Author: David Churbuck

Cape Codder with an itch to write

Dave? Dave’s not here man.

I hate the phone. I hated it as a kid, I hate it even more not.

The old phone in Cotuit was on a party line shared with a few neighbors and as a child I was warned never to pick it up unless it made some distinctive ring, like a long/short/short sequence I could never remember. The phone was a wall phone, rotary dialed, and in those days one didn’t have to dial the entire prefix when dialing around Cotuit or even Osterville — a simple five digits were all that were needed.

When I was allowed to answer the thing I was expected to be some perfect Lord Fauntleroy of telephonic etiquette and say “Churbuck Residence” and never “Hello?” There was one, and only one phone in the entire house, and if the call was for a grown-up one was expected to haul ass screaming from room to room that there was a CALL!

Long distance calls were expensive. As I grew older and called summer friends at their winter homes out of loneliness my father would call me to task and confront me with $15 charges for daring to yak with my buddy Jeffrey in Philadelphia. I’d have to work the conversation off raking leaves or doing some grim chore until I was so paranoid I never dared use it again.

The lack of mobile phones meant children were truly out of sight and out of mind. No one could stalk us if we took off on our bikes — the only rule was to report in ASAP if the firehouse whistle blew two times, the signal for an ambulance which made every Cotuit mother a nervous wreck until her flock checked in.

Skip ahead to 2017 and I have an ADHD inducing supercomputer in my hand that chirps, rings, belches and vibrates every time someone posts a picture of their latest meal on Instagram, tweets their displeasure, shares a video on Facebook, decides its cool to call me with a robot offering me solar panels, or finds me on LinkedIn and cold calls me to hear their sales pitch for “dynamic social engagement metrics solutions.”

So I turn the thing off and people are pissed. I get it, the entire purpose of the little tyrant is to be reachable anywhere, anyplace, anytime, but if nine out of ten actual phone calls are from IRS scammers in India, if text messages consist of incomprehensible emojis of poop, guns, vomiting smiley faces, and the rest is just so much shitty noise in a life already driven to Adderall by email, Slack, instant messages, news alerts, and all appointment reminders; then who the hell wouldn’t set the thing to “no disturb” and learn to ignore it?

Don’t get me started on the asshats who stroll the sidewalks of Boston with their earphones plugged in and their eyes locked onto their screens, just begging for a Silver Line bus to put them out of their shoes and their misery while obliviously crossing Atlantic Avenue. Don’t get me started on the parking lot entropy caused by some dipshit with their hand held to their ear as they blab away while trying to take off the bumper of my car. Don’t get me started on the pissed off accusations of “DON’T YOU EVER ANSWER YOUR PHONE” when I go silent on friends and families.

In my retirement I think I’m going device free. Heck, the inner Amish in me might even go back to candlelight and kick electricity out of my life.

The Mashpee Woodlot Revolt of 1833

I met someone yesterday who has a summer home on Briant’s Neck on Santuit Pond in Mashpee. Of course I got all professorial on them and started babbling about the Trout Mound and the old Wampanoag meeting house that used to stand on the neck until it was moved to its present location by oxen in 1717 ……

Anyway, I dug around on this blog to find my posts from 2013 when I presented a paper to the Cotuit Historical Society on the history of Mashpee and the “Woodlot Revolt of 1833 and realized I didn’t have the full paper on the site.

So here is the PDF. All 23 pages of it.

The Mashpee Woodlot Revolt of 1833

JP Donleavy: 1926-2017

JP Donleavy — The Ginger Man

The other evening I went to an afterwork cocktail party and light dinner with a couple dozen colleagues at a local pub called “The Ginger Man.” I’ve strolled past the place countless times, but had written it off as just another bad Irish pub in a neighborhood thick with them.

The Ginger Man, now there’s a novel to remember. It was so inappropriate when it was published in the mid 1950s that it was judged too obscene to publish in the UK and US and had to be printed by some Parisian porno press. It was the debut of James Patrick Donleavy, an American-Irish novelist born in New York City and educated at Trinity College in Dublin, and is the tale of a scurrilous American law student who lives a deplorable life of chasing women and punishing his liver while his pregnant wife frets at home. It is not a novel any man’s wife is going to suggest to her book club, and Oprah isn’t going to get gushy about it. Ever.

1024px-J._P._Donleavy_appearing_on_"After_Dark"%2C_16_March_1991.jpg

Donleavy was a remarkably funny, and very talented writer. One of his later works, Schultz, is one of the funniest things I’ve read — recommended to me by my Falstaffian step-brother Joe Nickerson and his British rugby buddy, (and my proctologist) Mark Bazalgette (whose ancestor, Sir Joseph Bazalgette: invented London’s sewer) — as part of a “bad-men doing unspeakable acts” series of literary works which includes the wonderful Money by Martin Amis. Basically tales of crapulous debauchery involving pornography, alcohol, bad hygiene, and inadvertent acts of public vandalism. I would include Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in this canon of party-hearty fiction, but The Ginger Man came first.

I walked into the bar and saw no evidence of JP Donleavy. The chalkboard behind the back bar seemed to honor some deceased customer, but not Donleavy, who passed away last month at the age of 91.

I ordered an Irish whiskey from the waiter but he claimed to have none. Detesting Guinness I looked at the list of expensive single malt scotches, asked the waiter if he was taking names and attendance, and assured of anonymity on the tab,  ordered a peaty Talisker neat. Ate a “slider”, slapped some backs, “rang the bell” making sure those who needed to note my presence took notice, and then pulled a sober Irish-goodbye to make the next train to Providence.

The end of a long voyage: the Aubreyad

In the 1990s, as the maritime novels of Patrick O’Brian emerged from obscurity to the top of the bestseller lists,  I took the advice of my good friend and neighbor Phil and invested in the first few volumes of the 20-volume epic. For some reason I never had the attention span to march through them all, as O’Brian was still living and writing new volumes at the rate of one per year up to his death in 2000. Maybe I was distracted by work or fatherhood, but  my reading tastes  were then focused on the history of the Byzantine empire and not the exploits of a Royal Navy Post Captain and his learned, naturalist-spy-surgeon during the first two decades of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars.

master_26_commander_cover

Maritime fiction and nonfiction has long been a personal favorite, beginning with the Hornblower series by C.S. Forrester,  Melville’s Moby Dick  and Typee and Omoo, the accounts of the first solo circumnavigators like Joshua Slocum, Bernard Moitessier, Sir Francis Chichester; the Atlantic oarsmen, Blythe and Ridgway and Robert Manry’s account of crossing the Atlantic in the 13-foot Tinkerbelle. At the top of the maritime stack has always sat Joseph Conrad, maybe my favorite writer in the English language, particularly for Lord Jim and The Nigger of the Narcisssus. From my earliest introduction to the shelf of sailing yarns at the Cotuit Library in the 1960s by the patient Ida Anderson to my college major in American maritime history, I have always been a sucker for a good sea story.

tinkerbelle_by_robert_manrySo last winter, as I whittled away at a 1:16 scale model of a New Bedford whaling boat, I found myself in a maritime history kind of mood, feeling truly an armchair sailor, and without giving it much thought decided to pick up the first volume in O’Brian’s 20-volume, 6,900-page saga — Master and Commander —and read it during my morning and evening commutes across Boston harbor on a Kindle.

By the time I paid my book tax to Amazon for the third time I realized I was screwing myself with ebooks, as I would losing the opportunity to collect the full   set to share with my sons and fill out yet another bookshelf in the home library. So I went on eBay, poked around, and found a complete set of paperbacks and hardcovers for $60. With Amazon gouging me over $10 per electronic edition, I was ahead as soon as I hit the buy button. A heavy box arrived a week later from some used book dealer and I’ve been buried in it ever since.

For the past nine months I’ve been savoring the series and using it as a springboard to dive deeper into the history of the Royal Navy, the War of 1812, the Enlightenment’s blossoming of the Royal Society as naturalists and scientists devoured their discoveries  and explored the globe. Yes, like most I had associated a lot of the series with the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but the experience was much more than any two hour film could hope to deliver (and I liked the movie a lot).

Like the critics who embraced the novels, I consider it a masterpiece of not just maritime literature or historical fiction, but one of the most ambitious and finely realized epic masterpieces of the English language. The depth of the language, the nautical nomenclature, the interweaving of actual historical events with the fictional characters and their personal backstories is nothing short of a masterpiece. While I whipped through the first volumes, I found myself slowing down, savoring the experience as winter turned to spring, reading a few pages on the train every morning and evening, index card marked with obscure vocabulary and nautical terms to look up later and add to my running O’Brian lexicon list. Then, these past few weeks, as the stack of books dwindled, I started to feel sad that it was all coming to an end; and last night it did. The twentieth volume — Blue at the Mizzen — ending sweetly with a piquant closure that leads me to believe the two familiar men – Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin would evermore sail on.

Yes, there is a 21st book — it consists of the first 60 pages of the next book which O’Brian started at the age of 85 before his death in January 2017. I have it ready to go,  fascinated by the prospect of reading a master novelist’s handwritten first draft and corrected typescript, just as I was when I once handled a page of Conrad’s palimpsest for the Narcissus and saw how the master struck out redundant words and experimented until he found the magical bon mot.

 

NYTimes: Watching Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Katia From 22,000 Miles Above Earth

Watching Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Katia From 22,000 Miles Above Earth https://nyti.ms/2xWvV9V

I find the time-lapse hypnotic. The new GOES 16 satellite has something like 4x the resolution of the older satellites and makes a beautiful but frightening point in this time lapse video

Petaluma – an open wherry

I have been looking for a small boat project to cut my teeth on. The need is for a light, easily car-topped rowing scull that can handle a slight chop and be used for river, creek, and harbor rowing. It has to have a sliding seat and riggers like a true scull and be rugged enough to put up with saltwater and some general neglect. In other words I don’t want a racing shell or anything at the level of a Carl Douglas or a Graeme King single, and I already have a tired composite trainer, an Empacher single I bought in the late 90s with some dot.com cash which is woefully tired and due for a refresh.

I have no idea how to build a shell, but I assume it’s a real test of woodworking and boatbuilding skills. Both Douglas and King are essentially luthiers who command high prices and lots of patience on long waiting lists for their gem-like boats I want something relatively simple to build and more on the lines of a wherry than a racing shell.

So I started researching and came upon two designs worth consideration, both featured by Woodenboat Magazine. The first is the Kingfisher, a design by Graeme King that has been around for a few decades and is closer to the design of a true racing boat. With a V-bottom, the Kingfisher would appear to be a simpler design to build than a classic shaped-hull scull which is made by forming a thin skin of cedar over ribs. Because I am a “clydesdale” sized rower, I need something a little more capacious (sculls are sold in various sizes according to the weight of the person who will be rowing it and I am definitely at the XXXXL end of the scale).

I decided on the Petaluma, an 20-foot open wherry with no deck. This design was discovered in a garage in Petaluma, California and reproduced by a local boat builder, Gregg Sabourin. The original boat may date back to the 1920s — builder unknown — the only marking on the boat being the initials “CRC” which may stand for the “California Rowing Club.” The boat was probably rowed on the Petaluma River in Sonoma County which empties into San Pablo Bay at the northwestern head of San Francisco Bay.

According to Simon Watts, the California woodworker who sells the plans and building instructions, the original boat was planked in red cedar and fastened with copper clench nails.

petaluma

So I ordered a set of plans and now am looking for a local woodworker who can help me make the molds and has the tools needed to make the necessary cuts. Who knows? I may actually build a boat one of these days.