Christmas, or to each his or her own …

 

I used to have a house in Rodanthe, on the windswept Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is a wild place. When you look out upon the ocean there you’re gazing upon the ‘Graveyard of The Atlantic’ where literally thousands of ships have gone down. The Outer Banks have been occupied for a few thousand years, starting with native American cultures around 500 AD (or CE or AO, or whatever term is comfortable to you) with the johnny-come-lately European settlers coming in in the 1580’s with the Lost Colony. But this is Christmas and I’d like to play with things I’ve run across in my mental wanderings concerning traditions of celebration of Rodanthe.

But first a little background.

Christmas day is the first day of the ‘Twelve days of Christmas’, with the ending known as the Epiphany. The precise day of the Epiphany and/or Twelfth Night depends upon the particular tradition. As they used to say in my old high school math books, more details of the particulars of the dates what is known as Christmastide is ‘left for the serious student’ and I recommend you consult Mr. Google. But the traditions themselves have many similarities to old English traditions, particularly old English dance traditions (specifically one performed at Abbots Bromley) and it’s these that I find interesting.

o   There are horned creatures played by masked dancers – in Rodanthe it’s “Old Buck” the mythical bull. Old Buck is either touched as he’s led around by a masked handler (while causing silly chaos) or ridden for luck or fertility. At Abbots Bromley, it’s ‘horned dancers’ and dancer dressed as a hobby horse are intended to ensure a bountiful hunt.

 o   In Rodanthe there is a tradition of beginning the festivities with fifes and drums playing eerie music at the crack of dawn to awaken the natives and natives run around. At Abbots Bromley there is the slow approach of the dancers to eerie music.

o   In Rodanthe in times past sometimes men would dress as women and women as men, rather like the English tradition of Pantomime. At Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, Maid Marion of Robin Hood fame is represented by a man wearing a dress.  

The origin of ‘Twelfth Night’ lies in the resistance of the British to adopt the Gregorian calendar, the last European nation to do so. It took them 170 years. When they finally did, to make up for the 11 days discrepancy between the true solar year (as reflected by the said Gregorian calendar) and the Julian calendar, Parliament decreed the dates of September 3 through September 13, 1752 simply didn’t exist. When the law took effect, Rodanthe was an isolated village whose residents were almost exclusively descendants of British settlers. It is unclear when they were told of the change in dates, but if so, the independently minded Outer Bankers chose to ignore it. Rodanthe is one of the few places in the United State that celebrates Old Christmas, or Twelfth Night. The people of Rodanthe mark Jesus’s birthday as January 6 (Twelfth Night) and thus celebrate “two Christmases.” Although there are no records of how the day was celebrated in the 18th century in the village, records of what happened on the Rodanthe Christmases dating to the early 1800s tell of celebrations that  included food, general silly fun and a creature called Old Buck, the mythical bull.The legend describes Buck swimming ashore from a shipwreck, found the local cows to his liking and took up residence on Hatteras Island. Different stories tell that he was either shot and became part of a feast, or disappeared into the forests of the island, but either way, on Old Christmas his spirit reappears every year in the form of a bulls head with a cloth covered body as the costume. Celebrations including skulls and animal heads are not unique to Abbots Bromley and Rodanthe. An 1883 article published in the British journal Antiquarian Chronicle reports, “There is another custom very common in Cheshire called Old Hob; it consists of a man carrying a dead horse’s head, covered with a sheet, to frighten people.” From Wales, comes the midwinter tradition of Mari Lwyd, meaning gray mare in English.

 

Rodanthe was once called Chicamacomico, an Algonquian term meaning “sinking down sand.” The old name is appropriate, as frequent nor’easter storms and hurricanes occasionally punch inlets through the thin barrier islands, including a “hotspot” just north of Rodanthe. The beach once supported herds of rangy cattle standing udder-deep in the surf for relief from the heat and flies. The barrier islands were ideal for raising horses, cattle, and sheep because fencing was cost-prohibitive to early settlers, and the ocean served as a natural barrier. Young men astride banks ponies once drove sheep up and down the beach for their annual shearing. In 1935 the North Carolina General Assembly put a stop to all that fun by passing a law that banned free-range livestock on Hatteras Island out of concern that overgrazing led to a lack of vegetation, which led to increased erosion. But the legend of Old Buck remains.

As a small final point of interest, though it seldom happens any longer, one tradition of Rodanthe holds that if you have a gripe with someone you fight it out at Old Christmas, to start the new year with a black eye and a clean slate. A rough tradition, but one that seems to have a bit of sense to it. But whatever your tradition, whether it be singing carols, dancing with elk horns or just chilling out in the recliner in front of the television watching the modern incarnation of medieval joisting known as American style football (lady fairs on the sidelines, young men on the field of battle dressed in plastic armor trying to beat each other’s heads in, etc), please celebrate with joy and care, relax and look forward to the New Year.

Happy Holidaze, be safe.

The Wright Brothers

On this date in 1903, on the cold sands of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, into a frigid gusting 27 mile-per-hour wind that froze standing water, two men flew for the first time while piloting a heavier-than-air powered aircraft under control. The men that accomplished this feat are, of course, known as the Wright Brothers.

They were from Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur, the elder brother, was slightly taller, slimmer and calm, and a natural outgoing public speaker who ‘never failed to delight an audience’. Orville, the younger, was quick-witted and a charming conversationalist, but only among family, as he was painfully shy and absolutely refused to speak in public.

Both were brilliant.

Their father Milton Wright was an Anglican bishop who was very well read, spoke several languages, but could not for the life of him drive a nail straight.

Their mother Susan Wright was a housewife/homemaker, but one who had grown up working in a carriage shop with her father and was gifted with great mechanical aptitude. When the boys were growing up, whenever they needed mechanical help with anything, they went to their mother. She designed and built household appliances and toys, including a snow sled with a rudder. They had their mother to thank for their inventive talent, their lifelong love of tinkering, and their ability to visualize mechanical mechanisms. But, like Orville, she suffered from painful shyness.

The Wrights proved that much can be accomplished by intelligent people who apply themselves to a project without the support or interference of government entities. They kept the details of their work largely secret until they were confident they’d solved the problems of practical flight.

But it was not their 1903 heavier-than-air aircraft that was described in their patent. Their patent was for the 1902 glider. Their patent was for their system of control. They flew literally hundreds of test flights in their gliders in the tough winds of Kitty Hawk, learning the wind. The elements of flight, making wings with lift, design of propellers, rudders, elevators were already fairly well known at the time. The Wrights simply applied modern scientific methods to the problem, including building their own wind tunnel to establish wing airfoil lift tables to correct the lift tables of Octave Chanute, a French pioneer of flight. But the true discovery of the modern secret of flight, their real accomplishment, was application of control around all three axes (ß yes, that’s the plural of axis) of rotation in the air, that of pitch, yaw and roll. On modern aircraft, up-and-down pitch is controlled by the horizontal elevators at the back of the plane, yaw (side-to-side turning) is controlled by rudders (also at the back of the plane) and roll (the tendency of aircraft to roll about its central longitudinal axis) is controlled by ailerons on the outboard trailing edge of the wings. On the Wright Brother’s aircraft, the elevators were on the front, the rudders were on the back and roll was controlled not by ailerons, but by what the Wrights called ‘wing warping.’ To imagine wing warping, take an empty single stack cracker box, hold it by the ends and give it a slight twist. Their aircraft was built supple, so the wings could move like that. They built their own aircraft out of wood, fabricated the metal parts themselves using their skills as bicycle mechanics and sewed the linen wing covers on their sister’s sewing machine. They designed their own propellers, using their lift tables to establish the propeller cross-sections, essentially making counter-rotating wings to push their craft. The Wrights, with the indispensable help of a first-class machinist by the name of Charlie Taylor, even designed and built their own engine, because no one at the time had built one that met their needs of power, smoothness and weight.

New difficulties arose with their success. Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle racer and johnny-come-lately flying enthusiast, simply stole their ideas of control and built his own airplanes with his own business, Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. To Curtiss’ credit, he did invent the aileron and the modern airplane yoke with steering wheel, but he kept the Wrights in patent court, steadfastly refusing to pay them what he owed for blatant patent infringement until after Wilbur died. Orville kept at it and finally won in court, but never got fair compensation because it would have bankrupted Curtiss. The settlement was, however, so large that it put Orville and his sister Katharine in solid financial condition for life. Eventually in 1929, Wright Aeronautics and Curtiss merged, to become Curtiss-Wright Corporation.

But all that came later. On this date, December 17, 1903, with the help of the Kill Devil Hills U.S. Lifesaving Station crew and a couple of other men, they hauled out the sections of launch rail and pinned them down onto the sand in the direction to fly into the wind. By 10:30 the machine was set into place, the brothers shook hands and Orville climbed onto the wing and lay down beside the engine. At about 10:35 Orville shifted the release lever and the machine began to move. It was all over very quickly. The machine rose and fell for about 12 seconds before it slid to earth only 120 feet from where it had lifted off the rail, but that was enough. On the cold desolate windswept beach of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the first time, an airplane had lifted from the earth, flown, and had landed, all under its own power, all under control.

Man had flown.  

Long time no see, ‘Watersong’ sets sail

My apologies. It has been an excruciatingly long time since I’ve blogged, but sometimes life overwhelms. I won’t go into details because they’re boring. Everyone has their ‘story’ and I don’t want to join in the media multitudes that automatically assume the world will be interested in them.

But I have not been idle. In the time away, I have been able to scribble and scratch together another book. The book is called ‘Watersong’. When I reviewed previous posts (in the effort to refresh my little gray cells on how to work this site) I was horrified, nay shocked and appalled, to find I’ve been working on it since October of 2017. Ye gods. I hadn’t thought it would take this much time, but at last the time has arrived to set my brainchild free. This book is a romantic adventure, set in the Caribbean in the days immediately prior to WWII. The planned ‘official’ publication date was the 4th of July, but since everything is done, it’s now available on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle. The cover and the synopsis are below.

The year is 1939. Captain Jason Achilles is captain, owner and operator of the Emmanuelle, a small trading ketch in the Caribbean islands. He is 32, tall, strong and independent to a fault. The jungle had long accepted Jason as it accepted everyone else, on its own terms, both fair and brutal. Jason is settled into a hard but steady life carrying small cargos to shallow water places where the large coasting schooners cannot not or will not go. He has had a few scrapes, but when folks learned of his honesty, a rarity in the trade, he had more business than he could handle. Lucienne Beaumont, the daughter of a plantation owner, turns his world upside down. Strikingly beautiful, with angular features, dark hair, strong curves and a strong beautiful mind, she captivates his heart. But there are dark forces at work with war on the horizon, and he finds he must fight to keep the love of his life.

As with my first book ‘The Fur, Fish, Flea and Beagle Club’, I have put a great deal of time into building Jason’s world. Research can be demanding, making certain everything used is extant in the time period in that place. In time I almost envied Jason his world, which I’m sure is a common thing for writers who care about their work.

I owe a great debt to those who have supported me in the journey. My writer’s group helped me immeasurably. The members of the group include Noelle Granger, (author of the wonderful Rhe Brewster mystery series, check out her blog at https://saylingaway.wordpress.com), Elizabeth Calwell, (author of ‘Dear Passenger’ a truly delightful foray into the world of flight attendants), Dawn Ronco, (author of the deeply perceptive ‘Unintended’ and ‘Limited Time Offer’), and Denis Dubay (a terrific science fiction writer.) Check them out on Amazon, you’ll be glad you did. Finally, I need to thank my beta readers: my dear sister Max Byrd, the remarkable Heide Dorfman, and the extraordinary Lucy Ringland, my oldest and dearest. Thank you.

Here’s hoping you like it.

The Last Pilgrim

This post is something different for me. I generally do not indulge in book reviews, largely because as a writer, I find that if I read too many other books it adversely affects my own writing, makes my natural tendency toward imitation come to the fore. But this time I cannot keep silent about a new book that has crossed my desk, ‘The Last Pilgrim, The Life of Mary Allerton Cushman’ by Noelle Granger.

The year was 1620. An old, battered and leaking ship, the Mayflower, arrived in the new world. Aboard are more than a hundred passengers, plus about thirty crew. They gaze at the land, grateful to have arrived in one piece, as they have survived storm, overcrowding, scurvy and death at sea. They anchor in the harbor at Cape Cod hook, now known as Provincetown Harbor. Here they draw up the Mayflower Compact and, led by William Bradford, established a colony in the new world.

All of us know these facts from history we were taught. As children we learned the dates, the names, the numbers of people, looked at paintings that represent the arrival at Plymouth Rock and dressed up as puritans with black paper hats and made turkey paintings by outlining our off-hands for Thanksgiving in first grade.

But history can be a cold thing, and the trials and tribulations of the Separatist English Puritans were very real. To feel what they felt, I recommend ‘The Last Pilgrim’ without reservation.

Of the passengers on the Mayflower, Ms. Granger picks the family of Isaac Allerton, and in particular, Isaac’s daughter Mary Allerton, as the vessel to show the reader what it was like to live in that time and place. On the voyage to the new world Mary is but a small child, intelligent and full of life. She has too much energy to be easily constrained to the quiet studious life of a rigid separatist, and so explores this new world as much as she can.

There is a tendency of historical fiction to overplay the history, to overload the narrative with as much information as possible, as if the writer were trying too hard to show how much they know. Ms. Granger does not do this. She weaves history seamlessly into the story using the known facts of Mary’s life. The clothes they wore, the shelters and houses they built, details of midwifery, the food and how they made it, the colony’s relationships with the natives, plus their frustrations with competing colonies and their own sponsors back in the old world, all appear naturally in the narrative. It’s very clear Ms. Granger has more than done her homework, but does not burden the reader with leaden textbook verbiage. I found myself learning without being aware I was learning, a true joy.

A particular pleasure was to read this book written from the standpoint of a woman of the time, to see the events of the day through her eyes. First as a child, then as a teenager, a young woman, a mature woman and finally as what we would now call a ‘senior citizen’, we are treated to Mary’s inquisitiveness, her courage and her strong heart as she navigates the joys and sorrows of life in her time.

I don’t want to give you the details of the story. Better for you to enjoy Ms. Granger’s well-crafted story for yourselves rather than me giving you a second hand Cliff Notes version. Suffice to say you will be transported to the time and will laugh and cry right along with her.

I leave you with the link to find this gem.

https://saylingaway.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/the-last-pilgrim-sets-sail/

One Hundred Years…

I do not know why I am drawn to the Great War. I have edited and upgraded this annual post since last year, but the sentiments remain the same.

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One hundred years ago tomorrow, on the 11th hour of the 11th month of the 11th day of 1918, the guns of the Great War fell silent. None now truly remember what it was like in the Great War. It is a time which has passed from living memory. A time when the final vestiges of trust of government by nobility died, the violent transition from the world of old noble houses to more representative governments.

In the United States it used to be known as Armistice Day. Now it’s known as Veteran’s Day. In England it’s known as Remembrance Day.

The ordinary Tommy, Poilu, or Doughboys were not always imbued with warrior spirit. Even the Jerry’s weren’t that enthusiastic all the time, because in the winter of 1914 there were unofficial truces on Christmas across the lines, where men met in no man’s land to exchange gifts, bury the dead and in some instances even played ad hoc football games.

The Great War had many firsts. It was the first war fought in the air in a significant way. It saw the first general use of machine guns in more than sporatic fashion, much to the sadness of the troops, for the tactics of open frontal assault in groups of soldiers walking toward enemy lines were of the 18th century whereas the weapons were of the modern age. Frontal assaults upon deeply dug trenches, well-defended positions equipped with machine guns, was madness, but the generals didn’t see that, didn’t understand until much too late. And the slaughter was at a level truly unimaginable, running into the millions, no one really knows how many. And not just soldiers. In Verdun alone there is an ossuary adjacent to the ruins of Fort Douaumont that contains the bones of over 200,000 civilians, stacked in random piles rather than buried in individual graves because the body parts were so scattered that the bodies could not be put back together after they’d been plucked from the mud. And Douaumont itself? See for yourself in the photos below, before and after. Obliterated. Obliterated like the nine towns in France that were lost completely and could never be rebuilt. Entire towns pounded to flat rubble by artillery. The french call them Les villages détruits (the destroyed villages). Three of the nine were eventually rebuilt. The other six are still entirely unpopulated, only remnants of rubble remaining as testament, villages that died for France. French farmers die every year when they plow their fields and detonate old unexploded shells that had been fired almost a century before. I’ve walked over the ground. Even now, after over 100 years, the ground still has deep overlapping shell holes as far as the eye can see. The French government posts the land, for unexploded ordnance buried in the ground is still lethal to the unsuspecting tourist.

The US lost roughly (all of the casualty numbers are ‘rough’, as many men just disappeared in the rain of hell known as artillery barrages) 100,000 men. Compare that if you will to the losses of the first day of the Somme, when the Brits alone lost over 56,000 men. In one day. Let me repeat that. In … one … day. It’s a number unimaginable. I used to work at a shipyard and I remember shift change when hundreds of people would walk in and out when the steam whistles screamed. At that time there were just under 30,000 employees who worked there. When I compared that number to the casualties of the Somme my heart crushed. Almost twice the number of people that worked in that shipyard were lost on the Somme by just the British … in one day. If you’re a student at university, think of every person on campus being slaughtered in one day. The thought, if you have any empathy at all, takes away the power of thought.

This was not glory, though the exploits of individuals like Sargent York were legendary. No, this was carnage, this was industrialized murder, fought all over the world from the muddy fields of Europe to the plains of Africa and beyond. I purposefully avoided posting the most awful photos in my possession, they’re not suitable for general consumption where children could possibly see them. I leave it to your imagination to visualize what happens when a body literally disappears under the blast of an artillery shell.

It was the first truly ‘world’ war, with peoples from all over being drawn into the carnage. It was the dividing line between the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. Old royals and aristocracies fell, to be replaced by republics of various types, the end of the era when the general population trusted their leaders to look out for them. No one was immune. Even Theodore Roosevelt lost his much beloved son Quentin, shot down whilst flying as a fighter pilot.

The US still has thousands buried there, in a cemetery at Montfaucon in France, the white marble crosses bear mute testimony to their sacrifice.

You will see the symbol of the poppy used in remembrance. That is because after the carnage, after the incessant artillery barrages, poppies were the only thing that would grow in the poisoned ground of the battlefields.

I wear my pin every year.

I know this is not a pleasant post. It’s not meant to be. But, like the Holocaust, the Great War is something never to be forgotten, a lesson bought hard by horrible deaths of innocents. If you would, at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, just stop, think, and imagine the thunder of guns falling silent, leaving a ringing stillness in the air.

If I might be allowed to paraphrase the movie ‘Shenandoah’, I think Jimmy Stewart’s character said it best, when he says about war, ‘The politicians praise it, the undertakers win it, and the soldiers just want to go home.’

Passing of a true friend

It is with great sadness that I type these words, at the passing this morning of a great friend of mine, my big black cat Fred. His passing was sudden, with no apparent sickness, no dimming of faculties, no warning. He was here, then he was not.

He was a British Shorthair, a breed known for their ability to get along with most any creature, even dogs. He was true to the breed, calm, quiet, unruffled. With certain exceptions. When friends of his (other cats) were being threatened by other cats or animals, then he was fierce, oh my yes. Even as a kitten, he sent a large mean tabby cat from next door flying when that feline threatened his buddy Squirt, a very old calico that had been declawed and was thus defenseless. To that same old calico he was unendingly patient and kind, never threatened her, never snarled or hissed to assert dominance, just sat calmly as she beat him about the head with her cotton ball paws, then sat just as calmly as she sauntered away as if she had won the day.

He was a bruiser, weighing in at about 16lbs (7.25kilos) and used his weight wisely. As a kitten, when his siblings became too rambunctious he would simply sit on top of them until they cried ‘uncle’. As an adult cat he was so heavy that more than once I thought someone was in the house when he thumped down the stairs.

Patient he was, oh yes. When wanting food or to be let out, he would simply come to you, give you a head butt, then turn around to walk away, looking back to see if you were following. If you didn’t, he’d head butt you again until you did.

He was my constant companion when I moved to England. I have never made friends easily, did not there. The neighbors were distant and shop owners are never really friends with someone who is their customer. But I could always depend on Fred to be there, thumping down the stairs and head butting me for treats when I got home.

He was not a lap cat, no. Did not particularly like being picked up. He would tolerate it for about three seconds, then want down, yet he would stay with me, following me like a puppy when I did yard work or worked in my shop or hammered away at my typewriter, curled up nearby from where he could keep me in sight. That was a pity, for he had the thickest, softest fur that fairly begged to be stroked. I still look for him coming around corners, his great bushy tail standing straight up like a waving flag, looking at me to make sure I was still there.

I am still here. My great buddy boy is not. For fifteen years he was a major part of my life, now not. A great heart gone that leaves a great hole in mine.

Back in the saddle again …

It has been entirely too long since I’ve posted here. My only excuse is that for a while I’ve been overcome by life events. There are more such events on the horizon, but now whilst there’s a period of relative calm, I thought I’d write a quick thank you note to those who still come to visit. I also thought I’d indulge in shameless copying, I guess I should say ‘reposting’, of a white paper I saw some time ago with ten universal wisdoms associated with writing.

How to Write Good

1 – Avoid alliteration. Always.
2 – Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3 – Avoid cliches like the plague. They’re old hat.
4 – Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
5 – Be more or less specific.
6 – Writers should never generalize.
Seven – Be consistent
8 – Don’t be redundant; Don’t use more words than necessary, it’s highly superfluous.
9 – Who needs rhetorical questions?
10 – Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Now that you are privy to the deepest ten secrets of the writing trade, I’ll get back to work. I am working on a new book called Watersong and hope to have the first rough draft finished by the first of the year. After the first draft, it’s editing for story and character arcs, character voices, etc. As Mitchener said, good books are not written, they are rewritten. That gives me hope as I slog through the doldrums of writing where the magic gestates before it blooms in the fully fledged story line. Hmm. Guess I need to take my own advice.
take care,
B

When the guns fell silent …

Ninety eight years ago tomorrow, on the 11th hour of the 11th month of the 11th day of 1918, the guns of the Great War fell silent. Here in America it used to be known as Armistice Day, but now it’s known as Veteran’s Day. In England it’s known as Remembrance Day.

The Great War had many firsts: It was the first war fought in the air in a significant way. It saw the first general use of machine guns in more than sporatic fashion, much to the sadness of the troops, for the tactics used were of the 18th century whereas the weapons were of the modern age. Frontal assaults upon deeply dug trenches, well-defended positions equipped with machine guns, was madness, but the generals didn’t see that, didn’t understand until much too late. And the slaughter was at a level truly unimaginable, running into the millions, no one really knows how many. And not just soldiers. In Verdun alone there is an ossuary adjacent to the ruins of Fort Douaumont that contains the bones of over 200,000 civilians, stacked rather than buried because the body parts were so scattered that the bodies could not be put back together after they’d been plucked from the mud. And Douaumont itself? See for yourself in the photos below, before and after. Obliterated. Obliterated like the nine towns in France that were lost completely and could never be rebuilt. Entire towns pounded to flat rubble by artillery. French farmers die every year when they plow their fields and detonate old unexploded shells that had been fired almost a century before. I’ve walked over the ground. Even now, the ground still has deep overlapping shell holes as far as the eye can see. The French government posts the land, for the unexploded ordnance is still dangerous to the unsuspecting tourist.

The US lost roughly (all of the casualty numbers are ‘rough’, as many men just disappeared in the rain of hell known as artillery barrages) 100,000 men. Compare that if you will to the losses of the first day of the Somme, when the Brits alone lost over 56,000 men. In one day. Let me repeat that. In … one … day. It’s a number unimaginable. I used to work at a shipyard and I remember shift change when hundreds of people would walk in and out when the steam whistles screamed. At that time there were just under 30,000 employees who worked there. When I compared that number to the casualties of the Somme my heart crushed. Almost twice the number of people that worked in that shipyard were lost on the Somme by just the British … in one day. If you’re a student at university, think of every person on campus being slaughtered in one day. The thought, if you have any empathy at all, takes away the power of thought.

This was not glory, though the exploits of individuals like Sargent York were legendary. No, this was carnage, this was industrialized murder, fought all over the world from the muddy fields of Europe to the plains of Africa and beyond. I purposefully avoided posting the most awful photos in my possession, they’re not suitable for general consumption where children could possibly see them. I leave it to your imagination to visualize what happens when a body literally disappears under the blast of an artillery shell.

It was the first truly ‘world’ war, with peoples from all over being drawn into the carnage. It was the dividing line between the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. Old royals and aristocracies fell, to be replaced by republics of various types, the end of the era when the general population trusted their leaders to look out for them. No one was immune, even Theodore Roosevelt lost his son Kermit, killed whilst flying as a fighter pilot. The US still has thousands buried there, in a cemetery at Montfaucon in France, the white marble crosses bear mute testimony to their sacrifice.

You will see the symbol of the poppy used in remembrance. That is because after the carnage, poppies were about the only thing that would grow in the battlefields. I wear my pin every year.

I know this is not a pleasant post. It’s not meant to be. But, like the Holocaust, the Great War is something never to be forgotten, a lesson bought hard by horrible deaths of innocents. If you would, at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, just stop, think, and imagine the thunder of guns falling silent, leaving a ringing stillness in the air.

It’s time to end this post and if I might be allowed to paraphrase the movie ‘Shenandoah’, I think Jimmy Stewart’s character said it best, when he says about war, ‘The politicians praise it, the undertakers win it, and the soldiers just want to go home.’

Anniversary of D-Day Invasion

I know this sounds lazy, and it may very well be, but the post I did last year for the anniversary of D-Day still sounds right to me. I would just like to add that the D-Day invasion was not just or mostly performed by Americans. Brave men from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands,  and Norway (and I’m certain others that I don’t know about) all faced down the fires of hell for us. So here it is again:

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“… I want to tell you what the opening of the second front entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.” Ernie Pyle, June 12, 1944

On June 6th, 1944, Operation Overlord, the start of the invasion of German-occupied France, began. In one night and a day, 175,000 fighting men traversed the one hundred nautical miles of the English Channel and landed upon the beaches of Normandy. Transported with them were 50,000 vehicles on 5,333 ships supported by 11,000 airplanes. Stephen Ambrose states that it was as if the entire cities of Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin were picked up and moved, every man, woman, child and automobile, to the east side of Lake Michigan, in one night. Most were not professional soldiers, they were kids that had signed up after Pearl Harbor or were drafted. They were citizen soldiers, folks like us, personally unacquainted with violent death. That did not last. Company A of the 116th Regiment, the first ashore at Omaha, suffered over 90 percent casualties.

The beaches bristled with obstacles, mines, mortars, machine guns and artillery like the dreaded 88mm cannon that had been adapted to almost every conceivable use from shelling infantry positions to antiaircraft fire. Rommel had  designed the defenses and he did his job well.

I have stood on Omaha beach. It is broad and flat and the idea of stumbling ashore weighted down with gear, bullets whizzing by like bumblebees, blood splattering the air and soaking the water, and people screaming all around is beyond my poor ability to comprehend and I have a pretty good imagination. I have stood at Pointe du Hoc and wondered just how in the world the Rangers climbed that vertical cliff face under fire. I have stood in front of the monument to the missing at Omaha, seen my own name carved in the stone and wondered what happened to my namesake.

It is beyond imagining.

So as the 6th passes by, please take a moment to remember. Remember the terrible sacrifices of very brave men for the simple principle of freedom, the ability to speak your mind and go where you choose. It is good that we are reminded from time to time of just how important that is.

 

 

Post A to Z follow up

I’d like to take this post to expressly thank everyone who read my little scribblings. When I’m safe and secure in my little writer’s garret my ideas feel great, but out in the open where the light of reality shines bright I’m afraid they’ll wilt like an orchid stuck in the Sahara. Roweee, a lovely blogger at beyondtheflow.wordpress.com, suggested that I follow up the challenge by listing my a-to-z posts so folks, especially new visitors I guess, can have a synopsis of the subjects I’ve covered. I think this is a great idea, so here goes:

A – A is for Anchor (or how to keep things in one place without really trying)

B – B is for Boat (a hole in the water in which you pour money, or ‘I really need this gadget for the boat, I really do!’)

C – C is for Circumnavigation (or round and round we go,  no matter how old we are)

D – D is for Dinghy (or the biggest little dinghy in the Navy)

E – E is for Engine (or how I make this damn thing go faster?)

F – F is for Fire and Fire Extinguishing (or how do I put this damn thing out?)

G – G is for Grog (or how else are we going to keep our spirits up?)

H – H is for Hulls (or you too can make it float)

I – I is for Inox (or the Swiss get it right)

J – J is for Jib (or what is that sail on the pointy end of the boat?)

K – K is for Ketch (not kvetch, it’s Ketch!)

L – L is for Lifeboat/Liferaft (or what to do when the big boat goes away)

M – M is for Multihull (or how many of these things do we need?)

N – N is for Navigation (or where the hell are we?)

O – O is for Oar (or how to pry your boat through the water in one easy lesson)

P – P is for Paint (or how did I get more on me than on the boat?)

Q – Q is for Q-ship (or deception is the order of the day)

R – R is for Rope (no way I’d feed you a line)

S – S is for Seasickness (Bleh and I do mean bleh)

T – T is for Tallow (the little-dab-will-do-yah for boats)

U – U is for U-boat (Aaahhh-oooo-gah, Dive, Dive!)

V – V is for Varnish (an art in itself)

W – W is for Wanderlust (not all who wander are lost)

X – X is for X Marks the Spot (or all things arrrghhhh)

Y – Y is for Yard or Yardarm (What is this strange wooden thing we hang sails and sailors from?)

Z – Z is for Zulu (or how do you spell that?)

I have more block in blog posts than I thought I would have, The last week in June I’ll be going down to the Outer Banks for another writer’s retreat, so you can expect more scribblings/photos of nautical sorts of things whilst I’m there, also posts that relate to ongoing research for the new book ‘Suzy and Dodge.’

Thanks for reading.