Another week, another bailout and other news

We wake up this morning to find another huge amount of money going to shore up Citibank. 25 billion here, a 100 billion there, hundred of billions of guarantees elsewhere! Why do these crises always seem to occur and supposedly get resolved over the weekend? I remember from a history class of long ago that in the late 30s, Hitler did many of his actions, such as invading countries and breaking arm treaties, on Friday afternoon. He knew that by then, members of the English parliament would have all retreated to country houses. By the time they could reconvene and address the situation, they’d be reacting to “old news.” I know they are saying they need to have these bailouts in place before the markets open, but I wonder sometimes if it’s easier to pull the wool over our eyes on the weekend.

It snowed today and that makes me happy! It’s a big difference from a week ago when I was enjoying warm weather on the Carolina coast. The picture is of the new Johnny Mercer’s pier on Wrightsville Beach. The old Johnny Mercer’s Pier was like the Kure Beach one, with wooden pylons. Every time a storm came through, a bit more of the pier was washed away… This one is built of concrete and is said to be capable of handling a 200 mph hurricane. We'll see.

I woke at 1:27 AM this morning in the middle of a terrifying dream. Although I often dream and even write about them, and some of them are really weird, as a general rule they're not nightmares. This one was an exception. The dream started out pleasant enough. I was going home, but someone warned me of a voodoo threat for the bridges I'd have to cross. I laughed it off and headed toward my truck, when I found myself attacked by something I couldn't see but could feel it compress around me and I fell down screaming in pain and praying for deliverance. It took me while to get back to sleep. Any of you folks doing voodoo on me?

I’m working on some more memoirs that I hope to start postings by midweek. I’ll need to take a break away from any Thanksgiving preparations I have to make (dinner will be at someone else’s home, so I won’t have to worry about a turkey).

The Same River Twice (A Book Review)

Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 188 pages.

About a quarter through the book, Offutt quotes Heraclitius, from ancient Greece, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” (54) Yet, metaphorically that’s what Offutt attempts to do, to step into the same river twice. This book tells of him leaving the security of home for a decade of wandering, and then finally settling down in his own home as with his wife who’s pregnant with his first born child. Again, there is stability in his life, yet the river remains, connecting him to the larger world. In telling his story, Offutt alternates between his wife’s pregnancy and his years on the loose.

Offutt begins his journey in his Kentucky home in the hills of Appalachia. He acknowledges that the popular view of Appalachia is less than flattering, “a land where every man is willing, at the drop of a proverbial overall strap, to shoot, fight, or f—k anything on hind legs. We’re men who buy half-pints of bootlegged liquor and throw the lids away in order to finish the whiskey in one laughing, brawling night, not carrying where we wake or how far from home…. The truth is a hair different,” he confesses. (19-20) Offutt’s first stop is New York City, a place he describes as having half the people being crazy and the rest being therapists. (36) While in the big city, Offutt, in good southerly fashion, defends a homeless woman that’s being harassed. After the incident, they get together and he discovers that she isn’t a she. He flees, and later hooks up with a black woman who serves as his mentor. In a way, this sounds tripe and a bit racist, a southern boy shocked at the big city and then learning the ways of the world from a black girl, but Offutt pulls it off well. Offutt describes sex using the analogy of sharpening a knife against a whetstone and as a baseball game. (And no, he doesn’t credit Meatloaf, whose song, "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights," also describes making love as stealing home in a baseball game.)

Offutt’s crisscrosses the country in this travels, stopping for a while in Minneapolis, Boston, and Flamingo, Florida. He does a stint with a circus travelling through the South. He notes that “Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis.” And like his ancestors from the Civil War, Offutt see’s himself being loyal to no direction.” (109) Along the way, he identifies himself with Daniel Boone and Christopher Columbus, always striking out for what’s new, yet both whose lives ended up less that happy. It seems Offutt is following in their footstep. Each new location gives him opportunity for more adventures and misadventures: opportunities for drinking, drug use and experiencing life from the bottom of society. At one point, he notes that “like rotgut and rainfall,” he’d found his lowspot.” (160) He goes home for his brother’s wedding where he’s confronted for his lack of goals and finds himself feeling inferior, yet he also realizes that he’s the loved son and that his brother, by staying home and working hard, has been trying to earn the approval of the family. (120f)

Along the way, Offutt makes observations about life. He describes the human race as Icarus, “with melting wax and loss of altitude” (131) and the “underclass of evolution.” (133) His salvation comes from meeting Rita, his wife and the princess that helps him rise into respectability. With his wife’s prodding, he applies and accepted into the Iowa Writer’s School (obviously Offutt left out the schooling he’d picked up along the way as he’d quit school to go on the road). At the end of his book, like most new fathers, he’s excited and tells about it as if he’s the first to experience such joy, but also aware of the responsibility of he has and hoping to break his family’s mold of bad fathers.

I enjoyed this book. Although I’ve managed to avoid many of Offutt’s low spots, I found myself relating to the way Offutt explores what it means to become a man and a father and, as he travels around, he sees himself tied to the land and linked to history. I also agree with one of his mentors who remarked, “The West wasn’t tamed, it was corralled for slaughter.” (67) And finally, like Offutt, I want to hibernate in summer and get restless to strike out for new territories when the weather turns chilly. (54)

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Click here for more of Sage's book reviews.

Update and a poem

I’m home. My flight home had been changed and I was going to be coming in on the late flight, so I was glad to take a bump in Atlanta and allow the airline to put me up and give me enough money for another trip… So I got home yesterday morning, flying back in to a landscape dusted with snow. What a change! Driving home from the airport, I listened to Stephen Cobert on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” Sunday, on Comedy Central, Cobert will present his “Christmas Special.” It sounds like a lot of fun. One of the songs played on Fresh Air was a parody of the commercialization of Christmas, sung by Cobert and Elvis Costello. I think I know what I’ll be doing Sunday evening.

Monday night, my last night in North Carolina, I spent some time thinking on the Kure Beach pier. When the moon rose a little at 9 PM, it was blood red and inspired this poem. I don't understand everything about blogger formating an why the second part is spaced differently than the rest!


Observing the Apocalypse from Kure Beach Pier

Gazing upon the firmaments from the end of the pier
I’m serenaded by waves lapping against the wooden pylons
and the sound of the wind whipping against my jacket
chilling the back of my neck and erasing my cares.
I see Orion, rise on his side, out of the sea,
as if pulled by his belt, one star at a time appearing
till the three stand on top of each other on the eastern horizon.
The Hunter’s club is raised, in his winter pursuit of the bull

And I saw a beast rising out of the sea…-Revelation 13:1

A woman behind me yells in Spanish
and her husband drops his rod and rushes to her side
to aid in her battle against the fish.
Her rod bent double.
he leans over the railing,
and hand over hand pulls in her line,
and the angry ray dancing on the end.
On the deck of the pier,
the fish, the son of the Leviathan,
lashes out at the gathering spectators,
whipping it’s tail around and exposing its lethal barbs

On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish the Laviathan…
-Isaiah 27:1

I look back upon the firmaments and observe
to the north of Orion
a fiery red moon rises above the waters,
the waning gibbous lunar body
looks as if its a caldron of molten iron
slightly tipped, ready to pour it’s deadly contents upon the ocean,
In horror, I watch,
but too fascinating to run.
And even if I could, where would I go?

The sun shall be blackened and the moon to blood
Before that great and terrible day of the Lord.
-Joel 2:31

Mesmerized, I watch in awe
and a feeling of relief yet sadness,
as the moon rises higher,
its hue changing from red to yellow
and finally white. Once again, we’ve been spared the apocalypse.

Fishing off Harker's Island

This has been an emotional time at home, dealing with my mother and helping my grandmother pack up and move into an assisted living center. At the beginning of my trip, thanks to my aunt staying with Mom, I got to spend a few good days with my Dad up around Cape Lookout. This is the story of us trying to fish Thursday morning. Instead of fishing, we went to the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. I didn’t take any photos while on the water on Thursday. (I never even took my camera out of the waterproof case). The picture of the sunset was taken from Harker’s Island later that day. The photo of my father fishing was taken on Friday. The seas had calmed, but the rain continued. I haven’t had internet access since early Friday morning. I’ll be returning back home tomorrow and will try to catch up with everyone by the weekend

The boat drops into the trough of a rolling wave, walls of water tower over our heads, obscuring everything and creating the feeling that we’re in a deep canyon. Then, we rise to the crest of a swell and see we were alone on the sea. It appears no one’s fishing at the jetty which juts out into the sea, west of the cape. With waves like these, there’d be no way to safely anchor off the rocks and any fishing in such rough water would require the finesse of a trapeze artist. We chicken out; Dad turns the boat around and we head back, surfing the crest of the waves and making good time with the wind to our back.

At the sea buoy marking Breakwater Point, he turns the boat 90 degrees into the channel. The inlet offers no protection. Instead of the long rolling waves of the open sea, we now have choppy ones foaming about the crest. Though violent, the water offers hope for fishing. In the distance I spot gulls and pelicans diving into the water where baitfish are jumping. Perhaps it’s a Bonita driving the smaller fish to the surface where they jump to escape the jaws of the larger fish. Life is precious at the bottom of the food chain. In an attempt to escape one threat, they expose themselves to the bills of awaiting birds. Dad maneuvers the boat toward the fish while I try my best to rig a line. By the time we get to the spot, the fish are gone and the birds have all settled down. We make a few casts, but the rain and wind are increasing. The few other boats fishing in what’s known as Lookout Bight are also heading in for safety and comfort and we do the same.

Dad is behind the wheel and I stand to the side of the console, holding on to the support for the canvas top that offers us little protection in the driving rain and splashing waves. I keep a lookout for the buoys that mark the maundering channel between Shackleford Banks and Cape Lookout. It’s a hard task for as we run, rain pellets my eyes. Sandbars cut across this channel, creating a maze to navigate. The boat pounds through the waves, splashing us with salt water. Rain and wind increase, dropping visibility further. The lighthouse, just a few miles away, can’t be seen but every 15 seconds we observe its faint light piercing the fog. Creating even more danger is the fact that we can’t see the next buoy and are soon in shallow water. Dad cuts the speed and turns on the depth finder. Luckily, the tide is high and rising. We move slowly off the bar as I continue to search for a buoy. When the rain lets up a bit, I spot a red one at 2 o’clock. We aim for it, keeping it to our starboard as we search of the next buoy, a green one, that’s to be on our port.

After we pass Catfish Point, we turn north, running through Barden’s Inlet with the wind to our back. Although it’s still hard to see buoys, rain drops are no longer painfully striking our eyes. We cross a few hundred yards in front of the lighthouse, its massive structure now visible, but looking ghost-like in the midst. We continue to follow the buoys pass Morgan Island and make the cut to Harker’s Island and into the safety of the break wall at Calico Jack’s. After securing the boat in the slip, we head to the bait shop for a cup of coffee and to talk with the staff and other returning fishermen about the weather. It doesn’t look like we’ll be doing any more fishing this day and it’s not even 10 A.M.

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Click here for a map of Cape Lookout National Seashore (go to the bottom to see where we were at).

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Click here for a story of surf fishing off Lookout in 2007

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Click here for a 2005 trip to Lookout along with pictures of horses on Shackleford Banks

Photos to help you pass time...

I'm with my Dad on Harker's Island for three days/two nights. We came up here to fish and since we're only here two nights, are camping out at the only hotel on the island (instead of camping on the beach. Today, that turned out to be a good choice due to the weather, but I'll write more about that at a later time. These are pictures from yesterday's fishing off the jetty southwest of Cape Lookout.Fishing wasn't great... Below is a blowfish, you rub it's belly and it'll swell up like this! I caught two of them and a 16 inch puppy drum (the limit size is 18), so they all went back in.

Below is the moonrise, looking across Lookout, toward the lighthouse.We fished till after sunset and ran back through the channel after dark (It was a lot easier than today with high winds and waves and rain and nearly zero visibility. Needless to say, I don't have pictures from today's expedition!).
A final shot of the fading day.

I won't be able to catch up with everyone's blog till next week. Till then, ya'll be good, ya'll hear!