Calypso Telltales: Urgent Alert

Monday, November 28, 2016

Urgent Alert

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About Me

LAURIE DOBSON: --October 21, 2014 This is the beginning of my sea voyage narrative. It could have started at an earlier point, or on the day we set off, anticipated to be early Friday morning. My story could have started years earlier in the build-up to my getting ready to live aboard a sailboat and head down to Tortola by way of the heavy weather we will hit on our way through to Bermuda. In fact, it doesn't matter where we start this, because, llike the waves rolling our boat, the Calypso, around tonight, it is a story that starts in forward motion. It could start in many places, but we would end up here, because I have narrowed my life and my options to this one excursion which shapes my destiny. What matters to me is what I am doing this FOR, and that is the problem. Just like my life, I am not certain still, at the age of 58, what I am meant to be doing. With the huge case of mission focus I have carried around as a military offspring, it seems like a failure not to be sure about myself and have the utmost confidence, while doing it. Much of my past seems to pave the way to my being here now, as a newbie, on a 'shakedown' cruise, meaning my first time out in blue water, cruising in a sailboat. Confidence is easy, pointing myself toward whatever is coming is second nature. Moving around the US ten times before the age of twelve and seeing the USA from the back of the station wagon with three other sisters in the early sixties was how I understood my role, which was to be ready for anything at a moment's notice. Ready to leave, or not. Here we came and there we went. My mother told me that my grandfather was an electrician, working on skyscrapers, such as the Time Life Building. I thought that was very daring, and I followed that family bent by becoming passionate about diving off the high dive as a youngster, or diving passionately into hobbies and interests, such as climbing trees in Oklahoma, where they were fairly scarce, in the panhandle, on an Air Force Base called Clinton Sherman, in Burns Flat, Oklahoma, off Rt. 66. My Dad flew planes, and was cool in my view, and we had pool privileges at the Officer's Club; I grew up thinking that life was none too bad. I developed the idea that I could be anyone and do anything, and acquired a bravura that carries me off beyond the usual restraints that I see other people impose on themselves. My father came from a town called Kennebunkport, in Maine, which to me growing up was considered the absolute boonies. When I was 12 in 1968, we were stationed to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH. I was ecstatic, not so much for the fact that I would attend schools with mostly town folk (and also some kids whose families worked at the Navy Yard), but because the trees were so high and green and lush, and there were lakes, and the ocean. The ocean! My Dad's father was a lobsterman, who owned the first diesel and fastest Beal's Island lobster boat out of Jonesport, which he underscored when he barreled out of Cape Porpoise harbor; he loved making fun where he could, to the consternation of some and the amusement of many. He worked hard every day out on his boat, when he wasn't making round wooden traps and nets in his workshop, or wooden lobster buoys (his were pure white and marked GG on them for his name, George Goodrich). He was a salty jokester, who was a good shot and who took chances, living a daredevil life as he made an impression on many people who have told me stories about him. In the twenties as a youth he climbed hand over hand to the Wandby, a ship that wrecked nearby, to avail himself of the loot, as did many others. He shot seagulls off other people's boats for a lark, and once shot an apple off the head of a fellow drinking buddy, who survived, fortunately, or my story would be drastically different. My grammy was loved by all, and ran 'Sadie's Swimming Lobsters', a roadside clam and lobster hut on the Mill's Road where they built a new house after the fire of 1947. Memories of them include family picnics with barrels of lobster my grandfather would bring us, down from Maine, all smelly with live lobsters packed in ice. I learned many things about their history when I moved back to Maine, after leaving in my early twenties, to go off to New York City. I was first set on following my Mom's footsteps, as she was born in Brooklyn and had her New York City adventures. My mom's growing up years were of romantic memories of Jones Beach, of working as a model, briefly, and then working as a publicity department assistant at the Daily News, and a counter girl at Macy's Department Store. Macy's still has the big parades at Thanksgiving, which were always a reminder to her of her early years. At Thanksgiving, we would watch them with her, and wonder about her interesting life before she became an Air Force Wife. She faithfully followed my dad through his twenty years as a career officer, from base to base, finally settling in the backwoods near Goose Rocks Beach where they built barns, houses, workshops, a hangar- where my dad built his three airplanes-and even a runway, where he would taxi us over to, across the field, and take us up in his balsa wood creations, including an ultralight, and fly around the 'Port. Recently I had a barn sale in my parent's hangar, and people asked me where the old yellow Piper Cub was; they missed seeing the plane out in the back field, where my folks also raised polled Herefords, a farm they dubbed 'Back Acres Ranch', most appropriately, since they cleared so many trees to make room for cows and planes. When I moved back to the Port, in 2005, I learned that my grandfathers' family tree went back to affluent sailors and farmers coming through Portsmouth from Devon, England in the late 1600's; they arrived in town as my ancestor Samuel Seaward came to Kennebunkport to marry Martha Hutchins. My Dad's stories mostly revolved around the locality, while he could remember them, such as the time when Dicky Emmons, a young scamp, took down one of the two fir trees in the front yard of the house my dad lived in as a youth in Cape Porpoise one year, for their Christmas tree. It's right down the street from where the tree made from the lobster traps gets built every year during the festivities known as 'Christmas Prelude' happen the first two weeks of December. That's the same house that had the tilted garage, (Grampy was no carpenter), where my dad helped his dad to beat off the fire of 1947 from the roof, to save the home, and also helped the neighbors. He was born in 1931, so that would have made him 16, right around when he developed a hankering to get out of town and into the air. I imagine it was pretty acrid and brutal after the fire. He can't tell me his stories anymore, as he has had Alzheimers now for eleven years. My mom is still there, has been there by his side all this time, and is keeping it all together. I have tried to reconcile my sense of duty with my desire to grab my own moment and go live my adventure. It's not that I haven't had many adventures before now, I have enough for a series of books, I say modestly. In retrospect, though, they have been a 'prelude' of their own, to the moment I am at now. I feel an extreme sense of keen awareness that I am embarking on a quest, not just for 'vision' but for all my senses. I feel as if I am still living my childhood dream of being a missionary, flying with my late sister, Lisa; our idea was that I would preach and she would fly us in and out of the bush. She never did become a pilot, although she joined the Air Force and worked as an operator in the towers. Two of her four sons followed her into the Air Force, both returned from duty and are now fathers, whereas I am yet to be made a grandmother by any of my three children. Which is fine! They can live their lives their own way. My duty still calls me out, though, expecting me to contribute something worthwhile. At least not to become a useless person, although I may have to redefine 'useless' to not automatically exclude people having fun. But duty calls in strange ways; I have done more than my share of volunteering: 15 years as an active PTA parent and active in my community in the town of Rowayton, CT, where I settled with the then husband, who grew up nearby in the entitled town of Greenwich. I met him in New York City where I moved with a girlfriend. I had the luck to have found a job at Rolling Stone Magazine, where I coordinated travel for employees, including the writers and photographers on intriguing assignments, and also processed insurance claims, (so I was pretty much into everybody's private business). In the City I met the father of my children; we had three and raised them in Rowayton, CT, before it ended in our divorce after 17 years. To be very brief, I remarried happily for nearly ten years; we lived in Vermont for a few years and then back to Maine and in the same town as my parents, and I could finally live near 'the grandparents' while my youngest was in high school. My mother, who has kept her own council, made good friends, been economical, been a vital member of her community, and also kept her figure and her loving nature, is the dream mother. When my late husband developed a brain tumor the year after we arrived, she helped me keep it together and got me into playing bridge, which was something I could do for HER and something that got me out of the house when he died. She is now the house bound one, but is happy for my ability to live a life of adventure, maybe to do something truly glorious, which has eluded me thus far, not for want of trying. I am a multi-talented mother pleaser, I guess you could say, and that ain't all bad. I still hope the hopes she has instilled in me and dream the dreams. What is wrong with a life lived hopefully? I remember to this day a morning 'prayer' that was repeated by me, age 16, and my fellow campers, at summer girl scout camp, a poem I just learned was from Robert Louis Stevenson. It can be googled, it starts, 'give us to awake with smiles, give us to labor smiling, give us health, good food, bright weather and light hearts.' --this, from a man who was a life-long invalid. He wrote Treasure Island about Blackbeard who purportedly left his gold on Norman Island in the BVI(British Virgin Islands). I intend to go there. I intend adventure! Here I am now, about to leave small potato-land. A bit roundabout way of coming to this point; I haven't said enough about my own family, about my son, Jesse, who just got married in Seattle, or about my elder daughter Lily who is an accomplished artist, writer and musician. Then there is my youngest daughter Emma and her husband Dillan, who have just moved into the house my beau Bob and I just finished rebuilding (down the road from the home I first lived in here for 9 years). Bob is one reason I am in good shape emotionally after some devastating years dating, while he stood by as my builder friend. He met me after Michael died, and helped me renovate two other houses in town. It was an occupation that came naturally after my many years in the landscape architecture business with my late husband, and my owning my own landscaping and remodeling business; and also getting into antiques as a side venture. Bob was a live aboard; he rebuilt his own 43 foot Viking powerboat and lived on it for eight years. He was firm about wanting to live on a sailboat someday, a prospect I did not share in the slightest. No interest, none, whatsoever, I thought, then. I also had no intention of settling down. Gradually, very gradually, he won me over, when I realized the friendship had grown and I was ready as a good deal of time passed. Four years later and we decided to go look at a few sailboats down the coast in Mystic CT and Portsmouth RI, and came back to Maine to find a boat advertised to have many bells and whistles. It was actually an understatement. The Calypso is a boat unlike any other; in point of fact. It took the owner, who was a former editor of Practical Sailor, ten years of diligent effort fine tuning the boat in his driveway in Newport, RI. He finished the hull of a boat whose keel he purchased in England, a 'Saltram Saga'. He and his wife sailed the boat for four years, traveling around the world and writing about every aspect of their boat and their travels as they went. He took periodic trips off the boat when they were in various ports to work as one of the measurers for the America's Cup. After we bought the boat, they visited for an afternoon and he was delighted to see that all the spare parts he so carefully procured for the boat were still on board, and everything was in good shape after ten years of good care and sailing by a doctor who needed to sell her, reluctantly, to us. It was such an incredible moment, to step aboard an know for certain that it was to be our boat. The realization is dawning that soon, very very very soon, we will be underway, if all goes as planned. This is enough, more than enough! to tell in one sitting. Off for now.

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Monday, November 28, 2016

Urgent Alert

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