In which we arrive alive.

We call the GPS "Alice," from a song in which the refrain goes -- well, I don't suppose it matters. Never mind that song. I've been making an effort not to use foul language.

Alice the GPS -- yes, though Alice didn't complain, she was peeved with our average speed on 3.4 mph for nearly two hours and then, later, in a separate incident, 7.9 mph for an hour and a half.  It was a trial for her to keep displaying the awful truth that the destination is STILL five hours and twenty minutes away. She was good enough to keep a civil tongue in her flat head because it appeared that there was no other route options available. But eventually we got there. 

We log a lot of miles, Captain Winnebago and me. We listen to books on tape, catch up on the podcasts we like (CarTalk! Radiolab!), point out various live and road-killed animals as we spot them. We saw a barcalounger on the side of the road, and the skipper said, "They aren't very fast, are they?"

We slogged through nearly the whole first CD of a bad YA novel before switching over to Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison.  Lord Peter Whimsey and Harriet Vane made our time in highway limbo pass less heavily. 

The other drive-time entertainment we enjoy is in looking for the untold story.  Like this one. That's a work-trailer absolutely packed with 5-gallon buckets. Hundreds of buckets. Neatly stacked. Used.
What in the name of Hephaestus are they used for?

At the end of the day -- not using that phrase metaphorically, it was actually the END of the day -- we pulled the rig into a friend's driveway and gratefully shut off the engine.  Outside the Winnie, as I type, lightning bugs are streaking around and the cicadas are dueling with the frogs for the last word.

In which we leave again on a sailing adventure.

Five minutes until five on a Thursday afternoon, we point ourselves north. We are going to the 2013 Flying Scot North American Championships (called the “NACs,” to rhyme with “stax”) on Lake Norman, North Carolina. 

Captain Winnebago takes the first shift at the helm of the camper with the small dog riding shotgun and our boat, the Speckled Butterbean, trailing obediently (knock wood!) behind. I have assumed my dual role as Snactician and Navigator with a first course of deviled eggs.

We hit traffic (as expected) and torrential rain (as usual this time of year), but the trip is mostly uneventful. 

I spotted an emu, an EMU of all animal sightings, by the side of the highway, far too fleetingly to snap a picture.  It did look, I thought, strangely a propos -- a strange, large, near-dinosaur standing idly by a wire fence under the rain-soaked emerald trees along the road. Talk about your primitive Florida.  Reading my mind, evidently, Captain W. pointed into the middle distance and said, Hey, is that a pteradactyl? Nope, a turkey vulture, but still.

I did manage to boot up the camera in time to catch a snap of this hot-rod. It was so modified that I couldn't even guess the original make. Its rear wheels were about 2 feet wide. Clearly someone's pride and joy.

Dozens of farm-stands can be found along rural 301 in central Florida. Between the stormy weather and the late hour, sadly, it’s too late to score one of those fat, green “home-grown” watermelons. Just south of the little speed-trap hamlet of Hawthorn,  a U-Pick farm advertises blueberry bushes for sale for $3.70 each. Captain Winnebago is growing half a dozen blueberry bushes already, but we covet more. Maybe we can time it on the way home so we can pick up a few plants. We could carry them in the Speckled Butterbean.

And if we can stop for blueberries, I suggest to the skipper, maybe we can also make a visit to the Taxidermy Museum? Captain W. says he doesn’t think we’ll be able to stop. This is not the first time he's expressed such a doubt. Huh. Who’s afraid of a big stuffed wolf? 

 We pull into the nearly deserted KOA at just past ten pm, having crossed our first state line of the trip. A walk with the dog while the endless hum of I-95 shushes beyond the leggy pine trees, and then it’s off to bed.

The RV slip we were assigned turned out to be a bit small, but we scooted the rig in.  It’s good to bring the cottage with us.

The boat-building project around our house continues for the 2014 Everglades Challenge race.

Bowsprits -- they aren't just for schooners any more. With the hull and decks trimmed down to the quick, the Frankenscot is ready to take shape. 

Starting with some additional length up front. 
         
Modern racing boats have taken to using carbon fiber, and making the sprits retractable. To install one on Frankenscot, the first step is to cut a hole in the bow of the boat. Nothing says "seaworthy" quite so convincingly as that. 

The Frankenscot bowsprit (Frankensprit?) began life as a section from an old Classic Moth mast, which in turn came from one of those yellow Escape Rumba boats. The sprit extends five feet out from the front of the boat, allowing us (we hope!) to attach the foot of a large spinnaker-like sail (technically, a gennaker) to the end of the sprit. The gennaker should help the Frankenscot gain a few knots on a reach.  

Using swaths of fiberglass dripping with resin, Captain TwoBeers reinforced the entry and housing for the sprit from inside the boat. Fiberglass work is itchy and stinky under the best of conditions, never mind when triple-digit temperatures help the resin kick up a hot, toxic funk in the close quarters of the forepeak.

"Forepeak" being a fancy name for the triangular wedge of space closed in by the deck at the front of the boat. When we have supercargo aboard the non-modified Flying Scot, we refer to this area as "the bear-cave." If you are the sort of small, youthful person who likes to bring Matchbox cars onboard, the bear-cave makes an excellent fort. It's roomy and private and protected from waves.

If you are less youthful and small, the bear-cave still protects a person from waves, but the floorplan shrinks. If you suffer from claustrophobia, well, you'll want to take up another sport. Or anyway another boat design.

Thanks to Paul  (Brother Paul-E) Silvernail for the images in the slide show below.

These four novels share a few obvious characteristics: they are set in London in the years around the World Wars, they follow the adventures of young women coming into their own in a challenging social milieu and were written by women near those times. These were contemporary novels of their day.

Cold Comfort Farm, particularly, is one of novels I return to and recommend time and again. Written in part as a satire of the dreary melodramatic agricultural novels (those of best-selling Mary Webb for one, and to some extent, D.H. Lawrence) of the time -- 1932 --  the novel is full of wonderful writing and invention. We should all be so lucky as to have Flora Poste applying the Higher Common Sense to our problems: " 'Nonsense!' said Flora. 'Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.'"
           The spritely 1996 film version is also well worth watching.

I found Rebecca Hume at a used book store, and having some vague recollection of the name (it's shameful what large chunks of history are missing from my education), I brought it. Of course, I know now that (Dame) Rebecca West was one of the intellectual lights of her time, a reporter, essayist and novelist, who drew on her affair with H.G. Wells for this odd little novel, which she subtitled "A London Fantasy." Not that this is a roman-a-clef, instead, it's a surreal story about a woman who is granted a telepathic view into her lover's mind -- not at all a blessing. While it's not a book I return to, it's one of those original stories that surprises and lingers.

Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea and A Mask for Apollo are just two of a series of compelling historical novels set in Ancient Greece that made the rounds every other year or so through my book-loving family. Bringing to life the stories of Theseus, Alexander the Great, the Peloponnesian Wars, Renault fueled my (our) interest in archeology, mythology, and the classics of Western Civ. 
         In contrast, The Friendly Young Ladies parallels Renault's own life during the end times of the British Empire: it's the story of a girl who runs away to London to spend time with her estranged older sister. Like Renault herself, the older sister is working as a writer and living with a woman. The subtleties of the older sister's love-life escape the younger sister (as they also, evidently, proved too subtle for some reviewers at the time), to humorous effect, but the novel is not so much about sexuality as about decisions on making a decent life, taking responsibility and generally, growing up. 
          It's surprising to imagine this book published in 1944, when Radcliffe's Well of Loneliness was still banned as pornography in the UK, and "sexual inversion" was considered criminal and corrupt. I'd heard about this novel, but didn't find it until Vintage Books reissued The Friendly Young Ladies in 2003, twenty years after Renault died.  
          Making me grateful once more to be living now, here.

Although Dodie Smith is famous for writing The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, she worked primarily a playwright. She wrote I Capture the Castle while living in Pennsylvania in the 1940's, homesick for England. I first read this novel at age eleven or twelve; it was one of my mom's books. 
          The narrator's determination to write despite the slow grind of genteel poverty -- well, I'd say it inspired me, but that doesn't quite cover my pre-teen identification with young Cassandra, living in a crumbling castle with her sister and her mad father and her dramatic, odd, nature-loving step-mother. 

We inherited the small dog when my mom went into the hospital for heart surgery.

A rescue Boston Terrier, Lilly was astonishingly well behaved: not a chewer, not a barker, not a dog prone to accidents. She was needy and a noisy breather, a snorer, with an unfortunate tendency to lick. She had no street-smarts and no dog-sense to speak of, but she sat and stayed on command. And she didn't beg for food. 

We'd meant to get a dog, but not for decades. It wouldn't be fair, since we travelled so much and were away from the house so often. Still, when the Dog of Destiny shows up, you have to open the door.

So Lilly came along with me to the hospital to visit Mom. She went with me when my sister and I started rehabbing Mom's house. She waited at Masthead Enterprises with Mr. Linton while I ran errands. She accompanied us to friends' houses for dinner. 

I started taking Lilly to the dog park mornings, early, when the pack of big, kindly dogs met to chase each other around and sniff. Not a fan of conflict, she protested loudly whenever the other dogs play-fought. When they didn't pay attention, she would inch closer to the fracas, barking and feinting, often breaking things up by sheer force of will. The other dog-owners named her "The Mayor." 

One day, she snatched a stick from the pack: three Labs, some mixed shepherds, a greyhound, a mastiff, a pair of boxers. Twenty pounds of buggy eyes and gravelly growl. The other dogs formed an uneasy circle around her, but none dared to take it back.  

Another time, she outstretched the greyhound on a gallop around the park. The greyhound's mom and I both called a halt to the game after one circuit: Lilly looked uncannily like the metal rabbit, and the greyhound's teeth seemed to be growing with each mighty stride in chase.

As with any playground, friendships form. Lilly and Calusa, a 200-lb mastiff played the bow-down game, both holding perfectly still with their forelegs stretched out and their butts in the air. Then they would break, leaping and snorting and freezing again, flashing the whites of their eyes at one another, like two goofy ends of a telescope.

My mother did not make it out of the hospital. I focused on finishing the rehab of her house. At the dog-park, with half-a-dozen dog-owners standing around holding their coffee mugs, watching the dogs and throwing the odd tennis-ball or worn Kong, I was grateful to simply consider the dogs. 

Lilly learned to circle back to me when she irritated the pack. I learned which owners were inattentive. I was over-protective, but she was little and foolish.

One morning, she came out of a scrum scrambling but unable to get to her feet. As I snatched her up, other dog-owners were jotting down the numbers for their doggie emergency rooms, offering advice about which place was open early.  I slid her into the passenger seat and tore back to the house -- I'd left my wallet and everything else there. By the time I whipped into my parking spot, Lilly was up and moving around the front seat, non plussed by my drama.

"She got her bell rung," her vet told me. "Didn't you, sugar?" he added, to the dog.

A few weeks later, Lilly was walking oddly. Though she was not a dog to yelp, she was clearly uncomfortable. She shook it off. 

At Christmas, a year after Mom died, I rushed the small dog to the vet. An X-ray showed that at some earlier point in her life -- pre-Mom, pre-us -- a mishap had left her with four ruptured disks. In some spots along her spine, it was bone-on-bone.

The vet didn't look at me. "You know she's on borrowed time, right?" Then, chucking Lilly under the chin, "We'll give her a shot, and maybe you can have your dog for another Christmas."

She bounced back. 

All dog stories end badly -- but this one? Not yet.  

Four years and Lilly continues to bounce back. She caught and ate a fiddler crab recently. The crab battled valiantly for its life, leaving the small dog with a de-crabbed claw dangling -- like one of those plastic ornaments in a not-so-mainstream facial piercing -- from her jowl. She shook it free and went after the next crab on the seawall.