedford to sketch that harbor’s offshore fishing vessels, which became the subjects of his bold, much admired pictures. And David Dandridge, retired Steamship Authority master, answered the unspoken summons.

Among the G&B crew was Lyle Zell, son of Ross Gannon. Ross built many of G&B’s wooden boats, as his son does now. Many of these were designed by Ross’s partner Nat Benjamin, who sailed into Vineyard Haven from the Mediterranean one day with his wife Pam and their two girls, and decided to stay. His designs, all in wood, including his own schooner Charlotte, which rode out the storm without a problem, populate the mooring field behind the Vineyard Haven breakwater. The wooden sailboat line from Captain Douglas has not been exhausted.

The Owen Park dock was under water. Only the tops of the pilings were visible. Captain Bangs lay Sirius alongside what was the east face of the flooded dock. His plan was a clever one. It evaded the problem, with the wind blowing as hard as it was, of lining up and maintaining Sirius in position to tow McNab off, and guarded against the powerful tug’s damaging the yacht by pulling mightily and perhaps unsteadily on cleats or other of the yacht’s deck structures that might not hold. Captain Bangs chose to use Sirius’s capstan. That allowed slow, steady, smooth pressure to be brought to bear. A line had already been run between McNab’s stern and the Owen Park dock to hold her up to the wind. Three of the crew of helpers got in a skiff and floated hand-over-hand along the line to McNab. They took the towline from Sirius with them, and fastened it to a bridle they fashioned and dropped over McNab’s stern. Sirius’s capstan began turning. The tide rose the last bit it had to give, and slowly the yacht freed herself. It was a nifty morning’s bit of salvage work.

There are several ways to look at all this. It was a dramatic morning for the casual spectator, better than if you were watching the TV news while some idiot staggered in the rain and wind with a microphone in his hand, imagining that he was delivering critical, life-saving information. If you were a tug captain, a salvage crew member, the owner of the stricken yacht, it was a meaningful, even heart-stopping event. If you were one of the bunch that has been here for a long time, been touched by the light Captain Douglas lit, or by the generous devotion Ralph Packer has for the waterfront and its devotees, it was another moment when the history you had been part of reminded you of its enduring authority.

Two vessels, Witch of Endor, a black ketch that charters out of Vineyard Haven in the summer, and Rachel Saunders, a wooden sloop that G&B has done a lot of work on, remained on the beach when the day ended. Witch had the worst luck, hurled against the pilings at the north side of the Steamship Authority wharf. Rachel Saunders rested in the sand, not badly beaten up. She was refloated before the next gale arrived on Wednesday.

First published by The Martha’s Vineyard Times, March 7, 2018.

 

 

Death, Tales Told by the Dying

Life is complicated. Death is simple, or can be. Anyhow, it’s conclusive and something common among us. Sometimes how we get to the end can be a story worth telling, and reading. You don’t need to be obsessed with death and its plans for you. I am not. Still, like almost everything else, learning something about the end of the line, how it works, and especially how gifted, accomplished people manage it is worth investigating. No special counsel required. Two books I’ll mention will advance enormously whatever you are thinking about your leave taking.

Nina Riggs’s Bright Hour is an Homeric tale told by a poet, lyric, brilliant, funny, lively, reflective, and heartbreaking. One ordinary life, but an epic odyssey. The immense loss that is, of course, the story’s conclusion reminds the reader of the certainty that awaits each of us and of death’s often broad, always careless embrace of the lives of surviving families and friends. Ms. Riggs died of a cruel, rapacious cancer, as her mother had only months earlier. Riggs’s account is not a cancer story. She might have succumbed to any other terrible, wasting, relentless illness. Bright Hour is the story not of the disease but of the enormity of her loss.

Inspired by Riggs’s prose poem and so driven to enlarge my struggle with death, or at least the inescapable fact of it, I went next to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. You might reverse the order, or you might look elsewhere, to Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal perhaps; or C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed; or Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die, or dozens of others. But, you will not find two such perfect companions as the stories by Kalanithi and Riggs. A neurosurgeon and scientist of enormous distinction, afflicted with cancer at the peak of his power, at work Kalanithi peered and probed with exquisite care the brains and spines of his patients to save for them their true selves, or at least, if possible, what was most precious to each. For one, perhaps a few more years, for another to see the first grandchild, or to see a business safely into his family’s charge. Kalanithi worked his scalpel along the delicate, even elusive, frontier between personhood and mere flesh and blood. And, as time grew short for him, as it had for so many of his patients, the certainty of his fate imposed the same reductive determination to save until the end first his work, his patients, but ultimately his wife, his parents, his friends, a daughter, and this book. He had a great deal to explain.

Kalanithi was not a poet, as Riggs was. He was a scientist, a philosopher, and an ethicist. He tells the story of the slow decline of his health, his powers, and his ambition, and comes to the very place that Riggs did and we will, though by a very different path.