Racing through paradise

Racing through Paradise

by William F.Buckley Jr. (Random House, 344 pp., $25)

THE SEA IS not our home; we imposeourselves there, buying survival with every trick we know. Not a scrap of available knowhow is irrelevant.

Thus you can lash a raft togetherwith vines; you can hollow out a log with a flint axe; you can weave a pliant frame and stretch skins over it. But to bring the Mycenaean armies by sea to Troy? That took the cutting edge of Bronze Age technology: the literal cutting edges of metal tools, to carve and plane planks till their snug fit would exclude water. In Homeric times all it implied--extracting ores; then much newfangled smelting, annealing, hafting, honing, directed by itinerant and pricy specialists--meant marshaling the resources of a kingdom (and leveling its huge trees).

So from Odysseus King of Ithaca toCornelius Vanderbilt and beyond, seafaring has seized technology--aluminum, radar, fiber glass--before it was "affordable.' Hence its reputation as a rich man's sport.

Technology is, yes, complication, andon some pages of Racing through Paradise Bill Buckley does seem an entangled Laocoon. Odysseus didn't have to remember (what Bill forgot) how to get minus signs into an HP calculator; didn't fret because something called SATNAV never worked; was unconcerned about any missing deck showerhead. On the other hand Odysseus was ten years just struggling between two Mediterranean ports, whereas Bill, despite the things that didn't work, could rely on everything that did work to get him from Honolulu to Kavieng near New Guinea, some four thousand miles, in 29 days. And to deal with sharks if need be there was a Ruger .223 stainless-steel rifle, while Odysseus before he took on the Cyclops had to sharpen a pole. And when the King lost all his crewmen it was unsurprising, though fancy the headlines had Bill lost even one! Yes, what we've learned since the Bronze Age does move us along.

In the Bronze Age, for that matter,you'd not have had Racing through Paradise with pages to turn and with photographs (many in color), though some bard might have sung you a metricated version, for instance:

A most beautiful sail; the moonsliding in and out

Of rain clouds, silver swells crestingand overtaking us,

Big ones--10-footers. Tried to keepour ass into them

With a bit of success. Every third onewould pivot us

Into a 30-degree heel. Whenever thathappens

I brace for a clatter of pans and thehundred-odd

Loose items we've not secured . . .

But I take that verbatim from onecrewman's logbook, just to show how the sea can still quicken rhetorical juices.

Ideally, we'd dawdle through Paradise.But by 1985 human affairs were so complex that synchronizing a mere thirty-day gap--the month of June--in the schedules of seven busy men was not the least of Skipper Bill's undertakings. Like Odysseus, he negotiated near summits of power: Van Galbraith, retiring as Ambassador to France, absolutely had to be back in time to host the Vice President; Dick Clurman, former Chief of Correspondents at Time, had a book to finish. WFB had just thirty days' leave from his syndicate. And so it went; on the eve of departure Nancy Herself called from Camp David to insist that such jeopardizing of national resources must not occur again. They raced through Paradise in a month, and even so Van Galbraith missed his burning Bush by a day.

The book takes you through thatmad month in one entranced evening. It's magnetic if you've sailed; I'll guess mesmerizing even if you haven't. Part of its secret is pace; though we seem to be under way at the top of page six, the main narrative doesn't resume till page 118; meanwhile in flashback other cruises show us the St. John River, the Leewards, the Azores, the Galapagos, even Tahiti, while we gain our sea legs and (if landlubbers) our sea lingo.

Lingo includes things unspoken, suchas the sea's immemorial courtesies. Thus when a man at a dock on the St. John River refused a crew permission to carry bagged garbage across his land to a dump, he behaved with an arrogance Poseidon would once have punished. Poseidon being in retirement, WFB punished him, with a glowing letter to the St. John (New Brunswick) Telegraph-Journal, extolling the courtesy of someone (location stated) who "devotes himself substantially to welcoming any yachtsmen or passersby who have garbage . . . to dispose of.' A jape, yes, but it sets us up for the stuffiness of Johnston Atoll, where a U.S. chicken colonel said, "You can't spend the night here,' and gave no reason.

"Simultaneously, 1) strict exclusionaryrules were being applied against 2) a crew two members of which were simultaneously adjusting their schedules to accommodate the Vice President and the wife of the Commander-in-Chief.' Now that is more than bureaucracy. It is maritime discourtesy, and we understand why, "Suddenly, the prospect of going back out to sea disappointed no one.' No more than with the bozo on the St. John would you want to share space with that colonel.