Kaimusailing

When the weather gets hot, in the afternoon over 90 degrees with high humidity, I retreat indoors to watch golf on TV or read one of the half million books for Kindle. Actually 460,000 books on this laptop, and only a couple dozen on the Kindle.
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What to read, why not Phillip Roth, he's America's greatest author. So I read “The Human Stain” and found out it was one of a trilogy. I had the first one also, “American Pastoral”. The middle one, “I Married a Communist”, I didn't have. You don't have to read these, I'll summarize them here. American Pastoral is about the American dream and how if one had a nearly perfect life, anything nasty would have a much more devastating effect than if it happened to someone else. The Human Stain refers to how we are unsuccessful rectifying the damage humans make because everything we do is human and thus has a further bad effect. I decided to read “The Plot Against America” because it was one of his newer works. It is a political history novel, “What if Charles Lindburgh became president in 1940 and supported Nazi ideals?”. The tale revolves around a Jewish family in Newark who seem powerless to escape a societal breakdown that crashes down upon them. The first thought in my mind was, “What if they had a boat?”. They could pack up and leave, escape the danger, go to a place that is safer, better.
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One can argue that you must stay and fight or somehow cure society of its ills. In Newark's case, it doesn't look like it would have been a good idea, not in a hypothetical novel, not in reality. But of course there must be someplace to escape, if you are going to jump in a boat and leave. There is always an island that is considered paradise. Sometimes the reality of the paradise island could be just as bad as downtown Newark. Hurricanes. Malaria.
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Let's go back in time to the era of “The Plot Against America”, the time between the world wars. It would be another 20 years or so before James Wharram invented his modern old fashioned polynesian catamarans. It was a time of epic voyages, the classics, Henry Pidgeon, Gault, Robinson, a time of wooden sailboats with no electronics or electricity at all. But there was another voyage, a frenchman who had fled the Japanese in China using a Chinese junk, sailing to Hawaii. It was Eric de Bisschop, an adventurer who later would be a rival of Thor Heyerdahl.
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de Bisschop's book, “Voyage of the Kaimiloa”, was a direct influence on the young James Wharram, for the Kaimiloa was a catamaran and its epic voyage spanned the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. Landing in France when the Vichy government was in power and France was at a low point of national pride, de Bisschop became a national hero. Later there was a backlash against de Bisschop, it was asserted that he was sympathetic to the Nazi's. It was probably more true that he had enemies who would do or say anything to damage his reputation. He was forced to give up his diplomatic post. He continued to explore and attempt to prove that the polynesians did not come from South America, as Heyerdahl said, they came from the west. It has been confirmed using DNA, linguistic, and cultural evidence, that he was right. He died after a disastrous collision with a reef. His last words were, “Some may be sad to hear of my death, but I am sure there will be an equal number who will be happy.”
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It seems that mankind has been migrating since day one and probably they weren't just following game or curious about what was around the next bend. They were getting away from persecution, overcrowding, they were trying to get away from their fellow man. These days it takes a city of concentrated civilization to get individuals motivated to move away, back in the old days, a small village was the beginning of “too many neighbors”. Either way, it is good to have a sea going boat handy, ready to head out to sea, to explore or just get away from the asphalt jungle.
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