Nightwalk in Bermuda

When last in Bermuda, we stayed in the very historic village of St. George. This place is utterly timeless and can be remembered as the scene of many British Navy goings-on in over two hundred years or so of the age of sail. St George is also the landing place for the annual Newport to Bermuda Race, where all the uber-wealthy show up to drink beer at the White Horse Tavern after bashing over 600 miles of the Atlantic in their expensive toys. During our stay, Laura and I took a nightwalk through the crooked streets and ended up at Folly's Cathedral, an old church that was built upon in fits and starts over decades more than a hundred years ago- but never finished. We stood just inside in the pitch dark and looked at the stars shining through the open ceiling where the roof was never installed. A walk thorough a town as ancient as St. George is almost surreal, and at night one feels as if time itself is blurry around the edges.

Out of that evening came another poem...

Night walk in St George’s


We walked a crooked mile
Under age-cracked eaves and scattered stars
Suspended above the bay where mooring lights traced new constellations
Echoed in dark shimmering ink.
The cobbles polished by the storied footsteps of four centuries and more,
Wound among lime-topped roofs and pastel walls
Steeped in English propriety.
We walked quickly for the time we’d stolen,
For adventures shared
One more among the many
When hands are held against the next dark corner turned
And we together are all that keep us safe.
Safe to witness the onyx emptiness
Of stone piled high to no purpose but folly.
To feel the chill of time’s presence midst the yawning spans
that let in the night where joisted roof tiles belong.

Sometimes we need the space of aimless wanders
To teach ourselves out-loud what we may already know in whispers.
That it is times like these together,
strung like pearls
on the beach of this Atlantic dustmote,
That make up the lovely moments of our lives.
Like the tropic's stolen treasures,
We steal ourselves away so we can sense those truths.
And on a midnight streetscape we walk hand-in-hand,
Talk, lean together, and know
That we’ve glimpsed way more than just
our numbered years.
We’ve seen our lives joined
In moments hidden from the process of living.
Captured, mounted & framed instants,
Suspended brightly in the space of what we are
Together.

Fairhope Retrospective

In my first years as a professional after my graduation from Arizona State University’s School of Engineering, I made a decision to live and work in Pensacola, Florida. If you can imagine a boy who was born and grew up in Phoenix,AZ packing up his stuff and loading it into his metallic-blue Chevy Corvair (unsafe at any speed) and venturing forth, bound for the Deep South. Why would a Westerner choose to go to the Gulf Coast? Try visions of sailing on limitless blue horizons while teaching the art of trimming a foresail to soft-syllable’d, long-vowel’ed southern girls, while the background music of Bob Marley pulsed out of a boombox somewhere down below decks. Hmm. Uh, where was I?
Oh yeah, why I decided on my first engineering post on the Gulf Coast. I was 22- need I say more?

These were, of course, the salad days. I sailed mostly on OPB’s (other people’s boats). Due to my experience on dinghy sailing & racing during my college years on Interlake and Coronado 15 class boats, I found myself a crewmember in demand. I also enjoyed an associate (read that “cheap”) membership at the Pensacola Yacht Club. I quickly learned that the owners of the big boats always needed crew and rarely needed money. Virtually my exact opposite. I quickly learned one of the truisms of the yacht club nautical life: older skippers that won races were often ecstatic in victory to the point of limitless crew bar tab privileges! This world was where I was first exposed to a magical place called Fairhope, Alabama.

Weeks before my introduction to Fairhope, I began to hear about the mythical Dauphin Island Race. Due to be hosted that year by the FYC (Fairhope Yacht Club), it was spoken of with much enthusiasm, energy and not a few exchanged insider jokes. I was selected by my adoptive skipper for both the delivery crew and the alternate helmsman post for the race. All I knew about the DI Race was what I heard around the club docks. All of it was good. Two hundred-fifty boats on the line in ten starts bound for a straight line race from Point Clear, AL south to the non-descript sandbar called Dauphin Island. At the end of the line, a massive circus tent was erected that held a rocked-out reggae band, a Bacardi-sponsored open bar (to those that held the mystical talisman of the competitor wrist-band) and a rumored raft of winsome Mobile girls who were ready to dance and meet the victors of the lifting breeze (us). All was true. We believed that life could not get any better… we were right.

Since that storied time, I’ve often thought of Fairhope, Alabama as a place that stayed in its place as an unchanging icon of sun, soft accents and gentile style। And just last November, I went back and found it to be so। After walking through the flowered streets and exchanging polite greetings to the folks I met on the sidewalks, I found that it was not a place that I wanted to return to… it was a place from which I never wanted to leave! I now have a boat that would also find a favored place at the starting line in this year’s DI Race।
All I need are some young, energetic crew members… life is a circle.

Nauticus Poetica

This next post takes a bit of explaining. During a business trip to Cambridge, MD, my wife and I decided to take a small side trip to Oxford, a small town that sits on a perfect Chesapeake site on the Tred Avon River. This is a very old town (est. 1649) that is distinguished as the home of Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a major financier of the Revolutionary War. Fully 67% of Oxford’s homes are on the National Registry of Historic Homes. Suffice it to say, Oxford is a powerful charmer. We walked throughout the town streets and lanes, which are mostly joined by the main avenue: Morris Street- named after you-know-who. As we strolled, I could imagine us living in this quaint little place. Eventually, the walk inspired this short poem…

Morris Street


The tender touch of rain
Cool patterns on breeze-kissed skin
Distracts us not at all
From the time-steeped taste of maritime flavors-
Oxford on Morris.
A cat on the passing porch
Switches time with an idle tail
A prince of his painted bead board domain.
Leaf-rustle hushes whisper
Contra point to the tympani of the halyard-clank.
A street that threads a fragile point
Of elegance and age rising from the wind-traced mirror,
Shimmered reflectance with a name,
Tred Avon.

We hold hands, walk and try to see
Our life-if-it-were-here
Chock-a-block with Hinckleys
And Adirondack chairs amidst the hydrangeas
A chardonnay tinkled toast on an ivy-bound sidedeck
Overlooking white-winged sail.
We talk in near-whispered voices
Afraid of visions flying away
In the sharp-set focus of where we must be
And when.

We know in heart’s mirror
Inside this lovely fantasy joined
Is the gentle outline of the love we match
And have matched for years.
Gentleness and a place to be
When sometime spirits
want to fly off the handle.
We find a calm breath taken
And realization wakes:
Beauty and desire is always there
Found now as we walk this street
And see these surroundings as a symbol of grace
Because we share it