Crew Log 202 – Continuing Education

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March 3, 2010 – At Sea, 14º 036’S, 076º 29’W
By Herb McCormick

The other day here on Ocean Watch, I picked up a copy of a book called Education of a Wandering Man by the late, prolific western writer, Louis L’Amour. I haven’t managed to put it back down. The memoir is an account of the author’s youthful ramblings, when he set off on his own before the Great Depression to ride the rails through the western states. Eventually he hopped a series of ships bound for the Far East, and later he served in World War II. It’s the tale of those travels, and it’s extremely well told.

L’Amour had dropped out of school early, bored and disengaged, in search of meaning and adventure. In the back of his mind, he knew he wanted to write, but he was smart enough to know he wasn’t ready. Wherever he went, he carried a few books with him, and in each town he landed, the first place he sought out was a library. L’Amour spent lots of time in libraries, none of it idle. The education to which he refers was self-taught and it never ended. Our good friend John Osberg left a pile of books on board, and this is one of them. He even inscribed it: “If you think you’re well read – think again!”

Today on Ocean Watch, we’re of course in the midst of our own wanderings, now less than a day out of Lima, Peru. Following up on yesterday’s log, we have good news to report from Jenny Pyles Cairncross regarding her parents, cruising sailors Knick and Lyn Pyles. Jenny writes:
“A Chilean humanitarian service called my sister via satellite phone to tell her that she had seen our parents and they were okay. Our parents asked her to tell us that they would try to call us as soon as communication lines were open again. I had seen on CNN Chile the helicopters in Dichato and bringing supplies so I was hoping that they would be reaching Coliumo as well.”

Back aboard a much-relieved Ocean Watch en route to Lima, the wind has been up and down, we’ve sailed when we could, and motored when we couldn’t. It’s been a good passage to get some reading done, and everyone has had a book going, as we always do. One of the great luxuries of going to sea is the time it affords to read, something none of us find enough of when we’re back on land. We can relate to the gist of Louis L’Amour’s treatise, for in many ways, the Around the Americas expedition has been The Education of Some Wandering Men.

We have a ton of textbooks and reference works onboard, and we refer to them often. We’ve also discovered a few science books that are as enlightening and as readable as they are interesting. Aussie scientist Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers addresses the climate-change issue in a forthright, powerful manner even skeptics might find inarguable. Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano’s Flotsametrics and the Floating World addresses the grand interaction of ocean currents in a narrative that has the pace of a detective story. I’ve only just thumbed through Deborah Cramer’s Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage, but I’m looking forward to getting into it; evocative and even poetic, it looks like it belongs in the same discussion as The Weather Makers and Flotsametrics.

As L’Amour attests, you can learn a lot from more entertaining fare as well. Having spent almost my entire professional life writing about boats and sailing, a lot of folks might be surprised that I’ve just now read a few books by authors whose mighty reputation were totally built on tales of the sea. To be honest, getting through Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – on my third attempt! – was a mighty effort, but in the end a hugely satisfying one.

For years, people whose taste I admire and opinion I respect have been urging me to read the Captain Jack Aubrey series of swashbuckling British Navy historical novels by Patrick O’Brian, and we just happened to have a copy of his book, Desolation Sound, aboard, which I tore through in a couple days. Great stuff: I’ll definitely be seeking out further Captain Jack adventures. Luckily, there are 21 more to go.

Then there’s the celebrated Welsh writer, Tristan Jones. If you ever see me on the street ask me to share my personal Tristan Jones story – it’s a doozy, and completely inappropriate for any school kids who might be reading this. A couple of times in the midst of reading Ocean Watch’s copy of Jones’s ICE! – for instance, when he was getting the better of a polar bear, or reinserting the eye dangling from his own socket – I thought to myself, I’ve never heard more unadulterated bull crap in my entire life. (After his death, a well-researched Jones biography revealed what many had always expected; at times he was a fabulist, if not an outright liar.) Even so, I finished the book smiling. True or not, the man could spin a yarn.

The following books I knew were fiction, and I enjoyed each one immensely. Leif Unger’s quirky western, So Brave, Young and Handsome, was an utter delight. Out Stealing Horses, by Per Patterson, is one of the most haunting, wonderful books I ever read. Stephen Harrigan’s sprawling Texas novel, The Gates of the Alamo, brought history to life in spectacular fashion. I really liked Arturo Perez-Reverte’s treasure-hunting mystery, The Nautical Chart, though my mates found it less amusing.

However, we all agreed that Fatal Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season by Peter Nichols, a factual account of the wild year of 1871 in the same waters we traversed last summer, was pretty darn good.

At the outset of the voyage I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a title no one is taking credit for shipping aboard. The year in question begins the moment Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, drops dead at dinnertime. This, most assuredly, is not a cheery tome. Didion’s an amazing talent and this was an award-winning effort on her behalf, but it just might be the single most depressing book I’ve ever laid eyes upon.

Happier fare included Harry Bruce’s book on writers and writing, the hilarious Page Fright, and another title that mined similar fare, Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives and Inspiration, a book of interviews with some of my favorite non-fiction writers, including Jonathan Raban, Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux and Tim Cahill. (Shapiro’s book was a gift from fellow sailing writer Rob Moore, one of the most underrated guys in the business, who “retired” to race sailboats all over the planet. By the way, Rob, it’s time to start writing again!)

As a writer, I like reading about other writers, and the opening chapters of The Kitchen Readings: Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson, by his long-time Aspen pals, Michael Cleverly and Bob Braudis, are an absolute riot. But The Kitchen Readings are quite the surprise, as the book is ultimately an emotional tribute to a dear friend. Their passages about “the Duke’s” final days, including the one when he took his own life, are enough to break your heart.

Also troubling, but for different reasons, is the book I finished just before starting L’Amour’s, a stunning collection of essays by John McPhee called The Control of Nature. I first read McPhee when I first started really reading. A Sense of Where You Are, his book on fellow Princeton graduate Bill Bradley, the All-American basketball player (before becoming a New York Knick and then a New Jersey senator), left a profound impression on me. It was the first time I realized that sports, my all-consuming love as a kid, could be understood and appreciated in an intellectual capacity, as well as a physical one.

Then, on my first trip to Alaska, I carried with me a copy of McPhee’s own epic, Alaskan masterpiece, Coming Into the Country, and I fell in love forever.

Reading McPhee, however, is a dangerous, almost reckless exercise for any writer. The man is so good, so smart, so fluid, and such a capable and total craftsman, that it makes you want to throw your computer overboard. In fact, McPhee is so outstanding, polished and professional, that if you’re foolish enough to compare his prose with your own, you’re left with the impression that your own scribbling nonsense is so pointless, lame and inconsequential that it makes a fine case that you should just stop trying. Once you’re over the discouragement, however, you can only hope some of him rubbed off on you along the way.

And that brings us back to Louis L’Amour, who offers this comforting advice for those afflicted with the urge to write: “Writing is forever and always a learning process. One is never good enough and one never knows enough. I cannot repeat that too often. No matter how good a writer becomes, he can always be better.”

Well, not McPhee, of course, but point taken. And John Osberg was correct: Comparing one’s own life reading list to Louis L’Amour’s is as humbling as reading McPhee. The man also wrote 86 novels, but Education of a Wandering Man, written just before his death in 1988, is certainly his most personal book.

The beauty of the memoir, and it is beautiful, is that it’s not just a great adventure story and a fine coming-of-age tale – though it is certainly both of those – it’s full of insights on travel, philosophy, history, and most of all, about books and writing. It’s something we can relate to here on Ocean Watch, where we love to hear and tell stories, and where books may be our most precious possessions. As with L’Amour on his journey, books have been a grand source of knowledge, entertainment, and even companionship on our own long wander across all these mighty seas.

I’ll finish this log with a confession and a promise. Until I picked up his Education, I’d never read a syllable of Louis L’Amour. Once I get ashore, that’s definitely going to change.

-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

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