Tropical Dotage

     I’ve had a bent toward silly and foolish all along.  Old and weak are recent… new… progressive.  It’s a matter of degree but the slope is downward.

     Eleven sevens.  Seventy-seven.  Eleven seven-year cycles of life.  Who’d have imagined?  I hadn’t.

     Where had I thought that I would be by now?  Well, I hadn’t.  Other than to assume that my little yacht and I would have gone to the bottom, either through reckless misadventure or finally meeting our storm.  (I was a bit of a romantic back then, I’ve matured some since.)

     Yet, I wound up where I am, still aboard, somewhere in the Caribbean, in the tropics.  The alternative for my second half might have been the Rocky Mountains, high country Colorado, where I grew up, which I loved.  But the Rockies have winter – serious.

     In Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, as one goes south the climate warms… in general.  However, the higher one’s elevation, the colder the air.  For instance, the mouth of the Amazon River is much warmer that atop the Andes of Ecuador – even though global warming is melting the glaciers.

     But you needn’t go that far south.  I stopped 750 miles north of the Equator, where there are no poisonous snakes and yacht services are better.

     My pact with the devil is that I don’t complain about being hot (within reason) if I don’t have to be cold.

     A thing about the tropics: in theory, it’s cheaper to live on a small yacht here than to heat a house that is big enough to avoid cabin fever during winter.  Not to mention the cost of such a house in the first place.  Not to mention the cost of buying and owning a yacht – think small.

     One need not be a numerologist to see that life rolls in seven-year cycles.  Zero to seven, acquiring basic skills over body and mind, then seven years of basic indoctrination, then, at fourteen, adolescence, featuring the boy-girl thing, followed by the fourth cycle, beginning at twenty one, when one becomes a fully certified adult – whatever that means.  The fifth and sixth cycles are typically our physical best, with a mid-life crisis following its peak.  Then, at forty-two for me, my second half began, the beginning of cycle seven.  I sold it all and bought a yacht.  In the tropics… well, in the sub-tropics – there is a difference.

     In the movie “Spy Game”, when Robert Redford finished training Brad Pitt as a spy, Pitt asked if there was anything else he should know.  Redford answered, put enough aside to die someplace warm.  Redford had chosen Grand Bahama, in the northern Bahamas.  Time was, I’d have thought that a great choice.  The Bahamas might be the best cruising ground in the Western Hemisphere, five hundred islands strung over five hundred miles in the sub-tropics.  Sub-tropics.  Weather from “temperate latitudes” often invades the sub-tropics during winter.  When you come down from high country Colorado, you don’t notice at first.  Then you do — long sleeves, long pants, often a jacket, even shoes and socks!  And the clear, warm water turns cold – not frigid, but cold enough.

     Even so, the Bahamas were the most cruising fun I’ve had, reliable wind, countless places to anchor, amazing snorkeling, sparsely populated islands with friendly people.  And the weather was warm during spring, summer and fall.  The Turks and Caicos Islands, at the southeast end of the Bahamas archipelago, were okay in winter.

     From there I forayed farther south, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Virgins.  (Interesting cruising, other stories.)

     At the Virgins, I turned south again and wound up in the Windward Islands, where I hang still, a thousand miles south of Redford’s “Spy Game” retirement haven.

     “Seven come eleven! ”  That’s a chant in craps, a game of chance.  How many sevens should we expect out of life?  Seven squared, forty-nine, surely bears special significance.  Might that be the halfway point, baring accident, famine and disease?  Ninety-eight, two times seven squared?  OMG!  Even Methuselah only made mid-seventies, which was a ripe old age back then.

     Ambia is lying in a bay under the lee of a small island deep in the tropics.  We’ve just had some morning showers.  Now  Sun is shining brightly between a scatter of scudding clouds.  I’m sitting in a well-shaded cockpit, partially sheltered from the winter trade wind, in my shorts.  It is January.  At night, I pull the sheet over me to sleep.  Some evenings are cool enough to put on a shirt when I’m on deck.  I can live with that.

     Paradise is said to be a myth, whether here or elsewhere.  What is paradise?  Whatever.  There are tradeoffs for sure.  We just finished a record Hurricane Season.  And many or most who retire to the Caribbean eventually go home for dotage.  That is where medical care that only insurance can afford and the grandchildren are.  I’ve cast my lot here.  My theory is that when I encounter medical problems requiring heroic state-of-the-art treatment that might extend my life some, I will, instead, die – here.  This is home.

     I have found my harbor.  Will I eventually have to move ashore?  Would that be when it should end anyway?  The extra exercise of living aboard and dinghying to shore is part of what keeps me alive.  I am happy enough to still be here for now.  Will I feel the same then?  How much longer will this go on?  A dozen sevens is eighty-four.  Who knows?  Thirteen, a baker’s dozen, is ninety-one.  One hears such numbers and higher in the local obituaries.  But those people (by and large) didn’t have the privileged life I’ve had.  They had to work hard to get there.  Once in a while they make two times seven squared and beyond.

     The government dermatologist, who flies up from the big island to do a clinic here every month, recommended the book, “Being Mortal”, by Dr. Atul Gawande.  It tells of relatively pleasant ways one can die if one picks, and can afford, the right nursing home.  Recommended reading whether you have the means for state-of-the-art dying or not.  Dr. Gawande clearly says how we come to dotage.  We outlive our bodies.  In the good old days, we’d have been dead long ago.

     Age kind of snuck up on me.  Where I am spending what’s left, however, in a friendly and welcoming part of the Caribbean, was a choice made many years ago.  I can’t think of any place I’d rather be.

 

Caribbean Compass, March 2021.

© 2021