Being a Bond Analyst

—05.11.2000—

Today’s hazy morning found me on St. Mary’s, sitting in a plane at the end of the runway, bound for the mainland. The pilot applied the brakes and the throttled the engines up hard in a prelude to takeoff. The little plane shuddered. Outside the windows the propellers began tearing the moisture out of the damp air in thin streams, which formed out of nothing at the tips of the invisible blades. They arced over the wings and bled away, fast and even, like smoke traces in a wind tunnel. Seconds later we were airborne.

Sadness fell on me last night as I was thinking about leaving St. Agnes. I could see it on Ellen’s face earlier in the evening. I dropped in to give her the necklace I had made for her out of thin, black cord and bright, yellow sea snail shells. Her face first registered surprise, then joy, then pleasure. Then her eyes went soft as she spoke about a friend’s upcoming wedding and my leaving.

My time here has been wonderful. I’m struck again and again by the quality of people’s relationships, the quality of thought and involvement that I see, the awareness of a greater scheme of things. Those things seemed to me to be missing in the world I inhabited before.

Ellen and Bryce absolutely adore each other. It’s so obvious and so nice to see. He’s out in the garden for ten minutes and Ellen is excited to see him when he comes back in. My friend Jessica in San Francisco has moved in with Erik (who I worked with on the web project back in March) and she says things like “We haven’t killed each other yet.”

——

So I’m off today, flying up to Bristol, and catching the train to London for a quick visit with Zoe, then heading off to Faversham in Kent to board Elde and join Jack and Dom for the first leg of the summer sailing adventure: a multi-day series of hops along the southern coast, down the English Channel, and back to St. Agnes.

I’m very much looking forward to this sailing trip but still don’t know what to expect in terms of the crew. Everyone I talk to says, “Oh, you’re going with Jack and Dom? Have fun.” And they offer this in a tone that seems to imply that I’m very brave indeed. I will say that I have experienced Dom as the press-your-naked-ass-against-the-pub-window type. And I don’t mean that figuratively.

——

I’m sitting in an Indian restaurant in Brick Lane, in east London. Tonight I thought I was going to be staying with Helen and Paul who are friends of Ellen and Bryce. But because of a communication error, they aren’t expecting me until tomorrow. As it happens Claudia, who is a friend of a friend from the U.S., is in town. She and her husband very kindly offered to host me last minute. I’m waiting now to meet them for dinner.

Zoe, although she is away for most of the weekend, offered to mail me a set of keys so I could’ve stayed at her flat the whole time. I wish I’d taken her up on it. Sometimes it feels like more of an effort to socialize to not.

London, along with my lack of foresight, is depressing me today. Already I’ve experienced a train delay, a bus delay, and an older, bearded gentleman, jacket and blazer in hand, spitting a hot, punctuated, “Fuck off!!” at a young, black man in a car, after an apparent altercation. The vehemence of the expletive hung on him like an ill-fitting suit.

——

Observations from Claudia and Paul’s place in Kensington: It’s beautiful. The ceilings of their flat are higher than all of Pengold. They’re a young couple. She’s lovely, perhaps a bit guarded, and has just completed a Ph. D. dissertation on Anarchism. He’s a bond analyst who likes to listen to The Sea and Cake. They’re pregnant.

I would later tell Jon about my evening there and specifically about Paul’s profession. He replied, “Yeah, that’s good work, if you can get it... You said pond analyst, right?” So funny...

—05.13.2000—

Notes from an evening at Bar Havana in Shoreditch with Paul and Helen: Met a woman named Mia. We talked shamanism. She was small, dark skin. Spoke of her mother’s death. Held a pink and blue rock that turned dark. The colors traded back and forth. Glittery eyeshadow. I got chills from her story and looked her in the eyes as she told it, not diverting them as per my usual. I wanted to kiss her...

—05.14.2000—

Today: Breakfast in Paul and Helen’s jungle of a back garden. Shopping. Conversations about parents and their fears. We eventually concluded that fears keep one from trying new things, from living life to the fullest. Maybe the newness wasn’t in that observation but in realizing the costs. We want to avoid the cost of risk and yet incur the cost of truncated, abbreviated experience.

Later I headed to Balham and spent the evening at Zoe’s with her roommate, Pippa, and Pippa’s friend Charlotte, who arrived late from Paddington Station. Charlotte’s very pretty, reminds me a lot of Pippa, same facial expressions, similar laugh. She lives up north in the country, grows herbs, studies reiki, has a three-year-old son named Obi (that’s right, named after Obi Wan Kenobi). She sewed a rose quartz crystal into a piglet doll for him after he’d had an organ replaced at infancy. Piglet was thought to have been abducted by a ghost in Zoe’s flat when they last visited (according to divining rods). True story. And by that I mean, that’s the way it was told to me.

Alright, that’s London. Off to Faversham in Kent.

—05.15.2000—

I arrived in Faversham yesterday to a hot summer sun. Jack welcomed me aboard Elde and got down to business right away, giving me a tour of the ship, showing me where to stow my gear, and familiarizing me with the navigation station. Then he said, “Can you program these waypoints into the GPS?” I said, “Sure,” though I’d never seen that particular piece of equipment before.

“Great–I’ll leave you to it then,” and disappeared into another part of the ship. I poked around on the keys for a moment and had it all figured out before long. Sometimes I feel like machines are easier to understand than people. Maybe 20 minutes later Jack passed by the nav station again.

“Waypoints in?” he asked.

“Yup, all done.” On the screen I showed him the waypoints he requested me to program in. We’d be using them to navigate.

“Good man.” I gave myself a mental pat on the back and felt proud, like I’d be a worthy member of the crew, one who could be dropped into any situation and figure it out.

By evening the heat was gone. And, somewhat alarmingly, so was all of the water around the boat. Elde was lying in (what had been) the upper reaches of Faversham Creek. Now at low tide she sat, firmly planted in deep mud, with not a drop of water in sight. These are spring tides at the moment, so the lows are very low and the highs are very high. That’s good news for tomorrow’s high tide. Perhaps we’ll be able to float Elde out of her muddy berth.