Atlantic High (13 page)

“No,” I said. “After all, they let you get out of the country without paying your income tax.” (At this point my wife was kicking me under the table, which went on for quite a while until, in the ladies’ room after dessert, Oona said to her, “Mrs. Buckley, you mustn’t mind. Don’t kick your husband. I’ve been kicking mine for thirty years, and it simply doesn’t work.”)

Chaplin was elated by the exchange and did splendid imitations of J. Edgar Hoover, General Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, and Hitler. To everyone’s surprise he announced that he would join us at the
boîte
to which we were now headed—usually he went home before
11 P.M
. Entering the little nightclub he was instantly spotted, and the orchestra switched directly to his theme song from
Limelight
. He felt the theatrical compulsion to requite the courtesy. He turned to me and said, “Have you ever seen a midget spotting a painting of a nude woman through the window of a gallery?” My answer was obvious: whereupon he turned, and diminished to one half his normal height.

His walking stick disappeared, and also his neck. His back to the audience, he began to weave, in time with the musical beat, as though straining before a store window, the better to see the pictures in the gallery. Suddenly he stopped. He had spotted the nubile lady! And, the better to see all of her, suddenly he began to grow. Beginning at about four feet tall, he grew to five, six, seven, eight feet. By dextrous use of the walking stick behind his cape, he seemed simply to elongate under the motive power of his lust. At no point, even at his tallest, was any flesh visible. The crowd went wild. He shrank back to normal size and, pleased with himself, said to me, “I learned that one doing vaudeville at age seventeen.”

Mark and David liked that, and said it is a part of the cinemato-graphical challenge to provide illusions pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the imagination. I threw a little cold water on it all, suggesting that a line had after all to be drawn—it was one thing to leave a dock three times, simulating a single departure; another to let someone fall overboard as though it had been accidental—and they both agreed. We reached no conclusions, other than that once under way, we would think about pixillation, Chaplinesque innovations, the whole bit. What happened after we got under way was that we were, for the most part, preoccupied with a) keeping the boat safe and on course, and b) relieving poor David of his awful seasickness.

One reason for my excitement, when celestial navigation time came around, was that this would be the debut of the Hewlett-Packard 41C computer. In due course I shall tell about Plath’s marvelous Navicomp, which in its own way is preeminent. But one exciting feature of the new 41C, for which the designers had yet to issue a Navigational Package, was the alphanumeric feature of it. The word you have just read means that the computer will talk to you not only in digits, but in letters.

I am so fortunate as to have, for a very close friend, Hugh Kenner. He is a genius who lives now with his second wife, Mary Anne (Mary Jo, R.I.P. 1964); the author of a dozen books, probably best known of which is
The Pound Era
. He has actually published a book on tetrahedrons, if I have correctly designated whatever it is that Buckminster Fuller invented, or was it geodesic domes? And, unsatisfied merely to be perhaps the foremost literary critic in North America (he is Canadian), he is as much at home with computers as in Joyce’s Dublin. I told him that Ken Newcomer, the scientific whiz kid at H-P, would not be doing a Nav-Pac in time for my crossing—and so Hugh, not quite knowing, I now imagine, what he was getting into, volunteered himself to program a Nav-Pac for me. I was stunned. This meant that he would need to program the geographical position of the sun, the moon, the stars, and as many planets as he had time for, for every second of every day during the month of June. Gallantly he went about it, and weeks later he confessed that he had devoted 120 hours to the project. But the great night came for the demonstration. I had lectured in Baltimore, the three of us had dined, and we were now in his house. He brought forth the 41C, smiling.

He handed it to me. “Let us take a problem involving the sun. Okay?” He brought out a copy of
Airborne
, in which, while illustrating the mechanics of celestial navigation, I give a hypothetical problem based on our crossing in 1975, but here I substitute from the
Sealestial’s
log.

He depressed a button in the hand-sized computer, in the top right-hand corner. Across the display section I saw:

“SUN”

This was by way of reminding you that you had summoned that program, not a different one. The “
SUN
“ stayed lit for one second, whereupon it was replaced by:

“GMT?”

This may strike the layman as curt, even indecipherable. To anyone with any experience at all in celestial navigation its meaning is as self-evident as a red light to a motorist. It is saying to you:

“What time was it in Greenwich, England, at the time you took your sight?”

Greenwich Mean Time (
GMT
) is the anchor time with reference to which the positions of the sun and the planets are given. If, for instance, the sun is at ooo°, it is directly over the meridian that runs through Greenwich. If it is at 180°, it is halfway across the globe while at Greenwich it’s midnight. All navigational tables are based on
GMT
. Inasmuch as the sun moves 15 degrees in one hour (in navigation, the earth is visualized as static; everything else “moves”), if you live in New York (longitude 74 degrees) you live in Zone 5, and in order to calculate
GMT
, you must add five hours to your local watch hour (
LWH)
.

The machine’s question mark indicates its desire to know the time at which you recorded your sextant sight. That time was written down by a friendly member of the crew when you called out, “Mark!”

You punch in the time—16 58 37 (4:58
P.M
., plus 37 seconds) — and depress the key marked
R/S
, which is the activating key. Whereupon you see:

“HS?”

That means, “What was the angle at which you caught the sun?”

(“H” stands for “Height;” “S” for “Sextant.”) You punch out 59 (degrees) 52 (minutes). Whereupon you see:
“UPP? YES
=I”

The machine is asking you whether you measured from the horizon to the
bottom
or to the
top
of the sun. Most navigators measure to the bottom of the sun but the tables allow for either—sometimes the bottom is clouded over, not so the top; in which case you will go for the latter. The machine assumes you went for the bottom, but if the answer to the question “Did you go for the upper?” is “
YES
,” then you are directed to depress the numeral I, advising the machine it must make the appropriate alterations. Since you did
not
go for the upper, you bypass by pushing, once again,
R/S
.

“LAT? S=“

The machine wishes to know what is your assumed latitude. All celestial navigation is based, as elsewhere explained, on the process of exclusion: i.e., you figure out where you are by the process of figuring out where you are
not.
¹
You take as your assumed latitude the most convenient point from which to plot—a good round number. In this case, a flat 37 degrees. But wait—”s=“: this is to remind you that if you are sailing in the southern hemisphere, you must record your latitude and then follow it by the minus sign for the computer, which is
CHS
(for “Change Sign”). But you are north, so you ignore this, entering merely 37 00. You activate the machine and now see:

“LONG? E=“

The machine of course needs also your assumed longitude, in this case a round 43 degrees. The “
E
=“ is to ask whether you are sailing in the eastern hemisphere, in which event once again you will need to follow your entry with the minus sign (
CHS
). You enter the longitude and activate, and see:

“YEAR?”

This needs very little translation. The answer is “1980.”

“MONTH?”

Months are given numerically, and June is the sixth month of the year so you depress 6….

“DAY?”

It happened to be the thirteenth. 13….

“H.EYE?”

The angle of the observed body is obviously going to change, depending on whether you are one foot above the water when you take your sight or one thousand feet (the higher up, the larger the angle). You figure, standing alongside the cockpit, you are approximately ten feet up from the water: 10.

Now Hewlett-Packard provides what looks like a tiny seagull. It makes its way fitfully across the viewing screen. Its exclusive function is to tell you that the machine is hard at work for you, assimilating all the data you have given it. Most machines (the Almighty Plath—see below—included) merely give you a blank while you await the result of the calculation. Giving you the flying bird is the equivalent of giving you recorded music when you call United Airlines and a voice says, “All the reservation lines are busy. Kindly stay on the line, and an operator will be with you shortly.” Followed by music. You are reminded, as long as you hear the music, that you haven’t been cut off. In seconds, the bird reaches its destination, and now the display reads:

“ZN
250.1”

That means that you must go to your assumed position, which was Latitude 37° North, Longitude 44° West, and strike out in the direction of 250°—child’s play with a protractor or a parallel rule. By way of orientation, you will recall that 180 degrees is due south, 270 degrees is due west. But, you ask, head 250° for how long? Depress your trusty activator,
R/S:

“15.8
AWAY”

“AWAY
“ means that your pencil must travel in
the opposite direction
of 250 degrees (i.e., 70 degrees. The “reciprocal” of any azimuth is that azimuth plus 180 degrees. If by adding 180 degrees you break the bank, defined as going past 360 degrees, then instead of adding 180 degrees, you subtract 180 degrees). You know now not only the exact direction you must travel, but how far: namely, 15.8 miles. Call it 16 miles. Measure (with a divider) sixteen miles and put a dot on the line extending from your assumed position northeast at 70 degrees. Then draw a line perpendicular to where that dot sits on the line you have drawn. That new line is your Line of Position (
LOP)
.

All celestial navigation is based on the accumulation of Lines of Position. When they intersect, you know your position exactly. If, for instance, as often is the case, the moon is also discernible, depress the button that brings in the moon on your computer and repeat the procedure above. You have two lines of position intersecting.

Hugh Kenner’s program includes all the navigational stars, and these are of course (assuming no overcast) simultaneously visible against the horizon for about ten minutes beginning forty minutes before dawn, and for about ten minutes beginning about thirty minutes after sunset. Set the LOPs for two stars, and you have your position.

It’s difficult to convey the kind of excitement a celestial navigator experiences with such a machine in hand (later, as I say, a machine in some respects more advanced is described, the Plath Navicomp). I attempted in an earlier book
(Airborne)
to use a metaphor to describe the pleasure of celestial navigation without almanac and tables, but even that recently the instrument (the HP-65) was preposterously primitive alongside the 41C, whose Nav-Pac by H-P’s Ken Newcomer will be available when these words are printed. I can only say that if you are one of the millions who kiss your wife, open the front door in the country, walk out, take your car out of the garage, park it at the station, take the train to Grand Central, take the subway downtown, and walk into your office on lower Broadway one hour and twenty minutes later, you would need to conceive of kissing your wife, opening your front door, and finding yourself
in
your office on lower Broadway to conceive the liberation from tedium given to the navigator by the calculator. With such an instrument as the HP-41C I would undertake to teach celestial navigation to Laurel and Hardy in fifteen minutes.

The great moment came, my first use at sea of the 41C, and as I had coached Danny, serving as assistant navigator, on It’s use, I asked him to bring it up. Five minutes later (for Danny, five minutes is a geological age—in five minutes he can prepare a meal, eat it, and clean up the mess) he arrived at the cockpit, forlorn.

“What’s the matter?” I knew it had to be grave.

“It doesn’t work. It just plain won’t turn on.”

I had him fetch up Hugh’s instructions, as unambiguous as a draft notice. I read them out loud. It was as simple as that when Danny pushed the “on” button,
nothing happened
. I knew that if we removed the memory module, the program would be lost forever. I called for Reggie, he took the machine in hand and started gently poking. His finger brushed the
“alpha”
key—and the display signal instantly blazoned out: “SUN.” It worked perfectly ever after, but I came close to growing old during those moments.

Other problems did not yield to Reggie’s numinous fingers, nor yet to the solid, patient, seductive ministrations of Allen Jouning who—the nearest anyone ever came to hearing Allen yield to exasperation—muttered to me, through the half-dozen nuts, bolts, screws, between his teeth, “Had more problems, pahst coupla days, than pahst six months!” Characteristically, Allen said this rather joyfully than complainingly, as though to be greeted at 6
A.M.
, as that same day he had been, with the news that
both
the central toilets were stuck with an evening’s accumulated evacuations was a perfect (Oh man! A problem to solve!) way to begin the day.

It requires only one weighted sentence to communicate the gravity of a nonfunctioning radiotelephone. The radio is the means by which,
in extremis
, one electrifies the impalpable but omnipresent ocean grid to one’s distress. Our phone worked once, two nights out. A call from me to my wife. As a collective social occasion the call, when it finally came through, caused me considerable personal amusement, recalling the high moment of personal mortification in my adult life. For reasons no one professionally engaged in the engineering of radiotelephones has ever given me, telephones aboard yachts are megaphones. I cannot understand why the signal from the telephone can’t come in via earset, so that the conversation, to the extent it is overheard by the crew, mightn’t at least give some privacy, as in: