Luke H. Smith

I Never Learn

When I moved back to San Diego in September 2013, I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to do what I did during my previous stint in the area: get so comfortable that I stop doing things I love that might require some exertion. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to just settle into the beach/surf lifestyle and was instead going to venture north to the Sierras, head out to the desert, explore Mexico and even (GASP!) spend more time enjoying what L.A. and the big city had to offer.

By the time I left three years later I’d done exactly none of those things. There’s a reason some local friends called North County “The Bubble”: because we were all living in a Stepford-like bubble of perfection and life was really just too easy. It wasn’t quite laziness, exactly, just a case of living in such a great place that had so much—for me, the ocean and surfing in a perfect climate—that I loved. In hindsight, I regret not pushing myself to do more.

Fast forward to the present when I’ve been thinking more and more about spending the coming winter living aboard here in Annapolis. It’s a great place and I have a good bunch of friends, and I can live comfortably on my boat while saving a bunch of money that would be spent on rent. The one drawback to living in Annapolis is that I miss the ocean. Terribly. But that can be addressed, right?

Yes. And as with my second adult stint in San Diego (actually, my third; I was also there during my college years), I swore to myself that I was going to start making more of an effort and not just settle into life here in Naptown. I was going to make the drive to the Delmarva coast (about two and a half hours away) whenever I needed some ocean time; I was going to drive a bit farther to the Virginia Beach area (four-and-change hours) and the Outer Banks (six hours) when I wanted real surf and water fun. Hell, I even swore I’d head west, out to the mountains of western Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia to get a little elevation into my blood, and (GASP!) up to New York City (an easy train ride away) for the culture you can only get in the Big Apple.

That mindset and those promises all came together this past week. A buddy from college is hosting a big party—today, as a matter of fact—at his new home outside of Boston featuring four (yes, four) bands and several of my closest, best friends are attending. I RSVP’ed in the affirmative as soon as I heard about the party weeks ago and have been looking forward to it since then.

And to top it all off, Hurricane Fiona picked this week to cruise north from the tropics and send surf to the Eastern Seaboard. Perfect!

My plan really came together last weekend. I was going to head to Connecticut or Rhode Island Thursday afternoon. I would stay wake up there Friday morning and get into the water. Surf a couple of hours then head back to wherever I was staying (or a library or Starbucks) for some work. Maybe an afternoon surf session if conditions stayed good and then a bit more work. Hopefully another session in the Atlantic Saturday morning and then a short drive up to Massachusetts to party like an aging rock star. Wake up Sunday and make the long drive back to Annapolis. Boom!

Well, as I’m sure you can guess by now, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Work chose this week to be the first time that a bunch of deliverables came due. And there were several Zoom calls that popped up late in the week that required my attendance. Spending seven-ish hours behind the wheel was not conducive to either of those two requirements. So instead of motoring, I spent Thursday afternoon going through a pile of articles about making a plan to protect one’s brand online. And Friday, when I might have sprinted to the Delmarva beaches, was spent going through a long video on digital privacy and picking out takeaways to highlight when we present said video to the public next week. I wound up working late on both Thursday and Friday, at which point, I pulled the chute and opted to stay here in Annapolis this weekend.

I took a lot of grief from my friends who are undoubtedly partying right now—the first band was scheduled to start just under an hour ago. But to be honest, there were several factors that combined to make me decide to sit tight.

For starters, I couldn’t, in good conscience, abdicate my responsibility to my work. Yes, believe it or not, I am a professional and take my job seriously, despite appearances to the contrary. And I had kinda hoped I could find a friend’s place to crash up in Connecticut or Rhode Island and save the expense of a hotel, but I struck out there, too. I’d have been content to pitch my tent—I did that the last time I visited Plum Island when I camped in a neighbor’s backyard, even during a torrential rainstorm—but I no longer know anyone in the area with room.

The point is: I bailed because I didn’t want to do the drive unless I could break it up a bit. Going seven-plus hours up today, partying and then driving seven-plus hours back tomorrow was never in the cards. Spending two whole, consecutive days behind the wheel, a bunch of it in and around the insanity of New York City? No. Thank. You. Yes, I used to drive double-digit hours on a whim but nowadays? Fuck that. Between the price of gas, the price of tolls (particularly the NYC river crossings) and the nonexistent driving skills of the majority of Americans on the road, all of whom are angry and selfish, and…brrrrrrr!

Had I been able to crash (no pun intended) somewhere and do, say, five hours on Thursday or Friday, stay local for a day or two, then a short drive to Massachusetts today, followed by the partying and one long day behind the wheel tomorrow? Yeah, that was doable. Seeing other friends en route would have added to the appeal. And getting some hurricane surf in Rhode Island would have been the SUPER tasty icing on top of the cake. But one by one those aspects I’d been looking forward to fell away and I found myself looking at the up-and-back option. And again, to that I say: No. Thank. You.

So right now I’m kicking myself, missing my friends and knowing that I’m missing an undoubtedly great time. And I find myself chastising my inaction, telling myself, as I titled this post, that I never learn. So yeah, I’m bummed I’m missing out on this weekend and I’m swearing to myself that I’m going to fire up and get active again and not be like myself in San Diego post-2013. I hope I succeed, and I believe I will. But it’s coming at the cost of this weekend and right now I’m beating myself up.

The thing is: I DO learn. I’m learning right now. I just need to apply what I’ve learned.

What A Nice Surprise

So, I was reading the NY Times, as I am wont to do despite my myriad complaints about the damned thing: the shitty way they treated my father (a reporter there for 22 years), the inexcusable both-sides-ism they practice so as to appear “objective” (an impossibility; fairness and honesty should be the goal), the even-more-inexcusable and morally reprehensible ways Judith Miller and Maggie Haberman sacrificed journalistic ethics and standards to make a few bucks (and, respectively, facilitated the Iraq War and the further treasonous behavior of that former president whose name I refuse to utter in the process) — and, of course, the arbitrary and exasperating provincialism they practice in their word puzzles (ARGH!).

All of those aggravations notwithstanding, I feel it’s important to support journalism for the benefit of society. And my late father, despite his feelings about the way he was treated, still read the Old Grey Lady every single day right up to the very end of his life.

So, yeah, I read the Times. And today I was treated to a wonderful surprise: a reminder of my late mother. An op-ed/Q-and-A with Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and others shared recollections on the 50th anniversary of the founding of Ms. magazine — an important and influential publication that my mother was also involved in founding.

There were several photos of early magazine covers in the essay, including one of a male’s back. The caption for the photo read, “Ms. shared an office with Robert Redford’s publicist, which is how his back side ended up on the cover of this issue.”

Well, we all know who that publicist was. I remember spending time in that office — I was probably 10 or so years old — and the “Tot Lot” for all the working moms’ younger-than-me kids mentioned in the story and all the hubbub surrounding Ms. in those days. It’s something my mother was proud of, and on this Father’s Day it occurs to me that I believe my dad was proud of his wife being involved with it. As much of a macho meathead as he could be (see? it’s not my fault, it’s genetic), he had nothing but respect for what they were trying to do with Ms., and especially for Pat Carbine, the original publisher of the magazine, who was as tough as he was (and who threw a famously wild St. Patrick’s Day party in New York City my parents never missed; I attended a couple of times when I got older). And, I daresay, he was proud of Mom and what she and the others at Ms. accomplished, though it seems as though the progressives and feminists of today have forgotten.

Anyway, what a treat to be sitting in the twilight of a June evening and…BAM! A reminder of Mom. Thanks, New York Times.

What I’ve Been Wrestling With

In my last post, I mentioned that my boat, Further, was waiting for her mast to get restepped (put back on, for you landlubbers) and that the job was supposed to get done around the end of April. Well, it’s now mid-June and I’m still waiting for the damned job to get done. But what makes that little detail relevant to this, my personal blog (as opposed to Further’s blog, which you can find here) is that the lease for the apartment I rented back in September ended on May 24. Because, you know, eight months is plenty of time to get the standing rigging fixed and reinstalled, right? Apparently not.

So I’ve been homeless since May 24. And that homeless state has added a bit of impetus an ongoing debate that had been going on in my mind for quite a bit of time. Namely: where should I live? The potential answers to that quandary are, to quote the title of this post, what I’ve been wrestling with.

Let’s get one thing out right from the get-go: I like Annapolis and I am happy here. I have a good crew of friends—mainly the guys I skate with and a small circle of friends from the Eastport/sailing side of life here—and there’s plenty going on in the town.

But I miss the ocean. A lot. Not just surfing but the ocean in general. I miss looking at it, breathing it in, feeling it, along with all the fun things I do there: swim, dive, fish, in addition to the surfing and sailing that are obvious. The Chesapeake Bay is nice but it ain’t the ocean. And the water’s pretty nasty, too. You can’t just anchor in a cove and jump overboard for a refreshing swim. Some people do, and a lot of people don’t, given the health concerns of the water. I choose not to, having heard too many stories about lifelong watermen who’ve been plying the waters of the Chesapeake for fifty years and also take jugs of Clorox with them to immediately cleanse any words they might pick up while hauling crab pots and the like.

So that’s the baseline I’m working from when I contemplate making my home elsewhere.

And not surprisingly, I often check the listings for rentals back home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I realize I’ll never be able to afford a rental on Plum Island and, short of winning the lottery I’ll never be able to live out there again (one of the primary reasons why I remain so angry about the sale of our family home out there; an added irony: if I’d had the job I have now, I could have afforded to buy out my brother and stayed in the house), but I’d be perfectly happy to rent an apartment in town in Newburyport. I did that in 2011 when I returned home and helped my parents who were living in the house on Plum Island at the time, and I was very content.

The thing is: rents in Newburyport are even more obscene than they are in a lot of places. On top of that, I’ve traded emails with people who post apartments on Craigslist and the places are gone within hours.

I think about heading up there and pounding the pavement, being local when something comes available so I can move quickly, and I may yet do that, but then I start to think about the pros and cons of living in the place I consider “home.”

My parents are gone. I have a handful of friends there, but no friends that I hang out with on a regular basis. As far as hockey goes, there’s the Friday night skate in Exeter but that’s once a week and I don’t hang out with any of those guys, unlike the skaters here in Annapolis. And while there IS surf in the area, it’s not like there’s a LOT of surf.

So other than some nebulous notion of “home,” what draws me back to Newburyport? I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot there for me. And I’d have to pay rent and for a place for Further if I were to go back there, that’s just a fact. Plus, the sailing season is about four months long, another fact. “Winter stays long this far north,” to paraphrase Bearclaw Chris Lapp.

As a result, I start thinking about relocating to other oceanfront, or ocean-near, places. Norfolk, Virginia, comes to mind. It has some decent marinas that allow liveaboards and a vibrant marine community so I’d have access to parts, companies and such. The open ocean is just outside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and the surf of Virginia Beach is about twenty to thirty minutes away by car, with the Outer Banks and all they have to offer just two hours away. There’s a minor-league hockey team in Norfolk so there’s definitely hockey to play and the airport is ten minutes from the marinas so quick escape is possible.

But I know absolutely no one in that area. And I hear sketchy things about Norfolk itself. So it’s a complete unknown.

Other unknowns are Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and I’ve heard nice things about both. But again, I know nothing whatsoever about those places.

The final possibility is Florida, and by “Florida” I mean some place on the Atlantic coast. I’ve visited Jacksonville and it’s nice, but marinas there are a long ways from the ocean. I visited friends in Palm Coast and the marina where they lived aboard for a winter was great, but it was an hour-plus through the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean. There was surf in nearby Flagler Beach but hockey is pretty distant. And I also spent a bunch of time in Cocoa Beach which has decent surf and good kiteboarding, and warm water all year long. There are marinas in Port Canaveral so the ocean is right there, but that’s a pretty industrial port, with cruise ships in and out of there constantly. And there is surprisingly solid beer-league hockey nearby, so that’s a plus.

But all of those ignore the fact that it’s f-ing Florida, for cryin’ out loud, the state where the Nazi politicians in control legislate against uttering the word “gay” and ban math books for teaching critical race theory, whatever the fuck that is. Do I really want that license plate on my car and have people look at me and think, “Is that a Florida man?”

And before you go raising the fact that Florida has no income tax, the fact is that financially, everything kinda comes out in the wash. Maryland actually has the worst tax burden of any place I’m thinking about (yes, even worse than so-called “Taxachusetts”), but I’m not looking to buy a home so real estate taxes aren’t a concern to me at this time. Sales taxes and insurance in Florida are really expensive, and boat insurance in the land of hurricanes is insane.

So there’s a lot goin’ on in my head these days, and that’s often not a good thing. Thanks to the ongoing bullshit with the riggers and Further’s mast, I woke up yesterday morning stressed out about how much money I’ve poured into the boat and how I was now broke and all those dreams of sailing (or flying) away are just pipe dreams and I’m gonna have to work till the day I die and just…aaaagh! I don’t get panic attacks but that’s as close as I’ve ever come, prompted by the thought, for the first time ever, that I wished I hadn’t bought the boat. That I’d be living in a hut on some beach in some paradise right now but for the boat that remains on the hard waiting for a bunch of guys to stop jerking me around.

These are all very first-world problems, I readily admit. I have an easy, blessed life. But it was not a pleasant morning. And that’s what I’m wrestling with.