Thanksgiving, 2006 - 2006-11-27 17:41:37 We're at our place in lovely St. John, arriving a week before Thanksgiving. The first few days, we spent doing all the odd chores that accrue in a house in the tropics after being away for a few months.
Actually, the house was in pretty good shape. Our friend Wayne looks after it when we're not here. He comes up at least once a week and checks all the lights, fans, faucets, and showers. He also flushes all the commodes. If these things aren't done, everything falls into disrepair, corroding or dissolving in turn. It's something most folks don't realize, that an unoccupied house tends to atrophy, and fail. In a warm climate, where everything is attacked by insects, salt, and various climactic wear and tear, the process is speeded up all the more. So we're thankful for Wayne who does a great job for us.
My big project was to install an automatic gate opener. The old one, a relatively light affair, had sputtered to a stop and no amount of troubleshooting and repairs by Wayne and my buddy David could fix it. So I took the old one out and put in a really heavy duty gate opener. It worked great! But only for about five minutes. Then it stalled, and died. After several days of breadboarding it back in my tool room, and trying everything I could imagine, and after consulting the manufacturer, I determined the problem was something called a revolution counter inside the gate arm. The manufacturer says it "never" fails. Well, it did this time, and now I have to haul the blamed thing back to the states to get it fixed. In the meantime, I'm considering buying a backup opener from a hardware store in next door Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, if possible. Anyway, I'm a frustrated automatic gate repairman. It's not as if we're lazy and can't open our own gate. Our driveway is nearly vertical and long and curved. It's dangerous to walk up and down it. Linda fell down it last time and still has the scars to prove it!
Other than the frustration with the gate, things are good at Skyridge. The weather is warm and lovely, our tropical gardens bountiful and aromatic, and the scenery from our elevation of 600 feet of 14 islands, including the magnificent Sir Francis Drake channel, is literally breathtaking. I could spend hours on our deck just watching the boats go by, and maybe someday, I'll do just that. Right now, we're busy entertaining guests. We have Linda's parents, Walt and Sue, and her brother Chris and his girlfriend Claudia. Walt and Sue mostly enjoy staying at home, holding down the hammocks and chairs and watching the water world go by. Linda and I have been snorkeling with Chris and Claudia nearly every day. They're comfortable in the water, and that allows us to enjoy ourselves and not be worrying about them getting into trouble. Yesterday, we hiked up to Ram's Head, a magnificent headland a couple of hundred feet above the sea. Bill and Sarah, our friends who live nearby in our St. John neighborhood known as Upper Carolina, also went with us. We enjoyed the view, then came down to snorkel in the cove we call Blue Rock Beach, named after the millions of blue pebbles that cover the beach and make a most delightful sound when the gentle waves roll them over and over. It was a good snorkel. We spotted two nice hawksbill turtles, always fun to see.
One of our snorkels was to Waterlemon Caye which is near some old sugar mill ruins. Waterlemon is one our favorite places to snorkel as we usually see turtles, rays, and sometimes nurse sharks there. This time, we saw a green turtle (which are fairly rare), another hawksbill, lots of reef fish, but no rays or sharks. Oh, well, next time! What you see on the reefs depends very much on the time of the year, the temperature of the water, and the prevailing winds.
Our friends from Atlanta, Claus and Debbie, have purchased a house within walking distance of us. They're here, and family members arrived on Thanksgiving. I wish them well but it's not easy to entertain guests down there unless they're entertained by the sea, the mountains, and the sun. That's always been enough for me but some folks get used to city life and nearly forget what nature is really like, and how to enjoy it.
Me? I've always enjoyed the outdoor life, especially when I'm diving, snorkeling, hiking, or hunting dinosaurs. I don't like canned adventures. For instance, I am completely, utterly, totally bored at a place like Disney World. Much of modern, civilized life does not appeal to me, frankly. I once thought I would have been happier living in the pirate days, but Linda thinks I was once a U-boat captain. Certainly, when I began my series of adventures researching what eventually became Torpedo Junction, I felt a great affinity for the U-boats and their crews. I was among the first divers to penetrate the sunken wreck of the U-352 off Cape Hatteras and I felt perfectly at home inside it, and knew my way around. Of course, the fact that I had studied for hours the layout diagram of the Type VII U-boat might have had something to do with that. Wreck diving is a dangerous sport and must be approached with care. I always did that, and maybe that's why I'm still around, although with a few scars from dragging my body through jagged torpedo holes. Many divers have been lost inside wrecks, unable to find their way out. My buddy Dave Todd once penetrated an ocean-going tug named the Marjorie McAllister where we encountered the remains of several unlucky crewmen. The MM had turned upside down when it sank, and so up was down, and down was up, just as in The Poseidon Adventure movie.
After our unexpected discovery of the still clothed skeletons, we were momentarily disoriented, especially with the silt stirred up when Dave pulled away one of the shirts off a skeleton. Suddenly, we were in zero vis, not certain where anything was, including the hatches. My heart rate shot up to about 1000 beats a minute, and the adrenaline spurted by the gallon. Add that to the naturally occurring nitrogen narcosis (rapture of the deep) which fuzzes the brain, and we were in trouble. With great difficulty, I forced myself to think, and concentrate, and not panic and start trying to muscle my way out of the situation which surely would have ended with our deaths. Gradually, I calmed myself down, slowing my breathing rate (air supply was dwindling, too) and thought of the route we'd taken coming in, and signalled Dave to follow me. We never were so glad to see the pale blue light coming through one of the deck hatches that led to our escape from the watery grave. We had nearly joined the dead of the Marjorie McAllister. Oddly enough, they raised that wreck and it's now back in service along the Atlantic coast.
I'm getting a small amount of work done on The Red Helmet, my novel set in today's West Virginia coalfields. Of course, I am always thinking how best to promote my next novel to be published, The Far Reaches, that comes out in June. The third in the "Josh Thurlow" trilogy, I think it stands alone and needs to be marketed as such.
The Far Reaches has Josh participating in the savage South Pacific battle of Tarawa. There, as the battle ends, he meets a young, Irish and quite beautiful nun with an astonishing and terrible secret. Thus begins his greatest challenge and adventure. He must save the nun, the people she loves, and also, incidentally, himself. It is an exciting novel, if I do say so myself, and I hope you'll enjoy it! For you fans of Rocket Boys who are convinced that book is the only one written by me worth reading, let me recommend once more to please read something else by that author Hickam. You might just find another favorite book! I swan.
More to come. Hope you and yours had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
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