Memories Created and Memories Retrieved

Below is a guest posting from our long-time friend and now shipmate, Keith Stevenson.
(Received on 26 October 2011)

This is an entry from a blog interloper, one of two passengers described on the Ile de Grace's waybill as "crew," because of their longstanding friendships with Jon and Jen. Aside from sharing watch duties and lending a hand with the frequent changes in sail configurations on this Mauritius to South Africa leg of Grace's circumnavigation, Geert van der Kolk and I actually lead enviable lives, devoted mainly to reading and contemplation in the Southern Spring sun that sparkles on the endless blue Indian Ocean.

Foreign journeys expose us to new experiences from which come memories that we carry with us as long as we live. To expand on Ratty's observation to Mole, there is, however, nothing, nothing quite like messing about for a couple of weeks on a beautifully engineered 44' catamaran in the middle of one of the great oceans, relying only on three gracious and generous companions for food, shelter, transportation, good conversation, and for life itself -- or at least one's safe delivery at the possibly perilous journey's end! Here new experiences and the memories they nurture come every day. And, for one returning to the land of his birth, these experiences also retrieve and refurbish old memories.

The new experiences are easy to catalog and their impacts are relatively straightforward. The open ocean is vast and awe-inspiring (cliché, I know). The power of the waves when you're on top of them is quite frightening. A humpback whale's patent leather skin arching through the water as he escorts the boat for a few hundred meters is delightful. When flocks of birds swarm in a frantic cacophony above water churning with tuna feeding on bait fish fleeing Grace, one has seen "nature red in tooth and claw."

On board, life is a series of new experiences, at least for one who's never sailed a small boat on the open sea. Grace's navigation and electronic steering systems are so sophisticated that after a couple of days of instruction , I can be trusted on the solo night watches to make simple steering decisions and keep us away from steel leviathans carrying cargo to ports around the world. This is very exciting. The mechanics of changing sail arrangements in wind and swell challenge the balance of the Medicare-eligible, but this is the group that needs more adrenalin pulses. Bring it on!

Other experiences are more complex, drawing on both the present and the past. My wife, Catherine and I have known Jon and Jen for 20 years. Even after lengthy separations, one drops back into the friendship with no change in rhythm. They remain the same warm, welcoming, loving, exciting people, from whom one grabs all one can from their trove of new books, music, technology, ideas, recipes and people to enrich one's own life. And so, being with them on their boat, brings back memories of times in West Hartford, DC and Tampa. Memories flood back of dads and sons playing ice hockey on Woodridge Lake in the dusk. Little Katie Glaudemans, the only representative of her gender, scraps for the puck and refuses to be denied. She who is now the accomplished Kate who will decide whether or not my blog is worthy of posting . . . !

Experiences redolent of my South African past are the most complex. From the boat at night, the stars are brilliant in the pitch dark and the Magellan Clouds still create a silver carpet for Orion and his dogs, who never stop chasing Taurus, the bull, toward the Southern Cross. When you think that your head will burst from it all, Jupiter rises to blot out the lesser lights and then the Moon comes up to wash away almost all of the characters the Greeks worked so hard to invent. Just as it was when 55 years ago a shivering Boy Scout looked up from his winter camp and drew in his breath hard.

The most complex retrieved memory or set of memories on this trip came from a chance remark by Geert that, as a schoolboy in Holland, he had had to study the South African Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. To prove his point, he began singing, almost flawlessly, a plaintive Afrikaans ballad written around that time, called "Sarie Marais." In it a Boer prisoner of war, far from his homeland, longs for the sweetheart from whom he is separated ("My Sarie Marais is so ver van my hart en ek hoop om haar weer te sien.") This song has the same impact on Afrikaners that "Loch Lomond" has on the Scots. It also shares oblique suggestions that the separation may not be temporary. He cries out to be returned to the Transvaal where he and Sarie can be together again ("Oo bring my terug na die ou Transvaal; daar waar my Sarie woon."). Not only did this retrieve long-buried, complex memories of my own Afrikaner heritage, but it took me back 43 years to two graduate students in love, separated by the distance between MIT and NYU. The intensity of the loss of the other was as intense as any POW for his sweetheart. Now that marriage has minimized these separations, when they do occur, as now, they are as intense.

So, thank you Geert for retrieving these memories.
Good night Catherine; we'll soon be together again in the old Transvaal.
Thank you Jon and Jen for creating the environment for all these memories.
And thank you Kate for posting this.