Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 6)

The following is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

The westernmost harbor on Jost Van Dyke, White Bay is a shallow half-mile inlet guarded by a series of natural reefs running across its mouth. There are three entrances through the reef, although it’s highly recommended that incoming boats run between the two largest reefs; for guidance, red and green buoys mark the suggested entrance route. The list of do’s and don’ts also includes not anchoring in the channel (as to block it) or anchoring in the coral that comprises the reefs. Suffice to say the landing at White Bay was going to be the most difficult of our journey, and with that in mind I turned the wheel over to my father and stepped forward to man the anchor as we approached the reefs.

The bay was relatively empty, meaning we wouldn’t need to worry about dodging other boats as we set the anchor, a 25-pound hunk of pointed metal designed to dig itself into the ocean floor. The trick here was obviously to not only avoid the precious coral, but also to make sure that I let out enough line (so the anchor stays put) but not too much, which would let us drift with the wind and possibly swing us into another boat or the reef. As Ken headed the boat into the wind, he shouted up to me and I dropped the anchor into the shallow water (White Bay was 10 feet deep at its maximum; the depth gauge in the cockpit read that our location was about seven) and let first the anchor chain, then the tough knotted rope slide through my hands. The ideal figure is for every foot of depth, one should let out seven feet of anchor line; thankfully, the Sunsail folks had marked our rode at intervals of 25 feet with small orange tags. After one of the tags passed by, I stopped the line and tugged on the anchor and Ken reversed the engine to drag slightly on the anchor so it would set properly on the sandy bottom. I then let one more tag slide through my hands before I pulled a few feet of rope back in and tied the line off on the starboard cleat.

I stayed at the forecastle for a few more minutes, watching the anchor as the wind nudged us gently aside. It held, and as I maneuvered back to the cockpit, my dad was already preparing lunch. We grilled hamburgers and bratwurst and paired them with a garlic potato salad I’d bought from the Harbour Market at Soper’s. It was a blissfully low-key meal, and it did wonders to bolster my mood. Ken washed down his lunch with a Carib, but I stuck with bottled water, not quite ready to climb back on that horse just yet.

We spent the next hour tidying up the cockpit and cabin, then cleaning ourselves in traditional Algir family fashion: we took the bottle of shampoo and bar of soap from my dad’s mesh toiletry kit, dove into the water, and had a good old-fashioned Caribbean bath. As antiquated as it seemed, it was a huge improvement over wedging oneself into one of the cramped heads on the boat, angling the body and the shower nozzle for maximum coverage amidst minimum comfort. Sure, when we emerged from the ocean we still were dripping with salty water (the fresh water shower on the swimming platform was still out of commission), but considering the alternative, I didn’t complain. As my mother used to constantly remark, “For boys, wet means clean.”

After drying off (which didn’t take long in the 95-degree afternoon heat) we changed into fresh clothes and climbed into the dinghy for a trip ashore. White Bay takes its name from the mile-long strip of pristine white sand that runs the length of the harbor. Ashore, a pair of quaint-yet-enchanting establishments border the beautiful beach. At the western end of the inlet sits White Bay Sandcastle, a tiny resort with a dazzling menu (we made reservations for breakfast the following morning); attached to the Sandcastle is the Soggy Dollar Bar, named for the sopping wet payment that many people use after mooring their boats outside the treacherous reef and swimming ashore; at the eastern end is Ivan’s Stress Free Bar and Campground, which country singer Kenny Chesney immortalized in the video for his song “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem.” Given that Jost has been nicknamed “the barefoot island” due to its laid-back atmosphere, at least two-thirds of the song’s title seemed appropriate. (However, it occurred to me that bearing the reputation of being the most laid-back of a series of extraordinarily laid-back islands sounds like holding a diving contest and declaring one person the “most wet.” On Cooper I thought that no place on earth could possibly get more relaxed, yet here we were.)

Note: here are a few photos of White Bay for reference.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 5)

The following is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

There’s a legend that alleges Robert Louis Stevenson used Norman Island as the inspiration for his classic Treasure Island. Part of the myth credits Stevenson’s uncle, a sailor, with regaling his nephew with legends of the British Virgin Islands. First sighted by Columbus in 1493, the mystique of the BVI certainly would’ve no doubt intrigued Stevenson, who crafted the first chapters of the book in the cold and dreary Scottish Highlands in 1881, nearly 400 years after the islands’ discovery. The story is augmented by the fact that not a half-mile off the coast of nearby Peter Island lies Dead Chest Island, but here the story grows murkier. It’s unclear whether the real-life island took its name from the sea shanty “Dead Man’s Chest” that Stevenson likely penned for the book or if he lifted the name from a book about the West Indies by Charles Kingsley, an English writer and contemporary of Stevenson’s.

I remember reading Treasure Island as a kid, one of those books that Jude and I raced through after our father consistently praised it as one of his favorites growing up. I mentally added Hispaniola, the name of Captain Flint’s schooner, to our growing list of boat names.

Norman has its share of actual history, too, from Spanish galleons transporting chests filled with silver coins to hapless fishermen braving a storm only to discover gold doubloons washed into their boat. No one’s quite sure where the name of the island originated, but another fable claims that Norman was the name of a pirate who laid claim to owning the island (legally or illegally) sometime during the 18th century. We would certainly find our share of interesting moments during our stay, and while I won’t fill up 34 chapters like Stevenson, I’ll attempt to do the famous island justice.

I awoke just in time to greet the dawn. I’d slept soundly in the cockpit, and awoke feeling as refreshed as I’d been since I left Santa Barbara five days earlier. It struck me that my internal clock was slowly growing adjusted to its temporary time zone, and I passed the time that Ken slept by first quietly cleaning up the dishes and garbage from the previous night, then settling back into the starboard-side bench with The Tempest, which I’d neglected since landing in Tortola. I chuckled knowingly in Act 2 as Ariel’s song floats the stranded Italians off to sleep and Antonio comments that it is “the quality o’ th’ climate” that causes their strange drowsiness—I could certainly appreciate the sentiment. The quiet morning didn’t last long, however, and as soon as the sun rose and burned off the slinky morning haze, the Bight sprang to life with boats leaving their moorings, others quickly snapping up those vacated, and frantic worker-bee dinghies motoring away from their vessels, off to fetch provisions or dump garbage for their queens.

Our trash would need to be disposed of sometime today as well, but considering we’d been cleaning our plates the old-fashioned way (either by devouring our meals or sharing scraps with the fish), we had little more than some food wrappers, dirty paper towels, and empty beer cans and bottles in our wastebasket. Early that morning a company wittily named Deliverance brought its boat around the Bight, the two long-haired white kids at the helm looking like they’d just stepped off their longboards at Leadbetter Point in Santa Barbara. They delivered any and every type of amenity from fresh ice to birthday cakes, and they took away our just-barely-full bag of trash for $2.50. My instinctive read of the two young men proved accurate, and we talked for a few minutes about surf conditions in the BVI before they motored on to the next boat. I learned that there were indeed a few good beach and point breaks in the islands, centered mostly around Tortola, but with so many dangerous reef bottoms (both exposed and hidden), they suggested I stick to snorkeling.

Note: here's an aerial photo of Norman Island for reference.

Review of Faith Hill at the Hollywood Bowl

With the Bowl Orchestra. Read my review for the Orange County Register here.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 4)

The following is an excerpt from the fourth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

The wind held, we made excellent time, and after an hour of snorkeling the Baths, we hiked up to a tiny restaurant atop the island for lunch. The Baths—a series of naturally occurring tide pools, underwater tunnels, rock arches and scenic grottoes—line the white sandy beaches of southern Virgin Gorda, a little over a mile from Spanish Town, the island’s main hamlet. Columbus’ “Fat Virgin” was at one point the capital of the BVI, and American philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller even built a hotel and harbor on the island in the 1950s. Just as the Rockefellers were instrumental in establishing and maintaining national parks in the U.S., a number of spots in the BVI had also been designated as National Parks in an effort to preserve their natural beauty.

Trust me: natural beauty was something these islands had in spades. The Baths were like nothing I’d ever seen—an anomalous formation of huge boulders, creating beautiful pools where the ocean creeps in between the rocks. The enormous slabs of granite (some nearly as large as our 49-foot boat) point to Virgin Gorda’s volcanic past, where superheated magma cooled into giant molten slabs, which over the course of tens of thousands of years, eventually eroded into the labyrinth of geologic wonder that was now called the Baths.

Because dinghies aren’t permitted on the beach, we couldn’t motor in and haul the small raft onto the shore, like we’d done at Cooper yesterday. Luckily, we didn’t need much besides our snorkeling gear and money for lunch, so after securing the boat to a buoy, we plunged into the tiny waves lapping at the sides of the boat and swam in. We spent just over an hour exploring, and though the Baths were crowded, we made our way to Devil’s Bay, the next inlet south, and found ourselves amid far fewer humans and amongst a breathtaking mélange of varying kinds of ocean life: bristly sponges that resembled desert cacti; waving green sea fans; multi-colored jacks with black stripes along their dorsal ridges and brilliantly regal black-and-yellow angelfish drifting and darting along the coral ledges and caves.

I’d never seen anything quite like it, and although I stayed far closer to the shore than my father did, I couldn’t help but marvel at the unspoiled splendor. As the pristine white sand gave way to a mottled light brown that melted into borderless gradients of cyan and sapphire, nowhere did the aquatic life seem bothered by our intrusion; the fish and plants simply went about their daily activities as if we were merely other big mammals swimming overhead. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, perhaps something about ecological symbiosis, or maybe just the permissive idea of going with the proverbial flow that nature accomplishes so well and humans emulate so poorly.

Note: here are some photos of The Baths at Virgin Gorda for reference.

Review of Old 97's at the Fonda

What's so great about the Barrier Reef? Read my review for the Orange County Register here.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 3)

The following is an excerpt from the third chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

I walked unsteadily down the dock towards the boat,
suddenly aware that the entire marina was bustling: engines spit and sputtered, halyards clinked and clanked, people drawled and droned. After two years of teaching, I’d grown to be a morning person, but considering my internal clock read just after 5:00 AM, it took me a while to come around. As I took in the boats refueling, dockhands loading and unloading gear, and finally my father, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts, hanging over the port side of his new boat, attempting to reach the waterline with a sudsy sponge… with all the activity and energy surging around me, I couldn’t help but awaken.

“That’s got to be easier from the water,” I called out. With the flick of his wrist, the sponge sailed through the air and landed at my feet.

“If you want to swim in this marina water, the job is yours,” he said, hoisting himself into a sitting position atop the cabin. He looked as if he’d been up for a while, working. He was skinny, like me (and like Jude), and a deep, weeks-old Caribbean tan made the tufts of gray-and-white hair on his chest stand out even more than usual. He brushed a few stray sweaty hairs from his face and smiled at me, a wry, lopsided grin like the one he offered yesterday when I first saw him striding down the dock; the kind of genuine, benevolent smile exchanged between family members like a secret handshake or an heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He was letting me know that everything was going to be okay, even if it was abundantly clear that he didn’t wholeheartedly believe it.

We spent the next hour checking and double-checking the boat’s vitals: making sure the sheets were coiled and knotted where they should be coiled and knotted and loose and unencumbered where they should be loose and unencumbered; inspecting the gauges on our gas tank and fresh water to ensure we’d have plenty of both; running the bilge pump to flush any stray ocean water from the lowest part of the interior hull below the waterline. Following my father’s lead, I’d shed my shirt and worked bare-chested in the glimmering mid-morning sun. For the first time in months, I was engaged in real manual labor—lifting and stretching, bending and pulling—and the soft, tensile ache in the muscles of my shoulders and back—as well as the sweat that wicked away my sunscreen—were physical manifestations of my efforts, and I wore them proudly.

After our inspection, my father fired up the inboard Yanmar 76-horsepower engine, and as it idled, I climbed over the starboard rail and onto the dock, releasing the docklines but hanging on to the rail to guide us. With my dad’s go-ahead, I walked the 49-foot boat forward out of the slip, waiting until the last possible moment to leap on board, swinging around a stable halyard.

As I gazed out beyond the reef to the Sir Francis Drake channel and the coruscating Caribbean, my heart swelled with lofty pride at my—no, our—undertaking. I looked back at my father behind the wheel, and behind his mirrored aviators, I sensed the same feeling of elation, of freedom from the world around us. He looked comfortable, he looked at peace, he looked… natural, as if his whole life had been leading up to this one singular moment, when everything he owned was under his control and everyone he cared about was on board—he truly was the captain, and my admiration for him had never been greater.


Note: here's a photo of a Beneteau 49 for reference.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 2)

The following is an excerpt from the second chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

As we drove, I learned that my cabbie, Berihun, had lived in Tortola nearly all of his 40-odd years, the British diacritic a result of his birth and rearing in South Africa. His father had served as a police officer on this, the largest of the islands, after bringing Berihun and his mother to the BVI in the late ‘60s. He proved to be a treasure trove of knowledge of the islands, and by a serendipitous stroke of dumb luck, he was my initial guide to paradise.

Leaving the airport behind, we crossed a small two-lane bridge connecting Beef Island to the primary mass of Tortola. According to Berihun, the new bridge had been dubbed Queen Elizabeth Bridge during the British Monarch’s visit to Tortola in 1967, the same year Berihun’s family arrived. So the legend goes, prior to the bridge, people crossed from Beef Island via a small wooden raft, just large enough for one car, that operators pulled back and forth between the two islands. A cross-breeze gusted through the windows of the makeshift taxi and I silently thanked Queen Elizabeth and Terrance B. Lettsome for replacing the raft-and-pulley system with this concrete causeway, which, although not nearly as romantic (at least in the Hemingway sense of the word) as its ancestor, felt far safer and imminently more reliable.

I glanced down at my watch, surprised that there wasn’t much traffic for just after 11:00 am on a Thursday. Then, remembering my pledge outside the hotel in San Juan, I slid the watch off my wrist and stuffed in it my small backpack with my cell phone. I made myself a small promise that I’d take them back out when I landed in JFK on the return flight (and not a second before). Berihun narrated as he drove, pointing and gesturing out the window with his left hand as we passed Buck Island, a tiny glob of greenery a few hundred feet offshore. Apparently Buck is a private island, and when its former owner began building a bridge connecting it to Tortola proper, he discovered that under BVI law, the bridge would’ve legally enabled the public to use the island’s beaches, so he abandoned the project.

“Some people very territorial here,” Berihun mused. “Most everybody very friendly, but some folks just don’t want to see nobody. They build big houses on the hills…” he waved his right hand at the foliage outside the passenger side windows, creeping straight up in a wall that towered high over the two-lane road. “They isolate themselves from the world.”

“I can understand that,” I replied.

“You one of those?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s no way for a man to live. People need other people. You listen to Simon and Garfunkel?”

“Sure.” I was practically raised on Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor and John Prine. My parents had a ton of vinyl, but my dad only had half a dozen cassettes in his car, and when we’d go on road trips, he’d listen to the same tape over and over and over, never caring that he’d just heard the same songs 40 minutes before, and 40 minutes before that.

“You know that song, ‘I am a Rock’?” Berihun asked into my memories.

“Yeah,” I answered, pretty sure I knew where my guide was taking this line of questioning. “A rock feels no pain and an island never cries,” I sang poorly. Berihun laughed out loud, but I took no offense. I knew I was a terrible singer, and my blurting out the lyrics was more for his value than mine.

“You got it,” he said, honking the horn as he rolled the cab to a gentle stop behind a beat-up pickup truck idling in our lane. “It’s actually John Donne,” he added, without looking back at me. I didn’t hear him clearly, so I asked him to repeat what he’d just said. Instead, Berihun leaned his head out his window to see what was holding us up and nearly had it taken off by a car speeding past in the opposite direction. He hooted and ducked back inside quickly, returning to our discussion as if he hadn’t just nearly been decapitated.

“John Donne. 17th century English metaphysical poet. He wrote ‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ Nobody is an island. You, me, we’re no islands; we’re part of the main. You’re not an island, are you?”

“I guess not.”

“You a rock?”

“That depends,” I said. “Sometimes being a rock is a good thing.”

“Like when?”

“What about Saint Peter? Christ told Peter that he was his rock. Upon Peter he’d build his church. That’s a ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.”

“That’s true,” Berihun agreed, laying on the horn until the pickup finally lurched into motion, hiccupping its way up the winding flora-bordered road. “I suppose it can be a good thing. You know what I’m saying though, right?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I assented. Berihun rounded a bend, and as the tall trees parted, I caught a glimpse of the sandy reef, the three long rows of docks, and the big red-roofed buildings. I had arrived.

“Hodges Creek Marina,” my driver announced as he flicked his left turn signal and swung into the small parking lot. “Home of Sunsail.” I swallowed heavily and with some difficulty. Here I was, after a couple days on the go I already felt like I’d been gone a week or more. Leaving Santa Barbara was a distant memory already, and I still had another week ahead of me. Berihun shifted into park and retrieved my bag from the rear hatch. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t move; I just sat there, staring through the front windshield at the front (or back, I wasn’t quite sure) of the building before me. This was far and away the most impulsive thing I’d ever done, and even a few fated feet from the door, I still wasn’t sure I had the courage to go through with it.

“Hey, Saint Peter!” Berihun rapped on the roof with his knuckles.

“Thomas,” I replied, shaking myself out of my daze.

“No sir. Saint Thomas about 20 miles west.” He pointed off in the distance, towards what I had to believe was the west. “You are in the land of the turtle dove, named by Christopher Columbus himself.”

“Sorry,” I said as I climbed out of the back seat. “That’s my name: Thomas.” I paused for moment—hearing my full Christian name out loud for the first time since my mother passed, standing at the threshold of a great adventure (or an epic disaster), my head was swimming.

“Tom,” I corrected.

“Well, Tom, it has been a pleasure serving you.” He stuck out his hand and I reached for my wallet, not realizing what his gesture truly meant.

“No, my friend,” Berihun said again. “Handshake first. Pay later.”

I palmed my wallet with my left hand, meeting my right hand in his with a firm, gracious shake and a smile. Upon release, I paid my new friend and thanked him for his help. (I hadn’t bothered to ask how he knew so much about 17th century English metaphysical poets.) As I walked gingerly toward the main building, he climbed back into the cab and rapped on the roof again.

I turned and he pointed at me. “Remember,” he said, “no man is an island, including you.”

I tried to squeak out a “thank you,” but could only wave as Berihun pulled out onto the highway, the little car’s horn bleating plaintively as he drove away.