Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Atlantic High

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Copyright

  Atlantic High

  Copyright © 1982 by William F. Buckley, Jr

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Electronic editions published 2002, 2010 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN ePub edition: 9780795311406

  Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Book Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Notes

  Prologue

  It was 11:30 at night and I was sprawled in the recesses of an armchair, in the living room of the hotel suite, doing a little listless reading, a glass of vodka and grapefruit juice at hand (the ingredients are packed by my wife when I tour); heavy with the fatigue that always hits after your hosts have finally returned you to your quarters—after the reception—after the question period—after the speech—after the dinner: a fatigue to which you don’t want instantly to surrender by sleeping, because the sweetness of decompression is too keen. You are alone! You aren’t talking! You will be able to sleep seven hours, before rising to go on to the airport for the next engagement. The telephone rang.

  “This is Christopher. Christopher Little. Gee I’m terribly sorry to ring you so late—”

  Christopher regularly apologizes when he calls, as if his presence were somehow burdensome. In fact it brings pleasure.

  “Apologize to me?” I said. “God,” I looked at my watch, “it’s two-thirty in New York! You are in New York?”

  “Yeah. I know. But the editors of People are going wild. They want just one line from you—there isn’t room for more than one line—on why you did it again.”

  “Did what again?”

  “Sail across the Atlantic.”

  “What do they have surrounding the blank line?”

  “Shall I read you the whole thing?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The big headline says, ‘WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. BRAVES THE HIGH SEAS, IN HIS FASHION, WITH CHAMPAGNE & SCARLATTI.’“

  I groaned, but not noisily—and anyway, it was largely my fault. Nobody made me mention champagne or Scarlatti.

  “Then they have the lead, in italics. It says: ‘William F. Buckley, Jr., 54, is well-known as a conservative (TV’s “Firing Line”) and best-selling author (Who’s On First). His reputation as an adventurer is less appreciated. Last month he set out from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to sail the Atlantic with four friends, four paid crew members and one intrepid photographer, Christopher Little—’ “

  “Who said you were intrepid?”

  He laughed. Christopher laughs like a shy teenager, at once appreciative and self-effacing. “You did, in the story.” “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “‘—aboard the 71-foot ketch Sealestial. It was Buckley’s second such crossing; the first was the subject of his 1976 book, Airborne. Why would he try it again?’—that’s where they need the line.”

  “What comes after the missing line?”

  “‘After 30 days at sea the Sealestial landed in Marbella early this month. Before beginning a book about the voyage—Atlantic High, to be published by Doubleday next year, with photographs by Little—Buckley wrote this account of the trip for People.’” Christopher paused. “That’s it.”

  “Say: ‘Buckley answered, “The wedding night is never enough:”’”

  Christopher laughed. But he’d have laughed if I had said, “ ‘Buckley answered, “Toasted Suzy is my ice cream.”’” Christopher is that appreciative, but it pays to remember that he maintains very high standards. He is too nice to kill anyone; that apart, he is the kind of person about whom you would say, “Christopher Little would kill to get a good picture.” It would have been totally accurate to say that Christopher Little damn-near killed himself to get some of the pictures he took. So I asked, cautiously, with that inflection of genuine curiosity necessary so that you don’t give the impression you are asking for praise, “Do you think it’s okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Christopher. Then there was that little social maneuver by which one treads cautiously away from any suggestion of sycophancy. “I think they’ll like it.”

  Of the six (all told) who shared the whole or a part of the passage, I knew Christopher least well. I had set out to get a professional photographer, and he came to mind. His father and my brother had been classmates at Yale, colleagues at the Yale Daily News, and lifelong friends. But my first meeting with Christopher had been professional. He was assigned by Time magazine to photograph me in connection with the publication of one of my books. I found him charming, obviously intelligent, easily amused, handsome like his Danish mother. When his father Stuart W. (Stu has only the single affectation that he insists on the use of his middle initial) wrote a book about Joseph Papp, I was invited to the book party at the apartment of the Littles. There I had a chance to chat with Christopher and observe him in relaxation. Then there was yet another professional photography session, in what connection I don’t remember.

  I called my brother’s charming and indiscreet daughter and told her I was looking for a photographer, but that since said photographer would be a member of my party, he had to be just right, because you don’t set out across the sea to eat ninety consecutive meals across the table from someone who isn’t exactly right. Priscilla, who had known Christopher since childhood, said he was splendid in every way. But Priscilla is only twenty-three years old, so (uncharacteristically) I decided to be a little more thorough, and called Christopher to ask if he would come around, as I wanted to talk to him about something.

  The meeting was at my apartment on Seventy-third Street. Christopher was instantly disarming. “Look, Mr. Buckley [he said], I have to level with you. Priscilla confided to me over the phone what this is all about. I went out ten minutes later and found a copy of your book Airborne. I finished it at five this morning. I’ve always wanted to cross the ocean. I want to go on this trip, desperately. I will take the best pictures you ever saw.”

  I took the precaution of asking him for a portfolio of pictures and, during the weekend, I and Pat (wife) and son (also Christopher) viewed them, and were much taken by them, as I had been by him. The subject of remuneration came up and I asked him to let me know what his fee would be. As so often happens in tender social situations, the subject of money gets picked up like a dead mouse, the breath held until the creature is dropped in the garbage. Weeks went by, and three times I had to press him. “After equal amounts of thought and procrastination,” he finally replied by mail, “I’ve arrived at some figures which seem to make sense.” I was greatly disconcerted, not to say astonished, at learning that he intended to shoot a total of 270 rolls of film, or 9,720 pictures. I replied, “I now wish your letter had been delayed even further…. I find the figures too high, but it grieves me terribly to argue with you (or anybody) about money…. I’d be sullen, but not mutinous, with a total bill, including expenses, of [I gave a figure]; but I would be extremely unhappy if you were unhappy…. What shall we do?” To which he replied, “We are in complete accord on at least two points—our enthusiasm for this grand project
and our aversion to arguments about money. I accept your counteroffer without a trace of rancor. I hope this letter resolves our business and leaves us free to enjoy a venture which, frankly, is the most exciting single project of my career.” Was ever a partnership better launched? Only the champagne was missing, but there would be time for that….

  “How’s everything else?” I asked on the phone.

  “Great. When are you getting back?”

  “Friday.”

  “The magazine will be out Monday. I might have a copy for you on Sunday.” “Terrific.”

  “Thanks again. Sorry about the hour. But that’s the way they work down here at deadline time.”

  We said good night. I thought, How quickly conventional habits are resumed. At eleven-thirty at night during the preceding month, far from being asleep, I was on watch duty. That was my one great big perk. I always took the watch from 8 P.M. to midnight, the dream watch. To be sure that’s when, as navigator, I’d work out the star sights. But it meant you could sleep the night through, barring a difficulty the watch captain didn’t want to take responsibility for: I was the captain, and always on call. Eating supper at seven tends to leave you undisposed for sleep at eight, though the two crew members (one chief and one Indian as we called them) who had the watch from midnight to 4 A.M. usually were asleep, if not by eight, by nine or a little later, unless their spirits and stamina were especially high—there were even nights when the midnight watch slept not at all before going on duty, electing instead to read in the saloon, or play a little poker. Much depended on how greatly they had exerted themselves during the day.

  The duty roster, by sailboat standards, was close to hedonistic: four hours on, eight hours off. The roster was systematically interrupted, in order to effect social rotation. To arrange this may strike you as easy, but that is only if you fail to reflect that chiefs and Indians are not interchangeable parts. There must be one chief on watch, which meant me, or Reggie (we’ve sailed together twenty-five years) or Danny, who is a chief though only in his late twenties, like Christopher (Christopher is an Indian because although he has sailed, he is not in Danny’s league, Danny having for four years skippered my yawl, taking out charter parties, and sailed and raced with me since he was thirteen). Van is an Indian, even though he is my age and has sailed with me practically since our college days together. There is something about Van, who is omnicompetent as a banker, and as a human being, that resists that incremental effort to dominate the art sufficient to earn a chief’s star; and besides, he would laugh right through the graduation ceremony, causing shambles. Although Tony is younger even than Christopher and Danny, he is a chief, having spent most of the two years after he finished Harvard racing sailboats, including a transatlantic race. He is a seasick chief the first day or two of any leg, but shrewd, and sound of judgment, quiet-spoken, happier at the helm when it is winding up and the waves have hit their stride, even than when eating, though it’s close.

  So then, why do it again? I had given the People people a flip reply, but the metaphor is not inept. Sailing satisfies, for some people, a certain quiet lust. Sailing across the Atlantic is both an elemental and a social experience. There are those who like to do it alone, even as there are mountain climbers who want to do it alone. I admire them, but disdain that masturbatory lust—you plus the sea plus the vessel are less than you plus the sea plus the vessel plus one or more companions. At one point during the crossing Danny evidently felt he had to say it, and did so even to an inanimate logbook: “This is one hell of a sleigh ride, Santa. Speed 10.15. Winds now gusting to 45 knots!” Would Danny have felt the same satisfaction if he had had only the logbook to speak to? Since first setting down my thoughts on the matter I have read Philip Weld’s enthralling book Moxie, an account of his single-handed race from Plymouth to Newport (a coincidence: our passages were simultaneous) in which among other things he condescended to set a world speed record for single-handed Atlantic crossings. He is so persuasive on the distinctive pleasures of a solitary passage that he very nearly takes you into his net….

  But then I return to my log, and read Tony’s entry when risen at 4 A.M. to relieve the predecessor watch.

  “Very cold and wet. Reg and Christopher somewhat happy and extremely exhilarated.”

  An experienced logbook reader, who is also an experienced friend of the principals, will know that that entry suggests ever so lightly that the oncoming chief detected, in the watch he was relieving, both natural, and synthetic, stimulants to the spirit.

  How to substitute for such exchanges? It is required that you have aboard companions who take, and give, pleasure from refractions of every kind. Without them we lose what the social scientists so regrettably term the “interfaces.” My conviction—though, after reading Philip Weld, no longer dogmatically pronounced—is that the entirety of the experience grows out of the sea and the shared experience, the operative word here being “shared.” Because, without my companions, it would not have been possible to say that when, finally, after twenty-eight days, we tied in to the slip at Marbella at midnight, I knew what (usually set in other contexts) goes by the name of the repose of the soul.

  Book One

  1

  Owning boats is costly in a second sense of the word. You can’t rusticate them—as you might, say, an atelier. I have a little such studio, and when I reach Switzerland I am fifteen minutes separated from cruising speed rpm. The paints are all there, the dust on the canvases can be made to disappear in seconds. The brushes, cleaned, are good again this year and will be, a dozen years down the line. (My painting companion in Switzerland is David Niven, and today he uses the identical brushes he bought in Hollywood before the Second World War. When he told me this he rejected my flattering suggestion that perhaps they really dated back to when he had gone ‘round the world in eighty days.) Everything, put simply, is just sitting there—canvases, turpentine, linseed oil, easels, sketch pads.

  Boats require constant tending. I speak now of wooden boats and steel boats, not having experienced the others, though I flatly doubt the chimera of the “maintenance-free boat” even if you stick one in hermetically sealed glass. (Beard-McKie—“Outfitting: Series of maintenance tasks performed on boats ashore during good-weather weekends in spring and summer months to make them ready for winter storage.”)

  Foremost to worry about when owning a boat ready to go to sea is, of course, the expense. But if you seek to mitigate this burden by chartering out your boat, administrative burdens are added to economic burdens. A week seldom goes by without a problem of personnel; or another requiring a decision whether to replace this or that piece of equipment, revise that insurance policy, accept a charter that wishes to leave the boat in Haiti…. Was it worth it all?

  I resolved, the summer after sailing my Cyrano to Spain (on an unforgettable cruise), to probe whether the same spirit that had taken us airborne across the Atlantic could be recaptured. So I reassembled most of the crew. This time I would take her to Mexico. During that trip I decided that on its completion I would experiment with a crewless boat. I would cut expenses by paying a splendid Cuban-American carpenter, who had done work on the boat in preparation for its transatlantic adventure, to spend a half day per week aboard, running the motor, turning on the lights, doing a little varnishing—that sort of thing. I would stop offering the boat for charter on a daily, weekend, or weekly basis, as I had been doing for nine years. That had required maintaining full-time a captain, cook, mate and steward. I would offer it fully staffed, but only for charters of ninety-day duration or longer. I talked to Reggie about it during the Mexican trip. We would see.

  I kept a brief journal of that cruise.

  There is something especially alluring in sailing to a foreign country. But no foreign country is finally exotic if its natives speak English: Thus a trip to Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, though there is much to be said for it, is not quite the same thing as it would be if M. Lévesque and his Parti Québécois practiced a littl
e irredentism and recaptured Fort Louisburg. One of the charms of the Leeward Islands is the need to accommodate to a different language virtually every time you throw out your anchor. Sailing to Europe meets all the tests, but is something of an enterprise. Sailing to Yucatan is less than a transatlantic labor. Indeed, Miami-Yucatan is less than Newport-Bermuda. But you achieve the feeling of having slipped away to a remote and thoroughly foreign country, and as a matter of fact you have.

  When you dwell on the distance between the Dry Tortugas (the final U.S. departure point) and Mujeres Island (the nearest Mexican point of land)—290 miles—you need to fight the feeling that your outing has been on the order of driving from San Diego to Tijuana. It is more than that for several reasons. Not the least of these is that lying in wait for you if your attention flags, just a few miles to the south, for over one half the distance, is the dragon Fafnir, guarding the forbidden treasures of Cuba. How far offshore from Cuba, I asked my friendly patron at the State Department, must I stay?

  “They assert three miles of territorial sovereignty, and twelve for customs,” I was told; but it does not do to tease them in the matter, as Lloyd Bucher, commanding the Pueblo, did the North Koreans. On no account slip past the twelve-mile limit.

  “What happens if you do?”

  There’s the rub. Anything can happen. One day a little Cuban coast guard vessel will politely usher you back out of Gulag waters. But another day the same vessel will take you to port, seize your boat, and submit you to a large dose of the People’s Hospitality, for days, maybe even weeks, depending on the temperature of international relations and the caprice of the Maximum Caudillo. The mere presence of Castro over one hundred miles or so of coastline is bracing, in the morbid sense that the Berlin Wall is bracing.

  Although determined that on setting out from Miami aboard my beloved Cyrano the ship would be totally equipped for the journey, foreknowledge that we would be passing by Key West encouraged a kind of nonchalance inappropriate to the preceding excursion one year earlier when the identical crew, save one substitute, set out from Miami bound for Marbella in Spain. This time we knew, subconsciously, that any egregious act of neglect could be corrected ninety miles down the road. I had my ritual bout with technology, which struts its imperfections with special flair aboard Cyrano. This year it was the single side-band radiotelephone. This wonderful machine we had used with extravagant delight going across the Atlantic. But no sooner had the vessel returned than the telephone company announced a new rate structure. The rate had been a dollar or two per call plus the local rate, so that a casual phone call from, say, Longitude 25° to Longitude 75° was something of a bargain. No more. The item escaped our attention until, after our Christmas cruise, the telephone bill came in, which I returned to the phone company with a cheerful note suggesting they oil their computers and send us a fresh bill.